The Trigger of Conscience

Front matter

by Robert Orr Chipperfield Author of “The Man in the Jury Box,” etc.

Part I

CHAPTER I.

Mr. Grant Invites Criticism

The golf course of the Broadlawns Country Club lay basking in the mellow sunshine of a late September afternoon. Vivid coats and sweaters made bright splashes of color, and the striped awning of the marquee upon the lawn challenged the eye as defiantly at the commencement of the season. But the stout, white-haired old gentleman on the veranda shivered and tugged at the collar of his too youthful sport coat.

“Hello, Sowerby! Been around to-day?” A cold, rather gibing voice sounded just behind him, and President Sowerby of the Tradesmen's Bank turned irascibly in his chair, and the gaitered foot, which had rested carefully upon the veranda rail, slipped to the floor.

Just behind him stood a handsome man of about forty. The telltale lines about his shrewd eyes and the curious patch, like a white postage stamp, in the dark hair above each ear, only added to an engaging countenance.

“Confound you, Bowles!” Rutherford Sowerby exclaimed as he recognized the newcomer. “Why do you sneak up on those rubber soles of yours like a stage detective?”

He paused with a snort, and the other, in the freedom of old acquaintanceship, laughed and perched himself on the veranda rail. “Sorry I startled you. Little touch of the gout to-day?” he asked with half-bantering sympathy.

“No, it isn't!” the old gentleman lied bravely. “I'm waiting for my wife; never knew a woman to be on time yet! How was the market? I didn't run into town this morning.”

“Pretty steady,” the broker responded absently, his eyes upon two figures, which, unseen by his older companion, had started around the corner of the veranda. One was a young woman not yet out of her twenties, pretty in a fluffy, colorless, rather insipid fashion, and the other was a slightly older man with a dapper little blond mustache and prominent light blue eyes.

The couple halted instantly, and the woman flushed and made a slight, almost imperceptible motion of dismissal. Her companion, accepting his dismissal, disappeared around the corner of the veranda, and she came forward biting her full lips. Bowles, the broker, smiled inwardly at the incident. The woman was Sowerby's young wife, and Philip Dorrance, treasurer—popularly known as “husband”—of the Farr Rubber Company, had been her companion. Ogden Bowles raised his voice slightly and added in his bantering tone: “There wasn't much movement on the Exchange, but rubber seems to be booming. Good afternoon, Mrs. Sowerby!” He rose, and young Mrs. Sowerby flushed—as he had meant that she should—and darted a venomous glance at him.

“Good afternoon,” she replied sweetly. “Have you met the new secretary of the club—the one whom the committee engaged to succeed poor Mr. Martin? Mrs. Carter says he is rather a grouch, but I believe he refused to advance her any money this afternoon to pay her bridge debt. He told her that her account on the books was already quite heavy for this month, and, being a new man, he couldn't take the responsibility without consulting the secretary of the club, Mr. Estridge.” She smiled and turned to her husband. “Have I kept you waiting, dear? I stopped for a minute to speak to the Frasers and Mr. Dorrance. They were watching Gerald Landon and Miss Dare finish their round.”

Bowles' face had darkened for an instant at her thrust at Mrs. Carter. Ignoring her remark about the secretary, he repeated, as he prepared to depart: “Gerald Landon? That young friend of the Frasers? I hope he shows up well later in the tournament, for he's made the only decent scores here this season. By the way, I understand he is the assistant cashier at your bank, Sowerby? What we need here is young blood to put some pep into the game. I am sure a golf enthusiast like yourself will agree with me. Please save me a fox trot at the dance to-night, Mrs. Sowerby.”

As the broker moved away Sowerby thundered at his wife. “What we need is less of his cool impudence around here,” he said. “What business is it of his how enthusiastic I am about his infernal golf, and what business have you to interest yourself in that Carter woman's debts?”

“Just—because,” Maud Sowerby responded.

“Gad, it's the sort of thing a man wouldn't have mentioned! Commend me to women for making a country club a hotbed of knocking and backbiting and general cattishness!” Her husband stamped his gouty foot and then swore vigorously, but her equanimity was not disturbed.

“Go on, dear! You've called me the name of about every other animal in the menagerie, so I may as well be a cat, too,” she observed.

