The consul for the United States of America at the port of St. Kentigern
was sitting alone in the settled gloom of his private office. Yet it was
only high noon, of a “seasonable” winter's day, by the face of the clock
that hung like a pallid moon on the murky wall opposite to him. What
else could be seen of the apartment by the faint light that struggled
through the pall of fog outside the lustreless windows presented the
ordinary aspect of a business sanctum. There were a shelf of fog-bound
admiralty law, one or two colored prints of ocean steamships under
full steam, bow on, tremendously foreshortened, and seeming to force
themselves through shadowy partitions; there were engravings of Lincoln
and Washington, as unsubstantial and shadowy as the dead themselves.
Outside, against the window, which was almost level with the street,
an occasional procession of black silhouetted figures of men and women,
with prayer-books in their hands and gloom on their faces, seemed to be
born of the fog, and prematurely to return to it. At which a conviction
of sin overcame the consul. He remembered that it was the Sabbath day,
and that he had no business to be at the consulate at all.
Unfortunately, with this shameful conviction came the sound of a bell
ringing somewhere in the depths of the building, and the shuffling of
feet on the outer steps. The light of his fire had evidently been seen,
and like a beacon had attracted some wandering and possibly intoxicated
mariner with American papers. The consul walked into the hall with a
sudden righteous frigidity of manner. It was one thing to be lounging
in one's own office on the Sabbath day, and quite another to be
deliberately calling there on business.
He opened the front door, and a middle-aged man entered, accompanying
and partly shoving forward a more diffident and younger one. Neither
appeared to be a sailor, although both were dressed in that dingy
respectability and remoteness of fashion affected by second and third
mates when ashore. They were already well in the hall, and making their
way toward the private office, when the elder man said, with an air
of casual explanation, “Lookin' for the American consul; I reckon this
yer's the consulate?”
“It is the consulate,” said the official dryly, “and I am the consul;
but”--
“That's all right,” interrupted the stranger, pushing past him, and
opening the door of the private office, into which he shoved his
companion. “Thar now!” he continued to the diffident youth, pointing to
a chair, and quite ignoring the presence of the consul; “thar's a bit
of America. Sit down thar. You're under the flag now, and can do as
you darn please.” Nevertheless, he looked a little disappointed as he
glanced around him, as if he had expected a different environment and
possibly a different climate.
“I presume,” said the consul suavely, “you wish to see me on some urgent
matter; for you probably know that the consulate is closed on Sunday to
ordinary business. I am here myself quite accidentally.”
“Then you don't live here?” said the visitor disappointedly.
“No.”
“I reckon that's the reason why we didn't see no flag a-flyin' when we
was a-huntin' this place yesterday. We were directed here, but I says to
Malcolm, says I, 'No; it ain't here, or you'd see the Stars and Stripes
afore you'd see anythin' else.' But I reckon you float it over your
house, eh?”
The consul here explained smilingly that he did NOT fly a flag over his
lodgings, and that except on national holidays it was not customary to
display the national ensign on the consulate.
“Then you can't do here--and you a CONSUL--what any nigger can do in the
States, eh? That's about how it pans out, don't it? But I didn't think
YOU'D tumble to it quite so quick, Jack.”
At this mention of his Christian name, the consul turned sharply on the
speaker. A closer scrutiny of the face before him ended with a flash
of reminiscence. The fog without and within seemed to melt away; he was
standing once more on a Western hillside with this man; a hundred miles
of sparkling sunshine and crisp, dry air stretching around him, and
above a blue and arched sky that roofed the third of a continent with
six months' summer. And then the fog seemed to come back heavier and
thicker to his consciousness. He emotionally stretched out his hand to
the stranger. But it was the fog and his personal surroundings which now
seemed to be unreal.
“Why it's Harry Custer!” he said with a laugh that, however, ended in
a sigh. “I didn't recognize you in this half light.” He then glanced
curiously toward the diffident young man, as if to identify another
possible old acquaintance.
“Well, I spotted you from the first,” said Custer, “though I ain't seen
you since we were in Scott's Camp together. That's ten years ago. You're
lookin' at HIM,” he continued, following the consul's wandering eye.
“Well, it's about him that I came to see you. This yer's a McHulish--a
genuine McHulish!”
He paused, as if to give effect to this statement. But the name
apparently offered no thrilling suggestion to the consul, who regarded
the young man closely for further explanation. He was a fair-faced youth
of about twenty years, with pale reddish-brown eyes, dark hair reddish
at the roots, and a singular white and pink waxiness of oval cheek,
which, however, narrowed suddenly at the angle of the jaw, and fell away
with the retreating chin.
“Yes,” continued Custer; “I oughter say the ONLY McHulish. He is the
direct heir--and of royal descent! He's one of them McHulishes whose
name in them old history times was enough to whoop up the boys and make
'em paint the town red. A regular campaign boomer--the old McHulish was.
