University of Virginia Library

45. CHAPTER XLV.
A PHILANTHROPIC CONSPIRACY.

One naturally marvels what the able and energetic Edward Wetherel is
doing all this while, and why he does not interfere in some Olympian manner
to save his cousin from her risky entanglement.

In apology for the young man we must observe that it is not so easy to deliver
a young woman who positively objects to deliverance. Besides, he was
breathlessly busy in these days, as indeed he had been ever since the tragedy of
Sea Lodge, although we have not deemed it worth while to follow him up in his
labors, which resulted in nothing more than mere futile rushing and raising
of dust, like the speed of a blinded Jehu who drives furiously to arrive nowhere.
It is only fair to him that we should listen to a bemoaning apology
for himself which he uttered about this time to Lehming.

“I am bringing nothing to pass,” he exclaimed fretfully. “But it does
seem to me that it is less my fault than the fault of ungovernable circumstances.
I have been driven to grapple with two awful mysteries—that of
my uncle's assassination, and that of Nestoria's disappearance—and they have
wasted all my time, and beaten me.”

Lehming was smitten by a twinge of conscience and of compassion. He
had by this time recovered a certain degree of trust in Edward's innocence of
murder; and for a moment he was impetuously tempted to say, “I will show
you Nestoria.”

“Horrible problems!” resumed Wetherel, shaking his head with a pathetic
air of lassitude. “They are too much for human ingenuity. They are like
ghosts to whom daybreak has not yet come, and who will persist in walking
the earth. Not one happy accident has favored my search; not one disentangling
clew has fallen within reach of my hands; and Heaven knows how
eagerly they have groped. But I am not the only one who is bailled; I am
only one of a perplexed multitude. The mousing of justice is equally at fault,
and the scent of public suspicion. The police of New York is as completely
bewildered as the police of Connecticut. Is it not monstrous and demoralizing

that one vile assassin should be an overmatch for all the human race? It
is not true that murder will out. It is a popular delusion, helpful to the general
conscience undoubtedly, but as false almost as a superstition of fairies or
witches. Since I have been engaged in seeking out this homicide I have
heard of dozens and scores of others, all equally fallen into the dust of mystery
and become impalpable. Unconvicted and unsuspected murderers elbow us
in the streets. It is a hideous, haunted world. I have some such feeling
about it as men must have had in other days when they believed in spectres,
brownies, wizards, troubling goblins, and physical manifestations of Satan.
I am constantly discovering, or rather seeming to discover, things which are
invisible to others' eyes, and which probably do not exist. Every day, and I
might almost say every hour, I see possible assassins. I am followed and
whispered to by credulities and suspicions which vanish as soon as I question
them. The earth has changed to me; it is no longer an ordinary, natural,
sunlit planet; it is a valley of the shadow of death, full of demoniacal apparitions.
Bunyan saw a part of existence as I see the whole of it.”

There was a passion, an exaltation, and a lyrical extravagance in his language
which showed that his imagination had been heated and set on fire by
the crime which had impinged upon and deflected his life. There had been a
collision of a mighty event with a soul, like the fabled shock of a comet
against a planet, and the result had been a conflagration. In his other days
of commonplace being he could not have talked with this lurid fervor of
fancy. Lehming listened to him and looked up at him with that surprise
which we accord to those who have ascended some mount of transfiguration.

“Had you not better suspend for a time this search after the assassin?”
he asked with hesitation. “It may end in becoming a fixed idea, and interfere
with your usefulness throughout life.”

“Yes,” conceded Wetherel with a sigh. “It may. It has already wasted
much time for me. For months now I have done next to nothing but grope
for traces of crime without finding them. I have not shown myself to much
advantage. I have been a mole, working incessantly, but working under
earth, and finding no exit. All the plans for doing some little good, which I
blabbed and bragged about to you a while since, have come to nothing. You
remember that I proposed to instruct and help the working classes. I haven't
done it; of course I haven't. How can a man carry out philanthropies when
he is startled every day by some false view-halloo after an atrocity which concerns
his good name and happiness? Now I am in chase of the murderer of
my uncle, and now of the kidnapper of Nestoria. I am not a sufficiently great
man to be a mighty worker and a benefactor of my kind amid such a distracting
hurly-burly. I can only say for myself that I have nearly settled that
estate, and that I have made some progress in my medical studies.”

