The face of counsel for the prosecution was livid as he rose. His contemptuous eyes rested for an instant on the plaintiff before he spoke.
“May it please the Court, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen of the jury, I find that this case has been falsely represented to me by my client. I withdraw.”
He swept up his books. With elaborate formality he bowed to the judge, to the jury, to opposing counsel. Head high, with catlike tread, he left the bar.
Phineas Carr fingered his white carnation.
“‘Te morituri salutamus!’” He delivered the gladiatorial salute in a voice, which, though low, must have been audible in the most remote corner of the weirdly still court-room.
Chapter XXI
Her father owner of one of the most famous collections of stamps in the world! Pamela’s mind steadied from the shock of Brown’s statement. It must be worth thousands if that King Edward specimen was a sample. He had owned them when his daughter had sold her jewels to pay his bills and those of his wife, when she had given up the chance to make good in the profession she loved, Terrence the school in which he was happy, to carry on the Silver Moon that he might have proper food and care. She tried to excuse him. He had been ill then, prostrated, hadn’t realized conditions. But the months since? Had Scott Mallory suspected that he had concealed assets? Of course. Hadn’t he asked her for the address of the stamp firm? Brown of Boston!
Phineas Carr returned from a conference with the judge. Pamela sensed the tense concentration of jury and spectators. What would happen now that counsel for the plaintiff had withdrawn from the case? His client had been close on his heels as he left the court-room. Carr swept up his papers. Smiled his whimsical smile as he said in a low voice:
“That will be all for the present, Miss Pamela. Went off with a bang, didn’t it? Hale justified my belief in his flair for theatric values. Pretended that his client had not told him all the facts — probably she hadn’t — and walked out of the courtroom with the sympathy and admiration of every spectator in it. This case will bring him business. Unless I am mightily mistaken — and I’m sure I am not — that is the end of the suit for alienation of affection.”
The kindly words with their tinge of humor smashed Pamela’s self-control. Her body shook, her voice caught in a sob when she tried to speak, her breath came in gasps. Phineas Carr laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Take your time, take your time. Stand up, my dear. His Honor is leaving the courtroom.”
He waited for the echo of the sheriff’s proclamation to die down. “You are coming home with me. I shan’t allow you to go back to the Silver Moon till you get your grip. Your father might be — well he can be very unpleasant. Mrs. Carr has returned. She told me to bring you for tea no matter which way the verdict went, said she had some wonderful news to tell you. We will slip out the rear door and dodge reporters. I told your brother not to wait, that I should run away with you.”
He nodded to a sheriff. The brass-buttoned one cleared the way to the door by which the judge had departed. A chauffeur in a white linen duster with cuffs and collar of the deep blue of the shining town car, at the door of which he stood, touched his cap as they approached. Phineas Carr seated himself beside her on the broadcloth cushioned seat. He folded his hands on top of the curved handle of his cane. Apparently unmindful of the curious crowd which had collected or the fact that she was shivering from reaction, he observed as the car shot forward:
“Of course, Miss Pamela, that stamp testimony had no legitimate right in this trial.” He chuckled. He was boyishly exultant, not so unlike his son when he was pleased with an achievement. “But we took a chance on it. I happened to know that the presiding judge was a stamp addict. I recognized the Elk juror, when he took his seat, as a plutocrat and a philatelist. We got by.”
We! It was the “we” of a crowned head or an editor, Pamela thought, as she tried to control her shaking body.
Mrs. Carr met them on the threshold of the Ship Room. Even in her turmoil of mind Pamela paid tribute to the lustre of her pearls, the exquisite amethyst frock, the sparkle of excitement in her lovely eyes. Her husband tenderly patted her shoulder.
“We licked them, my dear. Let this child cry it out for a few minutes, then bring her in for tea.”
So he had observed her reaction. Pamela pulled off her hat in the charming yellow and lavender room in which Mrs. Carr had left her. Cry it out! Not she. She sopped her face and throat with cold water until they glowed. Dusted her skin with powder. Her pulses steadied, her heart quieted, gay courage got the upper hand of taut nerves. Her eyes shone like dusky brilliants as she pulled her green hat over her dark hair before the mirror. She nodded to her reflection.
