but he was looking down on the cups. Then of a sudden I understood.
"Jimmy," I said humbly, "I've been an ass."
"Ah," said he, "I'm glad you see it in that light. . . . The
afternoon mail has gone: but there's the night boat. You can't
telegraph, unfortunately. In his state of mind you mustn't warn him.
You must catch him sitting."
"Look here," I proposed. "It will be a nuisance for you, Jimmy--it
will probably bore you stiff. But if you'll only come along with
me . . ."
"The implied compliment is noted and accepted," said Jimmy gravely.
"The invitation must be declined, with thanks, though. Your mind is
working better already. A few hours holiday off the L.C.C., and
you'll find yourself the man you were. But the gear wants oiling.
. . . Do you remember your betting me ten to one this morning, in a
lucid interval, that Farrell would break for home? Well, I didn't
take you up. I don't mind owning that, after you'd left, and after
some thought, I told Jephson to pack _both_ suit-cases. But that
lawyer, with his infernal notion of dispatch in business, will have
put money in the Professor's pocket some hours before you reach
Biarritz. Money's his means of pursuit: and it's well on the cards
that you'll find both your birds flown. You are going to Biarritz,
Otty, for your sins--like Napoleon III. and other eminent persons
before you: and you'll have, unlike the historical character just
named, to go alone for your sins. For on your ten-to-one odds that
Farrell breaks for home it's obvious that I remain and keep goal.
Now what you have to do is to make for the bank and get out some
money, while I take a swim in the tank here. After that," added
Jimmy, relapsing into frivolity, "I'll look up the Trades Directory
for a respectable firm dealing in strait-waistcoats."
Well, there is no need to tell of my chase to Biarritz; for I
arrived there only to be baulked. The porter who entered my name in
elegant script, with many flourishes, in the Hotel Visitors' Book,
informed me that the English Doctor had departed--it was four hours
ago--to catch the night express for Paris. Here was the entry--
"Dr. J. Foe, Chelsea, London." He had left no other address.
"Had he a companion?" No, none. He had passed his time in solitary
rambles: but on this, the last day, he had spent some time in writing
furiously, up to the moment of departure.
The porter moved away to clear the letter-box, which stood pretty
near the end of the table. I examined the register. Farrell's name
was not among the entries.
They had assigned me my room, and I was about to take the lift and
inspect, when I heard the porter say to himself, "_Tiens, c'est
drole, maintenant_." He had the bundle of cleared letters in his hand
and held out one. It was addressed to me in Jack's handwriting.
I pounced for it. "_C'est a moi--Ceci s'expliquera, sans doute_."
The porter hesitated. "_Une lettre timbree--c'est contre les regies,
sinon contre la loi . . . mais puisque c'est pour monsieur,
apparement_--"
A ten-franc piece did the rest. I took the letter up to my chamber
where I opened it and read--
[FOE to OTWAY]
"Grand Hotel, Biarritz.
"Dear Roddy,--I am obliged to you by receipt of your silly
lawyer's letter enclosing 100 pounds; though what kind of
salve it can spread on your conscience to commission a fellow
called Norgate to do what you won't do at first hand I fail to
perceive. However, have it your own way. I have an enemy who,
with a little training, won't give me time to worry about my
friends.
"Farrell is improving. It was difficult at first to get a move
on a man of his stupidity, and I could only work on his one
sensitive nerve, which is cowardice. He has imagination enough
to be terrified of that which hides and doesn't declare itself
whether for good or evil.
"My own early experiments have, I admit, been amateurish. But I
shall acquire skill, and the appetite shall learn refinements,
to keep it in health. I don't think it was bad sport, on the
whole, to open with low comedy. It tickled me, anyhow, to watch
Farrell emerge from a sort of bathing-machine upon the _plage_,
moderately nude and quite unsuspicious--having given me that
artful slip in Paris--and, approaching the machine from the
rear, to insert his shirt-collar, with my card, into his
left-hand shoe.
"That was the first card I left on him. He was putting up at the
_Albion_--I had no need to search; for the local paper, of
course, prints a Visitors' List which it collects from the
hotels, and there my gentleman was, under his own name.
(Oh, we're in the simple stages of the process, thus far, and he
hasn't yet had recourse to so much as an _alias_.) But I
didn't call on him at the _Albion_.
"I have since learnt from him that the discovery of my card in
the bathing-machine shook him up--well, pretty much as the
footprint on the sand shook up Robinson Crusoe. But there's a
difference, as he'll learn, between being shaken and being
scared into fits. At all events, he didn't bolt: for I kept out
of sight and molested him no more that day. Next morning he
took courage and started off for the golf-links, which lie out
to the north, beyond the lighthouse. He was enjoying his
liberty, you understand: for I had made him carry his clubs
about and up and down the Riviera, but never allowed him to
play. That was a part of our understanding. Also he may have
had some hazy notion that, golf being to me as holy water to the
Devil, he'd be safe out there, within a charmed circle.
"There's something in it, too, Roddy. And I've half a mind, if
he doesn't wake up and improve, to offer him a handicap.
He shall be safe, all the world over, when he can find a
golf-course for sanctuary, and shall play his little game while
I wait for him and:"
Sit on a stile
And continue to smile.
"I wonder what sort of a hell it would be, going round and
round on endless rounds of golf--with a real Colonel Bogey
sitting on the stile and watching. . . . But I make no promises,
no offers, just now.
"He tells me that at the Club House he found a Golf Major of
sorts--or, as he puts it, 'a compatriot, a military gentleman,
retired, with a remarkable knowledge of India'--and seduced him
into playing a round. I should gather that Farrell plays an
indifferent game. At all events, the Golf Major was averse from
a second round, and retiring to a table in the Club veranda
allowed Farrell to call for--catch hold of your French, Roddy--
'_Deux bieres, complet_.' The waiter understood it to mean
liquid refreshment and not a double funeral. . . . Over the
drink the Golf Major, who had known Biarritz for twenty years,
explained the difference between its old and its new
golf-course, and informed Farrell that in the old one there had
used to be the most sporting hole anywhere--for a beginner.
You drove slap across a chasm of the sea: if you didn't land
your ball neatly you were in the devil of a hole, and if you
foozled you saw your ball dropping down, down, to the beach and
the Atlantic. 'Too expensive for duffers altogether, especially
when the price of balls rose. Only the caddies thrived on it,
at the risk of their necks. . . . After this tiffin we'll stroll
over and have a look at it.'
"So thither they strolled, and by and by started to amuse
themselves with pot-shot drives from the old tee. The Major
whacked his ball across to a neat lie time after time.
Farrell muffed and foozled, wasting his substance in riotous
slogging. The height of the cliff, maybe, dizzied his head.
"In this way I suppose he expended all his ammunition. At any
rate there came a pause, and a small Basque boy in a blue
_beret_ began to descend the slope very cautiously, searching
for lost balls in the scree. At the foot of the gully, where it
funnelled to a sheer drop, I stepped from under my shelter and
met the youngster, holding out a golf-ball. 'Here is one more,'
said I--'Where are the two gentlemen gone?' He told me that
they had gone back to the Club House. 'Then here is a franc for
you,' said I, 'and here is a card which you will take with the
ball and my compliments to the gentleman who cannot play golf so
well as the other gentleman.'
