Held to Answer/Chapter 26
Following his instincts rather than any rule of sense, Rollie hurried out upon the street, posted himself upon a conspicuous corner, and for several minutes indulged the wildly improbable hope that he might spy the minister passing in the throng. When a little reflection had convinced him that this was time wasted, he made a hasty inventory of near-by places where his benefactor might have gone, and even went so far as to hurriedly visit two of them, threading the tables of the Forum Café, where sometimes Hampstead ate his luncheon, and scanning the chairs in the St. Albans barber shop, where from time to time the dominie's tawny fleece was shorn.
But by this time a new probability forced itself into the distracted young man's consciousness. This was that the minister had gone to pay his sympathetic respects to Miss Dounay and condole with her over her loss. Rollie was so near the Dounay apartment that to go upstairs and inquire if the minister were there would have been easy, but the peculiar circumstances made it difficult. Indeed only to recall how near he was to that fearsome lair of the tigress threw him into cold shivers and made him fly to the safer vantage ground of the telephone upon his own desk at the bank. But even merely to inquire for the Reverend John Hampstead from there was hard. In his nervous state, depleted by gloomy forebodings and now unfortified by the possession of the diamonds, Rollie felt utterly unequal to even a long-distance contact with that high-powered personality. All the morning he had been in terror lest she herself should call him up. All the morning he had known that in his character as an interested friend he should have telephoned to her. Now, the moment she recognized his voice, he would be taxed with this breach! What was he to say? Why, that he had not telephoned because he was intending to call in at the first moment he could get away from the bank, and that he would be up very soon now. She would be sarcastic, but the explanation would positively have to do. Besides, he had to locate the minister! and so, struggling to command a tone of indifference, he gave the St. Albans number.
Of course Julie or the secretary would answer, anyway. But evidently Miss Dounay, in her highly aroused mental state, was keeping an ear upon the telephone bell, for it was her own animated note that rasped at him through the instrument. It appeared, mercifully, that she did not recognize his voice,—a fact which at first relieved him, but on later reflection, at the conclusion of the incident, shook his remaining self-confidence still further to pieces, for it showed how completely out of hand he had allowed himself to get.
When, moreover, Rollie launched his timid inquiry if the Reverend John Hampstead was there, he got a negative so sharp that the receiver seemed to bite his ear. He broke the connection hastily and sat eyeing the telephone apprehensively, expecting the mouthpiece to open like a solemn eye, scan him inquiringly, and report to Miss Dounay. When it did not, he shrugged his shoulders and elongated his neck to get rid of that noose-like feeling which had just come upon him from nowhere. He had not killed anybody. What was the noose for, then? But this reflection got a most disagreeable answer: "It would kill your mother to know you are an embezzler and a thief. You would then be her murderer." Again he shrugged himself free of the distasteful sensation. "Buck up, Burbeck," he commanded himself, "or you are done for." Once more he grabbed the telephone, and this time more determinedly, for in the midst of his misery one really first-class inspiration had come to him: this was to communicate with the county jail. The minister was really much more likely to have friends in the county jail than in the St. Albans; and it was a safe wager that he went there more frequently. Rollie knew the jailer well.
"Hello—Sam," he called. "This is Rollie. Has Doctor Hampstead been there this morning?"
"Yeh!"
"There now?"
"Nope."
"Know where he went?"
Evidently Sam turned to some one else in the room for information. Rollie heard a voice answering him and caught the words "San Francisco" and "Red Lizard."
"Did you get that?" called Sam into the 'phone. "He's gone to San Francisco."
"Yes,—but what's that got to do with the Red Lizard?"
"He came down to see the Red Lizard."
"The Red Lizard!" Rollie could not restrain a gasp, and then wondered if gasps are transmitted over the telephone—but went on to ask: "Is the Red Lizard in?"
"Yeh!"
"What for?"
Rollie was clinging to the telephone now like a drowning man to a rope's end.
