The Mystery of Murray Davenport: A Story of New York at the Present Day

CHAPTER V — A LODGING BY THE RIVER

The day after his introduction to the Kenbys, Larcher went with Murray Davenport on one of those expeditions incidental to their collaboration as writer and illustrator. Larcher had observed an increase of the strange indifference which had appeared through all the artist's loquacity at their first interview. This loquacity was sometimes repeated, but more often Davenport's way was of silence. His apathy, or it might have been abstraction, usually wore the outer look of dreaminess.

“Your friend seems to go about in a trance,” Barry Tompkins said of him one day, after a chance meeting in which Larcher had made the two acquainted.

This was a near enough description of the man as he accompanied Larcher to a part of the riverfront not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, on the afternoon at which we have arrived. The two were walking along a squalid street lined on one side with old brick houses containing junk-shops, shipping offices, liquor saloons, sailors' hotels, and all the various establishments that sea-folk use. On the other side were the wharves, with a throng of vessels moored, and glimpses of craft on the broad river.

“Here we are,” said Larcher, who as he walked had been referring to a pocket map of the city. The two men came to a stop, and Davenport took from a portfolio an old print of the early nineteenth century, representing part of the river front. Silently they compared this with the scene around them, Larcher smiling at the difference. Davenport then looked up at the house before which they stood. There was a saloon on the ground floor, with a miniature ship and some shells among the bottles in the window.

“If I could get permission to make a sketch from one of those windows up there,” said Davenport, glancing at the first story over the saloon.

“Suppose we go in and see what can be done,” suggested Larcher.

They found the saloon a small, homely place, with only one attendant behind the bar at that hour, two marine-looking old fellows playing some sort of a game amidst a cloud of pipe-smoke at a table, and a third old fellow, not marine-looking but resembling a prosperous farmer, seated by himself in the enjoyment of an afternoon paper that was nearly all head-lines.

Larcher ordered drinks, and asked the barkeeper if he knew who lived overhead. The barkeeper, a round-headed young man of unflinching aspect, gazed hard across the bar at the two young men for several seconds, and finally vouchsafed the single word:

“Roomers.”

“I should like to see the person that has the front room up one flight,” began Larcher.

“All right; that won't cost you nothing. There he sets.” And the barkeeper pointed to the rural-looking old man with the newspaper, at the same time calling out, sportively: “Hey, Mr. Bud, here's a couple o' gents wants to look at you.”

Mr. Bud, who was tall, spare, and bent, about sixty, and the possessor of a pleasant knobby face half surrounded by a gray beard that stretched from ear to ear beneath his lower jaw, dropped his paper and scrutinized the young men benevolently. They went over to him, and Larcher explained their intrusion with as good a grace as possible.

“Why, certainly, certainly,” the old man chirped with alacrity. “Glad to have yuh. I'll be proud to do anything in the cause of literature. Come right up.” And he rose and led the way to the street door.

“Take care, Mr. Bud,” said the jocular barkeeper. “Don't let them sell you no gold bricks or nothin'. I never see them before, so you can't hold me if you lose your money.”

“You keep your mouth shut, Mick,” answered the old man, “and send me up a bottle o' whisky and a siphon o' seltzer as soon as your side partner comes in. This way, gentlemen.”

He conducted them out to the sidewalk, and then in through another door, and up a narrow stairway, to a room with two windows overlooking the river. It was a room of moderate size, provided with old furniture, a faded carpet, mended curtains, and lithographs of the sort given away with Sunday newspapers. It had, in its shabbiness, that curious effect of cosiness and comfort which these shabby old rooms somehow possess, and luxurious rooms somehow lack. A narrow bed in a corner was covered with an old-fashioned patchwork quilt. There was a cylindrical stove, but not in use, as the weather had changed since the day before; and beside the stove, visible and unashamed, was a large wooden box partly full of coal. While Larcher was noticing these things, and Mr. Bud was offering chairs, Davenport made directly for the window and looked out with an interest limited to the task in hand, and perfunctory even so.

“This is my city residence,” said the host, dropping into a chair. “It ain't every hard-worked countryman, these times, that's able to keep up a city residence.” As this was evidently one of Mr. Bud's favorite jests, Larcher politically smiled. Mr. Bud soon showed that he had other favorite jests. “Yuh see, I make my livin' up the State, but every now and then I feel like comin' to the city for rest and quiet, and so I keep this place the year round.”

“You come to New York for rest and quiet?” exclaimed Larcher, still kindly feigning amusement.

“Sure! Why not? As fur as rest goes, I just loaf around and watch other people work. That's what I call rest with a sauce to it. And as fur as quiet goes, I get used to the noises. Any sound that don't concern me, don't annoy me. I go about unknown, with nobody carin' what my business is, or where I'm bound fur. Now in the country everybody wants to know where from, and where to, and what fur. The only place to be reely alone is where thur's so many people that one man don't count for anything. And talk about noise!—What's all the clatter and bang amount to, if it's got nothin' to do with your own movements? Now at my home where the noise consists of half a dozen women's voices askin' me about this, and wantin' that, and callin' me to account for t'other,—that's the kind o' noise that jars a man. Yuh see, I got a wife and four daughters. They're very good women—very good women, the whole bunch—but I do find it restful and refreshin' to take the train to New York about once a month, and loaf around a week or so without anybody takin' notice, and no questions ast.”

“And what does your family say to that?”

“Nothin', now. They used to say considerable when I first fell into the habit. I hev some poultry customers here in the city, and I make out I got to come to look after business. That story don't go fur with the fam'ly; but they hev their way about everything else, so they got to gimme my way about this.”

Davenport turned around from the window, and spoke for the first time since entering:

“Then you don't occupy this room more than half the time?”

“No, sir, I close it up, and thank the Lord there ain't nothin' in it worth stealin'.”

“Oh, in that case,” Davenport went on, “if I began some sketches here, and you left town before they were done, I should have to go somewhere else to finish them.”

It was a remark that made Larcher wonder a little, at the moment, knowing the artist's usual methods of work. But Mr. Bud, ignorant of such matters, replied without question:

“Well, I don't know. That might be fixed all right, I guess.”

“I see you have a library,” said Davenport, abruptly, walking over to a row of well-worn books on a wooden shelf near the bed. His sudden interest, slight as it was, produced another transient surprise in Larcher.

“Yes, sir,” said the old man, with pride and affection, “them books is my chief amusement. Sir Walter Scott's works; I've read 'em over again and again, every one of 'em, though I must confess there's two or three that's pretty rough travellin'. But the others!—well, I've tried a good many authors, but gimme Scott. Take his characters! There's stacks of novels comes out nowadays that call themselves historical; but the people in 'em seems like they was cut out o' pasteboard; a bit o' wind would blow 'em away. But look at the body to Scott's people! They're all the way round, and clear through, his characters are.—Of course, I'm no literary man, gentlemen. I only give my own small opinion.” Mr. Bud's manner, on his suddenly considering his audience, had fallen from its bold enthusiasm.

“Your small opinion is quite right,” said Davenport. “There's no doubt about the thoroughness and consistency of Scott's characters.” He took one of the books, and turned over the leaves, while Mr. Bud looked on with brightened eyes. “Andrew Fairservice—there's a character. 'Gude e'en—gude e'en t' ye'—how patronizing his first salutation! 'She's a wild slip, that'—there you have Diana Vernon sketched by the old servant in a touch. And what a scene this is, where Diana rides with Frank to the hilltop, shows him Scotland, and advises him to fly across the border as fast as he can.”

“Yes, and the scene in the Tolbooth where Rob Roy gives Bailie Nicol Jarvie them three sufficient reasons fur not betrayin' him.” The old man grinned. He seemed to be at his happiest in praising, and finding another to praise, his favorite author.

“Interesting old illustrations these are,” said Davenport, taking up another volume. “Dryburgh Abbey—that's how it looks on a gray day. I was lucky enough to see it in the sunshine; it's loveliest then.”

“What?” exclaimed Mr. Bud. “You been to Dryburgh Abbey?—to Scott's grave?”

“Oh, yes,” said Davenport, smiling at the old man's joyous wonder, which was about the same as he might have shown upon meeting somebody who had been to fairy-land, or heaven, or some other place equally far from New York.

“You don't say! Well, to think of it! I am happy to meet you. By George, I never expected to get so close to Sir Walter Scott! And maybe you've seen Abbotsford?”

“Oh, certainly. And Scott's Edinburgh house in Castle Street, and the house in George Square where he lived as a boy and met Burns.”

Mr. Bud's excitement was great. “Maybe you've seen Holyrood Palace, and High Street—”

“Why, of course. And the Canongate, and the Parliament House, and the Castle, and the Grass-market, and all the rest. It's very easy; thousands of Americans go there every year. Why don't you run over next summer?”

The old man shook his head. “That's all too fur away from home fur me. The women are afraid o' the water, and they'd never let me go alone. I kind o' just drifted into this New York business, but if I undertook to go across the ocean, that would be the last straw. And I'm afraid I couldn't get on to the manners and customs over there. They say everything's different from here. To tell the truth, I'm timid where I don't know the ways. If I was like you—I shouldn't wonder if you'd been to some of the other places where things happen in his novels?”

With a smile, Davenport began to enumerate and describe. The old man sat enraptured. The whisky and seltzer came up, and the host saw that the glasses were filled and refilled, but he kept Davenport to the same subject. Larcher felt himself quite out of the talk, but found compensation in the whisky and in watching the old man's greedy enjoyment of Davenport's every word. The afternoon waned, and all opportunity of making the intended sketches passed for that day. Mr. Bud was for lighting up, or inviting the young men to dinner, but they found pretexts for tearing themselves away. They did not go, however, until Davenport had arranged to come the next day and perform his neglected task. Mr. Bud accompanied them out, and stood on the corner looking after them until they were out of sight.

“You've made a hit with the agriculturist,” said Larcher, as they took their way through a narrow street of old warehouses toward the region of skyscrapers and lower Broadway.

“Scott is evidently his hobby,” replied Davenport, with a careless smile, “and I liked to please him in it.”

He lapsed into that reticence which, as it was his manner during most of the time, made his strange seasons of communicativeness the more remarkable. A few days passed before another such talkative mood came on in Larcher's presence.

It was a drizzling, cheerless night. Larcher had been to a dinner in Madison Avenue, and he thus found himself not far from Davenport's abode. Going thither upon an impulse, he beheld the artist seated at the table, leaning forward over a confusion of old books, some of them open. He looked pallid in the light of the reading lamp at his elbow, and his eyes seemed withdrawn deep into their hollows. He welcomed his visitor with conventional politeness.

“No; merely rambling over familiar fields.” Davenport held out the topmost book.

“Oh, Shakespeare,” laughed Larcher. “The Sonnets. Hello, you've marked part of this.”

“Little need to mark anything so famous. But it comes closer to me than to most men, I fancy.” And he recited slowly, without looking down at the page:

'When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate,'—

He stopped, whereupon Larcher, not to be behind, and also without having recourse to the page, went on:

'Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possest, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,'—

“But I think that hits all men,” said Larcher, interrupting himself. “Everybody has wished himself in somebody else's shoes, now and again, don't you believe?”

“I have certainly wished myself out of my own shoes,” replied Davenport, almost with vehemence. “I have hated myself and my failures, God knows! I have wished hard enough that I were not I. But I haven't wished I were any other person now existing. I wouldn't change selves with this particular man, or that particular man. It wouldn't be enough to throw off the burden of my memories, with their clogging effect upon my life and conduct, and take up the burden of some other man's—though I should be the gainer even by that, in a thousand cases I could name.”

“Oh, I don't exactly mean changing with somebody else,” said Larcher. “We all prefer to remain ourselves, with our own tastes, I suppose. But we often wish our lot was like somebody else's.”

Davenport shook his head. “I don't prefer to remain myself, any more than to be some man whom I know or have heard of. I am tired of myself; weary and sick of Murray Davenport. To be a new man, of my own imagining—that would be something;—to begin afresh, with an unencumbered personality of my own choosing; to awake some morning and find that I was not Murray Davenport nor any man now living that I know of, but a different self, formed according to ideals of my own. There would be a liberation!”

“Well,” said Larcher, “if a man can't change to another self, he can at least change his place and his way of life.”

“But the old self is always there, casting its shadow on the new place. And even change of scene and habits is next to impossible without money.”

“I must admit that New York, and my present way of life, are good enough for me just now,” said Larcher.

Davenport's only reply was a short laugh.

“Suppose you had the money, and could live as you liked, where would you go?” demanded Larcher, slightly nettled.

“I would live a varied life. Probably it would have four phases, generally speaking, of unequal duration and no fixed order. For one phase, the chief scene would be a small secluded country-house in an old walled garden. There would be the home of my books, and the centre of my walks over moors and hills. From this, I would transport myself, when the mood came, to the intellectual society of some large city—that of London would be most to my choice. Mind you, I say the intellectual society; a far different thing from the Society that spells itself with a capital S.”

“Why not of New York? There's intellectual society here.”

“Yes; a trifle fussy and self-conscious, though. I should prefer a society more reposeful. From this, again, I would go to the life of the streets and byways of the city. And then, for the fourth phase, to the direct contemplation of art—music, architecture, sculpture, painting;—to haunting the great galleries, especially of Italy, studying and copying the old masters. I have no desire to originate. I should be satisfied, in the arts, rather to receive than to give; to be audience and spectator; to contemplate and admire.”

“Well, I hope you may have your wish yet,” was all that Larcher could say.

“I should like to have just one whack at life before I finish,” replied Davenport, gazing thoughtfully into the shadow beyond the lamplight. “Just one taste of comparative happiness.”

“Haven't you ever had even one?”

“I thought I had, for a brief season, but I was deceived.” (Larcher remembered the talk of an inconstant woman.) “No, I have never been anything like happy. My father was a cold man who chilled all around him. He died when I was a boy, and left my mother and me to poverty. My mother loved me well enough; she taught me music, encouraged my studies, and persuaded a distant relation to send me to the College of Medicine and Surgery; but her life was darkened by grief, and the darkness fell over me, too. When she died, my relation dropped me, and I undertook to make a living in New York. There was first the struggle for existence, then the sickening affair of that play; afterward, misfortune enough to fill a dozen biographies, the fatal reputation of ill luck, the brief dream of consolation in the love of woman, the awakening,—and the rest of it.”

He sighed wearily and turned, as if for relief from a bitter theme, to the book in his hand. He read aloud, from the sonnet out of which they had already been quoting:

'Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising—Haply I think on thee; and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate; For thy sweet love—'

Again he stopped short, and with a derisive laugh. “What an ass I was! As if any happiness that came to Murray Davenport could be real or lasting!”

“Oh, never be disheartened,” said Larcher. “Your time is to come; you'll have your 'whack at life' yet.”

“It would be acceptable, if only to feel that I had realized one or two of the dreams of youth—the dreams an unhappy lad consoled himself with.”

“What were they?” inquired Larcher.

CHAPTER VI — THE NAME OF ONE TURL COMES UP

A month passed. All the work in which Larcher had enlisted Davenport's cooperation was done. Larcher would have projected more, but the artist could not be pinned down to any definite engagement. He was non-committal, with the evasiveness of apathy. He seemed not to care any longer about anything. More than ever he appeared to go about in a dream. Larcher might have suspected some drug-taking habit, but for having observed the man so constantly, at such different hours, and often with so little warning, as to be convinced to the contrary.

One cold, clear November night, when the tingle of the air, and the beauty of the moonlight, should have aroused any healthy being to a sense of life's joy in the matchless late autumn of New York, Larcher met his friend on Broadway. Davenport was apparently as much absorbed in his inner contemplations, or as nearly void of any contemplation whatever, as a man could be under the most stupefying influences. He politely stopped, however, when Larcher did.

“Where are you going?” the latter asked.

“Home,” was the reply; thus amended the next instant: “To my room, that is.”

“I'll walk with you, if you don't mind. I feel like stretching my legs.”

“Glad to have you,” said Davenport, indifferently. They turned from Broadway eastward into a cross-town street, high above the end of which rose the moon, lending romance and serenity to the house-fronts. Larcher called the artist's attention to it. Davenport replied by quoting, mechanically:

“'With how slow steps, O moon, thou clim'st the sky, How silently, and with how wan a face!'”

“I'm glad to see you out on so fine a night,” pursued Larcher.

“I came out on business,” said the other. “I got a request by telegraph from the benevolent Bagley to meet him at his rooms. He received a 'hurry call' to Chicago, and must take the first train; so he sent for me, to look after a few matters in his absence.”

“I trust you'll find them interesting,” said Larcher, comparing his own failure with Bagley's success in obtaining Davenport's services.

“Not in the slightest,” replied Davenport.

“Then remunerative, at least.”

“Not sufficiently to attract me,” said the other.

“Then, if you'll pardon the remark, I really can't understand—”

“Mere force of habit,” replied Davenport, listlessly. “When he summons, I attend. When he entrusts, I accept. I've done it so long, and so often, I can't break myself of the habit. That is, of course, I could if I chose, but it would require an effort, and efforts aren't worth while at this stage.”

With little more talk, they arrived at the artist's house.

“If you talk of moonlight,” said Davenport, in a manner of some kindliness, “you should see its effect on the back yards, from my windows. You know how half-hearted the few trees look in the daytime; but I don't think you've seen that view on a moonlight night. The yards, taken as a whole, have some semblance to a real garden. Will you come up?”

Larcher assented readily. A minute later, while his host was seeking matches, he looked down from the dark chamber, and saw that the transformation wrought in the rectangular space of back yards had not been exaggerated. The shrubbery by the fences might have sheltered fairies. The boughs of the trees, now leafless, gently stirred. Even the plain house-backs were clad in beauty.

When Larcher turned from the window, Davenport lighted the gas, but not his lamp; then drew from an inside pocket, and tossed on the table, something which Larcher took to be a stenographer's note-book, narrow, thick, and with stiff brown covers. Its unbound end was confined by a thin rubber band. Davenport opened a drawer of the table, and essayed to sweep the book thereinto by a careless push. The book went too far, struck the arm of a chair, flew open at the breaking of the overstretched rubber, fell on its side by the chair leg, and disclosed a pile of bank-notes. These, tightly flattened, were the sole contents of the covers. As Larcher's startled eyes rested upon them, he saw that the topmost bill was for five hundred dollars.

Davenport exhibited a momentary vexation, then picked up the bills, and laid them on the table in full view.

“Bagley's money,” said he, sitting down before the table. “I'm to place it for him to-morrow. This sudden call to Chicago prevents his carrying out personally some plans he had formed. So he entrusts the business to the reliable Davenport.”

“When I walked home with you, I had no idea I was in the company of so much money,” said Larcher, who had taken a chair near his friend.

“I don't suppose there's another man in New York to-night with so much ready money on his person,” said Davenport, smiling. “These are large bills, you know. Ironical, isn't it? Think of Murray Davenport walking about with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket.”

“Twenty thousand! Why, that's just the amount you were—” Larcher checked himself.

“Yes,” said Davenport, unmoved. “Just the amount of Bagley's wealth that morally belongs to me, not considering interest. I could use it, too, to very good advantage. With my skill in the art of frugal living, I could make it go far—exceedingly far. I could realize that plan of a congenial life, which I told you of one night here. There it is; here am I; and if right prevailed, it would be mine. Yet if I ventured to treat it as mine, I should land in a cell. Isn't it a silly world?”

He languidly replaced the bills between the notebook covers, and put them in the drawer. As he did so, his glance fell on a sheet of paper lying there. With a curious, half-mirthful expression on his face, he took this up, and handed it to Larcher, saying:

“You told me once you could judge character by handwriting. What do you make of this man's character?”

Larcher read the following note, which was written in a small, precise, round hand:

“MY DEAR DAVENPORT:—I will meet you at the place and time you suggest. We can then, I trust, come to a final settlement, and go our different ways. Till then I have no desire to see you; and afterward, still less. Yours truly,

“FRANCIS TURL.”

“Francis Turl,” repeated Larcher. “I never heard the name before.”

“No, I suppose you never have,” replied Davenport, dryly. “But what character would you infer from his penmanship?”

“Well,—I don't know.” Put to the test, Larcher was at a loss. “An educated person, I should think; even scholarly, perhaps. Fastidious, steady, exact, reserved,—that's about all.”

“Not very much,” said Davenport, taking back the sheet. “You merely describe the handwriting itself. Your characterization, as far as it goes, would fit men who write very differently from this. It fits me, for instance, and yet look at my angular scrawl.” He held up a specimen of his own irregular hand, beside the elegant penmanship of the note, and Larcher had to admit himself a humbug as a graphologist.

“But,” he demanded, “did my description happen to fit that particular man—Francis Turl?”

“Oh, more or less,” said Davenport, evasively, as if not inclined to give any information about that person. This apparent disinclination increased Larcher's hidden curiosity as to who Francis Turl might be, and why Davenport had never mentioned him before, and what might be between the two for settlement.

Davenport put Turl's writing back into the drawer, but continued to regard his own. “'A vile cramped hand,'” he quoted. “I hate it, as I have grown to hate everything that partakes of me, or proceeds from me. Sometimes I fancy that my abominable handwriting had as much to do with alienating a certain fair inconstant as the news of my reputed unluckiness. Both coming to her at once, the combined effect was too much.”

“Why?—Did you break that news to her by letter?”

“That seems strange to you, perhaps. But you see, at first it didn't occur to me that I should have to break it to her at all. We met abroad; we were tourists whose paths happened to cross. Over there I almost forgot about the bad luck. It wasn't till both of us were back in New York, that I felt I should have to tell her, lest she might hear it first from somebody else. But I shied a little at the prospect, just enough to make me put the revelation off from day to day. The more I put it off, the more difficult it seemed—you know how the smallest matter, even the writing of an overdue letter, grows into a huge task that way. So this little ordeal got magnified for me, and all that winter I couldn't brace myself to go through it. In the spring, Bagley had use for me in his affairs, and he kept me busy night and day for two weeks. When I got free, I was surprised to find she had left town. I hadn't the least idea where she'd gone; till one day I received a letter from her. She wrote as if she thought I had known where she was; she reproached me with negligence, but was friendly nevertheless. I replied at once, clearing myself of the charge; and in that same letter I unburdened my soul of the bad luck secret. It was easier to write it than speak it.”

“And what then?”

“Nothing. I never heard from her again.”

“But your letter may have miscarried,—something of that sort.”

“I made allowance for that, and wrote another letter, which I registered. She got that all right, for the receipt came back, signed by her father. But no answer ever came from her, and I was a bit too proud to continue a one-sided correspondence. So ended that chapter in the harrowing history of Murray Davenport.—She was a fine young woman, as the world judges; she reminded me, in some ways, of Scott's heroines.”

“Ah! that's why you took kindly to the old fellow by the river. You remember his library—made up entirely of Scott?”

“Oh, that wasn't the reason. He interested me; or at least his way of living did.”

“I wonder if he wasn't fabricating a little. These old fellows from the country like to make themselves amusing. They're not so guileless.”

“I know that, but Mr. Bud is genuine. Since that day, he's been home in the country for three weeks, and now he's back in town again for a 'short spell,' as he calls it.”

“You still keep in touch with him?” asked Larcher, in surprise.

“Oh, yes. He's been very hospitable—allowing me the use of his room to sketch in.”

“Even during his absence?”

“Yes; why not? I made some drawings for him, of the view from his window. He's proud of them.”

Something in Davenport's manner seemed to betray a wish for reticence on the subject of Mr. Bud, even a regret that it had been broached. This stopped Larcher's inquisition, though not his curiosity. He was silent for a moment; then rose, with the words:

“Well, I'm keeping you up. Many thanks for the sight of your moonlit garden. When shall I see you again?”

“Oh, run in any time. It isn't so far out of your way, even if you don't find me here.”

“I'd like you to glance over the proofs of my Harlem Lane article. I shall have them day after to-morrow. Let's see—I'm engaged for that day. How will the next day suit you?”

“All right. Come the next day if you like.”

“That'll be Friday. Say one o'clock, and we can go out and lunch together.”

“Just as you please.”

“One o'clock on Friday then. Good night!”

“Good night!”

At the door, Larcher turned for a moment in passing out, and saw Davenport standing by the table, looking after him. What was the inscrutable expression—half amusement, half friendliness and self-accusing regret—which faintly relieved for a moment the indifference of the man's face?

CHAPTER VII — MYSTERY BEGINS

The discerning reader will perhaps think Mr. Thomas Larcher a very dull person in not having yet put this and that together and associated the love-affair of Murray Davenport with the “romance” of Miss Florence Kenby. One might suppose that Edna Hill's friendship for Miss Kenby, and her inquisitiveness regarding Davenport, formed a sufficient pair of connecting links. But the still more discerning reader will probably judge otherwise. For Miss Hill had many friends whom she brought to Larcher's notice, and Miss Kenby did not stand alone in his observation, as she necessarily does in this narrative. Larcher, too, was not as fully in possession of the circumstances as the reader. Nor, to him, were the circumstances isolated from the thousands of others that made up his life, as they are to the reader. Edna's allusion to Miss Kenby's “romance” had been cursory; Larcher understood only that she had given up a lover to please her father. Davenport's inconstant had abandoned him because he was unlucky; Larcher had always conceived her as such a woman, and so of a different type from that embodied in Miss Kenby. To be sure, he knew now that Davenport's fickle one had a father; but so had most young women. In short, the small connecting facts had no such significance in his mind, where they were not grouped away from other facts, as they must have in these pages, where their very presence together implies inter-relation.

In his reports to Edna, a certain delicacy had made him touch lightly upon the traces of Davenport's love-affair. He may, indeed, have guessed that those traces were what she was most desirous to hear of. But a certain manly allegiance to his sex kept him reticent on that point in spite of all her questions. He did not even say to what motive Davenport ascribed the false one's fickleness; nor what was Davenport's present opinion of her. “He was thrown over by some woman whose name he never mentions; since then he has steered clear of the sex,” was what Larcher replied to Edna a hundred times, in a hundred different sets of phrases; and it was all he replied on the subject.

So matters stood until two days after the interview related in the previous chapter. At the end of that interview, Larcher had said that for the second day thereafter he was engaged; Hence he had appointed the third day for his next meeting with Davenport. The engagement for the second day was, to spend the afternoon with Edna Hill at a riding-school. Upon arriving at the flat where Edna lived under the mild protection of her easy-going aunt, he found Miss Kenby included in the arrangement. To this he did not object; Miss Kenby was kind as well as beautiful; and Larcher was not unwilling to show the tyrannical Edna that he could play the cavalier to one pretty girl as well as to another. He did not, however, manage to disturb her serenity at all during the afternoon. The three returned, very merry, to the flat, in a state of the utmost readiness for afternoon tea, for the day was cold and blowy. To make things pleasanter, Aunt Clara had finished her tea and was taking a nap. The three young people had the drawing-room, with its bright coal fire, to themselves.

Everything was trim and elegant in this flat. The clear-skinned maid who placed the tea things, and brought the muffins and cake, might have been transported that instant from Mayfair, on a magic carpet, so neat was her black dress, so spotless her white apron, cap, and cuffs, so clean her slender hands.

“What a sweet place you have, Edna,” remarked Florence Kenby, looking around.

“So you've often said before, dear. And whenever you choose to make it sweeter, for good, you've only got to move in.”

Florence laughed, but with something very like a sigh.

“What, are you willing to take boarders?” said Larcher. “If that's the case, put me down as the first applicant.”

“Our capacity for 'paying guests' is strictly limited to one person, and no gentlemen need apply. Two lumps, Flo dear?”

“Yes, please.—If only your restrictions didn't keep out poor father—”

“If only your poor father would consider your happiness instead of his own selfish plans.”

“Edna, dear! You mustn't.”

“Why mustn't I?” replied Edna, pouring tea. “Truth's truth. He's your father, but I'm your friend, and you know in your heart which of us would do more for you. You know, and he knows, that you'd be happier, and have better health, if you came to live with us. If he really loves you, why doesn't he let you come? He could see you often enough. But I know the reason; he's afraid you'd get out of his control; he has his own projects. You needn't mind my saying this before Tom Larcher; he read your father like a book the first time he ever met him.”

Larcher, in the act of swallowing some buttered muffin, instantly looked very wise and penetrative.

“I should think your father himself would be happier,” said he, “if he lived less privately and had more of men's society.”

“He's often in poor health,” replied Florence.

“In that case, there are plenty of places, half hotel, half sanatorium, where the life is as luxurious as can be.”

“I couldn't think of deserting him. Even if he—weren't altogether unselfish about me, there would always be my promise.”

“What does that matter—such a promise?” inquired Edna, between sips of tea.

“You would make one think you were perfectly unscrupulous, dear,” said Florence, smiling. “But you know as well as I, that a promise is sacred.”

“Not all promises. Are they, Tommy?”

“No, not all,” replied Larcher. “It's like this: When you make a bad promise, you inaugurate a wrong. As long as you keep that promise, you perpetuate that wrong. The only way to end the wrong, is to break the promise.”

“Bravo, Tommy! You can't get over logic like that, Florence, dear, and your promise did inaugurate a wrong—a wrong against yourself.”

“Well, then, it's allowable to wrong oneself,” said Florence.

“But not one's friends—one's true, disinterested friends. And as for that other promise of yours—that fearful promise!—you can't deny you wronged somebody by that; somebody you had no right to wrong.”

“It was a choice between him and my father,” replied Florence, in a low voice, and turning very red.

“Very well; which deserved to be sacrificed?” cried Edna, her eyes and tone showing that the subject was a heating one. “Which was likely to suffer more by the sacrifice? You know perfectly well fathers don't die in those cases, and consequently your father's hysterics must have been put on for effect. Oh, don't tell me!—it makes me wild to think of it! Your father would have been all right in a week; whereas the other man's whole life is darkened.”

“Don't say that, dear,” pleaded Florence, gently. “Men soon get over such things.”

“Not so awfully soon;—not sincere men. Their views of life are changed, for all time. And this man seems to grow more and more melancholy, if what Tom says is true.”

“What I say?” exclaimed Larcher.

The two girls looked at each other.

“Goodness! I have given it away!” cried Edna.

“More and more melancholy?” repeated Larcher. “Why, that must be Murray Davenport. Was he the—? Then you must be the—! But surely you wouldn't have given him up on account of the bad luck nonsense.”

“Bad luck nonsense?” echoed Edna, while Miss Kenby looked bewildered.

“The silly idea of some foolish people, that he carried bad luck with him,” Larcher explained, addressing Florence. “He sent you a letter about it.”

“I never got any such letter from him,” said Florence, in wonderment.

“Then you didn't know? And that had nothing to do with your giving him up?”

“Indeed it had not! Why, if I'd known about that—But the letter you speak of—when was it? I never had a letter from him after I left town. He didn't even answer when I told him we were going.”

“Because he never heard you were going. He got a letter after you had gone, and then he wrote you about the bad luck nonsense. There must have been some strange defect in your mail arrangements.”

“I always thought some letters must have gone astray and miscarried between us. I knew he couldn't be so negligent. I'd have taken pains to clear it up, if I hadn't promised my father just at that time—” She stopped, unable to control her voice longer. Her lips were quivering.

“Speaking of your father,” said Larcher, “you must have got a subsequent letter from Davenport, because he sent it registered, and the receipt came back with your father's signature.”

“No, I never got that, either,” said Florence, before the inference struck her. When it did, she gazed from one to the other with a helpless, wounded look, and blushed as if the shame were her own.

Edna Hill's eyes blazed with indignation, then softened in pity for her friend. She turned to Larcher in a very calling-to-account manner.

“Why didn't you tell me all this before?”

“I didn't think it was necessary. And besides, he never told me about the letters till the night before last.”

“And all this time that poor young man has thought Florence tossed him over because of some ridiculous notion about bad luck?”

“Well, more or less,—and the general fickleness of the sex.”

“General fick—! And you, having seen Florence, let him go on thinking so?”

“But I didn't know Miss Kenby was the lady he meant. If you'd only told me it was for her you wanted news of him—”

“Stupid, you might have guessed! But I think it's about time he had some news of her. He ought to know she wasn't actuated by any such paltry, childish motive.”

“By George, I agree with you!” cried Larcher, with a sudden energy. “If you could see the effect on the man, of that false impression, Miss Kenby! I don't mean to say that his state of mind is entirely due to that; he had causes enough before. But it needed only that to take away all consolation, to stagger his faith, to kill his interest in life.”

“Has it made him so bitter?” asked Florence, sadly.

“I shouldn't call the effect bitterness. He has too lofty a mind for strong resentment. That false impression has only brought him to the last stage of indifference. I should say it was the finishing touch to making his life a wearisome drudgery, without motive or hope.”

Florence sighed deeply.

“To think that he could believe such a thing of Florence,” put in Edna. “I'm sure I couldn't. Could you, Tom?”

“When a man's in love, he doesn't see things in their true proportions,” said Larcher, authoritatively. “He exaggerates both the favors and the rebuffs he gets, both the kindness and the coldness of the woman. If he thinks he's ill-treated, he measures the supposed cause by his sufferings. As they are so great, he thinks the woman's cruelty correspondingly great. Nobody will believe such good things of a woman as the man who loves her; but nobody will believe such bad things if matters go wrong.”

“Dear, dear, Tommy! What a lot you know about it!”

But Miss Hill's momentary sarcasm went unheeded. “So I really think, Miss Kenby, if you'll pardon me,” Larcher continued, “that Murray Davenport ought to know your true reason for giving him up. Even if matters never go any further, he ought to know that you still—h'm—feel an interest in him—still wish him well. I'm sure if he knew about your solicitude—how it was the cause of my looking him up—I can see through all that now—”

“I can never thank you enough—and Edna,” said Florence, in a tremulous voice.

“No thanks are due me,” replied Larcher, emphatically. “I value his acquaintance on its own account. But if he knew about this, knew your real motives then, and your real feelings now, even if he were never to see you again, the knowledge would have an immense effect on his life. I'm sure it would. It would restore his faith in you, in woman, in humanity. It would console him inexpressibly; would be infinitely sweet to him. It would change the color of his view of life; give him hope and strength; make a new man of him.”

Florence's eyes glistened through her tears. “I should be so glad,” she said, gently, “if—if only—you see, I promised not to hold any sort of communication with him.”

“Oh, that promise!” cried Edna. “Just think how it was obtained. And think about those letters that were stopped. If that alone doesn't release you, I wonder what!”

Florence's face clouded with humiliation at the reminder.

“Moreover,” said Larcher, “you won't be holding communication. The matter has come to my knowledge fairly enough, through Edna's lucky forgetfulness. I take it on myself to tell Davenport. I'm to meet him to-morrow, anyhow—it looks as though it had all been ordained. I really don't see how you can prevent me, Miss Kenby.”

Florence's face threw off its cloud, and her conscience its scruples, and a look of gratitude and relief, almost of sudden happiness, appeared.

“You are so good, both of you. There's nothing in the world I'd rather have than to see him made happy.”

“If you'd like to see it with your own eyes,” said Larcher, “let me send him to you for the news.”

“Oh, no! I don't mean that. He mustn't know where to find me. If he came to see me, I don't know what father would do. I've been so afraid of meeting him by chance; or of his finding out I was in New York.”

Larcher understood now why Edna had prohibited his mentioning the Kenbys to anybody. “Well,” said he, “in that case, Murray Davenport shall be made happy by me at about one o'clock to-morrow afternoon.”

“And you shall come to tea afterward and tell us all about it,” cried Edna. “Flo, you must be here for the news, if I have to go in a hansom and kidnap you.”

“I think I can come voluntarily,” said Florence, smiling through her tears.

“And let's hope this is only the beginning of matters, in spite of any silly old promise obtained by false pretences! I say, we've let our tea get cold. I must have another cup.” And Miss Hill rang for fresh hot water.

The rest of the afternoon in that drawing-room was all mirth and laughter; the innocent, sweet laughter of youth enlisted in the generous cause of love and truth against the old, old foes—mercenary design, false appearance, and mistaken duty.

Larcher had two reasons for not going to his friend before the time previously set for his call. In the first place he had already laid out his time up to that hour, and, secondly, he would not hazard the disappointment of arriving with his good news ready, and not finding his friend in. To be doubly sure, he telegraphed Davenport not to forget the appointment on any account, as he had an important disclosure to make. Full of his revelation, then, he rang the bell of his friend's lodging-house at precisely one o'clock the next day.

“I'll go right up to Mr. Davenport's room,” he said to the negro boy at the door.

“All right, sir, but I don't think you'll find Mr. Davenport up there,” replied the servant, glancing at a brown envelope on the hat-stand.

Larcher saw that it was addressed to Murray Davenport. “When did that telegram come?” he inquired.

“Last evening.”

“It must be the one I sent. And he hasn't got it yet! Do you mean he hasn't been in?”

Heavy slippered footsteps in the rear of the hall announced the coming of somebody, who proved to be a rather fat woman in a soiled wrapper, with tousled light hair, flabby face, pale eyes, and a worried but kindly look. Larcher had seen her before; she was the landlady.

“Do you know anything about Mr. Davenport?” she asked, quickly.

“No, madam, except that I was to call on him here at one o'clock.”

“Oh, then, he may be here to meet you. When did you make that engagement?”

“On Tuesday, when I was here last! Why?—What's the matter?”

“Tuesday? I was in hopes you might 'a' made it since. Mr. Davenport hasn't been home for two days!”

“Two days! Why, that's rather strange!”

“Yes, it is; because he never stayed away overnight without he either told me beforehand or sent me word. He was always so gentlemanly about saving me trouble or anxiety.”

“And this time he said nothing about it?”

“Not a word. He went out day before yesterday at nine o'clock in the morning, and that's the last we've seen or heard of him. He didn't carry any grip, or have his trunk sent for; he took nothing but a parcel wrapped in brown paper.”

“Well, I can't understand it. It's after one o'clock now—If he doesn't soon turn up—What do you think about it?”

“I don't know what to think about it. I'm afraid it's a case of mysterious disappearance—that's what I think!”