"The lad grinned. We climbed the cliff together, and I saw him
speed off to the Club House."
"I had thus left two cards on Farrell, and it was now his turn to
call: which he duly did, and next day; not, however, at the
Grand Hotel, but at a far more romantic place of entertainment.
"If you don't know this place--and I do not commend it to you for
entertainment towards the close of the English season--let me
tell you that, walking south from the town by paths that lead
around the curves of the foreshore, you quickly lose Biarritz
and find yourself in a deserted and melancholy country,--a sort
of blasted heath that belongs to a fairy-tale. The great
military road for Spain runs hidden, pretty wide on your left,
among the lower foothills of the Pyrenees: and from it these
foothills undulate down and drop over little cliffs to form a
moorland with patches of salt marish. In spring, they tell me,
the ground is all gay with scarlet anemones in sheets; but, when
I took the path, their glory was over and but a few late flowers
lingered. I happen, however, to like flowers for their scent
more than for their colour: and the whole of this moor was a
spilth of scent from bushes of the purple Daphne--its full
flowering time over, but its scent lingering ghostlily on the
salt wind from the sea. And the sea was forlorn as it always is
in this inner bight of the Bay of Biscay, where no ships have
any business and your whole traffic is a fishing-boat or two, or
a thread of smoke out on the horizon. You are alone between sea
and mountains; and all along the strip that separates them,
while the sky is spring, the land and the sense of it are
autumn.
"Now I don't know the history of it, but can only guess that once
on a time some enterprising speculator, fired by the sudden
Third-Empire blaze of Biarritz, conceived the project of
starting a rival watering place, here to the South, and that
they were to make its beginning with a colossal Hotel. At any
rate, here, rounding a desolate point of the foreshore, I came
upon a long desolate beach, and a long desolate building,
magnificent of facade, new and yet ruinated, fronting the Bay
with a hundred empty eye-sockets.
"It broke on the view with a shock. It made me glance over my
shoulder to make sure of the real Biarritz not far behind.
But three or four spits of land shut off that human, if vulgar,
resort. Between me and the Pyrenees this immense ghastly
sarcophagus of misdirected enterprise possessed the landscape,
and I approached it. Yes, Roddy:"
Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set,
And blew. _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_.
"The horrible place turned out to be a mask--as I hope the Dark
Tower did, after all, for Childe Roland. But it was a horrible
mask. It had been started on foundations of good stone, with
true French lordliness: but it parodied--or, rather, it
satirised--the ambitious French tendency to impose architecture
upon nature. Behind the facade, through which the wind
whistled, all was an unroofed mass of rusted girders and joists;
a skeleton framework about which I climbed--the first and last
guest--conning and guessing where suites of rooms had been
planned, to be adorned with Louis Seize furniture, for a host of
fellow-guests that had never come and now would never arrive to
make merry. I clambered along a girder, off which my heels
scaled the rust in long flakes, and thrust my head through one
of the great empty windows to take in the view.
"--Which was indeed magnificent. But my eye switched from it to
a mean little human figure, moving along the foreshore with a
gait which, even at a goodish distance, I recognised for
Farrell's. It looked like a beetle creeping, nearing, across
the flats and hummocks. But it was Farrell.
"He halted at some distance, as I had halted; arrested, as I had
been arrested, at sight of the incongruous great structure,
planted here. He drew close, cast a sort of questioning glance
seaward, very deliberately drew a pair of field-glasses from a
case slung over his shoulder, and focused them on the building,
lifting them slowly.
"I had drawn back behind my window-jamb, yet so as to watch him.
As he tilted the glasses upward, I leaned out.
"He stood for a moment, or two motionless. Then his hands sank,
with the glasses clutched in them. He walked slowly away.
When he judged himself hidden by a spit of the shore--but my
window overlooked it--he broke into a run.
"I note that he is already beginning to reduce his figure.
"I returned the call that same evening. I dropped in on
him as he took his seat to dine _solus_ at the _Albion_.
The dining-room, I should tell you, was fairly full. Usual
ruck of people: sort of too-English; English you see at
_tables-d'hote_ and nowhere else in the world, with an
end-of-season preponderance of females who stay to look after
the British chaplain a little longer than he needs, or to
gratify some obscure puritan pride in seeing everybody out, or
because there's a bargain to be squeezed with the management to
the last ounce, or peradventure because they've planned a series
of cheap visits at home for our beautiful summer and one or two
of the Idle Rich have remembered to be less idle than they were
last year, and more restive.
"To do him credit--and it makes me hopeful for him--Farrell has a
certain instinct of self-preservation. Let us never forget that
he is a widower. Amid these Amazons he had fenced a bachelor
table. I walked up to it straight and said, with a glance
around, 'Farrell, you're lonely.'
"He passed a hand over his forehead and murmured, 'Oh, for God's
sake--don't drive me like this! . . .'
"'Nonsense,' said I. 'Forget it, man. Look around you and say
if there's one of these spinsters you'd rather have for
companion. Don't raise your voice. You started in admirable
key. . . . Let's keep to it and understand one another.
I'm dining with you. If you like, we'll toss up later for who
pays: but I'm dining with you. I promise not to hurt you
to-night, if that helps conviviality.'
"'It does,' said he in a queer way. 'Let's talk.'
"'Well then,' said I confidentially. 'You're a solid man.
You've made your way in the world, and I suppose the sort of
success you've won implies some grit. . . . What makes you
afraid of me, Farrell?'
"He drank some wine and stared down on the table-cloth, knitting
his brows. 'Well,' he answered, 'I might tell you it's because
you're mad.'
"'That's nonsense,' I assured him.
"'Oh, is it?' said he. 'I'd like to be sure it is.'
"'My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time," I quoted.
'Feel it, Farrell.'
"I stretched out my wrist. He started back as though it had been
a snake.
"'On the whole you're right,' said I, drawing back my hand
slowly, watching his eyes. 'If they saw you feeling my pulse
the ladies around us would at once solve the doubt they have
discussed in the drawing-room. All _table-d'hote_ ladies
speculate concerning their fellow-guests in the hotel. . . . .
Thirty pairs of eyes were on the point of detecting you for a
fashionable physician, and by this time to-morrow thirty ladies
travelling in search of health would have found means to make
your acquaintance and pump you for medical advice on the
cheap. . . . Yes, Farrell, you have a lively instinct of
self-preservation. I will note it. . . . Now tell me.--When I
walked in just now, that same instinct prompted you to get up
and run; to run as you did along the foreshore this afternoon.
What restrained you?'
"'Why, hang it all,' he blurted with a look around; 'a fellow
couldn't very well show up like that before all these ladies!'
"He meant it too, Roddy. It came out with a flush, plump and
honest.
"It makes the chase more interesting. But I am annoyed with
myself over the miscalculation. . . . I could have sworn he was
a coward in grain. I marked all the _stigmata_. . . .
And behold he can show fight!--at any rate in presence of the
other sex. . . . Can something have happened to him, think you,
since our talk at Versailles? Is it possible that I am
_educating_ the man?
"On top of this complicating discovery I made a simplifying one.
