The City of Masks Part 13

"You forget he is in Atlantic City," said de Bosky, as if suddenly coming out of a dream.

"Oh, Lord!" groaned Trotter, very white in the face.

There were tears in Miss Emsdale's eyes. "They--he means to drive you out of town," she murmured brokenly.

"Fine chance of that!" cried Trotter violently.

"Let us be calm," said M. Mirabeau, gently taking the young man's arm and leading him back to the box on which he had been sitting. "You must not play into their hands, and that is what you would be doing if you went to him in a rage. As long as you remain pa.s.sive, nothing will come of all this. If you show your teeth, they will stop at nothing. Take my word for it, Trotter, before many hours have pa.s.sed you will be interviewed by a detective,--a genuine detective, by the way, for some of them can be hired to do anything, my boy,--and you will be given your choice of going to prison or to some far distant city. You--"

"But how in thunder is he going to prove that I took any marked bills from him? You've got to prove those things, you know. The courts would not--"

"Just a moment! Did he pay you by check or with bank notes this morning?"

"He gave me a check for thirty dollars, and three ten-dollar bills and a five."

"Have you them on your person at present?"

"Not all of them. I have--wait a second! We'll see." He fumbled in his pocket for the bill-folder.

"What did you do with the rest?"

"Paid my landlady for--good Lord! I see what you mean! He paid me with marked bills! The--the d.a.m.ned scoundrel!"

"He not only did that, my boy, but he put a man on your trail to recover them as fast as you disposed of them," said M. Mirabeau calmly.

CHAPTER VIII

LADY JANE GOES ABOUT IT PROMPTLY

A FEW minutes before six o'clock that same afternoon, Mr. James Cricklewick, senior member of the firm of Cricklewick, Stackable & Co., linen merchants, got up from his desk in the crowded little compartment labelled "Private," and peered out of the second-floor window into the busy street below. Thousands of people were scurrying along the pavements in the direction of the brilliantly lighted Fifth Avenue, a few rods away; vague, dusky, unrecognizable forms in the darkness that comes so early and so abruptly to the cross-town streets at the end of a young March day. The middle of the street presented a serried line of snow heaps, piled up by the shovellers the day before,--symmetrical little mountains that formed an impa.s.sable range over which no chauffeur had the temerity to bolt in his senseless ambition to pa.s.s the car ahead.

Mr. James Cricklewick sighed. He knew from past experience that the Rock of Ages was but little more enduring than the snow-capped range in front of him. Time and a persistent sun inevitably would do the work of man, but in the meantime Mr. Cricklewick's wagons and trucks were a day and a half behind with deliveries, and that was worth sighing about. As he stood looking down the street, he sighed again. For more than forty years Mr. Cricklewick had made constant use of the phrase: "It's always something." If there was no one to say it to, he satisfied himself by condensing the lament into a strictly personal sigh.

He first resorted to the remark far back in the days when he was in the service of the Marquis of Camelford. If it wasn't one thing that was going wrong it was another; in any event it was "always something."

Prosperity and environment had not succeeded in bringing him to the point where he could snap his fingers and lightly say in the face of annoyances: "It's really nothing."

The fact that he was, after twenty-five years of ceaseless climbing, at the head of the well-known and thoroughly responsible house of Cricklewick, Stackable & Co., Linen Merchants and Drapers,--(he insisted on attaching the London word, not through sentiment, but for the sake of isolation),--operated not at all in bringing about a becalmed state of mind. Habitually he was disturbed by little things, which should not be in the least surprising when one stops to think of the mult.i.tudinous annoyances he must have experienced while managing the staff of under-servants in the extensive establishment of the late Marquis of Camelford.

He had never quite outgrown the temperament which makes for a good and dependable butler,--and that, in a way, accounts for the contention that "it is always something," and also for the excellent credit of the house he headed. Mr. Cricklewick made no effort to deceive himself. He occasionally deceived his wife in a mild and innocuous fashion by secretly reverting to form, but not for an instant did he deceive himself. He was a butler and he always would be a butler, despite the fact that the business and a certain section of the social world looked upon him as a very fine type of English gentleman, with a crest in his shop window and a popularly accepted record of having enjoyed a speaking acquaintance with Edward, the late King of England. Indeed, the late king appears to have enjoyed the same privilege claimed and exercised by the clerks, stenographers and floorwalkers in his employ, although His Majesty had a slight advantage over them in being free to call him "Cricky" to his face instead of behind his back.

Mr. Cricklewick, falling into a snug fortune when he was forty-five and at a time when the Marquis felt it to be necessary to curtail expenses by not only reducing his staff of servants but also the salaries of those who remained, married very nicely into a draper's family, and soon afterward voyaged to America to open and operate a branch of the concern in New York City. His fortune, including the savings of twenty years, amounted to something like thirty thousand pounds, most of which had been acc.u.mulated by a sheep-raising brother who had gone to and died in Australia. He put quite a bit of this into the business and became a partner, making himself doubly welcome to a family that had suffered considerably through compet.i.tion in business and a complete lack of it in respect to the matrimonial possibilities of five fully matured daughters.

