MISS ROMAINE GARLAND, STENOGRAPHER.
It was late that night when the excited Vreeland left the Circassia and he was still somewhat in the dark as to the real object of his veiled employment. He reasoned justly that there was not a grain of sentiment now in the frankly defined relations between himself and the Lady of Lakemere.
The money bond between them was only that cold one of employer and employed, and the unmistakable dignity of Elaine’s business manner held him decidedly aloof. Here was no lover’s thrall.
Not a single reference to her absence had escaped her lips. There was no pleasant, social white-lying going on between them, and he was still in the dark when he left, with the strictest orders to await every moment between ten and three, her signal for the beginning of stock operations of gigantic magnitude.
“This Sugar stock may pay twelve and seven per cent on common and preferred in a year, or else be driven down to half price. We must be wary,” she sighed. “No one can truly forecast the actions of our courts, journals, electors or government,” she mused. “The very principle of reckless instability is the one sure thing of all our American doings.”
“And yet, you move along with the others, Madonna,” smilingly said Vreeland.
“You shall see,” she laughed. “The stock market, the sea, and a woman’s heart are never at rest. Always distrust the seeming calm.
“Now,” her voice became grave, “you are to be, each instant, ready at the post of duty. You will personally telephone your orders as received from me to your buyer. The bank will then telephone me the deliveries of the stock, and I will telephone you to pay over each cheque myself.
“The thing is to be reversed in sales, when you have received certified cheques to your name as trustee, for any sales, you are then to telephone down your delivery order to be confirmed by me, after you have brought me the cheques. I have a private wire to the cashier, remember.
“But, above all, silence. You are now suspected of being a daring and a lucky speculator. You will be watched.
“Therefore, go out everywhere in society during the next three weeks. Show yourself as gay and jolly as you can.
“I am also handling some other very heavy matters, and I wish you, just now, to be particularly thought the gayest reveler in Gotham.
“In exhibiting yourself everywhere, the gossips will cease to watch us jointly and our different purposes will be divided in the public eye.
“Miss Kelly’s record of each day’s transactions will be your warrant. She comes to me nightly to report.”
Vreeland was overjoyed as he received Mrs. Willoughby’s hearty approval of his employing a personal stenographer.
“If you get the right person,” said his patroness, “she may be a pleasant companion for my trusted little Mary.”
When he had raised the lady’s hand to his lips and departed he realized how sternly he was being kept out of her real councils. Even the vainest fool could not have deceived himself.
“It’s the payment of money, the changing of coin between us, that simply makes me only an upper servant,” he snarled.
“Once that money passes between man and woman, in any relation, there is an end of any free will. But, I can wait. And, you shall pay me, Madame, to the uttermost, when you are in my power.”
He knew the probable magnitude of the transactions and, even his iron nerve was shaken.
“It cannot be merely herself, it is the grouped official cowards behind her, who are making money on the sly.”
He found a new surprise awaiting him at his rooms, one which brought the blood to his heart with a sudden surge. There was a bunch of red roses awaiting him with a sealed note. He knew not the handwriting, but, his eyes gleamed with a strange fire as he read:
“The Lady of the Red Rose will visit you at ten to-morrow night. Remember your promise. Fail not. She will be veiled and dressed in black. Be alone. And, at your door, at ten.”
“They are all the same,” he gasped, with a wildly beating heart, “under the rose, lurks always some wild intrigue, some desperate game.
“Life in New York is only a game of catch who catch can.”
And, when the sunset of the next day came, Mr. Harold Vreeland had dispatched the acute Bagley to Boston with a “valuable package” to be deposited in a Safe Deposit Company there, and he was seated in his own room gazing tenderly upon the crimsoned flowers whose mute incense filled the air.
The crawling hands of the clock were a torture to the man whose darkest purpose was now hidden behind a smiling face—for it is not often given, even to a smooth scoundrel, to betray two women at once. He was swimming in a sea of glory, now.
Vreeland slept but little after his conference with his resolute and beautiful patroness. He had scanned her face keenly to see the “sweet unrest of Love,” or the play of a hidden passion written there, but all that the keen schemer could discern was the calmness of a settled purpose, the poise of an unshaken self-control.
