The Sword of Damocles Part 50

"Then I'll go."

She drew him down the hall. "Why do you like to have me come to your house?" he prattled away.

She turned on him with a look which unfortunately Mr. Sylvester could not see. "Because your eyes are so blue and your skin is so white; they make me remember her!"

"And who is _her_?"

She laughed and seemed to hug herself in her rage and bitterness. "Your mother!" she cried, and in speaking it, she came upon Mr. Sylvester.

He at once put out his hand.

"I don't know who you are," said he, "but I do not think you had better take the child out to-night. From what you say, his father is evidently upstairs; if you will give the boy to me, I will take him back and leave him where he belongs."

"You will?" The slow intensity of her tone was indescribable. "Know that I don't bear interference from strangers." And catching up the child, she rushed by him like a flash. "You are probably one of those missionaries who go stealing about unasked into respectable persons'

rooms," she called back. "If by any chance you wander into his, tell him his child is in good hands, do you hear, in good hands!" And with a final burst of her hideous laugh, she dashed down the stairs and was gone.

Mr. Sylvester stood shocked and undecided. His fatherly heart urged him to search at once for the parent of this lame boy, and warn him of the possible results of entrusting his child to a woman with so little command over herself. But upon taking out his watch and finding it later by a good half-hour than he expected, he was so struck with the necessity of completing his errand, that he forgot everything else in his anxiety to confront Holt. Knocking at the first door he came to, he waited. A quick snarl and a surprised, "Come in!" announced that he had scared up some sort of a living being, but whether man or woman he found it impossible to tell, even after the door opened and the creature, whoever it was, rose upon him from a pile of rags scattered in one corner.

"I want Mr. Holt; can you tell me where to find him?"

"Upstairs," was the only reply he received, as the creature settled down again upon its heap of tattered clothing.

Fain to be content with this, he went up another flight and opened another door. He was more successful this time; one glance of his eye a.s.sured him that the man he was in search of, sat before him. He had never seen Mr. Holt; but the regular if vitiated features of the person upon whom he now intruded, his lank but not ungraceful form, and free if not airy manners, were not so common among the denizens of this unwholesome quarter, that there could be any doubt as to his being the accomplished but degenerate individual whose once attractive air had stolen the heart of Colonel j.a.pha's daughter.

He was sitting in front of a small pine table, and when Mr. Sylvester's eyes first fell upon him, was engaged in watching with a somewhat sinister smile, the final twirl of a solitary nickle which he had set spinning on the board before him. But at the sound of a step at the door, a lightning change pa.s.sed over his countenance, and rising with a quick antic.i.p.atory "Ah!" he turned with hasty action to meet the intruder. A second exclamation and a still more hasty recoil were the result. This was not the face or the form of him whom he had expected.

"Mr. Holt, I believe?" inquired Mr. Sylvester, advancing with his most dignified mien.

The other bowed, but in a doubtful way that for a moment robbed him of his usual air of impudent self-a.s.sertion.

"Then I have business with you," continued Mr. Sylvester, laying the man's own card down on the table before him. "My name is Sylvester," he proceeded, with a calmness that surprised himself; "and I am the uncle of the young man upon--whom you are at present presuming to levy blackmail."

The a.s.surance which for a moment had deserted the countenance of the other, returned with a flash. "His uncle!" reechoed he, with a low anomalous bow; "then it is from you I may expect the not unreasonable sum which I demand as the price of my attentions to your nephew's interest. Very good, I am not particular from what quarter it comes, so that it does come and that before the clock has struck the hour which I have set as the limit of my forbearance."

"Which is seven o'clock, I believe?"

"Which is seven o'clock."

Mr. Sylvester folded his arms and sternly eyed the man before him. "You still adhere to your intention, then, of forwarding to Mr. Stuyvesant at that hour, the sealed communication now in the hands of your lawyer?"

The smile with which the other responded was like the glint of a partly sheathed dagger. "My lawyer has already received his instructions.

Nothing but an immediate countermand on my part, will prevent the communication of which you speak, from going to Mr. Stuyvesant at seven o'clock."

The sigh which rose in Mr. Sylvester's breast did not disturb the severe immobility of his lip. "Have you ever considered the possibility," said he, "of the man whom you overheard talking in the restaurant in Dey Street two years ago, not being Mr. Bertram Sylvester of the Madison Bank?"

"No," returned the other, with a short, sharp, and wholly undisturbed laugh, "I do not think I ever have."

"Will you give me credit, then, for speaking with reason, when I declare to you that the man you overheard talking in the manner you profess to describe in your communication, was not Mr. Bertram Sylvester?"

A shrug of the shoulders, highly foreign and suggestive, was the other's answer. "It was Mr. Sylvester or it was the devil," proclaimed he--"with all deference to your reason, my good sir; or why are you here?" he keenly added.

Mr. Sylvester did not reply. With a sarcastic twitch of his lips the man took up the nickle with which he had been amusing himself when the former came in, and set it spinning again upon the table. "It is half-past six," remarked he. "It will take me a good half hour to go to my lawyer."

