Читать книгу Jim the Conqueror - Peter B. Kyne - Страница 3

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OLD William B. Latham lay on a wicker chaise longue in the veranda of his country house, Hillcrest, and pretended to be asleep—a subterfuge quite in keeping with a certain salient characteristic of his which, quite early in his career, had earned for him the not inappropriate sobriquet of “Crooked Bill.” Not that the old rascal was crooked in the commonly accepted sense of that term as employed in the quaint patois of our times (indeed he was a most honorable man), but because he was possessed of an uncommon degree of craft, of audacious and generally amusing slyness, in business and out of it—a sort of super-prudence born of uncanny innate ability to read human nature.

Such men are rarely deficient in a sense of humor, and Crooked Bill had found life more abundantly provocative of laughter than of sighs. His friends, who were legion, always remarked when the subject of his happy existence was broached that there was not a reason on earth why it shouldn’t be happy. He was popularly believed to have more money than some folks have hay; he had no wife to bother his life and he paddled his own canoe; he enjoyed excellent health; in fact he had spent but two dollars and fifty cents on his physical up-keep in the last half-century, and this outlay constituted the one regret of his placid existence. In an absent-minded moment he had once swallowed two tablets of bichloride of mercury in mistake for aspirin. Having discovered his error almost instantly he had dashed to a doctor’s office a block distant and been treated to an emetic of mustard and water. Since both these simple ingredients were to have been found in his own house, he had never ceased to regret the ignorance which had cost him that doctor’s office fee. Every night before retiring he drank a glass of old port and ate half a dozen walnuts, which he cracked with his own teeth.

It pleased William B. Latham this late afternoon to pretend to be asleep in order that he might, from under the drawn-down rim of his hat, watch his late wife’s niece engaged in a pastime peculiarly dear to that most attractive young woman, to wit, snaring and breaking the heart of a youth whose manifest decencies appeared, to Crooked Bill, sufficient justification for receiving from the young lady in question what her uncle and guardian described as “a whole lot of letting alone.”

Although attached to this Circe by the bonds of an affection somewhat more than avuncular and somewhat less than paternal, Crooked Bill was, nevertheless, entirely out of sympathy with her method of extracting from life a degree of interest and amusement necessary to making it worth the living; albeit her coquetry, so obvious to the old worldling but so thoroughly unsuspected by her victims, never failed to titillate his sense of the ridiculous. Safely hidden behind a screen of passion vines, through an aperture in which he could see the young people without being seen (his pretense of sleep being merely an additional precaution and quite in keeping with his motto of “safety first”), Crooked Bill estimated the situation and found it not to his liking.

With the ordinary run of young gentlemen who laid their vealy hearts at the feet of Miss Roberta Antrim, Crooked Bill had little sympathy and less patience. He was of the opinion that the receipt of their passports from Roberta was not a tragedy that weighed very heavily on them very long. The majority of them were he-flirts, amusing themselves with Roberta as outrageously as she amused herself with them, or else frankly attracted to her as a moth is attracted to a candle flame. And, of course, when the candle is extinguished the moth flies away, unless, indeed, he has already foolishly immolated himself. Up to the present none of Roberta’s rejects had committed suicide, although not less than four had vowed so to do. Crooked Bill had more than a suspicion, too, that, in addition to Roberta’s undoubted charms, the fact that she was his heir was not a negligible attraction to her continuous and shifting entourage.

In the case of the young gentleman who sat with Roberta on the stone bench under the elm at the end of the garden in the soft summer twilight, Crooked Bill could find no extenuating circumstances to adduce as to why Roberta should not be convicted of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment. Glenn Hackett, to begin with, was of good family where brains and money, in evidence for three generations, had always been used wisely. He was not the collar-advertisement type of man; on the contrary he was rather tall, loose-jointed and angular, with a plain honest face like a kind horse. He was apt to be regarded as downright homely until he smiled, when one forgot his plainness of feature, for that smile invested him with a singular manly charm. One trusted him instinctively; his quiet, dry Yankee wit, never disclosed on brief acquaintance, always made one desirous of meeting him again. He was thirty years old, a lawyer and a good one, which is to say that Crooked Bill gladly paid him a large annual retainer. The old man’s highest compliment for Glenn Hackett was that he had horse sense, and was the only man he knew who appeared to be as common and comfortable as an old shoe and yet wasn’t.

