Children of the Whirlwind
And he would do his best to make Maggie happy--his very best!
The young super-adventuress--she herself had mentally used the word
“adventuress” in thinking of herself, as being more genteel and mentally
aristocratic than the cruder words by which Barney and Old Jimmie and
their kind designated a woman accomplice--this young super-adventuress,
who had schemed all this so adroitly, and worked toward it with the best
of her brain and her conscious charm, was seized with new panic as she
listened to the eager torrent of his imploring words, as she gazed into
the quivering earnestness of his frank, blue-eyed face. She wished
she could get out of the machine and run away or sink through the
floor-boards of the car. For she really liked Dick.
“I'm--I'm not so good as you think,” she whispered. And then some
unsuspected force within her impelled her to say: “Dick, if you knew the
truth--”
He caught her shoulders. “I know all the truth about you I want to know!
You're wonderful, and I love you! Will you marry me? Answer that. That's
all I want to know!”
He had checked the confession that impulsively had surged toward her
lips. Silent, her eyes wide, her breath coming sharply, she sat gazing
at him.... And then from out the portion of her brain where were stored
her purposes, and the momentum of her pride and determination, there
flashed the realization that she had won! The thing that Barney and Old
Jimmie had prepared and she had so skillfully worked toward, was at last
achieved! She had only to say “yes,” and either of those two plans which
Barney had outlined could at once be put in operation--and there could
be no doubt of the swift success of either. Dick's eager, trusting face
was guarantee that there would come no obstruction from him.
She felt that in some strange way she had been caught in a trap. Yes,
what they had worked for, they had won! And yet, in this moment of
winning, as elements of her vast dizziness, Maggie felt sick and
ashamed--felt a frenzied desire to run away from the whole affair. For
Maggie, cynical, all-confident, and eighteen, was proving really a very
poor adventuress.
“Please, Maggie”--his imploring voice broke in upon her--“won't you
answer me? You like me, don't you?--you'll marry me, won't you?”
“I like you, Dick,” she choked out--and it was some slight comfort to
her to be telling this much of the truth--“but--but I can't marry you.”
“Maggie!” It was a cry of surprised pain, and the pain in his voice
shot acutely into her. “From the way you acted toward me--I thought--I
hoped--” He sharply halted the accusation which had risen to his lips.
“I'm not going to take that answer as final, Maggie,” he said doggedly.
“I'm going to give you more time to think it over--more time for me to
try. Then I'll ask you again.”
That which prompted Maggie's response was a mixture of impulses: the
desire, and this offered opportunity, to escape; and a faint reassertion
of the momentum of her purpose. For with one such as Maggie, the set
purposes may be seemingly overwhelmed, but death comes hard.
“All right,” she breathed rapidly. “Only please get me back as quickly
as you can. I'm to have dinner with my--my cousin, and I'll be very
late.”
Dick drove her into the city in almost unbroken silence and left her at
the great doors of the Grantham, abustle with a dozen lackeys in purple
livery. She stood a moment and watched him drive away. He really was a
nice boy--Dick.
As she shot up the elevator, she thought of a hitherto forgotten element
of that afternoon's bewildering situation. Barney Palmer! And Barney
was, she knew, now up in her sitting-room, impatiently waiting for her
report of what he had good reason to believe would prove a successful
experience. If she told the truth--that Dick had proposed, just as they
had planned for him to do--and she had refused him--why, Barney--!
She seemed caught on every side!
Maggie got into her suite by way of her bedroom. She wanted time to
gather her wits for meeting Barney. When Miss Grierson told her that
her cousin was still waiting to take her to dinner, she requested her
companion to inform Barney that she would be in as soon as she had
dressed. She wasted all the time she legitimately could in changing into
a dinner-gown, and when at length she stepped into her sitting-room she
was to Barney's eye the same cool Maggie as always.
Barney rose as she entered. He was in smart dinner jacket; these days
Barney was wearing the smartest of everything that money could secure.
There was a shadow of impatience on his face, but it was instantly
dissipated by Maggie's self-composed, direct-eyed beauty.
“How'd you come out with Miss Sherwood?” he whispered eagerly.
“Well enough for her to kiss me good-bye, and beg me to come again.”
“I've got to hand it to you, Maggie! You're sure some swell
actress--you've sure got class!” His dark eyes gleamed on her with half
a dozen pleasures: admiration of what she was in herself--admiration
of what she had just achieved--anticipation of results, many
results--anticipation of what she was later to mean to him in a personal
way. “If you can put it over on a swell like Miss Sherwood, you can put
it over on any one!” He exulted. “As soon as we clean up this job in
hand, we'll move on to one big thing after another!”
And then out came the question Maggie had been bracing herself for: “How
about Dick Sherwood? Did he finally come across with that proposal?”
“No,” Maggie answered steadily.
“No? Why not?” exclaimed Barney sharply. “I thought that was all that
was holding him back--waiting for his sister to look you over and give
you her O.K.?”
