The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories

by George Barr McCutcheon

  At first Mrs. Banks tried to dissuade her daughter from undertaking the long trip, but the girl was obstinate. Her mother then flatly refused to accompany her, complaining of her head and heart. In the end the elder lady decided to accept Mrs. Crow’s invitation to remain at the house until Elsie’s return.

  “I shall bring Rosalie back with me, mother,” said Elsie as she prepared to drive away. Mrs. Banks, frail and wan, bowed her head listlessly and turned to follow her hostess indoors. With Roscoe in the seat with the driver, the carriage started briskly off down the shady street, headed for the ferry road and Bonner Place.

  To return to Anderson Crow and his precipitancy. Just as the lodge keeper had said, the marshal, afoot and dusty, descended upon Mr. Barnes without ceremony. The great lawyer was strolling about the grounds when his old enemy arrived. He recognised the odd figure as it approached among the trees.

  “Hello, Mr. Crow!” he called cheerily. “Are you going to arrest me again?” He advanced to shake hands.

  “Yes, sir; you are my prisoner,” said Anderson, panting, but stern. “I know you, Mr. Barnes. It won’t do you any good to deny it.”

  “Come in and sit down. You look tired,” said Barnes genially, regarding his words as a jest; but Anderson proudly stood his ground.

  “You can’t come any game with me. It won’t do you no good to be perlite, my man. This time you don’t git away.”

  “You don’t mean to say you are in earnest?” cried Barnes.

  “I never joke when on duty. Come along with me. You c’n talk afterward. Your hirelin’ is in jail an’ he c’n identify you; so don’t resist.”

  “Wait a moment, sir. What is the charge?”

  “I don’t know yet. You know better’n I do what it is.”

  “Look here, Mr. Crow. You arrested me the first time I ever saw you, and now you yank me up again, after all these years. Haven’t you anything else to do but arrest me by mistake? Is that your only occupation?”

  Anderson sputtered indignantly. Driven to it, he informed John Barnes that he was charged with kidnaping, attempted murder, polygamy, child desertion, and nearly everything else under the sun. Barnes, at first indignant, finally broke into a hearty laugh. He magnanimously agreed to accompany his captor to Tinkletown. Not only that, but he provided the means of transportation. To the intense dismay of the servants, he merrily departed with Mr. Crow, a prisoner operating his own patrol wagon. The two were smoking the captive’s best cigars.

  “It’s mighty nice of you, Mr. Barnes, to let us use your autermobile,” said Anderson, benignly puffing away as they bowled off through the dust. “It would ’a’ been a long walk. I’ll speak a good word fer you fer this.”

  “Don’t mention it, old chap. I rather enjoy it. It’s been uncommonly dull up here. I did not get away as soon as I expected, you see. So I am charged with being Rosalie’s father, eh? And deserting her? And kidnaping her? By jove, I ought to be hung for all this!”

  “’Tain’t nothin’ to laugh at, my friend. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I was onto you the day you stopped me in the road an’ ast about her. What a fool you was. Reg’lar dead give-away.”

  “See here, Mr. Crow, I don’t like to upset your hopes and calculations,” said Barnes soberly. “I did that once before, you remember. That was years ago. You were wrong then, and you are wrong now. Shall I tell you why I am interested in this pretty waif of yours?”

  “It ain’t necessary,” protested the marshal.

  “I’ll tell you just the same. My son met her in New York while he was at school. He heard her story from mutual friends and repeated it to me. I was naturally interested, and questioned you. He said she was very pretty. That is the whole story, my dear sir.”

  “That’s all very purty, but how about the B in your hat?”

  “I don’t understand. Oh, you mean the political bee?”

  “Politics, your granny! I mean the ’nitial that Briggs saw. No; hold on! Don’t answer. Don’t say anything that’ll incriminate yourself.”

  “I never had an initial in my hat, and I don’t know Briggs. Mr. Crow, you are as crazy as a loon.” He prepared to bring the machine to a standstill. “I’m going home. You can ride back with me or get out and walk on, just as you please.”

