Loe raamatut: «Marjorie Dean at Hamilton Arms», lehekülg 8

CHAPTER XVI
ONLY OBEYING ORDERS

“Will you kindly tell me why you are here?” Leslie Cairns surveyed her chaperon, Mrs. Gaylord, with an anything but welcoming face. “Didn’t you understand my letter? It was written in English. At least, I thought I wrote English.” Leslie used sarcastic emphasis.

“Yes, Leslie, your letter was in English, I suppose your rude slang might be classed as English.” The chaperon’s voice was bitingly dry. Her florid, usually placid features were stiff with resentment of Leslie’s cavalier manner. “You took advantage of me in a most unfair way. Instead of writing me that you thought of going to New York to spend the holidays, you simply notified me at the last minute, completely ignoring me as your chaperon.”

“Oh, cut out the lecture!” Leslie made a derisive motion as though to push further rebuke from her. “What is the matter with you? Doesn’t our agreement hold good in New York as well as in Hamilton? Couldn’t we have got together in a few hours if necessary? I allowed for all that when I wrote you. I didn’t think it urgent to put it down in black and white. I gave you credit for having some gray matter. Who engaged you in the first place, my father, or I? He saw fit to butt in to my arrangement with you. Of course I’m not supposed to know that. Still it wouldn’t take me long to remind him of it, if he began to be fussy with me.” Displeasure of her father’s private understanding with Mrs. Gaylord momentarily banished Leslie’s regret of their estrangement.

“Leslie! I hope you would not be so treacherous as to let your father know that you – that he – that you know he and I have a private understanding about you,” stammered the chaperon in reproachful alarm. “That is a secret agreement between him and me.”

“Was a secret, you mean,” satirized Leslie, laughing with a kind of grotesque amusement. “A secret isn’t much of a secret after it goes as far as a third party.”

“Leslie!” Mrs. Gaylord repeated the name with exclamatory half-hearted wrath.

“Yes, ‘Leslie,’” mimicked her amused charge. “What’s the use of puffing, Gaylord? You know you always lose out with me in a talk contest. Sit down, take off your hat and your head will cool off. Registered at our village inn?” she raised ironic eyebrows at her chaperon.

“Yes; I have registered,” was the frigid return. Mrs. Gaylord tried not to show approval of the dainty Dresden apartment she was in. She had caught only a fleecing glimpse of Doris. The latter had promptly retreated to the bed-room she was to occupy of the expensive Dresden suite of small salon, two sleeping rooms and bath which Leslie had extravagantly engaged. “I engaged a room with bath on this floor, but – ” She glanced about the smart salon.

“No room here,” supplied Leslie. “Oh, you are welcome, of course, to inhabit the salon with Goldie and me,” she added flippantly.

“Thank you. You know, Leslie, that I have tried not to stand in your way.” Mrs. Gaylord spoke with reproving bitterness. “I am here now, not because I wish to be, but because – ” The chaperon made an impressive pause.

“Now we are getting down to brass tacks.” Leslie simulated genial encouragement.

Mrs. Gaylord frowned, but resisted bandying further words. “Your father ordered me to come to New York, Leslie,” she said with a direct simplicity which had more effect on her discourteous charge than had her air of affront.

“What?” Leslie almost screamed the question.

From the adjoining bed-room Doris heard the cry and wondered. She knew that Leslie had a chaperon, named Mrs. Gaylord, who amiably permitted Leslie to do as she pleased. While she had retired to her bed-room and closed the door, on the arrival of the chaperon, she had caught enough of the salutatory remarks between Leslie and the other woman to establish Mrs. Gaylord’s identity in her own mind. The fact that the caller had come at so late an hour further convinced her.

“Just what I say,” stiffly confirmed the chaperon. “I received this letter from him. You might as well see it.” She had opened her small seal traveling bag as she spoke. Now she handed Leslie the letter from Peter Cairns.

“Uh-h-h-h!” Leslie dropped down on a gilt-framed, pale-hued Dresden settee with a pretense of total collapse. Next second she sat up with a jerk. “Gaylord, I beg your pardon for ragging you. You seem to be a good sport,” was her half-humorous apology.

Mrs. Gaylord with difficulty maintained a grave face. Strangely enough, at heart she did not dislike Leslie. Constant companionship with the financier’s long-neglected daughter from the standpoint of a duenna had shown her plainly all Leslie’s faults and virtues. When first she had come to Leslie she had resentfully labeled her as having all faults and no virtues. Presently she discovered that Leslie was generous, not of spirit, but in a material way. She also had a virtue of minding her own affairs beyond that of any other girl or woman of Mrs. Gaylord’s acquaintance. Of Leslie’s intriguing, unscrupulous side the chaperon knew little. She admired the girl’s peculiar originality and thought her sayings distinctively clever or funny. She respected Leslie for being neither foolishly sentimental nor flirtatious. Leslie’s rudenesses she soon learned to overlook because Leslie was as civil to her as to anyone else, perhaps more civil.

