Madame Storey

PART ONE-3

"Your case against her is a little too good, Walter."

"Who else could have done it?"

"I don't know—yet. If she did it, why should she have stuck around the house until you arrested her?"

"She supposed it would be considered a suicide."

"But, according to you, a year-old child wouldn't have been deceived into thinking so."

"Well, you never can tell. They always do something foolish. Will you come down to the Tombs? I'll arrange for a room there."

"No, I must see the girl here."

"That's impossible!"

"Sorry; it's my invariable rule, you know."

"But have a heart, Rose. I daren't let her out of my custody."

"You and your men can wait outside the door, then."

"It's most irregular."

"I am an irregular person," was the bland reply. "You should not have come to me."

"Well—I suppose you must have your own way."

"Always do, my dear. With the girl send a transcript of whatever statements have been taken down in the case."

"All right. Rose, turn off that confounded dictagraph, will you? I want to speak to you privately."

"It's off."

It wasn't, though, for I continued to hear every word.

"Good God, Rose, why do you persist in trying to madden me?"

"Mercy, Walter! How?"

"You know! With your cold and scornful airs, your indifference. It's—it's only vanity. Your vanity is ridiculous!"

"Oh, if you're only going to call names, I'll turn on the dictagraph!"

"No, don't, don't! I scarcely know what I'm saying you provoke me so! Why won't you be decent to me, Rose? Why won't you take me? We were made for each other!"

"So you say."

"Do you never feel anything, anything behind that scornful smile? Are you a breathing woman or a cold and heartless monster?"

"Bless me, I don't know."

"You need a master!"

"Of course I do. Why don't you master me, Walter?"

"Don't taunt me. A man has his limits! You make me want to seize and hurt you!"

"Don't do that. You'd spoil my pretty frock. Besides, Giannino would bite the back of your neck."

"Don't taunt me. You'd be helpless in my arms. You're always asking for a master."

"I meant a master of my soul, Walter."

"I don't understand you."

"Yes, you do. Look at me! You can't. My soul is stronger than yours, Walter, and in your heart you know it."

"You're talking nonsense!"

"Don't mumble your words. That's my tragedy, if you only knew it. I have yet to meet a man bold enough to face me down. How could I surrender myself to one whose soul was secretly afraid of mine? So here I sit. You know that the Madame I have hitched to my name is just to save my face. No one would believe that a woman as beautiful as I could be still unmarried—and respectable. But I am both, worse luck!"

"It's your own fault that you're alone. You think too well of yourself. You make believe to scorn all men."

"Well, if it's a bluff, why doesn't some man call it?"

"I will right now! I'm tired of this fooling. You've got to marry me."

"Look at me when you say that, Walter."

A silence.

"Ah—you can't you see."

"Ah, Rose, don't torture me this way! Can't you see I'm mad about you? You spoil my rest at night; you come between me and my work by day. I hunger and thirst for you like a man in a desert. Think what a team you and I would make, Rose. There'd be no stopping us short of the White House."

Here, to my chagrin, the dictagraph was abruptly turned off, but when, a minute or two later, Mr. Barron burst out of the inner room purple with rage I guessed that no change had occurred in the situation. He flung across the floor and out of the door without a glance in my direction.

Mme. Storey called to me to bring in my note-book. As I entered she was talking to the monkey.

"Giannino, you are better off than you know. Better be a dumb beast than a half-thinking animal."

The little thing wrinkled up his forehead and chirruped as he always did when she addressed him.

"You disagree with me? I tell you, men would rather go to jail than put themselves to the trouble of thinking clearly."

IIIEddie, the hall boy, and I had become at least outwardly friendly. In his heart I think Eddie always despised me as "a jane out of the storehouse," one of his own expressions, but as he had the keenest curiosity about all that went on in our shop, he was obliged to be affable in order to tap such sources of information as I possessed. He adored Mme. Storey, of course; all youths did as well as older males. As for me, I couldn't help liking the amusing little wretch, he was so new.

Like most boys of his age his ruling passion was for airplanes and aviators. At this time his particular idol was the famous Lieutenant George Grantland who had broken so many records. Grantland had just started on a three days' point-to-point flight from Camp Tasker, encircling the whole country east of the Mississippi, and Eddie, in order to follow him, was obliged to buy an extra every hour. Bursting with the subject, and having no one else to talk to, he brought these up to my room. This was his style—of course I am only guessing at the figures.