His fat face flamed in mounting, apoplectic rage. “Cats aren't in menageries! They're in back alleys like the one you came from!” he exclaimed. “Stop that infernal tapping on the rail with your fingers. You're no longer at the typewriter where I found you when I was fool enough to marry you!”

Maud Sowerby's breath drew in with a little venomous hiss, but the nervous tapping of her fingers ceased obediently. She was as much ashamed of those stubby, thickened fingers as of the plebeian origin with which the irascible old man always taunted her when his gout got the better of him. The next moment she rose lightly from the low wicker chair.

“I think I'll join the Frasers.” In spite of herself a little sharp note had crept into her tones. “This constant washing of dirty linen in public, my dear Rutherford, really ought to be confined to back yards where alley cats congregate!”

As she left him the old man chuckled in vicious glee. He was still chuckling when a tall, slender, distinguished-looking, gray-haired man of fifty, after a word or two with the club steward in the doorway, approached him.

“Hello, Rutherford! Have you met the new secretary of the club?” His voice, though confidentially modulated, was suave and resonant with the notes of a trained orator, and the smile, with which he met the eyes of the bank president, was the diplomatic one which had overcome the prejudices of more than one difficult jury in a celebrated case.

Rutherford Sowerby grunted. “'Lo, Sam! What's all this about your infernal secretary? Haven't I always maintained that this club was too small to need a salaried one? Aren't you the official, duly elected officer in that capacity? I never did see why the steward couldn't keep the tuppenny monthly accounts and bring them to you to be ratified without any intermediary.”

“Yet you were one of the directors at the last meeting who instructed the chairman of the house committee to ask me to find a man for you.” Samuel Estridge's tone seemed not to have changed, but it held a quality which made the older man eye him more keenly. “I think you'd better come along and have a look at him.”

Without another word Sowerby hauled himself out of his chair, and the two strolled into the clubhouse. They proceeded at once to the secretary's office on the other side of the staircase from that of the steward.

Here they found a stocky man of indeterminate middle age, with a shock of sandy hair as heavy as a wig and thick-rimmed glasses beneath his eye-shade, poring nearsightedly over a ledger behind the desk. In front of it stood a stout, majestic, elderly woman with a high, bony nose and piercing dark eyes that glared across the counter through a short-handled, diamond studded lorgnette.

“I am positive that there is some mistake!” she was saying in frigid, dominant tones. Then, as she caught sight of the newcomers, she turned to the lawyer. “Mr. Estridge, I really think that Mr. Martin, no matter how ill he was before he went West, ought to have gone more thoroughly over the books with your new Mr. Grant here. I am certain that my personal account is incorrect, and, although I do not wish to go so far as to lay it before the board2”

“My dear Mrs. de Forest, this is Mr. Grant's first day in active charge, you know.” The lawyer's voice was as winning as his smile. “I promise you that I will give him my personal assistance and look into this matter at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Cutting short the lady's effusive declaration that she would not dream of troubling him and had no doubt that the trifling affair would adjust itself, he led her adroitly into a discussion of the afternoon's bridge game. Presently the dapper, blond, young Mr. Dorrance appeared in the doorway and, with the conciliatory little cough he usually reserved solely for addressing his own wife, announced: “Mrs. de Forest, I have been looking everywhere for you! Josephine and the Frasers are waiting tea, and they wouldn't dream2”

The social arbiter of Broadlawns smiled graciously. “Of course! I'll join them at once. How stupid of me!” With an inclination of her elaborately coiffured gray head to the others she departed in his company much after the manner of a huge liner with a fussy little tug. Sowerby growled in an aside to the lawyer: “Wish she would lay something before the board, as she's always threatening to do, while I'm present at the meeting! What I'll do to it2 But your man here does seem to be—er—going a bit farther than Martin. I hear he disputed Mrs. Carter's credit.”

The shock of sandy hair had not raised itself an inch from above the ledger, and Estridge stepped quickly forward as though he, too, had not heard his companion's remark.

“Getting on to the work all right, Grant? Mr. Sowerby, this is Mr. James Grant, who will look after the books for us in place of Mr. Martin. Grant, this is Mr. Rutherford Sowerby, president of the Tradesmen's Bank in New York and one of the directors of the club.”

