第54章

"Not in those days," said the Duchess, 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 Duchess'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 Duchess 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 Duchess 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 Duchess 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 Duchess 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.

The Duchess now understood the unfatherly disregard Old Jimmie had shown for the ordinary welfare of Maggie. Not being her father, he had not cared. Superficially, at least, Jimmie Carlisle must have been a much more plausible individual twenty years earlier, to have won the implicit trust of Joe Ellison and to have become his foremost friend.

She understood one reason why Old Jimmie had always boarded Maggie in the cheapest and lowest places; his hidden cupidity had thereby been pocketing about a thousand dollars a year of trust money for over sixteen years.

But there was one queer problem here to which the Duchess could not at this time see the answer. If Jimmie Carlisle had wished to gratify his cupidity and double-cross his friend, why had he not at the very start placed Maggie in an orphanage where she would have been neither charge nor cost to him, and thus have had the use of every penny of the trust fund? Why had he chosen to keep her by him, and train her carefully to be exactly what her father had most wished her not to be? There must have been some motive in the furtive, tortuous mind of Old Jimmie, that now would perhaps forever remain a mystery.

Of course she saw, or thought she saw, the reason for the report of Old Jimmie's death to Joe Ellison. That report had been sent to escape an accounting.