Читать книгу The Maker of Opportunities - George Gibbs - Страница 5

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“It’s lucky Ollie Farquhar’s fat,” said Mortimer Crabb when Geltman was out of earshot. “It was neat, Jepson, beautifully neat. Did you ever see fish take the bait better? But he’ll be coming to in a minute.”

Captain Jepson was watching the bewildered brewer. “He won’t get much information there,” he grinned.

“It can’t last much longer, though,” said Crabb. “How much of a run is it to the coast?”

“About an hour, sir.”

“Well, keep her on her course until eight bells. Then if he insists we’ll run in and land him on the beach somewhere.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“It will soon be over now. He can’t get in until to-morrow and then”—Crabb beamed with satisfaction—“and then it’ll be too late. Stow your smile, Jepson. He’s coming back.”

Not even this complete chain of circumstantial evidence could long avail against the brisk air and sunlight. In the broad expanse between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand Geltman noted the blue of some youthful tattooing. As he saw the familiar letters doubt took flight. He was himself. There was no doubt of that. As he went aft again he smiled triumphantly.

“Let’s be done with nonsense, Dr. Woolf,” he growled. “Look at that,” holding his hand before Crabb’s eyes. “If I’m Otto Fehrenbach how is it that the letters C. G. are marked in my hand?”

Crabb, his arms akimbo, stood looking him steadily in the eyes.

“So,” he said calmly, “you’re awake at last!”

He looked at Crabb and the Captain with eyes which saw not. What he had thought of saying and doing remained unsaid and undone. With no other word he lurched heavily forward and down the companion.

“There’ll be a hurricane in that quarter, Jepson, or I’m not weather wise,” laughed Crabb. “We’d better run in now. There isn’t much sea and the wind is offshore. We’ll land him at Quogue or Westhampton. In the meanwhile, keep the tarpaulin over the for’ard boat so that he can’t see the name on her. We’ll use the gig. If he tries to peep over the stern we’ll clap him in the stateroom. It will mean five years at least for me if he learns the name of the Blue Wing. So look sharp, Jepson, and keep an eye on him.”

“Never fear,” said the Captain with a grin, and walked forward.

Crabb walked the deck in high jubilation. He looked at his watch. Three o’clock! If McFee had followed his instructions Dicky Bowles and Juliet Hazard were man and wife. He had nicely figured his chances. To Geltman he was Dr. Woolf. To his crew he was Mr. Crabb taking an unfortunate relative for an airing; to Dicky Bowles he was the rescuer of forlorn damsels and the trump of good fellows.

Crabb was fully prepared to carry the villainy through to the end. Of one thing he was certain, the sooner his guest was off the Blue Wing and safely landed the better.

And so, when at last Geltman came on deck with the watchful Weckerly at his heels, Crabb noted the chastened expression upon the brewer’s face with singular satisfaction.

“I’ll go ashore, if you please,” he said, quietly.

Crabb affected disappointed surprise.

“Here? Now?” he said. “We’re pretty far down the coast. That’s Quogue in there. I can’t very well run back to New York, but——”

“Put me ashore, sir,” said Geltman sulkily.

When the gig was lowered, Crabb bowed the brewer over the side, his evening clothes tied in a paper package.

“Good-by,” said Crabb. “When you’re done with the flannels, Mr. Geltman, send ’em to Fehrenbach.”

But Geltman had no reply. He had folded his arms and was gazing stolidly toward the shore. The last glimpse Crabb had of him was when the Blue Wing drew offshore leaving him gesticulating wildly upon the beach in the glow of the setting sun.

When the figure was but a speck in the distance Mortimer Crabb turned away and threw himself wearily in his wicker chair.

“Where to now, sir?” asked Jepson.

“Oh, anywhere you like.”

“Sandy Hook, sir?”

“Oh, yes,” he sighed, “as well go there as anywhere else. New York, Jepson.”

Poor Crabb! In twenty-four hours he was, if anything, more bored than ever. The sight of the joyous faces of Dicky Bowles and his bride had done something to relieve the tedium vitæ, but he knew that their joy was of themselves and not of him, and so he gave them a “God bless you” and his country place on Long Island for a few weeks of honeymooning. He had even had the presumption to offer them the Blue Wing, but Dicky, whose new responsibilities had developed a vein of prudence, refused point blank. Crabb shrugged his shoulders.

“Suit yourselves,” he laughed. “It’s yours if you want it.”

“And have Geltman putting you in jail?”

“Oh, he won’t trouble me.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve made some inquiries. He’s dropped the thing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. He’s not so thick-skinned as he looks. That story wouldn’t look well in print, you know.”

With an outburst of friendship, Dicky threw his arms around Crabb’s shoulders and gave him a bear hug.