“She has either no heart, or else, a marvelous power of dissimulation,” he wearily decided. He felt that she was playing some great hidden game in which he was but a mere pawn, a poor private soldier in the fight.
“It’s a waiting game,” he rightly concluded, “but, it is for vengeance, or a fight to cover up her clouded past.”
He knew now that Elaine Willoughby was victorious over her young social enemy at every point of the field. For, the house of Hathorn was known to be divided against itself, and the once magnificent Frederick’s careworn brow showed a sullen discontent.
Hathorn’s disgruntled face was now too often reflected in the mirrors of the Café Savarin bar; he was shunned at the clubs even by the young flâneurs who had now gone over bodily to Mrs. Willoughby, and the little Sunday afternoon séances at Mrs. Alida Hathorn’s became noted for their daring camaraderie and the “high class vaudeville” enacted there.
Hathorn was now more frequently absent from town “upon business,” and Vreeland wrongly suspected him of tracing down the past antecedents of “his dearest foe.”
“What the old Harry did she throw him over and pick me up for?” he vainly pondered. “She may have found him creeping too closely on her track and perhaps she feared him.
“To cut the cord, she has pushed him out, and, pensioned him off on Alida.
“But, what chilling spectre of the past affrights her? That I can only reach by tapping her secret lines.
“I must get in between Endicott and her. I must find out her relations with the Sugar Trust, and also get at the underground railroad to the chamber where the first news of the secret operations of the ‘Senate Finance Committee’ makes her the witch of the Street.
“She is a sly one. She may be trading coldly on the secrets of the Sugar magnates, possibly selling out her senatorial friends and betraying old Endicott’s banking connections.
“Her social entertainments, those little confidences of the ‘pearl boudoir,’ give her a safe chance to play these men off, the one against the other.”
Vreeland’s San Francisco experience, his analytical brain, and his quick wit, had enabled him in his few months of New York stock speculating, to quietly pick up every trick of the “put, call and straddle,” every dark cross of the bucket-shop infamy, every “dummy” subterfuge used in “shearing the sheep.”
He knew now every mystery of “doubled trades,” “crossing trades,” and “wiping out a margin.”
“She has evidently never trusted me for a single moment, and, has covered her right hand, while she has played me as a ‘left bower.’”
It dawned upon him that she perhaps, like David, said in her heart, “All men are liars.” That her “developing process” with Fred Hathorn had made her “sadly wise,” and that she was “trying him out” now at every distance, before making him a champion.
He had, however, preserved the same even, devoted watchful courtesy, and he was wise enough not to try to jump blindly from “seed time” to harvest. “She has not opened her heart to me; if she ever marries me, it will only be when she is driven to my arms.
“But, I can wait.”
And, so, never having dipped deeper into any true woman’s heart than the light-winged swallow brushing the lake, he forgot that he was not true to her. He knew not the force of those ringing lines of “A Fo’castle Ballad”:
The morning found the energetic Mr. Harold Vreeland in close conference with the thin-lipped Miss Marble, of “Marble’s Business Agency,” near that dingy little square where Greeley in bronze gazes vacantly down at his own feet, awed by the stony glare of the New York Herald’s singularly inartistic owls.
The wary woman broker had listened in silence to the young banker’s long description of his need of an accomplished “private secretary.”
She flushed slightly when Vreeland mentioned the Elmleaf as the scene of the varied “labors.”
The quiet orgies of that “whited sepulchre” were now the theme of much whispered comment over the whole Tenderloin.
There were other “rising men” besides Harold Vreeland burning the candle of Life at both ends there and covertly reënacting the lurid scenes of old Monte Tiberio, and infamous Baiæ.
“Expense is no object, my dear Miss Marble,” softly purred Vreeland. “I fancy you know now what I want. I would prefer a capable young woman who is a stranger to New York City.
“One who has been accustomed to refinement. My private correspondence is largely social.”
The handsome scoundrel’s eye sunk under the keen woman’s direct thrust.
“There may be an objection on the part of the young lady, your social surroundings are of the gayest.”
