Larry undressed, had a bath, shaved, dressed again, and started to work. But that day the most Larry did was abstractedly going through the motions of work. He was completely filled with the situation and its many questions, and with the suspense of waiting for Maggie to come and of how he was going to manage to see her privately.
The meeting, however, proved no difficulty; for Maggie, who arrived at four, had come primarily on Larry's account and she herself maneuvered the encounter. While they were on the piazza, Dick having gone into the house for a fresh supply of cigarettes, and Miss Sherwood being in an animated discussion with Hunt, Maggie said:
“Miss Sherwood, I've never had a real look down at the Sound from the edge of your bluff. Do you mind if Mr. Brandon shows me?”
“Not at all. Tea won't be served for half an hour, so take your time. Have Mr. Brandon show you the view from just the other side of that old rose-bench; that's the best view.”
They walked away chatting mechanically until they were in a garden seat behind the rose-bench. The rose-bench was a rather sorry affair, for it had been set out in this exposed place by a former gardener who had forgotten that the direct winds from the Sound are malgracious to roses. However, it screened the two, and was far enough removed so that ordinary tones would not carry to the house.
“Did your grandmother get you word about the police?” Maggie asked with suppressed excitement as soon as they were seated.
“Yes. She came out here about midnight.”
“Then why, while you still had time, didn't you get farther away from New York than this?”
“If I'm to be caught, I'm to be caught; in the meantime, this is as safe a place as any other for me. Besides, I wanted to have at least one more talk with you—after something new grandmother told me about you.”
“Something new about me?” echoed Maggie, startled by his grave tone. “What?”
“About your father,” he said, watching closely for the effect upon her of his revelations.
“What about my father? What's he been doing that I don't know about?”
“You do not know a single thing that your father has done.”
“What!”
“Because you do not know who your father is.”
“What!” she gasped.
“Listen, Maggie. What I'm going to tell you may seem unbelievable, but you've got to believe it, because it's the truth. I can see that you have proofs if you want proofs. But you can accept what I tell you as absolute facts. You are by birth a very different person from what you believe yourself. Your father is not Jimmie Carlisle. And your mother—”
“Larry!” She tensely gripped his arm.
“Your mother was of a good family. I imagine something like Miss Sherwood's kind—though not so rich and not having such social standing. She died when you were born. She never knew what your father's business actually was; he passed for a country gentleman. He was about the smoothest and biggest crook of his time, and a straight crook if there is such a thing.”
“Larry!” she breathed.
“He kept this gentleman-farmer side of his life and his marriage entirely hidden from his crook acquaintances; that is, from all except one whom he trusted as his most loyal friend. Before you were old enough to remember, he was tripped up and sent away on a twenty-year sentence.”
“And he's—he's still in prison?” whispered Maggie.
Larry did not heed the interruption. “He had developed the highest kind of ambition for you. He wanted you to grow up a fine simple woman like your mother—something like Miss Sherwood. He did not want you ever to know the sort of life he had known; and he did not want you to be handicapped by the knowledge that you had a crook for a father. He still had intact your mother's fortune, a small one, but an honest one. So he put you and the money in the hands of his trusted friend, with the instructions that you were to be brought up as the girls of the nicest families are brought up, and believing yourself an orphan.”
“That friend of his, Larry?” she whispered tensely.
“Jimmie Carlisle.”
“O—oh!”
“I don't know what Jimmie Carlisle's motives were for what he has done. Perhaps to get your money, perhaps some grudge against your father, which he was afraid to show while your father was free, for your father was always his master. But Old Jimmie has brought you up exactly contrary to the orders he received. If revenge was Old Jimmie's motive, his cunning, cowardly brain could not have conceived a more diabolical revenge, one that would hurt your father more. Till a few years ago, when word was sent to your father that Old Jimmie was dead, Jimmie regularly wrote your father about the success of his plan, about how splendidly you were developing and getting on with the best people. And your father—I knew him in prison—now believes you have grown up into exactly the kind of young woman he planned.”
“Larry!” she choked in a numbed voice. “Larry!”
“Your father is now as happy as it is possible for him to be, for he has lived for years and still lives in the belief that his great dream, the only big thing left for him to do, has come to pass: that somewhere out in the world is his daughter, grown into a nice, simple, wholesome young woman, with a clean, wholesome life before her. And though she is the one thing in all the world to him, he never intends to see her again for fear that his seeing her might somehow result in an accident that would destroy her happy ignorance. Maggie, can you conceive the tremendous meaning to your father of what he believes he has created? And can you conceive the tremendous difference between the dream he lives upon, and the reality?”
