Two Flights Up (6 page)

“Please go back,” she said. “I’m quite all right.”

“You don’t look all right,” he told her roughly. “And this place is cold. Do you want pneumonia?”

“I’ve asked you to go. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and I’ve got to stay.”

“Don’t be silly. If you’re in some sort of trouble—”

“I’m in trouble enough, without you to make it worse. Please go. I’ve got to work this out alone.”

“But if I only want to help? I give you my word of honour, that’s all.”

She sat looking up at him for a perceptible time before she made a despairing gesture of acquiescence.

“You’ll find out anyhow,” she said. “Look here.”

But when he looked, he was in no way the wiser. He had, as has been said before, no background for Holly or, the family, and he had never heard of Tom Bayne. All he saw was that beneath the lifted floor boards a small suitcase was lying.

“I see. What about it?”

“The bond,” she said. “It must have come from here.
She
had no bonds. It was when she came up to get the point lace. She must have moved the trunk.”

He was still struggling to understand.

“You mean it didn’t belong to her?”

“It belonged to the Harrison Bank,” she said, and sat still, waiting for the heavens to fall.

When presently she realized that nothing fell but a silence, she looked up at him again.

“From the bank, don’t you understand?”

But he still looked blank.

He had never heard of their trouble! It seemed incredible to her, who had thought all the world knew of it. But the mere telling of the facts seemed to ease her. And when he had finally gathered the essential facts, a difficult matter because she whispered them, as if to do so somehow minimized their import, he was more at a loss than he had ever been in his self-confident still young life. He saw that she was laying her burden on him with childlike faith, as if by sheer virtue of being a man he would know what to do.

He did the only thing he could think of. He picked up the candle and held out his hand.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get out of here, for one thing.”

“And leave that?”

“Why not? It’s been here for years.”

“But suppose she comes up again? Suppose she—”

“She’s not likely to, before morning, is she? And she’ll have to know sooner or later that it’s been found.”

“It isn’t that.” She swallowed, as if to moisten her dry throat. “She’s taken one bond already, and you see—she needs it so dreadfully.”

It was at that moment that he felt a cold chill travel slowly up his spine and settle in his brain. The part he himself had already played in the situation began to dawn on him. He had sold a stolen bond, one of the carefully listed missing securities of a looted bank! Sooner or later—

He pulled himself together and smiled down at her gravely.

“What’s your own idea?” he asked.

“They have to go back to the bank, of course. Only, Mother’s got to be kept out of it. There must be some way.”

“Of course there’s a way,” he told her.

But he was not so sure of it. One of the bonds had already been sold. It might escape identification indefinitely; on the other hand, it might already have been recognized, his residence in the Bayne house noted, and a fatal connection established. In that case—

“See here,” he said. “Suppose I take the suitcase down to my room overnight? Then in the morning I can see the bank people and arrange for everything to be done quietly.”

“Without dragging Mother in?”

“I’ve promised to keep her out, haven’t I?”

She swayed a little as he helped her up. Still holding the candle, he lifted the suitcase; dust had penetrated the old floor boards and covered it, and he shook that off. Then he replaced the boards and took a last look around him.

“Better go ahead,” he told her. “I’ll follow after you’re safely down.”

But she stood still, looking up at him.

“Why should you help us?” she said. “We are nothing to you.”

“You are everything in the world to me,” he said quietly, and watched her down the stairs.

M
ARGARET COX WAS VERY
happy. She had even gained in flesh; every now and then James, her husband, put a penny in the slot of some weighing machine and stood by, eying the result proudly.

“A woman’s the better for a little meat on her bones,” he would tell her. “It shows somebody’s looking after her.”

And she no longer clenched her left hand for fear somebody would see her scarred forefinger. “Open it out,” said lordly James. “It’s only lazy hands that people have a right to be ashamed of. Only—” and here his voice would soften—“only, I wish the blisters were on mine and not on yours, my girl.”

He always called her his girl, and in his eyes Margaret really was a girl; he had never quite got over his astonishment at the depths of her ignorance in some matters.