“I’ll never forget it, Mort, never! You’re the salt of the earth——”

“There, there, Dicky. Salt should be taken in pinches, not by the spoonful, and you’ve mussed my cravat! Be off with you and don’t come back here until matrimony has sobered you into a proper sense of your new responsibilities to your Creator.”

From the window of his apartment Crabb watched Dicky’s taxi spin up the avenue in the direction of the modest boarding-house which sheltered the waiting bride, then turned with a heavy sigh and rang for McFee. Love like that never comes to the very rich. He, Mortimer Crabb, was not a sentient being, but only a chattel, an animated bank account upon which designing matrons cast envious eyes and for which ambitious daughters laid their pretty snares. No, love like that was not for him—or ever would be, it seemed.

His toilet made, Crabb strolled out for the air, wondering as he often did how the people on the street could smile their way through life, while he——

A hansom passed, turned just beyond and drew up at the curb beside him, and a voice addressed him.

“Crabb! Mortimer Crabb! By all that’s lucky!”

“Ross Burnett!” said Crabb, gladly. “I thought that you were dead. Have you dropped from heaven, man?”

“No,” laughed Ross, “not so far, only from China.”

Burnett dismissed the hansom at once and together they went to the Bachelors’ Club near by, where, over a friendly glass, they gathered up the loose ends of their friendship. Crabb listened with new interest as his old friend gave him an account of what had happened in the five years which had intervened since they had last met, recalling piece by piece the unfortunate events which had led to his departure from New York, and Burnett, glad of receptive ears, rehearsed it for him.

The boy had squandered his patrimony in Wall Street. Then by the grace of one of the senators from New York he obtained from the President an appointment as consular clerk, an office, which if it paid but little at home carried with it some dignity, a little authority, and certain appreciable perquisites in foreign ports.

He had chosen wisely. At Cairo, where he had been sent to fill a temporary vacancy caused by the death of the consul general and subsequent illness of his deputy, he found himself suddenly in charge of the consular office in the fullest press of business, with diplomatic functions requiring both ingenuity and discretion.

After all, it was very simple. The business of a consulate was child’s play, and the usual phases in the life of a diplomat were to be requisitely met by the usages of gentility—a quality Burnett discovered was not too amply possessed by those political gentlemen who sat abroad in the posts of honor to represent the great republic.

He thought that if he could get a post, however small, with plenary powers, he would be happy. But, alas! He had been away from home so long that he didn’t even know whether his senator was dead or alive, and when he reached Washington, a month or so after the inauguration, he realized how small were his chances for preferment.

The President and Secretary of State were besieged daily by powerful politicians, and one by one the posts coveted, even the smallest of them, were taken by frock-coated, soft-hatted, flowing-tied gentlemen, whom he had noticed lounging and chewing tobacco in the Willard Hotel lobby. It was apparently with such persons that power took preferment. His roseate dreams vanished. Ross Burnett was a mere State Department drudge again at twelve hundred a year!

He told Crabb that he had spoken to the chief of the diplomatic bureau in despair.

“Isn’t there any way, Crowthers?” he had asked. “Can’t a fellow ever get any higher?”

“If he had a pull, he might—but a consular clerk——” The shake of Crowthers’ head was eloquent.

“Isn’t there anything a fellow—even a consular clerk—could do to win promotion in this service?” he continued.

Crowthers had looked at him quizzically.

“Yes, there’s one thing. If you could do that, you might ask the Secretary for anything you wanted.”

“And that——”

“Get the text of the treaty between Germany and China from Baron Arnim.”

Crowthers had chuckled. Crabb chuckled, too. He thought it a very good joke. Baron Arnim had been the special envoy of Germany to China, accredited to the court of the Eastern potentate with the special mission of formulating a new and secret treaty between these monarchs. He was now returning home carrying a copy of this document in his baggage.

Burnett had laughed. It was a good joke.

“You’d better send me out again,” Burnett had said, hopelessly. “Anything from Arakan to Zanzibar will do for me.”

Crabb listened to the story with renewed marks of appreciation.

“So you’ve been out and doing in the world, after all?” he said, languidly, “while we—eheu jam satis!—have glutted ourselves with the stale and unprofitable. How I envy you!”

Burnett smoked silently. It was very easy to envy from the comfortable vantage ground of a hundred and fifty thousand a year.

“Why, man, if you knew how sick of it all I am,” sighed Crabb, “you’d thank your stars for the lucky dispensation that took you out of it. Rasselas was right. I’ve been pursuing the phantoms of hope for thirty years, and I’m still hopeless. There have been a few bright spots”—Crabb smiled at his cigar ash—“a very few, and far between.”

“Bored as ever, Crabb?”

