Children of the Whirlwind
thing, but with these hot qualities checked into a surface appearance of
unruffled equanimity by his self-control and his habitual reticence. And
now to see him thin, white-haired, bent, his old fire seemingly burned
to gray ashes--the Duchess, who had seen much in her generations, was
almost appalled at the transformation.
At first the Duchess skillfully guided the talk among commonplaces.
“Larry tells me you're out with him.”
“Yes,” said Joe. “Larry's been a mighty good pal.”
“What're you going to do when you get back your strength?”
“The same as I'm doing now--if they'll let me.”
And after a pause: “Perhaps later, if I had the necessary capital, I'd
like to start a little nursery. Or else grow flowers for the market.”
“Not going back to the old thing, then?”
Joe shook his white head. “I'm all through there. Flowers are a more
interesting proposition.”
“Whenever you get ready to start, Joe, you can have all the capital
you want from me. And it will cost you nothing. Or if you'd rather pay,
it'll cost you the same as at a bank--six per cent.”
“Thanks. I'll remember.” Joe Ellison could not have spoken his gratitude
more strongly.
The Duchess now carefully guided the talk in the direction of the thing
of which she had thought so constantly.
“By the way, Joe, Larry told me something about you I'd never heard
before--that you had been married, and had a child.”
“Yes. You didn't hear because I wasn't telling anybody about it when it
happened, and it never came out.”
“Mind telling me about it, Joe?”
He pulled at his perfecto while assembling his facts; and then he
made one of the longest speeches Joe Ellison--“Silent Joe” some of his
friends had called him in the old days--was ever known to utter. But
there was reason for its length; it was an epitome of the most important
period of his life.
“I had a nice little country place over in Jersey for three or four
years. It all happened there. No one knew me for what I was; they
took me for what I pretended to be, a small capitalist whose interests
required his taking occasional trips. Nice neighbors. That's where I met
my wife. She was fine every way. That's why I kept all that part of
my life from my pals; I was afraid they might leak and the truth would
spoil everything. My wife was an orphan, niece of the widow of a broker
who lived out there. She never knew the truth about me. She died when
the baby was born. When the baby was a year and a half my big smash
came, and I went up the river. But I was never connected up with the man
who lived over in Jersey and who suddenly cancelled his lease and moved
away.”
The Duchess drew nearer to the heart of her thoughts.
“Was the baby a boy or girl, Joe?”
“Girl.”
The Duchess did not so much as blink. “How old would she be by this
time?”
“Eighteen.”
“What was her name?”
“Mary--after her mother. But of course I ordered it to be changed. I
don't know what her name is now.”
The Duchess pressed closer.
“What became of her, Joe?”
A glow began to come into the somber eyes of Joe Ellison. “I told you
her mother was a fine woman, and she never knew anything bad about me. I
wanted my girl to grow up like her mother. I wanted her to have as good
a chance as any of those nice girls over in Jersey--I wanted her never
to know any of the lot I've known--I wanted her never to have the stain
of knowing her father was a crook--I wanted her never to know even who
her father was.”
“How did you manage it?”
“Her mother had left a little fortune, about twenty-five
thousand--twelve or fifteen hundred a year. I turned the money and the
girl over to my best pal--and the squarest pal a man ever had--the only
one I'd let know about my Jersey life. I told him what to do. She was an
awfully bright little thing; at a year and a half, when I saw her last,
she was already talking. She was to be brought up among nice, simple
people--go to a good school--grow up to be a nice, simple girl. And
especially never to know anything about me. She was to believe herself
an orphan. And my pal did just as I ordered. He wrote me how she was
getting on till about four years ago, then I had news that he was dead
and that the trust fund had been transferred to a firm of lawyers,
though I wasn't given the name of the lawyers. That doesn't make any
difference since she's getting the money just the same.”
“What was your pal's name, Joe?”
“Jimmie Carlisle.”
The Duchess had been certain what this name would be, but nevertheless
she could not repress a start.
“What's the matter?” Joe asked sharply. “Did you know him?”
“Not in those days,” said the Duchess, recovering her even tone. “Though
I got to know him later. By the way,” she added casually, “did Jimmie
Carlisle have any children of his own?”
“Not before I went away. He wasn't even married.”
There was now no slightest doubt left in the Duchess's mind. Maggie was
really Joe Ellison's daughter.
Joe Ellison went on, the glow of his sunken eyes becoming yet more
exalted. He was almost voicing his thoughts to himself alone, for
his friendship with the Duchess was so old that her presence was no
inhibition. His low words were almost identical in substance with what
Larry had told--a summary of what had come to be his one great hope and
dream, the nearest thing he had to a religion.
“Somewhere, in a nice place, my girl is now growing up like her mother.
Clean of everything I was and I knew. She must be practically a woman
now. I don't know where she is--there's now no way for me to learn.
And I don't want to know. And I don't want her ever to know about me.
I don't ever want to be the cause of making her feel disgraced, or of
dragging her down from among the people where she belongs.”