“Ashamed of you for going to pieces over good fortune. What would have happened had you lost the case? If you knew the relief I feel —”
“Should I reveal exactly how I feel —”
The song rose in her heart. The tightening lips of the looking-glass girl warned her. With a stifled exclamation she turned away.
On the threshold of the Ship Room she paraphrased gaily:
“See the conquering heroine comes! Sound the —” The sentence thinned into a mumble as Scott Mallory looked up from contemplation of the fire which, even on this spring day, flickered and faded on the hearth. Where had he come from? Why was he here? Was that her father talking with Carnation Carr over by the window? Her father?
The stiffening went out of her knees. She sank into a chair beside the tea-table. Mrs. Carr smiled at her as she sugared the rare cups as richly, darkly red as the carnations in a tall slender vase on the table. The fat Georgian tea-kettle snorted a white puff of steam, rattled its silver cover.
“I thought we would wait tea for Phil, Phin. He — he has something wonderful to tell you.” Mrs. Carr’s voice shook with eagerness.
Her husband’s face darkened. “He doubtless is still engrossed by the business which kept him away from court when I was trying a case. I had hoped he would be sufficiently interested to hear it through. Wait if you like. Mr. Mallory has something of importance to tell us.” His eyes cleared of annoyance, his voice was almost boyish as he amended:
“But, before he begins, I want you to know that the sudden termination of the alienation suit — don’t interrupt the Court, Mallory — was due to him. He worked up the defendant’s case; I merely presented it. Day before yesterday when I found that it would come up for trial the next morning, I phoned him. At the risk of being chewed to pulp he experimented with the yellow slicker and the dog.”
The mysterious appearance of the oilskin sleeve on the hay-mow was accounted for. Pamela’s first reaction was relief; she hadn’t cared for the possibility of skulking chicken thieves in this era when automatics were as easily acquired as a daily paper. Terrence was so careless of his own safety. So had Scott been when he had angered the Babe. The evening she and Philip Carr had met him in the orchard, he must have been lingering about for a chance to get to the barn unobserved. Why couldn’t Phineas Carr be friendly with his son as he was with others? Was he jealous of his wife’s affection for the boy? He was too big a man to be so small. It was abundantly evident that he had been hurt that Philip had not been in court to witness his victory. What would he say when he heard Phil’s grand news? Father and son were playing at cross-purposes.
“Miss Pamela! Miss Pamela, you are not listening,” Phineas Carr reproached. “The stamp business was all Mallory’s idea. I stalled yesterday at the trial to give Brown of Boston and your father time for their investigation. The case was sprung on us a week earlier than we had expected, we were not quite prepared. Brown spent last night in this house, Mallory and I the evening working up his testimony. I waive my claim to the old maple, Miss Pamela. Settle the question of fees with my associate. I merely served as senior counsel. Now, Mallory, it is your turn.”
Then she was still head over ears in debt to Scott? Pamela’s heart stopped and raced on. What next!
Scott Mallory stood back t
o the mantel, hands thrust hard in his pockets. He shook his head. “Not my turn. Mr. Leigh’s.”
Harold Leigh left the window. The skin over his knuckles was strained shiny as he gripped a chair-back. He seemed years younger than before his air trip. There was about him a trace of the gay and gallant man who had won the adoration of his small daughter. Pamela steeled herself against him, kept her eyes on the fantastic pinkish shadows the firelight cast on her crepe jacket and skirt, as he explained:
“Of course, when the right time came I intended to make up all you had spent for me, Pamela, but this last year of depression has been a bad time to sell stamps. I have traded under an assumed name always. Saves publicity. Cecile had a duplicate key to my box — it had not occurred to me that she would use it after she left me. They knew her at the bank. When we were first married she went there with me several times — I was fool enough to take the box in both our names and more of a fool to leave some of my valuable stamps there in a sealed package.” His eyes were as anguished as might be those of a parent parting with an adored child. “Brown sold the mint block for me and sent the cheque directly to Cecile. I told you that I wouldn’t let you mortgage your property for her; besides, I was afraid she would come after the money. I didn’t want her poking into my affairs.” The slow color rose under his waxen skin. “She has an infernal way of getting what she wants.”
