Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 17
I WANT you to charge the twenty thousand to me, to my account. I'll get it back or pay it back," declared Henry, when Old Two Blades had received him in his den by appointment, at about eight-thirty that night, having already, no doubt, received the fullest account of what had transpired from both Quackenbaugh and Scanlon. It seemed to mean more to Mr. Boland to lose the twenty thousand than it did to Scanlon or Quackenbaugh. To them it was a black mark. To him it was like a pain. He winced as if it had been a pound of flesh taken off next his heart. And yet
"Nothing of the sort," he insisted, "it couldn't be your fault. You were carrying out instructions." With this soothing interpretation, Mr. Boland seemed to shrug the money out of consideration, so far as Henry was concerned, and to fasten his mind upon the tragedy.
"You thought you recognized the dead man?" he recalled with a peculiar penetrative quality in his tone, a peculiar glitter in his deeply recessed eyes—"before he disappeared?"
Henry's face became grave. "Yes," he said, lowering his voice. "I recognized him. It was the man Miss Billie introduced to me day before yesterday as Count Eckstrom."
Mr. Boland started perceptibly; then for a moment his sharp features were set as graven stone and Harrington felt that recessed gaze sifting him—sifting almost as if it doubted. "Hum! That is a coincidence," he said eventually; then shifted the subject of his inquiries. "Quackenbaugh tells me that you . . . were unsuccessful with the Indian?"
Henry flushed but squared manfully to the admission. "Couldn't budge him, Mr. Boland. The Indian is stubborn and simply stood on his rights. There is nothing more that can be done. You will have to build your shingle mill somewhere else."
Mr. Boland's caverned eyes blinked behind their glasses. "You think so!" was his dry comment. But immediately he smiled. "Unfortunate," he ejaculated, "but don't let that worry you. That's a minor matter for Quackenbaugh and Scanlon to work out. The important question is"—Mr. Boland wet an eager lip—"have you made any progress on the Shell Point project? Any start yet?"
Henry's face lighted. "More—much more than a start, Mr. Boland," he assured with enthusiasm. "Miss Marceau, teacher of the Indian School, is committed to the project heart and soul. She has been sounding the Indians out already and feels certain they're going to be favorable."
Mr. Boland's tight features relaxed in a beatific smile. "I suppose knowledge of the Hurricane Island affair will leak out among the Indians and it probably won't do your influence any harm that you didn't crowd this fellow Adam John?" said Old Two Blades.
"Miss Marceau says that it will help us," responded Harrington eagerly, "that the Indians will think Adam John is a fool."
"Hum! Miss Marceau seems rather a sensible person."
"She is," affirmed Henry with emphasis. "Mr. Boland, I believe that within six weeks we shall have that petition signed by every Indian whose signature is required."
Harrington was so satisfied with this and so pleased that he could give that kind of assurance, that the sting of the Hurricane Island defeat was almost forgotten. It was cured entirely when Mr. Boland arose, beaming in every welt and wrinkle of his toil-chiseled face, and taking both of Harrington's hands in his, shook them warmly and said with enthusiasm: "Henry, I believe you will!
"But I must tell you of one mistake you are making about the Hurricane Island affair," he said, halting just inside the door, "The dead man was not Count Eckstrom."
"Not Eckstrom!" Henry was vastly incredulous.
"Count Eckstrom is in the music room now with Billie. There—that must be the count at the piano. It isn't her touch."
"Mr. Boland," said Henry solemnly, "I will take my oath that the man whom I saw dead in the ferns is the man Miss Billie presented to me day before yesterday as Count Eckstrom. I'd like to have a look at the fleshly phantom, if you don't mind."
"Certainly," smiled Mr. Boland, "we'll add another chapter to your mystery."
Arm in arm they advanced into the music room and stood halted just beyond the threshold; and there sat Eckstrom at the piano, the tails of his evening coat floating down behind the bench, his shoulders squared, hands banging the keys, his large head thrown back as if in a kind of rapture, his little yellow Vandyke pointed straight ahead of him. It was the very beard, the very face.
Billie was draped across a Viennese chair, with the green fan, of which she was so fond, beating lazy time to the count's music.
"I'm dazed," Henry whispered to Mr. Boland. Then added, "I'm not satisfied."
