Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  ‘Besides,’ said the lady quietly, ‘you would not have ruined all those little people if you could help it.’

  ‘You think I wouldn’t?’ He turned his eyes to her now.

  ‘I’m sure you would not,’ said the lady with perfect confidence.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ answered Mr. Van Torp in a doubtful tone. ‘Perhaps I wouldn’t. But it would only have been business if I had. It’s not as if Bamberger and I had started a story on purpose about our quarrelling in order to make things go down. I draw the line there. That’s downright dishonest, I call it. But if we’d just let things slide and taken advantage of what happened, it would only have been business after all. Except for that doubt about getting back to par,’ he added, as an afterthought. ‘But then I should have felt whether it was safe or not.’

  ‘Then why did you not let things slide, as you call it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. Maybe I was soft-hearted. We don’t always know why we do things in business. There’s a great deal more in the weather where big money is moving than you might think. For instance, there was never a great revolution in winter. But as for making people lose their money, those who can’t keep it ought not to have it. They’re a danger to society, and half the time it’s they who upset the market by acting like lunatics. They get a lot of sentimental pity sometimes, those people; but after all, if they didn’t try to cut in without capital, and play the game without knowing the rules, business would be much steadier and there would be fewer panics. They’re the people who get frightened and run, not we. The fact is, they ought never to have been there. That’s why I believe in big things myself.’

  He paused, having apparently reached the end of his subject.

  ‘Were you with the poor girl when she died?’ asked the lady presently.

  ‘No. She’d dined with a party and was in their box, and they were the last people who saw her. You read about the explosion. She bolted from the box in the dark, I was told, and as she couldn’t be found afterwards they concluded she had rushed out and taken a cab home. It seemed natural, I suppose.’

  ‘Who found her at last?’

  ‘A man called Griggs — the author, you know. He carried her to the manager’s room, still alive. They got a doctor, and as she wanted to see a woman, they sent for Cordova, the singer, from her dressing-room, and the girl died in her arms. They said it was heart failure, from shock.’

  ‘It was very sad.’

  ‘I’m sorry for poor Bamberger,’ said Mr. Van Torp thoughtfully. ‘She was his only child, and he doted on her. I never saw a man so cut up as he looked. I wanted to stay, but he said the mere sight of me drove him crazy, poor fellow, and as I had business over here and my passage was taken, I just sailed. Sometimes the kindest thing one can do is to get out. So I did. But I’m very sorry for him. I wish I could do anything to make it easier for him. It was nobody’s fault, I suppose, though I do think the people she was with might have prevented her from rushing out in the dark.’

  ‘They were frightened themselves. How could any one be blamed for her death?’

  ‘Exactly. But if any one could be made responsible, I know Bamberger would do for him in some way. He’s a resentful sort of man if any one does him an injury. Blood for blood is Bamberger’s motto, every time. One thing I’m sure of. He’ll run down whoever was responsible for that explosion, and he’ll do for him, whoever he is, if it costs one million to get a conviction. I wouldn’t like to be the fellow!’

  ‘I can understand wishing to be revenged for the death of one’s only child,’ said the lady thoughtfully. ‘Cannot you?’

  The American turned his hard face to her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I can. It’s only human, after all.’

  She sighed and looked into the fire. She was married, but she was childless, and that was a constant regret to her. Mr. Van Torp knew it and understood.

  ‘To change the subject,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I suppose you need money, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes! Indeed I do!’

  Her momentary sadness had already disappeared, and there was almost a ripple in her tone again as she answered.

  ‘How much?’ asked the millionaire smiling.

  She shook her head and smiled too; and as she met his eyes she settled herself and leaned far back in the shabby easy-chair. She was wonderfully graceful and good to look at in her easy attitude.

  ‘I’m afraid to tell you how much!’ She shook her head again, as she answered.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr. Van Torp in an encouraging tone, ‘I’ve brought some cash in my pocket, and if it isn’t enough I’ll get you some more to-morrow. But I won’t give you a cheque. It’s too compromising. I thought of that before I left New York, so I brought some English notes from there.’