Miss Marble was already familiar through the “blanket sheets,” with the comet-like cavorting of the young Western star in these Eastern skies.
“There is a business secretary, always there on duty, an exemplary young woman now in my employ, so, you can dismiss all your fears,” insidiously remarked Vreeland, “and, for the right person, I will pay you any commission that you ask.”
The eyes of the two adroit schemers met.
“I want a woman whom I can train up into my own ways,” meaningly said Vreeland. “I think that you understand me, now.”
The pale-green eyes of Miss Marble shone with glee at the prospect of some other woman “with reluctant feet” going blindly on to the thirty-third degree initiation of the hard ways of New York.
“I do, perfectly,” she replied, her thin, pitiless lips pressed closely together.
“How shall I select the one who is best fitted to suit you?” Her voice was slightly shaky.
“Easy enough,” lightly cried Vreeland, reaching for his hat and cane. “Take two or three days. Go over the whole field of your most promising applicants. Have say, four or five of them here to meet me when you are ready.
“You can indicate the one whom you would prefer. Find out all their private histories, as far as you can get at it,” he uneasily laughed.
“I will call in, of course, by hazard, and then take a look at them. You can then have the one whom we decide upon, meet me as your only candidate. The rest you can leave to me. If the first one is not suitable, we will follow on down the list.
“Remember, salary is no object. I am liberal in all things, especially, as to your commission.”
For once in her artful career, Miss Joanna Marble infused a real warmth into the clasp of her clammy hand.
For these two read between the lines of each other’s impassive faces.
“A very fine man—the sort of man likely in time, to get shot or lynched, down South,” mused the veteran Miss Marble, “as near a sleek human wolf in sheep’s clothing as they put them up.”
And, then, Joanna Marble carefully indited a dragnet advertisement which next day brought a shoal of young womanhood to the breakers of her woman trap.
There was “the solemn silence of the night,” the “speaking silence of a dream,” at ten o’clock, as the waiting Harold Vreeland listened with a beating heart behind the portals of his aerial den in the Elmleaf.
That gliding step came at last. “Soft as the dews that fell that night,” was the footfall of the Lady of the Red Rose when très discretement vêtue, in shrouding black, with her face swathed in an impermeable veil, Alida Hathorn glided into his room, and coolly threw aside her hat and wraps.
The flowers and ornate wealth of decorations made the room a very dream of luxury. Vreeland sprang forward when he had locked the door, but the burning words of tenderness on his lips were stayed as a slender, uplifted arm stopped him. The visitor’s face was impassive.
“Not yet. We must understand each other,” was the whisper which sounded like the voice of a lost soul. It was, with a fatal overreaching, that Vreeland murmured, “This is hardly the place for a business interview.”
“I know it,” stolidly said Alida Hathorn, turning toward him a face whose burning eyes thrilled him to his bosom’s core. “You have as much to lose as I have, perhaps more.”
“My life is ruined,” she gloomily said. “We will play fair to-night, you and I, with the cards on top the table. I know all your game—you shall now know mine. And, I presume that both of us are willing to pay the price.”
A French clock ticked away in the awkward silence, and then, Vreeland, a master of woman’s moods, quietly seated himself beside the excited woman, and took her burning palms in his own.
“Tell me what your will is. It shall be my law,” he simply said.
Alida Hathorn coldly studied his face for a moment. “I will soon test your sincerity,” she answered. “I will tear off the lying mask we all wear for a moment, and let you see the real woman behind the society veneer.”
“I have found out that my husband is only a reckless stock gambler, a man who coldly married me simply as ‘means to an end.’ He is half crazed by his loss of influence in the Street.
“He has lately established secret branches of his house in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago and Montreal.
“There seems to have been some devil crossing him everywhere, and, he has also fought out a silent duel to the death with Elaine Willoughby, who has torn the old firm to pieces.”
Vreeland was now watching her with gleaming eyes.
“Wolfe has nothing whatever to lose. My husband insists that I shall back the firm (practically himself), and, he swears that you are the most successful man on the Street. He knows of all your individual plunging.
