The House of a Thousand Candles - Meredith Nicholson (top 50 books to read txt) 📗
- Author: Meredith Nicholson
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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.
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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