The Paliser case. Saltus Edgar
are sure to like it. There! I have it. It is called: 'L'art de tromper les femmes.'"
Mrs. Austen moved to the door and looked back.
"But if you don't find it readily, let it go for to-night. Your young man is sure to have a copy. No nice young man is without one."
VI
Lennox was a broker, a vocation which he practised in Wall Street. Early on the following afternoon, while returning from there, he sat wedged between a gunman and a Hun. He was unconscious of either. The uncertain market; the slump, momentarily undiscernible, but mathematically inevitable; customers, credulous or sceptical, but always avid; the pulse of the feverish street which the ticker indifferently registered; the atmosphere of tobacco and greed; the trailing announcements; "Steel, three-fourths; Pennsy, a half," these things were forgotten. The train crashed on. Of that too he was unconscious.
Before him a panorama had unrolled – the day he first saw her, the hour he first loved her, the moment he first thought she might care for him – the usual panorama that unfolds before any one fortunate enough to love and to be loved in return.
"Grand Central!"
The gunman disappeared, the Hun had gone, the car emptied itself on a platform from which it was at once refilled. Lennox ascended the stair, reached the street, boarded a taxi, drove to his home.
The latter, situated on the ground floor of an apartment house a step from Park Avenue, was entirely commonplace, fitted with furniture large and ugly, yet minutely relieved by a photograph which showed the almost perfect oval of Margaret's almost perfect face.
The photograph stood on a table in the sitting-room beyond which extended other rooms that, in addition to being ugly, were dark. But Lennox had no degrading manias for comfort. Pending the great day he camped in these rooms, above which, on an upper storey was a duplex apartment which, if Margaret liked, he proposed to take.
It was for her opinion regarding it that he had asked her to come. In the forenoon she had telephoned that she and her mother would both be with him. He had instructed his servant accordingly and now a silver tea-service that had belonged to his grandmother and which, being Victorian, was hideous, gleamed at him as he entered the rooms.
Something else gleamed also. On a rug, a puddle of sunlight had spilled.
Above, on the embossed platter, were petits fours, watercress sandwiches, a sack of sweetmeats, a bunch of violets, a scatter of cups. Beneath was the puddle.
Lennox looked. It seemed all right.
Harris, his servant, a little man, thin as an umbrella, sidled silently by. The vestibule took him. From it came the sound of a voice, limpid, clear, which Lennox knew and knew too was not Margaret's.
"A lady to see you, sir," Harris, reappearing and effacing himself, announced.
The doorway framed her. There, with her shock of auburn hair, her cameo face, her slim figure and her costume which, though simple, was not the ruinous simplicity that Fifth Avenue achieves, Cassy presented a picture very different from that on the table, a picture otherwise differentiated by a bundle that was big as a baby.
Lennox did not know but that it might contain a baby and the possibility alarmed this man who was afraid of nobody.
"Hello!" he exclaimed.
In exclaiming, he stared. He liked the girl. But at the moment she was in the way. Moreover, why she had come to these rooms of his, where she had not been invited, and where she had not ventured before, was a mystery.
"How's your father?" he added.
There are people, as there are animals, that cannot be awkward and are never ridiculous. Cassy was one of them. None the less she stood on one foot. The tea-table had become very talkative. It told her that it was expecting somebody; that watercress sandwiches were not for her; no, nor Victorian horrors either.
"Be off!" it shouted.
"Sit down," said Lennox.
Cassy, hugging the bundle, remained in the doorway. It was not the tea-table merely, but something else, the indefinable something which one may feel and not describe that was telling her to hurry. Afterward, with that regret which multiplies tears and subtracts nothing, she wished she had hurried, wished rather that she had not come, wished that she had defied the wolf, outfaced the butcher, done anything except enter these rooms.
She shifted the bundle. "I have been gadding about in Wall Street. I never was there before, but it is so nice and windy I may go there again. This is just a good-day and good-bye."
As she spoke she turned, and as she turned Lennox' heart smote him. He hurried to her.
"See here! You can't go like this. Have a cup of tea."
Cassy gave him the rare seduction of her smile. "Thank you. I am out on business and I never drink in business hours."
But now Lennox had got himself between her and the vestibule.
"Business!" he repeated. "What is it? Anything in my line? Let's transact it here. Wall Street is no place" – for a pretty girl he was about to say but, desisting, he substituted – "for you."
"But you are expecting people."
"How in the world did you know? Anyway, they are not here yet and if they were they would be glad to meet you."
"I wonder!" said Cassy, whose wonder concerned not their pleasure but her own, and concerned it because she hated snobs, among whom she knew that Lennox moved.
"Now, tell me," he resumed.
Cassy, realising that it must be then or never, looked up at him.
"You remember father's violin?"
"I should say I did."
"Well, my business in Wall Street was to offer it as – what do you call it? – as collateral."
Lennox indicated the bundle. "Is that it?"
Cassy nodded. "I had to hide it and smuggle it out without his knowing it. He thinks it stolen. If he knew, he would kill me. As it is, he has gone crazy. To quiet him, I said I would go to the police."
Lennox laughed. "And I am the police!"
"Yes, you're the police."
"All right then. The police have recovered it. Take it back to him. How much do you need? Will a hundred do?"
That was not Cassy's idea. She shook her docked head at it. "You're the police but I am a business man. If you make the loan, you must keep the collateral."
"You are a little Jew, that's what you are," Lennox, affecting annoyance, replied.
Cassy smiled, "I like your jeu d'esprit. But not well enough to accept money as a gift."
"Good Lord!" Lennox protested. "Look here! I am not giving money away. I don't mean it as a gift. Pay me back whenever you like. Until then, what do you expect me to do with that thing? Give serenades? No, take it back to your father. I know just how he feels about it. He told me."
Cassy shifted the bundle. "Good-bye then." But as he still blocked the way, she added: "Will you let me pass?"
Moralists maintain that a man should never argue with a woman, particularly when she is young and good-looking. He should yield, they assert. Cassy's youth and beauty said nothing audible to Lennox. They said nothing of which he was then aware. In addition he was not a moralist. But there are influences, as there are bacilli, which unconsciously we absorb. For some time he had been absorbing a few. He did not realise it then. When he did, he was in prison. That though was later. At the moment he threw up his hands.
"I surrender. Will you mind putting it down somewhere?"
Cassy turned. Beyond was a table and near it a chair to which she went. There she dumped the violin. In so doing she saw Margaret's picture.
"What a lovely girl!"
Lennox, who had followed, nodded. "That is Miss Austen to whom I am engaged."
"Oh!" said Cassy. She did not know that Lennox was engaged. But suddenly the room had become uncomfortably