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The Mystery of Murray Davenport

R >> Robert Neilson Stephens >> The Mystery of Murray Davenport




He sighed wearily and turned, as if for relief from a bitter theme, to
the book in his hand. He read aloud, from the sonnet out of which they
had already been quoting:

'Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising--
Haply I think on thee; and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love--'

He broke off, and closed the book. "'For thy sweet love,'" he repeated.
"You see even this unhappy poet had his solace. I used to read those
lines and flatter myself they expressed my situation. There was a silly
song, too, that she pretended to like. You know it, of course,--a little
poem of Frank L. Stanton's." He went to the piano, and sang softly, in a
light baritone:

'Sometimes, dearest, the world goes wrong,
For God gives grief with the gift of song,
And poverty, too; but your love is more--'

Again he stopped short, and with a derisive laugh. "What an ass I was! As
if any happiness that came to Murray Davenport could be real or lasting!"

"Oh, never be disheartened," said Larcher. "Your time is to come; you'll
have your 'whack at life' yet."

"It would be acceptable, if only to feel that I had realized one or two
of the dreams of youth--the dreams an unhappy lad consoled himself with."

"What were they?" inquired Larcher.

"What were they not, that is fine and pleasant? I had my share of diverse
ambitions, or diverse hopes, at least. You know the old Lapland song, in
Longfellow:

_'For a boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'"_




CHAPTER VI.


THE NAME OF ONE TURL COMES UP

A month passed. All the work in which Larcher had enlisted Davenport's
cooperation was done. Larcher would have projected more, but the
artist could not be pinned down to any definite engagement. He was
non-committal, with the evasiveness of apathy. He seemed not to care any
longer about anything. More than ever he appeared to go about in a dream.
Larcher might have suspected some drug-taking habit, but for having
observed the man so constantly, at such different hours, and often with
so little warning, as to be convinced to the contrary.

One cold, clear November night, when the tingle of the air, and the
beauty of the moonlight, should have aroused any healthy being to a sense
of life's joy in the matchless late autumn of New York, Larcher met his
friend on Broadway. Davenport was apparently as much absorbed in his
inner contemplations, or as nearly void of any contemplation whatever, as
a man could be under the most stupefying influences. He politely stopped,
however, when Larcher did.

"Where are you going?" the latter asked.

"Home," was the reply; thus amended the next instant: "To my room, that
is."

"I'll walk with you, if you don't mind. I feel like stretching my legs."

"Glad to have you," said Davenport, indifferently. They turned from
Broadway eastward into a cross-town street, high above the end of which
rose the moon, lending romance and serenity to the house-fronts. Larcher
called the artist's attention to it. Davenport replied by quoting,
mechanically:

"'With how slow steps, O moon, thou clim'st the sky,
How silently, and with how wan a face!'"

"I'm glad to see you out on so fine a night," pursued Larcher.

"I came out on business," said the other. "I got a request by telegraph
from the benevolent Bagley to meet him at his rooms. He received a 'hurry
call' to Chicago, and must take the first train; so he sent for me, to
look after a few matters in his absence."

"I trust you'll find them interesting," said Larcher, comparing his own
failure with Bagley's success in obtaining Davenport's services.

"Not in the slightest," replied Davenport.

"Then remunerative, at least."

"Not sufficiently to attract _me_," said the other.

"Then, if you'll pardon the remark, I really can't understand--"

"Mere force of habit," replied Davenport, listlessly. "When he summons, I
attend. When he entrusts, I accept. I've done it so long, and so often, I
can't break myself of the habit. That is, of course, I could if I chose,
but it would require an effort, and efforts aren't worth while at this
stage."

With little more talk, they arrived at the artist's house.

"If you talk of moonlight," said Davenport, in a manner of some
kindliness, "you should see its effect on the back yards, from my
windows. You know how half-hearted the few trees look in the daytime;
but I don't think you've seen that view on a moonlight night. The yards,
taken as a whole, have some semblance to a real garden. Will you come
up?"

Larcher assented readily. A minute later, while his host was seeking
matches, he looked down from the dark chamber, and saw that the
transformation wrought in the rectangular space of back yards had not
been exaggerated. The shrubbery by the fences might have sheltered
fairies. The boughs of the trees, now leafless, gently stirred. Even the
plain house-backs were clad in beauty.