The new secretary of the club acknowledged the introduction with just the right shade of deference and then replied io the lawyer's question: “Yes, sir, I think I shall get on to the work in time quite satisfactorily. Murdock has been assisting me to-day in his spare time.”

“'Murdock?' Yes, I'm sure you'll find the steward very helpful, and there is no reason why you shouldn't delegate a lot of the minor accounts to him, Mr. Grant.” Samuel Estridge turned away. “You needn't stay cooped up in here all the time, you know. Come on, Rutherford, I've got something better than tea in my locker!”

Young Mrs. Sowerby appeared in the door of the office. “Rutherford, the car's waiting, and you know you ordered it for five o'clock.” She spoke hurriedly, and her eyes shifted as though, strangely enough, she were trying to avoid meeting the gaze of the man behind the desk. “How do you do, Mr. Estridge? May we drop you at your place on our way home?”

“Thanks, I'm staying on here a little longer. Have you met our new house secretary, Mr. Grant?” Estridge was watching her curiously, and he noted the quick, uncontrollable flush which mounted in her face.

“Yes, I—I've met Mr. Grant.” Her eyelids fluttered and fell, and then she turned quickly to her husband. “Rutherford, Whitcomb says that the batteries2”

With feline cleverness she had scratched upon a spot already sore. “Whitcomb's a fool!” Sowerby charged for the door. “See you to-night, Sam. This is your fool nonsense, Maud, in wanting a bullheaded British driver because he looked swagger. Swagger, my eye! Now he wants the earth! Don't I know the batteries of that car?”

His voice died away upon the veranda, and Estridge turned with a little shrug to the new secretary, but that worthy had bent once more over his ledger, and the lawyer strolled out.

In the rotundalike entrance hall, where, as upon the veranda, cozy little groups were having tea, he came upon Ogden Bowles deep in conversation with a tall, willowy woman, whose rich red hair was drawn down over her ears like a Madonna by Raphael. He would have passed them with a smiling nod, but the broker stopped him.

“I say, Estridge, do sit down for a minute and amuse Mrs. Carter. I've got to see the secretary, and I am afraid she will run away from me! I have been trying to persuade her to dine with the Dorrances and me at the Mayblossom Inn—I'd ask you, too, but I know that you are booked already, unfortunately—and I'm not having any luck.”

“Don't try to amuse me, Mr. Estridge—all the men do that—but take this chair by me and satisfy my feminine and trivial curiosity.” Mrs. Carter had large eyes of a peculiar golden brown, and she knew how to use them, There was nothing for the attorney to do but to acquiesce, and he dropped into the chair indicated, as Bowles bowed and turned toward the little office.

“Anything that interested you sufficiently to arouse your curiosity could not be trivial, Mrs. Carter,” he murmured mechanically.

“That isn't worthy of you, Mr. Estridge,” she replied. “One might expect that sort of thing from Phil Dorrance, perhaps, if his wife were not within hearing, but not from our most noted criminal lawyer.”

“'Criminal lawyer' sounds ambiguous, doesn't it?” he said. But, seriously, you have aroused my curiosity by declaring that you have any. I have always looked upon you as one woman devoid of it.”

“It isn't very active.” As she spoke Mr Carter's glinting, topaz eyes shifted from him to the tiny office at the right of the broad staircase. “Tell me something about the club's new secretary—Mr. Grant, isn't it? He seems to be rather an unusual individual, not quite like a mere clerk.”

“He isn't.” The attorney spoke easily enough, and his tone had sunk to an even more conversational level, but he eyed Mrs. Carter's profile, clean cut against her banded, straight red hair, with a shrewd glimmer of speculation. “I believe he held a more superior position of some sort, but he has accepted this until Martin's return because he is so keen on golf. He won't be tied down to the office since Murdock can do a lot of his work. You've met him? I hope he hasn't been officious about the accounts or anything? These men who feel superior to their positions so often are dictatorial.”