“What are you going to do about it?” Leslie inquired with rueful curiosity. “He’s in New York. I saw him last night in front of the Luxe-Garins. Don’t think he saw me. I was in a taxi. Goldie and I had been there to dinner.”

“You shouldn’t have gone there – just you two young girls!” cried out the chaperon despairingly.

“Oh, stuff. I’m not a minor. Think the Luxe-Garins is a jungle full of black-whiskered lions and unicorns? We didn’t dance, or speak to a soul. We only had eats. That’s not a social blunder, is it?”

“No-o-o.” There was a certain amount of relief in the reply. “I shall do nothing, Leslie. Your father has ordered me to come here to look after you. I am here. I thought before I came I would write him and explain why we were not together. I could find no proper explanation. I dare say he is very angry with me.” Mrs. Gaylord’s tone grew rather plaintive. “As your chaperon I should insist on your compliance with strict convention at all times. But it is as you say. You are not a minor, you have the right to go where you please and do as you please. Since your father has – well – has – .” The chaperon halted lamely.

“Cut me off his card index,” supplied Leslie with forceful moroseness.

Both chaperon and charge had spoken louder than they were aware. In the next room the last few sentences of their talk had come clearly to Doris’s ears. While she was not specially curious she could not help being impressed by what she heard.

“If I had been like some of the girls I’ve known I’d not have engaged a chaperon at all after he turned me down,” Leslie defended darkly. “I’m supposed not to know he has ever showed a spark of interest in me since he cut me out of his life. Don’t you let him call you down because I told you to visit your head off if you liked among your friends while I was at Hamilton. You may tell him I hired you and chased you away from me when I felt like being alone for a while. He owes you a debt of gratitude for telling me that he didn’t quite efface himself from my map. Tell him,” she snickered faintly, “that I pay you a salary for acting as a friend instead of a priggish frump. Tell him he ought to double your salary from his end of the deal for the same reason.”

“Why – Leslie!” Grateful amazement this time prompted the chaperon’s exclamation. “I had no idea you felt that way about me.”

“I had no idea myself,” Leslie retorted. She cast a half sheepish glance toward Mrs. Gaylord. She was experiencing the peculiar sensation of physical glow which invariably attends the moral defense of another person. For the first time in her wayward career she felt moved to defend someone for whose offense she was strictly to blame.

CHAPTER XVII
“NERVE”

Mrs. Gaylord took up her temporary abode at the Essenden expecting at almost any hour to be summoned to Peter Cairns’s offices or else receive a call from him at the hotel. Neither the summons nor the call came.

Following her spirited moment of defense of her chaperon Leslie returned to her usual half domineering, always wilful manner. Since her father had seen fit to order Mrs. Gaylord on the scene, she had decided that the chaperon would be more of an asset than a hindrance. Under Mrs. Gaylord’s wing she and Doris could go about more freely to tea rooms and hotel restaurants, and the theatres. They could stay out later in the evening with a certain feeling of assurance which neither had possessed during their first evening venture into New York’s gaieties.

The day after New Years Leslie announced to her chaperon and Doris that she wished they would go where they pleased and do as they pleased through the days that remained to them of the Christmas holiday, but without her company.

“Gaylord can show you the village as well as I can; maybe better,” she assured Doris with a droll twist of her mouth. “She won’t be peevish with you. I would, if you made me sore, which you’d probably do. I have special business to tend to here in the next few days. It concerns my garage proposition and is very important. I’ll hustle around through the days so as to go out to dinner with you in the evenings.”

Doris was as well pleased with Leslie’s new arrangement though she kept her satisfaction carefully hidden behind her politely indifferent features. She and Mrs. Gaylord had grown friendly from the start. The chaperon admired the sophomore’s unusual beauty and enjoyed the covert appreciation it drew wherever they went. She thought Doris’s poise remarkably high-bred and was satisfied that Peter Cairns could but approve of her as a friend for his daughter. He was still in the city, she believed. Leslie was of the same belief. “Don’t doubt he knows our middle names and what time we come back to the hotel every night,” was her shrewdly humorous opinion.

The special business to which she devoted her days was typical of the intriguing side of Leslie. While her father was presumably keeping an eye on her, she was even more anxious to trace his movements. She burned to know how long he intended to stay in New York, and whether he was staying at the family residence far out on Riverside Drive, or at his club.