Mr. Cricklewick had the further good sense to marry the youngest, prettiest and most ambitious of the quintette, and thereby paved the way for satisfactory though wholly unexpected social achievements in the City of Now York. His wife, with the customary British scorn for Americans, developed sn.o.bbish tendencies that rather alarmed Mr.

Cricklewick at the outset of his business career in New York, but which ultimately produced the most remarkable results.

Almost before he was safely out of the habit of saying "thank you" when it wasn't at all necessary to say it, his wife had him down at Hot Springs, Virginia, for a month in the fall season, where, because of his exceptionally mellifluous English accent and a stateliness he had never been able to overcome, he was looked upon by certain Anglo-maniacs as a real and unmistakable "toff."

Cricklewick had been brought up in, or on, the very best of society.

From his earliest days as third groom in the Camelford menage to the end of his reign as major-domo, he had been in a position to observe and a.s.similate the manners of the elect. No one knew better than he how to go about being a gentleman. He had had his lessons, not to say examples, from the first gentlemen of England. Having been brought up on dukes and earls,--and all that sort of thing,--to say nothing of quite a majority in the House of Lords, he was in a fair way of knowing "what's what," to use his own far from original expression.

You couldn't fool Cricklewick to save your life. The instant he looked upon you he could put you where you belonged, and, so far as he was concerned, that was where you would have to stay.

It is doubtful if there was ever a more discerning, more discriminating butler in all England. It was his rather astonishing contention that one could be quite at one's ease with dukes and d.u.c.h.esses and absolutely ill-at-ease with ordinary people. That was his way of making the distinction. It wasn't possible to be on terms of intimacy with the people who didn't belong. They never seemed to know their place.

The next thing he knew, after the Hot Springs visit, his name began to appear in the newspapers in columns next to advertising matter instead of the other way round. Up to this time it had been a struggle to get it in next to reading matter on account of the exorbitant rates demanded by the newspapers.

He protested to his wife. "Oh, I say, my dear, this is cutting it a bit thick, you know. You can't really be in earnest about it. I shouldn't know how to act sitting down at a dinner table like that, you know. I am informed that these people are regarded as real swells over 'ere,--here, I should say. You must sit down and drop 'em a line saying we can't come. Say we've suddenly been called out of town, or had bad news from home, or--"

"Rubbish! It will do them no end of good to see how you act at table.

Haven't you had the very best of training? All you have to do--"

"But I had it standing, my dear."

"Just the same, I shall accept the invitation. They are very excellent people, and I see no reason why we shouldn't know the best while we're about it."

"But they've got millions," he expostulated.

"Well," said she, "you musn't believe everything you hear about people with millions. I must say that I've not seen anything especially vulgar about them. So don't let that stand in your way, old dear." It was unconscious irony.

"It hasn't been a great while since I was a butler, my love; don't forget that. A matter of a little over seven years."

"Pray do not forget," said she coldly, "that it hasn't been so very long since all these people over here were Indians."

Mr. Cricklewick, being more or less hazy concerning overseas history, took heart. They went to the dinner and he, remembering just how certain n.o.blemen of his acquaintance deported themselves, got on famously. And although his wife never had seen a d.u.c.h.ess eat, except by proxy in the theatre, she left nothing to be desired,--except, perhaps, in the way of food, of which she was so fond that it was rather a bore to nibble as d.u.c.h.esses do.

Being a sensible and far-seeing woman, she did not resent it when he mildly protested that Lady So-and-So wouldn't have done this, and the d.u.c.h.ess of You-Know wouldn't have done that. She looked upon him as a master in the School of Manners. It was not long before she was able not only to hold her own with the elite, but also to hold her lorgnette with them. If she did not care to see you in a crowd she could overlook you in the very smartest way.

And so, after twenty or twenty-five years, we find the Cricklewicks,--mother, father and daughter,--substantially settled in the City of Masks, occupying an enviable position in society, and seldom, if ever,--even in the bosom of the family,--referring to the days of long ago,--a precaution no doubt inspired by the fear that they might be overheard and misunderstood by their own well-trained and admirable butler, whose respect they could not afford to lose.

Once a week, on Wednesday nights, Mr. Cricklewick took off his mask. It was, in a sense, his way of going to confession. He told his wife, however, that he was going to the club.

He sighed a little more briskly as he turned away from the window and crossed over to the closet in which his fur-lined coat and silk hat were hanging. It had taken time and a great deal of persuasion on the part of his wife to prove to him that it wasn't quite the thing to wear a silk hat with a sack coat in New York; he had grudgingly compromised with the barbaric demands of fashion by dispensing with the sack coat in favour of a cutaway. The silk hat was a fixture.

"A lady asking to see you, sir," said his office-boy, after knocking on the door marked "Private."

"Hold my coat for me, Thomas," said Mr. Cricklewick.

"Yes, sir," said Thomas. "But she says you will see her, sir, just as soon as you gets a look at her."

"Obviously," said Mr. Cricklewick, shaking himself down into the great coat. "Don't rub it the wrong way, you simpleton. You should always brush a silk hat with the nap and not--"

"May I have a few words with you, Mr. Cricklewick?" inquired a sweet, clear voice from the doorway.