Crooked Bill wished he might have been privileged to hear what Glenn Hackett and Roberta were saying. However, he was a fairly accurate reader of gesture, facial expression and nods, so he was assured that Hackett was proposing marriage to his niece.

“It’ll be like her to refuse him,” he decided, “and him the only real man I’ve ever seen on the premises. Shy on small talk and society chatter, but a good listener and a speaker of words worth while when he has something to say. And for once in his life he’s doing all the talking while Roberta does the listening. I know that meek, sad resigned bend of her head while she tugs at her handkerchief and tries to appear surprised. She must have admiration from men or life is a delusion and a snare! And now she’s picked on a victim that’s bound to back-fire on her, or I’m no judge of men. Hello, he’s talking too much! He’s getting oppressive. She’s finding the going not to her liking—ah, I thought so!”

Crooked Bill drew his hat brim down over his nose; then he rolled his head to one side, opened his mouth a little and commenced to breathe in long even respirations. He heard the rapid patter of Roberta’s little feet coming up the flagged walk, almost felt the swish of her as she passed him and entered the house. In about five minutes he heard the firm, leisurely tread of Glenn Hackett following, and was aware, presently, that the young man had sat down in a chair beside him. So he pretended to sleep on for five minutes, then he stirred uneasily, gritted his teeth, sighed, opened his eyes, looked straight ahead of him at the passion vine and yawned pleasurably.

“Well, now that you haven’t had your forty winks,” Hackett observed quietly, “what’s your opinion as to what my next move should be?”

“I never cared for riddles,” Crooked Bill protested virtuously.

“I’ve just jilted Roberta!”

Crooked Bill sat up with the abruptness of a Jack-in-the-box, which, in all fairness, he resembled not a little. “Shoot me for a horse-thief!” he ejaculated, with that expression conveying to Hackett, had that young man not been already aware of the former’s antecedents, the information that old William B.’s voting precinct had not always been Dobbs Ferry, Westchester County, New York. It aided and abetted the charge made by his hat that once upon a time Crooked Bill had been a son of vast horizons. Even to the unobservant few who, in these days of motion pictures, might fail to have been impressed by that hat, Crooked Bill’s soft, pliable leather boots with his trouser legs drawn over them, spoke eloquently of a land far beyond the Palisades on the Jersey shore. “Played fast and loose with you, eh, boy?”

“No. Just tried to.”

“So you threw the dally over your pommel and gave her the bust, eh? Three cheers for our side.”

“Cheer to your heart’s content. This poor devil isn’t dying,” Glenn Hackett retorted savagely.

Crooked Bill looked cautiously around to make certain the door from the veranda to the living-room was closed, for it was instinct with him never to make a move until all the conditions were propitious. “I hadn’t any idea you two were engaged, son.”

“We weren’t, although I think we could have been if I had been fool enough to insist. Bobby likes me tremendously. I’m sure of that.”

“Like is right. I doubt if she’ll ever love anybody, but if she should I’m certain he’ll be a married man with a large family and unavailable from every point of view. You interested her, son, far more than any of your predecessors, and I’ve seen them all come and go. I reckon that’s because you were a mite harder to land than the others. You gave her a run. However, I sort o’ reckoned that’d be the way when you first druv up,” he added comically.

“She’s been expecting me to propose for a month, and just a little while ago I was fool enough to do it. She looked so infernally proposable today! And while I was doing it I looked at her steadily and noted the triumphant glint in her eyes, and a little self-satisfied smile on her lovely lips. Something told me she was preparing the skids for me—”

“She was, undoubtedly. I watched the entire performance from here. I know the signs, Hackett.”

“So, no sooner had I popped the question and no sooner had she commenced to assure me that she hadn’t remotely suspected this attachment, than I interrupted her and withdrew my proposition. I begged her not to think any more about it.”

“Hell’s fire!” Crooked Bill was steeped in reverential awe.

“That got her blazing mad,” Hackett continued.

“It would anger a sheep,” Crooked Bill agreed. “Roberta’s mighty high and handsome in her ideas.”