"He got in some kind of a row with a service elevator man at the St. Albans last night and landed on him with the brass knucks. This morning the judge gave him three months in the county."
Rollie clenched his teeth, and his shoulders rocked for a moment. So that was what happened to the Red Lizard! What a long time ago last night was! How many things had happened! Last night he was a crook and a defaulter. To-day he was an honest man, and his accounts would bear the scrutiny of an X-ray. Now if only those diamonds—
But Sam had gone right on talking.
"We think Doctor Hampstead went to San Francisco on some sort of errand for the Lizard—Red's got a woman sick over there or something. But, say, the parson telephoned his house before he left here, and they can tell you sure."
"All right, thanks."
"So long, Rollie!"
Gone to San Francisco! Worse and worse. Rollie huddled in his chair. But there was still a grain of hope. Sam might be mistaken, or the trip might be a short one, or the minister might have left a telephone number that would reach him.
But the voice of Rose Langham dashed these hopes one by one. Her brother had gone to San Francisco on an uncertain quest; he would not be back until very late at night, and he had no idea himself where in the city his search would lead him.
For the second time that day Rollie found himself in a state bordering on physical collapse. The very stars were fighting against him. After the strain of a year in which the fear of detection, however masked, had always been present, his nerves were in none too good condition, anyway. The events of the last twenty-four hours had racked them to the limit of self-control. And yet, when safely past the danger of discovery of his defalcation, the growing sense of the enormity of the crime of theft had brought him to a point where in sheer self-defense he felt he must seize the jewels and literally fling them at their owner. Now, goaded, tricked, tantalized, defeated—everything was in a conspiracy against him! It was enough to drive a man insane. Burbeck felt himself very near the maniacal point. Again he was seeing things. One moment the street outside was full of patrol wagons, all ringing their gongs at once, while platoons of police were marching and surrounding the bank. Another moment he had decided to anticipate the police by rushing out to the corner by the plaza, tossing his hat high in the air, and shouting and shrieking until a crowd had gathered, when he would exhibit the diamonds and proclaim himself the thief.
But he was spared the possibility of this insane freak by the fact that he could not exhibit the diamonds. They were in the vault. Damn the vault! To hell with them! To hell with everything! To hell with himself! That was where he was going!
Suddenly he looked up, trembling. Mercer, the assistant cashier whose desk was next to his own, must have overheard him. But no, Mercer was calmly writing. He had heard nothing, because nothing had been spoken. Rollie had been thinking in shouts, not speaking. And yet he looked about him wonderingly, like a man coming out of a temporary aberration.
"I will be shouting it next," he said to himself. "I am getting dotty; I'll burst if I have to hold this much longer. I'll burst and give the whole thing away."
His hat had been pushed back from his brow; he drew it forward and down until it shaded his face, and then with his jaws set in the most determined mood he could muster, he walked out of the bank and piloted his steps, with knees that were sometimes stiff and sometimes tottering, in the direction of the Hotel St. Albans.
Without waiting to be announced, he went up and knocked at the door of Miss Dounay's apartment. It was opened a mere crack to reveal a nose and a bit of an eyebrow. This facial fragment belonged to Julie, and with it she managed to convey an expression at once forbidding and inquisitorial.
"Oh, la la!" she exclaimed, after her survey. "It is the handsome man. Come in," and the door swung wide. "Madame will be glad to see you. Perhaps you bring the diamonds."
Julie said all this in her slight but charming accent with an attempt at good-humored vivacity, but that last was a very embarrassing remark to a caller in young Mr. Burbeck's delicate position. It caused one of his knees to knock sharply against the other as he manœuvered to a position where he could lean against a heavy William-and-Mary chair, and thus remain standing until Miss Dounay should enter the room; since to sit down and then rise again suddenly was a feat that promised to be entirely beyond him.
