第42章

"Listen, Maggie!" In his intensity he gripped her bare forearm. "This is bad business, and if you had any sense you'd know it! Don't you think I get the layout? Barney is your cousin, Old Jimmie is your uncle, that dame in the next room and this suite and your swell clothes to help put up a front! And your sickness that wouldn't let you go to the theater is just a fake, so that, not wanting to disappoint them entirely, you'd have an excuse for having supper here--and thus adroitly draw some person into the trap of a more intimate relationship. It's a clever and classy layout. Maggie, exactly what's your game?"

"I'll not tell you!"

"Who's that man that's coming here?"

"I'll not tell you!"

"Is he the sucker you're out to trim?"

"I'll not tell you!"

"You will tell me!" he cried dominantly. "And you're going to get out of all this! You hear me? It may look good to you now. But I tell you it has only one finish! And that's a rotten finish!"

She tore free from his punishing grip, and pantingly glared at him--her former defiance now an egoistic fury.

"I won't have you interfering with my life!--you fake preacher!--you stool, you squealer!" she flung at him madly. "Stool--squealer!" she repeated. "I tell you I'm going my own way--and it's a big way--and I tell you again nothing you can say or do can stop me! If I could have my best wish, all I'd wish for would be something to keep you from always interfering--something to get you out of my way!"

Panting, she paused. Her tense figure, with hands closing and unclosing, expressed the very acme of furious defiance--of desire to annihilate--of ultimate hatred. Larry was astounded by the very extent, the profundity, of her passion. And so they stood, silent except for their quick breathing, eyes fixed upon eyes, for several moments.

And then a key sounded in the outer door of the little hallway.

Instantly there was an almost unbelievable transformation in Maggie.

From an imperious, uncontrollable fury, she changed to a white, quivering thing.

"Barney!" she whispered; and sprang to the inner door of the little hallway, closed and locked it.

She turned on Larry a face that was ghastly in its pallor.

"Barney always carries a pistol," she whispered.

They had heard the outer door close with a click of its automatic lock. They now heard the knob of the inner door turn and tugged at; and then heard Barney call:

"What's the matter, Maggie? Let us in."

Maggie made a supreme effort to reply in a controlled voice:

"Just a minute. I'm not quite ready."

Then a second voice sounded from the other side of the door:

"Don't keep us too long, Maggie. Please!"

There was a distantly familiar quality to Larry in that second voice.

But he did not try to place it then: he was too poignantly concerned in his own situation, and in the bewildering change in Maggie.

She slipped a hand through his arm. "Oh, La-Larry, why did you ever take such a risk!" she breathed. Her whisper was piteous, aquiver with fright. "Come this way!" and she quickly pulled him into the room where he had met Miss Grierson and to the door by which he had entered.

Maggie opened this door. "They're all in the little hallway--I don't think they'll see you," her rapid, agitated whisper went on. "Don't take the elevators in this corridor, they're in plain sight. There are elevators just around the corner. Take them; they're safer. Good-bye, Larry--and, oh, Larry, don't ever take such a risk again!"

With that she pushed him out and closed the door.

Larry followed her instructions about the elevator; he used the same precautions in leaving that he had used in coming, and twenty minutes later he was back in his room in the Sherwood apartment. For an hour or more he sat motionless--thinking--thinking: asking himself questions, but in his tumultuous state of mind and emotions not able to keep to a question long enough to reason out its possible answer.

Just what was that game in which Maggie was involved?--a game which required that Grantham setting, that eminently respectable companion, and Maggie's accouterment as a young lady of obvious wealth.

Whose was that vaguely familiar second voice?--that voice which he still could not place.

But what he thought about most of all was something very different.

What had caused that swift change in Maggie?--from a fury that was both fire and granite, to that pallid, quivering, whispering girl who had so rapidly led him safely out of his danger.

To and fro, back and forth, shuttled these questions. Toward two o'clock he stood up, mind still absorbed, and mechanically started to undress. He then observed the roll of paintings Hunt had given him.

Better for them if they were flattened out. Mechanically he removed string and paper. There on top was the Italian mother he had asked for. A great painting--a truly great painting. Mechanically he lifted this aside to see what was the second painting Hunt had included.

Larry gave a great start and the Italian mother went flapping to the floor.

The second painting was of Maggie; the one on which Hunt had been working the day Larry had come back: Maggie in her plain working clothes, looking out at the world confidently, conqueringly; the painting in which Hunt, his brain teeming with ideas, had tried to express the Maggie that was, the many Maggies that were in her, and the Maggie that was yet to be.