She was white, staring, wilted. For once all the defiance, self-confidence, bravado, melted out of her, and she was just an appalled and frightened young girl.
After a moment she managed to repeat the question Larry had ignored: “Is my real father—still in prison?”
“You'd like to see your real father?” he asked her.
“I think—I'd like to have a glimpse of him,” she breathed.
Larry, just before this, had noted Joe Ellison in his blue overalls and wide straw hat cleaning out a bank of young dahlias a distance up the bluff. He now took Maggie's arm and guided her in that direction.
“See that man there working among the dahlias?—the man who once brought you a bunch of roses? Joe Ellison is his name. He's the man I've been talking about—your father.”
He felt her quivering under his hand for a moment, and heard her breath come in swift, spasmodic pants. He was wondering what was the effect upon her of this climax of his revelation, when she whispered:
“Do you suppose—I can speak—to my father?”
“Of course. He likes all young women. And I told you that he and I were close friends.”
“Then—come on.” She arose, clinging to him, and drew him after her. Halfway to Joe she breathed: “You please say something first. Anything.”
He recognized this as the appeal of one whose faculties were reeling. There had never been any attempt here at Cedar Crest to conceal Joe Ellison's past, and in Larry's case there had been only such concealment as might help his evasion of his dangers. And so Larry remarked as Joe Ellison took his wide hat off his white hair and stood bareheaded before them:
“Joe, Miss Cameron knows who I really am, and about my having been in Sing Sing; and I've just told her about our having been friends there. Also I told her about your having a daughter. It interested her and she asked me if she couldn't talk to you, so I brought her over.”
Larry stood aside and tensely watched this meeting between father and daughter. Joe bowed slightly, and with a dignified grace that overalls and over fifteen years of prison could not take from one who during his early and middle manhood had been known as the perfection of the finished gentleman. His gray eyes warmed with appreciation of the young figure before him, just as Larry had seen them grow bright watching the young figures disporting in the Sound.
“It is very gracious for a young woman like you, Miss Cameron,” he said in a voice of grave courtesy, “to be interested enough in an old man like me to want to talk with him.”
Maggie made the supreme effort of her life to keep herself in hand. “I wanted to talk to you because of something Mr. Brainard told me about—about your having a daughter.”
Larry felt that this was too sacred a scene for him to intrude upon. “Would you mind excusing me,” he said; “there are some calculations I've got to rush out”—and he returned to the bench on which they had been sitting and pretended to busy himself over a pocket notebook.
While Larry had been speaking and moving away, Maggie had swiftly been appraising her father. His gray eyes were direct as against the furtiveness of Jimmie's; his mouth had a firm kindliness as against the wrinkled cunning of Jimmie's; his bearing was erect, self-possessed, as against Jimmie's bent, shuffling carriage. Maggie felt no swift-born daughter love for this stranger who was her father. The turmoil of her discovery filled her too completely to admit a full-grown affection; but she thrilled with the sense of the vast difference between her supposed father and this her real father.
In the meantime her father had spoken. Joe would have been more reserved with men or with older women; but with this girl, so much the sort of girl he had long dreamed about, his reserve vanished without resistance, and in its place was a desire to talk to this beautiful creature who came out of the world which the big white house represented.
“I have a daughter, yes,” he said. “But Larry—Mr. Brainard perhaps I should say—has likely told you all there is to tell.”
“I'd like to hear it from you, please—if you don't mind.”
“There's really not much to tell,” he said. “You know what I was and what happened. When I went to prison my daughter was too young to remember me—less than two years old. I didn't want her ever to be drawn into the sort of life that had been mine, or be the sort of woman that a girl becomes who gets into that life. And I didn't want her ever to have the stigma, and the handicap, of her knowing and the world knowing that her father was a convict. You can't understand it fully, Miss Cameron, but perhaps you can understand a little how disgraced you would feel, what a handicap it would be, if your father were a convict. I had a good friend I could trust. So I turned my daughter over to him, to be brought up with no knowledge of my existence, and with every reasonable advantage that a nice girl should have. I guess that's all, Miss Cameron.”
“This friend—what was his name?”