“And he knows, too, that you are ‘on the inside’ of the great Sugar deals, the Oil Company’s intrigues, and, are first favorite now since Hathorn married.”
Her voice rang out bitterly as she buried her face in her hands. “A woman’s capacity of resistance has its limits.
“I come to you to-night for help. I will make one last effort to break him of his mad folly, or else, leave him to his fate.
“When he is penniless, he may follow me over to Europe. He, at least, will be a husband, in name; a protection against the foreign society mob, over there.” Her voice was bitterly hard.
Vreeland began to murmur platitudes.
The beautiful woman’s eyes flashed. “Don’t dissemble. You shall know what I want!” she cried, pacing the room in her rising agitation.
“There is an ominous look in the Sugar market. You will go into the deal on a sure basis. Open your heart to me to-night, for my own sake. Give me your game for the next week. Let me copy it. I will make just one turn for him. If you only play fair, I may save him. It may bring me peace.
“If Hathorn will not be ruled, then my future life will be my own. I depend on you—on your honor, on your pledges made to me, at the Waldorf and the Savoy. I have come to you, here, fearlessly. What is your answer?”
They were facing each other, as Vreeland hoarsely whispered, “And, my reward?” The woman’s warring soul shone in her eyes.
“Let me know first that I can trust you,” she whispered with ashen lips. “Trust to me, and, remember a woman’s gratitude can overpay. Drive no hard bargain with me.”
In a moment, Harold Vreeland, on his pinnacle of sudden prosperity, saw the gulf yawning before him. “If Elaine should find it out.” He bowed his head, but the truth stole into his lying face.
“Is it possible that you are a coward?” cried Alida Hathorn. “You would flinch before the woman who has come to you here—here, at your bidding. I believed that we both were ready to pay the price.” He sprang to her side, in answer to the invitation of her eyes.
“Listen,” he whispered. “I will, so help me God, give you all the duplicate orders of my private account for the next two weeks. But, to you, alone.”
He listened, and was astounded at her daring plan to receive his betrayal of the confidence of a woman who had been her bane, and yet, he yielded to the charm at last.
The echo of her departing foot on the stair left him stunned and breathless at his own unwitting self-surrender. For, caught off his guard, he had left the vantage-ground which he proposed to hold.
“In any case, neither of us will dare to speak. There is ruin staring us both in the face, and, we should play fair. Fear is a wise counselor,” she had frankly said. He trembled before her moonlight eyes, burning in a wild unrest.
She had dominated him at the last, and, swept away an unscarred victor.
Three days of wild excitement followed the nocturnal visit of the Lady of the Red Rose. Vreeland was unable to leave his apartment even for a moment to meet Justine, his busy spy, or to respond to the urgent invitation of Miss Joanna Marble, who had telegraphed to him: “I have found the very woman you want. A perfect stranger, and, a beauty.”
In the haste of his feverish stock gambling, he had only time to order this happily discovered nonpareil to await his pleasure.
“Keep her with you. Give her a month’s salary, in advance. Accept my check sent by messenger as your commission. Will call soon.” So he had telegraphed in reply to the adroit Miss Marble, and dashed off a check for a round sum—a sum which clearly indicated to the overjoyed Miss Marble, the nature of the “discretionary advice” which she was to give to the beautiful neophyte in New York’s fiercest glitter.
Harold Vreeland, with a pale face, sat on watch in his own room, his eyes glued upon the features of Mary Kelly as she recorded each momentous message from the strange woman at the Circassia who was now playing a gigantic game.
An influx of bank and stock private confidential messengers, the evening conferences with Elaine Willoughby, and a breathless study of check book stubs “delivery and statements,” pressed him, while the pale-faced woman near him, cut out every lurid article of the daily journals describing the cyclonic rise and fall of the price of Sugar Certificates now heaving in a storm of unrest as sweeping as the Bay of Fundy’s tides.
Below, in the noisy street, the newsboys bawled “extras,” while all the hotels, clubs and money marts were thronged with excited babblers.
For three days, the corridors of the New York Stock Exchange were crowded with men whose vulpine faces were either hardened by despair, or else excitedly gleaming with the flush of victory.