When Larcher turned from the window, Davenport lighted the gas, but not
his lamp; then drew from an inside pocket, and tossed on the table,
something which Larcher took to be a stenographer's note-book, narrow,
thick, and with stiff brown covers. Its unbound end was confined by a
thin rubber band. Davenport opened a drawer of the table, and essayed
to sweep the book thereinto by a careless push. The book went too
far, struck the arm of a chair, flew open at the breaking of the
overstretched rubber, fell on its side by the chair leg, and disclosed a
pile of bank-notes. These, tightly flattened, were the sole contents of
the covers. As Larcher's startled eyes rested upon them, he saw that the
topmost bill was for five hundred dollars.

Davenport exhibited a momentary vexation, then picked up the bills, and
laid them on the table in full view.

"Bagley's money," said he, sitting down before the table. "I'm to place
it for him to-morrow. This sudden call to Chicago prevents his carrying
out personally some plans he had formed. So he entrusts the business to
the reliable Davenport."

"When I walked home with you, I had no idea I was in the company of so
much money," said Larcher, who had taken a chair near his friend.

"I don't suppose there's another man in New York to-night with so much
ready money on his person," said Davenport, smiling. "These are large
bills, you know. Ironical, isn't it? Think of Murray Davenport walking
about with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket."

"Twenty thousand! Why, that's just the amount you were--" Larcher checked
himself.

"Yes," said Davenport, unmoved. "Just the amount of Bagley's wealth that
morally belongs to me, not considering interest. I could use it, too, to
very good advantage. With my skill in the art of frugal living, I could
make it go far--exceedingly far. I could realize that plan of a
congenial life, which I told you of one night here. There it is; here am
I; and if right prevailed, it would be mine. Yet if I ventured to treat
it as mine, I should land in a cell. Isn't it a silly world?"

He languidly replaced the bills between the notebook covers, and put them
in the drawer. As he did so, his glance fell on a sheet of paper lying
there. With a curious, half-mirthful expression on his face, he took this
up, and handed it to Larcher, saying:

"You told me once you could judge character by handwriting. What do you
make of this man's character?"

Larcher read the following note, which was written in a small, precise,
round hand:

"MY DEAR DAVENPORT:--I will meet you at the place and time you suggest.
We can then, I trust, come to a final settlement, and go our different
ways. Till then I have no desire to see you; and afterward, still less.
Yours truly,

"FRANCIS TURL."

"Francis Turl," repeated Larcher. "I never heard the name before."

"No, I suppose you never have," replied Davenport, dryly. "But what
character would you infer from his penmanship?"

"Well,--I don't know." Put to the test, Larcher was at a loss. "An
educated person, I should think; even scholarly, perhaps. Fastidious,
steady, exact, reserved,--that's about all."

"Not very much," said Davenport, taking back the sheet. "You merely
describe the handwriting itself. Your characterization, as far as it
goes, would fit men who write very differently from this. It fits me,
for instance, and yet look at my angular scrawl." He held up a specimen
of his own irregular hand, beside the elegant penmanship of the note,
and Larcher had to admit himself a humbug as a graphologist.

"But," he demanded, "did my description happen to fit that particular
man--Francis Turl?"

"Oh, more or less," said Davenport, evasively, as if not inclined to give
any information about that person. This apparent disinclination increased
Larcher's hidden curiosity as to who Francis Turl might be, and why
Davenport had never mentioned him before, and what might be between the
two for settlement.

Davenport put Turl's writing back into the drawer, but continued to
regard his own. "'A vile cramped hand,'" he quoted. "I hate it, as I have
grown to hate everything that partakes of me, or proceeds from me.
Sometimes I fancy that my abominable handwriting had as much to do with
alienating a certain fair inconstant as the news of my reputed
unluckiness. Both coming to her at once, the combined effect was too
much."

"Why?--Did you break that news to her by letter?"

"That seems strange to you, perhaps. But you see, at first it didn't
occur to me that I should have to break it to her at all. We met abroad;
we were tourists whose paths happened to cross. Over there I almost
forgot about the bad luck. It wasn't till both of us were back in New
York, that I felt I should have to tell her, lest she might hear it first
from somebody else. But I shied a little at the prospect, just enough to
make me put the revelation off from day to day. The more I put it off,
the more difficult it seemed--you know how the smallest matter, even the
writing of an overdue letter, grows into a huge task that way. So this
little ordeal got magnified for me, and all that winter I couldn't brace
myself to go through it. In the spring, Bagley had use for me in his
affairs, and he kept me busy night and day for two weeks. When I got
free, I was surprised to find she had left town. I hadn't the least idea
where she'd gone; till one day I received a letter from her. She wrote as
if she thought I had known where she was; she reproached me with
negligence, but was friendly nevertheless. I replied at once, clearing
myself of the charge; and in that same letter I unburdened my soul of the
bad luck secret. It was easier to write it than speak it."

