The Pace That Kills: A Chronicle. Saltus Edgar

      "What business, I would like to know?"

      "So you shall. I took some papers for Mr. Dunellen to examine – papers relative to my father's estate. To-morrow I return to learn his opinion. Next week I go abroad again. When I leave I promise you shall find your cousin still heart-whole and fancy-free."

      As Roland delivered this little stab he paused a moment to note the effect. But apparently it had passed unnoticed – Thorold seemingly was engrossed in the statements that preceded it. The scowl was still on his face, but it was a scowl into which perplexity had entered, and which in entering had modified the aggressiveness that had first been there. At the moment his eyes wandered, and Roland, who was watching him, felt that he had scored a point.

      "You say you are going abroad?" he said, at last.

      "Yes; I have to join my wife."

      At this announcement Thorold looked up at him and then down at the umbrella. Presently, with an abrupt gesture, he unfurled it and raised it above his head. As he did so, Roland smiled. For that night at least the danger had gone. Of the morrow, however, he was unassured.

      "Suppose we walk along," he said, encouragingly; and before Thorold knew it, he was sharing that umbrella with his foe. "Yes," he continued, "my poor father left his affairs in a muddle, but Mr. Dunellen says he thinks he can straighten them out. You can understand that if any inkling of this thing were to reach him he would return the papers at once. You can understand that, can't you? After all, you must know that I have suffered."

      "Suffered!" Thorold cried. "What's that to me? It made my mother insane."

      "God knows I nearly lost my reason too. I can understand how you feel toward me: it is only what I deserve. Yet though you cannot forget, at least it can do you no good to rake this matter up."

      "It is because of – " and for a second the cousin halted in his speech.

      "Voilà!" mused Roland. "Je te vois venir."

      "However, if you are going abroad – "

      "Most certainly I am. I never expect to see Miss Dunellen again."

      "In that case I will say nothing."

      They had reached Fifth Avenue, and for a moment both loitered on the curb. Thorold seemed to have something to add, but he must have had difficulty in expressing it, for he nodded as though to reiterate the promise.

      "I can rely upon you then, can I?" Roland asked.

      "Keep out of my way, sir, and I will try, as I have tried, to forget."

      A 'bus was passing, he hailed it, and disappeared.

      Roland watched the conveyance, and shook the snow-flakes from his coat. "Try, and be damned," he muttered. "I haven't done with you yet."

      The disdain of a revenge at hand is accounted the uniquest possible vengeance. And it is quite possible that had Roland's monetary affairs been in a better condition, on a sound and solid basis, let us say, he would willingly have put that paradox into action. But on leaving Tuxedo he happened to be extremely hungry – hungry, first and foremost, for the possession of that wealth which in this admirably conducted country of ours lifts a man above the law, and, an adroit combination of scoundrelism and incompetence aiding, sometimes lands him high among the executives of state. By political ambition, however, it is only just to say he was uninspired. In certain assemblies he had taken the trouble to assert that our government is one at which Abyssinia might sneer, but the rôle of reformer was not one which he had any inclination to attempt. Several of his progenitors figured, and prominently too, in abridgments of history; and, if posterity were not satisfied with that, he had a very clear idea as to what posterity might do. In so far as he was personally concerned, the prominence alluded to was a thing which he accepted as a matter of course: it was an integral part of himself; he would have missed it as he would have missed a leg or the point of his nose; but otherwise it left his pulse unstirred. No, his hunger was not for preferment or place. It was for the ten million which the Hon. Paul Dunellen had gathered together, and which the laws of gravitation would prevent him from carrying away when he died. That was the nature of Roland Mistrial's hunger, and as incidental thereto was the thirst to adjust an outstanding account.

      Whatever the nature of that account may have been, in a more ordinary case it might have become outlawed through sheer lapse of time. But during that lapse of time Roland had been in exile because of it; and though even now he might have been willing to let it drift back into the past where it belonged, yet when the representative of it not only loomed between him and the millions, but was even attempting to gather them in for himself, the possibility of retaliation was too complete to suffer disdain. The injury, it is true, was one of his own doing. But, curiously enough, when a man injures another the more wanton that injury is the less it incites to repentance. In certain dispositions it becomes a source of malignant hate. Deserve a man's gratitude, and he may forgive you; but let him do you a wrong, and you have an enemy for life. Such is the human heart – or such at least was Roland Mistrial's.

      And now, as the conveyance rumbled off into the night, he shook the snow-flakes from his coat.

      "Try, and be damned," he repeated; "I haven't done with you yet."

      IV

      To the New Yorker March is the vilest month of all the year. In the South it is usually serene. Mrs. Metuchen, who gave herself the airs of an invalid, and who possessed the invalid's dislike of vile weather, was aware of this; and while the first false promises of February were being protested she succeeded in persuading Miss Dunellen to accompany her out of snow-drifts into the sun. It was Aiken that she chose as refuge; and when the two ladies arrived there they felt satisfied that their choice had been a proper one – a satisfaction which they did not share alone, for a few days after their arrival Roland Mistrial arrived there too.