BITTER FRUIT
From the North Station in Boston Alan Massey directed his course to a
small cigar store on Atlantic Avenue. A black eyed Italian lad in
attendance behind the counter looked up as he entered and surveyed him
with grave scrutiny.
"I am Mr. Massey," announced Alan. "Mr. Roberts is expecting me. I
wired."
"Jim's sick," said the boy briefly.
"I am sorry. I hope he is not too sick to see me."
"Naw, he'll see you. He wants to." The speaker motioned Alan to follow
him to the rear of the store. Together they mounted some narrow stairs,
passed through a hallway and into a bedroom, a disorderly, dingy,
obviously man-kept affair. On the bed lay a large framed, exceedingly
ugly looking man. His flesh was yellow and sagged loosely away from his
big bones. The impression he gave was one of huge animal bulk, shriveling
away in an unlovely manner, getting ready to disintegrate entirely. The
man was sick undoubtedly. Possibly dying. He looked it.
The door shut with a soft click. The two men were alone.
"Hello, Jim." Alan approached the bed. "Bad as this? I am sorry." He
spoke with the careless, easy friendliness he could assume when it
suited him.
The man grinned, faintly, ironically. The grin did not lessen the
ugliness of his face, rather accentuated it.
"It's not so bad," he drawled. "Nothing but death and what's that? I
don't suffer much--not now. It's cancer, keeps gnawing away like a rat in
the wall. By and by it will get up to my heart and then it's good-by Jim.
I shan't care. What's life good for that a chap should cling to it like a
barnacle on a rock?"
"We do though," said Alan Massey.
"Oh, yes, we do. It's the way we're made. We are always clinging to
something, good or bad. Life, love, home, drink, power, money! Always
something we are ready to sell our souls to get or keep. With you and me
it was money. You sold your soul to me to keep money and I took it to
get money."
He laughed raucously and Alan winced at the sound and cursed the morbid
curiosity that had brought him to the bedside of this man who for three
years past had held his own future in his dirty hand, or claimed to hold
it. Alan Massey had paid, paid high for the privilege of not knowing
things he did not wish to know.
"What kind of a trail had you struck when you wired me, Massey? I didn't
know you were anxious for details about young John Massey's career I
thought you preferred ignorance. It was what you bought of me."
"I know it was," groaned Alan, dropping into a creaking rocker beside the
bed. "I am a fool. I admit it. But sometimes it seems to me I can't stand
not knowing. I want to squeeze what you know out of you as you would
squeeze a lemon until there was nothing left but bitter pulp. It is
driving me mad."
The sick man eyed the speaker with a leer of malicious satisfaction. It
was meat to his soul to see this lordly young aristocrat racked with
misery and dread, to hold him in his power as a cat holds a mouse, which
it can crush and crunch at any moment if it will. Alan Massey's mood
filled Jim Roberts with exquisite enjoyment, enjoyment such as a gourmand
feels on setting his teeth in some rare morsel of food.
"I know," he nodded. "It works like that often. They say a murderer can't
keep away from the scene of his crime if he is left at large. There is an
irresistible fascination to him about the spot where he damned his
immortal soul."
"I'm not a criminal," snarled Alan. "Don't talk to me like that or you
will never see another cent of my money."
"Money!" sneered the sick man. "What's that to me now? I've lost my taste
for money. It is no good to me any more. I've got enough laid by to bury
me and I can't take the rest with me. Your money is nothing to me, Alan
Massey. But you'll pay still, in a different way. I am glad you came. It
is doing me good."
Alan made a gesture of disgust and got to his feet, pacing to and fro,
his face dark, his soul torn, between conflicting emotions.
"I'll be dead soon," went on the malicious, purring voice from the bed.
"Don't begrudge me my last fling. When I am in my grave you will be safe.
Nobody in the living world but me knows young John Massey's alive. You
can keep your money then with perfect ease of mind until you get to where
I am now and then,--maybe you will find out the money will comfort you no
longer, that nothing but having a soul can get you over the river."
The younger man's march came to a halt by the bedside.
"You shan't die until you tell me what you know about John Massey," he
said fiercely.
"You're a fool," said James Roberts. "What you don't know you are not
responsible for--you can forget in a way. If you insist on hearing the
whole story you will never be able to get away from it to your dying day.
John Massey as an abstraction is one thing. John Massey as a live human
being, whom you have cheated out of a name and a fortune, is another."
