Captivating Mary Carstairs

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

But at noon as he lolled upon his rear veranda, chatting kindly with his wife as she hung the linen of quality upon her drying lines, a lady had knocked upon his door, beautiful and insistent, to wheedle his will from him. It was only a tiny bit of a lawn, she had reiterated imploringly, hardly a constitutional to cut, and there was not one tall fellow in all Hunston whom she would permit to touch it but Hackley. Dead to all flattery as he was, his backbone ran to water at the clinging beauty of her smile, and so incredibly betrayed him into yielding. And now, at hard upon half after six o'clock, post-meridian, the dangerous dews of night already beginning to fall, he leaned against a lamp-post, a physical wreck, with a long block and a half still separating him from the comforts of home.

At the next corner but one above rose the red brick Ottoman, its inviting side stretching for many yards down the street towards him. Windows cut it here and there along its length, and over their green silk half-curtains, poured forth a golden light which was hospitality made visible. Yet, so strange are the ways of life, the proprietor of all these luxuries, who stood at the furthest window, beyond Hackley's range, did not look happy in their possession. His eyes gleamed fiercely; his heavy chin protruded savagely, as though deliberately insulting Main Street and the northward universe. Even his small derby, which he seldom doffed save at the hour for taps, contrived to bespeak a certain ferocity.

The Ottoman bar was bare of customers, all Hunston now verging towards its evening meal. Ryan rested his elbow upon its polished surface, and glared into the twilight. He was, as luck had it, in a terrible ill-humor. For he knew himself to-day for a man who had been physically flouted, a boss whose supremacy had been violently assailed, a king who felt his throne careen sickeningly beneath him.

Last night, when four men whom he had never seen before, three of them masked, had borne him off on a long wild drive, and dropped him at ten o'clock in a lonely bit of country eight miles from the Academy Theatre, there had at least been action to give point to his choler. All but out of his mind with passion, he had besought them all, singly or quadruply, to descend from their carriage and meet him in combat, thirsting sorely to kill or be killed. But they had only laughed at him, silently, and galloped away, leaving him screaming out futile curses on the empty night air.

Two hours later, when he had got back to Hunston, after an interminable nightmare of running over rough ground with unaccustomed limbs, and stumbling heavily to earth, and rising up to struggle again, he had learned to what uses his enemies had put that absence. Smith had related the story in the fastness of his office, and in wholly different guise from that which it wore next morning in the columns of his newspaper. And Ryan, listening, had slowly calmed, calmed to the still fury of implacable hate.

But he and Smith had quarreled violently. He was for publishing the story of his taking off in type as black as the dastardly act. Smith had a difficult time in holding him down, however much he pointed out that Ryan had no shadow of proof against his new adversary on the yacht, and that public sympathy in an affair of this sort was always with the successful. In the end Smith had carried his point, because he was, of those two men, both the more wise and the more resolute. But this morning they had conferred again and quarreled even more bitterly.

Yet Ryan, plotting in the window of his splendid gin-palace, his eye always sweeping the evening street as though a-search, was not thinking of the young editor now. Two other policies for the days to come monopolized his attention. One of these was crushing victory at the polls. The other was revenge. Probably in thinking of these, he put them at the moment in reverse order.

"Damn him!" he suddenly exploded: and it was not little Hare that he cursed. "Damn his soul!"

In the next breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied with the tedium of life indoors, would see what beguilement might await him abroad.

The boss looked first up the street and permitted his beady eye to range casually over the view. Then his gaze came slowly down and rested in time upon the person of James Hackley, now almost directly opposite. The boss's countenance lit up with a smile of pleased surprise.