How about the gambling?"
"My friend," said Wilmot, "you read me like a book. The gambling is all to the bad. I have just given you all the money I had in the world."
"A few dollars are of no use to me," said the beggar.
"Nor to me. Don't worry."
"I am not worrying. I'm thinking that you and I have something in common. And for that reason I am tempted to ask if a few thousand would be of any use to you?"
Wilmot smiled with engaging candor. "Fifteen thousand would."
"You shall have them," said the beggar shortly. He pointed to a glazed door across which was printed in gilt letters:
BLIZZARD--MFR. HATS
"That," said the beggar, "is my name, and that is my place of business. Come in."
Wilmot followed the beggar through the glass door, which at opening and closing caused a bell to clang. The front of the establishment was occupied by a dust-ridden salesroom, and an office with yellow-pine partitions. As he followed the beggar into this, Wilmot caught a glimpse in the distance of fifteen or twenty young girls who sat at a long table industriously plaiting straw hats. He lifted his own hat a little mechanically, and thought that he had never seen so many pretty girls at one time under one roof.
II
Wilmot buttoned his coat over fifteen one-thousand-dollar bills. Only supreme necessity could have persuaded him to take them, since, although he had not put his name to a paper of any kind, he felt a little as if he had sold himself to the devil. But Blizzard had shown him no deviltry; only kindness and a certain whimsicality of speech and a point of view that was engaging.
The transaction finished, Wilmot was for leaving, but being under obligation to the legless man was at pains not to be abrupt. He lingered then a little, and they talked.
"The first time we met," said the beggar, "you were roller-skating with a pretty child. She was so pretty that I asked you her name. And I have never forgotten it."
He did not add that he had watched that pretty child's goings and comings for many years; that he had lain in wait to see her pass; that he had bribed servants in her father's house to give him news of her: and that the day approached when, fearing neither man nor God, he proposed that she should disappear from the world that knew her, and go down into the infamous depths of that vengeance which had been the key-note of his life. Nor did he add that there were but two contingencies which he felt might thwart his plans: her marriage to Wilmot Allen, or his own untimely death. And he feared the latter but little. The former, however, had at times seemed imminent to those who spied upon the daily life of the heiress for him, and in lending money to Wilmot he was taking a first step toward making it impossible. For Barbara herself Blizzard had at this time no more feeling than for a pawn upon a chess-board. It pleased his sense of fitness to know she was beautiful; and to be told that she was like sunshine in her father's house.
"What has become of her?" he said.
"Of Miss Ferris?" Wilmot did not care to discuss her with a stranger. But unfortunately there were fifteen thousand dollars of the stranger's money in his inside pocket. "She became a great favorite in society," he said, "and then dropped out to study art."
"Painting?" The legless man knew perfectly well, but it suited him to make inquiries. "Music?"
"Sculpture," said Wilmot shortly.
"Is she succeeding?"
"She works very hard, and she has talent."
"That is not enthusiastic."
"You mustn't ask me; I'm not an art critic."
"What a pity."
"A pity that I'm not an art critic?"
"No. A pity for a beautiful girl to do anything but exist."
Wilmot's eyebrows went up a little. The beggar's speech surprised him, and pleased him, since it expressed a favorite thought of his own.
"Is any of her work on exhibition? Having seen her once, one takes an interest, you know."
"I think there is nothing that can be seen," said Wilmot coolly, "except upon special invitation. And I think she is very shy of showing anything that she has done."
"True artists," said Blizzard, who criminally was an artist himself and knew what he was talking about, "live in the future."
Again Wilmot's eyebrows went up a little. Why should a legless beggar be able to make loans of fifteen thousand dollars, and why should he be able to talk like a gentleman?
"I am interested in art," continued Blizzard; "sometimes I have earned a few dollars by sitting for my portrait."
He did not add that he continually put himself in the way of artists in the hope that his fame as a model would reach Barbara, and touch her imagination. He did not add that he haunted Washington Square and McBurney Place, where her studio was, in the hope that his face, which he knew to be different and more terrible than other faces, might kindle a fire of inspiration in her. He believed rightly that if a woman once looked him in the eyes she would never forget him. But hitherto Barbara had not so much as glanced at him, since she carried her lovely head very high, and looked straight before her as she went. While, as for him, he stood upon the stumps of his legs, a gigantic sort of dwarf, beneath the notice of the proud-eyed and the tall.
Wilmot passed out of the place in deep thought; not even the pretty girls plaiting straw won a glance from him. Coupled with the relief of being out of present difficulties was a disagreeable sense of foreboding. Suppose the legless man were to ask favors of him before the money could be repaid? Suppose they were favors which a gentleman could not grant? And he determined to find out, from the police if necessary, just what sort of a man it was with whom he had had dealings.
III
It seemed to Wilmot that he had not seen Barbara for an age. And indeed a week had passed without their meeting. Therefore, although he had often been forbidden to call during working hours, he had himself driven to 17 McBurney Place and climbed the two flights of stairs to her studio.
It was a disconsolate Barbara who received him. She had on her work-apron, but she was not working. She sat in a deep chair, and presented the soles of her small shoes to an open fire. Wilmot, expecting to be scolded for disobeying orders, was relieved at being received with visible signs of pleasure.
"You're just the person I wanted to see," she said, "just the one and only Wilmot in the world."
"Are you dying?" he asked.
She laughed. "I'm discouraged. I've come to one of those times when you just want to chuck everything. And there's a man at the bottom of it."
"Tell me," said Wilmot, "in words of two syllables."
"Well," said Barbara, "I woke up in the middle of the night out of a dream. I dreamed I'd made a statue of Satan after the fall from heaven, and that everybody said: 'Well done, Barbs, bully for you,' 'Got Rodin skinned a mile'--it was you said that--and so forth and so on. I rose, swollen with conceit, and made a sketch of the head I'd dreamed about, so's not to forget the pose, and then I went to sleep again. Next day, early, a man stopped me in Washington Square and begged for a dime. I looked at him, and he had just the expression of the fallen Satan I'd dreamed about--a beast of a face, but all filled with a sort of hopeless longing to 'get back,' and remorse. I invited him to pose for me--not for a dime--but for real money. Well, he fell for it. And for all that morning he looked just the way I wanted