  ‘How thoughtful you always are for me!’

  ‘It’s not much to do for a woman one likes. But I’m sorry if I’ve brought too little. Here it is, anyway.’

  He produced a large and well-worn pocket-book, and took from it a small envelope, which he handed to her.

  ‘Tell me how much more you’ll need,’ he said, ‘and I’ll give it to you to-morrow. I’ll put the notes between the pages of a new book and leave it at your door. He wouldn’t open a package that was addressed to you from a bookseller’s, would he?’

  ‘No,’ answered the lady, her expression changing a little, ‘I think he draws the line at the bookseller.’

  ‘You see, this was meant for you,’ said Mr. Van Torp. ‘There are your initials on it.’

  She glanced at the envelope, and saw that it was marked in pencil with the letters M.L. in one corner.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, but she did not open it.

  ‘You’d better count the notes,’ suggested the millionaire. ‘I’m open to making mistakes myself.’

  The lady took from the envelope a thin flat package of new Bank of England notes, folded together in four. Without separating them she glanced carelessly at the first, which was for a hundred pounds, and then counted the others by the edges. She counted four after the first, and Mr. Van Torp watched her face with evident amusement.

  ‘You need more than that, don’t you?’ he asked, when she had finished.

  ‘A little more, perhaps,’ she said quietly, though she could not quite conceal her disappointment, as she folded the notes and slipped them into the envelope again. ‘But I shall try to make this last. Thank you very much.’

  ‘I like you,’ said Mr. Van Torp. ‘You’re the real thing. They’d call you a chief’s daughter in the South Seas. But I’m not so mean as all that. I only thought you might need a little cash at once. That’s all.’

  A loud knocking at the outer door prevented the lady from answering.

  She looked at Mr. Van Torp in surprise.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, rather anxiously.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘He couldn’t guess that you were here, could he?’

  ‘Oh no! That’s quite out of the question!’

  ‘Then I’ll open the door,’ said the millionaire, and he left the sitting-room.

  The lady had not risen, and she still leaned back in her seat. She idly tapped the knuckles of her gloved hand with the small envelope.

  The knocking was repeated, she heard the outer door opened, and the sound of voices followed directly.

  ‘Oh!’ Mr. Van Torp exclaimed in a tone of contemptuous surprise, ‘it’s you, is it? Well, I’m busy just now. I can’t see you till to-morrow.’

  ‘My business will not keep till to-morrow,’ answered an oily voice in a slightly foreign accent.

  At the very first syllables the lady rose quickly to her feet, and resting one hand on the table she leant forward in the direction of the door, with an expression that was at once eager and anxious, and yet quite fearless.

  ‘What you call your business is going to wait my convenience,’ said Mr. Van Torp. ‘You’ll find me here to-morrow morning until eleven o’clock.’


  From the sounds the lady judged that the American now attempted to shut the door in his visitor’s face, but that he was hindered and that a scuffle followed.

  ‘Hold him!’ cried the oily voice in a tone of command. ‘Bring him in! Lock the door!’

  It was clear enough that the visitor had not come alone, and that Mr. Van Torp had been overpowered. The lady bit her salmon-coloured lip angrily and contemptuously.

  A moment later a tall heavily-built man with thick fair hair, a long moustache, and shifty blue eyes, rushed into the room and did not stop till there was only the small table between him and the lady.

  ‘I’ve caught you! What have you to say?’ he asked.

  ‘To you? Nothing!’

  She deliberately turned her back on her husband, rested one elbow on the mantelpiece and set one foot upon the low fender, drawing up her velvet gown over her instep. But a moment later she heard other footsteps in the room, and turned her head to see Mr. Van Torp enter the room between two big men who were evidently ex-policemen. The millionaire, having failed to shut the door in the face of the three men, had been too wise to attempt any further resistance.

