Captivating Mary Carstairs Part 3

"Not to put too fine a point on it," mused he, glancing out of his twentieth story window, "they flock to me, children do. I'm their good old Uncle Dudley. But why the deuce isn't she five years younger?"

Clearly, it was the next step that was the most delicate: getting Mary aboard the yacht. This was both the crux and the _finale_ of the whole thing: for Uncle Elbert was to be waiting for them, in a closed carriage, at a private dock near 130th Street (Peter remaining in Hunston to notify him by telephone of the start down), and Varney's responsibilities were over when the _Cypriani_ turned her nose homeward.

But here lay the thin ice. If anything should happen to go wrong at the moment when they were coaxing Mary on the yacht, if there was a leak in their plans or anybody suspected anything, he saw that the situation might be exceedingly awkward. The penalties for being fairly caught with the goods promised to be severe. As to kidnapping, he certainly remembered reading in the newspapers that some States punished it with death. At any rate, maybe the natives would try to thrash him and Peter.

In hopeful moments he conjured up visions of the deuce to pay.

But, after all, he was going to Hunston, whether he liked it or not, simply because Uncle Elbert had asked him. The lonely old gentleman, he knew, loved him like a son: he had turned straight to him in his hour of need. This had touched the young man, and had finally made up his mind for him. Moreover Mary, a spoiled little piece who was suffered to set her smug childish will against the combined wills of both her parents, aroused his keenest antipathy. To put her in her place, to teach her that children must obey their parents in the Lord, was a duty to society, to the State. What Uncle Elbert wanted with such a child, he could not conceive; but since he did want her, have her he should.

Tilting back his office chair and running his hand through his hair, Varney longed to spank her.

This thought came to him, definitely and for about the seventh time, at half-past one o'clock on the third day, Monday. At the same moment, his telephone-bell rang sharply. It was the sailing-master to say that his good spouse had come aboard and that everything on the _Cypriani_ was in readiness for the start.

"I'll be on board inside of an hour," said Varney.

He telephoned to Uncle Elbert, telephoned to Peter, and locked up his desk. To his office he casually gave out that pressing business matters were calling him out of town for a day or two.

The two young men had been as furtive as possible about their proposed journey. They had not met since the night Varney had dangled the hope of jail and disgrace into Peter's lightening face, and so, or otherwise, cajoled him into going along. Both of them had kept carefully away from the _Cypriani_. Now they proceeded to her by different routes, and reached her at different times, Peter first. Their luggage had gone aboard before them, and there was no longer a thing to wait for. At three o'clock, on Varney's signal, the s.h.i.+p's bell sounded, her whistle shrieked, and she slid off through the waters of the bay.

About the start there was nothing in the least dramatic: they had merely begun moving through the water and that was all. The _Cypriani_, for all her odd errand, was merely one of a thousand boats which indifferently crossed each other's wakes in one of the most crowded harbors in the world.

"For all the lime-light we draw," observed Maginnis, drinking in the freshening breeze, "we might be running up to Harlem to address the fortnightly meeting of a Girls' Friendly Society."

Varney said: "Give us a chance, will you?"

CHAPTER III

THEY ARRIVE IN HUNSTON AND FALL IN WITH A STRANGER

The landscape near Hunston, as it happened, was superfluously pretty. It deserved a group of resident artists to admire and to catch it upon canvas; and it had, roughly speaking, only artisans out of a job. The one blot was the town, sprawling hideously over the hillside. Set down against the perennial wood, by the side of the everlasting river, it looked very cheap and common. But all this was by day. Now night fell upon the poor little city and mercifully hid it from view.

They had made the start too late for hurry to be any object. It was only a three hours' run for the _Cypriani_, but she took it slowly, using four. At half-past six o'clock, when their destination was drawing near, the two men went below and dined. At seven, while they were still at table, they heard the slow-down signal, and, a moment later, the rattle of the anchor line. Now, at quarter-past seven, Varney lounged alone by the starboard rail and acquainted himself with the purview.

They had run perhaps quarter of a mile above the town, for reasons which he had not communicated to the sailing-master in transmitting his orders. One was that they might be removed somewhat from native curiosity. The other was, they might be near the Carstairs residence, which was up this way somewhere. So, between the yacht and the town lay hill and wood intervening. The _Cypriani_, so to say, had anch.o.r.ed in the country. Only a light glimmering here and there through the trees indicated the nearness of man's abode.

A soporific quality lurked in the quiet solitude, and Varney, sunk in a deck-chair, yawned. They had decided at dinner that they would do nothing that night but go to bed, for it seemed plain that there was nothing else to do: little girls did not ramble abroad alone after dark.

