She turned back to her letter which had turned into an impa.s.sioned plea that she would never forsake him, no matter what happened, never drive him over the precipice like the Gadderene swine.

"You and your love are the only thing that can save me, dear heart," he wrote. "Remember that always. Without you I shall go down, down into blacker pits than I ever sank before. With you I shall come out into the light. I swear it. But oh, beloved, pray for me, if you know how to pray.

I don't. I never had a G.o.d."

There were tears in Tony's eyes as she finished her lover's letter.

His unwonted humility touched her as no arrogance could ever have done. His appeal to his desperate need moved her profoundly as such appeals will always move woman. It is an old tale and one oft repeated. Man crying out at a woman's feet, "Save me! Save me! Myself I cannot save!" Woman, believing, because she longs to believe it, that salvation lies in her power, taking on herself the all but impossible mission for love's high sake.

Tony Holiday believed, as all the million other women have believed since time began, that she could save her lover, loved him tenfold the more because he threw himself upon her mercy, came indeed perhaps to truly love him for the first time now with a kind of consecrated fervor which belonged all to the spirit even as the love that had come to her while they danced had belonged rather to the flesh.

And day by day Jim Roberts grew sicker and the gnawing thing crept up nearer to his heart. Day by day he gloated over the goading whips he brandished over Alan Ma.s.sey's head, amused himself with the various developments it lay in his power to give to the situation as he pa.s.sed out of life.

He wrote two letters from his sick bed. The first one was addressed to d.i.c.k Carson, telling the full story of his own and Alan Ma.s.sey's share in the deliberate defraudment of that young man of his rightful name and estate. It pleased him to read and reread this letter and to reflect that when it was mailed Alan Ma.s.sey would drink the full cup of disgrace and exposure while he who was infinitely guiltier would be sleeping very quietly in a cool grave where hate, nor vengeance, nor even pity could touch him.

The other letter, which like the first he kept unmailed, was a less honest and less incriminating letter, filled with plausible half truths, telling how he had just become aware at last through coming into possession of some old letters of the ident.i.ty of the boy he had once had in his keeping and who had run away from him, an ident.i.ty which he now hastened to reveal in the interests of tardy justice. The letter made no mention of Alan Ma.s.sey nor of the unlovely bargain he had driven with that young man as the price of silence and the bliss of ignorance. It was addressed to the lawyers who handled the Ma.s.sey estate.

Roberts had followed up various trails and discovered that Antoinette Holiday was the girl Ma.s.sey loved, discovered through the bribing of a Crest House servant, that the young man they called Carson was also presumably in love with the girl whose family had befriended him so generously in his need. It was incredibly good he thought. He could hardly have thought out a more diabolically clever plot if he had tried.

He could make Alan Ma.s.sey writhe trebly, knowing these things.

Pursuing his malignant whim he wrote to Alan Ma.s.sey and told him of the existence of the two letters, as yet unmailed, in his table drawer. He made it clear that one of the letters d.a.m.ned Alan Ma.s.sey utterly while the other only robbed him of his ill-gotten fortune, made it clear also that he himself did not know which of the two would be mailed in the end, possibly he would decide it by a flip of a coin. Ma.s.sey could only wait and see what happened.

"I suppose you think the girl is worth going to h.e.l.l for, even if the money isn't," he had written. "Maybe she is. Some women are, perhaps. But don't forget that if she loves you, you will be dragging her down there too. Pretty thought, isn't it? I don't mean any future-life business either. That's rot. I heard enough of that when I was a boy to sicken me of it forever. It is the here and now h.e.l.l a man pays for his sins with, and that is G.o.d's truth, Alan Ma.s.sey."

And Alan, sitting in his luxurious studio reading the letter, crushed it in his hands and groaned aloud. He needed no commentary on the "here and now h.e.l.l" from Jim Roberts. He was living it those summer days if ever a man did.

It wasn't the money now. Alan told himself he no longer cared for that, hated it in fact. It was Tony now, all Tony, and the horrible fear lest Roberts betray him and shut the gates of Paradise upon him forever.

Sometimes in his agony of fear he could almost have been glad to end it all with one shot of the silver-mounted automatic he kept always near, to beat Jim Roberts to the bliss of oblivion in the easiest way.

But Alan Ma.s.sey had an incorrigible belief in his luck. Just as he had hoped, until he had all but believed, that his cousin John was as dead as he had told that very person he was, so now he hoped against all reason that he would be saved at the eleventh hour, that Roberts would go to his death carrying with him the secret that would destroy himself if it ceased to be a secret.

Those unmailed letters haunted him, however, day and night, so much so, in fact, that he took a journey to Boston one day and sought out the little cigar store again. But this time he had not mounted the stairs.

His business was with the black-eyed boy. With one fifty dollar bill he bought the lad's promise to destroy the letters and the packet in Robert's drawer in the event of the latter's death; secured also the promise that if at any time before his death Roberts gave orders that either letter should be mailed, the boy would send the same not to the address on the envelope but to Alan Ma.s.sey. If the boy kept faith with his pledges there would be another fifty coming to him after the death of the man. He bought the lad even as Roberts had once bought himself. It was a sickening transaction but it relieved his mind considerably and catered in a measure to that incorrigible hope within him.