“Immitigably. To live in the thick of things and see nothing but the pale drabs and grays. No red anywhere. Oh, for a passion that would burn and sear—love, hate, fear! I’m forever courting them all. And here I am still cool, colorless and unscarred. Only once”—his gray eyes lit up marvelously—“only once did I learn the true relation of life to death, Burnett; only once. That was when the Blue Wing struggled six days in a hurricane with Hatteras under her lee. It was glorious. They may talk of love and hate as they will; fear, I tell you, is the Titan of passions.”

Burnett was surprised at this unmasking.

“You should try big game,” he said, carelessly.

“I have,” said the other; “both beasts and men—and here I am in flannels and a red tie! I’ve skinned the one and been skinned by the other—to what end?”

“You’ve bought experience.”

“Cheap at any cost. You can’t buy fear. Love comes in varieties at the market values. Hate can be bought for a song; but fear, genuine and amazing, is priceless—a gem which only opportunity can provide; and how seldom opportunity knocks at any man’s door!”

“Crabb the original—the esoteric!”

“Yes. The same. The very same. And you, how different! How sober and rounded!”

There was a silence, contemplative, retrospective on both their parts. Crabb broke it.

“Tell me, old man,” he said, “about your position. Isn’t there any chance?”

Burnett smiled a little bitterly.

“I’m a consular clerk at twelve hundred a year during good behavior. When I’ve said that, I’ve said it all.”

“But your future?”

“I’m not in line of promotion.”

“Impossible! Politics?”

“Exactly. I’ve no pull to speak of.”

“But your service?”

“I’ve been paid for that.”

“Isn’t there any other way?”

“Oh, yes,” Burnett laughed, “that treaty. I happened to know something about it when I was out there. It has to do with neutrality, trade ports and coaling stations; but just what, the devil only knows, and his deputy, Baron Arnim, won’t tell. Arnim is now in Washington, ostensibly sight-seeing, but really to confer with Von Schlichter, the ambassador there, about it. You see, we’ve got rather more closely into the Eastern question than we really like, and a knowledge of Germany’s attitude is immensely important to us.”

“Pray go on,” drawled Crabb.

“That’s all there is. The rest was a joke. Crowthers wants me to get the text of that treaty from Baron Arnim’s dispatch-box.”

“Entertaining!” said Crabb, with clouding brow. And then, after a pause, with all the seriousness in the world: “And aren’t you going to?”

Burnett turned to look at him in surprise.

“What?”

“Get it. The treaty.”

“The treaty! From Baron Arnim! You don’t know much of diplomacy, Crabb.”

“You misunderstood me,” he said, coolly; and then, with lowered voice:

“Not from Baron Arnim—from Baron Arnim’s dispatch-box.”

Burnett looked at his acquaintance in a maze. Crabb had been thought a mystery in the old days. He was an enigma now.

“Surely you’re jesting.”

“Why? It oughtn’t to be difficult.”

Burnett looked fearfully around the room at their distant neighbors. “But it’s burglary. Worse than that. If I, in my connection with the State Department, were discovered tampering with the papers of a foreign government, it would lead to endless complications and, perhaps, the disruption of diplomatic relations. Such a thing is impossible. Its very impossibility was the one thing which prompted Crowthers’ suggestion. Can’t you understand that?”

Crabb was stroking his chin and contemplating his well-shaped boot.

“Admit that it’s impossible,” he said calmly. “Do you think, if by some chance you were enabled to give the Secretary of State this information, you’d better your condition?”

“What is the use, Crabb?” began Burnett.

“It can’t do any harm to answer me.”

“Well—yes, I suppose so. If we weren’t plunged immediately into war with Emperor William.”

“Oh!” Crabb was deep in thought. It was several moments before he went on, and then, as though dismissing the subject.

“What are your plans, Ross? Have you a week to spare? How about a cruise on the Blue Wing? There’s a lot I know that you don’t, and a lot you know that I’d like to. I’ll take you up to Washington whenever you’re bored. What do you say?”

Ross Burnett accepted with alacrity. He remembered the Blue Wing, Jepson and Valentin’s dinners. He had longed for them many times when he was eating spaghetti at Gabri’s little restaurant in Genoa.

When they parted it was with a consciousness on the part of Burnett that the affair of Baron Arnim had not been dismissed. The very thought had been madness. Was it only a little pleasantry of Crabb’s? If not, what wild plan had entered his head? It was unlike the Mortimer Crabb he remembered.

And yet there had been a deeper current flowing below his placid surface that gave a suggestion of desperate intent which nothing could explain away. And how illimitable were the possibilities if some plan could be devised by which the information could be obtained without resort to violent measures! It meant for him at least a post at the helm somewhere, or, perhaps, a secretaryship on one of the big commissions.

The idea of burglary, flagrant and nefarious, he dismissed at a thought. Would there not be some way—an unguarded moment—a faithless servant—to give the thing the aspect of possible achievement? As he dressed he found himself thinking of the matter with more seriousness than it deserved.