The Deluge Part 20

"An impulse," she said. "I don't quite understand it myself. An impulse from--from--" Her eyes and her thoughts were far away, and her expression was the one that made it hardest for me to believe she was a child of those parents of hers. "An impulse from a sense of justice--of decency. I am the cause of your trouble, and I daren't be a coward and a cheat." She repeated the last words. "A coward--a cheat! We--I--have taken much from you, more than you know. It must be repaid. If you still wish, I will--will keep to my bargain."

"It's true, I'd not have got into the mess," said I, "if I'd been attending to business instead of dangling after you. But you're not responsible for that folly."

She tried to speak several times, before she finally succeeded in saying:

"It's my fault. I mustn't shirk."

I studied her, but I couldn't puzzle her out.

"I've been thinking all along that you were simple and transparent," I said. "Now, I see you are a mystery. What are you hiding from me?"

Her smile was almost coquettish as she replied:

"When a woman makes a mystery of herself to a man, it's for the man's good."

I took her hand--almost timidly.

"Anita," I said, "do you still--dislike me?"

"I do not--and shall not--love you," she answered. "But you are--"

"More endurable?" I suggested, as she hesitated.

"Less unendurable," she said with raillery. Then she added, "Less unendurable than profiting by a-creeping up in the dark."

I thought I understood her better than she understood herself. And suddenly my pa.s.sion melted in a tenderness I would have said was as foreign to me as rain to a desert. I noticed that she had a haggard look. "You are very tired, child," said I. "Good night. I am a different man from what I was when I came in here."

"And I a different woman," said she, a beauty shining from her that was as far beyond her physical beauty as--as love is beyond pa.s.sion.

"A n.o.bler, better woman," I exclaimed, kissing her hand.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed it away.

"If you only knew!" she cried. "It seems to me, as I realize what sort of woman I am, that I am almost worthy of _you_!" And she blazed a look at me that left me rooted there, astounded.

But I went down the avenue with a light heart. "Just like a woman," I was saying to myself cheerfully, "not to know her own mind."

A few blocks, and I stopped and laughed outright--at Langdon's treachery, at my own credulity. "What an a.s.s I've been making of myself!" said I to myself. And I could see myself as I really had been during those months of social struggling--an a.s.s, braying and gamboling in a lion's skin--to impress the ladies!

"But not wholly to no purpose," I reflected, again all in a glow at thought of Anita.

XIX. A WINDFALL FROM "GENTLEMAN JOE"

I went to my rooms, purposing to go straight to bed, and get a good sleep.

I did make a start toward undressing; then I realized that I should only lie awake with my brain wearing me out, spinning crazy thoughts and schemes hour after hour--for my imagination rarely lets it do any effective thinking after the lights are out and the limitations of material things are wiped away by the darkness. I put on a dressing-gown and seated myself to smoke and to read.

When I was very young, new to New York, in with the Tenderloin crowd and up to all sorts of pranks, I once tried opium smoking. I don't think I ever heard of anything in those days without giving it a try. Usually, I believe, opium makes the smoker ill the first time or two; but it had no such effect on me, nor did it fill my mind with fantastic visions. On the contrary, it made everything around me intensely real--that is, it enormously stimulated my dominant characteristic of accurate observation.

I noticed the slightest details--such things as the slight difference in the length of the arms of the Chinaman who kept the "joint," the number of b.u.t.tons down the front of the waist of the girl in the bunk opposite mine, across the dingy, little, sweet-scented room. Nothing escaped me, and also I was conscious of each pa.s.sing second, or, rather, fraction of a second.

As a rule, time and events, even when one is quietest, go with such a rush that one notes almost nothing of what is pa.s.sing. The opium seemed to compel the kaleidoscope of life to turn more slowly; in fact, it sharpened my senses so that they unconsciously took impressions many times more quickly and easily and accurately. As I sat there that night after leaving Anita, forcing my mind to follow the printed lines, I found I was in exactly the state in which I had been during my one experiment with opium.

It seemed to me that as many days as there had been hours must have elapsed since I got the news of the raised Textile dividend. Days--yes, weeks, even months, of thought and action seemed to have been compressed into those six hours--for, as I sat there, it was not yet eleven o'clock.

And then I realized that this notion was not of the moment, but that I had been as if under the influence of some powerful nerve stimulant since my brain began to recover from the shock of that thunderbolt. Only, where nerve stimulants often make the mind pa.s.sive and disinclined to take part in the drama so vividly enacting before it, this opening of my reservoirs of reserve nervous energy had multiplied my power to act as well as my power to observe. "I wonder how long it will last," thought I. And it made me uneasy, this unnatural alertness, unaccompanied by any feverishness or sense of strain. "Is this the way madness begins?"

