THEY EMBARK UPON A CRIME
Varney was wrong in one thing: Mr. Carstairs's _Cypriani_ was not ready
to start anywhere at half a day's notice. For that reason it did not
start for Hunston on the following afternoon. As always happens, the
preparations for the little expedition took four times as long as
anybody would have thought possible.
For these delays no blame could be attached to Peter Maginnis. He had no
getting ready to do beyond bidding his father's man to pack him for a
week, and obtaining from his hatter's, at an out-of-season cut-price, an
immense and peculiar Panama with an offensive plaid band. Possibly it
was the only hat of its kind in the world. One might picture the
manufacturer as having it made up as an experiment, becoming morose when
he looked at it, and ordering his superintendent to make no more like it
at the peril of his life.
Peter, however, was delighted with it. Gazing at himself with smirking
satisfaction in the hat-shop mirror, he ordered the old one sent home
and was all ready to go to Hunston and kidnap Mary Carstairs.
But other preparations could not be completed with such speedy
satisfaction. The yacht had to coal, take on supplies, and pick up two
or three extra men for the crew. A Sunday came in and threw everything
back a day. Lastly the sailing-master's wife, whom Mr. Carstairs was
sending along to take charge of Mary on the homeward trip, chanced to be
down with an influenza.
As the details of getting ready multiplied about him, Varney's interest
in his novel undertaking imperceptibly grew. The thing had come upon him
so unexpectedly that it had not yet by any means lost its strangeness.
To the old friend of his mother's girlhood, Elbert Carstairs, he was
sincerely devoted, though knowing him for an indulgent man whose
indulgences were chiefly of himself. But when, responding to his excited
summons that night, he had sat and listened while Mr. Carstairs unfolded
his mad little domestic plot, he had been first utterly amazed and then
utterly repelled. And it was not until a final sense of the old man's
genuine need was borne in upon him, of his loneliness, his helplessness,
and his entire dependence upon him, Varney, that he had consented to
undertake the extraordinary commission.
In a sense, it was all simply preposterous. Here was he, Laurence
Varney, in sane mind, of law-abiding habits and hitherto of tolerable
standing in the community, solemnly pledged to go and steal the person
of a child, in defiance and contempt of the statutes of all known
nations. And the place where this lawless deed was to be done was not
Ruritania or the hazy dominions of Prince Otto, but a commonplace,
humdrum American town, not an hour and a half from his office chair by
the expresses.
In going about this task he was to conduct himself with the frankness
and straightforwardness of a sneak-thief. Not a soul in New York was to
know where he had gone. Not a soul in Hunston must dimly suspect what he
had come for. It must be gum-shoe work from start to finish, and the
_Cypriani's_ motto would be the inspiring word, "Sh-h-h." Though he had
to find a nondescript child whom he did not know from Eve, he was
forbidden to do it in a natural, easy, and dashing way. He could not
ring her mother's door-bell, ask for her, throw a meal-sack over her
head, and whip his waiting horses to a gallop. No, he must beat the tall
grasses before the old homestead until such time as she chose to walk
abroad alone. Really, when you came to think of it, it was an asinine
sort of proposition.
But when Mary did come out of that house, he saw that the fun would
begin. A well brought-up, moneyed, petted and curled girl of twelve was
no easy pawn in anybody's game. He could not win her love by a mere
offer of gum-drops. In fact, getting acquainted was likely to be a
difficult matter, taxing his ingenuity to a standstill. But he
entertained no doubts of his ability to do it, sooner or later.
"Not to put too fine a point on it," mused he, glancing out of his
twentieth story window, "they flock to me, children do. I'm their good
old Uncle Dudley. But why the deuce isn't she five years younger?"
Clearly, it was the next step that was the most delicate: getting Mary
aboard the yacht. This was both the crux and the _finale_ of the whole
thing: for Uncle Elbert was to be waiting for them, in a closed
carriage, at a private dock near 130th Street (Peter remaining in
Hunston to notify him by telephone of the start down), and Varney's
responsibilities were over when the _Cypriani_ turned her nose homeward.
But here lay the thin ice. If anything should happen to go wrong at the
moment when they were coaxing Mary on the yacht, if there was a leak in
their plans or anybody suspected anything, he saw that the situation
might be exceedingly awkward. The penalties for being fairly caught with
the goods promised to be severe. As to kidnapping, he certainly
remembered reading in the newspapers that some States punished it with
death. At any rate, maybe the natives would try to thrash him and Peter.
In hopeful moments he conjured up visions of the deuce to pay.
But, after all, he was going to Hunston, whether he liked it or not,
simply because Uncle Elbert had asked him. The lonely old gentleman, he
knew, loved him like a son: he had turned straight to him in his hour of
need. This had touched the young man, and had finally made up his mind
for him. Moreover Mary, a spoiled little piece who was suffered to set
her smug childish will against the combined wills of both her parents,
aroused his keenest antipathy. To put her in her place, to teach her
that children must obey their parents in the Lord, was a duty to
society, to the State. What Uncle Elbert wanted with such a child, he
could not conceive; but since he did want her, have her he should.
Tilting back his office chair and running his hand through his hair,
Varney longed to spank her.
This thought came to him, definitely and for about the seventh time, at
half-past one o'clock on the third day, Monday. At the same moment, his
telephone-bell rang sharply. It was the sailing-master to say that his
good spouse had come aboard and that everything on the _Cypriani_ was in
readiness for the start.
"I'll be on board inside of an hour," said Varney.
He telephoned to Uncle Elbert, telephoned to Peter, and locked up his
desk. To his office he casually gave out that pressing business matters
were calling him out of town for a day or two.
The two young men had been as furtive as possible about their proposed
journey. They had not met since the night Varney had dangled the hope of
jail and disgrace into Peter's lightening face, and so, or otherwise,
cajoled him into going along. Both of them had kept carefully away from
the _Cypriani_. Now they proceeded to her by different routes, and
reached her at different times, Peter first. Their luggage had gone
aboard before them, and there was no longer a thing to wait for. At
three o'clock, on Varney's signal, the ship's bell sounded, her whistle
shrieked, and she slid off through the waters of the bay.
About the start there was nothing in the least dramatic: they had merely
begun moving through the water and that was all. The _Cypriani_, for all
her odd errand, was merely one of a thousand boats which indifferently
crossed each other's wakes in one of the most crowded harbors in the
world.
"For all the lime-light we draw," observed Maginnis, drinking in the
freshening breeze, "we might be running up to Harlem to address the
fortnightly meeting of a Girls' Friendly Society."
Varney said: "Give us a chance, will you?"