Leroy Scott

“ There had been many women in Peter Loveman’s life, but Nina Cordova, all of whose flaws he knew and at whom he was ever laughing, Nina was the only woman he had ever loved.
Thus, as the car spun noiselessly through the heavy night, the shrewd, tireless brain schemed on and on—as that brain would scheme on and on, brilliantly, fascinated by its schemes and their working out, until death should bring its blankness.... ”

“ Once again he was the keen, powerful personality that made him master of men and things.
“You can’t slide out of it like that, Mary Morton,—to give you your right name for once,” he drove at her grimly. “Something seems to have awakened you—awakened you to what you regard as a real sense of honor. Well, here is something for this new sense of honor to consider: Whatever your motive was in marrying Jack, in marrying him you have incurred a definite obligation. It’s your duty, unless you want to be a quitter, and more of a crook than you were before, to fulfill that obligation!” ”

“ THE STRINGS OF HUMAN NATURE
Loveman had been gone no more than fifteen minutes, and Mary was thinking upon her plans, balancing this prospect against that danger, when her telephone began to ring. She took it up, and to her dismay the voice that greeted her over the wire was the voice of Jack’s father. His first words she did not hear at all—her senses were almost wholly concentrated in dismay that two of the persons from whom she had sought seclusion had within a single hour learned of her whereabouts! ”

“ He was aware that he had to act quickly, for any instant Peter Loveman might be here.
“What is it now?” he repeated, with a provoking smile. If he did not have power to stir her to love, he knew that he had the power to stir her to anger. “I was just recalling what you said a moment ago: to the effect that you were going to do what you pleased and do it when you pleased. Pardon me for smiling—but when a woman boasts, it sometimes is amusing and a bit absurd.” ”

“ His handsome if weak face was working with indignant, protesting passion; for the moment he was strong and sincere and fine to the capacity of his nature.
“Mary, I’m not going to stand for this! I’m not going to leave you in this way—I’m not that kind of a rat!”
“We’re going to do just as your father says, Jack,” she said with quiet dominance, her face very pale. “What he suggests is wisest for us all.”
Jack stared at her; he could not read whether there was subterfuge or utter finality in her words. But whatever her purpose, he recognized that in this situation her way had to be his. ”

“ And he saw Loveman, while he chatted, gaze about upon those gathering for supper and dancing. There were people here whose family names were daily in the society and Wall Street columns—most of them here with no intent more reprehensible than the restless search for pleasure, which in this our present day has become public pleasure. Loveman smiled on them most kindly: as why shouldn’t he, thought Clifford, since many of them were working for him, though they guessed it not? ”

“ Grappling each other they went staggering about the great muted room. The table, with its champagne glasses, its silver-and-glass épergne of terraced fruit, went toppling over. The next moment a splendid if incongruous buhl cabinet was a wreck and its ostentatious exhibit of cut-glass was a thousand fragments upon the floor. And still the two men-beasts swayed about in their destructive fury.
A minute of this mad straining of muscle against muscle, and that part of Clifford’s rage which was unbridled madness disappeared—though the rage itself remained. His head began to clear. ”

“ Clifford tried to struggle free: Mary must have been taken by those others, and his every impulse called on him to pursue. But there was no breaking the clutch of those mighty, hate-hungry arms. He tried only to struggle defensively, hoping for the appearance of Jimmie Kelly—but in a few moments he realized that if he merely tried to hold his own against this maddened antagonist he would swiftly be a defeated man—and that once beaten down he would be maimed to the exhaustion of Bradley’s fury. ”

“ The hands left Clifford’s throat, and the heavy figure lifted itself from his body; and, thus freed, Clifford slumped to the floor where he sat limply, pantingly, against the table. Loveman had stepped around the table, and Clifford now saw that he was looking up at Bradley, and he saw that the cherubic, large-eyed face of the lawyer was grim with an awful wrath.
“You dam’ big boob!” cried the little man. “You’d let yourself—and me!—in for a criminal charge! And people have always said you have a brain!” ”

“ You know you don’t care for him. You know what you are planning to do isn’t square. Why don’t you be true to the best self that is in you and end it all yourself?—and end it now? There’s the telephone,” he urged—remembering that Loveman might any moment appear—“call Jack Morton up and tell him you’ve decided not to do it!” ”

“ THE RETURN OF MARY REGAN
Suddenly all conjectures concerning Bradley were swept utterly from his mind. Down the gilded red-carpeted stairway that led from what the Grand Alcazar termed its “ballroom de luxe,” there came—though this was not the figure Clifford first noted—a short, full-bodied, ornately dressed man, with a bald crown and a smile of engaging amiability. Beside him, and a half-head taller,—and this is what Clifford first saw,—walked a slender young woman, in an evening coat of rose velvet, her rounded throat gleaming a dusky marble from the soft shadows of the furred collar. ”