But he paid a price too. Fifty miles away from Boston was Tony Holiday on her Heaven kissing hill. He was mad to go to her but dared not, lest this fresh corruption in some way betray itself to her clear gaze.

So he went back to New York without seeing her and Tony never knew he had been so near.

And that night Jim Roberts took an unexpected turn for the worse and died, foiled of that last highly antic.i.p.ated spice of malice in flipping the coin that was to decide Alan Ma.s.sey's fate.

In the end the boy had not had the courage to destroy the letters as he had promised to do. Instead he sent them both, together with the packet of evidence as to John Ma.s.sey's ident.i.ty, to Alan Ma.s.sey.

The thing was in Alan's own hands at last. Nothing could save or destroy him but himself. And by a paradox his salvation depended upon his being strong enough to bring himself to ruin.

CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH PHIL GETS HIS EYES OPENED

At home on her Hill Tony Holiday settled down more or less happily after her eventful sally into the great world. To the careless observer she was quite the same Tony who went down the Hill a few weeks earlier. If at times she was unusually quiet, had spells of sitting very still with folded hands and far away dreams in her eyes, if she crept away by herself to read the long letters that came so often, from many addresses but always in the same bold, beautiful script and to pen long answers to these; if she read more poetry than was her wont and sang love songs with a new, exquisite, but rather heart breaking timbre in her lovely contralto voice, no one paid much attention to these signs except possibly Doctor Philip who saw most things. He perceived regretfully that his little girl was slipping away from him, pa.s.sing through some experience that was by no means all joy or contentment and which was making her grow up all too fast. But he said nothing, quietly bided the hour of confidence which he felt sure would come sooner or later.

Tony puzzled much over the complexities of life these days, puzzled over other things beside her own perverse romance. Carlotta too was much on her mind. She wished she could wave a magic wand and make things come right for these two friends of hers who were evidently made for each other as Hal had propounded. She wondered if Phil were as unhappy as Carlotta was and meant to find out in her own time and way.

She had seen almost nothing of him since her return to the Hill. He was working very hard in the store and never appeared at any of the little dances and picnics and teas with which the Dunbury younger set pa.s.sed away the summer days and nights, and which Ted and the twins and usually Tony herself frequented. Larry never did. He hated things of that sort.

But Phil was different. He had always liked fun and parties and had always been on hand and in great demand hitherto at every social function from a Ladies' Aid strawberry festival to a grand Masonic ball. It wasn't natural for Phil to shut himself out of things like that. It was a bad sign Tony thought.

At any rate she determined to find out for herself how the land lay if she could. Having occasion to do some shopping she marched down the Hill and presented herself at Stuart Lambert and Son's, demanding to be served by no less a person than Philip himself.

"I want a pair of black satin pumps with very frivolous heels," she announced. "Produce them this instant, slave." She smiled at Phil and he smiled back. He and Tony had always been the best of chums.

"Cannzy ones?" he laughed. "That's what one of our customers calls them."

And while he knelt before her with an array of shoe boxes around him, fitting a dainty slipper on Tony's pretty foot, Tony herself looked not at the slipper but at Philip, studying his face shrewdly. He looked older, graver. There was less laughter in his blue eyes, a grimmer line about his young mouth. Poor Phil! Evidently Carlotta wasn't the only one who was paying the price of too much loving. Tony made up her mind to rush in, though she knew it might be a case for angel hesitation.

"I've never given you a message Hal Underwood sent you," she observed irrelevantly.

Philip looked up surprised.

"Hal Underwood! What message did he send me? I hardly know him."

"He seemed to know you rather well. He told me to tell you to come down and marry Carlotta, that you were the only man that could keep her in order. That is too big, Phil. Try a smaller one." The speaker kicked off the offending slipper. Philip mechanically picked it up and replaced it in the box.

"That is rather a queer message," he commented. "I had an idea Underwood wanted to marry Carlotta himself. Try this." He reached for another pump.

His eyes were lowered so Tony could not see them. She wished she could.

"He does," she said. "She won't have him."

"Is--is there--anybody she is likely to have?" The words jerked out as the young man groped for the shoe horn which was almost beside his hand but which apparently he did not see at all.

"I am afraid she is likely to take Herbert Lathrop unless somebody stops her by main force. Why don't you play Lochinvar yourself, Phil?

You could."

Philip looked straight up at Tony then, the slipper forgotten in his hand.

"Tony, do you mean that?" he asked.

"I certainly do. Make her marry you, Phil. It is the only way with Carlotta."

"I don't want to _make_ any girl marry me," he said.

"Oh, hang your silly pride, Phil Lambert! Carlotta wants to marry you I tell you though she would murder me if she knew I did tell you."

"Maybe she does. But she doesn't want to live in Dunbury. I've good reason to know that. We thrashed it out rather thoroughly on the top of Mount Tom last June. She hasn't changed her mind."

Tony sighed. She was afraid Phil was right. Carlotta hadn't changed her mind. Was it because she was afraid she might, that she was determining to marry Herbert?