A Poor Wise Man Part 56

he said, quietly obstinate. "Grant your point, that I'm defeated. All right, I'll be defeated--but I won't quit."

And Anthony Cardew, confronted by that very quality of obstinacy which had been his own weapon for so many years, retired in high dudgeon to his upper rooms. He was living in a strange new world, a reasonable soul on an unreasonable earth, an earth where a man's last sanctuary, his club, was blown up about him, and a man's family apparently lived only to thwart him.

With Anthony gone, Howard dropped the discussion with the air of a man who has made a final stand.

"What you have said about Mr. Doyle interests me greatly," he observed, "because--you probably do not know this--my sister married him some years ago. It was a most unhappy affair."

"I do know it. For that reason I am glad that Miss Lily has come home."

"Has come home? She has not come home, Mr. Cameron. There was a condition we felt forced to make, and she refused to agree to it.

Perhaps we were wrong. I--"

w.i.l.l.y Cameron got up.

"Was that to-day?" he asked.

"No."

"But she was coming home to-day. She was to leave there this afternoon."

"How do you know that?"

"Denslow saw her there this afternoon. She agreed to leave at once. He had told her of the bombs, and of other things. She hadn't understood before, and she was horrified. It is just possible Doyle wouldn't let her go."

"But--that's ridiculous. She can't be a prisoner in my sister's house."

"Will you telephone and find out if she is there?" Howard went to the telephone at once. It seemed to w.i.l.l.y Cameron that he stood there for uncounted years, and as though, through all that eternity of waiting, he knew what the answer would be. And that he knew, too, what that answer meant, where she had gone, what she had done. If only she had come to him. If only she had come to him. He would have saved her from herself.

He--

"She is not there," Howard Cardew said, in a voice from which all life had gone. "She left this afternoon, at four o'clock. Of course she has friends. Or she may have gone to a hotel. We had managed to make it practically impossible for her to come home."

w.i.l.l.y Cameron glanced at his watch. He had discounted the worst before it came, and unlike the older man, was ready for action. It was he who took hold of the situation.

"Order a car, Mr. Cardew, and go to the hotels," he said. "And if you will drop me downtown--I'll tell you where--I'll follow up something that has just occurred to me."

CHAPTER XXIX

In one way Howard had been correct in his surmise. It had been Lily's idea to go to a hotel until she had made some definite plan. She would telephone Louis then, and the rest--she did not think beyond that. She called a taxi and took a small bag with her, but in the taxicab she suddenly realized that she could not go to any of the hotels she knew.

She would be recognized at once.

She wanted a little time to herself, time to think. And before it was discovered that she had left Cardew Way she must see Louis, and judge again if he intended to act in good faith. While he was with her, reiterating his promises, she believed him, but when he was gone, she always felt, a curious doubt.

She thought then of finding a quiet room somewhere, and stopping the cab, bought a newspaper. It was when she was searching for the "rooms for rent" column that she saw he had been attacked and slightly injured.

They had got him. He had said that if they ever suspected him of playing them false they would get him, and now they had done so. That removed the last doubt of his good faith from her mind. She felt indignation and dismay, and a sort of aching consciousness that always she brought only trouble to the people who cared for her; she felt that she was going through her life, leaving only unhappiness behind her.

He had suffered, and for her.

She told the chauffeur to go to the Benedict Apartments, and sitting back read the notice again. He had been attacked by two masked men and badly bruised, after putting up a terrific resistance. They would wear masks, of course. They loved the theatrical. Their very flag was theatrical. And he had made a hard fight That was like him, too; he was a fighter.

She was a Cardew, and she loved strength. There were other men, men like w.i.l.l.y Cameron, for instance, who were lovable in many ways, but they were not fighters. They sat back, and let life beat them, and they took the hurt bravely and stoically. But they never got life by the throat and shook it until it gave up what they wanted.

She had never been in a bachelors' apartment house before, and she was both frightened and self-conscious. The girl at the desk eyed her curiously while she telephoned her message, and watched her as she moved toward the elevator. "Ever seen her before?" she said to the hall boy.

"No. She's a new one."

"Face's kind of familiar to me," said the telephone girl, reflectively.

"Looks worried, doesn't she? Two masked men! Huh! All Sam took up there last night was a thin fellow with a limp."

The hall boy grinned.

"Then his limp didn't bother him any. Sam says y'ought to seen that place."

In the meantime, outside the door of Akers' apartment, Lily's fine courage almost left her. Had it not been for the eyes of the elevator man, fixed on her while he lounged in his gateway, she might have gone away, even then. But she stood there, committed to a course of action, and rang.

Louis himself admitted her, an oddly battered Louis, in a dressing gown and slippers; an oddly watchful Louis, too, waiting, after the manner of men of his kind the world over, to see which way the cat would jump.

He had had a bad day, and his nerves were on edge. All day he had sat there, unable to go out, and had wondered just when Cameron would see her and tell her about Edith Boyd. For, just as w.i.l.l.y Cameron rushed him for the first time, there had been something from between clenched teeth about marrying another girl, under the given circ.u.mstances. Only that had not been the sort of language in which it was delivered.

"I just saw about it in the newspaper," Lily said. "How dreadful, Louis."

He straightened himself and drew a deep breath. The game was still his, if he played it right.

"Bad enough, dear," he said, "but I gave them some trouble, too." He pushed a chair toward her. "It was like you to come. But I don't like your seeing me all mussed up, little girl."

He made a move then to kiss her, but she drew back.

"Please!" she said. "Not here. And I can't sit down. I can't stay. I only came because I wanted to tell you something and I didn't want to telephone it. Louis, Jim Doyle knew about those bombs last night. He didn't want it to happen before the election, but--that doesn't alter the fact, does it?"

"How do you know he knew?"

"I do know. That's all. And I have left Aunt Elinor's."

"No!"

"I couldn't stay, could I?" She looked up at him, the little wistful glance that w.i.l.l.y always found so infinitely touching, like the appeal of a willful but lovable child, that has somehow got into trouble. "And I can't go home, Louis, unless I--"

"Unless you give me up," he finished for her. "Well?"

She hesitated. She hated making terms with him, and yet somehow she must make terms.

"Well?" he repeated. "Are you going to throw me over?"

Apparently merely putting the thought into words crystallized all his fears of the past hours; seeing her there, too, had intensified his want of her. She stood there, where he had so often dreamed of seeing her, but still holding him off with the aloofness that both chilled and inflamed him, and with a question in her eyes. He held out his arms, but she drew back.

"Do you mean what you have said, Louis, about leaving them, if I marry you, and doing all you can to stop them?"