Children of the Whirlwind Part 21

"I won't have you interfering with my life!--you fake preacher!--you stool, you squealer!" she flung at him madly. "Stool--squealer!" she repeated. "I tell you I'm going my own way--and it's a big way--and I tell you again nothing you can say or do can stop me! If I could have my best wish, all I'd wish for would be something to keep you from always interfering--something to get you out of my way!"

Panting, she paused. Her tense figure, with hands closing and unclosing, expressed the very acme of furious defiance--of desire to annihilate--of ultimate hatred. Larry was astounded by the very extent, the profundity, of her pa.s.sion. And so they stood, silent except for their quick breathing, eyes fixed upon eyes, for several moments.

And then a key sounded in the outer door of the little hallway.

Instantly there was an almost unbelievable transformation in Maggie.

From an imperious, uncontrollable fury, she changed to a white, quivering thing.

"Barney!" she whispered; and sprang to the inner door of the little hallway, closed and locked it.

She turned on Larry a face that was ghastly in its pallor.

"Barney always carries a pistol," she whispered.

They had heard the outer door close with a click of its automatic lock.

They now heard the k.n.o.b of the inner door turn and tugged at; and then heard Barney call: "What's the matter, Maggie? Let us in."

Maggie made a supreme effort to reply in a controlled voice:

"Just a minute. I'm not quite ready."

Then a second voice sounded from the other side of the door:

"Don't keep us too long, Maggie. Please!"

There was a distantly familiar quality to Larry in that second voice.

But he did not try to place it then: he was too poignantly concerned in his own situation, and in the bewildering change in Maggie.

She slipped a hand through his arm. "Oh, La-Larry, why did you ever take such a risk!" she breathed. Her whisper was piteous, aquiver with fright. "Come this way!" and she quickly pulled him into the room where he had met Miss Grierson and to the door by which he had entered.

Maggie opened this door. "They're all in the little hallway--I don't think they'll see you," her rapid, agitated whisper went on. "Don't take the elevators in this corridor, they're in plain sight. There are elevators just around the corner. Take them; they're safer. Good-bye, Larry--and, oh, Larry, don't ever take such a risk again!"

With that she pushed him out and closed the door.

Larry followed her instructions about the elevator; he used the same precautions in leaving that he had used in coming, and twenty minutes later he was back in his room in the Sherwood apartment. For an hour or more he sat motionless--thinking--thinking: asking himself questions, but in his tumultuous state of mind and emotions not able to keep to a question long enough to reason out its possible answer.

Just what was that game in which Maggie was involved?--a game which required that Grantham setting, that eminently respectable companion, and Maggie's accouterment as a young lady of obvious wealth.

Whose was that vaguely familiar second voice?--that voice which he still could not place.

But what he thought about most of all was something very different. What had caused that swift change in Maggie?--from a fury that was both fire and granite, to that pallid, quivering, whispering girl who had so rapidly led him safely out of his danger.

To and fro, back and forth, shuttled these questions. Toward two o'clock he stood up, mind still absorbed, and mechanically started to undress.

He then observed the roll of paintings Hunt had given him. Better for them if they were flattened out. Mechanically he removed string and paper. There on top was the Italian mother he had asked for. A great painting--a truly great painting. Mechanically he lifted this aside to see what was the second painting Hunt had included. Larry gave a great start and the Italian mother went flapping to the floor.

The second painting was of Maggie; the one on which Hunt had been working the day Larry had come back: Maggie in her plain working clothes, looking out at the world confidently, conqueringly; the painting in which Hunt, his brain teeming with ideas, had tried to express the Maggie that was, the many Maggies that were in her, and the Maggie that was yet to be.

CHAPTER XVIII

The next morning Larry tried to force his mind to attend strictly to Miss Sherwood's affairs. But in this effort he was less than fifty per cent effective. His experience of the night before had been too exciting, too provocative of speculation, too involved with what he frankly recognized to be the major interest of his life, to allow him to apply himself with perfect and unperturbed concentration to the day's routine. Constantly he was seeing the transformed Maggie in the cerise evening gown with the fan of green plumes--seeing her elaborate setting in her suite at the Grantham--hearing that vaguely familiar but unplaceable voice outside her door--recalling the frenzied effort with which Maggie had so swiftly effected his escape.

This last matter puzzled him greatly. If she were so angered at him as she had declared, if she so distrusted him, why had she not given him up when she had had him at her mercy? Could it be that, despite her words, she had an unacknowledged liking for him? He did not dare let himself believe this.

