Two Flights Up (8 page)

“If they had only kept him another month!” she said. “Take this thing away; I can’t eat with this hanging over my head.”

“Still, if he is really ill—”

“They have doctors there, and a Hospital. A good hospital. I’ve seen it. Anyhow, I don’t believe he’s so ill. He’s only been doing clerical work there; he’s had it easy enough.”

“You don’t really feel that way, Mother.”

“Certainly I do. Another month or so wouldn’t have hurt him after all these years. And he
knows
about the wedding. I sent him the announcements from the papers.”

“Let’s not think about the wedding just now. We’ll have to make some plans. I can move up to Aunt Margaret’s room, and he can have mine. I’ll fix the bed now and get ready.”

“You can’t go to Margaret’s room. I’m not going to have you on the same floor with that wretched man. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I’m not blind.”

Holly’s pale face flushed

“Father can’t climb all those stairs. And—” she hesitated—“I don’t suppose you want him in here?”

“You can put up the cot in the nursery.” It was still the nursery, after all these years.

“Very well,” said Holly quietly. “That’s what I’ll do. But I’ll go there myself, Mother. It’s quite comfortable.”

She went out, taking the tray with her. She was hardly capable of consecutive thought, but there was room in her mind for a great thankfulness. The suitcase and all it contained was gone, and downtown that portion of her trouble at least was being straightened out. True, she dreaded the moment when Mrs. Bayne would go to the attic again and find out what had happened. Not that there would be a scene. The very facts precluded that. But there would be a shock.

She tried to think of some way to avoid that shock, but without success.

The morning wore on. She worked hard; but then, she was accustomed to that. Now and then the relation of the new situation to her marriage obtruded itself, but she drove it away. Time for that when they came to it. But in the back of her mind she was puzzling over it. How could she go away and leave those two there together? A sick man and an ailing, helpless woman?

For Mrs. Bayne was not well. Holly could not leave her, even to go to Margaret’s. At half-past eleven, there being no telephone in the house, she went to Simmons’s grocery store and called her up, but the Cox apartment did not answer, and she went back again, vaguely uneasy.

At noon she carried up another tray. Mrs. Bayne was up in a chair by that time; she looked really ill, but she would not have a doctor.

“Have you heard from Furness yet?”

“No. Of course he’s busy, and with no telephone—”

“Just the same, he might have sent you some word. He must know we are anxious.”

“I’m not anxious, Mother. If he would let a thing like this keep him away, a thing he always knew had to happen sometime, then it’s better to learn it now rather than later on.”

At one o’clock, however, there came a box of roses and his card. “
Always thine
,” it read, in his affected manner. She carried the flowers to her mother’s room and was completely routed by the relief in Mrs. Bayne’s face.

“Then it’s all right!” she said. “I really have been terrified, Holly. If anything goes wrong now, I really think it will finish me.”

She put her handkerchief to her eyes, that soft bit of fresh linen with her initials in the corner,
A. H. B.
, which was always in her hand. Holly could not remember her mother without a handkerchief; and when, later on, one of them played its small part in her story, the mere sight of it was to bring up not only every crisis of her life, it was to bring up that life itself, day by day and hour by hour.

“Nothing will go wrong, Mother,” Holly told her.

It was about two o’clock when the bell rang. Mrs. Bayne slept quietly on her couch, a lavender slumber robe drawn over her, and the scent of the roses heavy in the room. Downstairs, Holly had dusted the drawing room and laid out the tea table—if her mother wakened and came down, it would never do for her to find it unready—and was standing in front of an old photograph of her father which she had brought from the disused library across the hall, where like her father himself it had been shelved for many years.

He must not, she reasoned, ever guess that it had been hidden away.

It was out of date now. Mr. Bayne had been taken in his dress clothes, after the fashion of twenty years ago. Over a broad and high expanse of snowy white shirt bosom and collar he looked into his daughter’s eyes, handsome and debonair.

“Poor Father!” said Holly, and dusting the glass, placed the photograph on a table.

She had not seen him for many years, and she had never known him well, but acting on impulse she went across the hall into the closed library, and wrote a telegram.