Mrs. Carter laughed lightly, and one of her long, white hands gripped the air arm until the wicker creaked. “Oh, dear, no! I never bother about my club accounts except to write a check for the total at the first of the month without even glancing over my slips. I'm such a bad business woman! But, when I went in to ask this Mr. Grant some trivial question or other, a little while ago, he seemed to mistake me for some one else and was so politely incredulous about it that it rather amused me. I'm sure I never laid eyes on the man before, unless he has waited upon me in some shop or bank. What did you say position was previous to his coming here, Mr. Estridge?”

Her tone was a bored, idle one, but, as she moved restlessly in her chair, the attorney caught another glimpse of her eye and their eager, almost defensive, light did not accord with her manner. Was it fear that he read in—the same fear which had covered the less well-poised little Mrs. Sowerby with confusion?

“I didn't say, but I'm quite sure he has never waited upon any one in his life,” Estridge replied deliberately. “I understand he was the confidential secretary for some very noted personage.”

“For whom?” A crisp voice behind him made him glance over his should to see that Ogden Bowles had returned. In the usually debonair broker, too, there appeared a slight, but significant change. The fine lines about his eyes seemed to have deepened, and his lips were set. “Who is this fellow, Grant Estridge? You'll forgive me for overhearing a part of your conversation, but it was unavoidable. The man seems rather a dub to me.”

“Oh, give him time, Bowles; this is his first day, you know.” The attorney laughed good-naturedly, but in his mind a curious question was forming. “I don't know for whom the chap was confidential secretary, but if you're interested I don't doubt that I can find out from the house committee.”

“I'm not sufficiently interested for that, thanks.” Bowles laughed also, but rather shortly. “Mrs. Carter, is it to be the Mayblossom Inn?”

She rose with a slow shake of her head. “So sorry, but I find that I have a slight headache, and, if I am to return for the dance to-night, I must rest. I'll let you run me home to my little cottage, though, if you like.”

After a final word or two with Estridge the couple moved off down the veranda steps, and the attorney sank back in the chair from which he had just arisen, but he turned it so as to face the door of the little office in which the new secretary had been installed. What was the matter with Mrs. Sowerby and Mrs. Carter and Bowles? Could it be his own imagination, could his nerves have gone back on him after that last big, grueling contest of wits in court, or was there really something strange and sinister underlying the tranquil surface atmosphere of this little club of suburban acquaintances—greater even than he had conceived in his knowledge of their petty affairs?

While he sat there lost in reverie Murdock, the steward, approached. He a man of forty-odd with a slight ouch of gray at his temples and the expressionless face of the perfectly trained servant. Absently Estridge ordered a lemonade. When the man brought it he remarked: “Murdock, Mr. Grant says that you have been helping him to-day with the accounts which Mr. Martin left unfinished.”

Murdock coughed. “Well, yes, sir,” he murmured. “Having a little spare time and knowing the books from going over them with Mr. Martin, I thought it was what the house committee would wish, sir.”

His tone was apologetic, as though feeling that he had overstepped the bounds of his appointed duty, but Samuel Estridge nodded approvingly. “Quite right, Murdock. Take as much off Mr. Grant's hands as you can, especially at first. You know the books, and of course they've been kept absolutely straight.”

“Of course, sir.” Murdock placed the empty glass upon his tray and started to move off. The attorney stopped him once more and spoke in a lowered tone:

“Murdock, you've been a trusted employee of Broadlawns since it was built, and, if anything goes on at any time that strikes you as being—er—not quite regular, I shall appreciate your coming to me, as secretary, instead of first reporting the matter to the house committee, you understand?”

Murdock's face remained expressionless, but he responded with a shade more emphasis: “Perfectly, sir. I have heard of nothing irregular, and I am quite sure that there will be no difficulty about the books. Thank you, sir.”

This time he departed without further comment or instruction, but when he had disappeared Estridge glanced once more through the doorway into the office of the new secretary. The shock of sandy hair had been raised for an instant from above the ledger, and from behind a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses two shadowed, unexpectedly keen eyes seemed staring into his own.

CHAPTER II.

The Hornet's Nest

September had vanished in a burst of springlike warmth. October ushered in a period of premature, nipping frost which drove all but the hardiest of the golf players from the course and speedily turned the leaves of the trees about the clubhouse to the evanescent scarlet and gold of autumn.