"Pardon the intrusion, Billie," apologized her father, "but as Count Eckstrom is leaving tomorrow I thought it would be a pity if he and Mr. Harrington did not have an opportunity to broaden their acquaintance beyond a mere introduction."
Billie started with surprise at this revelation of the other two presences within the room; and Henry started at this revelation that Count Eckstrom, big, alive and well, was abruptly cutting short his stay—but that was as nothing to the start over his presence here and now!
"That was thoughtful of you, father," Billie was responding, casually; but centering her gaze on Harrington. Yesterday she had found this somewhat self-assured young man in a mood of depression. She had lectured him and left him—both for his own good; she had warned him to expect her father's displeasure. Yet, here he stood, with that father's arm linked through his, and pushed forward by him to interrupt a rather interesting tête-à-tête with a rather interesting gentleman of whom her father knew that she thought exceedingly well. The young man must have succecded then in his second mission to the island. He must have profited by her admonition. And her instinct always was to hail success. She rejoiced in young men who profited by admonitions.
"Ah, the burden-bearer!" patronized the count, arising and advancing.
Harrington was a bit stary. He saw approaching him an opossum grin and the wide expanse of white shirt over a breast which he was willing to wager he had seen only nine hours before covered with blue flannel and oozing a red welter upon the green of a forest floor. But he tried to rise to the moment.
"I am quite disappointed, Count Eckstrom, to hear of your leaving us," he began well enough; but his instinctive dislike for the man plus his suspicions and irritating bewilderment, made him suddenly rude. "By the way, Miss Boland," he inquired coolly: "Had you noticed how very much Count Eckstrom's voice resembles Mr. Scanlon's?"
Billie was shocked. This was rather gauche, since Scanlon was such a coarse person; and there was nothing charming about his voice either; it was unpleasant. True, Count Eckstrom's tones were husky, but they were charming. Count Eckstrom was all charm.
"I have not had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Scanlon," said Count Eckstrom suavely, but the line of his brow straightened proudly. "Perhaps he got his husk in the same cloud of phosgene that I got mine—not far from Châlons-sur-Marne."
This was the retort caustic.
"I am afraid it was Three Star Hennessey that gassed Scanlon's voice," smiled Mr. Boland as believing the conversation should be lightened; but nobody laughed. Billie continued slightly vexed. Harrington seemed still to be blundering.
"Have you, by any chance, a twin brother?" he asked, surveying the count, detail by detail.
"I have not the pleasure," responded the count, smilingly opaque.
"Strange, Count Eckstrom," mused Henry, as frankly absorbed in some haunting memory. "I've seen a face exactly like yours—somewhere—exactly. Strange, too, that when Miss Billie introduced you the other day I thought I had heard your voice before."
The count laughed, but a bit nervously, perhaps. "As I have said—there are many gassed voices. As for my face: if I have a double, do not charge me with his sins, I pray you. I have enough to answer for."
"Perhaps, instead, he will have virtues that we can credit you with," tormented Harrington.
But Billie, who prided herself on her discernment, felt hopelessly fogged. "Whatever are you two men talking about?" she demanded.
"We are talking, Miss Boland, about someone who looks and sounds like me," smiled Count Eckstrom, with a gesture of suave condescension toward Harrington.
"More like you than you look and sound like yourself, Count Eckstrom," indicated Henry, without a trace of a smile. "Have you ever by any chance been in India?"
"And why India, in particular, Mr. Harrington?" Billie interposed as protecting her guest. "Count Eckstrom has been every where."
"Because, in India I have heard that magicians sometimes bring the dead to life."
"Hum! Ahem! Oh—oh, by the way!" Mr. Boland immediately became explosive and interjectory, shouldering in between them with: "I wonder, Billie, if you and Count Eckstrom won't excuse Mr. Harrington after all—at least for a moment. I have just remembered an important instruction that I want to give him."
Count Eckstrom's reception of his host's interjectory mood was the essence of good breeding. If, to a gentleman of his traditions, it was a trifle bizarre the way these Americans did mix business and social life; and if Mr. Boland, under the veil of a thin humility, was autocratic and self-indulgent to a degree, he could overlook it, since everybody indulged Mr. Boland.
"Father, you are so ridiculous!" flushed Billie. "You bring Mr. Harrington to us and then you snatch him away, before I get a chance even to ask him what all this absurd word play with the Count is about. It was too swift for me."
