Captivating Mary Carstairs Part 24

The editor pitched another cigarette-end out of the window. Again a shout from the street indicated that it had become a bone of bitter contest among the town's smokers of the _sub-rosa_ cla.s.s.

"Suppose I were to tell you," said Smith slowly, "that I antic.i.p.ate a shakeup here which will cut the backbone out of my profits? What would you say to that?"

"I suppose I should say that it was ever the custom of rats to desert a sinking s.h.i.+p. So that was your mainspring, was it?"

"On the contrary," said Smith. "I am taking what is technically known as a small rise out of you. You ask why I sold. It was a man with the price. Money," began Mr. Smith, "screams. The cash on my desk was this man's way of doing business, and a good deal it was. However, it'll net him six per cent year in and out, at that--a good rate in these lean times. I, of course, did better. I got--shall we say?--pickings. The past tense already, heigho! Well, it's been a most instructive life. My father taught me to write. He was esteemed a good editor, and he was, but at eighteen I was correcting his leaders for him. Hand Greeley a soft pencil and a pa.s.s at the encyclopedia, so he used to say, and he could prove anything under the sun. I am like that, except that--well, I don't believe I need the encyclopedia. It wasn't Greeley who made the remark, of course. It's a rule on the press to pin all journalistic anecdotes on Greeley. You sign the pledge when you go in. To be accounted strictly moral," continued Smith, "an editor must be blind in one eye and astigmatic in the other. Then he rings the bull's-eye of Virtue ten times out of ten, and the clergy bleats with delight. You can't find spiritual candor anywhere with a telescope, except in the criminal cla.s.ses. There are no Pharisees there, G.o.d be praised! For my part, I see both sides of every question that was ever asked, and usually--don't you think?--both of them are right. I first adopt my point of view and subsequently prove it. Obviously, this is where the pickings come in. My grandfather started this paper on two hundred and fifty dollars, fifty dollars of which, I have heard, was his own. I could knock off for life as an idle member of the predatory cla.s.ses, I suppose, but after all, I was made for an editor. In years past, I have, of course, had my offers from New York. Two of them were left open forever, and a little while ago, I telegraphed down and took the best. A grateful wire came in five minutes ahead of you. And that," he concluded wearily, in the flattest tones of a curiously flat voice, "is the life story of C. Smith, editor, up to the hour of going to press."

Varney, who had never once been tempted to interrupt this strange apologia, struggled with an impulse to feel desperately sorry for Mr.

Smith, and almost overcame it.

"Smith," he said, in a moment, "why don't you tell me why you sold?"

The editor got up and stared out of the window. Presently he turned, an odd faint flush tingeing his ordinarily colorless cheek. His air of smooth cynicism was gone, for once; and Varney saw then, as he had somehow suspected before, that the editor of the _Gazette_ wore polished bravado as a cloak and that underneath it he carried a rather troubled soul.

"You are right," said Smith, "I--was twigging you again. Let us say,"

he added, looking at Varney with a kind of shamefaced defiance, "that a man gets tired of living on pickings after a while."

If he had been ten times a liar, ten times a slanderer and a.s.sa.s.sin of character, a man would have known that the young editor spoke the truth then. That knowledge disarmed Varney. To have sold the _Gazette_ to one who would prost.i.tute it still further was hardly a n.o.ble act; but for Smith it meant unmistakably that he wanted to cut loose from the old evil walks where he had done ill by his honor and battened exceedingly.

"All along," said Varney slowly, "I have had a kind of sneaking feeling that there was a spark left in you yet."

He picked up his hat and stick again, and faced the pale young editor.

"Smith, you have done me a devilish wrong. You have knowingly printed a vile slander about me, aware that the natural result of your falsehood was that some poor drunken fool would shoot me down from behind. When I walked in here five minutes ago, I had two purposes in mind. One was to buy your paper. The other was to throw you down the front stairs. I am leaving now without doing either. I abandoned the first because I had to; I abandon the second, voluntarily, because--I don't quite know why--but I think it is because it seems inappropriate to hit a man when he is down and something is just driving him to try to scramble up."

