The Midnight Passenger, Richard Henry Savage [best reads of all time txt] 📗

to sell you this one, so that I can import one for her framed in our own Viennese manner.

"The lady awaits your wishes, through me. It certainly is very courteous on her part. I have done her certain little business favors and she is kindly willing to oblige."

"If I could only meet her," murmured Randall Clayton, with lips dry with all the eagerness of a newly born passion. He was in a defiant mood now, his whole being stirred with the treason of the friend of years and the unmasked villainy of his pseudo-benefactor. This fair mystery allured him strangely.

"Nothing easier," smiled the dealer, reaching out for his silk hat. "The Fräulein is taking her usual luncheon at the Restaurant Bavaria, and I agreed to notify her of your wishes, as she may travel, and would be willing to wait for the arrival of my Vienna importation. I will be very glad to present you to her."

The world took on a new brightness as Randall Clayton passed out of the shop with the dealer. He scarcely dared to trust himself to bring up the subject now nearest his heart.

But the careful directions of Mr. Fritz Braun had given Lilienthal his cue. The dealer babbled on of pleasant trivial things as they stemmed the tide of the crowded streets. "I hope that Fräulein Gluyas will soon appear in opera and achieve the success which she deserves. She is really here incognito, and spends all her time in private musical practice at Chickering Hall and the study of languages."

"Why this secrecy?" asked Clayton.

"Ah! My dear sir! These are the ways of impresarios. If Grau does not secure a certain great operatic star with whom he has quarrelled, then Fräulein Gluyas will be brought out with a great flourish of trumpets under a stage name to be selected later. She will then be heralded as a 'wonder of the world.' It will pay Grau, and he will also have his revenge!"

"And if the great star relents?" smilingly asked Clayton, as they neared the Restaurant Bavaria.

"Then," cheerfully answered the dealer, "the lady will make a grand concert tour, adequately supported. It is for that contingency she is studying English ballads and the language."

Clayton suddenly remembered the unromantic address of 192 Layte Street, Brooklyn. "Fräulein Gluyas resides in Brooklyn?" he said, with a fine air of carelessness.

Lilienthal's eyes swept obliquely the young man's distrustful face. "Fräulein Gluyas ordered the picture sent to the rooms of her music master, 192 Layte Street, Brooklyn. Poor old Raffoni was once a world-wide star, a velvet tenor. Now he is literally a voice maker, a master of technique for Maurice Grau. The Hungarian nightingale studies there, and only takes her hall practice here in the off season, in Chickering's empty salon. There is a jealous professional mystery in this secrecy. The summer is the opera's off season, just as the winter is the same for the great circus and travelling shows. The hardest work is thus veiled from the public. The impresario is always a wily individual."

"And the lady's real residence?" impatiently queried the budding lover. "That is an absolute secret, for Grau carefully hides away his coming stars. Somewhere on Long Island an old Hungarian noble family have had a retreat since the days of Kossuth.

"The Fräulein is their guest, and, for other reasons than complete faith with Grau, she receives no one. She is as proud and haughty as she is beautiful, and rumor has it that the pursuit of an Austrian Archduke drove her to the safety of our shores. All this I have gathered from my old friend, Signore Raffoni."

Clayton mutely followed Lilienthal to the door of a private room in the "Bavaria" and, with a wildly beating heart, was bowing low before the woman whose shining eyes had brought to his bosom such strange unrest.

"It is like a page from a novel," the flute-like voice murmured, "that this lucky picture should have brought us together again, as it strangely did once face to face."

Randall Clayton's ears drank in that soft, wooing accent, and all the ardor of his eyes betrayed the instant recognition which lay behind the diva's merry words.

When he had murmured his thanks, the presence of Lilienthal seemed to be a bar to any rapprochement. Clayton was fain to accept Fräulein Gluyas' courtesy in allowing him a choice as to the handling of the picture or its replica.

"If Mademoiselle will allow me," said Clayton, "I will give Mr. Lilienthal my cheque for the coming proof, and retain in my possession the one framed in our American manner."

This was soon settled, and then, with a glance at his watch, the dealer, bowing low, hurried away.

"We artists have to be unconventional," frankly said the Magyar beauty.

"I await Madame Raffoni here for a little tour of the wonderful New York shops."

It was a natural passage from the picture to the memories of the Danube, and then, under the kindling glances of the diva, Randall Clayton talked, with spirit, of his happy summer ramblings through Austria and Hungary.

Irma Gluyas' magnetic eyes burned into his soul as she followed the young stranger in his itinerary. It was only when the maître d'hôtel entered, announcing Madame Raffoni as in waiting in her carriage, that Randall Clayton's castle in Spain came crashing down around him.