Mr. Sylvester made a final effort. "If you could be convinced," said he, "that you have got your grasp upon the wrong man, would you still persist in the course upon which you seem determined?"

With a dexterous sleight-of-hand movement, the man picked up the whirling nickle and laid it flat on the table before him. "A fellow whose whole fortune is represented by a coin like that"--tapping the piece significantly--"is not as easily convinced as a man of your means, perhaps. But if I should be brought to own that I had made a mistake in my man, I should still feel myself justified in proceeding against him, since my very accusation of him seems to be enough to arouse such interest on the part of his friends."

"Wretch!" leaped to Mr. Sylvester's lips, but he did not speak it. "His friends," declared he, "have most certainly a great interest in his reputation and his happiness; but they never will pay any thing upon coercion to preserve the one or to insure the other."

"They won't!" And for the first time Roger Holt slightly quavered.

"A man's honor and happiness are much, and he will struggle long before he will consent to part from them. But a citizen of a great town like this, owes something to his fellows, and submitting to blackmail is but a poor precedent to set. You will have to proceed as you will, Mr. Holt; neither my nephew nor myself, have any money to give you."

The glare in the man's eyes was like that of an aroused tiger. "Do you mean to say," cried he, "that you will not give from your abundance, a paltry thousand dollars to save one of your blood from a suspicion that will never leave him, _never leave him_ to the end of his miserable days?"

"I mean to say that not one cent will pa.s.s from me to you in payment of a silence, which as a gentleman, you ought to feel it inc.u.mbent upon you to preserve unasked, if only to prove to your fellow-men that you have not entirely lost all the instincts of the caste to which you once belonged. Not that I look for anything so disinterested from you," he went on. "A man who could enter the home of a respectable gentleman, and under cover of a brotherly regard, lure into degradation and despair, the woman who was at once its ornament and pride, cannot be expected to practice the virtues of ordinary manhood, much less those of a gentleman and a Christian. He is a wretch, who, whatever his breeding or antecedents, is open to nothing but execration and contempt."

With an oath and a quick backward spring, Roger Holt cried out, "Who are you, and by what right do you come here to reproach me with a matter dead and buried, by heaven, a dozen years ago?"

"The right of one who, though a stranger, knows well what you are and what you have done. Colonel j.a.pha himself is dead, but the avenger of his honor yet lives! Roger Holt, _where is Jacqueline j.a.pha_?"

The force with which this was uttered, seemed to confound the man. For a moment he stood silent, his eye upon his guest, then a subtle change took place in his expression; he smiled with a slow devilish meaning, and tossing his head with an airy gesture, lightly remarked:

"You must ask some more constant lover than I. A woman who was charming ten years ago--Bah! what would I be likely to know about her now!"

"Everything, when that woman is Jacqueline j.a.pha," cried Mr. Sylvester, advancing upon him with a look that would have shaken most men, but which only made the eye of this one burn more eagerly. "Though you might easily wish to give her the slip, she is not one to forget you. If she is alive, you know where she is; speak then, and let the worth of one good action make what amends it can for a long list of evil ones."

"You really want to see the woman, then; enough to pay for it, I mean?"

"The reward which has been offered for news of the fate or whereabouts of Jacqueline j.a.pha, still stands good," was Mr. Sylvester's reply.

The excited stare with which the man received this announcement, slowly subsided into his former subtle look.

"Well, well," said he, "we will see." The truth was, that he knew no more than the other where this woman was to be found. "If I happen to come across her in any of my wanderings, I shall know where to apply for means to make her welcome. But that is not what at present concerns us.

Your nephew is losing ground with every pa.s.sing minute. In a half-hour more his future will be decided, unless you bid me order my lawyer to delay the forwarding of that communication to Mr. Stuyvesant. In that case--"

"I believe I have already made it plain to you that I have no intentions of interfering with your action in this matter," quoth Mr. Sylvester, turning slowly toward the door. "If you are determined to send your statement, it must go, only--" And here he turned upon the bitterly disappointed man with an aspect whose n.o.bility the other was but little calculated to appreciate--"only when you do so, be particular to state that the person whose story you thus forward to a director of the Madison Bank, is not Bertram Sylvester, the cas.h.i.+er, but Edward Sylvester, his uncle, and the bank's president."

And the stately head bowed and the tall form was about to withdraw, when Holt with an excited tremble that affected even his words, advanced and seized Mr. Sylvester by the arm.

"His uncle!" cried he, "why that is what you--Great heaven!" he exclaimed, falling back with an expression not unmixed with awe, "you are the man and you have denounced yourself!" Then quickly, "Speak again; let me hear your voice."

And Mr. Sylvester with a sad smile, repeated in a slow and meaning tone, "It is but one little _fuss_ more!" then as the other cringed, added a dignified, "Good evening, Mr. Holt," and pa.s.sed swiftly across the room towards the door.

What was it that stopped him half-way, and made him look back with such a startled glance at the man he had left behind him? A smell of smoke in the air, the faint yet unmistakable odor of burning wood, as though the house were on fire, or--

Ha! the man himself has discerned it, is on his feet, is at the window, has seen what? His cry of mingled terror and dismay does not reveal. Mr.