The veranda was now practically deserted. Those of the all-year colony, who still forgathered at Broadlawns for tea and afternoon bridge, preferred the spacious entrance hall and dining room—the latter in reality a converted sun parlor. It was here that two feminine members of the club were lunching together one glowing day late in the month.

“This salad is atrocious!” The larger, more elderly of the two ladies shook her elaborately dressed gray head indignantly. “I am really tempted to lay the matter of the cuisine before the board! As it is I would have invited you to lunch at the house, Mrs. Dorrance, but I fancied we might pick up two people here for bridge later. Besides I am breaking in a new cook. You know what that means!”

“Indeed I do, my dear Mrs. de Forest!” the other replied. She was dark and beetle-browed, and an undeniable shadow appeared upon her firm upper lip. A tendency to embonpoint she curbed with obviously Spartan courage. Her one known act of self-indulgence had been her marriage to good-looking, penniless, weak Phil Dorrance, twelve years her junior. She had made him treasurer of the great Farr Rubber Company, and, although men looked with contempt upon him for the transaction, it was mingled with pity. For the “Empress Josephine,” as all Broadlawns called her behind her arrogant back, was no easy task mistress. “Our own cook left this morning, but Philip is bringing another out from town with him this afternoon.”

“I thought he was playing off his match with Ogden Bowles to-day,” Mrs. de Forest observed.

“No. I sent him in to Harlier's with ny emeralds; it occurred to me that I had better have the settings looked over before the Halloween dance to-morrow night.” Josephine Dorrance eyed her peach Melba and then pushed it resolutely from her. “You will wear your diamond necklace, of course?”

Mrs. de Forest shook her head, and her lips tightened. “No. With so many nouveau riche members coming into the club I decided that such a display, at a mere informal Hallowe'en affair, would be not only vulgar, but a bad example for Alice. Girls—especially those with no money of their own—do get such silly notions and expectations! You've no idea what it is to have a penniless, spoiled orphan niece on your hands!” Mrs. de Forest sighed. “I had hoped that Alice would be quite a help to me—a sort of social secretary, you know—but my poor sister-in-law indulged her so, and on positively nothing, my dear, that Alice takes everything quite for granted!”

The Farr rubber fortune was newer by two generations than the De Forest wealth, and Mrs. Dorrance quite enjoyed the sensation her emeralds always created at the club, especially among the lately admitted members. Therefore she raised her heavy brows slightly as she replied: “I don't believe you will be troubled with Miss Dare very long. That nice Landon boy who is visiting the Frasers2”

“A mere bank employee of Rutherford Sowerby's!” Mrs. de Forest exclaimed. “I have forbidden Alice to have anything more to do with him than sheer courtesy demands. After all she is my niece, and I do not approve of even a wealthy, mature woman marrying an indigent upstart, much less an impressionable girl like Alice with her future before her. She will keep Gerald Landon in his place.” With this Parthian shot Mrs. de Forest led the way from the dining room.

At that very moment Alice Dare was having considerably more to do with the Landon boy than sheer courtesy demanded. As a matter of fact, she was seriously interfering with his driving of the Frasers' little runabout by cuddling her head into his shoulder, and Gerald Landon did not seem to object in the least. They were on a secluded road several miles from Broadlawns, making rapidly for a little, old fashioned village and a certain little old-fashioned cottage on its main street.

All at once Alice straightened in her seat and asked for the twentieth time: “Oh, do you think it will be all right, Gerald, darling?”

“Right as rain!” he responded promptly, avoiding a rut in the road by the narrowest margin.

“I don't know!” Alice replied. “There's just one person in that club whom I'll be afraid to face, and that person is the secretary. There's something odd about him, Gerald; I don't know whether it's that shaggy mop of hair that he peers out from beneath when he asks one of those funny, unexpected questions, or the way he stares after one. He's not disrespectful at all, nor even personal, and I can't say that I dislike him; he simply makes me uncomfortable. I wish I could see his eyes without that shade or those heavy-rimmed glasses.”

“Oh, he's just an old codger who has been in a rut always, dear, and country-club life is all new to him,” Gerald replied. “Jack Fraser seems to think he is clever.”