The Duchess gave no visible sign of emotion, but her ancient
heart-strings were set vibrating by that tense, low-pitched voice. She
had a momentary impulse to tell him the truth. But just then the Duchess
was a confusion of many conflicting impulses, and the balance of their
strength was for the moment against telling. So she said nothing.
Their talk drifted back to commonplaces, and presently Joe Ellison
went away. The Duchess sat motionless at her desk, again
thinking--thinking--thinking; and when Joe Ellison was back in his
gardener's cottage at Cedar Crest and was happily asleep, she still sat
where he had left her. During her generations of looking upon life from
the inside, she had seen the truth of many strange situations of which
the world had learned only the wildest rumors or the most respectable
versions; but during the long night hours, perhaps because the affair
touched her so closely, this seemed to her the strangest situation she
had ever known. A father believing with the firm belief of established
certainty that his daughter had been brought up free from all taint of
his own life, carefully bred among the best of people. In reality the
girl brought up in a criminal atmosphere, with criminal ideas implanted
in her as normal ideas, and carefully trained in criminal ways and
ambitions. And neither father nor daughter having a guess of the truth.
Indeed it was a strange situation! A situation charged with all kinds of
unforeseeable results.
The Duchess now understood the unfatherly disregard Old Jimmie had shown
for the ordinary welfare of Maggie. Not being her father, he had not
cared. Superficially, at least, Jimmie Carlisle must have been a much
more plausible individual twenty years earlier, to have won the implicit
trust of Joe Ellison and to have become his foremost friend. She
understood one reason why Old Jimmie had always boarded Maggie in
the cheapest and lowest places; his hidden cupidity had thereby been
pocketing about a thousand dollars a year of trust money for over
sixteen years.
But there was one queer problem here to which the Duchess could not at
this time see the answer. If Jimmie Carlisle had wished to gratify his
cupidity and double-cross his friend, why had he not at the very start
placed Maggie in an orphanage where she would have been neither charge
nor cost to him, and thus have had the use of every penny of the trust
fund? Why had he chosen to keep her by him, and train her carefully to
be exactly what her father had most wished her not to be? There must
have been some motive in the furtive, tortuous mind of Old Jimmie, that
now would perhaps forever remain a mystery.
Of course she saw, or thought she saw, the reason for the report of Old
Jimmie's death to Joe Ellison. That report had been sent to escape an
accounting.
As she sat through the night hours the Duchess for the first time felt
warmth creep over her for Maggie. She saw Maggie in the light of a
victim. If Maggie had been brought up as her father had planned, she
might now be much the girl her father dreamed her. But Old Jimmie had
entered the scheme of things. Yes, the audacious, willful, confident
Maggie, bent on conquering the world in the way Old Jimmie and later
Barney Palmer had taught her, was really just a poor misguided victim
who should have had a far different fate.
And now the Duchess came to one of the greatest problems of her life.
What should she do? Considering the facts that Joe Ellison wished the
life of a recluse and desired to avoid all talk of the old days, the
chances were that he would never happen upon the real state of affairs.
Only she and Old Jimmie knew the essentials of the situation--and very
likely Jimmie did not yet know that the friend who had once trusted him
was now a free man. She felt as though she held in her hands the strings
of destiny. Should she tell the truth?
She pondered long. All her considerations were given weight according to
what she saw as their possible effect upon Larry; for Larry was the one
person left whom she loved, and on him were fixed the aspirations of
these her final years. Therefore her thoughts and arguments were myopic,
almost necessarily specious. She wanted to see justice done, of course.
But most of all she wanted what was best for Larry. If she told the
truth, it might result in some kind of temporary breakdown in Maggie's
attitude which would bring her and Larry together. That would be
disastrous. If not disastrous at once, certainly in the end. Maggie was
a victim, and undoubtedly deserved sympathy. But others should not be
sacrificed merely because Maggie had suffered an injury. She had been
too long under the tutelage of Old Jimmie, and his teachings were
now too thoroughly the fiber of her very being, for her to alter
permanently. She might change temporarily under the urge of an emotional
revelation; but she would surely revert to her present self. There was
no doubt of that.
And the Duchess gave weight to other considerations--all human, yet all
in some measure specious. Joe Ellison was happy in his dream, and would
be happy in it all the rest of his life. Why tell the truth and destroy
his precious illusion?--especially when there was no chance to change
Maggie?
And further, she recalled the terrific temper that had lived within the
composed demeanor of Joe Ellison. The fires of that temper could not yet
be all burned out. If she told the truth, told that Jimmie Carlisle was
still alive, that might be just touching the trigger of a devastating
tragedy--might be disaster for all. What would be the use when no one
would have been benefited?
And so, in the wisdom of her old head and the entanglements of her old
heart, the Duchess decided she would never tell. And that loving, human
decision she was to cling to through the stress of times to come.
But even while she was thus deciding upon a measure to checkmate them
both, Larry was pacing his room at Cedar Crest, at last excitedly
evolving the elusive plan which was to bring Maggie to her senses and