There was another man, too, besides her father, whose whereabouts in New York she was eager to learn. He was a man to whom her father had more than once intrusted certain business about which she thought she knew a good deal. This man had come to their home twice as a dinner guest. He was tall, slim, with aquiline, foreign features, deep set dark eyes and iron gray hair. She could recall distinctly his courtly manners. What she could not recall was his full name. It was Anton – . There memory failed her.

After she had unsuccessfully racked her brain for the missing surname she came into startled knowledge of a way to gain it. Dared she take it? Leslie’s heart beat faster every time she thought about it. She could not make up her mind to take it until she had definite information concerning her father’s plans. She decided that she would at once try to obtain it from his offices.

On the day after New Years she left Mrs. Gaylord and Doris directly after breakfast and hurried from the Essenden to start on the trail of the “special” business. It was a fairly long drive from the Essenden to her father’s downtown offices. Leslie grew perceptibly nervous as she neared her destination. There was no one to witness her uneasiness, however. There was only one chance against a hundred that she might encounter her father. She could not imagine what she would do if she were to come suddenly face to face with him. And in this thought lay her inclination to panic.

She arrived at last before the skyscraper, two floors of which housed the executive and clerical forces necessary to Peter Cairns’s several speculative interests. Leslie ordered the driver of the taxicab to wait and made a bold entrance into the building. She could hear her heart begin to thump against her side as she dodged into the cage of a waiting elevator and dodged out again at the third floor. Presently she had walked a little way down a wide corridor and opened a door which in the past she had opened many times.

It led to an outer office, given over to the keeping of a solitary office boy. When she inquired for Mr. Carrington, one of her father’s important managers, and gave the youngster her name, he stared at her with blue startled eyes and made a zealous dash for a door leading to an inner office.

“How are you, Mr. Carrington?” she drawled to a clean-cut pleasant man of perhaps forty, who had instantly emerged from the office to greet her and now ushered her into his private business domain.

“Very well, Miss Cairns; thank you. And you? It has been a long time since you visited these offices.”

“Yes;” Leslie smiled affably. She was speculating how long it might take to “pump Carrington, and beat it.” “I was at college for several winters, you know, and away from New York summers. I’m not at the Riverside Drive house much. It doesn’t pay to keep it open. My father is there so seldom for any length of time.”

“So he tells me. He doesn’t stay even in New York for any length of time, for that matter,” laughed the manager. “It isn’t an easy proposition, getting hold of him when I need him.”

“I should imagine not.” Leslie smiled in apparent sympathy. “Even I lose track of him for days at a time. I am at the Essenden, at present with my chaperon, Mrs. Gaylord. I came down town this morning to see if you would help me with a little steamer surprise I am planning to give my father. That is, if he goes to England soon. I thought you would let me know the day and hour he’d plan to sail. Then I wouldn’t need to ask him a single question, beforehand. He is likely to start for England in a hurry without coming to the hotel to say good-bye. Then where would my surprise be?” Leslie put just the right amount of dejection into the question.

“Oh, he has changed his mind about the trip to England, Miss Cairns. He doesn’t intend to go across the pond until he comes back from the coast. That will be two weeks at least. I will let you know, nearer the date of sailing,” was the pleasant promise.

“The western trip? Oh, yes.” Leslie nodded wisely. “I have no surprise ready for him for that. There’d hardly be time for one, would there?” she asked innocently.

“Hardly.” The manager consulted his watch as though amused at his own reply. “His car was to pull out from the B. R. P. at noon today. It’s almost noon now.”

“You mean for the west; to the coast?” was Leslie’s double question. It was asked with a drawling inflection that nearly robbed it of interrogation.

“Yes. Where shall I address you, Miss Cairns, about the England matter?” Mr. Carrington questioned courteously.

“At the Essenden. Thank you so much, Mr. Carrington. You are always so kind to me. Not a word to my father that I was here!” She raised a playful forefinger. “You understand why.”

“Absolutely discreet, Miss Cairns.” The manager raised a hand as though taking an oath.

After a further brief exchange of pleasantries Leslie rose to depart. She was in nervous haste to be gone. It had taken “nerve,” according to her way of thinking, to lead up to the information she had sought, then to ask the right questions at the right time. She had not devised until the last moment a way of exacting secrecy from the manager that would not arouse him to suspicion against her. She knew that her father’s lieutenants of years were chary of speech and still more chary of information. It was evident that her father’s harsh stand in regard to herself was not known in his offices. Since Mr. Carrington did not know it, Leslie was sure he did not, then none other of his staff of financiers knew.