  “Hold on! Don’t do that! I’ll see that you’re paid fer the use of the machine. Besides, consarn ye, you’re my prisoner.” This was too much for Barnes. He laughed long and loud, and he did not turn back.

  Just beyond the ferry they turned aside to permit a carriage to pass. A boy on the box with the driver shouted frantically after them, and Anderson tried to stop the machine himself.

  “Stop her!” he cried; “that’s Roscoe, my boy. Hold on! Who’s that with him? Why, by cracky, it’s Miss Banks! Gee whiz, has she come back here to teach again? Whoa! Turn her around, Mr. Barnes. They are motionin’ fer us to come back. ’Pears to be important, too.”

  Barnes obligingly turned around and ran back to where the carriage was standing. An hour later the automobile rolled into the driveway at Bonner Place, and Anderson Crow, a glorious triumph in his face, handed Miss Banks from the tonneau and into the arms of Rosalie Gray, who at first had mistaken the automobile for another. Pompous to the point of explosion, Anderson waved his hand to the party assembled on the veranda, strolled around to Mr. Barnes’s seat and acquired a light for his cigar with a nonchalance that almost overcame his one-time prisoner, and then said, apparently to the whole world, for he addressed no one in particular:

  “I knowed I could solve the blamed thing if they’d jest give me time.”

  CHAPTER XXXV.

  The Story is Told

  Elsie Banks had a small and select audience in Mrs. Bonner’s room upstairs. She had come from New York—or from California, strictly speaking—to furnish the narrative which was to set Rosalie Gray’s mind at rest forever-more. It was not a pleasant task; it was not an easy sacrifice for this spirited girl who had known luxury all her life. Her spellbound hearers were Mrs. Bonner and Edith, Wicker Bonner, Anderson Crow, Rosalie, and John E. Barnes, who, far from being a captive of the law, was now Miss Gray’s attorney, retained some hours before by his former captor.

  “I discharge you, sir,” Anderson had said, after hearing Miss Bank’s statement in the roadway. “You are no longer a prisoner. Have you anything to say, sir?”

  “Nothing, Mr. Crow, except to offer my legal services to you and your ward in this extraordinary matter. Put the matter in my hands, sir, and she shall soon come into her own, thanks to this young lady. I may add that, as I am not in the habit of soliciting clients, it is not my intention in this instance to exact a fee from your ward. My services are quite free, given in return, Mr. Crow, for the magnanimous way in which you have taken me into your confidence ever since I have known you. It is an honour to have been arrested by you; truthfully it is no disgrace.”

  In the privacy of Mrs. Bonner’s sitting-room, Elsie Banks, dry-eyed and bitter, told the story of her life. I cannot tell it as she did, for she was able to bring tears to the eyes of her listeners. It is only for me to relate the bare facts, putting them into her words as closely as possible. Rosalie Gray, faint with astonishment and incredulity, a lump in her throat that would not go down, and tears in her eyes, leaned back in an easy-chair and watched her unhappy friend.

  “I shall provide Mr. Barnes with proof of everything I say,” said Miss Banks. “There can be no difficulty, Rosalie dear, in confirming all that I have to tell. If you will permit me to relate the story without interruption and afterward let me go my way without either pity or contempt, I shall be, oh, so grateful to you all—especially to you, dear Rosalie. Believe me I love you with my whole soul.

  “I have come to you voluntarily, and my mother, who is in Tinkletown, in resigning herself to the calls of conscience, is now happier than she has ever been before. A more powerful influence than her own will or her own honour, an influence that was evil to the core, inspired her to countenance th
is awful wrong. It also checkmated every good impulse she may have had to undo it in after years. That influence came from Oswald Banks, a base monster to whom my mother was married when I was a year old. My mother was the daughter of Lord Abbott Brace, but married my own father, George Stuart, who was a brilliant but radical newspaper writer in London, against her father’s wish. For this he cast her off and disinherited her. Grandfather hated him and his views, and he could not forgive my mother even after my father died, which was two years after their marriage.