“ Clifford descended to the Grantham’s lounge, which was fitted in the manner of the smartest and most exclusive of men’s clubs. Five minutes later Mr. Morton entered and came straight to him. Clifford had already made his private estimate of this man with the graying hair and distinguished face: a man whose habit it was to buy men,—and women, too,—use them, and when finished with them, throw them aside without a thought and go on his way. ”

“ At that same instant Clifford saw the magnitude of what had suddenly been opened to her—and he saw that she was seeing it, too. At last, by a strange twist of circumstances and of Clifford’s attempt to guide events, she had won! Won all that was included in her original plan! And most amazing of all, what she had thought to get as the reward of scheming, she was now being begged to accept as a favor—wealth, worldly position, and all that each could bring! ”

“ He turned to Mary. “Jack’s a sentimentalist. But you’re a sensible woman and don’t humbug yourself by hesitating to call a thing by its right name.”
His last words were an even-toned affirmation of a commonplace, not a question. Clifford watched Mary closely: of a certainty, Life was testing her! He waited tensely for her reply, and so did Jack—and Clifford realized what vague worlds of different events hung upon the words yet within her lips.
“I am Jack’s mistress—yes,” she said, looking very straight into Mr. Morton’s eyes. ”

“ Why, you poor thing,”—he smiled irritatingly,—“to think you could hold a man like Jack Morton—you having to remain inactive, under cover—he free to roam about with all sorts of charming women—particularly with Miss Cordova!”
She did not speak for a moment. She was choked with that anger on which he had so carefully counted: no person, he knew, would be so likely to act upon impulse as a proud and angered woman, before the man who has insulted her. ”

“ And as the car whirred on, devouring the silent, deserted miles, on and on went his brain, calculating his chances, shaping the details of his new course—that brain whose supreme and sole function was to plan—in which function all other qualities and potentialities of the man had become centered and concentrated, and for which they and the body itself had come solely to exist—that brain which would never cease its tireless, brilliant planning until death should still its mechanism. ”

“ He was certain that some vital phase of Loveman’s shrewd scheming was being, or was to be, enacted within: Le Bain’s reticent and expensive house was not taken for ordinary pleasures or commonplace enterprises.
He had to get inside, somehow; he had to know what was happening there. Without making the test, he knew Le Bain would have upon those two front doors, stoop and basement, locks of a character that it would be wasted time to try to pick or force quietly. ”

“ All Clifford’s instincts, and all his cold reasoning, told him that Loveman was concerned in this latest relapse of Jack. It was, as he well knew, an easy matter to keep a man—either with or against his consent—hidden in the vast human wilderness of New York.
More intently, and more carefully, than before Clifford now followed the little lawyer—about his downtown legal work by day, about the restaurants and roof-gardens at night. Every hour of the twenty-four either Clifford, or the men assigned to help him, had the little man under surveillance. ”

“ He was pressing her hard from one direction, and outside sat Loveman, a danger from another direction—watching her, ready to expose and destroy her at the slightest sign of failure. Of the two she just then feared Loveman the more. She had to put Morton off—she had to have some weapon against Loveman.
An idea flashed into her brain—a desperate idea, but she was now playing a desperate game.
“Won’t you please give me a hint?” he insisted.
“Well,” she said, with the air of one consenting, “here is a proposition that may sound to you absurd—but then a woman is supposed to be irrational. ”

“ And so, as she now gazed down through the winter dusk upon the shifting motor-tops, she was very certain of herself despite her palpitant expectation over Clifford’s coming—very confident of herself, and what she was, and what she was going to do, and what she was going to be: just as many another young woman, of a perhaps more careful rearing, was preeningly confident of herself, in those limousines far below her. ”

“ Maisie had to be so led that she believed herself to be leading, and whatever she learned she must apparently find out for herself.
“Miss Jones, these men are all alike,” Mary answered lightly, “and they say Jack Morton is the most alike of them all.”
“But—but I’d heard that Jack Morton was very steady just now.”
“That’s the little way men have.” Mary gave the soft, cynical laugh of the wise young woman of fashion. “The more that men have to hide, the more steady and proper do they try to appear.”
“You mean that he is—that there is a woman—” Maisie Jones could get no further. ”