Moreover, light as had been Julie's manner, Rollie saw that her appearance belied it. Her eyes were red, her sharp little nose was also highly colored, and in her hand was a tight ball of a handkerchief that had been wetted to such compactness by tears.
Mercifully Miss Dounay did not leave time for the young man's apprehensions to increase. She entered almost as Julie disappeared, wearing something black and oddly cut, a baggy thing, like a gown he remembered once seeing upon a sculptress when at work in her studio. It was the nearest to an unbecoming garb that he had ever known Marien to wear, and yet unbecoming was hardly the word. It did become her mood, which was somber. Her face was pale, and there were shadows beneath her eyes. She looked subdued, defeated even; but by no means broken. There were hard lines about her mouth, lines which Rollie had never seen there before. She wore a sullen expression, and a passion that was volcanic appeared to smoulder in her eyes. She greeted him rather perfunctorily, as if her mind had been brooding and, after bidding him be seated and sinking herself upon a couch, cushion-piled as usual, shrouded herself again in a state of aloofness which reminded him of the weather when a storm is brooding.
Rollie had expected her to be raging like a wild woman,—alternately hurling anathemas at the thief for having stolen her gems and heaping denunciations upon the police because they had not already captured the criminal and recovered the necklace.
Her apparent indifference to that subject only emphasized to Rollie what he had before observed,—that it was impossible ever to forecast the mind of this woman upon any subject, or under any circumstances. At the same time, the young man was extremely grateful for this abstraction, because it made what he had to do vastly easier.
"I suppose," he ventured huskily, "you are worried to death about your diamonds."
The sentence drew one lightning flash from her eyes, and that was all.
"To tell you the truth, I have hardly thought of them," she snapped.
Rollie sat with open mouth, totally unable to comprehend, staring until his stare annoyed her.
"I say I have hardly thought of them," she repeated, with an asperity entirely sufficient to recall the young man from his amazement at her manner to the real object of his visit.
"But wouldn't you like to get your diamonds back?" he asked perspiringly.
"Of course, silly!" the actress replied, not bothering to conceal the fact that she regarded Burbeck as a child, sometimes useful and sometimes a nuisance. Apparently, she had hailed his advent because her ill humor required a fresh butt, Julie's face having indicated clearly that she had been made to suffer to the breaking point.
But Rollie was in no position to insist upon niceties of speech or manner. He had a trouble compared to which all other troubles of which he had ever conceived were nothing at all. He was haunted by a terrible fear, and to escape its torture he plumped full in the face of it by blurting:
"I have come to tell you that you are going to get your diamonds back."
If Marien's demeanor were a pose, it must have proved that she really was what her press agents claimed,—the greatest actress on the English speaking stage. She did not start, or speak. For a few seconds not even the direction of her glance was changed. Then her face did shift sufficiently for the black piercing eyes to stab straight into Rollie's, while her brows were lifted inquiringly. The glance said, "Well, go on!"
The young man obeyed desperately: "I am an ambassador for the—"
Still Miss Dounay did not speak; she did not move nor change an expression even; and yet Rollie felt himself interrupted. He could not tell how this was done, but he was sure that this woman had detected him in the first note of insincerity and by a thought-wave had emphatically said, "Don't lie to me!"
All at once, too, he realized that this motionless, marble-lipped creature sitting there before him was more implacable, more potential for evil than the raging tigress he had expected to confront. He felt somehow that she was not a woman, but a super-devil into whose clutches he was being drawn. He even had a sense that he was not going to be allowed any increased issue of moral stock on the ground of telling this woman the truth. He was going to tell her the truth because he had to, because she hypnotized it out of him.
"I say," he began, and stopped to wet his lips, but found his tongue so furred that it could not function in that behalf. "I say," he went on again, croaking hoarsely, "that I am the thief."
"You? The banker?"
Rollie fell to wondering how blue vitriol bites. Certainly it could not be more biting than the sarcasm in look and tone with which the woman had asked this question.
