The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “She is actually helping along your alienation for that broker. You yourself have given me the clue in your dreams. Only I am telling you the truth about them. She holds it back and tells you plausible falsehoods to help her own ends. She is trying to arouse in you those passions which you have suppressed, and she has not scrupled to use drugged cigarettes with you and others to do it. You remember the breakfast dream, when I said that much could be traced back to dreams? A thing happens. It causes a dream. That in turn sometimes causes action. No, don’t interrupt. Let me finish first.

  “Take that first dream,” continued Constance, rapidly thrusting home her interpretation so that it would have its full effect. “You dreamed that your husband was dying and you were afraid. She said it meant love was dead. It did not. The fact is that neurotic fear in a woman has its origin in repressed, unsatisfied love, love which for one reason or another is turned away from its object and has not succeeded in being applied. Then his death. That simply means that you have a feeling that you might be happier if he were away and didn’t devil you. It is a survival of childhood, when death is synonymous with absence. I know you don’t believe it. But if you had studied the subject as I have in the last few days you’d understand. Madame Cassandra understands.

  “And the wall. That was Wall Street, probably, which does divide you two. You tried to get over it and you fell. That means your fear of actually falling, morally, of being a fallen woman.”

  Mildred was staring wildly. She might deny but in her heart she must admit.

  “The thing that pursued you, half bull, half snake, was Davies and his blandishments. I have seen him. I know what he is. The crowd in a dream always denotes a secret. He is pursuing you, as in the dream. But he hasn’t caught you. He thinks there is in you the same wild demimondaine instinct that with many an ardent woman, slumbers unknown in the back of her mind.

  “Whatever you may say, you do think of him. When a woman dreams of breakfasting cozily with some one other than her husband it has an obvious meaning. As for the messenger and the message about the United Traction, there, too, was a plain wish, and, as you must see, wishes in one form or another, disguised or distorted, lie at the basis of dreams. Take the coal fire. That, too, is susceptible of interpretation. I think you must have heard the couplet:

  “‘No coal, no fire so hotly glows As the secret love that no one knows.’”

  Mildred Caswell had risen, an indignant flush on her face.

  Constance put her hand on her arm gently to restrain her, knowing that such indignation was the first sign that she had struck at the core of truth in her interpretation.

  “My dear,” she urged, “I’m only telling you the truth, for your own sake, and not to take advantage of you as Madame Cassandra is doing. Please—remember that the best evidence of your normal condition is just what I find, that absence of love would be abnormal. My dear, you are what the psychologists call a consciously frigid, unconsciously passionate woman. Consciously you reject this Davies; unconsciously you accept him. And it is the more dangerous, although you do not know it, because some one else is watching. It was not one of his friends who told your husband—”

  Mrs. Caswell had paled. “Is—is there a—detective?” she faltered.

  Constance nodded.

  Mildred had collapsed completely. She was sobbing in a chair, her head bowed in her hands, her little lace handkerchief soaked. “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

  There was a sudden tap at the door.

  “Quick—in there,” whispered Constance, shoving her through the portieres into the drawing room.

  It was Forest Caswell.

  For a moment Constance stood irresolute, wondering just how to meet him, then she said, “Good evening, Mr. Caswell. I hope you will pardon me for asking you to call on me, but, as you know, I’ve come to know your wife—perhaps better than you do.”

  “Not better,” he corrected, seeming to see that it was directness that she was aiming at. “It is bad enough to get mixed up badly in Wall Street, but what would you yourself say—you are a business woman—what would you say about getting into the clutches of a—a dream doctor—and worse?”

  He had put Constance on the defensive in a sentence.

  “Don’t you ever dream?” she asked quietly.

  He looked at her a moment as if doubting even her mentality.

  “Lord,” he exclaimed in disgust, “you, too, defend it?”

  “But, don’t you dream?” she persisted.

  “Why, of course I dream,” he answered somewhat petulantly. “What of it? I don’t guide my actions by it.”

  “Do you ever dream of Mildred?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “Ever of other—er—people?” she pursued.

  “Yes,” he replied, “sometimes of other people. But what has that to do with it? I cannot help my dreams. My conduct I can help and I do help.”

  Constance had not expected him to be frank to the extent of taking her into his confidence. Still, she felt that he had told her just enough. She discerned a vague sense of jealousy in his tone which told her more than words that whatever he might have said or done to Mildred he resented, unconsciously, the manner in which she had striven to gain sympathy outside.

  “Fortunately he knows nothing of the new theories,” she said to herself.

  “Mrs. Dunlap,” he resumed, “since you have been frank with me, I must be equally frank with you. I think you are far too sensible a woman not to understand in just what a peculiar position my wife has placed me.”

  He had taken out of his pocket a few sheets of closely typewritten tissue paper. He did not look at them. Evidently he knew the contents by heart. Constance did not need to be told that this was a sheaf of the daily reports of the agency for which Drummond worked.

  He paused. She had been watching him searchingly. She was determined not to let him justify himself first.