"You know that I have a knack with animals, in the way of
handling their passions. I've never tried it on humans: for
I've never laid down any basis of knowledge, and I've always
detested empiricism. That study, as you remember, was to come.
"Well, I'll write further about it some day. . . . But I believe
I have _something like_ this power over Farrell. . . . I put out
a feeler or two--to change metaphors, I waved a hand gently over
the lyre, scarcely touching the strings; and it certainly
struck me that they responded. You will understand that a
_table-d'hote_ was no place for pushing the experiment.
And there were one or two men in the smoking-room when we sought
it.
"Farrell found himself; talked, after a while, quite well and
easily. In the smoking-room he told me a good deal about his
early life: all _bourgeois_ stuff, of course, but recounted in
the manner that belongs to it, and quite worth listening to.
"He never wilted once, until I got up to go and drank what
remained of my whisky-and-seltzer 'to our next merry meeting.'
He followed me out to the hotel doorway to say Good night.
We did not shake hands.
"There are indications that he will travel back north to-night.
He has left for Pau, to play golf. At Dax this evening--mark my
words--a solitary traveller may be observed furtively stealing
on board the night express for Paris. He will be observed: but
he won't be a solitary traveller.
"Your lawyer's letter--as I started by remarking--has arrived
opportunely. If Farrell, as I suspect, intends to go through to
London, I may reach you almost as soon as this letter, and shall
add a piece of my mind for a postscript.--Yours,"
"J. F."
I slept the night at Biarritz and started back early next morning for
London.
I found Jimmy recumbent in what he called his Young Oxford Student's
Reading Chair, alone with the racing news in the evening papers.
"Hallo!" he greeted me. "I rather expected you just now. Let's go
and dine somewhere."
"Has Jack turned up here?" I asked.
"'Course he has: Farrell too--Farrell first by a short head.
Rather a good idea, my stopping at home to keep goal. Hard lines on
you, though; all that journey for nothing. . . . If it's any
consolation, the Professor was much affected when I told him of all
the trouble you were taking, out of pure friendship, to fit him with
a strait-waistcoat. 'Good old Roddy!' he said."
"No, he didn't," I interrupted. "And if he did, we'll cut that out.
Tell me what happened."
"He said he had posted a letter to you from Biarritz: that it ought
to have arrived by this time. I told him it hadn't, and it hasn't.
If it had, I warn you I should have opened it."
"That's all right," I said. "I extracted it from the post-box at
Biarritz, and have it here. You shall read it by and by. Go on."
"Well, in my opinion, the Professor's pulling your leg--or he and
Farrell between 'em. If either's mad, it's Farrell; or else--which
I'm inclined to suspect--Farrell's a born actor."
"Now see here," I threatened, "I've travelled some thousands of
miles: I've spent two nights in the train and one in a French
bedstead haunted by mosquitoes: I've had the beast of a crossing, and
I'm in the worst possible temper. Will you, please tell me exactly
what has happened?"
"You shall have the details over dinner," he promised affably.
"For you've omitted the one observation that's relevant--your stomach
is crying aloud for a meal. The Cafe Royal is prescribed."
"Not until I've had a tub and dressed myself. The dust of
coal-brick--"
"That's all right, again. . . . I admonished Jephson. You'll find
the bath spread and your clothes laid out in your bedder, and in five
minutes or so Jephson will bring hot water in a lordly can. I, too,
will dress. . . . But meantime, here are the outlines:
"Farrell knocked in early this morning. He was agitated and he
perspired. He wished to see you at once. I pointed out that it was
impossible and, as they say in examinations, gave reasons for my
answer. Hearing it, he showed a disposition to shake at the knees
and cling to the furniture. When he went on to discover that I might
do in your place, and the furniture's place, and started clinging to
me--well, I struck. I pointed out that he was apparently sound in
wind and limb, inquired if he owed money, and having his assurance to
the contrary, suggested that he should pull himself together and copy
the Village Blacksmith.
"While we were arguing it, the Professor butted in. I'll do him the
justice to say he wasn't perspiring. But he, too, was in the devil
of a hurry to interview you. So I had to play band as before.
"The position was really rather funny. There, by the door, was the
Professor, asking questions hard, and seemingly unaware that Farrell
was anywhere in the room. Here was I, playing faithful Gelert
life-size, but pretty warily, covering Farrell--who, for aught I
knew, had gone to earth under the sofa. I couldn't hear him
breathing--and he's pretty stertorous, as a rule.
"I kept a pretty straight eye on the Professor, somehow, and told him
the facts--that you had sent the money ('Yes, I know,' said he: 'I
got it before leaving Biarritz'): that you had actually gone to that
health-resort in search of him. ('Good God!' said he. 'That's like
old Roddy'--or some words to that effect. You wouldn't let me repeat
'em, just now.) Then he started telling me about this letter he'd
posted at Biarritz, and that it should have arrived, by rights.
'Well, it hasn't,' said I, feeling pretty inhospitable for not asking
him to sit down and have a drink. . . . But, you see, I wasn't
certain he wouldn't sit down somewhere on top of Farrell. . . .
'Think he'll be home tonight?' asked the Professor. 'That's what I'm
allowing, in the circumstances,' said I. '--But you owe him some
apology, you know, because you've led him the devil of a dance.'
'Don't I realise _that!_' says he, like a man worried and much
affected. 'We'll call around to-night, on the chance of his turning
up to forgive us. Come along, Farrell!' says he.
"I whipped about; and there was Farrell, seated in that chair of
yours, bolt upright, smirking as foolish as a wet-nurse at a
christening! I couldn't have believed my eyes. . . . But there it
was--and after what I'd been listening to, five minutes before!
"As I'm describing it, it staggered me--and the more when the
Professor, looking past me, said, 'If you're ready, Farrell?' and
Farrell stood up, smiling and ready, and moved to join him.
But I kept what face I could.
"'You're going to look in again, you two?' I asked. The Professor
said 'Yes, on the chance that Roddy may turn up'; and he looked at
Farrell; and Farrell blinked and said, 'Yes, we owe him an
explanation, of course.'
"'Well,' said I,' you'll be lucky if he don't throw you both
downstairs for a pair of knockabout artists astray. I've a sense of
humour that can stretch some distance, and with the permission of our
kind friends in front this matinee performance will be repeated
to-night, when Otty's sense of humour will gape for it, no doubt,
after being stretched to the Pyrenees and back.'
"The Professor motioned Farrell out to the staircase. Then he came
forward to me and said, pretty low and serious, 'You're a good boy,
Jimmy. You're so good a boy that I want you to keep out of this.
If Roddy turns up to-night, tell him that my man's for Wimbledon,
safe and sound. On second thoughts, we won't bother a tired man,
to-night, with any excuses or apologies. By to-morrow he will
probably have had my letter, and will understand. He may or may not
decide to show it to you. I hope he won't. I hope you'll let us see
him alone to-morrow. Good-bye.'
"--Now what do you make of that?" demanded Jimmy helplessly.
"I make it out to be no jest, but pretty serious," said I.
"But luckily Farrell's located at Wimbledon. Where's Jack?" I asked.
"Don't know," answered Jimmy.