"I never cheated him of a name. You did that."
The man grunted.
"Right. That is on my bill. Lord knows, I wish it wasn't. Little enough
did I ever get out of that particular piece of deviltry. I over-reached
myself, was a darned little bit too smart. I held on to the boy, thinking
I'd get more out of it later, and he slid out of my hands like an eel and
I had nothing to show for it, until you came along and I saw a chance to
make a new deal at your expense. You fell for it like a lamb to the
slaughter. I'll never forget your face when I told you John Massey was
alive and that I could produce him in a minute for the courts. If I had,
your name would have been Dutch, young man. You'd never have gotten a
look in on the money. You had the sense to see that. Old John died
without a will. His grandson and not his grand-nephew was his heir
provided anybody could dig up the fellow, and I was the boy that could do
that. I proved that to you, Alan Massey."
"You proved nothing. You scared me into handing you over a whole lot of
money, you blackmailing rascal, I admit that. But you didn't prove
anything. You showed me the baby clothes you said John Massey wore when
he was stolen. The name might easily enough have been stamped on the
linen later. You showed me a silver rattle marked 'John Massey.' The
inscription might also easily enough have been added later at a crook's
convenience. You showed me some letters purporting to have been written
by the woman who stole the child and was too much frightened by her crime
to get the gains she planned to win from it. The letters, too, might
easily have been forgery. The whole thing might have been a cock and bull
story, fabricated by a rotten, clever mind like yours, to apply the money
screw to me."
"True," chuckled Jim Roberts. "Quite true. I wondered at your credulity
at the time."
"You rat! So it was all a fake, a trap?"
"You would like to believe that, wouldn't you? You would like to have a
dying man's oath that there was nothing but a pack of lies to the whole
thing, blackmail of the crudest, most unsupportable variety?"
Alan bent over the man, shook his fist in the evil, withered old face.
"Damn you, Jim Roberts! Was it a lie or was it not?"
"Keep your hands off me, Alan Massey. It was the truth. Sarah Nelson did
steal the child just as I told you. She gave the child to me when she was
dying a few months later. I'll give my oath on that if you like."
Alan brushed his hand across his forehead, and sat down again limply in
the creaking rocker.
"Oh, you are willing to believe that again now, are you?" mocked Roberts.
"I've got to, I suppose. Go on. Tell me the rest. I've got to know. Did
you really make a circus brat of John Massey and did he really run away
from you? That is all you told me before, you remember."
"It was all you wanted to know. Besides," the man smiled his diabolical
grin again, "there was a reason for going light on the details. At the
time I held you up I hadn't any more idea than you had where John Massey
was, nor whether he was even alive. It was the weak spot in my armor.
But you were so panic stricken at the thought of having to give up your
gentleman's fortune that you never looked at the hollowness of the thing.
You could have bowled over my whole scheme in a minute by being honest
and telling me to bring on your cousin, John Massey. But you didn't. You
were only too afraid I would bring him on before you could buy me off. I
knew I could count on your being blind and rotten. I knew my man."
"Then you don't know now whether John Massey is alive or not?" Alan asked
after a pause during which he let the full irony of the man's confession
sink into his heart and turn there like a knife in a wound.
"That is where you're dead wrong. I do know. I made it my business to
find out. It was too important to have an invulnerable shield not to
patch up the discrepancy as early as possible. It took me a year to get
my facts and it cost a good chink of the filthy, but I got them. I not
only know that John Massey is alive but I know where he is and what he is
doing. I could send for him to-morrow, and cook your goose for you
forever, young man."
He pulled himself up on one elbow to peer into Alan's gloomy face.
"I may do it yet," he added. "You needn't offer me hush money. It's no
good to me, as I told you. I don't want money. I only want to pass the
time until the reaper comes along. You'll grant that it would be amusing
to me to watch the see-saw tip once more, to see you go down and your
cousin John come up."
Alan was on his feet again now, striding nervously from door to window
and back again. He had wanted to know. Now he knew. He had knowledge
bitter as wormwood. The man had lied before. He was not lying now.
"What made you send that wire? Were you on the track, too, trying to
find out on your own where your cousin is?"
"Not exactly. Lord knows I didn't want to know. But I had a queer hunch.
Some coincidences bobbed up under my nose that I didn't like the looks
of. I met a young man a few days ago that was about the age John would
have been, a chap with a past, who had run away from a circus. The thing
stuck in my crop, especially as there was a kind of shadowy resemblance
between us that people noticed."
