CHAPTER XXVIII. A DROP OF POISON.
Frost was succeeding in bringing Robert Milburn into open disrepute. That he was, will appear from his statement of the case to a few friends who had accompanied him into the bar room of —— hotel.
“I was saying, gentlemen, that it is such a deuced pity to see Milburn waste his talents, but the fact is, these self-destructive excesses must result in a total wreck. Am I not right?”
The man appealed to nodded approval.
“That’s what you are.”
“I say when a man gets so that he can walk up to a bar and take a drink alone, it’s about time to put a bridle on him.”
“That’s a fact,” assented a third; “and that isn’t all of it.”
“No,” put in Frost, “I saw him driving up and down Fifty-eighth Street with the Morris woman the other day, in the early afternoon. I just told him what I thought about it.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, he flared up, and said it was his own affair.”
“Well, I always thought Milburn a pretty square kind of a fellow,” said a quiet man who stood leaning against a gilded column. “In that deal with ‘—— Syndicate’—you recollect it, Frost—he could have beaten the life out of you, but he stood to you when I know he was offered double commission to come off.”
“Ah! nobody is saying anything against his honesty,” returned Willard, sharply, “he’s square enough, but it is his infernal recklessness. Now, yesterday, I sauntered into his office to remonstrate. I said, ‘Robert, old boy, you are getting yourself out of everybody’s good books; why don’t you brace up? The first thing you know, you will be dropped like a hot nail.’ I asked him why he couldn’t be a little more modest about it, for instance, I suggested, ‘when the spirit moves you to take Morris out for an airing, why won’t a moonlight night and a by-road answer the purpose as well as Fifty-eighth Street and the middle of the afternoon.’”
“And what did he say to that?”
“He held out his cigar case to me saying, ‘You are wasting your time, I don’t care to be respectably wicked, and I choose to go to the devil in my own way.’”
“Look here!” interrupted the quiet man, “I fancy I know Milburn better than most people, and he has a clean life behind him; moreover, he thinks you are the only man on earth. I can’t understand how he can deliberately throw himself away, as you say he is doing. There is a very strong motive of some kind. He is not a man to take to dissipation for its own sake.”
Frost’s eye twinkled as he turned abruptly and fronted the speaker.
“Then you think he has a provocation?”
“He must have; I’ve observed him pretty closely, and there is an underlying streak of good metal in his character that will crop out at times. Say, Frost, have you tried to help him?”
“Always.” An oppressive little silence followed, and Frost frowned as he tugged away at his mustache. “But I can do little with him of late.”
“It is all very bad—very bad,” said the quiet man.
“Though if he did a world of wrong, injuring every human creature that came between him and his pleasure, he should not be forsaken by you—he sticks to you.”
Every line in the clear whiteness of Frost’s face was cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking at the man whose words were the fine point of a sword with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him through the body.
Frost bent his head in his most courtly fashion.
“Milburn may not be all at fault; you know he has a pretty wife!” There was a secrecy in his smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words that struck the other forcibly. At the same time the thin, straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that looked handsomely diabolic.
“Come, what will you have gentlemen?”