"I'm tired enough for this night, anyhow," said I. "And here's
Jephson.--'Evening, Jephson."
Jephson came in with a can in one hand and in the other a tray with a
telegram upon it.
"Good evening, Sir Roderick! Glad to see you safe home, sir," said
Jephson. "Telegram just delivered at the Lodge for Mr. Collingwood."
"For me?" said Jimmy. "I've backed nothing to-day. Been too busy."
He tore upon the envelope, read the message, and after a pause handed
it to me, whistling softly. It had been handed in at the Docks
Station, Liverpool, and it ran--
"Tell O. that F. and I sail to-night New York S.S. _Emania_.
"Foe."
NIGHT THE TWELFTH.
THE "EMANIA".
I am going to spin the next stretch of this yarn--and maybe the next
after it--in my own way. You will wonder how I happened by certain
scraps of information: but you will understand before we come to the
end.
It comes mainly from later report, but partly from documents which I
have been too busy, of late, to sift. Here they are, all mixed: and
I choose one only out of the heap--and that a passage which doesn't
help the actual story much, though it may help the understanding of
it. It occurs in a letter of Foe's written at sea and posted from
New York--
"She had been reading a magazine, borrowed from the ship's
library, and when she left me, she left it lying beside her
deck-chair. The wind ruffled its pages and threatened to tear
them: so I picked the thing up, and was about to close it, and
to stow it behind her cushion, when a story-title caught my eye
and agreeably whetted my curiosity. It was 'The Head Hunter.'
"I don't care greatly for short stories. Fiction as a rule bores
me in inverse proportion to its length--which seems a paradox
and liable to be reduced to the absurd by any moderately expert
logician. Yet you will find it experimentally true of five
readers out of six. . . . Moreover the yarn had little or
nothing to do with real head-hunting--except in its preamble.
I soon glanced at the end, and had no further use for the story.
"But I turned my attention back to the preamble and reread it
twice. The fellow, an American, has a queer cocky irregular
style: but he can write when he chooses: and in one shot he so
fairly hit me between wind and water that I had to steal the
book, carry it down to my cabin and copy out the passage for
your benefit. . . . Yes, for yours: because it conveys something
I've been wanting you to understand about this chase of mine,
something I couldn't have put into words though I'd tried for a
month. I enclose it herewith. . . .
"When I had finished my copying, I took the thing back, meaning
to slip it under Miss Denistoun's cushion. But she had returned
to her chair, and so I was caught red-handed. 'So it was you?'
said she. 'What have you been doing with my magazine?'
'Skimming it,' said I--which was true enough, literally, but I
didn't manage it very well. 'Did you find anything to interest
you specially?' she asked. 'Well, yes,' I admitted;' I picked
it up and lit on something that promised well: but the story
came to nothing.' She gave me a glance and I felt sure she had
spotted my awkwardness and was going to pursue the catechism.
But she didn't. To my relief she harked back to our previous
talk. At tea-time, however, she remembered to take the
magazine away with her. . . . It has not yet been returned to
store. . . ."
(ENCLOSURE)
"'_Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated
and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen
known as the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless
little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the
subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail
of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous
mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable
jungles, always near, with the inevitable hand of death
uplifted, betraying their pursuits only by such signs as a beast
or a bird or a gliding serpent might make--a twig crackling in
the awful sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the
screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the
rushes of a water-level--a hint of death for every mile and
every hour--they amused me greatly, those little fellows of one
idea._'"
You observe that a lady has come into the story at last, as she was
bound to do. (You will hear of another and a very different one by
and by.) It is not my fault that she enters it so late--I tell of
things as they occurred--though a clever writer would have dragged
her in long before this. I wish to God I hadn't to bring her into it
at all. I slipped out her surname just now. . . .
It was through being a friend of mine that she comes into it.
Constantia Denistoun and I had ridden ponies, tickled for trout,
bird-nested, tumbled off trees, out of duck-punts, through forbidden
ice, and into every form of juvenile disgrace, together as boy and
girl. Her father and mine had been college friends, and (I believe)
had both fallen in love with my mother, at a College ball, and my
father won--but all on an understanding of honourable combat.
Denistoun set out to travel, quite in the traditional way of the
Rejected One. He was a Yorkshire squire with plenty of money, and
could afford the prescribed cure. He travelled as far as to
Virginia, U.S.A., where he halted, and wooed and won the heiress of a
wide estate of cotton and tobacco and a great Palladian house, all
devastated and ruined by the War, in which her father had fallen,
one of Lee's pet leaders of cavalry. . . . Yes, I know it sounds
like a tale out of Ouida: but such things happen, and this thing
happened. . . . Denistoun scaled the twenty steps of the Ionic
portico, cleft his way through the cobwebs and briers that were
living and dying for Dixie, kicked over the grand piano that Dinah's
duster still reverentially spared, and carried off the enchanted
Princess across the seas to Yorkshire: where in due course she bore
him a daughter, Constantia, and, some years later, a son who
eventually came into the property but doesn't come into the story.
In the meantime it had happened that _I_ saw the light. . . .
My mother died, a year later: and after seven years of widowhood my
father married again. My sister Sally--the recipient of those long
letters you see me inditing o' nights--is my step-sister, and an
adored one at that.
There you have the family history, or enough of it. The old
friendship between my father and Squire Denistoun had never been
broken; and now that death had taken away the last excuse for a
rivalry which had been felt but to be renounced, Constantia and I--
unconscious brats--shared holidays, as it chanced at my home or hers,
in nefarious poaching beside Avon or in gallops between her northern
moors and the sea.
That is all, or almost all. I have to add that, having fallen into
most scrapes with her, I ended by proposing one in which she gently
but decisively declined to share the risk. . . . I am inclined to
think that, having been so frank with her, and so frequent, in
confidences about others to whom my heart was lost, she may have
missed the bloom on the recital. . . . But there it was; and that's
that, as they say.
I accused her at the time of a priggish, unnatural craving for things
of the intellect. All my excuse was that at a certain time of her
life she took a sudden turn for reading and setting queer new values
on things. But she was always a sportswoman, a woman of the open
air, and--here's the point--always knowledgeable with animals and
always beloved by them, but always (as it seemed to me) inclined to
be severe and disciplinary. To a lean pack she was Diana; they
fawned behind her for no pay but hope of her word to let slip.
But she would beat them off the piled platter, and from a fed lap-dog
she could scarcely restrain her hands. If you think this hasn't to
do with the story, I can only assure you that it has.
One thing more--She had met Foe; for the first time at a
luncheon-party in my rooms at Cambridge, in May Week; a second time,
it may be, at a May Week ball--but that wouldn't count, for she
danced divinely and Foe couldn't compete for nuts. She may have met
him once or twice afterwards, in London. It's not likely.
Anyhow (as she has told me since) she recognised him at once when he
turned up on the _Emania_.
She and her mother were bound out to visit some friends at
Washington, thence to fare South and stay a while with a cousin who
held the old homestead in which her mother retained some sort of
dower share.
Thus she recognised Foe as soon as he appeared on deck.
But he did not appear on deck until the _Emania_ was well out from
Queenstown; having made sure that Farrell didn't bolt there.
The two--need I tell it?--had not taken passage in collusion.
