Children of the Whirlwind, Leroy Scott [read full novel txt] 📗

eyes.

Now how and where did that impecunious, rough-neck painter fit into -

But the dazed question Larry was asking was interrupted by a voice from the door - the thick voice of a man:

"Who the hell 'r' you?"

Larry whirled about. In the doorway stood a tall, bellicose young gentleman of perhaps twenty-four or five, in evening dress, flushed of face, holding unsteadily to the door-jamb.

"I beg your pardon," said Larry.

"'N' what the hell you doin' here?" continued the belligerent young gentleman.

"I'd be obliged to you if you could tell me," said Larry.

"Tryin' to stall, 'r' you," declared the young gentleman with a scowling profundity. "No go. Got to come out your corner 'n' fight. 'N' I'm goin' lick you."

The young man crossed unsteadily to Larry and took a fighting pose.

"Put 'em up!" he ordered.

This was certainly a night of strange adventure, thought Larry. His wild escape - his coming to this unknown place - and now this befuddled young fellow intent upon battle with him.

"Let's fight to-morrow," Larry suggested soothingly.

"Put 'em up!" ordered the other. "If you don't know what you're doin' here, I'll show you what you're doin' here!"

But he was not to show Larry, for while he was uttering his last words, trying to steady himself in a crouch for the delivery of a blow, a voice sounded sharply from the doorway - a woman's voice:

"Dick!"

The young man slowly turned. But Larry had seen her first. He had no chance to take her in, that first moment, beyond noting that she was slender and young and exquisitely gowned, for she swept straight across to them.

"Dick, you're drunk again!" she exclaimed.

"Wrong, sis," he corrected in an injured tone. "It's same drunk."

"Dick, you go to bed!"

"Now, sis - "

"You go to bed!"

The young man wavered before her commanding gaze. "Jus's you say - jus's you say," he mumbled, and went unsteadily toward the door.

The young woman watched him out, and then turned her troubled face back to Larry. "I'm sorry Dick behaved to you as he did."

And then before Larry could make answer, her clouded look was gone. "So you're here at last, Mr. Brainard." She held her hand out, smiling a smile that by some magic seemed to envelop him within an immediate friendship.

"I'm Miss Sherwood." He noted that the slender, tapering hand had almost a man's strength of grip. "You needn't tell me anything about yourself," she added, "for I already know a lot - all I need to know: about you - and about Maggie Carlisle. You see an hour ago a messenger brought me a long letter he'd written about you." And she nodded to the photograph Larry was still holding.

"You - you know him?" Larry stammered.

She answered with a whimsical smile: "Yes. Isn't he a grand, foolish old dear? He's such a roistering, bragging personage that I've named him Benvenuto Cellini - though he's neither liar nor thief. He must have told you what I called him."

So that explained this password of "Benvenuto Cellini"! "No, he didn't explain anything. There was no time."

"I don't know where he is," she continued; "please don't tell me. I don't want to know until he wants me to know."

Larry had been making a swift appraisal of her. She was perhaps thirty, fair, with golden-brown hair held in place by a large comb of wrought gold, with violet-blue eyes, wearing a low-cut gown of violet chiffon velvet and dull gold shoes. Larry's instinct told him that here was a patrician, a thoroughbred: with poise, with a knowledge of the world, with whimsical humor, with a kindly understanding of people, with steel in her, and with a smiling readiness for almost any situation.

"I think no one will find you - at least for the present," her pleasantly modulated voice continued. "There are so many things I want to talk over with you. Perhaps I can help about Maggie. I hope you don't mind my talking about her." Larry could not imagine any one taking offense at anything this brilliant apparition might possibly say. "But we'll put off our talk until to-morrow. It's late, and you're wet and cold, and besides, my aunt is having one of her bad spells and thinks she needs me. Judkins will see to you. Good-night."

"Good-night," said Larry.

She moved gracefully out - almost floated, Larry would have said. The next moment the man was with him who had been his escort here, and led Larry into a spacious bedroom with bath attached. Ten minutes later Judkins made his exit, carrying Larry's outer clothes; and another ten minutes later, after a hot bath, and garbed in silk pajamas which Judkins had produced, Larry was in the softest and freshest bed that had ever held him.

But sleep did not come to Larry for a long time. He lay wondering about this golden-haired, poiseful Miss Sherwood. She was undoubtedly the woman in the back of Hunt's life. And he wondered about Hunt - who he really was - what had really driven him into this strange exile. And he wondered about Maggie - what she might be doing - what from this strange new vantage-point he might do for her and with her. And he wondered how his own complex situation was going to work itself out.

And still wondering, Larry at length fell asleep.


CHAPTER XII


When Larry awoke the next morning, he blinked for several bewildered moments about his bedroom, so unlike his cell at Sing Sing and so unlike Hunt's helter-skelter studio down at the Duchess's which he had shared, before he realized that this big, airy chamber and this miracle of a bed on which he lay were realities and not a mere continuation of a dream of fantastic and body-flattering wealth.