He put on his hat and started to go; but Smith stopped him with a gesture. He let his eye, from which all sign of emotion had faded, run slowly over Varney's slender figure.

"I wasn't such a slouch in my younger days," he said. "Football at my prep school, football and crew at my college. Boxed some at odd moments; was counted fair to middling. Some offhand practice since with people I've roasted--agents, actors, and the like. As to that throwing downstairs proposition now, if you'd care to try it on--"

Varney shook his head. "I don't know that I can explain it--and no one regrets it more than I--but all the wish to _smash_ you, Smith, has gone away somewhere. The bottom has dropped out of it. Good-bye."

"You are going? So am I," said Smith, with a fair imitation of his usual lightness. "Going away for good. I hope you will come through this all right. I'll never see you again. Shake hands, will you? You couldn't know it, of course, but--it--is possible that I owe something to--you two fellows."

He stood motionless, half turned away, thin hands hanging loosely at his sides.

Varney, who had colored slightly, took a last look at him. "No," he said, suddenly much embarra.s.sed, "I--I'm afraid I couldn't do it in the way you mean, and so there wouldn't be any point in it. But I--I do wish you luck with all my heart."

He shut the door, and started down the stairway; and he straightway forgot Smith in the returning tide of his own difficulties. He saw clearly that there was no longer any hope; his plans were wrecked past mending. Persuading Miss Carstairs to keep her engagement to-morrow, his one great problem this morning, had become an unimportant detail now.

Charlie Hammerton, with his merciless knowledge, filled the whole horizon like a menacing mirage.

It would not be enough to close the boy's month till after the luncheon and then let it open to babble. For Elbert Carstairs had flatly drawn the line at a yellow aftermath of sensation. He would count a tall-typed scandal the day after to-morrow, when his daughter was with him, fully as bad as the same affliction now. And, the newspaper finally lost to them, there was no conceivable way in which that scandal could be averted now.

But about the moment when his foot hit the bottom of the worn stairs, the door at the head of them burst open, and a curiously stirred voice, which he had some difficulty in recognizing as Smith's, called his name.

"Varney! oh, Varney! I--really meant to tell you--and then I forgot."

He turned and saw the editor's pale face hanging over the banisters.

"It was Maginnis I sold the _Gazette_ to, you know--Peter Maginnis. I wouldn't have sold it to anybody else. You'll find him at the hotel eating supper."

Varney, looking at him, knew then what it was that Smith thought he owed to him and Maginnis.

He went back up the stairs and the two men shook hands in rather an agitated silence.

CHAPTER XIV

CONFERENCE BETWEEN MR. HACKLEY, THE DOG MAN, AND MR. RYAN, THE BOSS

At half past six o'clock, or thereabouts, James Hackley dragged slowly up Main Street. He was garbed in his working suit of denim blue, trimmed with monkey wrench and chisel, and he wore, further, an air of exaggerated fatigue. A rounded protuberance upon his cheek indicated that the exhilaration of the quid was not wanting to his inner man, but the solace he drew from it appeared pitifully trifling. Now and then he would pause, rest his person against a lamp-post, or the front of some emporium, and shake his head despondently, like one most fearful of the consequences of certain matters.

Since four o'clock that afternoon, in fact, Mr. Hackley had been out upon a reluctant stint of lawn-mowing, reluctant because he hated all work with a t.i.tanic hatred and sedulously cultivated the conviction that his was a delicate health. In view of the magnificent windfall in connection with the killing of his dog, it had not been his design to accept any more retainers for a long time to come. That occurrence had lifted him, as by the ears, from the proletariat into the capitalistic leisure cla.s.s; and the map of the world had become but the portrait of his oyster.

But at noon as he lolled upon his rear veranda, chatting kindly with his wife as she hung the linen of quality upon her drying lines, a lady had knocked upon his door, beautiful and insistent, to wheedle his will from him. It was only a tiny bit of a lawn, she had reiterated imploringly, hardly a const.i.tutional to cut, and there was not one tall fellow in all Hunston whom she would permit to touch it but Hackley.