I dressed myself again and went out--went up to Joe Healey's gambling place in Forty-fourth Street. Most of the well-known gamblers up town, as well as their "respectable" down town fellow members of the fraternity, were old acquaintances of mine; Joe Healey was as close a friend as I had. He had great fame for squareness--and, in a sense, deserved it. With his fellow gamblers he was straight as a string at all times--to be otherwise would have meant that when he went broke he would stay broke, because none of the fraternity would "stake" him. But with his patrons--being regarded by them as a pariah, he acted toward them like a pariah--a prudent pariah. He fooled them with a frank show of gentlemanliness, of honesty to his own hurt; under that cover he fleeced them well, but always judiciously.

That night, I recall, Joe's guests were several young fellows of the fashionable set, rich men's sons and their parasites, a few of the big down town operators who hadn't yet got hipped on "respectability"--they playing poker in a private room--and a couple of flush-faced, flush-pursed chaps from out of town, for whom one of Joe's men was dealing faro from what looked to my experienced and accurate eye like a "brace" box.

Joe, very elegant, too elegant in fact, in evening dress, was showing a new piece of statuary to the oldest son of Melville, of the National Industrial Bank. Joe knew a little something about art--he was much like the art dealers who, as a matter of business, learn the difference between good things and bad, but in their hearts wonder and laugh at people willing to part with large sums of money for a little paint or marble or the like.

As soon as Joe thought he had sufficiently impressed young Melville, he drifted him to a roulette table, left him there and joined me.

"Come to my office," said he. "I want to see you."

He led the way down the richly-carpeted marble stairway as far as the landing at the turn. There, on a sort of mezzanine, he had a gorgeous little suite. The princ.i.p.al object in the sitting-room or office was a huge safe. He closed and locked the outside door behind us.

"Take a seat," said he. "You'll like the cigars in the second box on my desk--the long one." And he began turning the combination lock. "You haven't dropped in on us for the past three or four months," he went on.

"No," said I, getting a great deal of pleasure out of seeing again, and thus intimately, his round, ruddy face--like a yachtman's, not like a drinker's--and his shifty, laughing brown eyes. "The game down town has given me enough excitement. I haven't had to continue it up town to keep my hand in."

In fact, I had, as I have already said, been breaking off with my former friends because, while many of the most reputable and reliable financiers down town go in for high play occasionally at the gambling houses, it isn't wise for the man trying to establish himself as a strictly legitimate financier. I had been playing as much as ever, but only in games in my own rooms and at the rooms of other bankers, brokers and commercial leaders.

The pa.s.sion for high play is a craving that gnaws at a man all the time, and he must always be feeding it one way or another.

"I've noticed that you are getting too swell to patronize us fellows," said he, his shrewd smile showing that my polite excuse had not fooled him.

"Well, Matt, you're right--you always did have good sound sense and a steady eye for the main chance. I used to think the women'd ruin you, they were so crazy about that handsome mug and figure of yours. But when I saw you knew exactly when to let go, I knew nothing could stop you."

By this time he had the safe open, disclosing several compartments and a small, inside safe. He worked away at the second combination lock, and presently exposed the interior of the little safe. It was filled with a great roll of bills. He pried this out, brought it over to the desk and began wrapping it up. "I want you to take this with you when you go," said he. "I've made several big killings lately, and I'm going to get you to invest the proceeds."

"I can't take that big bundle along with me, Joe," said I. "Besides, it ain't safe. Put it in the bank and send me a check."

"Not on your life," replied Healey with a laugh. "The suckers we trimmed gave checks, and I turned 'em into cash as soon as the banks opened. I wasn't any too spry, either. Two of the d.a.m.ned sneaks consulted lawyers as soon as they sobered off, and tried to stop payment on their checks.

They're threatening proceedings. You must take the dough away with you, and I don't want a receipt."

"Tr.i.m.m.i.n.g suckers, eh?" said I, not able to decide what to do.

"Their fathers stole it from the public," he explained. "They're drunken little sn.o.bs, not fit to have money. I'm doing a public service by relieving them of it. If I'd 'a' got more, I'd feel that much more"--he vented his light, cool, sarcastic laugh--"more patriotic."

"I can't take it," said I, feeling that, in my present condition, to take it would be very near to betraying the confidence of my old friend.

"They lost it in a straight game," he hastened to a.s.sure me. "I haven't had a 'brace' box or crooked wheel for four years." This with a sober face and a twinkle in his eye. "But even if I had helped chance to do the good work of teaching them to take care of their money, you'd not refuse me. Up town and down town, and all over the place, what's business, when you come to look at it sensibly, but trading in stolen goods? Do you know a man who could honestly earn more than ten or twenty thousand a year--good clean money by good clean work?"

"Oh, for that matter, your money's as clean as anybody's," said I. "But, you know, I'm a speculator, Joe. I have my downs--and this happens to be a stormy time for me. If I take your money, I mayn't be able to account for it or even to pay dividends on it for--maybe a year or so."

"It's all right, old man. I'll never give it a thought till you remind me of it. Use it as you'd use your own. I've got to put it behind somebody's luck--why not yours?"