"And what then?"

"Nothing. I never heard from her again."

"But your letter may have miscarried,--something of that sort."

"I made allowance for that, and wrote another letter, which I registered.
She got that all right, for the receipt came back, signed by her father.
But no answer ever came from her, and I was a bit too proud to continue a
one-sided correspondence. So ended that chapter in the harrowing history
of Murray Davenport.--She was a fine young woman, as the world judges;
she reminded me, in some ways, of Scott's heroines."

"Ah! that's why you took kindly to the old fellow by the river. You
remember his library--made up entirely of Scott?"

"Oh, that wasn't the reason. He interested me; or at least his way of
living did."

"I wonder if he wasn't fabricating a little. These old fellows from the
country like to make themselves amusing. They're not so guileless."

"I know that, but Mr. Bud is genuine. Since that day, he's been home in
the country for three weeks, and now he's back in town again for a 'short
spell,' as he calls it."

"You still keep in touch with him?" asked Larcher, in surprise.

"Oh, yes. He's been very hospitable--allowing me the use of his room to
sketch in."

"Even during his absence?"

"Yes; why not? I made some drawings for him, of the view from his window.
He's proud of them."

Something in Davenport's manner seemed to betray a wish for reticence on
the subject of Mr. Bud, even a regret that it had been broached. This
stopped Larcher's inquisition, though not his curiosity. He was silent
for a moment; then rose, with the words:

"Well, I'm keeping you up. Many thanks for the sight of your moonlit
garden. When shall I see you again?"

"Oh, run in any time. It isn't so far out of your way, even if you don't
find me here."

"I'd like you to glance over the proofs of my Harlem Lane article. I
shall have them day after to-morrow. Let's see--I'm engaged for that day.
How will the next day suit you?"

"All right. Come the next day if you like."

"That'll be Friday. Say one o'clock, and we can go out and lunch
together."

"Just as you please."

"One o'clock on Friday then. Good night!"

"Good night!"

At the door, Larcher turned for a moment in passing out, and saw
Davenport standing by the table, looking after him. What was the
inscrutable expression--half amusement, half friendliness and
self-accusing regret--which faintly relieved for a moment the
indifference of the man's face?




CHAPTER VII.


MYSTERY BEGINS

The discerning reader will perhaps think Mr. Thomas Larcher a very dull
person in not having yet put this and that together and associated the
love-affair of Murray Davenport with the "romance" of Miss Florence
Kenby. One might suppose that Edna Hill's friendship for Miss Kenby, and
her inquisitiveness regarding Davenport, formed a sufficient pair of
connecting links. But the still more discerning reader will probably
judge otherwise. For Miss Hill had many friends whom she brought to
Larcher's notice, and Miss Kenby did not stand alone in his observation,
as she necessarily does in this narrative. Larcher, too, was not as fully
in possession of the circumstances as the reader. Nor, to him, were the
circumstances isolated from the thousands of others that made up his
life, as they are to the reader. Edna's allusion to Miss Kenby's
"romance" had been cursory; Larcher understood only that she had given
up a lover to please her father. Davenport's inconstant had abandoned
him because he was unlucky; Larcher had always conceived her as such a
woman, and so of a different type from that embodied in Miss Kenby. To
be sure, he knew now that Davenport's fickle one had a father; but so
had most young women. In short, the small connecting facts had no such
significance in his mind, where they were not grouped away from other
facts, as they must have in these pages, where their very presence
together implies inter-relation.

In his reports to Edna, a certain delicacy had made him touch lightly
upon the traces of Davenport's love-affair. He may, indeed, have guessed
that those traces were what she was most desirous to hear of. But a
certain manly allegiance to his sex kept him reticent on that point in
spite of all her questions. He did not even say to what motive Davenport
ascribed the false one's fickleness; nor what was Davenport's present
opinion of her. "He was thrown over by some woman whose name he never
mentions; since then he has steered clear of the sex," was what Larcher
replied to Edna a hundred times, in a hundred different sets of phrases;
and it was all he replied on the subject.

