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safeguarded legally, that if the congregation ever

intrusted its spiritual welfare to a minister named

Reginald, Harold or Claude, an amount equal to his

gift, with interest, should be paid to the Massachusetts

Humane Society.

 

The thought of him touched me now. I was glad to

feel that his money had never been a lure to me; it did

not matter whether his estate was great or small, I

could, at least, ease my conscience by obeying the behest

of the old man whose name I bore, and whose interest in

the finer things of life and art had given him an undeniable

distinction.

 

“I should like to know something of Mr. Glenarm’s

last days,” I said abruptly.

 

“He wished to visit the village where he was born,

and Bates, his companion and servant, went to Vermont

with him. He died quite suddenly, and was buried beside

his father in the old village cemetery. I saw him

last early in the summer. I was away from home and

did not know of his death until it was all over. Bates

came to report it to me, and to sign the necessary papers

in probating the will. It had to be done in the place of

the decedent’s residence, and we went together to Wabana,

the seat of the county in which Annandale lies.”

 

I was silent after this, looking out toward the sea

that had lured me since my earliest dreams of the world

that lay beyond it.

 

“It’s a poor stake, Glenarm,” remarked Pickering

consolingly, and I wheeled upon him.

 

“I suppose you think it a poor stake! I suppose you

can’t see anything in that old man’s life beyond his

money; but I don’t care a curse what my inheritance is!

I never obeyed any of my grandfather’s wishes in his

lifetime, but now that he’s dead his last wish is mandatory.

I’m going out there to spend a year if I die

for it. Do you get my idea?”

 

“Humph! You always were a stormy petrel,” he

sneered. “I fancy it will be safer to keep our most

agreeable acquaintance on a strictly business basis. If

you accept the terms of the will—”

 

“Of course I accept them! Do you think I am going

to make a row, refuse to fulfil that old man’s last wish!

I gave him enough trouble in his life without disappointing

him in his grave. I suppose you’d like to have

me fight the will; but I’m going to disappoint you.”

 

He said nothing, but played with his pencil. I had

never disliked him so heartily; he was so smug and

comfortable. His office breathed the very spirit of prosperity.

I wished to finish my business and get away.

 

“I suppose the region out there has a high death-rate.

How’s the malaria?”

 

“Not alarmingly prevalent, I understand. There’s a

summer resort over on one side of Lake Annandale.

The place is really supposed to be wholesome. I don’t

believe your grandfather had homicide in mind in sending

you there.”

 

“No, he probably thought the rustication would make

a man of me. Must I do my own victualing? I suppose

I’ll be allowed to eat.”

 

“Bates can cook for you. He’ll supply the necessities.

I’ll instruct him to obey your orders. I assume

you’ll not have many guests—in fact,”—he studied the

back of his hand intently—“while that isn’t stipulated,

I doubt whether it was your grandfather’s intention

that you should surround yourself—”

 

“With boisterous companions!” I supplied the words

in my cheerfullest tone. “No; my conduct shall be exemplary,

Mr. Pickering,” I added, with affable irony.

 

He picked up a single sheet of thin type-written

paper and passed it across the table. It was a formal

acquiescence in the provisions of the will. Pickering

had prepared it in advance of my coming, and this assumption

that I would accept the terms irritated me.

Assumptions as to what I should do under given conditions

had always irritated me, and accounted, in a

large measure, for my proneness to surprise and disappoint

people. Pickering summoned a clerk to witness

my signature.

 

“How soon shall you take possession?” he asked. “I

have to make a record of that.”

 

“I shall start for Indiana to-morrow,” I answered.

 

“You are prompt,” he replied, deliberately folding in

quarters the paper I had just signed. “I hoped you

might dine with me before going out; but I fancy New

York is pretty tame after the caf��s and bazaars of the

East.”

 

His reference to my wanderings angered me again;

for here was the point at which I was most sensitive.

I was twenty-seven and had spent my patrimony; I had

tasted the bread of many lands, and I was doomed to

spend a year qualifying myself for my grandfather’s

legacy by settling down on an abandoned and lonely

Indiana farm that I had never seen and had no interest

in whatever.

 

As I rose to go Pickering said:

 

“It will be sufficient if you drop me a line, say once

a month, to let me know you are there. The post-office

is Annandale.”

 

“I suppose I might file a supply of postal cards in the

village and arrange for the mailing of one every

month.”

 

“It might be done that way,” be answered evenly.

 

“We may perhaps meet again, if I don’t die of starvation

or ennui. Good-by.”

 

We shook hands stiffly and I left him, going down in

an elevator filled with eager-eyed, anxious men. I, at

least, had no cares of business. It made no difference

to me whether the market rose or fell. Something of

the spirit of adventure that had been my curse quickened

in my heart as I walked through crowded Broadway

past Trinity Church to a bank and drew the balance

remaining on my letter of credit. I received in

currency slightly less than one thousand dollars.

 

As I turned from the teller’s window I ran into the

arms of the last man in the world I expected to see.

