A Poor Wise Man Part 57

"You know I mean it."

"Then--I'll not go home."

"You are going to marry me? Now?"

"Whenever you say."

Suddenly she was trembling violently, and her lips felt dry and stiff.

He pushed her into a chair, and knelt down beside her.

"You poor little kid," he said, softly.

Through his brain were racing a hundred thoughts; Lily his, in his arms, in spite of that white-faced drug clerk with the cold eyes; himself in the Cardew house, one of them, beating old Anthony Cardew at his own cynical game; and persistently held back and often rising again to the surface, Woslosky and Doyle and the others, killers that they were, pursuing him with their vengeance over the world. They would have to be counted in; they were his price, as he, had he known it, was Lily's.

"My wife!" he said. "My wife."

She stiffened in his arms.

"I must go, Louis," she said. "I can't stay here. I felt very queer downstairs. They all stared so."

There was a clock on the mantel shelf, and he looked at it. It was a quarter before five.

"One thing is sure, Lily," he said. "You can't wander about alone, and you are right--you can't stay here. They probably recognized you downstairs. You are pretty well known."

For the first time it occurred to her that she had compromised herself, and that the net, of her own making, was closing fast about her.

"I wish I hadn't come."

"Why? We can fix that all right in a jiffy."

But when he suggested an immediate marriage she made a final struggle.

In a few days, even to-morrow, but not just then. He listened, impatiently, his eyes on the clock. Beside it in the mirror he saw his own marred face, and it added to his anger. In the end he took control of the situation; went into his bedroom, changed into a coat, and came out again, ready for the street. He telephoned down for a taxicab, and then confronted her, his face grim.

"I've let you run things pretty much to suit yourself, Lily," he said.

"Now I'm in charge. It won't be to-morrow or next week or next month. It will be now. You're here. You've given them a chance to talk downstairs.

You've nowhere to go, and you're going to marry me at once."

In the cab he explained more fully. They would get a license, and then go to one of the hotels. There they could be married, in their own suite.

"All regularly and in order, honey," he said, and kissed her hand. She had hardly heard. She was staring ahead, not thinking, not listening, not seeing, fighting down a growing fear of the man before her, of his sheer physical proximity, of his increasing exuberance.

"I'm mad about you, girl," he said. "Mad. And now you are going to be mine, until death do us part."

She shivered and drew away, and he laughed a little. Girls were like that, at such times. They always took a step back for every two steps forward. He let her hand go, and took a careful survey of his face in the mirror of the cab. The swelling had gone down, but that bruise below his eye would last for days. He cursed under his breath.

It was after nine o'clock when one of the Cardew cars stopped not far from the Benedict Apartments, and w.i.l.l.y Cameron got out.

He was quite certain that Louis Akers would know where Lily was, and he antic.i.p.ated the interview with a sort of grim humor. There might be another fight; certainly Akers would try to get back at him for the night before. But he set his jaw. He would learn where Lily was if he had to choke the knowledge out of that leering devil's thick white throat. His arrival in the foyer of the Benedict Apartments caused more than a ripple of excitement.

"Well, look who's here!" muttered the telephone girl, and watched his approach, with its faint limp, over the top of her desk. Behind, from his cage, the elevator man was staring with avid interest.

"I suppose Mr. Akers is in?" said w.i.l.l.y Cameron, politely. The girl smiled up at him.

"I'll say he ought to be, after last night! What're you going to do now?

Kill him?"

In spite of his anxiety there was a faint twinkle in w.i.l.l.y Cameron's eyes.

"No," he said slowly. "No. I think not. I want to talk to him."

"Sam," called the telephone girl, "take this gentleman up to forty-three."

"Forty-three's out." Sam partly shut the elevator door; he had seen Forty-three's rooms the night before, and he had the discretion of his race. "Went out with a lady at quarter to five."

w.i.l.l.y Cameron took a step or two toward the cage.

"You don't happen to be lying, I suppose?"

"No, sir!" said Sam. "I'll take you up to look, if you like. And about an hour ago he sent a boy here with a note, to get some of his clothes.

The young lady at the desk was out at the movies at the time."

"I was getting my supper, Sam."

w.i.l.l.y Cameron had gone very white.

"Did the boy say where he was taking the things?"

"To the Saint Elmo Hotel, sir."

On the street again w.i.l.l.y Cameron took himself fiercely in hand. There were a half-dozen reasons why Akers might go to the Saint Elmo. He might, for one thing, have thought that he, Cameron, would go back to the Benedict. He might be hiding from Dan, or from reporters. But there had been, apparently, no attempt to keep his new quarters secret. If Lily was at the Saint Elmo--

He found a taxicab, and as it drew up at the curb before the hotel he saw the Cardew car moving away. It gave him his first real breath for twenty minutes. Lily was not there.

But Louis Akers was. He got his room number from a clerk and went up, still determinedly holding on to himself. Afterwards he had no clear recollection of any interval between the Benedict and the moment he found himself standing outside a door on an upper floor of the Saint Elmo. From that time on it was as clear as crystal, his own sudden calm, the overturning of a chair inside, a man's voice, slightly raised, which he recognized, and then the thin crash of a winegla.s.s dropped or thrown to the floor.

He opened the door and went in.

In the center of the sitting room a table was set, and on it the remains of a dinner for two. Akers was standing by the table, his chair overturned behind him, a splintered gla.s.s at his feet, staring angrily at the window. Even then w.i.l.l.y Cameron saw that he had had too much to drink, and that he was in an ugly mood. He was in dinner clothes, but with his bruised face and scowling brows he looked a sinister imitation of a gentleman.

By the window, her back to the room, was Lily.

Neither of them glanced at the door. Evidently the waiter had been moving in and out, and Akers considered him as little as he would a dog.

"Come and sit down," he said angrily. "I've quit drinking, I tell you.

Good G.o.d, just because I've had a little wine--and I had the h.e.l.l of a time getting it--you won't eat and won't talk. Come here."

"I'm not hungry."