The Mystery of Murray Davenport Part 9

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 penmans.h.i.+p?"

"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 penmans.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ed 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 pa.s.sing out, and saw Davenport standing by the table, looking after him. What was the inscrutable expression--half amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 a.s.sociated the love-affair of Murray Davenport with the "romance" of Miss Florence Kenby. One might suppose that Edna Hill's friends.h.i.+p 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 circ.u.mstances as the reader. Nor, to him, were the circ.u.mstances 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x," 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 m.u.f.fins and cake, might have been transported that instant from Mayfair, on a magic carpet, so neat was her black dress, so spotless her white ap.r.o.n, 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."