“ Clifford still spoke in his steady, impersonal tone. “Mr. Hilton is one of several men that I am after—and he’s one of the cleverest and most dangerous of the lot. It is the easiest thing in the world for a crook who is well-dressed, well-mannered, and who can dance, to make acquaintances wherever he likes. The regular game of these crooks is to pick out a woman with money, or who can get money, make her acquaintance, gain her confidence and some of her secrets, and then lead her into a situation where she must pay or be exposed. ”

“ They hurried into the long, low, gray car—the car which was to have borne Mary upon that cunningly devised saturnalia. “Jimmie, if you don’t mind, sit in front with Slim Harrison,” said Clifford, and himself took the rear seat with Mr. Morton, Mary between them. He leaned forward and spoke with harsh dominance into Slim’s ear. “Slim, I know this is a great machine, and I know that when you want to be you’re a great driver—and understand this, your only chance of getting out of this affair halfway easy is for you to get us to Greenport not later than the car ahead. Now, turn her loose.” ”

“ Clifford, supping with Uncle George, whose company he found a boon in this late-houred routine, saw Loveman start home at a little before two, an hour earlier than was his wont. In a taxi with Uncle George Clifford followed Loveman’s car, saw Loveman when he came to one of the upper West Forties,—a street of one-time handsome residences,—slip out of his car and walk rapidly through the quiet, deserted cross-street. Clifford also got quickly out of his taxi, and slipped into the dark shadow of a stoop—where Uncle George, showing a surprising quickness, joined him a moment later. ”

“ Clifford watched her, dazed by this last turn of circumstances. He saw the realities and prospects that Morton’s words had given her. She now possessed, open and aboveboard, all that she had ever dreamed to gain by trickery—yes, and [379] more! And she had it all unhampered! All these months he had tried to make Life test her—and Life had responded by, in the end, giving her everything!
Still Mary did not speak. Mr. Morton went on, a note of urging, of reassurance, in his subdued voice:
“And, Mary,—whatever I may have said in the past,—you have nothing to fear from me. ”

“ Mary, my dear, if I were to tell you what I’ve done for some women in this town—you’d certainly sit up! I don’t know now just what I’ll do with you; I’m an opportunist—I always play for the biggest chance that comes along [175] at a given time, or for the biggest chance that I can develop. But what I’ll do for you will be strictly within the law—it may even be most thoroughly respectable. I tell you, Mary,” he enthused, “with me handling you, with my knowledge of New York life and of the strings to pull, there is nothing I can’t do for you!— I tell you nothing!” ”

“ But despite Mary’s scorn—which was, perhaps, composed in part of that hate which human nature feels toward its contemplated victim—Mary [189] perceived that beneath the girl’s fluffy worldliness, she was fundamentally the sort of girl who develops into a woman whose life is centered upon her domestic affairs and domestic happiness—who demands and subsists upon loyalty. And Mary now knew enough of Jack to know what Jack, with his instability of purpose and affection, would in the years to come bring into the life of this girl. ”

“ There was a delay; he guessed that Mary was surprised at this third successive call; then he was shown through the curtained doorway into the drawing-room. His swift impression of the room was that it was large for a New York apartment, and that its prodigal furnishings bespoke wealth rather than taste on the part of its absent lessee. The next moment Mary came in through a door which he judged led from the library. ”

“ Clifford watched many persons speak briefly to Loveman. He tried to guess what the shrewd little lawyer might now be up to. Among those who came to Loveman’s table he particularly noted a dark, perfectly tailored young man, of perhaps thirty, with the lithe slenderness of the expert dancing male. Clifford knew him by name and reputation, and already he had set him down as one he must watch, together with Loveman and Bradley.
But for all his efforts to concentrate upon his present business, Clifford’s mind kept shifting back to Mary Regan. ”

“ Supposing Mary Regan is trying to put something across by holding back a little of the truth—sort of saving it up for a rainy day. Well, what of that? Ain’t we all liars? You take it from your Uncle George, a superannuated old burglar, president emeritus of that grand old alma mater, the University of Broadway, who’s played every kind of game with every kind of male and female now decorating this earth—take it from me, son, I’ve never seen the strait and narrow road of truth congested with the traffic. That’s one road you can speed on, and not even see a cop. ”

“ Life certainly had not given her what she had expected in her bargain.
Again the question rose: how was it all coming out?
The next afternoon Clifford, following Hilton, saw his quarry enter the Mordona, the great apartment house on the Drive before which he had left Mary the night before. He followed into the lobby just as his man disappeared into an elevator. He had no doubt on whom the dark gentleman was calling, or for what reason he called.
Opening into the elaborate lobby, for whose gilded ostentation the tenants were assessed a goodly portion of their rent, was a florist’s shop. ”