"Well, neither has anyone else, I venture to say. He is a shrewd,
shifty old rounder, Preble; no more and no less. And there are men in
New York who will tell you that he sails pretty close to the wind a
good bit of the time--that he has to to save his face. It's a nasty
thing to say, but I more than half believe he is playing Gerald up to
Conetta for purely fiduciary reasons."
"But Conetta has no money," I protested.
"No; but Aunt Mehitable has--a barrel of it. And it will come to
Conetta, sooner or later--always provided Conetta marries to please
Aunt Mehitable."
Now this statement was not exactly in accordance with the facts, as I
knew them, or thought I knew them, and I said so.
"Miss Mehitable's will is already made, and I happen to know that her
money will not go to Conetta. It will be divided among a number of
charitable institutions."
We were on the starboard promenade forward, and Grey looked around as
if to make sure there were no overhearers.
"I'm going to breach a professional confidence and tell you something,
Preble, taking it for granted that it will go no farther. One day about
three years ago, while I was reading for my Bar examinations in the
office of Maxim, Townsend and Maxim, Miss Mehitable did make just such
a will as you mention; I know it because I made the transcript of it.
That will was left in the office safe, and something like a week later
she came back, asked for it, got it, and destroyed it. Then she had
Townsend draw another--which I also copied. That one, so far as I know,
is still in existence and unchanged. It leaves a few bequests to the
charity folk, and the bulk of the property to Conetta."
If Grey had drawn off and hit me in the face I could scarcely have
been more dumfounded. For some inscrutable--and wicked--reason of her
own, Aunt Mehitable had wanted to break our engagement, Conetta's and
mine, and the loss of my patrimony had given her an easy half of the
means. Upon hearing of my loss she had quickly supplied the other half
by making the will which she didn't mean to let stand--which she had
promptly destroyed as soon as I had been safely eliminated. The grim
irony of her expedient might have been amusing if I hadn't been so
angry. She might easily have lied to me about the disposition of her
property, but that would have been against her principles. To quiet
what she was probably calling her conscience, she had actually made the
will with which she had clubbed me to death; a will which she fully
intended to revoke, and did revoke--after I was out of the way.
How much or how little Grey suspected the turmoil he had stirred up in
me by his breach of office confidence I do not know, but he was good
enough to give me a chance to get back to normal, searching his pockets
for a cigar, and, when he had found one, turning his back to me--and
the breeze--while he lighted it.
"Do you think Miss Gilmore believes in the major's coupon clipping?" I
asked, after I had contrived to swallow the shock he had given me.
Again he let me see the slow wink.
"That is the farcical part of it. For a sharp-eyed, keen-witted maiden
lady who has made a good bit of real money buying and selling in the
Street, it is little less than wonderful. But it's a fact, Preble; she
_does_ believe in it. She lets the major write himself off at his own
valuation, and never dreams of asking to see a certified check. She
seems to regard Jerry Dupuyster as one of the few really desirable
matrimonial propositions on the market. That is why she is here--with
Conetta."
This last assertion of Grey's told me nothing that I had not
already set down as an obvious fact, but his gossipy talk afforded
a luminous commentary upon the manner in which an isolated group of
human beings will secrete all sorts of small uncharities, if the
isolation be only complete enough. These little incidents to the
contrary notwithstanding, however, I could not see that Van Dyck
was making much progress in his unmasking experiment. Up to this
time, and outwardly, at least, we were still only a party of winter
loiterers, pleasurers, decently grateful to our host and decently and
conventionally well-behaved. If there were any plots or conspiracies
of the money-hunting sort in the air, they were not suffered to become
unpleasantly obtrusive.
But for one member of the party I was conscious of a great and growing
contempt. In former days we of the younger set had known Holly Barclay
as a sort of reincarnation of the Beau Brummell type; an idler of the
clubs who lived upon his wife's money, and who was much too indolent to
be even manfully vicious. Good-looking, in a way, self-centered, and
even more finically careful for the creature comforts and luxuries than
Major Terwilliger, I remember it had seemed grossly incredible to us
younger folk that he could be the father of the thoughtful, high-minded
and convincingly beautiful young woman who paid him the compliment of
being his daughter.
From the beginning of the voyage Barclay's attitude had been
sufficiently apparent to me, or I thought it was. I decided that he
was somewhat anxiously weighing the pros and cons as between Van Dyck
and Ingerson in the matrimonial scale; weighing them strictly with
reference to the results as they might affect him, individually, and
quite without concern for his daughter's future happiness. That Bonteck
was a clean man and a gentleman, while his rival was everything that
Van Dyck was not, appeared to cut no figure.
It was hugely farcical, if one could but shut his eyes to the possible
tragedies involved. Holly Barclay had joined the _Andromeda's_ company
to dispose of his daughter. Ingerson had come as a cold-blooded buyer
to the market. Miss Mehitable was hoping to corner the major and
Gerald Dupuyster; and Mrs. Van Tromp, yielding precedence, of course,
to Barclay and his schemings, had come on the chance of dividing the
spoils, since one of the two chief matrimonial prizes would be left
after Madeleine--or rather Madeleine's father--had secured the other.
That Mrs. Van Tromp's armament was only a secondary battery might
have been denied by some. Alicia, the oldest of the trio, was, as
I may have said, an attractive young woman of the athletic type, a
rider to hounds, a champion swimmer, and a good comrade where men were
concerned. In the modern meaning of the term she was a man's woman,
with a sort of compelling charm that was all her own.