Farrell was escaping, Foe on his trail. But Foe had no idea of any
dramatic surprise on board. Having made sure of his man, he just
took a remnant first-class berth at the last moment, turned in, and
went to sleep.
In all their commerce (you will have begun to remark) Foe and Farrell
were apt to yield, at intervals, to an abandonment of weariness, but
so that they alternated, the exhaustion of one seeming ever to double
the other's fever. Foe sought his bunk and lay there like a log.
Farrell, after the first shock of reading his pursuer's name in the
Passengers' Book--where it sprang to his eyes fair and square--fell
to haunting the passage-way, low down in the vessel, on which one
dreadful door refused to open. His terror of it so preoccupied him
that he forgot to feel sea-sick. But the steward of those nether
regions marked him, by the electric lamps, as a lurking passenger to
be watched; and wondered who, at that depth in the ship, could be
carrying valuables to tempt a middle-aged gentleman who (if looks
were any guide) ought to be up and losing money to the regular
card-sharpers.
It was not until the second day out, and pretty late in the
afternoon, that Foe emerged from his cabin, neatly dressed and hale.
(Unlike some Professors I have known, Jack kept his clothes brushed
and his hair cut.) As he opened his door his ear caught a slight
shuffling sound; whereupon he smiled and stepped quickly down the
passage to the turn of the companion way.
"No hurry, Farrell!" he called; and Farrell, arrested, turned slowly
about on the stair. "Man, you're like the swain in Thackeray:"
Although I enter not,
Yet round about the spot
Oft-times I hover--
"Solicitous, were you?--thought I might be sea-sick?"
"I was wondering," Farrell stammered. "Seeing that you didn't turn
up at meals--"
(Here I must read you a queer remark from the letter in which Jack
reported this encounter. Here's the extract:--)
"_Do you know, Roddy, that silly simple answer gave me half a
fright for a moment, or a fright for half a moment--I forget
which. . . . What I had to remember then was my discovery that I
had my second keyboard in reserve and could pull certain stops
out of him at will. . . . But seriously, I wouldn't, without
that power, back myself in this experiment against a man who
obstinately persisted in forgiving. It came on me with a
flash--and I offer this tribute to the Christian religion_."
Foe's answer was, "Very kind of you. As a fact, I have been
subsisting on hard biscuit and weak whisky-and-water: though I'm an
excellent sailor, as they say. . . . It's a diet that suits me when
I'm working hard."
"Working?" exclaimed Farrell. "What? Head-work, d'you mean? . . .
Doctor, this is the best news you could have told me. If only I
could know that you were picking up your interests--getting back to
yourself--"
Foe took him by the arm. "It's no good, unfortunately," he answered.
"Come up on deck, and I'll tell you."
On deck he repeated, "It's no good. I've been hard at it, working on
my memory, trying to sketch out a kind of monograph--summary of
conclusions--salvage from the wreck. But it won't do. It was an
edifice to be built up on data, bit by bit, like an atoll. . . . Ever
seen a coral reef, by the way? We'll inspect one--many perhaps--on
our travels. . . . I'd burn in the pit rather than smatter out
popular guess-work. Yes, all personal pride apart, I couldn't do it.
But however badly I set down conclusions, they've all rested on data,
they've all grown up on data, and I haven't the data. . . . I wrote
out half a dozen pages and then asked myself, 'What would _you_ say
if a man came along professing to have made this discovery?
You'd demand his evidence, and you'd be right. Of course you'd be
right. And if he didn't produce it, you'd call him a quack.
Right again.' . . . From this personal point of view, to be sure, I
might take this sorry way out--print my conclusions, and anticipate
the demand for evidence by throwing myself overboard. . . . In the
dim and distant future some fellow might strike the lost path, take
the pains that I've taken, work out the theory, yes, and (it's even
possible) be generous enough to add that, by some freak of guessing,
in the year 1907, a certain Dr. John Foe, of whom nothing further is
known, did, in unscientific fashion, hit on the truth, or a part of
the truth. Oh, damn! _Why_ should I burn in the pit, or throw myself
overboard, or go down to the shades for a quack, because a thing like
you has crawled out of the Tottenham Court Road. . . . Eh? Well, I
won't, anyhow: and so you see how it is, and how it's going to be."
Farrell leaned against the rail, and held to a boat's davit, while
his gaze wandered vaguely out over the Atlantic as if it would
capture some wireless message. ("I knew how it would be," adds Foe
in his letter reporting this talk. "He was going to try the
forgive-and-forget with me: but by this time I was sure of myself.")
"Listen to me, Doctor," Farrell began. "Listen to me, for God's
pity! I didn't get off at Queenstown, though I knew you were on
board--"
"No use if you had," put in Foe. "You don't think I had overlooked
that possibility, do you?"
"Well, I didn't, anyway," was the answer. "And I'll tell you why.
Honest I will. . . . We're both here and bound for America, ain't we?
And, from what I've heard, there's no such expensive, bright,
up-to-date laboratories--if that's the way to pronounce it--as you'll
find in the States, in every walk of Science. Now, I never meant you
an injury, Doctor; but I did you one--that I freely own. . . . What I
say is, if money can make any amends, and if there's an outfit for
science to be found in the States to your mind, why, I'll improve on
it, sir. And I'm not saying it, as you might suppose, under any
threat, but because I've been thinking it out and I mean it. I'm a
childless man--"
Foe cut him short here. "My only trouble with you, Farrell,"
said he, "is that you may reach your grave without understanding.
If I thought that wasn't preventible somehow, it would save me
trouble to wring your neck here and now and throw you overboard.
As it is--"
But, as it was, along the deck just then came Constantia Denistoun,
with her mother leaning on her arm and a maid following. She
recognised Foe and halted.
"Why, good Heavens! . . . and I'd no idea that you were on the
_Emania_," said she. "Mother, this is Mr. Foe--Roddy's friend,
you know. . . . Or ought I to call you Doctor, or Professor, or
what? . . . You weren't anything of that sort anyhow, when we met--
how many years ago? at Cambridge."
--That, or to that effect. . . . Constantia told me afterwards that
she didn't remember throwing more than a glance at Farrell, whom she
took, very pardonably, to be a chance acquaintance from the
smoking-room, picked up as such acquaintances are picked up on
ship-board. And Farrell stood back a couple of paces. To do him
justice, he was in no wise a thruster.
"It's odd," she went on, "that we haven't run across one another
until this moment. What's your business, over yonder? if that's not
a rude question."
"It's a natural one, anyhow," Foe answered. "My business? Well, it
has been suggested to me that a trip in the States, to see what
they're doing in the way of scientific outfit and, maybe, get hints
for a new laboratory, might not be waste of time."
"Yes, I know; I've heard," she said softly. "It's splendid to find
you taking it like this . . . picking up the pieces, eh? . . .
I wonder if"--she hesitated--"if I might ask you some questions?
. . . Just as much as you choose to tell: but something to put into
a letter to our Roddy, you know. Any news of you will be honey to
him. . . . You'll be writing from New York, of course. But one man
doesn't tell another that he's looking brave and well; and yet that's
often what the other may be most wanting to know."