Lehming still pondered whether he should reveal the hiding-place of Nesstoria
to this man who seemed so honestly and passionately eager to find her.
But he remembered the girl's word, wait; he remembered his promise that he
would keep her secret; and, with a profoundly troubled spirit, he turned to
another urgent subject.

“What will you do with the Dinnefords?” he asked. “Here is this
wretched marriage. If you pay those two women some large sum of money,
what will become of it? Poloski, whatever else he may be, is a gambler and
a spendthrift.”

“I am master in this matter, of course,” replied Wetherel. “I shall pay

them, but under a trusteeship, and I shall be the trustee. I decided upon that
step as soon as I heard of the engagement.”

“Have you ever considered one thing?” continued Lehming. “I have
thought of it repeatedly, but never when in your company. This will—this
will that you accept and talk of executing—you have no knowledge of it except
through Mrs. Dinneford.”

“Mrs. Dinneford is such an entirely unselfish and honorable woman that I
should hardly doubt her unsupported word, even in a transaction so much to
her benefit,” replied Wetherel tranquilly. “But I have other evidence. In
the first place, my uncle told me that he should cut me off, and he was a man
who never said more than he meant. In the second place, I found in his
journal a record of the making of the will, and a summary of its leading provisions.”

“Ah!” said Lehming. “All that is new to me. I have occasionally wondered
whether you were not acting on insufficient testimony.”

“No,” responded Wetherel.

For a moment the two superbly unselfish men looked at each other in admiration.

“I thought you knew all this,” resumed Wetherel with a smile. “You
are very incurious about your own affairs, and indifferent about money. I dare
say it is well for civilization that some men set greater store by it.”

“Undoubtedly,” admitted Lehming. “The greedy and even the miserly
are immensely useful, in spite of their egotistic and sordid motives. Capitalists
are essential to the advancement of the material and also the intellectual
and moral interests of mankind. I have no doubt that Sallust's gardens and
even Lucullus's suppers helped to elevate the human race.”

At this moment up came Wolverton, radiant as usual with the careful dandyism
of thirty odd, but with a perturbed air of having something on his mind
and of finding it a worrying novelty.

“Have you heard anything?” asked Wetherel eagerly, as if he expected
important information.

“A good deal,” answered Wolverton in a hurried, confidential tone. “He's
a tough curse, that fellow is. I got Sweet to track him again, and Sweet has
a doose of a story to tell, and I believe it. He doesn't go to Riley's any more;
but why doesn't he? Because he has set Riley's daughter wrong; at least
that is what Sweet tells me, you know; and so the girl's father and brothers
are after him. Of course he could make it all right by marrying the little
fool; but that he won't do because she's common trash, and he's a gentleman.
Isn't the whole thing devilish ridiculous? Poloski too much of a gentleman
to marry Riley's daughter! Besides, there's this other bewitched young lady
(I beg your pardon) and a chance of getting a fortune by her, or at least a
moderate pot of money. Of course he isn't going to marry poor little Riley.
Well, the result is (so Sweet tells me) that his life is in danger. If the male
Rileys meet him, they'll break his skull or something of that sort, and he
knows it. That's why he wants to hurry up the wedding and get off for Europe.”

“It must be stopped,” scowled Edward. “We must take this story at once
to Mrs. Dinneford.”

“Yes—if it will be of any use,” drawled Wolverton. “I'll hunt up Sweet,
and we'll all go together, if it will be of any use. But will it? Women are
so devilish unbelieving of warnings in such matters! The man who says, You

are a dear creature, is always believed; the man who says, You are not a dear
creature, he is a liar; that's the way women judge. Can't you thrash the
chap within an inch of his life, or get some one to do it? Sweet would hammer
him to a jelly, for money enough. That's my idea.”

“It would not convince them,” judged Wetherel. “Besides, it is an unmannerly,
disorderly way of doing things, begging your pardon, Wolverton.”

“Oh, we mustn't stand on decorum with such a low beast,” said the dandy.
“Manners are for gentlemen.”

“But my relations would always think ill of it,” persisted Wetherel. “I
should lose their esteem and confidence. I want to convince them that the
fellow is a knave, before I treat him as such.”