  “Lord Richard Brace, my mother’s only brother, married the daughter of the Duchess of B——. You, Rosalie, are Lady Rosalie Brace of Brace Hall, W—shire, England, the true granddaughter of General Lord Abbott Brace, one of the noblest and richest men of his day. Please let me go on; I cannot endure the interruptions. The absolute, unalterable proof of what I say shall be established through the confession of my own mother, in whose possession lies every document necessary to give back to you that which she would have given to me.

  “Your mother died a few weeks after you were born, and Sir Richard, who loved my mother in the face of his father’s displeasure, placed you in her care, while he rushed off, heart-broken, to find solace in Egypt. It is said that he hated you because you were the cause of her death. On the day after your birth, old Lord Brace changed his will and bequeathed a vast amount of unentailed property to you, to be held in trust by your father until you were twenty-one years of age. I was almost two years old at the time, and the old man, unexpectedly compassionate, inserted a provision which, in the event that you were to die before that time, gave all this money to me on my twenty-first birthday. The interest on this money, amounting to five thousand pounds annually, was to go to you regularly, in one case, or to me, in the other. Oswald Banks was an American, whom my mother had met in London several years prior to her first marriage. He was the London representative of a big Pennsylvania manufacturing concern. He was ambitious, unscrupulous and clever beyond conception. He still is all of these and more, for he is now a coward.

  “Well, it was he who concocted the diabolical scheme to one day get possession of your inheritance. He coerced my poor mother into acquiescense, and she became his wretched tool instead of an honoured wife and helpmate. One night, when you were three weeks old, the house in which we lived was burned to the ground, the inmates narrowly escaping. So narrow was the escape, in fact, that you were said to have been left behind in the confusion, and the world was told, the next day, that the granddaughter of Lord Brace had been destroyed by the flames.

  “The truth, however, was not told. My stepfather did not dare to go so far as to kill you. It was he who caused the fire, but he had you removed to a small hotel in another part of the city some hours earlier, secretly, of course, but in charge of a trusted maid. My mother was responsible for this. She would not listen to his awful plan to leave you in the house. But you might just as well have died. No one was the wiser and you were given up as lost. A week later, my mother and Mr. Banks started for America. You and I were with them, but you went as the daughter of a maid-servant—Ellen Hayes.

  “This is the story as my mother has told it to me after all these years. My stepfather’s plan, of course, was to place you where you could never be found, and then to see to it that our grandfather did not succeed in changing his will. Moreover, he was bound and determined that he himself should be named as trustee—when the fortune came over at Lord Brace’s death. That part of it turned out precisely as he had calculated. Let me go on a few months in advance of my story. Lord Brace died, and the will was properly probated and the provisions carried out. Brace Hall and the estates went to your father and the bequest came to me, for you were considered dead. My stepfather was made trustee. He gave bond in England and America, I believe. In any event, the fortune was to be mine when I reached the age of twenty-one, but each year the income, nearly twenty-five thousand dollars, was to be paid to my stepfather as trustee, to be safely invested by him. My mother’s name was not mentioned in the document, except once, to identify me as the beneficiary. I can only add to this phase of the hateful conspiracy, that for nineteen years my stepfather received this income, and that he used it to establish his own fortune. By investing what was supposed to be my money, he has won his own way to wealth.

  “Mr. Banks decided that the operations were safest from this side of the Atlantic. He and my mother took up their residence in New York, and it has been their home ever since. He spent the first half year after your suspected death in London, solely for the purpose of establishing himself in Lord Brace’s favour. Within a year after the death of Lord Brace your father was killed by a poacher on the estate. He had but lately returned from Egypt, and was in full control of the lands and property attached to Brace Hall. If my stepfather had designs upon Brace Hall, they failed, for the lands and the title went at once to your father’s cousin, Sir Harry Brace, the present lord.

