Chapter 13

"He's elderly, yes; old enough to have a grown daughter." Then the clerk laughed. "Perhaps you've got things tangled. Perhaps you 'met up' with Miss Charlotte. She was down on the Gulf Coast last winter."

"Not me," said Broffin, matching the ice-breaking laugh. And then he registered for a room and passed on into the café, deferring to the appetite which, for the first time in nearly four tedious weeks, he felt justified in indulging to the untroubled limit.

Having, by the slow but sure process of elimination, finally reduced his equation to its lowest terms, Broffin put the past four weeks and their failures behind him, and prepared to draw the net which he hoped would entangle the lost identity of the bank robber. After a good night's sleep in a real bed, he awoke refreshed and alert, breakfasted with an open mind, and presently went about the net-drawing methodically and with every contingency carefully provided for.

The first step was to assure himself beyond question that Miss Farnham was the writer of the unsigned letter. This step he was able, by a piece of great good fortune, to take almost immediately. A bit of morning gossip with the obliging clerk of the Winnebago House developed the fact that Dr. Farnham's daughter had once taught in the free kindergarten which was one of the charitable out-reachings of the Wahaska Public Library. Two blocks east and one south: Broffin walked them promptly, made himself known to the librarian as a visitor interested in kindergarten work, and was cheerfully shown the records. When he turned to the pages signed "Charlotte Farnham" the last doubt vanished and assurance was made sure. The anonymous letter writer was found.

It was just here that Matthew Broffin fell under the limitations of his trade. Though the detective in real life is as little as may be like the Inspector Buckets and the Javerts of fiction, certain characteristics persist. Broffin thought he knew the worth of boldness; where it was a mere matter of snapping the handcuffs upon some desperate criminal, the boldness was not wanting. But now, when he found himself face to face with the straightforward expedient, the craft limitations bound him. Instantly he thought of a dozen good reasons why he should make haste slowly; and he recognized in none of them the craftsman's slant toward indirection--the tradition of the trade which discounts the straightforward attack and puts a premium upon the methods of the deer-stalker.

Sooner or later, of course, the attack must be made. But only an apprentice, he told himself, would be foolish enough to make it without mapping out all the hazards of the ground over which it must be made. In a word, he must "place" Miss Farnham precisely; make a careful study of the young woman and her environment, to the end that every thread of advantage should be in his hands when he should finally force her to a confession. For by now the assumption that she knew the mysterious bank robber was no longer hypothetical in Broffin's mind: it had grown to the dimensions of a conviction.

Wahaska was not difficult of approach on its gossiping side. Though it owned a charter and called itself a city, it was still in the country-town stage which favors a wide distribution of news with the personal note emphasized. Broffin, conveying the impression that he was a Louisiana lumberman on a vacation, approved himself as a good listener, and little more was needed. In a week he had traced the social outlines of the town as one finds the accent of a painting; in a fortnight he had grouped the Griersons, the Raymers, the Oswalds, the Barrs, and the Farnhams in their various interrelations, business and otherwise.

With the patient curiosity of his tribe he suffered no detail, however trivial, to escape its jotting down. To familiarize himself with the goings and comings of one young woman, he made the acquaintance of an entire town. He knew Jasper Grierson's ambition, and its fruitage in the practical ownership of Wahaska. He knew that Edward Raymer had borrowed money from Grierson's bank--and was likely to be unable to pay it when his notes fell due. He had heard it whispered that there had once been a love affair between young Raymer and Miss Farnham, and that it had been broken off by Raymer's infatuation for Margery Grierson. Also, last and least important of all the gossiping details, as it seemed at the time, he learned that the bewitching Miss Grierson was a creature of fads; that within the past month or two she had returned from a Florida trip, bringing with her a sick man, a total stranger, who had been picked up on the train, taken to the great house on the lake shore and nursed back to life as Miss Grierson's latest defiance of the conventions.