Foe was touched (so he's told me). He said some ordinary thing that
tried to show he was grateful, and Constantia and her mother passed
on. He had not introduced Farrell.
Constantia told me most of the rest, some months later, pouring tea
for me in her flat. There is not much in it. She said that she had
taken very little account of Jack's companion; had just reckoned him
up for a chance idler in his company--"a sort of super-commercial
traveller"; so she described him; "not at all bad-looking though."
She went on to tell that she had been mildly surprised to see them at
dinner, seated together; further surprised and even intrigued, to see
them at breakfast together, next morning.
"Later," said she, "I asked him, 'Who's your friend that you didn't
introduce yesterday?' 'Well,' said Dr. Foe, 'I didn't introduce him
because I thought you mightn't like it. He's rather an outsider.
His name's Farrell.' 'Farrell,' I said--'But isn't that--wasn't
he--?' 'Yes, he is, and he was,' Dr. Foe told me very gravely.
'That's just it.' I couldn't help asking how, after what had
happened, they came to be travelling in company. 'That's the funny
part of it,' was the answer; 'he's trying to make some kind of--well,
of a reparation.' I thought better of Dr. Foe, Roddy. . . . It seems
so _mean_, somehow, that after what you've told me, Dr. Foe should
be-what shall I say?--accepting this reparation from a man who
happens to be rich!"
Constantia repeated this, in effect, some two or three nights later.
We had danced through a waltz together and agreed to sit out another.
We sat it out, under a palm. It was somewhere in the immediate
neighbourhood of Queen's Gate, and a fashionable band, tired of
modernist tunes, was throbbing out the old _Wiener Blatter_. . . .
If Constantia remembered that sacred tune, she gave no sign of it.
"I thought better--somehow--of your friend," said Constantia.
I gave her a sort of guessing look. "You may take it from me, Con,"
I said, "that the trouble's not there. I'm worried about Jack.
I haven't heard from him for months. But he's not of that make,
whatever he is."
"Are you sure?" she asked. "I feel that I'd like to know. If you
are right, why were he and this Mr. Farrell such close friends?"
"Farrell's pretty impossible, I agree," said I.
Constantia opened her fan and snapped it. "Impossible?" said she.
"Well, I don't know. . . . Dr. Foe introduced him, later on . . .
and what do you think Mamma said? She said that she had supposed
them at first sight to be relatives. There was a trick about the
eyes and the corner of the brow. . . . You are quite sure," she added
irrelevantly, "that Dr.--that your friend--would be above--?"
"I swear to you, Con," I assured her. "I know Jack Foe inside and
out."
She had opened her fan again very deliberately; and as deliberately
she closed it.
"No man ever knew that of a man," she said; "nor no woman either.
. . . You're a rotter, Roddy--but you're rather a dear."
NIGHT THE THIRTEENTH.
ESCAPE.
Somewhere in the bustle of landing and scrimmage past the Customs,
Miss Denistoun lost sight of the two travellers; and with that, for a
time, she goes out of the story.
You may almost put it that for a time they do the same. At all
events for the next few weeks the record keeps a very slight hold on
them and their doings. Jack knew, you see, that--though not a
disapproving sort, as a rule, and in those days (though you children
will hardly believe it) inclined to like my friends the better for
doing what they jolly well pleased--I barred this vendetta-game of
his, and would have called him off if I could. Folk were a bit more
squeamish, if you remember, in those dear old pre-War days.
But please note _this_, for it is a part of his story. Jack wrote
seldom, having a sense that I didn't want to hear. When he did
write, however, he was liable at any time to break away from the
light, half-jesting, half-defiant tone which he had purposely chosen
to cover our disagreement, and to give me a sentence or two, or even
a page, of cold-blooded confession. It may have been that his
purpose, at that point, suddenly absorbed him, sucked him under.
It may have been that his fixed idea had begun to spread like a
disease over his other sensibilities, hardening and deadening the
tissue, so that he did this kind of thing unconsciously. It may have
been both. You shall judge before we have finished.
I will give you just one specimen. It occurs in the very first
letter addressed from America. He and Farrell had spent five days in
New York:
"I am going to ease the chain--to run it out several lengths,
in fact. I shall still keep pretty close in attendance on the
patient, but my professional visits will be rarer. A new and
more strenuous course of treatment requires these holidays, if
his nerves are not to break down under it.
"The suggestion, after all, came from him, and I am merely
improving on it. . . . This continent has started a small
heat-wave--the first of the summer. Now Farrell, who perspires
freely, tells me that he doesn't mind any amount of heat, so
that it isn't accompanied by noise: but noise and heat combined
drive him crazy. I had myself noted that while the tall
buildings here excited no curiosity in him, he acted as the
veriest rubberneck under the clang and roar of the overhead
trains; and the din of Broadway, he confessed, gave him vertigo
after the soft tide of traffic that moves broad and full--
'strong without rage, without o'erflowing full'--down Tottenham
Court Road, embanked with antique furniture or colourable
imitations.
"He made this confession to me in the _entr'acte_ of a silly
vaudeville, to witness which we had been carried by an elevator
some sixteen storeys and landed on a roof crowded with palms and
funny people behaving like millionaires. In the _entr'acte_ the
band sank its blare suddenly to a sort of 'Home, Sweet Home'
adagio, and after a minute of it Farrell put up a hand, covering
his eyes, and I saw the tears welling--yes, positively--between
his fingers. He's sentimental, of course.
"I asked what was the matter? He turned me a face like poor
Susan's when at the thrush's song she beheld:"
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide
And a river flow on through the vale of Cheapside.
He said pitiably that he wanted--that he wanted very much--to go
home; and gave as his reason that New York was too noisy for
him. . . . A sudden notion took me at this. 'If that's the
trouble,' I answered, 'one voice in this city shall cease its
small contribution to the din. . . . We will try,' I said,
'the sedative of silence.'
"For three days now I have been applying this treatment.
At breakfast, luncheon, dinner; in the street, at the theatre;
I sit or walk with him, saying never a word, silent as a shadow.
He desires nothing so little, I need not tell you. In the
infernal din of this town he looks at me and would sell his
soul for the sound of an English voice--even his worst enemy's.
It is torture, and he will break down if I don't give him a
holiday. The curious part of it is that, under this twist of
the screw, he has apparently found some resource of pluck.
He doesn't entreat, though it is killing him with quite curious
rapidity. I must give him a holiday to-morrow."
I piece it out from later letters that from New York they harked out
and harked back, to and from various excursions--quite ordinary ones.
I might, if it were worth while, construct the itinerary; but it
would take a lot of useless labour and yield nothing of importance.
If Farrell, under this careful slackness of pursuit, had made a bolt
for Texas or Alaska, the chronicle just here might be worth reciting.
But he didn't, and it isn't. Buffalo--Long Island--Newport--and, in
one of Jack's letters, Chicago for farthest West--occur in a miz-maze
fashion. It is obvious to me that during these months Farrell, kept
on the run, ran like a hare (and a pretty tame one); that twice or
thrice he headed back for New York, and was headed off.
I passed over each letter, as it came, to Jimmy, It was over some
later letter, pretty much like the one I've just read to you, that
Jimmy, frowning thoughtfully, put the sudden question, "I say, Otty,
are we fond enough of him to start on another wild-goose chase?--to
America this time, and together?"