Maggie had decided that her air of cool, indifferent certainty was the
best manner to use in this situation with Barney. So she shrugged her
white shoulders.
“How can I tell what makes a man do something, and what makes him not do
it?”
“But did he seem any less interested in you than before?” Barney
pursued.
“No,” replied Maggie.
“Then maybe he's just waiting to get up his nerve. He'll ask you, all
right; nothing there for us to worry about. Come on, let's have dinner.
I'm starved.”
On the roof of the Grantham they were excellently served; for Barney
knew how to order a dinner, and he knew the art, which is an alchemistic
mixture of suave diplomacy and the insinuated power and purpose of
murder, of handling head-waiters and their sub-autocrats. Having no
other business in hand, Barney devoted himself to that business which
ran like a core through all his businesses--paying court to Maggie. And
when Barney wished to be a courtier, there were few of his class who
could give a better superficial interpretation of the role; and in this
particular instance he was at the advantage of being in earnest. He
forced the most expensive tidbits announced by the dinner card upon
Maggie; he gallantly and very gracefully put on and removed, as required
by circumstances, the green cobweb of a scarf Maggie had brought to
the roof as protection against the elements; and when he took the
dancing-floor with her, he swung her about and hopped up and down
and stepped in and out with all the skill of a master of the modern
perversion of dancing. Barney was really good enough to have been a
professional dancer had his desires not led him toward what seemed to
him a more exciting and more profitable career.
Maggie, not to rouse Barney's suspicions, played her role as well as he
did his own. And most of the other diners, a fraction of the changing
two or three hundred thousand people from the South and West who choose
New York as the best of all summer resorts, gazed upon this handsome
couple with their intricate steps which were timed with such effortless
and enviable accuracy, and excitedly believed that they were beholding
two distinguished specimens of what their home papers persisted in
calling New York's Four Hundred.
Maggie got back to her room with the feeling that she had staved off
Barney and her numerous other dilemmas for the immediate present. Her
chief thought in the many events of the day had been only to escape her
dangers and difficulties for the moment; all the time she had known that
her real thinking, her real decisions, were for a later time when she
was not so driven by the press of unexpected circumstances. That less
stressful time was now beginning.
What was she to do next? What were to be her final decisions? And what,
in all this strange ferment, was likely to germinate as possible forces
against her?
She mulled these things over for several days, during which Dick came to
see her twice, and twice proposed, and was twice put off. She had quiet
now, and was most of the time alone, but that clarity which she had
expected, that quickness and surety of purpose which she had always
believed to be unfailingly hers, refused to come.
She tried to have it otherwise, but the outstanding figure in her
meditations was Larry. Larry, who had not exposed her at the Sherwoods',
and whose influence had caused Hunt also not to expose her--Larry, who
without deception was on a familiar footing at the Sherwoods' where she
had been received only through trickery--Larry, a fugitive in danger
from so many enemies, perhaps after all undeserved enemies--Larry,
who looked to be making good on his boast to achieve success through
honesty--Larry, who had again told her that he loved her. She liked Dick
Sherwood--she really did. But Larry--that was something different.
And thus she thought on, drawn this way and that, and unable to reach a
decision. But with most people, when in a state of acute mental turmoil,
that which has been most definite in the past, instinct, habit of mind,
purpose, tradition, becomes at least temporarily the dominant factor
through the mere circumstance that it has existed powerfully before,
through its comparative stability, through its semi-permanence. And so
with Maggie. She had for that one afternoon almost been won over against
herself by the workings of Larry's secret diplomacy. Then had come
the natural reaction. And now in her turmoil, in so far as she had any
decision, it was instinctively to go right ahead in the direction in
which she had been going.
But on the sixth day of her uncertainty, just after Dick had called on
her and she had provisionally accepted an invitation to Cedar Crest for
the following afternoon, a danger which she had half seen from the
start burst upon her without a moment's warning. It came into her
sitting-room, just before her dinner hour, in the dual form of Barney
and Old Jimmie. The faces of both were lowering.
“Get rid of that boob chaperon of yours!” gritted Barney. “We're going
to have some real talk!”
Maggie stepped to the connecting door, sent Miss Grierson on an
inconsequential errand, and returned.
“You're looking as pleasant as if you were sitting for a new photograph,
Barney. What gives you that sweet expression?”
“You'll cut out your comic-supplement stuff in just one second,” Barney
warned her. “We both saw young Sherwood awhile ago as he was leaving the
Grantham, and he told us everything!”
Persiflage did indeed fail Maggie. “Everything?” she exclaimed. “What's
everything?”
“He told us about proposing to you almost a week ago, and about your
refusing him. And you lied to us--kept us sitting round, wasting our
time--and all the while you've been double-crossing us!”
Those visitors from South and West, especially the women, who a few
nights before on the roof had regarded Barney as the perfect courtier,
would not have so esteemed him if they had seen him at the present
moment. He seized Maggie's wrists, and all the evil of his violent
nature glared from his small bright eyes.
“Damn you!” he cried. “Jimmie, she's yours, and a father's got a right