  The fair man glanced down at the table and saw the envelope with his wife’s initials lying beside the tea things. She had dropped it there when she had risen to her feet at the sound of his voice. He snatched it away as soon as he saw the pencilled letters on it, and in a moment he had taken out the notes and was looking over them.

  ‘I should like you to remember this, please,’ he said, addressing the two men who had accompanied him. ‘This envelope is addressed to my wife, under her initials, in the handwriting of Mr. Van Torp. Am I right in taking it for your handwriting?’ he inquired, in a disagreeably polite tone, and turning towards the millionaire.

  ‘You are,’ answered the American, in a perfectly colourless voice and without moving a muscle. ‘That’s my writing.’

  ‘And this envelope,’ continued the husband, holding up the notes before the men, ‘contains notes to the amount of four thousand one hundred pounds.’

  ‘Five hundred pounds, you mean,’ said the lady coldly.

  ‘See for yourself!’ retorted the fair man, raising his eyebrows and holding out the notes.

  ‘That’s correct,’ said Mr. Van Torp, smiling and looking at the lady. ‘Four thousand one hundred. Only the first one was for a hundred, and the rest were thousands. I meant it for a little surprise, you see.’

  ‘Oh, how kind! How dear and kind!’ cried the lady gratefully, and with amazing disregard of her husband’s presence.

  The two ex-policemen had not expected anything so interesting as this, and their expressions were worthy of study. They had been engaged, through a private agency, to assist and support an injured husband, and afterwards to appear as witnesses of a vulgar clandestine meeting, as they supposed. It was not the first time they had been employed on such business, but they did not remember ever having had to deal with two persons who exhibited such hardened indifference; and though the incident of the notes was not new to them, they had never been in a case where the amount of cash received by the lady at one time was so very large.

  ‘It is needless,’ said the fair man, addressing them both, ‘to ask what this money was for.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Van Torp coolly. ‘You needn’t bother. But I’ll call your attention to the fact that the notes are not yours, and that I’d like to see them put back into that envelope and laid on that table before you go. You broke into my house by force anyhow. If you take valuables away with you, which you found here, it’s burglary in England, whatever it may be in your country; and if you don’t know it, these two professional gentlemen do. So you just do as I tell you, if you want to keep out of gaol.’

  The fair man had shown a too evident intention of slipping the envelope into his own pocket, doubtless to be produced in evidence, but Mr. Van Torp’s final argument seemed convincing.

  ‘I have not the smallest intention of depriving my wife of the price of my honour, sir. Indeed, I am rather flattered to find that you both value it so highly.’

  Mr. Van Torp’s hard face grew harder, and a very singular light came into his eyes. He moved forwards till he was close to the fair man.

  ‘None of that!’ he said authoritatively. ‘If you say another word against your wife in my hearing I’ll make it the last you ever said to anybody. Now you’d better be gone before I telephone for the police. Do you understand?’

  The two ex-policemen employed by a private agency thought the case was becoming more and more interesting; but at the same time they were made vaguely nervous by Mr. Van Torp’s attitude.

  ‘I think you are threatening me,’ said the fair man, drawing back a step, and leaving the envelope on the table.

  ‘No,’ answered his adversary, ‘I’m warning you off my premises, and if you don’t go pretty soon I’ll telephone for the police. Is that a threat?’

  The last question was addressed to the two men.

  ‘No, sir,’ answered one of them.

  ‘It would hardly be to your advantage to have more witnesses of my wife’s presence here,’ observed the fair man coldly, ‘but as I intend to take her home we may as well go at once. Come, Maud! The carriage is waiting.’

  The lady, whose name was now spoken for the first time since she had entered Mr. Van Torp’s lodging, had not moved from the fireplace since she had taken up her position there. Women are as clever as Napoleon or Julius Caesar in selecting strong positions when there is to be an encounter, and a fireplace, with a solid mantelpiece to lean against, to strike, to cry upon or to cling to, is one of the strongest. The enemy is thus reduced to prowling about the room and handling knick-knacks while he talks, or smashing them if he is of a violent disposition.