"Jack's my best friend, of course," I answered after a moment.
"You don't tell me--" and here I broke off, for he was eyeing me
queerly.
"The Professor is, or was, a pretty good friend of mine," said he.
"But you hesitated a moment. Why? . . . Oh, you needn't answer:
I'll tell you. When I asked, 'Are you so fond of him?' for a
moment--just for a flash--you hadn't Jack Foe in your mind, but
Farrell."
"Well, that's true," I owned. "I'm pretty angry with Jack: he's
playing it outside the touch-line, in my opinion. Except that I
detest cruelty, Farrell's nothing to me, of course."
"I wonder," Jimmy mused. "Sometimes, when I'm thinking over this
affair--but let us confine ourselves to the Professor. He's in some
danger, if you think _that_ worth the journey. They shoot pretty
quick in the States, and they don't value human life a bit as we
value it in England: or so I've always heard. If it's true--and it
would be rather interesting to run across and find this out for
oneself--one of these days Farrell will be pushed outside _his_
touch-line--outside the British conventions in which he lives and
moves and has his poor being--and a second later the Professor will
get six pellets of lead pumped into him."
"Oh, as for that," said I, "Jack must look after himself, as he's
well able to. When a man takes to head-hunting, it's no job for his
friends to save him risks."
"Glad you look at it so," said Jimmy. "Then, so far as the
Professor's concerned, it's from himself we're not protecting him,
just now?"
"Or from the self which is not himself," I suggested.
"That's better," Jimmy agreed, and again fell a-musing. "Sometimes I
think we might get closer to it yet". . . But he did not supply the
definition. After half-a-minute's brooding he woke up, as it were,
with a start. "Could you sail this next week?" he asked.
Well, we sailed, five days later; and there is no need to say more of
this trip than that it panned out a fiasco worse than my first.
At New York we beat up the police; and, later on, worried Mulberry
Street and the great detective service for which the city is famous.
Police and detectives availed us nothing. I knew that by the same
mail which brought his latest letter to me, Foe had drawn 600 pounds
on Norgate; and Norgate had dispatched the money without delay, five
days ahead of us. The address was a hotel at the then fashionable
end of Third Avenue. There we found their names on the register.
Plain sailing enough. Farrell had left, as we calculated (the
detectives helping us), on the day the money presumably arrived, and
at about six in the evening; Foe some fifteen or sixteen hours later.
And, with that, we were up against a wall. Not a trace could be
discovered of either from the moment he had walked out of the hotel.
Farrell, having paid his bill, had walked out, carrying a small
handbag (or 'grip,' as the porter termed it), leaving a portmanteau
behind, with word that he would return next day and fetch it.
We were allowed to examine the portmanteau. It contained some shirts
and collars and two suits of clothes, but no clue whatever--not a
scrap of paper in any of the pockets. Foe had departed leisurably
next morning, with his slight baggage.
Our detective (to do him justice) did his best to earn his money.
He carefully traced out and documented the movements of the two
travellers from one to another of the various addresses I was able to
supply: and he handed in a report, which attested not only his
calligraphy but a high degree of professional zeal. It corresponded
with everything I knew already and decorated it with details which
could only have been accumulated by conscientious research. They
tallied with--they corroborated--they substantiated--they touched
up--the bald facts we already knew. But they did not advance us one
foot beyond the portals of the Flaxman Building Hotel, out of which
Farrell and Foe had walked, at fifteen hours' interval, and walked
straight into vacancy.
In short, Jimmy and I sailed for home, a fortnight later, utterly
beaten.
Now I'm telling the story in my own way. A novelist, who knew how to
work it, would (I'm pretty sure) keep up the mystery just about here.
But I'm going to put in what happened, though I didn't hear about it
until two years later.
What happened was that, one evening, Jack drove Farrell too far, and
over a trifle. Without knowing it, too, he had been teaching Farrell
to learn cunning. They were back in New York and (it seems almost
too silly to repeat) seated in a restaurant, ordering dinner.
Jack held the _carte du jour_: the waiter was at his elbow; Farrell
sat opposite, waiting. For some twenty-four hours--that is, since
their return to New York City--Jack had chosen to be talkative.
Farrell was even encouraged to hope that he had broken the spell of
his hatred, and that the next boat for England might carry them home
in company and forgiving. Just then the devil put it into Jack to
resume his torture. He laid down the card and sat silent, the waiter
still at his elbow. "Well, what shall it be?" asked Farrell, a
trifle faintly. Jack, like the Tar-Baby, kept on saying nothing.
The waiter looked about him, and fetched back his attention politely.
"What shall it be?" Farrell repeated. Then, as Jack stared quietly
at the table, not answering, "Go and attend to the next table," said
he to the man. "You can come back in three minutes." The waiter
went. "Now," said Farrell, laying down the napkin he had unfolded,
"are you going to speak?"
Foe picked up the card again and studied it.
"Yes or no, damn you?" demanded Farrell. "Here and now I'll have an
end to this monkeying--Yes, or no?" he cried explosively.
Foe pointed a finger at the chair from which Farrell had sprung up.
"I won't!" protested Farrell, and wrenched himself away. "Here's the
end of it, and I'm shut of you!"
He dragged himself to the door. Foe, still studying the card through
his glasses, did not even trouble to throw a glance after him.
Once in the street, Farrell felt his chain broken: he hailed a cab,
and was driven off to his hotel. There he packed, paid his bill, and
vanished with his grip into the night, leaving his portmanteau behind
with a word that he would return for it.
Foe had taught him cunning.
He bethought him of Renton, an old foreman of his; a highly
intelligent fellow, who had come out to New York, some years before,
to better himself, and had so far succeeded that he now controlled
and practically owned a mammoth furnishing emporium--The Home Circle
Store--in Twenty-Third Street. Farrell was pretty sure of the
address; because Renton, who had long since taken out his papers of
naturalisation, regularly remembered his old employer on Thanksgiving
Day and sent him a report of his prosperity, mixed up with no little
sentiment. To this Farrell had for some years responded with a note
of his good wishes, cordial, but brief and businesslike. Of late,
however, this acknowledgment, though still punctual, had tended to
express itself in the form of a Christmas-card.
Farrell confirmed his recollection of the address by checking it in
the Telephone Book, and paid a call on the Home Circle Store next
afternoon, while Foe was enjoying a siesta in that state of lassitude
which (as I've told you) almost always in one or other of the men
followed their crises of animosity.
Renton was unaffectedly glad to see Farrell. "Well, Mr. Farrell," he
said, as they shook hands, "well, _sir!_ If this isn't a sight for
sore eyes! And--when I've been meaning, every fall, to step across
home and see your luck--to think that it should be you first dropping
in upon me!" He rushed Farrell up and down elevators, over floor
after floor of his great establishment, perspiring (for the afternoon
was hot), swelling with hospitality and pardonable pride. "And when
we've done, sir, I must take you to my little place up town and make
you acquainted with Mrs. Renton. She's not by any means the least
part of my luck, sir. She'll be all over it when I present you,
having so often heard tell--You've aged, Mr. Farrell! And yet,
in a way, you haven't. . . . You were putting on waist when I saw you
last, and now you're what-one-might-call in good condition--almost
thin. Yes, sir, I heard about your poor lady . . . I wrote about it,
if you remember. Sudden, as I understand? . . . But if you look at
it in one way, that's often for the best: and in the midst of life--
You'll be taking dinner with us. That's understood."
