The Penalty Part 31

The piano burst into a storm of sound, under cover of which Rose, still at her post, torn with jealousy, continued to pedal at the direction of her lord and master, and sobbed as if her heart would break. Devils filled the room, whirling in mad dances; they screamed and yelled; the souls of the d.a.m.ned screeched in torment; and the face of him who invoked the inferno, swollen, streaming with sweat, the eyes glazed, protruding, was the face of a madman.

Rose, for whom her master's playing had the eloquence and precision of speech, forgot her jealousy in fear of those consequences which her ill-timed sobbing must bring upon her. Her tears dried as in a desert wind; her sobs ceased, and in a moment or two the madness was going out of Blizzard's music and out of his face. He rested, preluded, and then began to play Beethoven, quietly, with a pure singing tone, music of a heavenly sanity.

The jarred feelings of his audience were soothed. Into his own face there stole a high-priest look. And when he had finished playing, this look remained for a few moments. Then he laughed quietly and, speaking for the first time, expressed the hope that he had not made them listen too long.

He reached for the wall behind him, and turned a switch so that the room became brightly lighted. Then, reluctantly, he came out from behind the piano, swinging between his crutches, and leaving Rose to escape at the first favorable opportunity. His descent from colossus to cripple had an unpleasant effect. And the question, "How the deuce do you work the pedals?" was jerked from Blythe, usually a most tactful person.

"Why," said Blizzard simply, "I have an a.s.sistant." He caught Barbara's eye and reddened a little. "A young man who is musical and intelligent.

We have a system of signals, and--but I think there is a sort of thought communication that comes of much rehearsing together. And in our best moments we do pretty well. But sometimes when our minds are not tuned together we make a dreadful hash of things."

He might have added: "At such times I drag her about by the hair and beat her." But he didn't. He looked instead the picture of a very patient man who makes the best of things.

"Whatever you do at times," said Barbara gently, "you have done wonders to-night. But you know better than we do how good your playing is. So what is the use of praising it--to you?"

She felt that he was her own private discovery--almost her property. And knowing that her friends were still profoundly affected by his playing, she was filled with honest pride. Her eyes flashed, her cheeks glowed.

"What did I tell you?" she exclaimed. "Was I right? Didn't I promise that he would make good? Did he?"

She was delighted with Blizzard, delighted with herself, delighted with the whole party. She had forgotten the madman face that he had showed.

She forgot that he was a cripple, a thing soured and wicked. She thought of him only as a great genius, which she herself had discovered.

The childlike pleasure which she felt communicated itself to the others, and Blizzard, escaping an ovation of honest praise, led them into the next room, where, among palms and roses, such a supper was spread as gamblers, the big men of the profession, spread for their victims.

The mere sight of the champagne-gla.s.ses loosened the men's tongues. Talk flowed. Mrs. Bruce and Barbara, seated right and left of their host, made much of his music and his hospitality. For once in his life he was genuinely happy. He looked very handsome, very high-minded, very modest, a man's man. Sitting, he was much taller than the others. You forgot that, standing, he was but a dwarf. He towered at the head of his table, his mind working in swift, good-natured, hospitable flashes. It was obvious that he had been born a gentleman, and that he had never "forgotten how." It was obvious, too, that he was a man of power and position, who when he wished could spend money like a great lord, and who was accustomed to give orders.

In his manner to Barbara there was (perhaps noticeable only to herself) an air of long-proved friendship and a kind of guardianly tenderness, and he managed somehow to convey to her that she had an immense influence over him; that he looked to her for help--for inspiration.

The desire to make a great man of him invaded her mind. Her heart warmed toward him.

"I wonder," said Bruce suddenly, "where our wandering Wilmot is to-night?"

"I drink to him," said the beggar quickly, "wherever he is, and wish him luck."