Dead to all flattery as he was, his backbone ran to water at the clinging beauty of her smile, and so incredibly betrayed him into yielding. And now, at hard upon half after six o'clock, post-meridian, the dangerous dews of night already beginning to fall, he leaned against a lamp-post, a physical wreck, with a long block and a half still separating him from the comforts of home.

At the next corner but one above rose the red brick Ottoman, its inviting side stretching for many yards down the street towards him.

Windows cut it here and there along its length, and over their green silk half-curtains, poured forth a golden light which was hospitality made visible. Yet, so strange are the ways of life, the proprietor of all these luxuries, who stood at the furthest window, beyond Hackley's range, did not look happy in their possession. His eyes gleamed fiercely; his heavy chin protruded savagely, as though deliberately insulting Main Street and the northward universe. Even his small derby, which he seldom doffed save at the hour for taps, contrived to bespeak a certain ferocity.

The Ottoman bar was bare of customers, all Hunston now verging towards its evening meal. Ryan rested his elbow upon its polished surface, and glared into the twilight. He was, as luck had it, in a terrible ill-humor. For he knew himself to-day for a man who had been physically flouted, a boss whose supremacy had been violently a.s.sailed, a king who felt his throne careen sickeningly beneath him.

Last night, when four men whom he had never seen before, three of them masked, had borne him off on a long wild drive, and dropped him at ten o'clock in a lonely bit of country eight miles from the Academy Theatre, there had at least been action to give point to his choler. All but out of his mind with pa.s.sion, he had besought them all, singly or quadruply, to descend from their carriage and meet him in combat, thirsting sorely to kill or be killed. But they had only laughed at him, silently, and galloped away, leaving him screaming out futile curses on the empty night air.

Two hours later, when he had got back to Hunston, after an interminable nightmare of running over rough ground with unaccustomed limbs, and stumbling heavily to earth, and rising up to struggle again, he had learned to what uses his enemies had put that absence. Smith had related the story in the fastness of his office, and in wholly different guise from that which it wore next morning in the columns of his newspaper.

And Ryan, listening, had slowly calmed, calmed to the still fury of implacable hate.

But he and Smith had quarreled violently. He was for publis.h.i.+ng the story of his taking off in type as black as the dastardly act. Smith had a difficult time in holding him down, however much he pointed out that Ryan had no shadow of proof against his new adversary on the yacht, and that public sympathy in an affair of this sort was always with the successful. In the end Smith had carried his point, because he was, of those two men, both the more wise and the more resolute. But this morning they had conferred again and quarreled even more bitterly.

Yet Ryan, plotting in the window of his splendid gin-palace, his eye always sweeping the evening street as though a-search, was not thinking of the young editor now. Two other policies for the days to come monopolized his attention. One of these was crus.h.i.+ng victory at the polls. The other was revenge. Probably in thinking of these, he put them at the moment in reverse order.

"d.a.m.n him!" he suddenly exploded: and it was not little Hare that he cursed. "d.a.m.n his soul!"

In the next breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied with the tedium of life indoors, would see what beguilement might await him abroad.

The boss looked first up the street and permitted his beady eye to range casually over the view. Then his gaze came slowly down and rested in time upon the person of James Hackley, now almost directly opposite. The boss's countenance lit up with a smile of pleased surprise.

"Why, h.e.l.lo, Jim!" he called out. "Where you been hidin' yourself lately? Ain't seen you for a week o' Sundays. Come across and pa.s.s the time of day!"

Mr. Hackley, who had been debating whether or not he should pause for inspiration at the Ottoman, and had just virtuously declared for the negative, shambled over.

Ryan eyed him sympathetically. "You look kind o' played out, Jim. What you been doin' with yourself? Come in and take a drop of somethin' to hearten you up some. On the house."

"Well," said Mr. Hackley, unable to resist the novel fascination of liquoring gratis, "just a weeny mite for to cut the dust out o' my windpipe."

Ryan went behind the bar and served them himself, selecting with care a bottle which he described as the primest stuff in the house. From this he poured Hackley a remarkably stiff potation, slightly wetting the bottom of his own gla.s.s the while. The bottle he left standing ready on the bar.