第72章

On the sidewalk Larry glanced swiftly around him. Half a block down the street on the front of a drug-store was a blue telephone flag. A minute later he was inside a telephone booth in the drug-store, asking first for the Hotel Grantham, and then asking the Grantham operator to be connected with Miss Maggie Cameron.

There was a long wait. While he listened for Maggie's voice he blazed with terrible fury against Barney Paler. For Maggie to be connected with a straight crook, that idea had been bad enough. But for her to be under the influence of the worst crook of all, a stool, a cunning traitor to his own friends--that was more than could possibly be stood! In his rage in Maggie's behalf he forgot for the moment the many evils Barney had done to himself. He thought of wild, incoherent, vaguely tremendous plans. First he would get Maggie away from Barney and Old Jimmie--somehow. Then he would square accounts with those two--again by an undefined somehow.

Presently the tired, impersonal voice of the Grantham operator remarked against his ear-drum: "Miss Cameron don't answer."

"Have her paged, please," he requested.

Larry, of course, could not know that his telephone call was the very one which had rung in Maggie's room while Barney and Old Jimmie were with her, and which Barney had harshly forbidden her to answer.

Therefore he could not know that any attempt to get Maggie by telephone just then was futile.

When he came out of the booth, the impersonal voice having informed him that Miss Cameron was not in, it was with the intention of calling Maggie up between eight and nine when she probably would have returned from dinner where he judged her now to be. He knew that Dick Sherwood had no engagement with her, for Dick was to be out at Cedar Crest that evening, so he judged it almost certain Maggie would be at home and alone later on.

Having nothing else to do for an hour and a half, he thought of a note he had received from the Duchess in that morning's mail asking him to come down to see her when he was next in town. Thirty minutes later he was in the familiar room behind the pawnshop. The Duchess asked him if he had eaten, and on his reply that he had not and did not care to, instead of proceeding to the business of her letter she mumbled something and went into the pawnshop.

She left Larry for the very simple reason that now that she had him here she was uncertain what she should say, and how far she should go.

Unknown to either, one thread of the drama of Larry and Maggie was being spun in the brain and heart of the Duchess; and being spun with pain to her, and in very great doubt. True, she had definitely decided, for Larry's welfare, that the facts about Maggie's parentage should never be known from her--and since the only other person who could tell the truth was Jimmie Carlisle, and his interests were all apparently in favor of silence, then it followed that the truth would never be known from any one. But having so decided, and decided definitely and finally, the Duchess had proceeded to wonder if she had decided wisely.

Day and night this had been the main subject of her thought. Could she be wrong in her estimate of Maggie's character, and what she might turn out to be? Could she be wrong in her belief that, given enough time, Larry would outgrow his infatuation for Maggie? And since she was in such doubt about these two points, had she any right, and was it for the best, to suppress a fact that might so gravely influence both matters? She did not know. What she wanted was whatever was best for Larry--and so in her doubt she had determined to talk again to Larry, hoping that the interview might in some way replace her uncertainty with stability of purpose.

Presently she returned to the inner room, and in her direct way and using the fewest possible words, which had created for her her reputation of a woman who never spoke and who was packed with strange secrets, she asked Larry what he had done concerning Maggie. He told her of the plan he had evolved, of Maggie's visit to Cedar Crest, of his ignorance of Maggie's reactions. To all this his grandmother made response neither by word nor by change of expression. He then went on to tell her of what he had just learned from Casey of Barney's maneuvering his misfortunes.

The old head nodded. "Yes, Barney's just that sort," she said in her flat monotone.

And then she came to the purpose of her sending for him. "How do you feel about Maggie now?"

"The same as before."

"You love her?"

"Yes--and always will," he said firmly.

She was silent once more. Then, "What are you going to do next?"

"Break things up between her and Barney and her father. Get her away from them."

She asked no further questions. Larry was as settled as a man could be. But was Maggie worth while?--that was the great question still unanswered.

"Just what did you want me for, grandmother?" he asked her finally.

"Something which I thought might have developed, but which hasn't."

And so she let him go away without telling him. And wishing to shape things for the best for him, she was troubled by the same doubts as before.

His visit with his grandmother had had no meaning to Larry, since he had no guess of the struggle going on within that ancient, inscrutable figure. The visit had for him merely served to fill in a nervous, useless hour. His rage against Barney had all the while possessed him too thoroughly for him to give more than the mere surface of his mind to what had passed between his grandmother and himself. And when he had left her, his rage at Barney's treachery and his impetuous desire to snatch Maggie away from her present influences, so stormed within him that his usually cautious judgment was blown away and recklessness swept like a gale into control of him.

When he called up the Grantham a second time, at nine o'clock, Maggie's voice came to him:

"Hello. Who this, please?"

"Mr. Brandon."

He heard a stilted "Oh!" at the other end of the line "I'm coming right up to see you," he said.

"I--I don't think you--"