But the poison had been spilled on Barbara's evening. For three hours she had not once thought of the man whom twelve hours ago she had really wanted to marry. And her heart meanwhile had warmed and expanded toward one who at best was a prodigiously successful crook and rascal, and she was ashamed. But for all that neither the warmth nor the triumphant sense of influence and conquest went out of her heart. And later, when Mrs. Bruce said: "I really think we ought to go," Barbara, outwardly all sweetness and agreement, was inwardly annoyed. She wanted very much to stay, for she knew that the moment she was alone her conscience would give her no peace, and that she would make resolutions which she would not, judging from past experiences, be able to keep. She would resolve to abandon her bust of Blizzard, resolve never to see the creature again, since it seemed that he had in him power upon her emotions--dangerous power.

"Do we work to-morrow, Miss Ferris?"

The words, "No, I'm afraid not to-morrow," rose to her lips. The words, "_Please,_ at the usual time," came out.

And she felt as if his will, not her own, had caused her to say those words. Her heart gave a sudden leap of fear.

XXVI

Barbara knew very well that she was doing wrong. Summer had descended, blazing, upon the city. Without exception her friends had gone to the country. Her father had gone to Colorado upon an errand of which for the present he chose to make a mystery. She made a habit of lunching at the Colony Club, and occasionally saw some friend or other who had run into town for a face ma.s.sage, a hair wave, a gown, or a hat. But the afternoons and evenings hung very heavily upon her hands. So that she got to living in and for her mornings at the studio. With the appearance of Blizzard, clean, thoughtful, and forceful, her feelings of loneliness and depression vanished. If her vitality was at low ebb, his was not.

The heat appeared to brace him, and he had the faculty of communicating something of his own energy, so that it was not until she had finished working and dismissed him that she was sensible of fatigue and discouragement.

The man was on his best behavior. He could not but realize that he had established an influence over her; that she was beginning to take him at his own estimate of himself, and to believe in his pretended aspirations. And while he credited her with no affection for himself, he had the presumption to imagine that his maimed condition and his low station in life no longer made the slightest difference to her, and that finally her friendliness would turn into a warmer feeling. But if not, he had but to wait until the maturity of his plans should throw the city into chaos, when she would be at his mercy.

The hand which he had dealt himself was so full of high cards that the occasional losing of a trick did not disturb him in the slightest. He had through her father's hideous mistake a hold on Barbara's conscience.

As a personage whose power over certain sections of the city was stronger than the law, he had a hold upon her imagination. As the inspirer of her best work, he had a hold upon her grat.i.tude. He had, or thought he had, a chance to win her affection in open and equal compet.i.tion. And, highest card of all--ace of trumps--he had persuaded her that her influence upon him was such that with all the strength of remorse he was shaping his life toward high ideals.

In his heart she was usually, but not always, the first consideration.

Sometimes the pa.s.sion of ambition overlapped the pa.s.sion of love. And sometimes he felt that he would forego the fruition of all his plans if only by some miracle his legs could be restored to him.

But on the whole, he had reached a high-water mark of self-satisfaction.

He had found it easy to carry corruption into high places. A list of those who were in his power--willing or unwilling--would have horrified the whole nation. From O'Hagan in the West came reports that all went well with the organization, and that Wilmot Allen was displaying genius in teaching inexperienced Polacks to shoot.

On his walks through the city the legless man carried a high head, and looked about him with the eye of a landlord. His imagination was so strong that he had already the feelings of a genuine conqueror, and not of a man confronted by the awful possibilities of failure. And by some subtlety of mental communication Barbara was coming more and more into this same opinion of him. And in realizing this, and in allowing their relations to continue, she knew that she was doing wrong.

She compared her model with all the men she had known, always to conclude that there was in him a sort of greatness utterly wanting in the others. If he had revealed his plans to her, she would have believed him not only capable of carrying them out, but sure to do so--if he wished. He might be Satan fallen, but he was still a G.o.d. In the early days of their a.s.sociation she had felt herself the important person of the two, and her bust of him the most important thing in the world. He and she would surely die, but the bust had a chance to live. But now she had the feeling that the work was of less importance than the man; and that she herself was an insignificant spoiled person of no importance whatever. When Blizzard entered the studio she had the feeling that a great and busy man was, out of pure good nature, wasting his time upon an unknown artist. But she knew very well that such was not the case.