  “Mr. Caswell,” she persisted in a low, earnest tone, “don’t be so sure that there is nothing in this dream, business. Before you read me those reports from Mr. Drummond, let me finish.”

  Forest Caswell almost dropped them in surprise.

  “Dreams,” she continued, seeing her advantage, “are wishes, either suppressed or expressed. Sometimes the dream is frank and shows an expressed wish. Other times it shows a suppressed wish, or a wish which in its fulfilment in the dream is disguised or distorted.

  “You are the cause of your wife’s dreams. She feels in them anxiety. And, according to the modern psychologists who have studied dreams carefully and scientifically, fear and anxiety represent love repressed or suppressed.”

  She paused to emphasize the point, glad to note that he was following her.

  “That clairvoyant,” she went on, “has found out the truth. True, it may not have been the part of wisdom for Mildred to have gone to her in the first place. I pass over that. I do not know whether you or she was most to blame at the start. But that woman, in the guise of being her friend, has played on every string of your wife’s lonely heart, which you have wrung until it vibrates.

  “Then,” she hastened on, “came your precious friend Drummond, Drummond who has, no doubt, told you a pack of lies about me. You see that!”

  She had flung down on the table a cigarette which she had managed to get at Madame Cassandra’s.

  “Smoke it.”

  He lighted it gingerly, took a puff or two, puckered his face, frowned, and rubbed the lighted end on the fireplace to extinguish it.

  “What is it?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Hashish,” she answered tersely. “Things were not going fast enough to suit either Madame Cassandra or Drummond. Madame Cassandra helped along the dreams by a drug noted for its effect on the passions. More than that,” adde
d Constance, leaning over toward him and catching his eye, “Madame Cassandra was working in league with a broker, as so many of the fakers do. Drummond knew it, whether he told you the truth about it or not. That broker was a swindler named Davies.”

  She was watching the effect on him. She saw that he had been reserving this for a last shot at her, that he realized she had stolen his own ammunition and appropriated it to herself.

  “They were only too glad when Drummond approached them. There you are, three against that poor little woman—no, four, including yourself. Perhaps she was foolish. But it was not so much to her discredit as to those who cast her adrift when she had a natural right to protection. Here was a woman with passions which she herself did not understand, and a little money—alone. Her case appealed to me. I knew her dreams. I studied them.”

  Caswell was listening in amazement. “It is dangerous to be with a person who pays attention to such little things,” he said.

  Evidently Drummond himself must have been listening. The door buzzer sounded and he stepped in, perhaps to bolster up his client in case he should be weakening.

  As he met Constance’s eye he smiled superciliously and was about to speak. But she did not give him time even to say good evening.

  “Ask him,” she cried, her eyes flashing, for she realized that it had been part of the plan to confront her, perhaps worm out of her just enough to confirm Drummond’s own story to Caswell, “ask him to tell the truth—if he is capable of it—not the truth that will make a good daily report of a hired shadow who colors his report the way he thinks his client desires it, but the real truth.”

  “Mr. Caswell,” interrupted Drummond, “this woman——”

  “Mr. Drummond,” cried Constance, rising and shaking the burnt stub of the little gold-banded cigarette at him to impress it on his mind, “Mr. Drummond, I don’t care whether I am a—a she-devil”—she almost hissed the words at him—“but I have evidence enough to go before the district attorney of this city and the grand jury and get indictments for conspiracy against a certain clairvoyant and a bucket shop operator. To save themselves, they will probably tell all they know about a certain crook who has been using them.”

  Caswell looked at her, amazed at her denunciation of the detective. As for Drummond, he turned his back on her as if to ignore her utterly.

  “Mr. Caswell,” he said bitterly, “in those reports—”

  “Forest Caswell,” insisted Constance, rising and facing him, “if you have in that heart of yours one shred of manhood it should move you. You—this man—the others—have placed in the path of a woman every provocation, every temptation for financial, physical, and moral ruin. She has consulted a clairvoyant—yes. She has speculated—yes. Yet she was proof against something greater than that. And I know—because I know her unconscious self which her dreams reveal, her inmost soul—I know her better than you do, better than she does herself. I know that even now she is as good and true and would be as loving as—”

  Constance had paused and taken a step toward the drawing room. Before she knew it, the portieres flew apart and an eager little woman had rushed past her and flung her arms about the neck of the man.

  Caswell’s features were working, as he gently disengaged her arms, still keeping one hand. Half shoving her aside, ignoring Constance, he had faced Drummond. For a moment the brazen detective flinched.

  As he did so, deForest Caswell crumpled up the mass of tissue paper reports and flung them into the fireplace.

  “Get out!” he said, suppressing his voice with difficulty. “Send me—your bill. I’ll pay it—but, mind, if it is one penny more than it should be, I’ll—I’ll fight if it takes me from the district attorney and the grand jury to the highest court of the State. Now—go!”

  Caswell turned slowly again toward his wife.

  “I’ve been a brute,” he said simply.

  Something almost akin to jealousy rose in Constance’s heart as she saw Mildred, safe at last.

