“Send Mr. Deacon!”
“Yessir.”
“Dead, is he?” continued the editor, in a different tone. “I am sorry to hear that. It must have been sudden. Just give me a few details.”
While speaking he had taken a pencil and paper. Trist told him in a few words what had taken place in the Heimdalfjord, and as he spoke the editor wrote. A minute later Mr. Deacon, a small man, who looked incapable of taking the initiative in anything whatsoever, appeared.
“Sudden death of Admiral Wylie,” said the editor in a monotone, as he held out the paper towards Mr. Deacon, without looking, however, in his direction. “Short paragraph—look up details of career.”
“Nothing sensational and nothing very personal,” put in Trist with gentle severity.
“No,” added his companion, “nothing of that sort. Admiral Wylie was a personal friend of my own.”
Mr. Deacon vanished, and closed the door behind him with scrupulous noiselessness.
“When can you go?” asked the editor.
“Eight-twenty from Charing Cross,” was the reply, given in Trist’s most soothing way. He leant back in his deep chair, and passed his hand round his clean-shaven chin in a thoughtful, almost indolent, manner. Then he waited for his companion to continue the conversation.
“It was rather a risky thing waiting for you; but I heard from Lloyd’s this morning that your boat arrived at Hull in time for you to be here by five-thirty. If that boat had been late, my boy, I should have sent another man.”
Again Trist smiled.
“I very nearly did not come at all.”
This remark appeared to have rather a peculiar effect upon the editor. He received it with unsympathetic gravity, and, resting his heavy arms upon his desk, he leant forward. While playing with a pencil in an easy, thoughtful way, he fixed his eyes upon Trist’s face with a kindly scrutiny. Gray eyes they were, of a shade merging on green, with at times a suggestion of brown. Such eyes have a singular power of expressing kindness of heart, in which they differ greatly from the gray of a blue shade, such as Trist’s, which have gentleness but no loving-kindness. It is usual to hold in abhorrence all shades of green in respect to human orbs, but this is mere prejudice. There is no such thing—despite Thackeray—as a green eye; and the noblest character, the truest gentleman and kindest-hearted being who has crossed the present writer’s path possesses eyes of a gray shade slightly tinged with green. Again, there is another person I know. She … well—she is herself; and her eyes are of a deep gray, which assume at times a distinctly green hue.
Before speaking the editor shook his massive head incredulously.
“My impression of you, Trist, is that you are a man who never ‘very nearly’ does anything. While actually reading my telegram you made up your mind whether you were going or not, and after that no power on earth would have altered your decision. Of course, it sometimes pays (especially with ladies) to appear vacillating, and desirous of placing the deciding vote in someone else’s hands. No doubt you practise this amiable fraud at times. I am sorry, but I don’t believe that you ‘very nearly’ did not come, seeing that you are here.”
Trist laughed without denying this insinuation.
“And now,” he said, “that I am here, perhaps it would be wiser to get to business, and leave my personal failings for discussion behind my back when I am gone.”
“Yes,” answered the other briskly, “let us get to business. You must leave in two hours. Now about terms. Are they to be the same as for the Franco-Prussian?”
“No!” answered Trist.
“Ah!”
“Your terms were generous for the Franco-Prussian War,” replied the correspondent, “but now they would be miserly.”
The editor raised his august eyebrows and waited in quizzical silence. He appeared to be amused.
“I was a young man then, and a beginner. You did me a great kindness, and I am not going to repay it by such a mean ruse as working below the market price. I am worth more now, and I expect more. It is only natural that my health will give in someday, or my reputation may die, in either of which cases I shall have little to live upon. During this war and the disturbances of some description which will undoubtedly follow, I mean to make money.”
The great man laughed aloud.
“Capital!” he exclaimed—“capital! What a head for business! My dear Trist, you are worth four times as much money as we gave you in ’70, and I am authorized to offer you that sum.”
“I think that is too much.”
“Not at all. It is merely a businesslike speculation. You risk your life, and we pay you. Your life goes up in market-value; we pay you more. Do you accept?”
“Yes.”
“That is right. I have the agreement ready in my desk for you to sign. Personally speaking, I think they might have offered you more, but you have the publishers clamouring for a book, and I suppose you will represent Le Pays as well as ourselves.”
“Yes; I telegraphed to them from Hull. But I am quite content; in fact, it is more than I expected. I will make a good thing out of it.”
“We shall,” observed the editor, with a keen smile, “be having you on the turf when you come back, or launching into … matrimony.”
“Both amusements,” suggested Trist coolly, “being so eminently calculated to forward the career of a special war-correspondent.”
The editor was busy collecting various papers that lay in apparent disorder on his desk—telegrams, foreign and English; “flimsies” from the news agencies and Lloyd’s; printed matter and manuscript.
“No, Trist,” he said, without looking up; “we cannot have you marrying yet. The warlike public cannot do without you, my boy.”
“It is wonderful,” murmured Trist ambiguously, “what we can do without when we try. I am not, however, going to do without something to eat. I will go along to the club and dine now. You will be here when I come back?”
“I shall be here until two in the morning,”
