The Indian Drum by William MacHarg (classic english novels txt) 📕

"Miss Sherrill—" he checked himself.

"What is it?"

"This afternoon your father said that you believed that Mr. Corvet's disappearance was in some way connected with you; he said that he did not think that was so; but do you want to tell me why you thought it?"

"Yes; I will tell you." She colored quickly. "One of the last things Mr. Corvet did—in fact, the last thing we know of his doing before he sent for you—was to come to me and warn me against one of my friends."

"Warn you, Miss Sherrill? How? I mean, warn you against what?"

"Against thinking too much of him." She turned away.

Alan saw in the rear of the hall the man who had been waiting with the suitcase. It was after midnight now and, for far more than the intended half hour, Alan had left his father's house unwatched, to be entered by the front door whenever the man, who had entered it before, returned with his key.

"I think I'll come to see your father in the morning," Alan said, when Constance looked back to him.

"You won't borrow Simons?" she asked again.

"Thank you, no."

"But you'll come over here for breakfast in the morning?"

"You want me?"

"Certainly."

"I'd like to come very much."

"Then I'll expect you." She followed him to the door when he had put on his things, and he made no objection when she asked that the man be allowed to carry his bag around to the other house. When he glanced back, after reaching the walk, he saw her standing inside the door, watching through the glass after him.

When he had dismissed Simons and reentered the house on Astor Street, he found no evidences of any disturbance while he had been gone. On the second floor, to the east of the room which had been his father's, was a bedroom which evidently had been kept as a guest chamber; Alan carried his suitcase there and made ready for bed.

The sight of Constance Sherrill standing and watching after him in concern as he started back to this house, came to him again and again and, also, her flush when she had spoken of the friend against whom Benjamin Corvet had warned her. Who was he? It had been impossible at that moment for Alan to ask her more; besides, if he had asked and she had told him, he would have learned only a name which he could not place yet in any connection with her or with Benjamin Corvet. Whoever he was, it was plain that Constance Sherrill "thought of him"; lucky man, Alan said to himself. Yet Corvet had warned her not to think of him....

Alan turned back his bed. It had been for him a tremendous day. Barely twelve hours before he had come to that house, Alan Conrad from Blue Rapids, Kansas; now ... phrases from what Lawrence Sherrill had told him of his father were running through his mind as he opened the door of the room to be able to hear any noise in Benjamin Corvet's house, of which he was sole protector. The emotion roused by his first sight of the lake went through him again as he opened the window to the east.

Now—he was in bed—he seemed to be standing, a specter before a man blaspheming Benjamin Corvet and the souls of men dead. "And the hole above the eye! ... The bullet got you! ... So it's you that got Ben! ... I'll get you! ... You can't save the Miwaka!"

The Miwaka! The stir of that name was stronger now even than before; it had been running through his consciousness almost constantly since he had heard it. He jumped up and turned on the light and found a pencil. He did not know how to spell the name and it was not necessary to write it down; the name had taken on that definiteness and ineffaceableness of a thing which, once heard, can never again be forgotten. But, in panic that he might forget, he wrote it, guessing at the spelling—"Miwaka."

It was a name, of course; but the name of what? It repeated and repeated itself to him, after he got back into bed, until its very iteration made him drowsy.

Outside the gale whistled and shrieked. The wind, passing its last resistance after its sweep across the prairies before it leaped upon the lake, battered and clamored in its assault about the house. But as Alan became sleepier, he heard it no longer as it rattled the windows and howled under the eaves and over the roof, but as out on the lake, above the roaring and ice-crunching waves, it whipped and circled with its chill the ice-shrouded sides of struggling ships. So, with the roar of surf and gale in his ears, he went to sleep with the sole conscious connection in his mind between himself and these people, among whom Benjamin Corvet's summons had brought him, the one name "Miwaka."

In the morning a great change had come over the lake. The wind still blew freshly, but no longer fiercely, from the west; and now, from before the beach beyond the drive, and from the piers and breakwaters at the harbor mouth, and from all the western shore, the ice had departed. Far out, a nearly indiscernible white line marked the ice-floe where it was traveling eastward before the wind; nearer, and with only a gleaming crystal fringe of frozen snow clinging to the shore edge, the water sparkled, blue and dimpling, under the morning sun; multitudes of gulls, hungry after the storm, called to one another and circled over the breakwaters, the piers, and out over the water as far as the eye could see; and a half mile off shore, a little work boat—a shallop twenty feet long—was put-put-ing on some errand along a path where twelve hours before no horsepower creatable by man could have driven the hugest steamer.

