VI
Lord Dawlish sat in the apartment on East Twenty-seventh Street. The hour was half-past ten in the evening; the day, the second day after the exodus of Nutty Boyd from the farm. Before him on the table lay a letter. He was smoking pensively.
Lord Dawlish had found New York enjoyable but a trifle fatiguing. There was much to be seen in the city, and he had made the mistake of trying to see it all at once. It had been his intention, when he came home after dinner that night, to try to restore the balance of things by going to bed early. He had sat up longer than he had intended because he had been thinking about this letter.
Immediately upon his arrival in America Bill had sought out a lawyer and instructed him to write to Elizabeth Boyd, offering her one-half of the late Ira Nutcombe’s money. He had had time during the voyage to think the whole matter over, and this seemed to him the only possible course. He could not keep it all. He would feel like a despoiler of the widow and the orphan. Nor would it be fair to Claire to give it all up. If he halved the legacy everybody would be satisfied.
That, at least, had been his view until Elizabeth’s reply had arrived. It was this reply that lay on the table, a brief, formal note setting forth Miss Boyd’s absolute refusal to accept any portion of the money. This was a development which Bill had not foreseen, and he was feeling baffled. What was the next step? He had smoked many pipes in the endeavor to find an answer to this problem, and was lighting another when the doorbell rang.
He opened the door and found himself confronting an extraordinarily tall and thin young man in evening dress.
Lord Dawlish was a little startled. He had taken it for granted, when the bell rang, that his visitor was Tom, the elevator man from downstairs, a friendly soul who hailed from London and had been dropping in at intervals during the past two days to acquire the latest news from his native land. He stared at this changeling inquiringly. The solution of the mystery came with the stranger’s first words:
“Is Gates in?”
He spoke eagerly, as if Gates were extremely necessary to his well-being. It distressed Lord Dawlish to disappoint him, but there was nothing else to be done.
“Gates is in London,” he said.
“What! When did he go there?”
“About four months ago.”
“May I come in a minute?”
“Yes, rather, do.”
He led the way into the sitting-room. The stranger gave abruptly in the middle, as if he were being folded up by some invisible agency, and in this attitude sank into a chair, where he lay back looking at Bill over his knees, like a sorrowful sheep peering over a sharp-pointed fence.
“You’re from England, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Been in New York long?”
“Only a couple of days.”
The stranger folded himself up another foot or so until his knees were higher than his head, and lit a cigarette.
“The curse of New York,” he said mournfully, “is the way everything changes in it. You can’t take your eye off it for a minute. The population’s always shifting. It’s like a damned railway station. You go away for a spell and come back and try to find your old pals, and they’re all gone: Ike’s in Arizona, Mike’s in a sanatorium, Spike’s in jail, and nobody seems to know where the rest of them have got to. I came back from the country two days ago, expecting to find all the old gang along Broadway the same as ever, and I’m darned if I’ve been able to put my hands on one of them! Not a single, solitary one of them! And it’s only six months since I was here last.”
Lord Dawlish made sympathetic noises.
“Of course,” proceeded the other, “the time of year may have something to do with it. Living down in the country you lose count of time, and I forgot that it was July when people go out of the city. I guess that must be what happened. I used to know all sorts of fellows, actors and fellows like that, and they’re all away somewhere. I tell you,” he said with pathos, “I never knew I could be so infernally lonesome as I have been these last two days. If I had known what a rotten time I was going to have I would never have left Brookport.”
“Brookport?”
“It’s a place down on Long Island.”
Bill was not by nature a plotter, but the mere fact of traveling under an assumed name had developed a streak of wariness in him. He checked himself just as he was about to ask his companion if he happened to know a Miss Elizabeth Boyd who also lived at Brookport. It occurred to him that the question would invite a counter question as to his own knowledge of Miss Boyd, and he knew that he would not be able to invent a satisfactory answer to that offhand.
“This evening,” said the thin young man, resuming his dirge, “I was sweating my brain to try to think of somebody I could hunt up in this ghastly, deserted city. It isn’t so easy, you know, to think of fellows’ names and addresses. I can get the names all right, but unless the