So matters stood until two days after the interview related in the
previous chapter. At the end of that interview, Larcher had said that
for the second day thereafter he was engaged; Hence he had appointed
the third day for his next meeting with Davenport. The engagement for
the second day was, to spend the afternoon with Edna Hill at a
riding-school. Upon arriving at the flat where Edna lived under the mild
protection of her easy-going aunt, he found Miss Kenby included in the
arrangement. To this he did not object; Miss Kenby was kind as well as
beautiful; and Larcher was not unwilling to show the tyrannical Edna
that he could play the cavalier to one pretty girl as well as to another.
He did not, however, manage to disturb her serenity at all during the
afternoon. The three returned, very merry, to the flat, in a state of the
utmost readiness for afternoon tea, for the day was cold and blowy. To
make things pleasanter, Aunt Clara had finished her tea and was taking a
nap. The three young people had the drawing-room, with its bright coal
fire, to themselves.

Everything was trim and elegant in this flat. The clear-skinned maid who
placed the tea things, and brought the muffins and cake, might have been
transported that instant from Mayfair, on a magic carpet, so neat was
her black dress, so spotless her white apron, cap, and cuffs, so clean
her slender hands.

"What a sweet place you have, Edna," remarked Florence Kenby, looking
around.

"So you've often said before, dear. And whenever you choose to make it
sweeter, for good, you've only got to move in."

Florence laughed, but with something very like a sigh.

"What, are you willing to take boarders?" said Larcher. "If that's the
case, put me down as the first applicant."

"Our capacity for 'paying guests' is strictly limited to one person, and
no gentlemen need apply. Two lumps, Flo dear?"

"Yes, please.--If only your restrictions didn't keep out poor father--"

"If only your poor father would consider your happiness instead of his
own selfish plans."

"Edna, dear! You mustn't."

"Why mustn't I?" replied Edna, pouring tea. "Truth's truth. He's your
father, but I'm your friend, and you know in your heart which of us would
do more for you. You know, and he knows, that you'd be happier, and have
better health, if you came to live with us. If he really loves you, why
doesn't he let you come? He could see you often enough. But I know the
reason; he's afraid you'd get out of his control; he has his own
projects. You needn't mind my saying this before Tom Larcher; he read
your father like a book the first time he ever met him."

Larcher, in the act of swallowing some buttered muffin, instantly looked
very wise and penetrative.

"I should think your father himself would be happier," said he, "if he
lived less privately and had more of men's society."

"He's often in poor health," replied Florence.

"In that case, there are plenty of places, half hotel, half sanatorium,
where the life is as luxurious as can be."

"I couldn't think of deserting him. Even if he--weren't altogether
unselfish about me, there would always be my promise."

"What does that matter--such a promise?" inquired Edna, between sips of
tea.

"You would make one think you were perfectly unscrupulous, dear," said
Florence, smiling. "But you know as well as I, that a promise is sacred."

"Not all promises. Are they, Tommy?"

"No, not all," replied Larcher. "It's like this: When you make a bad
promise, you inaugurate a wrong. As long as you keep that promise, you
perpetuate that wrong. The only way to end the wrong, is to break the
promise."

"Bravo, Tommy! You can't get over logic like that, Florence, dear, and
your promise did inaugurate a wrong--a wrong against yourself."

"Well, then, it's allowable to wrong oneself," said Florence.

"But not one's friends--one's true, disinterested friends. And as for
that other promise of yours--that _fearful_ promise!--you can't deny you
wronged somebody by that; somebody you had no right to wrong."

"It was a choice between him and my father," replied Florence, in a low
voice, and turning very red.

"Very well; which deserved to be sacrificed?" cried Edna, her eyes and
tone showing that the subject was a heating one. "Which was likely to
suffer more by the sacrifice? You know perfectly well fathers _don't_ die
in those cases, and consequently your father's hysterics _must_ have been
put on for effect. Oh, don't tell me!--it makes me wild to think of it!
Your father would have been all right in a week; whereas the other man's
whole life is darkened."

"Don't say that, dear," pleaded Florence, gently. "Men soon get over such
things."

"Not so awfully soon;--not sincere men. Their views of life are changed,
for all time. And _this_ man seems to grow more and more melancholy, if
what Tom says is true."