  “So much for the conditions in England then and now. I now return to that part of the story which most interests and concerns you. My poor mother was compelled, within a fortnight after we landed in New York, to give up the dangerous infant who was always to hang like a cloud between fortune and honour. The maid-servant was paid well for her silence. By the way, she died mysteriously soon after coming to America, but not before giving to my mother a signed paper setting forth clearly every detail in so far as it bore upon her connection with the hateful transaction. Conscience was forever at work in my mother’s heart; honour was constantly struggling to the surface, only to be held back by fear of and loyalty to the man she loved.

  “It was decided that the most humane way to put you out of existence was to leave you on the doorstep of some kindly disposed person, far from New York. My stepfather and my mother deliberately set forth on this so-called mission of mercy. They came north, and by chance, fell in with a resident of Boggs City while in the station at Albany. They were debating which way to turn for the next step. My mother was firm in the resolve that you should be left in the care of honest, reliable, tender-hearted people, who would not abuse the trust she was to impose. The Boggs City man said he had been in Albany to see about a bill in the legislature, which was to provide for the erection of a monument in Tinkletown—where a Revolutionary battle had been fought. It was he who spoke of Anderson Crow, and it was his stories of your goodness and generosity, Mr. Crow, that caused them to select you as the man who was to have Rosalie, and, with her, the sum of one thousand dollars a year for your trouble and her needs.

  “My mother’s description of that stormy night in February, more than twenty-one years ago, is the most pitiful thing I have ever listened to. Together they made their way to Tinkletown, hiring a vehicle in Boggs City for the purpose. Mr. Banks left the basket on your porch while mother stood far down the street and waited for him, half frozen and heartsick. Then they hurried out of town and were soon safely on their way to New York. It was while my stepfather was in London, later on, that mother came up to see Rosalie and make that memorable first payment to Mr. Crow. How it went on for years, you all know. It was my stepfather’s cleverness that made it so impossible to learn the source from which the mysterious money came.

  “We travelled constantly, always finding new places of interest in which my mother’s conscience could be eased by contact with beauty and excitement. Gradually she became hardened to the conditions, for, after all, was it not her own child who was to be enriched by the theft and the deception? Mr. Banks constantly forced that fact in upon her mother-love and her vanity. Through it all, however, you were never neglected nor forgotten. My mother had your welfare always in mind. It was she who saw that you and I were placed at the same school in New York, and it was she who saw that your training in a way was as good as it could possibly be without exciting risk.

  “Of course, I knew nothing of all this. I was rolling in wealth and luxury, but not in happiness. Instinctively I loathed my stepfather. He was hard, cruel, unreasonable. It was becaus
e of him that I left school and afterward sought to earn my own living. You know, Rosalie, how Tom Reddon came into my life. He was the son of William Reddon, my stepfather’s business partner, who had charge of the Western branch of the concern in Chicago. We lived in Chicago for several years, establishing the business. Mr. Banks was until recently president of the Banks & Reddon Iron Works. Last year, you doubtless know, the plant was sold to the great combine and the old company passed out of existence. This act was the result of a demand from England that the trust under which he served be closed and struck from the records. It was his plan to settle the matter, turn the inheritance over to me according to law, and then impose upon my inexperience for all time to come. The money, while mine literally, was to be his in point of possession.

  “But he had reckoned without the son of his partner. Tom Reddon in some way learned the secret, and he was compelled to admit the young man into all of his plans. This came about some three years ago, while I was in school. I had known Tom Reddon in Chicago. He won my love. I cannot deny it, although I despise him today more deeply than I ever expect to hate again. He was even more despicable than my stepfather. Without the faintest touch of pity, he set about to obliterate every chance Rosalie could have had for restitution. Time began to prove to me that he was not the man I thought him to be. His nature revealed itself; and I found I could not marry him. Besides, my mother was beginning to repent. She awoke from her stupor of indifference and strove in every way to circumvent the plot of the two conspirators, so far as I was concerned. The strain told on her at last, and we went to California soon after my ridiculous flight from Tinkletown last winter. It was not until after that adventure that I began to see deep into the wretched soul of Tom Reddon.