“Well, I’m darned,” he would say. “Didn’t they ever tell you anything at all?”

“They” in his mind were Margaret’s family, and less immediately that
terra incognita
of aristocracy and repressions from which he had abducted her. “Certainly put one over on them,” was his manner of referring to that abduction.

“There were a good many things we were taught not to discuss,” she would say, colouring faintly. “It wasn’t considered ladylike.”

“Well, you can’t be a real honest-to-John woman and be their kind of a lady at the same time,” he would retort, and chuckle a bit.

Undoubtedly he was a vulgar little man, but he was honest, good-humoured, and sturdily independent. “I stand on my own feet,” was one of his commonest expressions. Oddly enough, Margaret not only did not resent his vulgarity; she seemed indeed rather to like it. It was perhaps her idea of a gesture toward truth after a lifetime of polite evasions.

And probably it was. James’s honesty was his outstanding quality; he had a tremendous pride in it.

“You can tell them,” he had said during the strange days of their courtship, “that I’m no great shakes as to money or position, but you can tell ’em too for me that, by God, I’m honest. And that’s more than they can say.”

Which was, by the way, the only reference he had ever made to Margaret concerning the presence of her brother-in-law in the penitentiary.

They lived very simply. They had three rooms, a bath, and a kitchenette, and Margaret never got over the sensation of extravagance when she let the tub fill with hot water; taking a bath “at home,” as she still called the Bayne house, had required deliberation and preparation. The furniture had come from “the store,” at a discount, and in the evenings, after her bath, Margaret would put on a bright pink kimono and sit in front of her shiny dressing table and brush the long heavy hair which was her only beauty.

James would be reading the paper in the living room, and the odour of his cigar would come in through the doorway. It still seemed to her incredible that a man—her man—was in the next room, with the door open between.

Sometimes he would call in. He had taken to reading the society columns.

“I see your cousins the Sam Parkers are going abroad.”

“Really? They’re leaving the children with the governess, I dare say.”

Or:

“Mrs. Willoughby-Jones is giving a luncheon, Margaret. Ask you?”

“No. Why on earth should she?”

“Well, why shouldn’t she?” he would grumble. “I guess you’re as good as anybody she’ll have there.”

And Margaret would smile at his belligerent tone.

On the day Holly’s engagement was announced in the papers, James took one with him to the store and showed it around proudly.

“Seen this, Smith?” he would say. “My wife’s niece. She’s marrying young Brooks; father was Schuyler Brooks, you know.”

To which the department responded in kind. Smith, or Jones, would call James and show him a tablecloth.

“See this tablecloth, Cox?” he would say. “Just sold it to young Mrs. Maginnis; mother was a Flaherty, you know.”

And James took his ragging cheerfully.

He adored Margaret. Beyond his wife, his home, and his department in the store he had no life and wished none. He liked his world to be within the reach of his arms.

It was to this humble terrain, then, that the battle of the Bayne pride was to shift, and that right speedily. They had come in from the movies, and Margaret was in front of her toilet table. She looked up, and James was in the doorway with the newspaper in his hand.

“See here,” he said, “did you know that there was a move on to get Tom Bayne out of the pen?”

“My goodness, no!”

“Well, there is. Or was.”

“They’re not going to let him out?”

“The pardon’s granted. Kidneys gone wrong or something. Say he’s a dying man.”

“Oh, James!” she wailed. “What will they do? And Holly’s wedding next month!”

“I thought you didn’t want that wedding.”

“Well, they want it. At least—”

“At least the old lady does, eh? Well, that’s neither here nor there. I just want to say this, Margaret: He’s not to come here bothering you, or me either. I’m not trafficking with crooks.”

She did not resent it. She knew his frightful honesty, and she liked his masterfulness.

“I don’t think he’ll bother us, James. But what they’re to live on I don’t know.”

“Let him get out and work. Dig ditches or run a street car. That may hurt his pride, but it’s honest.”

“If he’s sick—”

“Oh, fiddledeedee!” He grunted. “Sick, nothing. That’s the old dodge to get him out. Everything goes but flat feet.”