Again and again he thought of this adventure in whose very middle Maggie now was, and of whose successful issue she had proudly boasted to him.

It was indeed something big, as she had said; that establishment at the Grantham was proof of this. Larry could now perceive the adventure's general outlines. There was nothing original in what he perceived; and the plan, so far as he could see it, would not have interested him in the least as a novel creation of the brain were not Maggie its central figure, and were not Barney and Old Jimmie her directing agents.

A pretty woman was being used as a lure to some rich man, and his infatuation for her was to cause him to part with a great deal of money: some variation of this ancient idea, which has a thousand variations--that was the plan.

Obviously the enterprise was not directed at some gross victim whose palate might permit his swallowing anything. If any one item essentially proved this, it was the item of the overwhelmingly respectable chaperon.

Maggie was being presented as an innocent, respectable, young girl; and the victim, whoever he was, was the type of man for whom only such a type of girl would have a compelling appeal.

And this man--who was he? Ever and again he tried to place the man's voice, with its faintly familiar quality, but it kept dodging away like a dream one cannot quite recall.

The whole business made Larry rage within himself. Maggie to be used in such a way! He did not blame Maggie, for he understood her. Also he loved her. She was young, proud, willful, had been trained to regard such adventures as colorful and legitimate; and had not lived long enough for experience to teach her otherwise. No, Maggie was not to blame. But Old Jimmie! He would like to twist Old Jimmie's neck! But then Old Jimmie was Maggie's father; and the mere fact of Old Jimmie being Maggie's father would, he knew, safeguard the old man from his wrath even were he at liberty to go forth and act.

He cursed his enforced seclusion. If only he were free to go out and do his best in the open! But then, even if he were, his best endeavors would have little influence upon Maggie--with her despising and distrusting him as she did, and with her so determined to go ahead in her own way.

Once during the morning, he slipped from the library into his room and gazed at the portrait of Maggie that Hunt had given him the night before: Maggie, self-confident, willful, a beautiful n.o.body who was staring the world out of countenance; a Maggie that was a thousand possible Maggies. And as he gazed he thought of the wager he had made with Hunt, and of his own rather scatter-brained plannings concerning it. He removed Maggie's portrait from the fellowship of the picture of the Italian mother, and hid it in his chiffonier. Whatever he might do in his endeavor to make good his boast to Hunt, for the present he would regard Maggie's portrait as his private property. To use the painting as he had vaguely planned, before he had been surprised to find it Maggie's portrait, would be to pa.s.s it on into other possession where it might become public--where, through some chance, the Maggie of the working-girl's cheap shirt-waist might be identified with the rich Miss Cameron of the Grantham, to Maggie's great discomfiture, and possibly to her entanglement with the police.

When Miss Sherwood came into the library a little later, Larry tried to put Maggie and all matters pertaining to his previous night's adventure out of his mind. He had enough other affairs which he was trying adroitly to handle--for instance, Miss Sherwood and Hunt; and when his business talk with her was ended, he remarked:

"I saw Mr. Hunt last evening."

He watched her closely, but he could detect no flash of interest at Hunt's name.

"You went down to your grandmother's?"

"Yes."

"That was a very great risk for you to take," she reproved him. "I'm glad you got back safely."

Despite the disturbance Maggie had been to his thoughts, part of his brain had been trying to make plans to forward this other aim; so he now told Miss Sherwood of his wager with Hunt and his bringing away a picture--he said "one picture." He wanted to awaken the suppressed interest each had in the other; to help bridge or close the chasm which he sensed had opened between them. So he brought the picture of the Italian mother from his room. She regarded it critically, but with no sign of approval or disapproval.

"What do you think of it?" she asked.

"It's a most remarkable piece of work!" he said emphatically--wishing he could bring in that picture of Maggie as additional evidence supporting his opinion.

She made no further comment, and it was up to Larry to keep the conversation alive. "What is the most Mr. Hunt ever was paid for a painting? I mean one of what he swears at as his 'pretty pictures'?"

"I believe about two thousand dollars."

That was part of the information necessary to Larry's plan.

"Miss Sherwood, I'm going to ask another favor of you. In connection with a bet I made with Mr. Hunt. I want to talk with a picture dealer--the best one there is. I can't very well go to him. Can you manage to have him come here?"

"Easily. I know the man best for your purpose. I'll telephone, and if he's in New York he'll come to see you this afternoon."