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

her O.K.?"

Maggie had decided that her air of cool, indifferent certainty was the best manner to use in this situation with Barney. So she shrugged her white shoulders.

"How can I tell what makes a man do something, and what makes him not do it?"

"But did he seem any less interested in you than before?" Barney pursued.

"No," replied Maggie.

"Then maybe he's just waiting to get up his nerve. He'll ask you, all right; nothing there for us to worry about. Come on, let's have dinner. I'm starved."

On the roof of the Grantham they were excellently served; for Barney knew how to order a dinner, and he knew the art, which is an alchemistic mixture of suave diplomacy and the insinuated power and purpose of murder, of handling head-waiters and their sub-autocrats. Having no other business in hand, Barney devoted himself to that business which ran like a core through all his businesses - paying court to Maggie. And when Barney wished to be a courtier, there were few of his class who could give a better superficial interpretation of the role; and in this particular instance he was at the advantage of being in earnest. He forced the most expensive tidbits announced by the dinner card upon Maggie; he gallantly and very gracefully put on and removed, as required by circumstances, the green cobweb of a scarf Maggie had brought to the roof as protection against the elements; and when he took the dancing-floor with her, he swung her about and hopped up and down and stepped in and out with all the skill of a master of the modern perversion of dancing. Barney was really good enough to have been a professional dancer had his desires not led him toward what seemed to him a more exciting and more profitable career.

Maggie, not to rouse Barney's suspicions, played her role as well as he did his own. And most of the other diners, a fraction of the changing two or three hundred thousand people from the South and West who choose New York as the best of all summer resorts, gazed upon this handsome couple with their intricate steps which were timed with such effortless and enviable accuracy, and excitedly believed that they were beholding two distinguished specimens of what their home papers persisted in calling New York's Four Hundred.

Maggie got back to her room with the feeling that she had staved off Barney and her numerous other dilemmas for the immediate present. Her chief thought in the many events of the day had been only to escape her dangers and difficulties for the moment; all the time she had known that her real thinking, her real decisions, were for a later time when she was not so driven by the press of unexpected circumstances. That less stressful time was now beginning.

What was she to do next? What were to be her final decisions? And what, in all this strange ferment, was likely to germinate as possible forces against her?

She mulled these things over for several days, during which Dick came to see her twice, and twice proposed, and was twice put off. She had quiet now, and was most of the time alone, but that clarity which she had expected, that quickness and surety of purpose which she had always believed to be unfailingly hers, refused to come.

She tried to have it otherwise, but the outstanding figure in her meditations was Larry. Larry, who had not exposed her at the Sherwoods', and whose influence had caused Hunt also not to expose her - Larry, who without deception was on a familiar footing at the Sherwoods' where she had been received only through trickery - Larry, a fugitive in danger from so many enemies, perhaps after all undeserved enemies - Larry, who looked to be making good on his boast to achieve success through honesty - Larry, who had again told her that he loved her. She liked Dick Sherwood - she really did. But Larry - that was something different.

And thus she thought on, drawn this way and that, and unable to reach a decision. But with most people, when in a state of acute mental turmoil, that which has been most definite in the past, instinct, habit of mind, purpose, tradition, becomes at least temporarily the dominant factor through the mere circumstance that it has existed powerfully before, through its comparative stability, through its semi-permanence. And so with Maggie. She had for that one afternoon almost been won over against herself by the workings of Larry's secret diplomacy. Then had come the natural reaction. And now in her turmoil, in so far as she had any decision, it was instinctively to go right ahead in the direction in which she had been going.

But on the sixth day of her uncertainty, just after Dick had called on her and she had provisionally accepted an invitation to Cedar Crest for the following afternoon, a danger which she had half seen from the start burst upon her without a moment's warning. It came into her sitting-room, just before her dinner hour, in the dual form of Barney and Old Jimmie. The faces of both were lowering.

"Get rid of that boob chaperon of yours!" gritted Barney. "We're going to have some real talk!"

Maggie stepped to the connecting door, sent Miss Grierson on an inconsequential errand, and returned.

"You're looking as pleasant as if you were sitting for a new photograph, Barney. What gives you that sweet expression?"

"You'll cut out your comic-supplement stuff in just one second," Barney warned her. "We both saw young Sherwood awhile ago as he was leaving the Grantham, and he told us everything!"

Persiflage did indeed fail Maggie. "Everything?" she exclaimed. "What's everything?"

