Again she was silent a s.p.a.ce, her sunken eyes steady With thought. Then she said:
"From the time he was twenty till he was thirty I knew Joe Ellison well--better than I"ve ever told you. He knew your mother when she was a girl, Larry. I wish you"d ask him to come in to see me. As soon as he can manage it."
Larry promised. His grandmother said no more about Maggie, and presently Larry bade her good-night and made his cautious way, ever on the lookout for danger, to where he had left his roadster, and thence safely out to Cedar Crest. But the d.u.c.h.ess sat for hours exactly as he had left her, her accounts unheeded, thinking, thinking, thinking over an utterly impossible possibility that had first presented itself faintly to her several days before. She did not see how the thing could be; and yet somehow it might be, for many a strange thing did happen in this border world where for so long she had lived. When finally she went to bed she slept little; her busy conjectures would not permit sleep. And though the next day she went about her shop seemingly as usual, she was still thinking.
That night Joe Ellison came. They met as though they had last seen each other but yesterday.
"Good-evening, Joe."
"Glad to see you, d.u.c.h.ess."
She held out to him a box of the best cigars, which she had bought against his coming, for she had remembered Joe Ellison"s once fastidious taste regarding tobacco. He lit one, and they fell into the easy silence of old friends, taking up their friendship exactly where it had been broken off. As a matter of fact, Joe Ellison might have been her son-in-law but for her own firm att.i.tude. He had known her daughter very much better than her words to Larry the previous evening had indicated.
Not only had Joe known her while a girl down here, but much later he had learned in what convent she was going to school and there had been surrept.i.tious love-making despite convent rules and boundaries--till the d.u.c.h.ess had learned what was going on. She had had a square out-and-out talk with Joe; the romance had suddenly ended; and later Larry"s mother had married elsewhere. But the snuffed-out romance had made no difference in the friendship between the d.u.c.h.ess and Joe; each had recognized the other as square, as that word was understood in their border world.
To Joe Ellison the d.u.c.h.ess was changed but little since twenty-odd years ago. She had seemed old even then; though as a youth he had known old men who had talked of her beauty when a young woman and of how she had queened it among the reckless spirits of that far time. But to the d.u.c.h.ess the change in Joe Ellison was astounding. She had last seen him in his middle thirties: black-haired, handsome, careful of dress, powerful of physique, dominant, fiery-tempered, fearless of any living 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 d.u.c.h.ess, who had seen much in her generations, was almost appalled at the transformation.
At first the d.u.c.h.ess 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 grat.i.tude more strongly.
The d.u.c.h.ess 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 a.s.sembling 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 d.u.c.h.ess drew nearer to the heart of her thoughts.
"Was the baby a boy or girl, Joe?"
"Girl."
The d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 d.u.c.h.ess"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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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.