Up the companion-way and over the glistening after-deck strolled Peter, an eye-catching figure in the flooding moonlight. For, retiring to his stateroom from the table, he had divested himself of much raiment and encased his figure in a great purple bathrobe. He was a man who loved to be comfortable, was Peter. Topping the robe, he wore his new Panama.

Varney looked around at the sound of footsteps, and was considerably struck by his friend's appearance.

"Feeling well, old man?" he asked with solicitude.

"Certainly."

"Not seasick at all? You won't let me fetch you the hot-water bottle?"

"No, a.s.s."

Peter sank down in an upholstered wicker chair with pillows in it, and looked out appreciatively at the night. The yacht's lights were set, but her deck bulbs hung dark; for the soft and s.h.i.+mmering radiance of the sky made man's illumination an offense.

However, aesthetics, like everything else, has its place in human economy and no more. No one aboard the _Cypriani_ became so absorbed in the marvels of nature as to become insensible to other pleasures. The air, new and fine from the hands of its Maker, acquired a distinct flavor of nicotine as it flitted past the yacht. From some hidden depth rose the subdued and convalescent snores of that early retirer, the sailing-master's wife. Below forward, two deck-hands were thoughtfully playing set-back for pennies, while a machinist sat by and read a sporting extra by a swinging bulb. Above forward, on a coil of rope, McTosh, the head steward and one of Mr. Carstairs's oldest servants, smoked a bad pipe, and expectorated stoically into the Hudson.

The thought of the essential commonplaceness of this sort of thing recurred to Peter Maginnis. For all his life of idleness, which was, as it were, accidental, Peter was essentially a man of action; and life's sedentary movements irked him sorely.

"Who is the individual monkeying around at the bow?" he asked presently.

"It is Mr. Bissett, the s.h.i.+p's engineer, who is putting a coat of white lead over the yacht's name."

"Aha! Aren't we old-sleuthy, though! And what's that piece of stage-play for?"

"All these little hookers," said Varney, "are listed in a book, which many persons own. Why have the local press tell everybody to-morrow that the yacht _Cypriani_ belonging to Mr. Carstairs, husband once-removed to our own Mrs. Elbert Carstairs, is anch.o.r.ed off these sh.o.r.es?"

"It seems," said Peter, "like a lot of smoke for such a little fire."

He got up and sprawled on the rail, his yellow Panama pulled far over his eyes, his gaze fixed on the s.h.i.+ning water.

"First and last, I've seen rivers in my time," he said presently, "big and little, pretty and not, clean and soiled, decent and indecent. Yes, boy," said he, "you can take it from me that I've seen the world's darnedest in the matter of rivers, and I have liked them all from Ganges to the Sacramento and back again. There was a time when I didn't have that sort of personal feeling for 'em, but a little chap up in Canada, he helped me to the light. He was the keenest on rivers I ever knew."

He broke off to yawn greatly, started to resume, thought better of it, checked himself, and presently said in an absent voice:

"No, that's too long to tell."

"There's two hours till bedtime."

Peter straightened and began strolling aimlessly about the deck, half regretting that they had decided to spend the evening on the yacht.

Varney looked after him with a certain sense of guilt. Against this background of quiet night and moonlit peace, his enterprise began to look very small and easy. A ramble through the pleasant woods over there, a little girl met and played with, a leisurely stroll hand-in-hand down a woodland path to the yacht--was it for this that he had begged the a.s.sistance of Peter Maginnis, of the large administrative abilities and the teeming energies? Varney began to be a little ashamed of himself. To follow out Peter's own figure, it appeared that he had called out the fire department to help him put out a smoking sheet of note-paper on a hearth.

Soon, in one of his goings and comings, Peter halted. "There was another Hunston dispatch in the paper this morning," he vouchsafed.

"Politics?"

"Said the reform movement was a joke."

"Good one?"

"Good movement, you mean?"

"No--good joke."

"No reform movement is ever a good joke, under any circ.u.mstances whatsoever. Where it appears a joke at all, it is the kind that would appeal only to pinheads of the dottiest nature."

"I see."

"I'm going up there to-morrow," said Peter, nodding toward the town, "and look into it a little. If there is time, I may even decide to show these fellows how a reform proposition ought to be handled to ensure results."

Far off on the hill a single light twinkled through the trees, very yellow against the pale moonlight. Varney's eye fell upon it and absently held it. It was Mary Carstairs's light, though, of course, he had no means of knowing that.

Presently Peter lolled around and looked at him. "H'm! Sunk in a sodden slumber, I suppose?"