She would have liked to ask Mr. Carrington to give her the surname of the man, Anton. She remembered that the manager had once dined with them on the same evening as the foreigner. She had not dared ask about him. Nor did she believe it would be wise to call again at her father’s offices to interrogate Mr. Carrington further. She recalled the old fable of the pitcher that went once too often to the well and was broken. She did not intend to risk losing what she had already gained. There was still the other way of learning the name.

CHAPTER XVIII
ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

Leslie stopped for luncheon at an odd French restaurant, the Fontainebleau. It was a Gallic triumph in soft grays and rated as being more Parisian than any other restaurant in New York. After luncheon she ordered the driver of the taxicab she was using to take her for a spin on Riverside Drive.

“Keep on going out Riverside till I tell you to turn around,” she ordered the man. “If you hear me tell you to go slow, then go slow. I’m interested in certain properties out on the Drive.”

Even by prosaic daylight Leslie felt a strange new sentiment for New York which had never before visited her. What a wonderful life she might have in the splendid city of her birth if only she were her father’s assistant. Perhaps she might be, and before another year had passed. If she could successfully carry out at Hamilton the project which was now occupying her thoughts he would be forced to admire her for her audacity and brilliancy. How he would laugh at a certain feature of her undertaking. Not unless she were clever enough “to get away with it.” That was a foregone conclusion.

Leslie’s swarthy features stiffened with stubborn determination. This time there was to be no failure. Her small dark eyes were engaged in keeping a concentrated watch on the residences lining the Drive as the taxicab slipped easily along on the smooth paving.

It would be a great day for her when her father forgave her and took her back into his confidence. Before she devoted herself wholly to a career in finance under her father’s generalship she would make him take her for a long cruise to the South Seas in his superb, clean-lined yacht, the White Swallow. So Leslie promised herself as the car sped on.

Presently she had come within pleasantly familiar territory. Since earliest childhood she had seen the palaces she was now passing. In them lived families she had known and associated with as neighbors. She had played with the girls and boys of these vast, cheerless castles. They had all had the same dancing masters; had attended one another’s parties. They had later formed the younger set with whom she had moved socially. Like herself many of them lived only to please themselves.

There it was; her old home! It was the house in which she had been born; the house from which her mother had passed to Heaven, leaving behind a baby girl to be brought up by nurses and governesses and surfeited with riches out of all healthy proportion.

Leslie snatched the speaking tube from its accustomed place and called through it to the driver. “Slow down,” she ordered, “but keep on going.” She had spied the house from a distance of half a block away. In consequence the driver had begun to slacken speed before the machine had passed the “show shop,” as Leslie had whimsically named her home because of its ornate splendor of architecture and breadth of rare-shrubbed lawn.

“Go ahead and park,” she again ordered through the speaking tube. “Any place along here will do.” The instant he had obeyed her and brought the machine to a stop she hopped out of it and quickly gained the sidewalk. The Cairns’s residence took up a half of one block. Another massive gray stone residence claimed the remaining half of the same block.

“Thank fortune,” she muttered as she strolled along at the slow swagger she affected. “There’s no place like home, Leslie, old top. Peter the Great can lead a merry life at the show shop, but I should fidget, for all he cares,” was her bitter reflection. “Rather that than see the place boarded up like a disused barn. Gee whiz! Then I would have my troubles. Wonder how much of the menagerie is at large inside?”

Leslie paraded up and down the entire block several times. From the street she could see nothing about the exterior of the house to challenge her interest. An ornamental iron fence squared the Cairns’s property. The entrance gates were closed, apparently locked. She stopped before them during one of her patrols and pretended to lean against them. As she did so she investigated them. They were securely fastened.

She stood eyeing them with sullen dismay, her forehead corrugated by a deep scowl. Of a sudden she appeared to have laid hold of a forgotten fact. Her brows cleared like magic. Thanks to a crafty provision against such an emergency in time past she could cope with this latest obstacle.

She lingered at the gates as long as she thought prudent, her avid glance roving from point to point of the house, searching for signs of the servants about the place. She smiled grimly to herself as she recalled how often in her childhood days bright-eyed groups of “common kids” would pause on the sidewalk outside to peer wistfully through the iron interstices of the fence at the spring glory of crocuses, hyacinths and tulips which graced the Cairns’s garden beds in colorful, fragrant loveliness. How contemptuous she had been of the famished little beauty worshippers! Now she was “on the outside, looking in.” She was “on the wrong side of the fence.” She was “barred out” of the show shop as effectively as had been “those common kids.”