It should have been a memorable day for Matthew Broffin when he had this sick man pointed out to him as Miss Grierson's companion in the high trap--which was also one of Miss Margery's bids for criticism in a town where the family carryall was still a feature. But Broffin was sufficiently human to see only a very beautiful young woman sitting correctly erect on the slanting driving-seat and holding the reins over a high-stepping horse which, he was told, had cost Jasper Grierson every cent of a thousand dollars. To be sure, he saw the man, as one sees a vanishing figure in a kaleidoscope. But there was nothing in the clean-shaven face of the gaunt, and as yet rather haggard, convalescent to evoke the faintest thrill of interest--or of memory.

XXII

IN THE BURGLAR-PROOF

A week and a day after the opening of new vistas at Miss Grierson's "evening," Griswold--Raymer's intercession with the Widow Holcomb having paved the way--took a favorable opportunity of announcing his intention of leaving Mereside. It figured as a grateful disappointment to him--one of the many she was constantly giving him--that Margery placed no obstacles in the way of the intention. On the contrary, she approved the plan.

"I know how you feel," she said, nodding complete comprehension. "You want to have a place that you can call your own; a place where you can go and come as you please and settle down to work. You _are_ going to work, aren't you?--on the book, I mean?"

Griswold replaced in its proper niche the volume he had been reading. It was Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, and he had been wondering by what ironical chance it had found a place in the banker's library.

"Yes; that is what I mean to do," he returned. "But it will have to be done in such scraps and parings of time as I can save from some bread-and-butter occupation. One must eat to live, you know."

She was sitting on the arm of one of the big library lounging-chairs and looking up at him with a smile that was suspiciously innocent and childlike.

"You mean that you will have to work for your living?" she asked.

"Exactly."

"What were you thinking of doing?"

"I don't know," he confessed. "I have been hoping that Raymer might help me to find a place; possibly in the machine works as an under bookkeeper, or something of that sort. Not that I know very much about any really useful occupation, when it comes to that; but I suppose I can learn."

Again he surprised the lurking smile in the velvety eyes, but this time it was half-mischievous.

"We have a college here in Wahaska, and you might get a place on the faculty," she suggested; adding: "As an instructor in philosophy, for example."

"Philosophy? that is the one thing in the world that I know least about."

"In theory, perhaps," she conceded, laughing openly at him now. "But in practice you are perfect, Mr. Griswold. Hasn't anybody ever told you that before?"

"No; and you don't mean it. You are merely taking a base advantage of a sick man and making fun of me. I don't mind: I'm in a heavenly temper this afternoon."

"Oh, but I do mean it, honestly," she averred. "You are a philosopher, really and truly, and I can prove it. Do you feel equal to another little drive down-town?"

"Being a philosopher, I ought to be equal to anything," he postulated; and he went up-stairs to get a street coat and his hat.

She had disappeared when he came down again, and he went out to sit on the sun-warmed veranda while he waited. He had already forgotten what she had said about the object of the drive--the proving of the philosophic charge against him--and was looking forward with keenly pleasurable anticipations to another outing with her, the second for that day. It had come to this, now; to admitting frankly the charm which he was still calling sensuous, and which, in the moments of insight recurring, as often as they can be borne, to the imaginative, and vouchsafed now and then even to the wayfaring, he was still disposed to characterize as an appeal to that which was least worthy in him.

Latterly, however, he had begun to question himself more acutely as to the exact justice of this attitude; and while he was sunning himself on the veranda and listening for the hoof-beats of the big trap horse on the stable approach, he was doing it again. In those graver analytical moments he had called Margery a preternaturally clever little barbarian, setting his own immense obligation to her aside in deference to what he assumed to be the immutable realities. In the sun-warming excursion came another of those precious moments of insight; a moment in which he was given a sobering glimpse of the deathless Philistine within. Who was he to be setting his machine-made ideals above the living, breathing, human fact whose very limitations and shortcomings might figure as angelic virtues when weighed in any balance save that of the Philistinic ego?

