Jack Carleton had heard him out in silence, indeed, but without further emotion, without any change of the hard, set look on his face. “Oh, you’re damned generous,” he sneered, as the other paused, “and you’re doing it all out of love for me. It’s awfully sudden, this affection, isn’t it? It’s been a long time coming.” He laughed with a jarring offensiveness, as if, strangely enough, he was deliberately trying to incense, instead of to placate, the man of whose good will he stood so sorely in need.
Again Henry Carleton’s face grew dark, as if at last his irritation had got the upper hand. “For Heaven’s sake, Jack,” he cried, “don’t be a child, just for the pleasure of trying to annoy me. I say again, I’m being fair with you. I say again, more than fair. And if you want to exercise your irony on me by implying that I’m not actuated by any love for you, I’ll say frankly that this is too complicated an affair for any one person’s claims to be paramount in trying to settle it. I’m considering every one interested; I’m weighing all the chances for everybody concerned; you and I, and Rose, and Vaughan, and Mrs. Satterlee—we’re all involved, and I say again, looking at everything from all possible points of view, it’s for our interest, Jack—for yours and mine—to stand together, whatever happens. There’s nothing I want more, whether you believe it or not, than to see you get out of the whole thing clear. And don’t—” he raised his hand as Jack started to speak—“don’t go running off on any abstract theory of what’s right and what isn’t. It’s no use. It’s waste of time. We’ve got to look at this matter as it is—not as perhaps it ought to be. It’s intensely practical for us, Jack, and so let’s look at it that way.”
His words seemed effectual, as far as any further protest from Jack Carleton was concerned. For a moment he sat silent, and then, with an air of resignation, mingled with a certain indifference, “Very well,” he said, “look at it in that way, if you choose, for all of me. How does that help? The whole thing’s as mixed as before; you can’t solve it satisfactorily, try as you may.”
Henry Carleton, well pleased, drew a quiet breath of satisfaction. So much, indeed, seemed to him a signal gain. Little by little—that was Henry Carleton’s way. “Good,” he said shortly, and then, “but it can be solved, Jack, for all that. Not with perfect satisfaction to everybody, perhaps; but it can be solved.”
He spoke with such an air of assurance that Jack Carleton glanced at him quickly, as if seeking some underlying significance in his words. Henry Carleton’s face, however, was devoid of anything of enlightenment, and his eyes were looking idly across the room. “Yes,” he repeated, “still satisfactorily, in the main, I think. It’s a pure question of logic, Jack. Let’s start with the assumption that if it can be avoided, you’re not eager to die.”
Jack Carleton’s eyebrows were raised half grimly, half ruefully. Something of a kind of hysterical humor seemed to him to exist in the idea of asking a man with such seriousness whether or not he was eager to die. “Yes,” he returned, “you can assume that. That’s a good point to start with.”
There was something in his tone, despite the solemnity of the discussion, that made Henry Carleton force a sickly smile, which faded almost before it had come. “And second,” he said, “you’ll keep quiet as long as any one else will.”
Jack nodded again. “Certainly,” he said, perhaps with more of bitterness in his tone.
Henry Carleton leaned forward, looking him now straight in the eye, and speaking with the most intense earnestness. “Then take the parties involved in their turn,” he cried, “if you stick to that, no harm can come from you. No harm will come from me, in any event. And Rose, of course, doesn’t know. Of the other two, Mrs. Satterlee—” he paused an instant, then continued, a little hastily, as it seemed. “Perhaps there’s no further need of going into that. As we know, she is safe, and if not, there are certain precautions—no, we may dismiss that entirely, I think. And that—” the pause was longer this time, “that leaves the man who’s been foolish enough to raise all this trouble to start with. That leaves your friend, and my prospective son-in-law,—one man to be reckoned with—Arthur Vaughan.”
This time there was no mistaking the gathering menace in his tone. But Jack Carleton seemed not to choose to understand his words. “Well?” he asked.