“You are different from what you used to be,” said Wolverton.

“Yes,” asserted Wetherel gravely. “I should have thrashed him once, I
suppose, without stopping to think. I have been sobered, you know.”

“Oh, I dare say,” mumbled Wolverton, shrugging his shoulders a little as
he thought of that ugly business, the Wetherel Affair. “Well, let's see. You
want to expose him. I can bring about a sort of exposure, if there is time for
it. Here we are at the 23d, and the wedding comes off on the 25th, and they
sail on the 26th. There isn't much leeway. However, what I can show is
this: I can show it to be pretty certain that Poloski hasn't any property; I
can show, too, that he is charging all his bills, or some of them, to Mrs. Dinneford.”

“That will help,” said Edward.

“Oh, yes, I can make a pretty fair showing there,” laughed Wolverton.
“It's a good joke. He's run up lots of bills for Mrs. Dinneford to settle. His
wedding clothes, his presents to the young lady, the engagement ring, and so
on—they are all down against the mother. You see he has been around among
the foreign dealers, the Jews and so forth, and told them who he is going to
marry, and got his two or three thousand dollars on credit. The bills are to
go in to the old lady on the 27th, the day after the happy pair have started for
Europe. Now that can be shown. Sweet knows of three or four heavy accounts,
and says there are others. You see he has had his eye on Riley's gang
for some time back, and on Poloski as a supposed member of it. He found
out that the noble foreigner had been buying largely of late, and he looked
into it; and, as I told you, he came across three or four bouncing bills charged
to Mrs. Dinneford, and heard of others. By the way, Wetherel, Sweet wants
some money.”

“I'll give him something,” returned Edward. “Suppose we look him up
and set him about this exposure. I am greatly obliged to you, Wolverton,
for attending to my business for me, and doing it so well.”

“Oh, it's nothing,” drawled the dandy. “In fact, it rather amuses me,
and slaughters the time. Besides, I want to smash Poloski.”

A walk to the Tombs and a brief search through that sombre and grimy
edifice (within human memory the pride of New York) brought the three men
face to face with detective Sweet. He was dressed in a velveteen shooting-jacket,
double-breasted vest of the same material, and corduroy trousers, all
showing signs of wear and tear, especially the latter. He looked a little worn
and torn himself, too, his face being as red and scratched as if somebody had
been filing it, his eyes unusually bloodshot and one of them surrounded by a
bluish halo, and his knuckles “barked” in various degrees of rawness.

“Excuse my breath, gentlemen,” he hoarsely apologized as he drew confidentially

close to Wolverton and Wetherel. “I've been taking a restorer
or two. Up all night last night.”

“I want to see you about that Pole, Count Poloski,” said Wetherel. “You
tell Mr. Wolverton here that the man has been getting his accounts charged
to a Mrs. Dinneford. Can you prove that?”

“I can get the bills,” declared Sweet with cheerful promptness. “I can
get—let me see—six. I can bring you six of them debits any day you want.”

“Do you know where Mrs. Dinneford lives?”

“I can get full name, number, and street, off one of the dealers' books. It
was all down.”

“Very well. Now have those bills sent in to-morrow, the 24th of November,
at twelve o'clock, without fail. Here is something for your expense and
trouble thus far. Can I depend on you? To-morrow at noon.”

“Twelve sharp,” replied Mr. Sweet. “Thank you, sir; you're a gentleman.
Twelve to-morrow, November 24th. You can bet on me. Do you
want 'em presented for collection? All right. I'll bring the chalks myself,
with a C. O. D. No; that won't do, either. I don't want this man to know
that I am on his trail in any way. I'll send the dealers.”

“If you fail, it is the last job you get through me,” said Wetherel grimly.

“If I fail, may I be busted!” imprecated Mr. Sweet. “Oh, you just lay
your pile on me. Good morning, Mr. Wetherel. Very much obliged to you.
You're a gentleman—and a cutthroat prehaps,” he muttered to himself as the
three visitors went out of hearing. “But I don't know 's I much blame him,”
he continued to soliloquize in a fair-minded spirit. “A million is a pile of
money. It's enough to make any man kill his uncle. And if Wetherel done
that job, he's a regular smart one, and I respect him. He hain't left a trail,
and he's as sassy as a saint in Paradise.”