Broad and Wall streets were filled with excited crowds, while in the galleries, the clients, reporters and money-betting public watched the members on the floor struggling over Sugar.
From ten to three daily the heat of battle was on, and, even after dark the duels of winner and loser were transferred “uptown.”
In the Consolidated Petroleum and Stock Exchange a mad riot reigned, intensified by the vociferous dealings of the crowding “curb-stone” brokers.
With a cowardice newly born of his mean treason, Harold Vreeland trembled as he crept out of the “Elmleaf,” during the three days to steal into a decorous-looking private residence near, where from ten to three with her eyes glittering with a fierce excitement, Alida Hathorn sat in a rear parlor, guarded by the all too accommodating Mrs. Volney McMorris cozily ensconced upstairs.
But the schemer well knew that Hathorn was a leading figure in the downtown mêlée where “Sugar” had been steadily hammered down from “seventy” to “fifty” under tremendous sales. Every conceivable disaster had been suddenly “materialized” around the standard of the hitherto strongly upheld monopoly.
It was on Friday, at one o’clock, that Vreeland, awestruck, added up his scheduled statement of sales, on ten-day delivery terms. It amounted to nearly twenty thousand shares, and the total of the transactions astounded him.
He had just stolen in to report the last order to Alida Hathorn, a sale of a thousand shares, and she had gleefully whispered, “You have already handled twenty, but I have turned forty thousand shares, and I’ve now reached my limit. If it goes down ten dollars more, we can cover all our contracts and clear nearly a half million dollars.”
Vreeland’s eyes opened in wonder, as he saw the file of waiting messengers in her gallery, and a cipher book at her side. He fled away in silence.
At the door of his room, he was seized by Mary Kelly, her white hands trembling. “She is there now at the instrument, calling you—hasten.”
Bold, intrigant, as he was, Vreeland paled, and the blood left his heart as he listened to Elaine Willoughby’s last orders. It was a most momentous message. “Telegraph instantly down over private wire, to Cashier Mineralogical Bank. For my order, buy in, at once—on this board—forty thousand shares of Sugar in lots of one to five thousand shares. Do not leave the instrument for one moment, till you report the execution back to me. Have them telegraph to you the buying rate of each lot and report when all is bought in. Then I will come to the Waldorf and send over for you.
“I will sign the checks myself there at the hotel. Keep the messengers there in your room with the stocks. I have suite No. 700 in the hotel.”
Mary Kelly’s flying fingers had recorded the momentous message in shorthand as it fell from Hathorn’s pallid lips, and, her fingers then pressed the telegraph key with lightning rapidity. Vreeland was dazed. “My God, this is ruin for her,” he whispered. It was of the Lady of the Red Rose he spoke.
“You must sit here, sir, and record for me,” cried the girl. “They are holding me on the wire.” The agony of hell was in the heart of the entrapped scoundrel.
He knew that his whole personal future now depended on executing his mistress’ behests with lightning rapidity. There was no way to warn Alida Hathorn. He dared not trust Bagley—a spy, perhaps.
One hasty sentence of explanation and he sat down at the table, beside the girl, while far away at the Circassia, Elaine Willoughby eagerly awaited the warning ring of the telephone bell. In three-quarters of an hour, Vreeland staggered to the speaking tube. “The whole order is covered,” he reported, “opening price, forty-nine; closing price, seventy-three. I will await you here.”
With a sickening heart, the would-be traitor watched Mary Kelly adding up the scheduled lots and averaging the prices.
“The whole forty thousand shares average us sixty-four dollars,” she whispered, pushing the paper over to him, as she bent over her clicking key. “There has been a terrific rise. Failures on the Street are reported. Sugar is going up with jumps. Market practically bare.”
“My God!” groaned Vreeland, as he hid his face for a few moments in his own room.
“This will be her ruin. Poor Alida. Forty thousand shares left to cover, means a loss of three-quarters of a million.”
And then his own white face stared back at him, in the glass as his trembling lips refused to frame the question: “Did Elaine know of his treachery?” For, it seemed that his sin had found him out.
He dared not even for a single moment leave the presence of the girl who was now recording each message from the cashier of the bank, announcing the departure of the agents with each lot of the stocks as bought in.