"What I say?" exclaimed Larcher.

The two girls looked at each other.

"Goodness! I _have_ given it away!" cried Edna.

"More and more melancholy?" repeated Larcher. "Why, that must be Murray
Davenport. Was he the--? Then you must be the--! But surely _you_
wouldn't have given him up on account of the bad luck nonsense."

"Bad luck nonsense?" echoed Edna, while Miss Kenby looked bewildered.

"The silly idea of some foolish people, that he carried bad luck with
him," Larcher explained, addressing Florence. "He sent you a letter about
it."

"I never got any such letter from him," said Florence, in wonderment.

"Then you didn't know? And that had nothing to do with your giving him
up?"

"Indeed it had not! Why, if I'd known about that--But the letter you
speak of--when was it? I never had a letter from him after I left town.
He didn't even answer when I told him we were going."

"Because he never heard you were going. He got a letter after you had
gone, and then he wrote you about the bad luck nonsense. There must
have been some strange defect in your mail arrangements."

"I always thought some letters must have gone astray and miscarried
between us. I knew he couldn't be so negligent. I'd have taken pains to
clear it up, if I hadn't promised my father just at that time--" She
stopped, unable to control her voice longer. Her lips were quivering.

"Speaking of your father," said Larcher, "you must have got a subsequent
letter from Davenport, because he sent it registered, and the receipt
came back with your father's signature."

"No, I never got that, either," said Florence, before the inference
struck her. When it did, she gazed from one to the other with a helpless,
wounded look, and blushed as if the shame were her own.

Edna Hill's eyes blazed with indignation, then softened in pity for her
friend. She turned to Larcher in a very calling-to-account manner.

"Why didn't you tell me all this before?"

"I didn't think it was necessary. And besides, he never told me about
the letters till the night before last."

"And all this time that poor young man has thought Florence tossed him
over because of some ridiculous notion about bad luck?"

"Well, more or less,--and the general fickleness of the sex."

"General fick--! And you, having seen Florence, let him go on thinking
so?"

"But I didn't know Miss Kenby was the lady he meant. If you'd only told
me it was for her you wanted news of him--"

"Stupid, you might have guessed! But I think it's about time he had some
news of _her_. He ought to know she wasn't actuated by any such paltry,
childish motive."

"By George, I agree with you!" cried Larcher, with a sudden energy. "If
you could see the effect on the man, of that false impression, Miss
Kenby! I don't mean to say that his state of mind is entirely due to
that; he had causes enough before. But it needed only that to take away
all consolation, to stagger his faith, to kill his interest in life."

"Has it made him so bitter?" asked Florence, sadly.

"I shouldn't call the effect bitterness. He has too lofty a mind for
strong resentment. That false impression has only brought him to the
last stage of indifference. I should say it was the finishing touch to
making his life a wearisome drudgery, without motive or hope."

Florence sighed deeply.

"To think that he could believe such a thing of Florence," put in Edna.
"I'm sure _I_ couldn't. Could you, Tom?"

"When a man's in love, he doesn't see things in their true proportions,"
said Larcher, authoritatively. "He exaggerates both the favors and the
rebuffs he gets, both the kindness and the coldness of the woman. If he
thinks he's ill-treated, he measures the supposed cause by his
sufferings. As they are so great, he thinks the woman's cruelty
correspondingly great. Nobody will believe such good things of a woman
as the man who loves her; but nobody will believe such bad things if
matters go wrong."

"Dear, dear, Tommy! What a lot you know about it!"

But Miss Hill's momentary sarcasm went unheeded. "So I really think,
Miss Kenby, if you'll pardon me," Larcher continued, "that Murray
Davenport ought to know your true reason for giving him up. Even if
matters never go any further, he ought to know that you still--h'm--feel
an interest in him--still wish him well. I'm sure if he knew about your
solicitude--how it was the cause of my looking him up--I can see through
all that now--"

"I can never thank you enough--and Edna," said Florence, in a tremulous
voice.

"No thanks are due me," replied Larcher, emphatically. "I value his
acquaintance on its own account. But if he knew about this, knew your
real motives then, and your real feelings now, even if he were never to
see you again, the knowledge would have an immense effect on his life.
I'm sure it would. It would restore his faith in you, in woman, in
humanity. It would console him inexpressibly; would be infinitely sweet
to him. It would change the color of his view of life; give him hope and
strength; make a new man of him."

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