But later on he felt that perhaps he had been a trifle violent, and after they were in bed he put a hand over and caught hers. He felt carefully for her worn forefinger and stroked it gently.

“Maybe I said too much,” he whispered, “but he left you to slave for them there. I hate his very insides.”

He went to sleep soon after, but Margaret lay awake, wide-eyed and anxious. The satin had come for Holly’s wedding dress, and already she had cut it out. It was very wonderful satin, but she wondered now if it would ever be used. If only she hadn’t cut it!

She was not the only one who lay awake. Indeed, save Mrs. Bayne and James, none of the characters in the approaching drama got much sleep at all.

Holly’s world had suddenly crashed beneath her feet, and the very figure of stability, her mother, had destroyed it. Holly might have been whirling through space, with her father and her mother and Furness, and the children at school who used to howl after her, all whirling about her. When she dropped to sleep, it was to have the sensation of falling, and to waken damp with the sweat of terror. Once she roused thus and sat up in bed to see two shining eyes fixed on her from across the room.

It was some time before she realized that they were the paste buckles on a pair of slippers on her dressing table, a part of her mother’s purchases that day.

Through it all, however, there was one figure that did not move or whirl. It was as steady as one of the fixed stars. When her tired brain refused the hundred crowding chaotic thoughts, it seized on this for rest and peace: Warrington, solid and gravely dependable, and saying: “You are everything in the world to me.”

Toward morning she fell into heavy sleep, from which she was roused by the ringing of the doorbell. Her mother was stirring across the hall, and Holly opened her door and spoke to her.

“I’ll go down,” she said. “Go back to bed, Mother.””

“Don’t let anyone in until you know who it is,” said Mrs. Bayne. There was a curious catch in her voice, and even in the haste of getting down and opening the front door, Holly noticed it.

As if it had been lying in the back of her mind all the time the thought sprang out at her: “Suppose there was something more in selling that bond than just taking what didn’t belong to one? Suppose there was—risk?”

“Who’s there?” she called with her hand on the knob. “What do you want?”

“Telegram,” was the laconic answer.

She opened the door, and, after signing the book, read the message. She knew, as she stood there, that her mother was in the hall above, listening and perhaps trembling.

“It’s just a telegram, Mother,” she called up reassuringly.

“A telegram? What about?”

“The pardon’s been granted. He’ll be coming home, Mother, as soon as he can travel.”

Suddenly and without warning Mrs. Bayne burst into tears.

W
ARRINGTON HAD CARRIED DOWN
the suitcase and placed it in his closet. He felt no desire to examine its contents. Rather, he had an extreme repugnance to so doing. It occurred to him, grimly enough, that if the bond he had sold had been identified, the last place he should choose for the suitcase was his closet.

Outside of that, and his yearning pity for Holly, his attention was mainly directed to Mrs. Bayne and her temptation. Had Holly been right, and had she discovered the hiding place by accident? Or had she known it all along? Stranger things than that had happened, he knew; but the idea of Mrs. Bayne as
particeps criminis
was hardly tenable.

No. He preferred Holly’s theory. It was more like her. He could even see her moving the trunk into a better light, and perhaps a board lifting, a giving under her feet. Then the discovery, and the temptation; sitting there, perhaps, on the trunk itself, staring at the papers in her hand; putting on her gold
pince-nez
and carefully reading; understanding, finally, and her soft relaxed chin working.

He could even follow the reasoning of her worldly yet childlike mind. It was all over so long ago, and Bayne had paid the penalty. So had she. So had Holly. They had paid once; were they to pay again? And the bank had not suffered permanently. It was more prosperous now than ever.

But she had been canny, too. She had not tried to sell the bond herself. She had given it to him to sell. For all her ignorance she had known enough for that. Lying there sleepless, he began quite definitely to put the burden of responsibility on Mrs. Bayne. Probably, in that long ago, she had lived beyond their means and so precipitated the catastrophe. And now she had not only yielded to temptation; she had not scrupled to use him.