  The lady now leant back against the dingy marble shelf and laid one white-gloved arm along it, in an attitude that was positively regal. Her right hand might appropriately have been toying with the orb of empire on the mantelpiece, and her left, which hung down beside her, might have loosely held the sceptre. Mr. Van Torp, who often bought large pictures, was reminded of one recently offered to him in America, representing an empress. He would have bought the portrait if the dealer could have remembered which empress it represented, but the fact that he could not had seemed suspicious to Mr. Van Torp. It was clearly the man’s business to know empresses by sight.

  From her commanding position the Lady Maud refused her husband’s invitation to go home with him.

  ‘I shall certainly not go with you,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m dining early at the Turkish Embassy and we are going to the play. You need not wait for me. I’ll take care of myself this evening, thank you.’

  ‘This is monstrous!’ cried the fair man, and with a peculiarly un-English gesture he thrust his hand into his thick hair.

  The foreigner in despair has always amused the genuine Anglo-Saxon. Lady Maud’s lip did not curl contemptuously now, she did not raise her eyebrows, nor did her eyes flash with scorn. On the contrary, she smiled quite frankly, and the sweet ripple was in her voice, the ripple that drove some men almost crazy.

  ‘You needn’t make such a fuss,’ she said. ‘It’s quite absurd, you know. Mr. Van Torp is an old friend of mine, and you have known him ever so long, and he is a man of business. You are, are you not?’ she asked, looking to the American for assent.

  ‘I’m generally thought to be that,’ he answered.

  ‘Very well. I came here, to Mr. Van Torp’s rooms in the Temple, before going to dinner, because I wished to see him about a matter of business, in what is a place of business. It’s all ridiculous nonsense to talk about having caught me — and worse. That money is for a charity, and I am going to take it before your eyes, and thank Mr. Van Torp for being so splendidly generous. Now go, and take those persons with you, and let me hear no more of this!’

  Thereupon Lady Maud came forward from the mantelpiece and deliberately took from the table the envelope which contained four tho
usand one hundred pounds in new Bank of England notes; and she put it into the bosom of her gown, and smiled pleasantly at her husband.

  Mr. Van Torp watched her with genuine admiration, and when she looked at him and nodded her thanks again, he unconsciously smiled too, and answered by a nod of approval.

  The fair-haired foreign gentleman turned to his two ex-policemen with considerable dignity.

  ‘You have heard and seen,’ he said impressively. ‘I shall expect you to remember all this when you are in the witness-box. Let us go.’ He made a sweeping bow to his wife and Mr. Van Torp. ‘I wish you an agreeable evening,’ he said.

  Thereupon he marched out of the room, followed by his men, who each made an awkward bow at nothing in particular before going out. Mr. Van Torp followed them at some distance towards the outer door, judging that as they had forced their way in they could probably find their way out. He did not even go to the outer threshold, for the last of the three shut the door behind him.

  When the millionaire came back Lady Maud was seated in the easy-chair, leaning forward and looking thoughtfully into the fire. Assuredly no one would have suspected from her composed face that anything unusual had happened. She glanced at her friend when he came in, but did not speak, and he began to walk up and down on the other side of the table, with his hands behind him.

  ‘You’ve got pretty good nerves,’ he said presently.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Lady Maud, still watching the coals, ‘they really are rather good.’

  A long silence followed, during which she did not move and Mr. Van Torp steadily paced the floor.

  ‘I didn’t tell a fib, either,’ she said at last. ‘It’s charity, in its way.’

  ‘Certainly,’ assented her friend. ‘What isn’t either purchase-money or interest, or taxes, or a bribe, or a loan, or a premium, or a present, or blackmail, must be charity, because it must be something, and it isn’t anything else you can name.’