Stump speeches and brass-bands warn't in it with the boys when HE was
around. They'd go their bottom dollar and last cartridge--if they'd had
cartridges in them days--on him. That was the regular McHulish gait. And
Malcolm there's the last of 'em--got the same style of features, too.”
Ludicrous as the situation was, it struck the consul dimly, as
through fog and darkness, that the features of the young man were not
unfamiliar, and indeed had looked out upon him dimly and vaguely at
various times, from various historic canvases. It was the face of
complacent fatuity, incompetency, and inconstancy, which had dragged
down strength, competency, and constancy to its own idiotic fate and
levels,--a face for whose weaknesses valor and beauty had not only
sacrificed themselves, but made things equally unpleasant to a great
many minor virtues. Nevertheless, the consul, with an amused sense of
its ridiculous incongruity to the grim Scottish Sabbath procession in
the street, and the fog-bound volumes of admiralty law in the room,
smiled affably.
“Of course our young friend has no desire to test the magic of his name
here, in these degenerate days.”
“No,” said Custer complacently; “though between you and me, old man,
there's always no tellin' what might turn up over in this yer monarchy.
Things of course are different over our way. But jest now Malcolm will
be satisfied to take the title and property to which he's rightful
heir.”
The consul's face fell. Alas! it was only the old, old story. Its
endless repetitions and variations had been familiar to him even in his
youth and in his own land. “Ef that man had his rights,” had once been
pointed out to him in a wild Western camp, “he'd be now sittin' in
scarlet on the right of the Queen of England!” The gentleman who was
indicated in this apocalyptical vision, it appeared, simply bore a
singular likeness to a reigning Hanoverian family, which for some
unexplained reason he had contented himself with bearing with fortitude
and patience. But it was in his official capacity that the consul's
experience had been the most trying. At times it had seemed to him that
much of the real property and peerage of Great Britain was the inherited
right of penniless American republicans who had hitherto refrained
from presenting their legal claims, and that the habitual first duty of
generations of British noblemen on coming into their estates and titles
was to ship their heirs and next of kin to America, and then forget all
about them. He had listened patiently to claims to positions more
or less exalted,--claims often presented with ingenuous sophistry or
pathetic simplicity, prosecuted with great good humor, and abandoned
with invincible cheerfulness; but they seldom culminated more seriously
than in the disbursement of a few dollars by the consul to enable the
rightful owner of millions to procure a steerage passage back to his
previous democratic retirement. There had been others, less sincere but
more pretentious in quality, to whom, however, a letter to the Heralds'
College in London was all sufficient, and who, on payment of various
fees and emoluments, were enabled to stagger back to New York or Boston
with certain unclaimed and forgotten luggage which a more gallant
ancestor had scorned to bring with him into the new life, or had thrown
aside in his undue haste to make them citizens of the republic. Still,
all this had grown monotonous and wearisome, and was disappointing
as coming through the intervention of an old friend who ought to know
better.
“Of course you have already had legal opinion on the subject over
there,” said the consul, with a sigh, “but here, you know, you ought
first to get some professional advice from those acquainted with Scotch
procedure. But perhaps you have that too.”
“No,” said Custer cheerfully. “Why, it ain't only two months ago that
I first saw Malcolm. Tumbled over him on his own farm jest out of
MacCorkleville, Kentucky, where he and his fathers before him had been
livin' nigh a hundred years--yes, A HUNDRED YEARS, by Jove! ever since
they first emigrated to the country. Had a talk over it; saw an old
Bible about as big and as used up as that,”--lifting the well-worn
consular Bible,--“with dates in it, and heard the whole story. And here
we are.”
“And you have consulted no lawyer?” gasped the consul.
“The McHulishes,” said an unexpected voice that sounded thin and
feminine, “never took any legal decision. From the craggy summits of
Glen Crankie he lifted the banner of his forefathers, or raised the
war-cry, 'Hulish dhu, ieroe!' from the battlements of Craigiedurrach.
And the clan gathered round him with shouts that rent the air. That was
the way of it in old times. And the boys whooped him up and stood by
him.” It was the diffident young man who had half spoken, half recited,
with an odd enthusiasm that even the culminating slang could not make
conventional.
“That's about the size of it,” said Custer, leaning back in his chair
easily with an approving glance at the young man. “And I don't know if
that ain't the way to work the thing now.”
The consul stared hopelessly from the one to the other. It had always
seemed possible that this dreadful mania might develop into actual
insanity, and he had little doubt but that the younger man's brain
was slightly affected. But this did not account for the delusion and
expectations of the elder. Harry Custer, as the consul remembered him,
was a level-headed, practical miner, whose leaning to adventure and
excitement had not prevented him from being a cool speculator, and he
had amassed more than a competency by reason of his judicious foresight
and prompt action. Yet he was evidently under the glamour of this
madman, although outwardly as lazily self-contained as ever.
“Do you mean to tell me,” said the consul in a suppressed voice, “that
you two have come here equipped only with a statement of facts and
a family Bible, and that you expect to take advantage of a feudal
enthusiasm which no longer exists--and perhaps never did exist out of
the pages of romance--as a means of claiming estates whose titles have
long since been settled by law, and can be claimed only under that
tenure? Surely I have misunderstood you. You cannot be in earnest.”