“
So glad you are coming. Welcome home and much love.
”

After a little hesitation, she signed both her mother’s name and her own.

The library had been his room, as the drawing room had been her mother’s. It was hardly ever opened now; the matter of heating it had been a factor, but Holly knew too that as definitely as her mother had shut her husband out of her life, she had closed and sheeted the room which had been his.

The anger Holly had felt the night before was lost in pity. He had stolen, and he had not only spent; he had hidden away a part of that stolen wealth in that very house. He was dying and he had made no attempt at restitution. But he was dying; he could not live long.

And then suddenly there came to her mind her mother’s face, on the day she came home from the penitentiary; and later on, her suppressed excitement, the times when she had sat like someone who nursed a secret, the haste as to the wedding and the trousseau.

Suppose on that visit of hers he had told her? Suppose she had not happened on the suitcase but had known it was there? Suppose he had wanted to make restitution, to come back clean, and had told her; and out of her dire need her mother—

She sat up suddenly. The doorbell was furiously ringing.

J
AMES COX WAS ENORMOUSLY
proud of his stock. He liked, when he was not busy, to run his hand down over his tidy shelves and to realize that he could tell its very quality by touch. And when he opened up the blue wrappers from his best tablecloths it was as though he gained a vicarious splendour from their quality.

“Wonderful piece of work, this,” he would say. “Grace any table! Make any sort of food taste good, eh?”

He was completely out of patience with the new vogue for doilies, although he had to sell them. The nearest thing he had ever come to a quarrel with Margaret was on that very question. He came home one evening to find the table set with small bits of linen, scalloped by her own busy hands, little islands of white in a shining sea of imitation mahogany.

“What’s this you’ve got on the table?”

“Don’t you like them?”

“Oh, they’re all right,” he said grudgingly. …” He didn’t like to hurt her. “But if you ask me, give me honest food on an honest linen cloth.”

“Then off they go!” said Margaret, shamelessly and spinelessly loving. “I don’t care for them myself. I just thought—”

Honest linen! Honest everything. That was James Cox.

On the day, then, that Warrington had carried the suitcase to Margaret, James was behind his counter. They had opened up a new shipment in the stockroom, and huge baskets were still being trundled along the aisles.

He was in a state of suppressed excitement, as he was always when new stock came in, and so he did not notice that he was being quickly observed from a near-by counter. Nor was his feeling when he was summoned to the manager’s office other than one of irritation at being interrupted. He never saw the light-stepping, rather stout man who followed him there and unceremoniously entered after him.

The office was empty. James, hearing the door close behind him, turned and confronted this gentleman.

“Your name Cox?” said the stranger.

“Yes.”

“Live at Number Eleven, Aurelia Apartments?”

James suddenly stopped breathing. Something had happened to Margaret!

“I do,” he stammered. “I live there. What’s wrong? For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“Don’t get excited, Mr. Cox. Sit down. I only want to ask you some questions.”

“My wife—”

“She’s all right, so far as I know. Mr. Cox, you are related to a family named Bayne, I believe, on Kelsey Street?”

Mr. Cox had recovered, and now he stiffened.

“Only by marriage. My wife is Mrs. Bayne’s sister.”

“But you are on pretty friendly terms with the family?”

“Never been in the house,” said Mr. Cox, unflaggingly honest. “They don’t like me, and I don’t like them. The girl’s all right,” he added conscientiously.

“Do you know a young man named Warrington who has a room there?”

“Never saw him but once,” said James. But he looked self-conscious, as well he might, recalling that amazing evening; and the detective saw it.

“But your wife knows him? Rather, well?”

“Look here,” said Mr. Cox, “I don’t know what it’s all about, and I don’t give a damn. But I want my wife’s name left out of this, see?”

The detective knew men, and so he realized the belligerent honesty of James’s attitude. It put him at a disadvantage, in a way; you can trap a scoundrel, but there is no trap for the straightforward. However, he tried it.

“What’s the use, Mr. Cox? We’ve got the stuff!”