To admit the query was to admit a doubtful distrust of all the charted anchorages; those sure holding-grounds which he had once believed to be the very bottoming of facts assured and incontestible. From his lounging seat the trees on the lawn framed a noble vista of lakescape and crescent-curved beach drive, the latter with its water-facing row of modest mansions, the homes of Wahaska's well-to-do elect. At the end of the crescent he could see the chimneys of the Raymer house rising above a groving of young maples; and nearer at hand the substantial, two-storied frame house which Miss Grierson had pointed out to him as the home of the kindly Doctor Bertie. When he found himself drifting, his thoughts reverted automatically to Charlotte Farnham. There, if anywhere, lay the touchstone of truth and the verities; there, he told himself, was at least one life into which the doubtful distrust of the anchorages had never come.

Passing easily from Miss Farnham the ideal to Miss Farnham the flesh-and-blood reality, he was moved to wonder mildly why the fate which had brought him twice into critically intimate relations with her was now denying him even a chance meeting. For a week or more he had been going out daily; sometimes with Miss Grierson in the trap, but oftener afoot and alone. The walking excursions had led him most frequently up and down the lakeside drive, but the doctor's house stood well back in its enclosure, and there was much shrubbery. Once he had heard her voice: she was reading aloud to some one on the vine-screened porch. And once again in passing, he had caught a glimpse of a shapely arm with the loose sleeve falling away from it as it was thrust upward through the porch greenery to pluck a bud from the crimson rambler adding its graceful mass to the clambering vines. It was rather disappointing, but he was not impatient. In the fulness of time the destiny which had twice intervened would intervene again. He was as certain of it as he was of the day-to-day renewal of his strength and vitality; and he could afford to wait. For, whatever else might happen in a mutable world, neither an ideal nor its embodiment may suffer change.

As if to add the touch of definitiveness to the presumptive conclusion, a voice broke in upon his revery; the voice of the young woman whose most alluring charm was her many-sided changefulness.

"What? no trap yet? Thorsen is outliving his usefulness; he is getting slower and pokier every added day he lives!" the voice was saying, with a faintly acid quality in it that Griswold had seldom heard. Then, as if she had marked his preoccupied gaze and divined its object: "You must have a little more patience, Mr. Griswold. All things come to him who waits. When you have left Mereside finally, Doctor Bertie will some time take you home to dinner with him."

For his own peace of mind, Griswold hastily assured himself that it was only the wildest of chance shots. Since the day when he had admitted that he knew Miss Farnham's name without knowing Miss Farnham in person, the doctor's daughter had never been mentioned between them.

"How did you happen to guess that I was thinking of the good doctor?" he asked, curiously.

"You were not thinking of Doctor Bertie; you were thinking of Doctor Bertie's 'only'," was the laughing contradiction; and Griswold was glad that the coming of the man with the trap saved him from the necessity of falling any farther into what might easily prove to be a dangerous pitfall. Later on, while he was mechanically lifting his hat in recognition of the many salutations acknowledged by his companion in their triumphal progress down Main Street, he was still thankful and still puzzling over the almost uncanny coincidence. It was not the first time that Miss Grierson had seemed able to read his inmost thoughts.

The short afternoon drive paused at the curb in front of Jasper Grierson's bank, and, as on former occasions, Margery lightly scorned the convalescent's up-stretched arms and sprang unhelped to the pavement. But now her mood was sweetly indulgent and she softened the refusal. "By and by, after you are quite well and strong again," she said; and when a horse-holding boy had been found, she led the way into the bank.

It was Griswold's first visit to the Farmers' and Merchants', and while his companion was speaking to the cashier he was absently contrasting its rather showy interior with the severe plainness of the Bayou State Security; contrasting, and congratulating himself upon the gift of the artistic memory which enabled him to recall with vivid accuracy all the little details of the New Orleans banking house--this notwithstanding the good excuse the observing eye might have had for wandering.