"Here's the latest. Landed at New Orleans four thirty this A.M., two hours ahead of time. Gee! If I could only get out to a bulletin-board! Slept four hours and went on. Four hundred and forty-two miles in under four hours. Wouldn't that expand your lungs? Say, that guy is a king of the air all right. Flies by night as well as day. They have lights to guide him where to land. Hasn't had to come down once for trouble. Here's a picture of his plane. It's the Bentley-Critchard type. They're just out. Good for a hundred and forty an hour. Six hundred horse. Do you get that? Think of driving six hundred plugs through the clouds. Some team!"

After two days of this I was almost as well acquainted with the exploits of Lieutenant Grantland as his admirer. Every hour or two Eddie would have a new picture of the dashing aviator to show me. Even after being snapshotted in the blazing sun and reproduced in a newspaper half-tone, he remained a handsome young fellow.

Eddie was in the thick of this when they brought Philippa Dean up from the Tombs, but as she was indubitably a "class one jane," his attention was momentarily won from his newspapers. The assistant district attorney did not accompany her. To be obliged to wait outside was, I suppose, too great a trial to his dignity. Miss Dean was under escort of two gigantic plain-clothes men, the slender little thing. I was glad, at any rate, that they had not handcuffed her.

My first impression was a favourable one; her eyes struck you at once. They were full, limpid, blue, very wide open under fine brows, giving her an expression of proud candour in which there was something really affecting—however, I had learned ere this from Mme. Storey that you cannot read a woman's soul in her eyes, so I reserved judgment. Her hair was light-brown. She was dressed with that fine simplicity which is the despair of newly arrived women. At present she looked hard and wary, and her lips were compressed into a scarlet line—but that was small wonder in her situation.

Mme. Storey came out when she heard them. What was her first impression of the girl I cannot say, for she never gave anything away in her face at such moments. She invited the two detectives to make themselves comfortable in the outer office, and we three women passed into the big room. She waved the girl to a seat.

"You may relax," she said, smiling; "nobody is going to put you through the third degree here."

But the girl sat down bolt upright, with her hands clenched in her lap. It was painful to see that tightness. Mme. Storey applied herself to the task of charming it away. She said to the ape:

"Giannino, take off your hat to Miss Dean, and tell her that we wish her well."

The little animal stood up on the table, jerked off his cap and gibbered in his own tongue. It was a performance that never failed to win a smile, but this girl's lips looked as if they had forgotten how.

"The assistant district attorney has asked me to examine you," Mme. Storey began in friendly style. "Being a public prosecutor, he's bent on your conviction, having nobody else to accuse. But I may as well tell you that I don't share his feelings. Indeed, he's so c**k-sure that it would give me pleasure to prove him wrong."

I knew that my employer was sincere in saying this, but I suppose the poor girl had learned to her cost that the devil himself can be sympathetic. At any rate, the speech had no effect on her.

"I hope you will believe that I have no object except to discover the truth," Mme. Storey went on.

"That's what they all say," muttered the girl.

"Satisfy yourself in your own way as to whether you can trust me. Come, we have all afternoon."

"Am I obliged to answer your questions?" demanded the girl.

"By no means," was the prompt reply. "Why don't you question me first?"

The girl took her at her word. "Who are you?" she asked. "I have been told nothing."

"Mme. Rosika Storey. They call me a practical psychologist. The district attorney's office sometimes does me the honour to consult me, particularly in the cases of women."

"You'll get no confession out of me!"

"I don't expect to. I don't believe you did it. No sane woman would shoot a man between the shoulder-blades and expect to make out that it was a suicide. At any rate, Ashcomb Poor seems to have richly deserved his fate. Come now, frankly, did you do it?"

The girl's blue eyes flashed. "I did not."

"Good! Then tell me what happened that night."

The girl sullenly shook her head. "What's the use?"

"Why, to clear yourself, naturally."

"They haven't enough evidence to convict me. They couldn't convict me, because I didn't do it."

"That's a perilous line to take, my dear. I suspect you haven't had much experience with juries. The gentleman of the jury would consider silence in a woman not only unnatural, but incriminating. Of course, they might let you off, anyway, if you condescended to ogle them, but as I say, it's perilous. Why did you confess in the first place?"

"To get rid of them. They were driving me out of my mind with their questions."

"I can well understand that. Well then, what did happen, really?"

The girl set her lips. "I have made up my mind to say nothing, and I shall stick to it," she replied.

Mme. Storey spread out her hands. "Very well, let's talk about something else. Dean is a good old name here in New York. Are you of the New York family?"

"My people have lived here for four generations."

"I have read of a great beau in the sixties and seventies—Philip Dean. Are you related to him?"

"He was my grandfather."

"I might have guessed it from your first name. How interesting! All the chronicles of those days are full of references to his wit and savoir faire. But he must have been a rich man. How does it come that you have to work for your living?"