“What stuff?” roared Mr. Cox. “If you’re accusing me of having bootleg stuff in my place, it’s a lie. That bottle of brandy was given me ten years ago, and I can prove it.”

“We’ve got the suitcase.”

James stared at him, and the detective stared back.

“What suitcase? What about a suitcase?” James demanded, a bit warily. He did not like the look in the other man’s face; it was too complacent.

“The one your wife received this morning from the Bayne house, and hid away in your closet.”

Mr. Cox was suddenly thinking hard. A suitcase from the Bayne house! Now what on earth—A suitcase from the Bayne house. Trust that woman to make trouble if she could. A suitcase from the—

“I don’t know anything about any suitcase,” he said, surly now. “As for my wife hiding anything, she’s got nothing to hide, and I’m damn well ready to tell you that. And what business is it of yours, anyhow?”

Amazingly, he was looking at a badge the officer uncovered. James’s hands began to sweat. They were cold and clammy. He got out his handkerchief and wiped them.

“I’m telling you. If you don’t know about this suitcase, then your wife does, all right.”

He considered that warily. They weren’t going to catch James Cox napping, not they. And Margaret wasn’t going to be in this, not by a darned sight.

“All right,” he said. “If there’s a suitcase there and you’re interested in it, we’ll say it’s mine and let it go at that. Now, what about it?”

“That’s right,” said the detective more affably. “No need of dragging a woman in if we can help it. You admit it’s your suitcase?”

“Wait a minute! I’ll admit that the only suitcase I know about in the flat is mine, and that’s as far as I’ll go.”

He was rather pleased with this masterpiece of strategy; they hadn’t caught him napping. No, sir. You had to go some to catch James Cox asleep on his feet. However, the detective, as Mr. Cox now knew him to be, only yawned slightly and looked at his watch.

“If you’ll get your hat,” he said, “we’ll wander over to the City Hall. District Attorney wants to talk to you.”

“I’m not free here until twelve-thirty.”

“Oh, you’re free enough,” said the detective amiably. “That’s all fixed. You just get your things and come along.”

There was an authority in that “come along” that froze Mr. Cox to the marrow of his insignificant bones. But it would never do to show it.

“You seem damned certain I’m coming,” he snapped.

“I
am
damned certain,” said the detective.

H
AVING FAILED IN HIS
first plan at the bank, Warrington found himself rather at a loose end. He had no idea what further steps to take. He felt that a legal opinion would help him out, but also that he had no right to take an attorney into his confidence without consulting Holly first.

His own opinion was that, although he had planted what amounted to a bomb in the Cox household, there was no reason to believe that anybody was waiting to touch off the fuse.

Nevertheless, he had sold a stolen bond, and it was with mixed feelings that he went somewhat belatedly to the office. Everything there was the same as usual, apparently. Hawkins, with a green shade over his eyes, was working at the board, and half a dozen men sat or stood watching it. The ticker rattled on, like a distant machine gun; when he had first gone into the office, it often took him back to the war; and Miss Sharp, the stenographer, would catch the far-away look in his eyes.

“Well,” she said once pertly, “you must have enjoyed it, whatever it was. Been to a party?”

“You might call it a party,” he told her. “Perhaps it’s like a lot of things, pleasanter to remember than to go through with.”

“Can you beat that!” she inquired of nobody in particular. “I’ll take to remembering when I’m too old for anything else.”

Like the cashier at the Red Rose, she found him attractive and strongly male. “He mayn’t be much of a salesman,” she said once or twice, “but believe me, he’s some man.”

He never flirted with her, but he knew she had a good hard brain and an amazing memory. So that morning it was to her he went for information.

“Put away your book,” he said. “I’m not going to give you any letters. I want some information. Do you remember when a man named Bayne got in trouble at the Harrison Bank?”

“Do I remember the San Francisco earthquake! Sure I do.” She hedged on that, however. “I was only a kid at the time, but I remember it, all right. Our landlord lost a lot of money, and Ma threw a celebration that night.”

However, bit by bit out of a mass of extraneous material, he dug out the story. Bayne had tried to make a get-away, but had failed; he had spent a good bit, but some of it had never been accounted for.