A moment later he found himself bringing up the rear of a procession of three, led by a young woman with a bunch of keys at her girdle. The procession halted for the opening of a massive gate in the steel grille at the rear of the public lobby; after which, with the gate latching itself automatically behind him, Griswold found himself in the grated corridor facing the safety deposit vaults.

"Number three-forty-five-A, please," his companion was saying to the young woman custodian, and he stood aside and admired the workmanship of the complicated time-locks while the two entered the electric-lighted vault and jointly opened one of the multitude of small safes. When Miss Grierson came out, she was carrying a small, japanned document box under her arm, and her eyes were shining with a soft light that was new to the man who was waiting in the corridor. "Come with me to one of the coupon-rooms," she said; and then to the custodian: "You needn't stay; I'll ring when we want to be let out."

Griswold followed in mild bewilderment when she turned aside to one of the little mahogany-lined cells set apart for the use of the safe-holders, saw her press the button which switched the lights on, and mechanically obeyed her signal to close the door. When their complete privacy was assured, she put the japanned box on the tiny table and motioned him to one of the two chairs.

"Do you know why I have brought you here?" she asked, when he was sitting within arm's-reach of the small black box.

"How should I?" he said. "You take me where you please, and when you please, and I ask no questions. I am too well contented to be with you to care very much about the whys and wherefores."

"Oh, how nicely you say it!" she commended, with the frank little laugh which he had come to know and to seek to provoke. She was standing against the opposite cell wall with her shoulders squared and her hands behind her: the pose, whether intentional or natural, was dramatically perfect and altogether bewitching. "I was born to be your fairy godmother, I think," she went on joyously. "Tell me; when you bought your ticket to Wahaska that night in St. Louis, were you meaning to come here to find work?--the bread-and-butter work?"

"No," he admitted; "I had money, then."

"What became of it?"

"I don't know. I suppose it was stolen from me on the train. It was in a package in one of my suit-cases; and Doctor Farnham said----"

"I know; he told you that we had searched your suit-cases when you were at your worst--thinking we owed it to you and your friends, if you had any."

"Yes; that is what he told me."

"Also, he told you that we didn't find any money?"

"Yes; he told me that, too. We agreed that somebody must have gone through the grips on the train."

"And you let it go at that? Why didn't you tell me, so that we might at least try to find the thief?"

He had quite lost sight of the black box on the table by this time, and was consumed with curiosity to know why she had brought him to such a place to reproach him for his lack of confidence.

"How often are we able to tell the exact 'why' of anything?" he answered evasively. "Perhaps I didn't wish to trouble you--you who had already troubled yourself so generously in behalf of an unknown castaway."

"So you just let the money go?"

"So I just let it go."

She was laughing again and the bedazzling eyes were dancing with delight.

"I told you I was going to prove that you are a philosopher!" she exulted. "Sour old Diogenes himself couldn't have been more superbly indifferent to the goods the gods provide. Open that box on the table, please."

He did it half-absently: at the first sight of the brown-paper packet within, the electric bulb suspended over the table seemed to grow black and the mahogany walls of the tiny room to spin dizzily. Then, with a click that he fancied he could hear, the buzzing mental machinery stopped and reversed itself. A cold sweat, clammy and sickening, started out on him when he realized that the reversal had made him once again the crafty, cornered criminal, ready to fight or fly--or to slay, if a life stood in the way of escape. Without knowing what he did, he closed the box and got upon his feet, eying her with a growing ferocity that he could neither banish nor control.

"I see: you were a little beforehand with the doctor," he said, and he strove to say it naturally; to keep the malignant devil that was whispering in his ear from dictating the tone as well as the words.

"I was, indeed; several days beforehand," she boasted, still joyously exultant.

"You--you opened the package?" he went on, once more pushing the importunate devil aside.

"Naturally. How else would I have known that it was worth locking up?"