“So does Mr. Estridge and—and Mr. Sowerby,” Alice said in a lowered tone. “I've seen them talking to him a lot.”

“Well, I'm safe enough even if Sowerby has taken a queer fancy to him,” Gerald observed. “I'm not a member, you know, just a guest of the Frasers, and Grant only bothers with his club accounts and ledgers. Not a single one of the crowd will see us until we get back.”

But the young assistant cashier of Sowerby's bank was wrong. The solitary occupant of a big, high-powered car, coming down one of the side roads, had noted and recognized the couple in the little runabout, and he gazed after them speculatively as he swung his own machine back the way they had come, toward Broadlawns. When he neared the club, however, he made a detour down a winding byway that was known as the “Glen Road,” and here all thought of the other two was driven from his mind when he came upon a second couple.

These two people were as much engrossed with each other as the first pair had been, and they were equally oblivious to his proximity as he slowed down the car to make as little noise as possible in passing them. They were seated upon a rustic bench half hidden behind a rock; the man wore a dapper town suit and the woman was dressed in a blue sweater and sport skirt. Her ash-blond hair was conspicuously fluffy.

“Fools!” said the occupant of the big car as he turned out upon the highway again headed for the club. “Fools!”

An hour later Mrs. Jack Fraser emerged from the caddie house and started alone for the club veranda. She was a pretty little woman in the late twenties, with a sensible, humorous mouth, healthily tanned skin, and wind-blown brown hair, and she walked with a free, athletic stride devoid of swagger. As she neared the veranda steps she caught sight of Ogden Bowles and hailed him cordially.

“Jack and I have just been around,” she said. “It was such a gorgeous afternoon that I couldn't resist it, but I really meant to call on Mrs. Carter. I heard that she had been ill for the last few days, and, as a matter of fact, we've hardly seen her here at the club for the past month.”

Ogden Bowles hesitated, eying her frank, smiling countenance for a moment as though uncertain what to reply. Then he, too, smiled.

“I am sure that Mrs. Carter's indisposition is not serious. She has promised to come to the Halloween dance with me to-morrow night,” he replied. “Won't you come in and let me give you a cup of tea, Mrs. Fraser?”

“You come in and join us,” she suggested instead. “All the rest of the crowd are having tea in the foyer.”

The atmosphere seemed more chilly indoors than out in the sunshine, and a tiny fire had been started upon the hearth. Rutherford Sowerby had settled himself squarely before it, and Jack Fraser and Samuel Estridge stood with their elbows on the mantel, deep in conversation with him. The attorney appeared to have been remonstrating, but Sowerby was continuing to speak in a loud voice: “I don't care! I tell you something's got to be done. Here it's been more than a month since the affair happened, and what has been accomplished? Exactly nothing!”

“Look here, Rutherford, unless you want the unholy scandal that we've all been trying to avoid, you'll talk lower!” Estridge spoke in keen, incisive tones with a quick glance toward the bay window where Mrs. Fraser and Ogden Bowles had joined Mrs. de Forest and Mrs. Dorrance, and it was evident that a bridge game was being arranged. “We've taken the only possible step under the circumstances2”

“Well, that step will have to lead somewhere during the next twenty-four hours, Sam, or that unholy scandal you are talking about is likely to spread through all creation!' The bank president's retort was made in a modulated voice. “It happened at the Harvest Dance, if you remember, and to-morrow night is Halloween. If the same thing or something like it occurs then we'll all be in a deuce of a hole!”

“But there are only a few of us who know, and we can all watch,” Jack Fraser suggested. He was as tanned and lithe and clear-eyed as his wife, but half a head taller, with a look of strength and purposefulness that told of a few added years and wider experiences. Just now his jaw was set, and his gray eyes were stern. “Don't think I'm not taking this seriously; the scandal of such a thing may mean mere notoriety for some of us, but actual ruin for the rest, particularly if the matter is never cleared up.”

“Cleared up!” exclaimed Sowerby. “It'll be cleared up, by gad, if every member of this club2 Oh, here's my wife!”

But Maud Sowerby, her fluffy, ash-blond hair slightly roughened by the wind, straightened her blue sweater and merely nodded to the group near the fireplace. Joining the others by the bridge table, she rang for the steward.