"He told us about proposing to you almost a week ago, and about your refusing him. And you lied to us - kept us sitting round, wasting our time - and all the while you've been double-crossing us!"

Those visitors from South and West, especially the women, who a few nights before on the roof had regarded Barney as the perfect courtier, would not have so esteemed him if they had seen him at the present moment. He seized Maggie's wrists, and all the evil of his violent nature glared from his small bright eyes.

"Damn you!" he cried. "Jimmie, she's yours, and a father's got a right to do anything he likes to his own daughter. Give it to her proper if she don't come across with the truth!"

Jimmie stepped closer to her and bared his yellow teeth. "I haven't given you a basting since you were fifteen - but I'll paste you one right in the mouth if you don't talk straight talk!"

"You hear that!" Barney gritted at her. He believed there was justice in his wrath - as indeed there was, of a sort. "Think what Jimmie and I've put into this, in time and hard coin! We've given you your chance, we've made you! And then, after hard work and waiting and our spending so much, and everything comes out exactly as we figured, you go and throw us down - not just yourself, but us and our rights! Now you talk straight stuff! Tell us, why did you refuse Sherwood when he proposed? And why did you tell me that lie about his not proposing?"

Maggie realized she was in a desperate plight, with these two inflamed gazes upon her. Never had she felt so little of a daughter's liking for Old Jimmie as now when she looked into his lean, harsh, yellow- fanged face. And she had no illusions about Barney. He might love her, as she knew he did; but that would not be a check upon his ruthlessness if he thought himself balked or betrayed.

Just then her telephone began to ring. She started to move toward it, but Barney's grip checked her short.

"You're going to answer me - not any damned telephone! Let it ring!"

The bell rang for a minute or two before it stilled its shrill clamor. Its ringing was in a way a brief respite to Maggie, for it gave her additional time to consider what should be her course. She realized that she dared not let Barney believe at this moment that she had turned against him. Again she fell back upon her cool, self-confident manner.

"You want to know why? The answer is simple enough. I thought I might try out an improvement of our plan - something that might suit me better."

"What's that?" Barney harshly demanded.

"Since Miss Sherwood fell for me so easy, it struck me that she'd be pretty sure to fall for me if I told her the whole truth about myself. That is, everything except our scheme to play Dick for a sucker."

"What're you driving at?"

"Don't you see? If she forgave me being what I am, and I rather think she would, and with Dick liking me as he does - why, it struck me as the best thing for yours truly to marry Dick for keeps."

"What?" Though Barney's voice was low, it had the effect of a startled and savage roar. "And chuck us over-board?"

"Not at all. If I married Dick for keeps, I intended to pay you a lump sum, or else a regular amount each year."

"No, you don't!" Barney cried in the same muffled roar.

"Perhaps not - I haven't decided," Maggie said evenly. "I've merely been telling you, as you requested me, why I did as I did. I refused Dick, and lied to you, so that I might have more time to think over what I really wanted to do."

Instinctively she had counted on rousing Barney's jealousy in order to throw him off the track of her real thoughts. She succeeded.

"I can tell you what you're going to do!" Barney flung at her with fierce mastery. "You're not going to put over a sure-enough marriage with any Dick Sherwood! When there's that kind of a marriage, I'm going to be the man! And you're going to go right straight ahead with our old plan! Dick'll propose again if you give him half a chance. And when he does, you say 'yes'! Understand? That's what you're going to do!"

There was no safety in openly defying Barney. And as a matter of fact what he had ordered was what, in the shifting currents of her thoughts, the steady momentum of her old ambitions and purposes had been pushing her toward. So she said, in her even voice:

"You waste such a lot of your good energy, Barney, by exploding when there's nothing to blow up. That's exactly what I'd decided to do. Miss Sherwood has asked me out to Cedar Crest to-morrow afternoon, and I'm going."

Barney let go the hold he had kept upon her wrists, and the dark look slowly lifted from his face. "Why didn't you tell a fellow this at first?" he half grumbled. Then with a grim enthusiasm: "And when you come back, you're going to tell us it's all settled!"

"Of course - if he asks me. And now suppose you two go away. You've given me a headache, and I want to rest."

"We'll go," said Barney. "But there may be some more points about this that we may want to talk over a little later to-night. So better get all the rest you can."

But when they had gone and left her to the silence of her pretentious and characterless suite, Maggie did not rest. She had made up her mind; she was going