The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale | Page 5

It was an impossible
situation--it was untenable. That he could play his role in the
underworld with only the underworld to reckon with--yes; but with the
police as well, watching him in his character of a poor, drug-wrecked
artist, constantly in touch with him, likely at any moment to make the
discovery that Smarlinghue and Jimmie Dale, the millionaire clubman,
a leader in New York's most exclusive set, were one and the same--no!
And yet what was he to do? With the Gray Seal it had been different.
Then, police and underworld alike were openly allied as common
enemies against him--but none had known who the Gray Seal was until
that night when the Magpie had roused the Bad Lands like a hive of
swarming hornets with the news that the Gray Seal was Larry the Bat;

none had known until that night when it was accepted as a fact that
Larry the Bat, and therefore the Gray Seal, had perished miserably in
the tenement fire.
Around the squalid room, lighted now only by the moonrays, Jimmie
Dale's eyes travelled slowly, abstractedly. Yes, in that one particular it
was different; but here was the New Sanctuary, and again he was living
the old life in close, intimate companionship with the underworld--the
old life that only six months ago he had thought to have done with
forever!
He turned his face suddenly to the wall, and lay very still--only his
hands still remained tightly clenched, and the hard, set look on his face
grew harder still.
Six months ago, like some mocking illusion, like some phantom of
unreality that jeered at him, it seemed now, he had lived for a few short
weeks in a dreamland of wondrous happiness, a happiness that all his
own great wealth had never been able to bring him, a happiness that no
wealth could ever buy--the joy of her--the glad promise that for always
their lives would be lived together--and then, as though she had
vanished utterly from the face of the earth, she was gone.
The Tocsin! Marie LaSalle to the world, she was always, and always
would be, the Tocsin to him. Gone! A hand unclenched and passed
heavily across his eyes and flirted the hair back from his forehead. She
had taken her place in her own world again; her fortune had been
restored to her, its management placed in the hands of a trust company;
the interior of the mansion on Fifth Avenue, with its sliding walls and
secret passages, that had served as headquarters for the Crime Club,
was in the process of reconstruction--and she had disappeared.
It had come suddenly, and yet--as he understood now, though then he
had only attributed it to an exaggerated prudence on her part--not
without warning. In the three weeks that had intervened between the
night of the fire in the old Sanctuary and her disappearance, she had
permitted him to see her only at such times and at such intervals as
would be consistent with the most casual of acquaintanceships. He

remembered well enough now her answer to his constant protests, an
answer that was always the same. "Jimmie," she had said, "a sudden
intimacy between us would undo all that you have done--you know that.
It would not only renew, but would be almost proof positive to those
who are left of the Crime Club that their suspicions of Jimmie Dale
were justified, and from that as a starting point it would not take a very
clever brain to identify Jimmie Dale as Larry the Bat--and the Gray
Seal. Don't you see! You never knew me before all the misery and
trouble came--there was nothing between us then. To see too much of
each other now, to have too much in common now would only be to
court disaster. Our intimacy must appear to come gradually, to come
naturally. We must wait--a year at least--Jimmie."
A year! And within a few hours following the last occasion on which
she had said that, Jason, his butler, had laid the morning mail upon the
breakfast table, and he had found her note.
It seemed as though he were living that moment over again now, as he
lay here on the cot in the darkness--his eagerness as he had recognised
the well-known hand amongst the pile of correspondence, the thrill
akin to tenderness with which he had opened the note; and then the
utter misery of it all, the room swirling about him, the blind agony in
which he had risen from his chair, and, as he had groped his way from
the room, the sudden, pitiful anxiety on the faithful old Jason's face,
which, even in his own distress, he had not failed to note and
understand and be grateful for.
There had been only a