"Look here, Ned," Farrell interrupted. "It's done me good to shake
you by the hand and see you so flourishing. But I've looked you up
because--well, because I'm in a tight place, and I wonder if you
could anyways help."
"Eh?" Renton pulled up and looked at him shrewdly. "What's wrong?
Nothing to do with the old firm, now, surely? . . . I get the London
_Times_ sent over, and your last Shareholders' Meeting was a perfect
Hallelujah Chorus. Why, you're quoted--"
Now you'll know Farrell, by this time, for a man of his class--and a
pretty good class it is, in England, when all's said and done; for a
man of the sort that resents a suspicion on his business about as
quickly as he'd resent one on his private and domestic honour--
perhaps even a trifle more smartly. His business, in short, _is_ the
first home and hearth of his honour. So Farrell cut in, very quick
and hot,--
"If my business were only twice as solid as yours, Ned Renton, I
might be worrying you about it. . . . There, don't take me amiss!
. . . I've come to trouble you about myself. Fact is, I'm in a
hole. There's a man after me; and I want you to get me out of this
place pretty quick and without drawing any attention more than you
can avoid."
"O-oh!" said Renton, rubbing his chin, and looking serious. "And
what about the lady?"
"There's no woman in this," Farrell assured him. "No, Ned; nor the
trace of one."
"That's curious," said Renton, still reflective. "You being a
widower, I thought, maybe . . . But as between friends, you'll
understand, I'm not asking."
"I'll tell you the gist of it later," said Farrell. "It started over
politics."
"So? . . . We've a way with that trouble over here," said Renton.
"Now you mention it, I'd read in the London _Times_ that you were
running for municipal government, and then somehow you seemed to fade
out. . . . I wondered why. . . . Is that part of the story?"
Farrell answered that it was. They were seated in Renton's private
office, and Renton picked up a small square block of wood from his
desk. It looked like a paper-weight.
"I've a certain amount of--well, we'll call it influence--hereabouts,
if any man happens to be troubling you," he suggested musingly, and
glanced at Farrell. "But you're not taking it that way, I see."
Farrell nodded.
"You just want to be cleared out. . . . That's all right. You shall
tell me all about it later, boss--any time that suits you."
He handed the paperweight across to Farrell. "Ever come across that
kind of wood?" he asked.
Farrell examined it. "Never," he answered. "It looks like
mahogany--if 'tweren't for the colour. Dyed, is it?"
"Not a bit. I could show you with a chisel in two minutes. . . . But
you're right. Mahogany it is, and cuts like mahogany. . . . I keep a
high-class warehouse of stuff lower down-town, and there I'll show
you a log of it, seven-by-four. It's from Costa Rica. Would you
care to prospect? . . . I don't mind sharing secrets with the old
firm, as you always dealt with me honourably and we're both growing
old enough to remember old kindness."
"I'd make a holiday of it," said Farrell heartily, fingering the
wood. "Comes from Costa Rica, eh?"
"There's not much of it going, even there," said Renton.
"Not enough, I'm afraid, to start a fashionable craze. It was
brought to me, as a sample, by an enterprising skipper from Puerto
Limon, and I was going to send back a man with him, to prospect.
. . . But it's not detracting from his character to say that he
can't tell mahogany from walnut with his finger-tips in the dark--as
_you_ could, boss. If it's a holiday you want, with a trifle of high
cabinet-science thrown in, what about taking his place?"
"It's the loveliest stuff," said Farrell, rapt, fingering the wood
delicately.
"Well, now, that makes me feel good, having my old master's word for
it, that taught me all I know. Look at it sideways and catch the
tints under the light. 'Opaline mahogany' we'll call it.
Come down-town with me, and I'll show you the baulk of it. It don't
grow big. . . . What about cash?"
"I've a plenty for the present," Farrell assured him. "Clearing's my
only difficulty."
"You trust to me, and I'll oblige," said his old employee.
Farrell went back to his hotel that evening, paid his bill and walked
out with his grip. At Renton's warehouse in the lower town he
changed his dress for a workman's; was conveyed to the Quay by
Renton, who shipped him aboard the lime-tramp. She carried him down
to Puerto Limon; where the skipper took a holiday, and the pair
struck farther down the coast on mule-back for a hundred miles or so,
and then inland for the Mosquito village hard by which they were to
find the grove of this mysterious purple hardwood. They found it--as
Farrell had agreed with Renton in expecting--to be no forest,
scarcely even a grove, but a mere patch, and the timber a "sport"
though an exceedingly beautiful one. On their return to Limon
Farrell wrote out a careful report. The wood was priceless.
It deserved a new genius to design a new style of inlay for it.
Given that, with the very pink of artists among cabinet-makers and a
knowledgeable man to put the furniture on the market, a reasonable
fortune was to be made. With skill it could be propagated: but for
two generations and longer it must depend on its rarity. He added
some suggestions for propagating it and wound up, "Turn these over,
for what they are worth, to someone who understands this climate and
is botanist as well as nurseryman. It won't profit you or me, Ned;
and we've no children. Mr. Weekes has, though"--Weekes was the
skipper--"and his grandchildren ought to have something to inherit.
I'd hate to die and think that such stuff was being lost to the
trade. But for the standing timber, anyway, there's only one word.
_Buy_. Yours gratefully, P. Farrell."
When his report was written and signed, he handed it to Weekes.
"We can mail this, if you approve," he said.
Weekes read it over and approved the document. "But I don't approve
mailing it," he assured Farrell. "No, sirree: your boss has a name
for playing straight, but we won't give him all that time and
temptation. We'll go back and hand him this together--for you come
into it, I guess, on some floor or other."
"No," said Farrell. "The report's as good as it promises; but I'm
out of this job. The only favour you can do me is to help me shift
down this coast--as far as Colon, for instance. And I owe it to
Renton, of course, to mail this letter. With your knowledge of the
boats and trains, you can get to New York along with it or even ahead
of it."
"That's all very well, so far as it goes," said Weekes, thoughtfully;
"and I see your point. But again, what about _you_?"
"Ah, to be sure," answered Farrell, pondering in his turn.
"There's the risk of leaving me behind to chip in on you both.
Well . . . You don't run any whalers from this port, do you?"
"Whalers?" Captain Weekes opened his eyes.
"I understand," Farrell explained, "that they keep out at sea for a
considerable time. . . . No, and it wouldn't help your confidence if
I told you that there's a man in New York--an Englishman like
myself--hunting me for my life. . . . But see here. Of your
knowledge find me a southward bound vessel that, once out, certainly
won't make port for a fortnight. We'll mail this report from the
Quay, and you can put me on board at the last moment, watch me waving
farewells from the offing, and then hurry north as soon as you
please."
Well, this, or something like it, was agreed upon; and here Farrell
sails out of the story for ten months, a passenger on the schooner
_Garcia_, bound for Colon.