"Yes, I—"
The young man was going to prepare the soil for throwing himself upon her mercy—this woman whom he was now positive knew no such thing as mercy—by telling her about his defalcation; but in the wooden state of his mind, one quivering gleam of intelligence suggested that it was quite unnecessary to tell her anything about his defalcation; that it might give her an added set of pincers for the torture she might choose to inflict.
"Yes, I stole them," he affirmed doggedly. "And I am going to bring them back."
"Going to?" she asked, again making the fine shade of her meaning clear with the slightest expenditure of sound.
"Yes, a little accident happened."
"An accident!" The woman's eyes blazed, her cheeks were aflame, and her whole attitude expressive of menace. "You didn't lose them?"
"I only lost control of them for a few hours through a bit of stupidity," he confessed, and hurried on to explain: "For safe keeping this morning I locked them in John Hampstead's safe deposit box, and he went off with the key. He's wandering around the tenderloin of San Francisco now on an errand for a man in the county jail, and they don't even expect him home before to-morrow morning. We can get them—"
Again Rollie felt himself mentally interrupted, although Miss Dounay had not spoken.
This time, however, her features did change unmistakably. She had been listening with a cynical expression that somehow suggested the manner of a cat about to pounce; and suddenly this manner had departed. It was succeeded by a look of surprise and then of thoughtful interest, followed by that indefinable something which bade him cease to speak. He paused abruptly with his tongue in air, as it were; yet she neither spoke nor looked at him. Her features were a sort of moving picture of complex and swift-flying mental processes which succeeded one another with astonishing rapidity and ended in a queer expression of glory and triumph, while she stiffened her body and drew a full breath so quickly that the air whistled in her narrowing nostrils.
Then, as if becoming suddenly aware of the visitor's presence, Miss Dounay turned her eyes directly upon him and exclaimed, with a manner quite the most pleasant she had yet displayed:
"Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Burbeck. Something you said started such an interesting train of thought."
Her cordiality extended to the point of reaching out a hand and laying it reassuringly upon Rollie's arm, while she asked, and this time with a tone of real consideration:
"Will you be kind enough to tell me again, very carefully, and a little more in detail, just why you couldn't bring the diamonds to-day?"
Rollie, greatly relieved at this softening in Marien's mood at the very point where he had feared she might actually leap on him and throttle him, retold the story, only being careful to omit all reference as to why he chanced to be visiting Doctor Hampstead's box, and why Doctor Hampstead happened to come into his office so that he might pick up the key, as he did.
"What an odd coincidence!" commented Marien, when the recital was finished. Actually, she was laughing. Rollie's heart went out to her completely. He felt a sting of self-reproach at the harshness of his judgment of her, and was sensible of a new charity growing in his life for all mankind. It was really going to be made easy for him to take "the way up." He felt like singing a little psalm of thanksgiving.
"And the minister has no idea that the diamonds are in his vault?" that mercurial lady inquired, with a chuckle.
"Not the least in the world," assured Rollie, anxious to relieve his benefactor of any slightest odium of indiscretion.
"And when did you say Doctor Hampstead was expected home from San Francisco?"
Miss Dounay had stopped laughing and had an intent look, as if desiring to understand something very clearly.
"Perhaps the last boat to-night—possibly not till to-morrow morning."
"Then there is no way of getting the jewels until to-morrow morning?"
"None at all," confessed Rollie. "But as a matter of fact, they are perfectly safe there—safer than they are in your own apartment."
"So I should say," Miss Dounay observed dryly, "unless I revise my guest list."
Rollie flushed.
"That was coming to me," he confessed, frowning at himself. "That and much more."
His tone was serious and full of bitter self-reproach. Miss Dounay's surprisingly indulgent attitude emboldened him to pursue the disagreeable subject farther.
"I have not told you," he went on, "that I came to ask you for mercy."