Her coolness astounded him. If she knew the whole truth--and the demon at his ear was assuring him that she must know it--she must also know that she was confronting a great peril; the peril of one who voluntarily shuts himself into a trap with the fear-maddened wild thing for which the trap was baited and set. He was steadying himself with a hand on the table when he said: "Well, you opened the package; what did you find out?"

"What did I find out?" He heard her half-hesitant repetition of his query, and for one flitting instant he made sure that he saw the fear of death in the wide-open eyes that were lifted to his. But the next instant the eyes were laughing at him, and she was going on confidently. "Of course, as soon as I untied the string I saw it was money--a lot of money; and you can imagine that I tied it up again, quickly, and didn't lose any more time than I could help in putting it away in the safest place I could think of. Every day since you began to get well, I've been expecting you to say something about it; but as long as you wouldn't, I wouldn't."

Slowly the blood came back into the saner channels, and the whispering demon at his ear grew less articulate. Was she telling the truth? Could it be possible that she had not opened the packet far enough to see and read the damning evidence of the printed bank-slips which, in a very bravado of carelessness, as he now remembered, he had neglected to remove and destroy? He was searching the dark eyes for the naked soul behind them when he ventured again.

"You--you and your father--must have thought it very singular that a sick man should be knocking about the country with so much money carried carelessly in a suit-case?"

"My father knows nothing about it; nor does any one else. And it wasn't my place to gossip or to wonder. I found it, and I took care of it for you. Are you glad, or sorry?"

He took the necessary forward step and stood before her. And his answer was no answer at all.

"Miss Grierson--Margery--are you telling me the truth?--all of it?" he demanded, seeking once again to pinion the soul which lay beyond the deepest depth of the limpid eyes.

Her laugh was as cheerful as a bird song.

"Telling you the truth? How could you suspect me of such a thing! No, my good friend; no woman ever tells a man the whole truth when she can help it. I didn't find your money, and I didn't lock it up in poppa's vault: I am merely playing a part in a deep and diabolical plot to----"

Griswold forgot that he was her poor beneficiary; forgot that she had taken him in as her guest; forgot, in the mad joy of the reactionary moment, everything that he should have remembered--saw nothing, thought of nothing save the flushed face with its glorious eyes and tempting lips: the eyes and lips of the daughter of men.

She broke away from him hotly after he had taken the flushed face between his hands and kissed her; broke away to drop into the chair at the other side of the table, hiding the flashing eyes and the burning cheeks and the quivering lips in the crook of a round arm which made room for itself on the narrow table by pushing the japanned money-box off the opposite edge.

It was the normal Griswold who picked up the box and put it in the other chair, gravely and methodically. Then he stood before her again with his back to the wall, waiting for what every gentle drop of blood in his veins was telling him he richly deserved. His punishment was long in coming; so long that when he made sure she was crying, he began to invite it.

"Say it," he suggested gently, "you needn't spare me at all. The only excuse I could offer would only make the offence still greater."

She looked up quickly and the dark eyes were swimming. But whether the tears were of anger or only of outraged generosity, he could not tell.

"Then there was an excuse?" she flashed up at him.

"No," he denied, as one who finds the second thought the worthier; "there was no excuse."

She had found a filmy bit of lace-bordered linen at her belt and was furtively wiping her lips with it.

"I thought perhaps you might be able to--to invent one of some sort," she said, and her tone was as colorless as the gray skies of an autumn nightfall. And then, with a childlike appeal in the wonderful eyes: "I think you will have to help me a little--out of your broader experience, you know. What ought I to do?"

His reply came hot from the refining-fire of self-abasement.

"You should write me down as one who wasn't worthy of your loving-kindness and compassion, Miss Grierson. Then you should call the custodian and turn me out."

"But afterward," she persisted pathetically. "There must be an afterward?"

"I am leaving Mereside this evening," he reminded her. "It will be for you to say whether its doors shall ever open to me again."