When Maggie drove away with Dick from Cedar Crest—this was an hour before Gavegan descended out of the blue upon Larry and two hours before he rode triumphantly away with his captive—she was the most dazed and disillusioned young creature who had ever set out confidently to conquer the world. Courage, confidence, quickness of wit, all the qualities on which she had prided herself, were now entirely gone, and she was just a white, limp figure that wanted to run away: a weak figure in which swirled thoughts almost too spasmodically powerful for so weakened a vessel not to be shattered under their wild strain: thoughts of her amazingly discovered real father—of how she was the very contradiction of her father's dream—of Larry—of the cunning Jimmie Carlisle whom till this day she had believed her father—of Barney Palmer.
So agitated was she with these gyrating thoughts that she was not conscious that Dick had stopped the car on the green roadside until he had taken her hand and had begun to speak. The happy, garrulous, unobservant Dick had not noticed anything out of the way with her more than a pallor which she had explained away as being due to nothing more than a bit of temporary dizziness. And so for the second time Dick now poured out his love to her and asked her to marry him.
“Don't, Dick—please!” she interrupted him. “I can't marry you! Never!”
“What!” cried the astounded Dick. “Maggie—why not?”
“I can't. That's final. And don't make me talk to you now, Dick—please! I cannot!”
His face, so fresh and happy the moment before, became gray and lined with pain. But he silently swung the car back into the road.
She forgot him utterly in what was happening within her. As they rode on, she forced herself to think of what she should do. She saw herself as the victim of much, and as guilty of much. And then inspiration came upon her, or perhaps it was merely a high frenzy of desperation, and she saw that the responsibility for the whole situation was upon her alone; she saw it as her duty, the role assigned her, to try to untangle alone this tangled situation, to try to measure out justice to every one.
First of all, as she had told Larry, her father's dream of her must remain unbroken. Whatever she did, she must do nothing that might possibly be a sharp blow to the conception of his daughter which were the roots and trunk and flowering branches of his present happiness.. .. And then came a real inspiration! She would, in time, make herself into the girl he believed her—make his dream the truth! She would get rid of Old Jimmie and Barney—would cut loose from everything pertaining to her former life—would disappear and live for a year or two in the kind of environment in which he believed he had placed her—and would reappear and claim him for her father! And for his own sake, he should never know the truth. Two years more and he should have the actuality, where he now had only the dream!
But before she was free to enter upon this plan, before she could vanish out of the knowledge of all who had known her, there was a great duty to Larry Brainard which she must discharge. He was hunted by the police, he was hunted by his former pals. And he was in his predicament fundamentally because of her. Therefore, it was her foremost duty to clear Larry Brainard.
Yes, she would do that first! Somehow!...
She was considering this problem of how she was to clear Larry, who had tried to awaken her, who had shielded her, who loved her, when Dick slowed his car down in front of the Grantham and helped her out. As he said a subdued good-bye and was stepping back into his car, an impulse surged up into her—an impulse of this different Maggie whose birth was being attended by such bewildering emotions and decisions.
“Dick, won't you please come up for just a little while?”
Three minutes later they were in her sitting-room. Cap in hand Dick awaited her words in the misery of silence. Her look was drawn, but direct.
“Back in the road, Dick, you asked me why I couldn't marry you. I asked you up here to tell you.”
“Yes?” he queried dully.
“One reason is that, though I like you, I don't like you that way. The more important reason to you is that I am a fraud.”
“A fraud!” he exclaimed incredulously.
It had come to her, as she was leaving the car, that the place to start her new life was to start right, or quit right, with Dick. “A fraud,” she repeated—“an impostor. There is no Maggie Cameron. I am born of no good family from the West. I have no money. I have always lived in New York—most of the time down on the East Side. I used to work in a Fifth Avenue millinery shop. Till three months ago I sold cigarettes in one of the big hotels.”
“What of that!” cried Dick.
“That is the nicest part of what I have to tell you,” she continued relentlessly. “My supposed relatives, Jimmie Carlisle and Barney Palmer, are no relatives at all, but are two clever confidence men. I have been in with them, working on a scheme they have framed. Everything I have seemed to be, everything I have done, even this expensive apartment, have all been parts of that scheme. The idea of that scheme was to swindle some rich man out of a lot of money—through my playing on his susceptibilities.”
“Maggie!” he gasped.
“More concretely, the idea was to trick some rich man into falling in love with me, to get him to propose, then to have me confess that I was already married, but to a man who would give me a divorce if he were paid enough. The rich man would then drive a bargain with my supposed husband, pay over a lot of money—after which Barney, Old Jimmie, and I would disappear with our profits.”
“Maggie!” he repeated, stupefied with his incredulous amazement. But the unflinching gaze she held upon him convinced him she was speaking the truth. “Then, if that was your game, why are you telling me now? Why didn't you say 'yes' when I proposed a week ago? I would have fallen for the game; you would have succeeded.”
Not till that moment did Maggie realize the full truth; not till then did she realize the solid influence Larry Brainard had been in the background of her life all these months.
“I didn't go through with it because of Larry Brainard.”
“Larry Brainard!” His astonishment increased. “You know Larry Brainard, then?”