"Do you not perceive that you are getting it without asking?" the actress replied, with a liquid glance that was really full of gentleness and sympathy.
"Of course," Rollie averred. "But I am so grateful that I did not want you to think I could take it for granted. I was in a terrible position, Miss Dounay. The crime was not accidental, but deliberate; that it miscarried was the accident. But that your diamonds are to be restored to you, and that I myself am on my way to a sort of character restoration, if I ever had any, which I begin to doubt, is all due to one good friend whom I saw to-day, and who is also a good friend of yours."
Again Rollie was interrupted; but this time there was nothing intangible about it.
Miss Dounay's face grew suddenly hard; cruel lines that were tense and threatening appeared about her mouth, while her eyes bored straight into his, as she exclaimed: "Never mind about that now. As for the theft: you need never hear from me one word about what you have done. The only injunction that I lay upon you is to keep absolute silence about it yourself. Remember, no matter what comes to pass, you know nothing and have nothing to say. So long as you are silent, I will protect you absolutely. Break the silence, and you will go where you belong!"
Of all the hard glances Miss Dounay had given young Burbeck, the look which accompanied this last menacing sentence was positively the hardest. A spasm of mortal terror wrung the young man's heart, as he saw how deliberately implacable this woman could be, and how completely he was in her power.
But presently, Miss Dounay, as if suddenly ashamed of her outburst of feeling over so slight an occasion, broke into radiant smiles, took Rollie by the arm, and led him a few steps in the direction of the door. Her manner was gracious and almost affectionate, proclaiming that at least as long as all went well with her moods, the whole wretched incident was past and forgotten absolutely.
As if to make this emphatically clear, she inquired:
"And when is it that you go out with Mrs. Ellsworth Harrington upon her launch party?"
"With Mrs. Harrington's launch party?" Rollie asked, in a dazed voice, his mind groping as at some elusive memory.
"Yes," the actress replied crisply. "You told me yesterday you were going out to-day with her party for a cruise on the Bay."
"Yesterday!" confessed Rollie dreamily. "By Jove, so I did. But," and as though it made all the difference in the world, "that was yesterday!"
"And isn't to-day to-day?" Miss Dounay asked significantly. "Going to buck up, aren't you?" she continued with intimate friendliness of tone. "You are still to continue as the Amalgamated's social ambassador?"
"Why, of course," the young man replied, although weakly, for after what he had passed through of hope and fear in the past few hours and even the past few minutes, he felt quite unequal to any such prospect as the immediate resumption of his social duties.
But it was a part of the swiftly forming plans of the strong willed woman that he should take them up immediately, and she cleverly recalled his mind to the necessity of special attention to Mrs. Harrington's projects by inquiring tentatively: "I suppose Mrs. Harrington was very much put out because I did not attend her dinner last night?"
"I should say!" confessed Rollie, turning a wry face at the memory.
"Suppose," suggested Miss Dounay in calculating tones, "that I went with you upon her launch party this afternoon."
"You? Oh! Miss Dounay!" Rollo exclaimed, with another of his looks of dog-like gratefulness. "Could you be as good as that? Why, say!" and the young man's enthusiasm actually began to kindle. "You'd undo the damage of last night and fix me with her for life. Positively for life; because," and he hesitated while an expression half ludicrous and half painful crossed his face; "because you are ten times as big a social asset now that—that—" he could not bring himself to finish the sentence.
But Miss Dounay relieved him of his embarrassment by appearing not to notice and broke in with a practical question:
"What time does the launch leave the pier?"
"At four. It is now one-thirty."
For a moment Miss Dounay's brow was threaded with lines of thought, as if she were making calculations and tying the loose ends of some project together in her mind.
"Yes," she said, her face clearing and a look of impish happiness coming into her eyes, "I can go. It will be a delightful relief. I have been bored beyond measure by my own company to-day. Come here at three-thirty and François will take us to the pier."