She knew that he came to the studio because she attracted him, and for no other reason. And at times she felt keenly curious to know just how much she attracted him, and the morbid wish, for which she hated herself, of leading him into some sort of a declaration.

XXVII

However unnecessary the hot waves of the New York summer may appear to some people, they were never wasted on Bubbles. He had a pa.s.sion for the water, and to his love of swimming was added a pa.s.sion for the underworld gossip with which the piers of the East River reek in bathing weather. For just as mice are more intimate with the details of houses than landlords are, so the small boys of a city have the best opportunities for being acquainted with its workings, and with the intimate lives of its inhabitants. The street-boy's mind matures while his body is still that of a child. Births and deaths are familiar spectacles to him. He knows and holds of high import hundreds of things which men have forgotten. He can see in the dark. He can hide in a handful of shadow. And when he isn't overhearing on his own hook, he is listening to what somebody else has overheard. Second-story men fear him, lovers loathe him, and nature, who has been thwarted in her intention that he should run in sweet meadows, sleep in fresh air, and bathe in clean water, sighs over him.

It was so hot that the policeman whose duty and privilege it was to see that no small boy cooled himself from Pier 31A, disappeared tactfully into the family entrance of a water-front saloon. The city had many laws which to this particular officer appeared unreasonable and which he enforced only when he couldn't help himself. In men there is the need of gambling and some other things. As for small boys, they _must_ play baseball and they _must_ swim.

Bubbles went overboard at about three o'clock. There were twenty or thirty boys of all sizes already in the water, and the addition of one to the struggling group of wet heads was not to be noticed. Nor was the disappearance of that head noticed, nor the fact that it appeared to remain under water for nearly three-quarters of an hour, nor that when it finally did emerge it looked on the whole as if it had seen a ghost.

Bubbles, it seems, was less interested in the waters around Pier 31A than in the waters underneath. And for this reason: on the previous night, while stripping for a swim, he had heard a m.u.f.fled sound of voices coming from directly under the pier, followed by a long subdued roaring as of a load of earth being emptied into the water. Now, under Harry West's tuition Bubbles had formed the habit of investigating whatever he did not understand. And he wished very much to find out why people should talk under piers at night, how they could get under Pier 31A except by swimming, and _if_ they were throwing earth overboard _why_ they were doing so, and where they got the earth.

His head filled with vague and highly colored notions of a smugglers'

cave, his narrow lungs filled with air, Bubbles dove, swam between two slimy barnacled piles, and came up presently in a dark, dank, stale, gurgling region, wonderfully cool after the blazing sunlight which he had just left.

Toward the sh.o.r.e the light that filtered between the supporting piles of Pier 31A became less and less, until completely shut off by walls of solid masonry. Into this darkness Bubbles swam with great caution, accustoming his eyes to the obscurity and holding himself ready to dive in retreat at the first alarm.

The sh.o.r.e end of Pier 31A had originally been a clean wall of solid masonry. The removal of half a dozen great blocks of stone had made a jagged opening in the midst of this, and into this opening, pulling himself a little out of the water, Bubbles strained and strained his eyes and saw nothing but the beginning of a pa.s.sageway and then pitch darkness.

His heart beat very hard and fast like the heart of a caught bird. Here, leading into the city from the sh.o.r.e of the East River, was a mysterious pa.s.sageway. Who had made it and why? There were two ways of finding out.

One was to wait patiently until some one entered the pa.s.sage or emerged from it. The other way, and the better, was to forget how very much the idea of so doing frightened you, climb into the opening, and follow the pa.s.sage to its other end. Bubbles compromised. He waited patiently for half an hour. Nothing happened. Then he pulled himself into the opening and crawled through the darkness for perhaps the length of a city block.

"What," he then said to himself, "is the use of me going any further? I can't see in the dark. I've got no matches, and if anything happens to me, there'll be n.o.body to tell Harry about this place. Better make a get-away now, find Harry, and bring him here to-night. Then if we find anybody there'll be something doing."

He had turned and was crawling rather rapidly toward the entrance of the pa.s.sage.

XXVIII