The Magyar witch dropped her eyes when Clayton took her hands in adieu. "You have made me forget time, and my workaday world," he said. "I have now something to live for - to hear you sing! It seems so hard to meet only to part. I may never see your coming picture; you may never see mine again. But I cannot lose you from my life. It seemed, Fräulein Irma," he said, earnestly, "when I first met the glance of your dreaming eyes, that I had known you in some other world."

"I receive no one; I am a recluse," murmured Irma, with eyes smiling through down dropped lashes; "but, if you care, you may come, a week from to-day, and breakfast with me here! Dear old Raffoni will play propriety. As for the singing, I am pledged to be mute, parôle d'honneur. But you must be in my first audience. I must keep an artist's faith with my manager."

"I shall have the loge d'honneur at your début," enthusiastically cried Clayton, as he lingered over her frankly extended hand after murmuring his acceptance.

The woman who sat, with her head bowed upon her hands, listened to his receding footsteps. "Il Regalantuomo," she murmured. "It is a pity, too! What does Fritz want of him?"

Then gliding serpent-like from the darkened corridor, she joined the waiting woman in the carriage below, a woman whose form was but dimly defined beyond the half-lowered silken curtain of the carriage as Randall Clayton sped along to his money mill.

Some indefinable impulse kept Clayton from speaking of his breakfast engagement as he strode into the Newport Art Gallery. His cheque for one hundred and twenty-five dollars was soon transferred to Lilienthal in return for the coveted picture, which was dispatched to the young man's lonely apartment.

"Not a bad turn," mused Adolf Lilienthal. "I raised him seventy-five dollars! He paid like a prince, and, if I mistake not, this is his first and last transaction here. The picture that he wanted is burned into his heart now."

It was but one of a hundred similar intrigues to which Lilienthal had been the successful Leporello, and he calmly betook himself to the continued villainy of his daily life. He feared also to follow on the footsteps of the crafty Fritz Braun, for in the years of their illicit dealings the weaker nature had been molded by the daring master villain into a habitual subjection. "He has some little game of his own," chuckled Lilienthal. "Friend Fritz is a sly one."

But the man, now burning with a new purpose in life, the puppet of strange destinies, dreamed only of a golden future as he lingered late that night at the Astor House with Jack Witherspoon.

It was two o'clock before he returned to his lonely rooms to gloat over the picture and its promise of the future meeting.

"I shall be rich," he mused, "and I will follow her to the end of the earth until I read the secret of those wonderful eyes."

He little dreamed that even before he had paid Lilienthal the cheque, a carriage had stopped for a moment before Magdal's Pharmacy, and Mr. Fritz Braun had heard, with a wild delight, the whispered words, "The game is won; he will come!" The busy devil prisoned in Braun's heart laughed for very joy.


CHAPTER IV.

UNDER THE SHADOWS OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.


When the "Fuerst Bismarck" moved grandly away from her wharf and glided down the stream, Jack Witherspoon paced the deck with clouded brows. The acute Detroit lawyer had rightly estimated the crushing effect of his disclosure of Hugh Worthington's treachery.

The two college mates were now banded together, however, by a secret compact, and both of them realized the craft of the foe whom they were fighting. "Not a letter, not a cable, not a single scrap of paper," said the wary Jack. "And you must keep away from me and be sure to dissemble all your wrath."

Clayton appreciated the prudence which had separated them in the last three days of his friend's stay, and minutely followed Witherspoon's final descriptions of the hidden plans of the great syndicate. "You must be ever on your guard," said the new champion, "and remember the annual election and this strange wedding must be allowed to take place without suspicion.

"On my return I shall frankly mingle with the 'upper ten' of the Trust. You are never to be seen alone in my company. But you can meet me over in Jersey City; there we can arrange a simple cipher for future use, and, when the blow falls, you are then to demand a month's leave of absence. So no word to any one of your destination.

"If Hugh Worthington lurks on the Pacific Coast until he has made the coup, I will find him out there. You can be in hiding near, ready to appear, and then boldly claim your rights. Arthur Ferris will probably be back in New York City in charge, and Worthington will yield rather than have the world, his beloved daughter, and all society know of his inward baseness. I shall delve further into the old records, under pretense of following up the title to our purchase. Perhaps we may even now unearth other unconveyed property."

Randall Clayton, brave as he was, shuddered when Witherspoon solemnly said: "Remember! Your life is in your own hands. For God's sake, be prudent! One little self-betrayal in sudden anger, and then either Worthington or Ferris would surely compass your death for this tempting million. You will fight for your birthright, and I for the future happiness of darling Francine Delacroix."

When they wrung each other's hands in the last good-bye, "each heart recalled a different name."

For, burning on the altars of that lonely heart of Clayton's was the fierce fire which bound him now as the worshipper of the velvet-voiced Magyar witch. He, too, had some one to fight for now, and his