CHAPTER III
THEY ARRIVE IN HUNSTON AND FALL IN WITH A STRANGER
The landscape near Hunston, as it happened, was superfluously pretty. It deserved a group of resident artists to admire and to catch it upon canvas; and it had, roughly speaking, only artisans out of a job. The one blot was the town, sprawling hideously over the hillside. Set down against the perennial wood, by the side of the everlasting river, it looked very cheap and common. But all this was by day. Now night fell upon the poor little city and mercifully hid it from view.
They had made the start too late for hurry to be any object. It was only a three hours' run for the Cypriani, but she took it slowly, using four. At half-past six o'clock, when their destination was drawing near, the two men went below and dined. At seven, while they were still at table, they heard the slow-down signal, and, a moment later, the rattle of the anchor line. Now, at quarter-past seven, Varney lounged alone by the starboard rail and acquainted himself with the purview.
They had run perhaps quarter of a mile above the town, for reasons which he had not communicated to the sailing-master in transmitting his orders. One was that they might be removed somewhat from native curiosity. The other was, they might be near the Carstairs residence, which was up this way somewhere. So, between the yacht and the town lay hill and wood intervening. The Cypriani, so to say, had anchored in the country. Only a light glimmering here and there through the trees indicated the nearness of man's abode.
A soporific quality lurked in the quiet solitude, and Varney, sunk in a deck-chair, yawned. They had decided at dinner that they would do nothing that night but go to bed, for it seemed plain that there was nothing else to do: little girls did not ramble abroad alone after dark. Up the companion-way and over the glistening after-deck strolled Peter, an eye-catching figure in the flooding moonlight. For, retiring to his stateroom from the table, he had divested himself of much raiment and encased his figure in a great purple bathrobe. He was a man who loved to be comfortable, was Peter. Topping the robe, he wore his new Panama. Varney looked around at the sound of footsteps, and was considerably struck by his friend's appearance.
"Feeling well, old man?" he asked with solicitude.
"Certainly."
"Not seasick at all? You won't let me fetch you the hot-water bottle?"
"No, ass."
Peter sank down in an upholstered wicker chair with pillows in it, and looked out appreciatively at the night. The yacht's lights were set, but her deck bulbs hung dark; for the soft and shimmering radiance of the sky made man's illumination an offense.
However, aesthetics, like everything else, has its place in human economy and no more. No one aboard the Cypriani became so absorbed in the marvels of nature as to become insensible to other pleasures. The air, new and fine from the hands of its Maker, acquired a distinct flavor of nicotine as it flitted past the yacht. From some hidden depth rose the subdued and convalescent snores of that early retirer, the sailing-master's wife. Below forward, two deck-hands were thoughtfully playing set-back for pennies, while a machinist sat by and read a sporting extra by a swinging bulb. Above forward, on a coil of rope, McTosh, the head steward and one of Mr. Carstairs's oldest servants, smoked a bad pipe, and expectorated stoically into the Hudson.
The thought of the essential commonplaceness of this sort of thing recurred to Peter Maginnis. For all his life of idleness, which was, as it were, accidental, Peter was essentially a man of action; and life's sedentary movements irked him sorely.
"Who is the individual monkeying around at the bow?" he asked presently.
"It is Mr. Bissett, the ship's engineer, who is putting a coat of white lead over the yacht's name."
"Aha! Aren't we old-sleuthy, though! And what's that piece of stage-play for?"
"All these little hookers," said Varney, "are listed in a book, which many persons own. Why have the local press tell everybody to-morrow that the yacht Cypriani belonging to Mr. Carstairs, husband once-removed to our own Mrs. Elbert Carstairs, is anchored off these shores?"
"It seems," said Peter, "like a lot of smoke for such a little fire."
He got up and sprawled on the rail, his yellow Panama pulled far over his eyes, his gaze fixed on the shining water.
"First and last, I've seen rivers in my time," he said presently, "big and little, pretty and not, clean and soiled, decent and indecent. Yes, boy," said he, "you can take it from me that I've seen the world's darnedest in the matter of rivers, and I have liked them all from Ganges to the Sacramento and back again. There was a time when I didn't have that sort of personal feeling for 'em, but a little chap up in Canada, he helped me to the light. He was the keenest on rivers I ever knew."
He broke off to yawn greatly, started to resume, thought better of it, checked himself, and presently said in an absent voice:
"No, that's too long to tell."
"There's two hours till bedtime."
Peter straightened and began strolling aimlessly about the deck, half regretting that they had decided to spend the evening on the yacht. Varney looked after him with a certain sense of guilt. Against this background of quiet night and moonlit peace, his enterprise began to look very small and easy. A ramble through the pleasant woods over there, a little girl met and played with, a leisurely stroll hand-in-hand down a woodland path to the yacht—was it for this that he had begged the assistance of Peter Maginnis, of the large administrative abilities and the teeming energies? Varney began to be a little ashamed of himself. To follow out Peter's own figure, it appeared that he had called out the fire department to help him put out a smoking sheet of note-paper on a hearth.
Soon, in one of his goings and comings, Peter halted. "There was another
Hunston dispatch in the paper this morning," he vouchsafed.
"Politics?"
"Said the reform movement was a joke."
"Good one?"
"Good movement, you mean?"
"No—good joke."
"No reform movement is ever a good joke, under any circumstances whatsoever. Where it appears a joke at all, it is the kind that would appeal only to pinheads of the dottiest nature."
"I see."
"I'm going up there to-morrow," said Peter, nodding toward the town, "and look into it a little. If there is time, I may even decide to show these fellows how a reform proposition ought to be handled to ensure results."
Far off on the hill a single light twinkled through the trees, very yellow against the pale moonlight. Varney's eye fell upon it and absently held it. It was Mary Carstairs's light, though, of course, he had no means of knowing that.
Presently Peter lolled around and looked at him. "H'm! Sunk in a sodden slumber, I suppose?"
"Not at all. Interested by your conversation—fascinated. Ha! Here is something to vary the evening's monotony. A row-boat is drifting down-stream towards us. Let us make little wagers with each other as to who'll be in it."
He looked over his shoulder upward at the moon, which a flying scud of cloud had momentarily veiled. Peter, who had sat down again, glanced up the river.
"I don't see any boat."
"There is where the wager comes in, my son. Hurry up—the moon will pop out in another minute, and spoil the sport."
"Drifting, you say. Bet you she's empty—broke away from her moorings and riding down with the current. Bet you half a dollar. My second bet," he said, warming to the work, "is an old washerwoman and her little boy, out on their rounds collecting clothes. It's Monday. In case both firsts are wrong, second choices get the money."
"My bet is—Ha! Stand ready with your half! There she comes—Jove!"
"Good God!" cried Peter and sprang up.
For the moon had jumped out from behind its cloud like a cuckoo in a clock, and fallen full upon the drifting boat, now hardly fifty yards away. In the bottom of it lay a man, sprawled over his useless oars, his upturned face very white in the moonlight, limp legs huddled under him anyhow. Something in the abandon of his position suggested that he would not get up any more.