  Then Caswell turned slowly to her. “You,” he said, stroking his wife’s hand gently but looking at Constance, “you are a real clairvoyant.”

  CHAPTER VII

  THE PLUNGERS

  “They have the most select clientele in the city here.”

  Constance Dunlap was sitting in the white steamy room of Charmant’s Beauty Shop. Her informant, reclining dreamily in a luxurious wicker chair, bathed in the perspiring vapor, had evidently taken a fancy to her.

  “And no wonder, either; they fix you up so well,” she rattled on; then confidingly, “Now, last night after the show a party of us went to supper and a dance—and it was in the wee small hours when we broke up. But Madame here can make you all over again. Floretta,” she called to an attendant who had entered, “if Mr. Warrington calls up on the ’phone, say I’ll call him later.”

  “Yes, Miss Larue.”

  Constance glanced up quickly as Floretta mentioned the name of the popular young actress. Stella Larue was a pretty girl on whom the wild dissipation of the night life of New York was just beginning to show its effects. The name of Warrington, too, recalled to Constance instantly some gossip she had heard in Wall Street about the disagreement in the board of directors of the new Rubber Syndicate and the effort to oust the president whose escapades were something more than mere whispers of scandal.

  This was the woman in the case. Constance looked at Stella now with added interest as she rose languidly, drew her bathrobe about her superb figure carelessly in such a way as to show it at best advantage.

  “I’ve had more or less to do with Wall Street myself,” observed Constance.

  “Oh, have you? Isn’t that interesting,” cried Stella.

  “I hope you’re not putting money in Rubber?” queried Constance.

  “On the contrary,” rippled Stella, then added, “You’re going to stay? Let me tell you something. Have Floretta do your hair. She’s the best here. Then come around to see me in the dormitory if I’m here when you are through, won’t you?”

  Constance promised and Stella fluttered away like the pretty butterfly that she was, leaving Constance to wonder at the natural gravitation of plungers in the money market toward plungers in the white lights.

  Charmant’s Beauty Parlor was indeed all its name implied, a temple of the cult of adornment, the last cry in the effort to satisfy what is more than health, wealth, and happiness to some women—the fundamental feminine instinct for beauty.

  Constance had visited the beauty specialist to have an incipient wrinkle smoothed out. Frankly, it was not vanity. But she had come to realize that her greatest asset was her personal appearance. Once that had a chance to work, her native wit and keen ability would carry her to success.

  Madame Charmant herself was a tall, dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed, well-groomed woman who looked as if she had been stamped from a die for a fashion plate—and then the die had been thrown away. All others like her were spurious copies, counterfeits. More than that, she affected the name of Vera, which in itself had the ring of truth.

  And so Charmant had prevailed on Constance to take a full course in beautification and withhold the wrinkle at the source.

  “Besides, you know, my dear,” she purred, “there’s nothing discovered by the greatest minds of the age that we don’t apply at once.”

  Constance was not impervious to feminine reason, and here she was.

  “Has Miss Larue gone?” she asked when at last she was seated in a comfortable chair again sipping a little aromatic cup of coffee.

  “No, she’s resting in one of the little dressing rooms.”

  She followed Floretta down the corridor. Each little compartment had its neat, plain white enameled bed, a dresser and a chair.

  Stella smiled as Constance entered. “Yes,” she murmured in response to the greeting, “I feel
quite myself now.”

  “Mr. Warrington on the wire,” announced Floretta a moment later, coming down the corridor again with a telephone on a long unwinding wire.

  “Hello, Alfred—oh, rocky this morning,” Constance overheard. “I said to myself, ‘Never again—until the next time. Vera? Oh, she was as fresh as a lark. Can I lunch with you downtown? Of course.’” Then as she hung up the receiver she called, “Floretta, get me a taxi.”

  “Yes, Miss Larue.”

  “I always have a feeling here,” whispered Stella, “that I am being listened to. I mean to speak to Vera about it some time. By the way, wouldn’t you like to join us to-night? Vera will be along and Mr. Warrington and perhaps ‘Diamond Jack’ Braden—you know him?”

  Constance confessed frankly that she did not have the pleasure of the acquaintance of the well-known turfman and first nighter.

  She hesitated. Perhaps it was that that Stella liked. Almost any one else would have been overeager to accept. But to Constance, sure of herself now, nothing of the sort was worth scrambling for. Besides, she was wondering how a man with the fight of his life on his hands could find time to lunch downtown even with Stella.

  “I’ve taken quite a fancy to you,” pressed Stella.

  “Thank you, it’s very kind of you,” Constance answered. “I shall try very hard to be there.”

  “I’ll leave a box for you at the office. Come around after the performance to my dressing room.”

  “Miss Larue, your taxi’s waiting,” announced Floretta.

  “Thanks. Are you going now, Mrs. Dunlap? Yes? Then ride down in the elevator with me.”

  They parted at the foot of the elevator and Constance walked through the arcade of the office building in which the beauty parlor occupied the top floor. She stopped at a florist’s stand to admire the flowers, but more for an excuse to look back at Stella.