“Honest Injun,” said Custer, nodding his head lazily. “We mean it, but
not jest that way you've put it. F'r instance, it ain't only us two.
This yer thing, ole pard, we're runnin' as a syndicate.”
“A syndicate?” echoed the consul.
“A syndicate,” repeated Custer. “Half the boys that were at Eagle Camp
are in it, and two of Malcolm's neighbors from Kentucky--the regular
old Scotch breed like himself; for you know that MacCorkle County
was settled by them old Scotch Covenanters, and the folks are Scotch
Presbyterians to this day. And for the matter of that, the Eagle boys
that are in it are of Scotch descent, or a kind of blend, you know; in
fact, I'm half Scotch myself--or Irish,” he added thoughtfully. “So
you see that settles your argument about any local opinion, for if them
Scots don't know their own people, who does?”
“May I ask,” said the consul, with a desperate attempt to preserve his
composure, “what you are proposing to do?”
“Well,” said Custer, settling himself comfortably back in his chair
again, “that depends. Do you remember the time that we jumped them
Mexican claims on the North Fork--the time them greasers wanted to take
in the whole river-bank because they'd found gold on one of the upper
bars? Seems to me we jest went peaceful-like over there one moonshiny
night, and took up THEIR stakes and set down OURS. Seems to me YOU were
one of the party.”
“That was in our own country,” returned the consul hastily, “and was an
indefensible act, even in a lawless frontier civilization. But you are
surely not mad enough even to conceive of such a thing HERE!”
“Keep your hair on, Jack,” said Custer lazily. “What's the matter with
constitutional methods, eh? Do you remember the time when we didn't like
Pueblo rules, and we laid out Eureka City on their lines, and whooped up
the Mexicans and diggers to elect mayor and aldermen, and put the city
front on Juanita Creek, and then corraled it for water lots? Seems to
me you were county clerk then. Now who's to keep Dick Macgregor and Joe
Hamilton, that are both up the Nile now, from droppin' in over here to
see Malcolm in his own house? Who's goin' to object to Wallace or Baird,
who are on this side, doin' the Eytalian lakes, from comin' here on
their way home; or Watson and Moore and Timley, that are livin' over in
Paris, from joinin' the boys in givin' Malcolm a housewarmin' in his old
home? What's to keep the whole syndicate from gatherin' at Kelpie Island
up here off the west coast, among the tombs of Malcolm's ancestors, and
fixin' up things generally with the clan?”
“Only one thing,” said the consul, with a gravity which he nevertheless
felt might be a mistaken attitude. “You shouldn't have told ME about
it. For if, as your old friend, I cannot keep you from committing an
unconceivable folly, as the American consul here it will be my first
duty to give notice to our legation, and perhaps warn the authorities.
And you may be sure I will do it.”
To his surprise Custer leaned forward and pressed his hand with an
expression of cheerful relief. “That's so, old pard; I reckoned on it.
In fact, I told Malcolm that that would be about your gait. Of course
you couldn't do otherwise. And it would have been playin' it rather low
down on you to have left you out in the cold--without even THAT show in
the game. For what you will do in warnin' the other fellows, don't you
see, will just waken up the clan. It's better than a campaign circular.”
“Don't be too sure of that,” said the consul, with a half-hysterical
laugh. “But we won't consider so lamentable a contingency. Come and
dine with me, both of you, and we'll discuss the only thing worth
discussing,--your LEGAL rights,--and you can tell me your whole story,
which, by the way, I haven't heard.”
“Sorry, Jack, but it can't be done,” said Custer, with his first
approach to seriousness of manner. “You see, we'd made up our mind not
to come here again after this first call. We ain't goin' to compromise
you.”
“I am the best judge of that,” returned the consul dryly. Then suddenly
changing his manner, he grasped Custer's hands with both his own. “Come,
Harry,” he said earnestly; “I will not believe that this is not a joke,
but I beg of you to promise me one thing,--do not move a step further in
this matter without legal counsel. I will give you a letter to a legal
friend of mine--a man of affairs, a man of the world, and a Scot as
typical, perhaps, as any you have mentioned. State your LEGAL case
to him--only that; but his opinion will show you also, if I am not
mistaken, the folly of your depending upon any sectional or historical
sentiment in this matter.”
Without waiting for a reply, he sat down and hastily wrote a few lines
to a friendly local magnate. When he had handed the note to Custer, the
latter looked at the address, and showed it to his young companion.
“Same name, isn't it?” he asked.
“Yes,” responded Mr. McHulish.
“Do you know him?” asked the consul, evidently surprised.
“We don't, but he's a friend of one of the Eagle boys. I reckon we would
have seen him anyhow; but we'll agree with you to hold on until we do.
It's a go. Goodby, old pard! So long.”
They both shook the consul's hand, and departed, leaving him staring at
the fog into which they had melted as if they were unreal shadows of the
past.