His daughter looked at him steadily. “What is the value of one of the most famous collections of English stamps in the country — the world perhaps?”
He cleared his throat nervously. “That is no one’s business but mine, now.” He drew two cheques from his pocket. “Mallory has advised me that as Cecile will undoubtedly win in her proceedings for an allowance, I would better give you and Terrence what I owe on the legacies your mother left. I had intended to make good when prices went up. I may be a stamp fanatic but I am not a thief. When the crash came and my wife deserted me, I was too numb mentally to realize what my collapse was doing to your life and Terry’s, Pamela. Then, then somehow I didn’t care. I never would have lost that money nor my own had I stuck to the business I know, but Cecile was all for speculation. I am not afraid to stack thousands on my knowledge of philatelies. These are Brown’s cheques for a portion of my holdings. He was only too eager to buy what it was like tearing my arm off to part with.”
Irritated resentment in his voice, the furtive gleam Pamela had seen before in his eyes. She felt as if she were looking on at a play with the lead acted by a stranger. Even as she told her father that she was happy that he was well again; that she was glad for Terrence, more than for herself, that he was able to make good on the legacies; she was hurt, intolerably hurt, that he had hoarded when he might have helped. Her voice sounded in her ears like that of an automaton. To Harold Leigh it must have seemed as usual for he approved:
“Glad that you are facing the facts without a fuss, Pamela. Mr. Carr has agreed to act as guardian for Terrence, it is the arrangement your grandmother wanted. The income from fifty thousand dollars, augmented by some of the principal if necessary, will see the boy through college.”
He dropped a cheque into his daughter’s lap. “Here is the same amount for you. Mallory has fought tooth and nail to get it for you. I would have preferred to wait until prices went up before I turned some of my holdings into cash, but he is so — so unflinching. I hope he will show as much fight for me when Cecile comes after that allowance. May I commandeer your limousine, Carr, to take me home? I notice it is at the door.” He coughed hollowly. “I am beginning to feel the nervous strain of the last forty-eight hours.”
Pamela sat stiffly erect listening to the departing purr of the motor. Had that touch of exhaustion in her father’s voice meant that he was returning to his role of invalid? She looked at the slip of pink paper. Fifty thousand dollars! Scott had practically forced that money from her father. He had been working for her all the time she had thought him indifferent. He and Phineas Carr were conferring. Would he give her a chance to thank him, to explain that she liked him more, infinitely more than she liked Philip Carr? A voice crashed into her repentance.
“I don’t care if they’ve got the judge of the court in there! I’m goin’ to see his folks. I’ll tell ’em!”
Eddie Pike! Eddie in his variegated court costume on the threshold! What had happened now? His ready-to-wear bow tie was under an ear, his china-blue eyes bulged, the rise and fall of his lurid plaid waistcoat registered turmoil, his slack mouth gaped.
“Say, Judge, I want to know about my sister.”
Phineas Carr scowled at him, growled, “Inquire of my wife. She hires Milly.”
Mrs. Carr smiled at the belligerent intruder, said soothingly:
“We don’t know where Milly is, Eddie. Cook says that at about nine o’clock she saw her meet someone — a man, she thought — outside the back gate. She hasn’t come home.”
Pike took a step into the room, his face worked horribly. With an unconscious sense of dramatic values he paused long enough for suspense to get in its nerve-tickling work.
“’Course she hasn’t come home. She’s run off with your Phil in his slick roadster!”
Mrs. Carr swayed, steadied. “Have you lost your mind, Eddie?” Her fixed smile never wavered as her eyes met her husband’s. Face ashen, he looked back at her.