Constance Sherrill, awakened by the sunlight reflected from the water upon her ceiling, found nothing odd or startling in this change; it roused her but did not surprise her. Except for the short periods of her visits away from Chicago, she had lived all her life on the shore of the lake: the water—wonderful, ever altering—was the first sight each morning. As it made wilder and more grim the desolation of a stormy day, so it made brighter and more smiling the splendor of the sunshine and, by that much more, influenced one's feelings.

Constance held by preference to the seagoing traditions of her family. Since she was a child, the lake and the life of the ships had delighted and fascinated her; very early she had discovered that, upon the lake, she was permitted privileges sternly denied upon land—an arbitrary distinction which led her to designate water, when she was a little girl, as her family's "respectable element." For while her father's investments were, in part, on the water, her mother's property all was on the land. Her mother, who was a Seaton, owned property somewhere in the city, in common with Constance's uncles; this property consisted, as Constance succeeded in ascertaining about the time she was nine, of large, wholesale grocery buildings. They and the "brand" had been in the possession of the Seaton family for many years; both Constance's uncles worked in the big buildings where the canning was done; and, when Constance was taken to visit them, she found the place most interesting—the berries and fruit coming up in great steaming cauldrons; the machines pushing the cans under the enormous faucets where the preserves ran out and then sealing the cans and pasting the bright Seaton "brand" about them. The people there were interesting—the girls with flying fingers sorting fruit, and the men pounding the big boxes together; and the great shaggy-hoofed horses which pulled the huge, groaning wagons were most fascinating. She wanted to ride on one of the wagons; but her request was promptly and completely squashed.

It was not "done"; nor was anything about the groceries and the canning to be mentioned before visitors; Constance brought up the subject once and found out. It was different about her father's ships. She could talk about them when she wanted to; and her father often spoke of them; and any one who came to the house could speak about them. Ships, apparently, were respectable.

When she went down to the docks with her father, she could climb all over them, if she was only careful of her clothes; she could spend a day watching one of her father's boats discharging grain or another unloading ore; and, when she was twelve, for a great treat, her father took her on one of the freighters to Duluth; and for one delightful, wonderful week she chummed with the captain and mates and wheelmen and learned all the pilot signals and the way the different lighthouses winked.

Mr. Spearman, who recently had become a partner of her father's, was also on the boat upon that trip. He had no particular duty; he was just "an owner" like her father; but Constance observed that, while the captain and the mates and the engineers were always polite and respectful to her father, they asked Mr. Spearman's opinion about things in a very different way and paid real attention—not merely polite attention—when he talked. He was a most desirable sort of acquisition; for he was a friend who could come to the house at any time, and yet he, himself, had done all sorts of exciting things. He had not just gone to Harvard and then become an owner, as Constance's father had; at fifteen, he had run away from his father's farm back from the east shore of little Traverse Bay near the northern end of Lake Michigan. At eighteen, after all sorts of adventures, he had become mate of a lumber schooner; he had "taken to steam" shortly after that and had been an officer upon many kinds of ships. Then Uncle Benny had taken him into partnership. Constance had a most exciting example of what he could do when the ship ran into a big storm on Lake Superior.

Coming into Whitefish Bay, a barge had blundered against the vessel; a seam started, and water came in so fast that it gained on the pumps. Instantly, Mr. Spearman, not the captain, was in command and, from the way he steered the ship to protect the seam and from the scheme he devised to stay the inrush of water, the pumps began to gain at once, and the ship went into Duluth safe and dry. Constance liked that in a man of the sort whom people knew. For, as the most active partner—though not the chief stockholder—of Corvet, Sherrill and Spearman, almost every one in the city knew him. He had his bachelor "rooms" in one of the newest and most fashionable of the apartment buildings facing the lake just north of the downtown city; he had become a member of the best city and country clubs; and he was welcomed quickly along the Drive, where the Sherrills' mansion was coming to be considered a characteristic "old" Chicago home.

But little over forty, and appearing even younger, Spearman was distinctly of the new generation; and Constance Sherrill was only one of many of the younger girls who found in Henry Spearman refreshing relief from the youths who were the sons of men but who could never become men themselves. They were nice, earnest boys with all sorts of serious Marxian ideas of establishing social justice in the plants which their fathers had built; and carrying the highest motives into the city or national politics.