 

This, let it be remembered, was in October of the

year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and one.

CHAPTER II

A FACE AT SHERRY’S

 

“Don’t mention my name an thou lovest me!” said

Laurance Donovan, and he drew me aside, ignored my

hand and otherwise threw into our meeting a casual

quality that was somewhat amazing in view of the fact

that we had met last at Cairo.

 

“Allah il Allah!”

 

It was undoubtedly Larry. I felt the heat of the

desert and heard the camel-drivers cursing and our

Sudanese guides plotting mischief under a window far

away.

 

“Well!” we both exclaimed interrogatively.

 

He rocked gently back and forth, with his hands in

his pockets, on the tile floor of the banking-house. I

had seen him stand thus once on a time when we had

eaten nothing in four days—it was in Abyssinia, and

our guides had lost us in the worst possible place—with

the same untroubled look in his eyes.

 

“Please don’t appear surprised, or scared or anything,

Jack,” he said, with his delicious intonation. “I

saw a fellow looking for me an hour or so ago. He’s

been at it for several months; hence my presence on

these shores of the brave and the free. He’s probably

still looking, as he’s a persistent devil. I’m here, as

we may say, quite incog. Staying at an East-side lodging-house,

where I shan’t invite you to call on me.

But I must see you.”

 

“Dine with me to-night, at Sherry’s—”

 

“Too big, too many people—”

 

“Therein lies security, if you’re in trouble. I’m about

to go into exile, and I want to eat one more civilized

dinner before I go.”

 

“Perhaps it’s just as well. Where are you off for—

not Africa again?”

 

“No. Just Indiana—one of the sovereign American

states, as you ought to know.”

 

“Indians?”

 

“No; warranted all dead.”

 

“Pack-train—balloon—automobile—camels—how do

you get there?”

 

“Varnished ears. It’s easy. It’s not the getting there;

it’s the not dying of ennui after you’re on the spot.”

 

“Humph! What hour did you say for the dinner?”

 

“Seven o’clock. Meet me at the entrance.”

 

“If I’m at large! Allow me to precede you through

the door, and don’t follow me on the street please!”

 

He walked away, his gloved hands clasped lazily behind

him, lounged out upon Broadway and turned

toward the Battery. I waited until he disappeared, then

took an up-town car.

 

My first meeting with Laurance Donovan was in Constantinople,

at a caf�� where I was dining. He got into

a row with an Englishman and knocked him down. It

was not my affair, but I liked the ease and definiteness

with which Larry put his foe out of commission. I

learned later that it was a way he had. The Englishman

meant well enough, but he could not, of course,

know the intensity of Larry’s feeling about the unhappy

lot of Ireland. In the beginning of my own acquaintance

with Donovan I sometimes argued with him, but I

soon learned better manners. He quite converted me to

his own notion of Irish affairs, and I was as hot an

advocate as he of head-smashing as a means of restoring

Ireland’s lost prestige.

 

My friend, the American consul-general at Constantinople,

was not without a sense of humor, and I

easily enlisted him in Larry’s behalf. The Englishman

thirsted for vengeance and invoked all the powers. He

insisted, with reason, that Larry was a British subject

and that the American consul had no right to give him

asylum—a point that was, I understand, thoroughly

well-grounded in law and fact. Larry maintained, on

the other hand, that he was not English but Irish, and

that, as his country maintained no representative in

Turkey, it was his privilege to find refuge wherever it

was offered. Larry was always the most plausible of

human beings, and between us—he, the American consul

and I—we made an impression, and got him off.

 

I did not realize until later that the real joke lay in

the fact that Larry was English-born, and that his devotion

to Ireland was purely sentimental and quixotic.

His family had, to be sure, come out of Ireland some

time in the dim past, and settled in England; but when

Larry reached years of knowledge, if not of discretion,

he cut Oxford and insisted on taking his degree at

Dublin. He even believed—or thought he believed—

in banshees. He allied himself during his university

days with the most radical and turbulent advocates of

a separate national existence for Ireland, and occasionally

spent a month in jail for rioting. But Larry’s

instincts were scholarly; he made a brilliant record at

the University; then, at twenty-two, he came forth to

look at the world, and liked it exceedingly well. His

father was a busy man, and he had other sons; he

granted Larry an allowance and told him to keep away

from home until he got ready to be respectable. So,

from Constantinople, after a tour of Europe, we together

crossed the Mediterranean in search of the flesh-pots

of lost kingdoms, spending three years in the pursuit.

We parted at Cairo on excellent terms. He returned

to England and later to his beloved Ireland, for

he had blithely sung the wildest Gaelic songs in the

darkest days of our adventures, and never lost his love

for The Sod, as he apostrophized—and capitalized—his

adopted country.

 

Larry had the habit of immaculateness. He emerged

from his East-side lodging-house that night clothed

properly, and wearing the gentlemanly air of peace and

reserve that is so wholly incompatible with his disposition

to breed discord and indulge in riot. When we

sat

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