In truth, she was glad enough to have Harrington snatched away. Of course, this wire-haired manner of his toward the count was due solely to jealousy; he was Hellfire Harrington, she remembered; and while it piqued it also amused her; so that when Count Eckstrom took up once more the task of enthralling her mind, he found it more difficult than before.
"I—I'm groggy," confessed Harrington to Mr. Boland as his host was rather dragging him away. "And yet I—I tell you there's something phony about him; didn't you think I shook him up some? Didn't you think he betrayed himself a little?"
"You jarred him like an earthquake," opined Boland, and indulged a long low chuckle. The caverned beams with which he contemplated Harrington were benignant and highly approving.
"But phony or not, I'm glad you did go after him, Henry, because I had thought you might be lying to me about that disappearing dead man of yours. Now I know that you were not."
Henry darted a charged glance at Old Two Blades. "I will never lie to you, Mr. Boland," he said simply and directly. "I am not going to boast that I'm a little George Washington; but lying is not my habit. It is seldom my refuge. I shall never lie to you."
The older man weighed the younger in his eye.
"You will though, Henry," he prophesied, faintly pessimistic. "Everybody lies to me. They think that's the way to get on with me. Perhaps it is—in part. I am weak and mortal. The truth is often ugly, unpleasant. Somctimes people tell me lies and I know they are lies; yet because they are pleasant lies, I like them for telling them to me. But when a young man—still so young that he knows the difference between the naked truth and a fawning falschood—says to me what you have just said, I pause and consider what a golden thing truth is, and how impracticable at times."
Henry gasped. "Why, Mr. Boland, you amaze me. You want men to lie to you?"
"Expect them to, rather, let me say; and I must trust my own perspicacity to know when they are doing so. Upon that knowledge my control of them is built."
"But you do not lie, Mr. Boland?" Henry's glance was frank and inquiring.
Before Mr. Boland could answer, Billie had entered rather abruptly, a bright vision in pink chiffon, with a high-piled coiffure.
"Count Eckstrom would like a word with you, father, before he goes," she said quite innocently.
"Certainly—excuse me, Harrington!" Mr. Boland arose and went out.
Henry was groggy again—groggier than when Count Eckstrom confronted him alive in the music room. Did this mean that Eckstrom had proposed? That Billie had accepted him?
For a moment the girl's expression lent color to this theory—until with a bewitching toss of her wilful head it was made clear that she was only rebuking him for the presumption of his manner with the count.
"I—I'm sorry; but I had to go after that fellow," Harrington confessed with such sober honesty as must have mollified resentment.
For a moment Billie regarded Harrington steadily; then said with a far-away note in her voice: "Count Eckstrom is going away . . . forever." There was a look in her blue eyes as if she announced this for the young man's comfort.
"Miss Boland!" Henry exclaimed gratefully; but her manner held him off at the same moment that her features kindled with admiring interest in him and him alone.
"You are getting on well with father, aren't you?" she smiled with congratulation in her tone.
"I'd rather be sure I was getting on well with you," Henry countered daringly.
"And don't you feel that you are?"
"May I?" he challenged like a flash, but with voice lowered to a very tender significance as he advanced with outstretched hand.
But she held off again, this time with a laugh; yet there was admiration in it, cordial good feeling in it. Although her manner became elusive and bantering, there was encouragement in it—all kinds of encouragement, Henry thought as a little later he went down the hill with long plunging strides, under the stars.
"I wonder if she canned him?" he speculated. "If he got scared and lit out? I wonder who beaned me? I wonder who got the twenty thousand? I wonder who the dead man was, and how the devil two men could look so much alike and not be the same? It would be a great thing for a con man to have a double though, wouldn't it? Well, Lahleet spoiled that! Fierce for the girl, wasn't it? And she stood it like the inscrutable stoic she can be!"
Thus did things sordid and unpleasant intrude themselves into the golden glory of Henry Harrington's romance, quite as things sordid and unpleasant have a way of doing with romance in this scrambled world of ours. And the most of these speculations had to go unanswered while weeks and months of time sped by; yet they remained vividly alive in his mind, for there was so much to occupy him now that he was rather unconscious of the flight of time. All these things were but of yesterday; all their solutions must come at the latest by tomorrow; but today—ah, today! Henry was very, very busy today.