“Was it a blind pool to break and make a market?” he queried.
But, he found no time to steal away an instant from Mary Kelly’s eyes and the impassive Bagley who stood waiting to conduct him to Mrs. Willoughby at the Waldorf. “I am watched,” the cowed traitor muttered.
The house was dark where Alida Hathorn had directed her secret campaign when Vreeland, under Bagley’s escort, returned at midnight from the Waldorf. Vreeland turned his eyes away in a sickening dread.
The only remark made by the serene Queen of the Street was a commendation of his promptness. She was graciously cheerful. “The market turned upon us so quickly, that not a moment was to be lost,” placidly remarked Elaine Willoughby, whose pleasant smile of dismissal followed the sending up of a card whereon Vreeland saw the words “Hiram Endicott.” But, his patroness said, “You have earned a week’s rest. I can now give you that. You can amuse yourself for a week. I shall stand out of the market. You can go ahead and pick up the threads of current affairs down town.
“Remember, not a word of this to Wyman. It would lead to our instant parting. You have done well. I know now that I can trust to you, to the very last.”
Vreeland shuddered and stole away, wearing a sickly smile. The night had new terrors for him now.
All that long night, Mr. Harold Vreeland paced his room, waiting for the morrow. His haggard face was gray and ashen in the morning dawn, as he waited for the earliest journals.
And, for once, the brandy bottle was his friend.
He recalled a thousand times the impassioned face of the beautiful woman who had blindly followed his desperate lead.
“I had nothing to lose,” he mused. “This fierce play was only a flurry to my nerves, but, she may be wrecked. And if she should now turn upon me.”
He did not dare to think of facing her, and he even feared to show himself in Wall Street until the news of his beautiful accomplice’s situation should reach him.
“Where would she land on Life’s stormy seas?” He did not dare to face the ruin he had wrought.
An occupation for his morning hours suggested itself. He would visit Miss Joanna Marble, and so, at eleven o’clock, he was seated in her “Bureau,” curiously awaiting the arrival of the young woman who was to fill the lofty position of “private secretary” to the “star” of the Elmleaf. Leaning out of the window, he beckoned to one of a shouting mob of newsboys as the words “Extra! extra! Failures in Wall Street!” resounded high above the din of Herald Square.
Tossing the lad a half dollar, he unfolded the still damp sheet. Among the glaring headlines, he read, “Failure of Hathorn & Wolfe. Liabilities, one million dollars.”
He sank back in his chair, and then, seized with a sudden impulse, he quickly ran downstairs and jumped into a coupé, bidding the agent detain the expected beauty.
Some indefinable impulse led him to his rooms, where the grave Bagley handed him a telegraphic dispatch. He tore it open and read the bitter lines: “You have lied and basely betrayed me. I have left America forever. I leave it to the future to punish you.” The signature, “Red Rose,” was that of a woman who was sobbing alone in her stateroom on the Etruria, as she glided past the Narrows on this sunny Saturday morning.
With a clouded brow, Vreeland descended the stair and at the street door, met Mr. Jimmy Potter, who whispered: “Fred Hathorn has cleared out to Havana—last night—the fool. He gouged his wife out of half a million.
“I saw her off on the Etruria to-day, and I’m going to save what I can for her out of the wreck, and, then go over and meet her in Paris.
“I told you that all things would come round to the man who waits.”
With a smothered oath, Vreeland pushed on, glad to escape the easy-going tormentor who was destined to be the prochain ami of the daring Lady of the Red Rose.
He dashed away to Miss Marble’s “Bureau,” where his eyes gleamed as Miss Joanna led him into her private room. Her warning glance gave him the key to his conduct.
And he was speechless in silent rapture, as he gazed upon the fresh and womanly beauty of “Miss Romaine Garland, stenographer.”
“She is the very woman,” he mused. “The woman of my dreams.”
Afar, uptown, in the shaded boudoir of her pleasaunce palace, Elaine Willoughby dropped the newspaper from her hands. “I am safe at last. He is a criminal fugitive.
“And, now, to plead to God for the return of my child.”