“I told her it had suddenly occurred to me that she could never possibly consider marrying a lawyer who grubbed for a living in the heart of New York’s financial quarter. I told her I was quite certain that what she was seeking was a knight-errant and I wasn’t it. I told her I’d be the last man in the world to skewer himself on a spear, like kidneys en brochette, for the sake of a lady’s smile. I told her I had suddenly made up my mind that it was all a hideous mistake and— But that’s as far as I got.”

“She up and left you then, son? She was crying as she passed me. I didn’t see her, but my hearing’s right good for my years. Boy, you’re a gift from God! Continue to play your cards like that and she’s yours without a flicker. That girl requires a whole lot o’ lickin’, but she’s only got to be licked once!”

“I’m wondering if I overplayed my hand?”

“What if you did? She didn’t have even a dirty little deuce to trump your ace, did she?”

“I suppose I startled her.”

“You jarred her conceit, that’s what you did. The dearest of women have a lot o’ that commodity, son, only they call it womanly pride. However, they’ll all humiliate themselves to win the right man. You just keep on rollin’ your hoop the way you’ve started and you’ll win in a walk.”

“I’m a little bit afraid to carry on, Mr. Latham. She plays fast and loose with a man. Doesn’t appear to have a very well-formulated idea that a man is anything except an object of amusement—and I’m no jester to a queen. She’s a confirmed flirt.”

“They make awful good wives once you halter-break ’em,” Crooked Bill suggested.

“How do you know?”

“I married one—and she was that girl’s aunt. Roberta comes by her misfortune honestly. All the Barrows women were romantic. In fact Roberta’s mother ran away with an end man in a minstrel show. She adored the jokes that boy used to crack until he cracked one on her by marrying her. She didn’t get back at him for two years, but when she did the laugh was on him. She bore him Roberta and from that day until he died Roberta ran him ragged and made the poor devil like it. He was a good end man but a poor judge of investments, and when he and his wife were killed in a train wreck, my wife and I fell heir to Roberta. She was eleven then. My wife died ten years ago and I’ve been riding herd on Roberta ever since.”

“I fear you’ve made a bad job of it, Mr. Latham.”

“Well, you can’t bar me for tryin’,” Crooked Bill responded calmly. “The girl’s sound at heart, but cursed with a face and figure that’d make Helen of Troy look like a Navajo squaw in comparison. She has brains, she has poise—”

“Not any more,” Glenn Hackett interrupted gloomily. “I’ve just upset her poise!”

Crooked Bill indulged himself in a very mirthful little chuckle. “Well, at any rate, she’s a very good dear sweet girl,” he defended finally.

“She can’t coquet with me. She wants to be pursued. I’m a busy man and I’ve pursued her for a year, and you know, Mr. Latham, as well as I do, that whenever she has another swain on hand she always devotes herself to him and ignores me.”

“Wants to see if you’ll get jealous. You’d ought to have done that much for her and it would have tickled her most to death to think she had the power to hurt you, and she’d have been so grateful to you for obligin’ her, most likely she’d have treated you human for a month thereafter. But you made the mistake of resistin’ her, son. No woman dodges any sort of contest and I never knew one that didn’t dig into a fight with a winning sperrit. Trouble is, you don’t know any other way of fightin’ except to go in to win with any weapon handy. A feller in love with Roberta had ought to take a leaf out of the lifetime experience of a coyote with foxhounds. Señor Coyote, meeting up with a little lone foxhound he maybe can lick without extendin’ himself, never fusses his fur in a precipitate engagement. He just lopes away and not too fast, either; he lures the hound off into the desert where he knows some of his friends will be nosing around, and then they gang-jump that pup and destroy him with ease. When you jilted Roberta a little while ago, was that just your strategy or your temper?”

“My temper, I think. I know I lost it completely and yielded to a sudden mad impulse to give her a dose of her own medicine.”

Crooked Bill stroked his chin and spat a thin amber stream over the veranda railing. “Tell you what you do, son,” he announced presently, and Glenn Hackett leaned forward to listen to the words of wisdom from the oracle. “You stay to dinner just as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Roberta’ll dine in her room, if she has any appetite at all, which I doubt, because the maid’ll tell her you’re still here and she’ll think that’s indecent of you. Let her think it. Continue to come out uninvited and unexpected whenever the notion grips you, and when she gives you the dead face you grin at her like a Chinese idol and tell her how winsome she looks in that new dress. As the poet says: