HORACE Boyce was too enraged to preserve a polite demeanor toward the sympathizers who had followed him out of the hall, and who showed a disposition to discuss the situation with him now the street was reached. After a muttered word or two to Tenney, the young man abruptly turned his back on the group, and walked with a hurried step down the street toward his hotel.
Entering the building, he made his way direct to the bar-room back of the office—a place where he had rarely been before—and poured out for himself a heavy portion of whiskey, which he drank off without noticing the glass of iced water placed for him beside the bottle. He turned to go, but came back again to the bar after he had reached the swinging screen-doors, and said he would take a bottle of the liquor up to his room. “I haven’t been sleeping well these last few nights,” he explained to the bar-keeper.
Once in his room, Horace put off his boots, got into easy coat and slippers, raked down the fire, looked for an aimless minute or two at the row of books on his shelf, and then threw himself into the arm-chair beside the stove. The earlier suggestion of gray in his hair at the temples had grown more marked these last few weeks, and there were new lines of care on his clear-cut face, which gave it a haggard look now as he bent his brows in rumination.
An important interview with Tenney and Wendover was to take place in this room a half hour later; but, besides a certain hard-drawn notion that he would briskly hold his own with them, Horace did not try to form plans for this or even to fasten his mind upon it.
The fortnight or more that had passed since that terrible momentary vision of Kate Minster running up the stairs to avoid him, had been to the young man a period of unexampled gloominess and unrest, full of deep wrath at the fate which had played upon him such a group of scurvy tricks all at once, yet having room for sustained exasperation over the minor discomforts of his new condition.
The quarrel with his father had forced him to change his residence, and this was a peculiarly annoying circumstance coming at just such a time. He realized now that he had been very comfortable in the paternal house, and that his was a temperament extremely dependent upon well-ordered and satisfactory surroundings. These new rooms of his, though they cost a good deal of money, were not at all to his liking, and the service was execrable. The sense of being at home was wholly lacking; he felt as disconnected and out of touch with the life about him as if he had been travelling in a foreign country which he did not like.
The great humiliation and wrong—the fact that he had been rejected with open contumely by the rich girl he had planned to marry—lay steadily day and night upon the confines of his consciousness, like a huge black morass with danger signals hung upon all its borders. His perverse mind kept returning to view these menacing signals, and torturing him with threats to disregard them and plunge into the forbidden darkness. The constant strain to hold his thoughts back from this hateful abyss wore upon him like an unremitting physical pain.
The resolve which had chilled and stiffened him into self-possession that afternoon in the drawingroom, and had even enabled him to speak with cold distinctness to Mrs. Minster and to leave the house of insult and defeat with dignity, had been as formless and unshaped as poor, heart-torn, trembling Lear’s threat to his daughters before Gloster’s gate. Revenge he would have—sweeping, complete, merciless, but by what means he knew not. That would come later.
Two weeks were gone, and the revenge seemed measurably nearer, though still its paths were all unmapped. It was clear enough to the young man’s mind now that Tenney and Wendover were intent on nothing less than plundering the whole Minster estate. Until that fatal afternoon in the drawingroom, he had kept himself surrounded with an elaborate system of self-deception. He had pretended to himself that the designs of these associates of his were merely smart commercial plans, which needed only to be watched with equal smartness. Now the pretence was put aside. He knew the men to be villains, and openly rated them as such in his thoughts.
He had a stem satisfaction in the thought that their schemes were in his hands. He would join them now, frankly and with all his heart, only providing the condition that his share of the proceeds should be safe-guarded. They should have his help to wreck this insolent, purse-proud, newly rich family, to strip them remorselessly of their wealth. His fellow brigands might keep the furnaces, might keep everything in and about this stupid Thessaly. He would take his share in hard coin, and shake the mud and slush of Dearborn County from off his feet. He was only in the prime of his youth. Romance beckoned to him from a hundred centres of summer civilization, where men knew how to live, and girls added culture and dowries to beauty and artistic dress. Oh, yes! he would take his money and go.
The dream of a career in his native village had brought him delight only so long as Kate Minster was its central figure. That vision now seemed so clumsy and foolish that he laughed at it. He realized that he had never liked the people here about him. Even the Minsters had been provincial, only a gilded variation upon the rustic character of the section. Nothing but the over-sanguine folly of youth could ever have prompted him to think that he wanted to be mayor of Thessaly, or that it would be good to link his fortunes with the dull, under-bred place. Oh, no! he would take his money and go.
The two men for whom he had been waiting broke abruptly in upon his revery by entering the room. They came in without even a show of knocking on the door, and Horace frowned a little at their rudeness.
Stout Judge Wendover panted heavily with the exertion of ascending the stairs, and it seemed to have put him out of temper as well as breath. He threw off his overcoat with an impatient jerk, took a chair, and gruffly grunted “How-de-do!” in the direction of his host, without taking the trouble to even nod a salutation. Tenney also seated himself, but he did not remove his overcoat. Even in the coldest seasons he seemed to wear the same light, autumnal clothes, creaseless and gray, and mouselike in effect. The two men looked silently at Horace, and he felt that they disapproved his velveteen coat.
“Well?” he asked, at last, leaning back in his chair and trying to equal them in indifference. “What is new in New York, Judge?”
“Never mind New York! Thessaly is more in our line just now,” said Wendover, sternly.
The young man simulated a slight yawn. “You’re welcome to my share of the town, I’m sure,” he said; “I’m not very enthusiastic about it myself.”
“How much has Reuben Tracy got to work on? How much have you blabbed about our business to him?” asked the New Yorker.
“I neither know nor care anything about Mr. Tracy,” said Horace, coldly. “As for what you elegantly describe as my ‘blabbing’ to him, I daresay you understand what it means. I don’t.”
“It means that you have made a fool of us; got us into trouble; perhaps ruined the whole business, by your God A’mighty stupidity! That’s what it means!” said Wendover, with his little blue-bead eyes snapping angrily in the lamplight.
“I hope it won’t strike you as irrelevant if I suggest that this is my room,” drawled Horace, “and that I have a distinct preference for civil conversation in it. If you have any criticisms to offer upon my conduct, as you seem to think that you have, I must beg that you couch them in the language which gentlemen—”
“Gentlemen be damned!” broke in the Judge, sharply. “We’ve had too much ‘gentleman’ in this whole business! Answer me a plain question. What does Tracy mean by his applications?”
“I haven’t the remotest idea what you are talking about. I’ve already told you that I know nothing of Mr. Tracy or his doings.”
Schuyler Tenney interposed, impassively: “He may not have heard of the application, Judge. You must remember that, for the sake of appearances, he then being in partnership, you were made Mrs. Minster’s attorney, in both the agreements. That is how notices came to be served on you.”
The Judge had not taken his eyes off the young man in the velveteen jacket. “Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t learned from Mrs. Minster that this man Tracy has made applications on behalf of the daughters to upset the trust agreement, and to have a receiver appointed to overhaul the books of the Mfg. Company?”
Horace sat up straight. “Good God, no!” he stammered. “I’ve heard nothing of that.”
“You never do seem to hear about things. What did you suppose you were here for, except to watch Mrs. Minster, and keep track of what was going on?” demanded Wendover.
“I may tell you,” answered Horace, speaking hesitatingly, “that circumstances have arisen which render it somewhat difficult for me to call upon Mrs. Minster at her house—for that matter, out of the question. She has only been to my office office within the—the last fortnight.”
Schuyler Tenney spoke again. “The ‘circumstances’ means, Judge, that he—”
“Pardon me, Mr. Tenney,” said Horace, with decision: “what the circumstances mean is neither your business nor that of your friend. That is something that we will not discuss, if you please.”
“Won’t we, though!” burst in Wendover, peremptorily. “You make a fool of us. You go sneaking around one of the girls up there. You think you’ll set yourself in a tub of butter, and let our schemes go to the devil. You try to play this behind our backs. You get kicked out of the house for your impudence. And then you sit here, dressed like an Italian organ-grinder, by God, and tell me that we won’t discuss the subject!”
Horace rose to his feet, with all his veins tingling. “You may leave this room, both of you,” he said, in a voice which he with difficulty kept down. His face was pale with rage.
Judge Wendover rose, also, but it was not to obey Horace’s command. Instead, he pointed imperiously to the chair which the young man had vacated.
“Sit down there,” he shouted. “Sit down, I tell you! I warn you, I’m in no mood to be fooled with. You deserve to have your neck wrung for what you’ve done already. If I have another word of cheek from you, by God, it shall be wrung! We’ll throw you on the dungheap as we would a dead rat.”
Horace had begun to listen to these staccato sentences with his arms folded, and lofty defiance in his glance. Somehow, as he looked into his antagonist’s blazing eyes, his courage melted before their hot menace. The pudgy figure of the Judge visibly magnified itself under his gaze, and the threat in that dry, husky voice set his nerves to quaking. He sank into his seat again.
“All right,” he said, in an altered voice. “I’m willing enough to talk, only a man doesn’t like to be bullied in that way in his own house.”
“It’s a tarnation sight better than being bullied by a warder in Auburn State’s prison,” said the Judge, as he too resumed his chair. “Take my word for that.”
Schuyler Tenney crossed his legs nervously at this, and coughed. Horace looked at them both in a mystified but uneasy silence.
“You heard what I said?” queried Wendover, brusquely, after a moment’s pause.
“Undoubtedly I did,” answered Horace. “But—but its application escaped me.”
“What I mean is”—the Judge hesitated for a moment to note Tenney’s mute signal of dissuasion, and then went on: “We might as well not beat about the bush—what I mean is that there’s a penitentiary job in this thing for somebody, unless we all keep ou............