Beatrice, the second daughter, had, as has been noted, a bookish turn.
If she had chosen to study surgery she would have been a ruthless
vivisector. As a result of this inquiring bent, she had an astonishing,
and sometimes rather disconcerting, knowledge of things as they are.
But to offset the touch of the blue-stocking, she owned a pair of
long-lashed eyes that kindled quickly at any torch of sentiment, and
they were set in a face of uncommon sweetness--winsomeness, one would
say, if the word were not so desperately outworn.
Edith, for whose sake Billy Grisdale was cutting a good half of his
Sophomore year, was a replica, in rounder lines and easier curves, of
her sister Alicia. Having been carefully held back to give her older
sisters a clear field, she was still something of a tomboy, but her
very roughnesses were lovable, and Billy's callow folly found, it must
be admitted, its full and sufficient excuse in its object.
It was Edie Van Tromp, roaming the yacht like a restless bit of
misdirected energy, as was her custom, who came to fling herself into
the steamer chair next to mine; this in the afternoon of the day when
John Grey had given me still less cause to love Miss Mehitable Gilmore.
"I'm bored, Mr. Richard Preble--bored to extinction!" she gasped,
fanning herself with a vigor that was all her own. "Is nothing ever
going to happen on this tiresome ship?"
"There are things happening all the time, if we only have eyes to
perceive them," I told her, laughing. "In your own case, for example,
there is Billy Grisdale. To an interested and sympathetic onlooker
like myself it would seem that he is constantly happening in as many
different ways as he can devise."
"Oh, Billy--yes," she admitted, with pouting emphasis. Then, with a
great show of confidence: "Uncle Dick--I may call you Uncle Dick, if I
want to, mayn't I?--if you were only a little older and grayer I might
tell you something."
"Tell me anyhow," I urged. "I am old enough to be perfectly safe, don't
you think?"
"It's Billy, and you started it," she went on pertly. "That boy is
fairly worrying the life out of me. Positively, I'm getting the
dreadful habit of carrying my head on my shoulder. He--he's always just
there, you know, if I look around."
"Is that why you are bored?"
"I suppose it is; it must be. Nothing can ever come of it, of course.
Billy is nothing but just a handsome, good-natured, sweet-tempered
_boy_. It would be years and years, and then more years before----"
"So it would," I agreed. "And, besides, Billy has three brothers and
two sisters coming along, and Grisdale _père_ is only moderately
well-to-do, as fortunes go nowadays."
Instantly Miss Edith's straight-browed eyes flashed blue fire.
"Money--always and forever money!" she flamed out. "I haven't heard
anything else all my life! One would think that heaven itself was
paved with it and that the angels wear gold coins for charmstrings. I
_hate_ it!"
"Oh, no, you don't," I hastened to say. "It's a good, broad-backed
little beast, and you can always count upon it for carrying the load.
And Billy will probably have to make his own way, without even so much
as a loan of the little beast."
"I don't care! I think it is perfectly frightful the way we bow down
and kowtow to your beast--the great god Cash! I'd rather wash dishes
and make bread--for two!"
This seemed to be verging toward the edge of things serious. I knew
that Mrs. Van Tromp was suffering Billy only because he was so absurdly
young as to be supposedly harmless. But if Edith, the healthy-bodied
and strong-willed, were even beginning to take notice, there was
trouble ahead.
"We can none of us afford to defy the conventions, my dear girl," I
cautioned, taking the avuncular rôle she had tried to thrust upon me.
"And we mustn't let ourselves get into narrow little ruts. The play's
the thing, and we are only a part of the audience--you and I."
"The play?" she echoed doubtfully. "You mean the--the----"
"I mean the great human comedy, of course. It is going on all around
us, all the time."
"I don't get you," she said, in the free phrase which may have been her
own, or may have been a Billy Grisdale transplantation.
"You are too young and inexperienced," I asserted in mock gravity.
"Otherwise you could hardly have lived a week in the _Andromeda_
without realizing that the stage is set, with the call-boy making his
last hasty round, beating upon the doors of the dressing-rooms and
summoning the people of the play to come and take their places."
"I can't understand a word you say!" she protested petulantly. "Do you
mean Conetta and Jerry Dupuyster?"
"Miss Kincaide and Jerry are only two, and the cast of characters is
large. Wait patiently, Edie, and you shall see. Meanwhile, if I am not
mistaken, that long, low streak in the west--you can just make it out
if you shade your eyes from the sun glare on the water--is land."
She was up and gone at the word, flying to the bridge and crying her
discovery--or mine. What the land was, I could not tell. Van Dyck
had made a joking mystery of the yacht's course, which, naturally,
none of us could determine with any degree of accuracy merely by
looking now and then at the telltale compass in the cabin ceiling. I
fancied that Van Dyck's object in keeping us in the dark was chiefly
to add something to the zest of the cruise, the interest lying in the
uncertainty as to what landfall we should first make. As to this,
however, nobody seemed to care greatly where we were going, or when
we should arrive, so, as one may say, the small mystery had hitherto
fallen flat.
But now there was a stir among the after-deck idlers, and Major
Terwilliger, thrifty grasper at opportunity, immediately made a
pool upon the name of the landfall--with Jack Grey whispering
to me that the major had already fortified himself by casually
questioning the hard-faced sailing-master as to the yacht's latest
quadrant-reading--from which he had doubtless been able privately to
prick off the latitude and approximate position of the _Andromeda_ upon
the cabin chart.
V