How ready he was to doubt his son, and how it hurt him, Pamela thought as she met his tormented eyes. Phil and Milly! Memory projected a picture of the two under an arch of apple blossoms, the man apparently pleading. Hateful suspicion. She wouldn’t believe it.
“Where did you pick up that crazy idea, Pike?” Scott Mallory’s coolly amused question snapped the tension.
Eddie blinked vacant blue eyes. “You’re the lawyer fella that got Terry and me to take the dog to court, ain’t you? My idea ain’t crazy. I’ve watched ’em. I’ve follered ’em. This mornin’ I see ’em start off. Milly and a suitcase.”
“A suitcase!” Mrs. Carr’s repetition quavered.
“Yes sir — ma’am. An’ if Phil Carr’s run off with my sister —”
Scott Mallory caught his shoulder. “Go slow, Eddie!”
Pike waved a wild arm. “You can’t softsoap me. I say he’s got to marry —”
“Who’s got to marry who? What’s all the shouting about?” demanded Philip Carr from the threshold.
Chapter XXII
Young Carr grinned engagingly as he asked the question, but the lighter he held to his cigarette was not quite steady. In his effort to produce a voice Pike gasped like a goldfish snapping at food in the water of a crystal bowl.
“What did you think of my coup, Judge? Masterly, what?”
His son’s question brought a faint color to Phineas Carr’s cameo-like face. Was it generated by relief or anger?
“Not knowing to what you refer I can’t express an opinion.”
“Phin! Don’t be so hard!” pleaded his wife. She smiled at her son through a mist of tears. “What was the coup? Tell your mother, Philip.”
That “mother” contracted Pamela’s throat. She had not known that a word could sound so like shaken music. Pike recovered his voice to demand, with that brand of truculence which only the drunk and the mentally retarded achieve:
“You tell me what you done with my sister! Ran away with her, didn’t you?”
Philip Carr deliberately turned his back on his father to smile boyishly at his mother. Her eyes responded with a lovely light.
“Sure, I ran away with her — in a sense. Didn’t Terry tell you of our scheme, Mallory?”
“No.”
Scott was as unsympathetic as Phineas Carr, Pamela thought indignantly. There were little flames in the dark grayness of his eyes, a tenseness of jaw which she had come to recognize as steel against which it would be futile to batter.
“Tell me what you done with my sister, you —”
Philip Carr roughly interrupted. “Shut up, Pike. Cut out the whine. Your sister is in the kitchen. I promised
her that if she would tell me something I wanted to know I would take her to a city shopping and pay the bills — the girl is clothes mad. She was canny enough to withhold the information I was after until we drove into the yard here a few minutes ago. Now you know the truth, fade-out. You smell horsey.”
“He is on the level. Go, Eddie.” Scott Mallory answered the question in the troubled china-blue eyes interrogating him.
Pike loped to the threshold, stopped to wag a threatening head. “I’m goin’. But if it ain’t true, if Milly ain’t in the kitchen, I’ll be back. I’ll be back!”
His mutter thinned into the distance. A girl’s shrill exclamation was shut off by the slam of a door.
Philip Carr drew a long breath. “That’s that!”
His father crossed the room to stand beside Scott Mallory before the fire. Two powerful, forceful men. The same fairness of spirit — except in the elder man’s attitude toward his son — the same sincerity and competence in their profession. Would they have been sympathetic as father and son, Pamela wondered, or were they too much alike?
“What’s this about a coup?” The elder Carr’s voice was as implacable as when he had a witness writhing under cross-examination, his fingers tightened on the lapel of his coat under the white carnation.
His son chuckled boyishly. Phil was sweet, Pamela told herself; most men would have furiously resented that tone.
“It was this way, Judge. Terrence and I got a hunch that Milly Pike was in the pay of plaintiff’s counsel. No family the size of ours could possibly consume the number of eggs she personally conducted from the Silver Moon — you will find them all charged on your bill. Mother. We didn’t know what she was snooping for but we were convinced that she was spying. Remember the time you caught me talking to her in the orchard, Pam? I was trying to make her tell me what she was up to.”
Fair Tomorrow Page 21