Then his mind turned back a page in the book of his life and he lay considering the events of the previous evening: the scene with Barney and Old Jimmie and Maggie, their all denouncing him as a police stool- pigeon and a squealer, and Maggie's defiant departure to begin her long-dreamed-of career as a leading-woman and perhaps star in what she saw as great and thrilling adventures; his own enforced and frenzied flight; his strange method of reaching this splendid apartment; his meeting with the handsome, drink-befuddled young man in evening clothes; his meeting with the exquisitely gowned patrician Miss Sherwood, who had received him with the poise and frank friendliness of a democratic queen, and had immediately ordered him off to bed.

Strange, all of these things! But they were all realities. And in this new set of circumstances which had come into being in a night, what was he to do?

He recalled that Miss Sherwood had said that she and he would have their talk that morning. He pulled his watch from under his pillow. It was past nine o'clock. He looked about him for clothes, but saw only a bathrobe. Then he remembered Judkins carrying off his rain-soaked garments, with "Ring for me when you wake up, sir."

Larry found an electric bell button dangling over the top of his bed by a silken cord. He pushed the button and waited. Within two minutes the door opened, and Judkins entered, laden with fresh garments.

"Good-morning, sir," said Judkins. "Your own clothes, and some shirts and other things I've borrowed from Mr. Dick. How will you have your bath, sir - hot or cold?"

"Cold," said the bewildered Larry.

Judkins disappeared into the great white-tiled bathroom, there was the rush of splashing water for a few moments, then silence, and Judkins reappeared.

"Your bath is ready, sir. I've laid out some of Mr. Dick's razors. How soon shall I bring you in your breakfast?"

"In about twenty minutes," said Larry.

Exactly twenty minutes later Judkins carried in a tray, and set it on a table beside a window looking down into Park Avenue. "Miss Sherwood asked me to tell you she would see you in the library at ten o'clock, sir - where she saw you last night," said Judkins, and noiselessly was gone.

Freshly shaven, tingling from his bath, with a sense of being garbed flawlessly, though in garments partly alien, Larry addressed himself to the breakfast of grapefruit, omelette, toast and coffee, served on Sevres china with covers of old silver. In his more prosperous eras Larry had enjoyed the best private service that the best hotels in New York had to sell; but their best had been coarse and slovenly compared to this. He would eat for a minute or two - then get up and look at his carefully dressed self in the full-length mirror - then gaze from his high, exclusive window down into Park Avenue with its stream of cars comfortably carrying their occupants toward ten o'clock jobs in Wall or Broad Streets - and then he would return to his breakfast. This was amazing - bewildering!

He was toward the end of his omelette when a knock sounded at his door. Thinking Judkins had returned, he called, "Come in"; but instead of Judkins the opening door admitted the belligerent young man in rumpled evening clothes of the previous night. Now he wore a silk dressing-gown of a flamboyant peacock blue, his feet showed bare in toe slippers, his wavy, yellowish hair had the tousled effect of a very recent separation from a pillow. A cigarette depended from the corner of his mouth.

Larry started to rise. But the young man arrested the motion with a gesture of mock imperativeness.

"Keep your seat, fair sir; I would fain have speech with thee." He crossed and sat on a corner of Larry's table, one slippered foot dangling, and looked Larry over with an appraising eye. "Permit me to remark, sir," he continued in his grand manner, "that you look as though you might be some one."

"Is that what you wanted to tell me, Mr. Sherwood?" queried Larry.

The other's grand manner vanished and he grinned. "Forget the 'Mr. Sherwood,' or you'll make me feel not at home in my own house," he begged with humorous mournfulness. "Call me Dick. Everybody else does. That's settled. Now to the reason for this visitation at such an ungodly hour. Sis has just been in picking on me. Says I was rude to you last night. I suppose I was. I'd had several from my private stock early in the evening; and several more around in jovial Manhattan joints where prohibition hasn't checked the flow of happiness if you know the countersign. The cumulative effect you saw, and were the victim of. I apologize, sir."

"That's all right, Mr. - "

"Dick is what I said," interrupted the other.

"Dick, then. It's all right. I understand."

"Thanks. I'll call you Old Captain Nemo for short. Sis didn't tell me your name or anything about you, and she said I wasn't to ask you questions. But whatever Isabel does is usually one hundred percent right. She said I'd probably be seeing a lot of you, so I'll introduce myself. You'd learn all about me from some one else, anyhow, so you might as well learn about me from me and get an impartial and unbiased statement. Clever of me, ain't it, to beat 'em to it?"

Larry found himself smiling back into the ingratiating, irresponsible, boyish face. "I suppose so."

"I'll shoot you the whole works at once. Name, Richard Livingston Sherwood. Years, twenty-four, but