“Carlisle—Jimmie Carlisle. But his name could never have meant anything to you. Besides, he's dead now.”
Maggie forced herself on. “Your plan—it turned out all right? And you—you are happy?”
“Yes.” In the sympathetic atmosphere which this young girl's presence created for him, Joe's emotions flowed into words more freely than ever before in the company of a human being. Though he was answering her, what he was really doing was rather just letting his heart use its long-silent voice, speak its exultant dream and belief.
“Somewhere out in the world—I don't know where, and I don't want to know—my daughter has now grown into a wholesome, splendid young woman!” he said in a vibrant voice. Brooding in solitude so long upon his careful plan that he believed could not fail, had made the keen Joe Ellison less suspicious concerning it than he otherwise would have been—perhaps had made him a bit daffy on this one subject. “I have saved my daughter from all the grime she might have known, and which might have soiled her, and even pulled her down if I hadn't thought out in good time my plan to protect her. And of course I am happy!” he exulted. “I have done the best thing that it was possible for me to do, the thing which I wanted most to do! Instead of what she might have been, I have as a daughter just such a nice girl as you are—just about your own age—though, of course, she hasn't your money, your social position, and naturally not quite the advantages you have had. Of course I'm happy!”
“You're—you're sure she's all that?”
Again his words were as much a statement aloud to himself of his constant dream as they were a direct answer to Maggie. “Of course! There was enough money—the plan was in the hands of a friend who knew how to handle such a thing—she's never known anything but the very best surroundings—and until she was fourteen I had regular reports on how wonderfully she was progressing. You see my friend had had her legally adopted by a splendid family, so there's no doubt about everything being for the best.”
“And you”—Maggie drove herself on—“don't you ever want to see her?”
“Of course I do. But at the very beginning I fixed things so I could not; so that I would not even know where she is. Removed temptation from myself, you see. Don't you see the possible results if I should try to see her? Something might happen that would bring out the truth, and that would ruin her happiness, her career. Don't you see?”
His gray eyes, bright with his great dream, were fixed intently upon Maggie; and yet she felt that they were gazing far beyond her at some other girl... at his girl.
“I—I—” she gulped and swayed and would have fallen if he had not been quick to catch her arm.
“You are sick, Miss?” he asked anxiously.
“I—I have been,” she stammered, trying to regain control of her faculties. “It's—it's that—and my not eating—and standing in this hot sun. Thank you very much for what you've told me. I'd—I'd better be getting back.”
“I'll help you.” And very gently, with a firm hand under one arm, he escorted her to the bench where Larry sat scribbling nothings. He then raised his hat and returned to his dahlias.
“Well?” queried Larry when they were alone.
“I can't stand it to stay here and talk to these people,” she replied in an agonized whisper. “I must get away from here quick, so that I can think.”
“May I come with you?”
“No, Larry—I must be alone. Please, Larry, please get into the house, and manage to fake a telephone message for me, calling me back to New York at once.”
“All right.” And Larry hurried away. She sat, pale, breathing rapidly, her whole being clenched, staring fixedly out at the Sound. Five minutes later Larry was back.
“It's all arranged, Maggie. I've told the people; they're sorry you've got to go. And Dick is getting his car ready.”
She turned her eyes upon him. He had never seen in them such a look. They were feverish, with a dazed, affrighted horror. She clutched his arm.
“You must promise never to tell my father about me!”
“I won't. Unless I have to.”
“But you must not! Never!” she cried desperately. “He thinks I'm—Oh, don't you understand? If he were to learn what I really am, it would kill him. He must keep his dream. For his sake he must never find out, he must keep on thinking of me just the same. Now, you understand?”
Larry slowly nodded.
Her next words were dully vibrant with stricken awe. “And it means that I can never have him for my father! Never! And I think—I'd—I'd like him for a father! Don't you see?”
Again Larry nodded. In this entirely new phase of her, a white-faced, stricken, shivering girl, Larry felt a poignant sympathy for her the like of which had never tingled through him in her conquering moods. Indeed Maggie's situation was opening out into great human problems such as neither he nor any one else had ever foreseen!
“There comes Dick,” she whispered. “I must do my best to hold myself together. Good-bye, Larry.”
A minute later, Larry just behind her, she was crossing the lawn on Dick's arm, explaining her weakness and pallor by the sudden dizziness which had come upon her in consequence of not eating and of being in the hot sun.
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