"That is interesting. And his name?"
"He goes under the name of Carson--Richard Carson."
Roberts nodded.
"The same. Good boy. You have succeeded in finding your cousin.
Congratulations!" he cackled maliciously.
"Then it really is he?"
"Not a doubt of it. He was taken up by a family named Holiday in Dunbury,
Massachusetts. They gave him a home, saw that he got some schooling,
started him on a country newspaper. He was smart, took to books, got
ahead, was promoted from one paper to another. He is on a New York daily
now, making good still, I'm told. Does it tally?"
Alan bowed assent. It tallied all too well. The lad he had insulted,
jeered at, hated with instinctive hate, was his cousin, John Massey, the
third, whom he had told the other was quite dead. John Massey was very
much alive and was the rightful heir to the fortune which Alan Massey was
spending as the heavens had spent rain yesterday.
It was worse than that. If the other was no longer nameless, had the
right to the same fine, old name that Alan himself bore, and had too
often disgraced, the barrier between him and Tony Holiday was swept
away. That was the bitterest drop in the cup. No wonder he hated
Dick--hated him now with a cumulative, almost murderous intensity. He had
mocked at the other, but how should he stand against him in fair field?
It was he--Alan Massey--that was the outcast, his mother a woman of
doubtful fame, himself a follower of false fires, his life ignoble,
wayward, erratic, unclean? Would it not be John rather than Alan Massey
Tony Holiday would choose, if she knew all? This ugly, venomous,
sin-scarred old rascal held his fate in the hollow of his evil old hand.
The other was watching him narrowly, evidently striving to follow
his thoughts.
"Well?" he asked. "Going to beat me at my own game, give your
cousin his due?"
"No," curtly.
"Queer," mused the man. "A month ago I would have understood it. It would
have seemed sensible enough to hold on to the cold cash at any risk. Now
it looks different. Money is filthy stuff, man. It is what they put on
dead eye-lids to keep them down. Sometimes we put it on our own living
lids to keep us from seeing straight. You are sure the money's worth so
much to you, Alan Massey?"
The man's eyes burned livid, like coals. It was a strange and rather
sickening thing, Alan Massey thought, to hear him talk like this after
having lived the rottenest kind of a life, sunk in slime for years.
"The money is nothing to me," he flung back. "Not now. I thought it was
worth considerable when I drove that devilish bargain with you to keep
it. It has been worse than nothing, if you care to know. It killed my
art--the only decent thing about me--the only thing I had a right to take
honest pride in. John Massey might have every penny of it to-morrow for
all I care if that were all there were to it."
"What else is there?" probed the old man.
"None of your business," snarled Alan. Not for worlds would he have
spoken Tony Holiday's name in this spot, under the baleful gleam of those
dying eyes.
The man chuckled maliciously.
"You don't need to tell me, I know. There's always a woman in it when a
man takes the path to Hell. Does she want money? Is that why you must
hang on to the filthy stuff?"
"She doesn't want anything except what I can't give her, thanks to you
and myself--the love of a decent man."
"I see. When we meet _the_ woman we wish we'd sowed fewer wild oats. I
went through that myself once. She was a white lily sort of girl and
I--well, I'd gone the pace long before I met her. I wasn't fit to touch
her and I knew it. I went down fast after that--nothing to keep me back.
Old Shakespeare says something somewhere about our pleasant vices beings
whips to goad us with. You and I can understand that, Alan Massey. We've
both felt the lash."
Alan made an impatient gesture. He did not care to be lumped with this
rotten piece of flesh lying there before him.
"I suppose you are wondering what my next move is," went on Roberts.
"I don't care."
"Oh yes, you do. You care a good deal. I can break you, Alan Massey, and
you know it."
"Go ahead and break and be damned if you choose," raged Alan.
"Exactly. As I choose. And I can keep you dancing on some mighty hot
gridirons before I shuffle off. Don't forget that, Alan Massey. And
there will be several months to dance yet, if the doctors aren't off
their count."
"Suit yourself. Don't hurry about dying on my account," said Alan with
ironical courtesy.
A few moments later he was on his way back to the station. His universe
reeled. All he was sure was that he loved Tony Holiday and would fight to
the last ditch to win and keep her and that she would be in his arms
to-night for perhaps the last time. The rest was a hideous blur.