“I've known him for several years.”
“And you've been coming out, and he's been pretending not to know you! Of course I knew what Larry Brainard has been. But is he in this, too?”
“No. He's exactly what you think him. From the start he's been trying to keep me out of this. He was behind my coming to your house; he's told me so. His reason for getting me there was his belief that my being treated by you and your sister as I was would make me ashamed of myself and make me want to quit what I was doing. And I think—I think he was right—partly.”
“And Larry—he's the reason you're telling me now?”
“I think so. But there are other reasons.” Making a clean breast of things though she was, she felt she dared not trust Dick with the secret of her father. “I—I wanted to clear things up as far as I was responsible. That's one reason I'm telling you. There was the chance you might sometime find out that Larry had known me and suspect him; I wanted you to know the truth of what he'd really done. And I wanted to tell you the truth about myself, so you'd despise and forget me, instead of perhaps carrying around romantic delusions about me after I've gone. And there's another reason. I'd like to tell you—for you've been everything that's fine to me—if it won't offend you.”
“Go on,” he said huskily.
“Barney Palmer picked you out as the victim—you didn't know you were being picked out—because he said that you were an easy mark. That you took things for exactly what they pretended to be, and didn't care what you did with your money. That you never would settle down into a responsible person. I'm telling you all this, Dick, because I don't want you to be what Barney said.”
Dick slumped into a chair, at last beaten down by this cumulative revelation. He buried his face in his hands and his panting breath was convulsive with unuttered sobs. Maggie looked down upon the young boy, with pity, remorse, and an increasing recognition of the wide-spread suffering she had wrought.
“To think that this has all been horrible make-believe!” he at last groaned. “That all the while I've been looked on as just a young fool who would always remain a fool!”
Maggie, in her sense of guilt, was helpless to make any reply that would soften his agony; and for a space neither spoke.
Presently Dick stood suddenly up. His face was still marked by suffering, but somehow it seemed to have grown older without losing its youth. There was a new blaze of determination in the direct look he held on Maggie.
“You say you have never loved me?” he demanded.
She shook her head. “But I've told you that I've always liked you.”
“Larry Brainard's doing what he has kept on doing for you—that means that he loves you, doesn't it?” he pressed on.
“He has told me so.”
“And you love him?”
“What difference does that make?—since I am going away as soon as I get everything I'm wholly or partly responsible for cleared up.”
“If Larry Brainard has known you for a long while, then how about Barney Palmer and Jimmie Carlisle?”
“They've known me as long, or longer.”
“Then you must have all known each other?”
“Yes. Years ago Larry worked with Barney and Jimmie Carlisle.”
“What was the attitude of those two toward Larry, when he was trying to balk them by making you give up the plan?”
“They hated him. They are the cause—especially Barney—of all of Larry's trouble with the police and with the old crowd he's quit. To try to clear Larry, that's the most important thing I'm going to try to do.”
“And that's where you've got to let me help you!” Dick cried with sudden energy. “Larry's been a mighty good friend to me—he's tried to head me right—and I owe him a lot. And I'd like a chance to show that Barney Palmer I'm not going to keep on being the eternal fool he sized me up to be!”
Maggie was startled by this swift transformation. “Why—why, Dick!” she breathed.
“What's your plan to clear Larry?”
“I hadn't got so far as to have a clear plan. I had only just realized that there had to be a plan. But since they have set the police on Larry, it came to me that the idea behind any plan would be for the police to really capture Barney and Jimmie Carlisle—get them out of Larry's way.”
“That's it!” Dick Sherwood had a mind which, given an interesting stimulus, could work swiftly; and it worked swiftly now. “They were planning to trim me. Let's use that plan you outlined to me—use it to-night. You can tell them some story which will make immediate action seem necessary and we'll all get together this evening. I'll play my part all right—don't you worry about me! I'll come with a roll of money that I'll dig up somewhere, and it'll be marked money. When it's passed—bingo!—a couple of detectives that we'll have planted to watch the proceedings will step right up and nab the two!”
She was taken aback by the very idea of him, the victim, after her confession, throwing his lot in with her. “Why, Dick”—she stammered—“to think of you offering to do such a thing!”
“I owe that much to Larry Brainard,” he declared. “And—and I owe that much to your desire to help set him straight. Well, what about my plan?”
Since he seemed eager to lend himself to it, it seemed to her altogether wonderful, and she told him so. They discussed details for several minutes, for there was much to be done and it had all to be done most adroitly. It was agreed that he should come at ten o'clock, when the stage would all be set.
As he was leaving to attend to his part of the play, a precautionary idea flashed upon Maggie.
“Better telephone me just before you come. Something may have happened to change our plans.”
“All right—I'll telephone. Just keep your nerve.”
With that he hurried out. At about the time he left, Larry was leaving Cedar Crest in handcuffs beside the burly and triumphant Gavegan, and believing that the power he had sought to exercise was now effectually at an end. He was out of it. In his despondency it was not granted him to see that the greatest thing which he could do was already done; that he had set in motion all the machinery of what had taken place and what was about to take place; that all the figures in the action of the further drama of that night were to act as they were to do primarily because of promptings which came from him.
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