Part 18

“No,” said the lady, with her bright eyes fixed upon him.

“Well, that was all well and good, and I'd liked to have carried out my part of the contract, and was willing, and am still. But you see, Kelly, after she'd landed Reddy on firm ground, got a little tired, I reckon, gal-like, of the thing she'd worked so easily, and when she went East she looked around for some other wreck to try her hand on, and she found it on the steamer coming back. And who do you think it was? Why, our friend Louis Sylvester!”

Mrs. Merrydew smiled slightly, with her bright eyes still on the speaker.

“Well, you know he IS fast at times--if he is a friend of mine--and she reg'larly tackled him; and as my old woman says, it was a sight to see her go for him. But then HE didn't tumble to it. No! Reformin' ain't in HIS line I'm afeard. And what was the result? Why, Kelly only got all the more keen when she found she couldn't manage him like Reddy,--and, between you and me, she'd have liked Reddy more if he hadn't been so easy,--and it's ended, I reckon, in her now falling dead in love with Sylvester. She swears she won't marry any one else, and wants to devote her whole life to him! Now, what's to be done! Reddy don't know it yet, and I don't know how to tell him. Kelly says her mission was ended when she made a new man of him, and he oughter be thankful for that. Couldn't you kinder break the news to him and tell him there ain't any show for him?”

“Does he love the girl so much, then?” said the lady gently.

“Yes; but I am afraid there is no hope for Reddy as long as she thinks there's a chance of her capturing Sylvester.”

The lady rose and went to the writing-table. “Would it be any comfort to you, Mr. Woodridge, if you were told that she had not the slightest chance with Sylvester?”

“Yes.”

She wrote a few lines on a card, put it in an envelope, and handed it to Woodridge. “Find out where Sylvester is in San Francisco, and give him that card. I think it will satisfy you. And now as I have to catch the return coach in ten minutes, I must ask you to excuse me while I put my things together.”

“And you won't first break the news to Reddy for me?”

“No; and I advise you to keep the whole matter to yourself for the present. Good-by!”

She smiled again, fascinatingly as usual, but, as it seemed to him, a trifle wearily, and then passed into the inner room. Years after, in his practical, matter of fact recollections of this strange woman, he always remembered her by this smile.

But she had sufficiently impressed him by her parting adjuration to cause him to answer Reddy's eager inquiries with the statement that Kelly and her mother were greatly preoccupied with some friends in San Francisco, and to speedily escape further questioning. Reddy's disappointment was somewhat mitigated by the simultaneous announcement of Mrs. Merrydew's departure. But he was still more relieved and gratified to hear, a few days later, of the marriage of Mrs. Merrydew with Louis Sylvester. If, to the general surprise and comment it excited, he contributed only a smile of cynical toleration and superior self-complacency, the reader will understand and not blame him. Nor did the public, who knew the austere completeness of his reform. Nor did Mr. Woodridge, who failed to understand the only actor in this little comedy who might perhaps have differed from them all.

A month later James Reddy married Kelly Woodridge, in the chilly little church at Oakdale. Perhaps by that time it might have occurred to him that although the freshness and fruition of summer were everywhere, the building seemed to be still unwarmed. And when he stepped forth with his bride, and glanced across the prosperous landscape toward the distant bay and headlands of San Francisco, he shivered slightly at the dryly practical kiss of the keen northwestern Trades.

But he was prosperous and comfortable thereafter, as the respectable owner of broad lands and paying shares. It was said that Mrs. Reddy contributed much to the popularity of the hotel by her charming freedom from prejudice and sympathy with mankind; but this was perhaps only due to the contrast to her more serious and at times abstracted husband. At least this was the charitable opinion of the proverbially tolerant and kind-hearted Baroness Streichholzer (nee Merrydew, and relict of the late lamented Louis Sylvester, Esq.), whom I recently had the pleasure of meeting at Wiesbaden, where the waters and reposeful surroundings strongly reminded her of Oakdale.

THE HEIR OF THE McHULISHES.

The consul for the United States of America at the port of St. Kentigern was sitting alone in the settled gloom of his private office. Yet it was only high noon, of a “seasonable” winter's day, by the face of the clock that hung like a pallid moon on the murky wall opposite to him. What else could be seen of the apartment by the faint light that struggled through the pall of fog outside the lustreless windows presented the ordinary aspect of a business sanctum. There were a shelf of fog-bound admiralty law, one or two colored prints of ocean steamships under full steam, bow on, tremendously foreshortened, and seeming to force themselves through shadowy partitions; there were engravings of Lincoln and Washington, as unsubstantial and shadowy as the dead themselves. Outside, against the window, which was almost level with the street, an occasional procession of black silhouetted figures of men and women, with prayer-books in their hands and gloom on their faces, seemed to be born of the fog, and prematurely to return to it. At which a conviction of sin overcame the consul. He remembered that it was the Sabbath day, and that he had no business to be at the consulate at all.

Unfortunately, with this shameful conviction came the sound of a bell ringing somewhere in the depths of the building, and the shuffling of feet on the outer steps. The light of his fire had evidently been seen, and like a beacon had attracted some wandering and possibly intoxicated mariner with American papers. The consul walked into the hall with a sudden righteous frigidity of manner. It was one thing to be lounging in one's own office on the Sabbath day, and quite another to be deliberately calling there on business.

He opened the front door, and a middle-aged man entered, accompanying and partly shoving forward a more diffident and younger one. Neither appeared to be a sailor, although both were dressed in that dingy respectability and remoteness of fashion affected by second and third mates when ashore. They were already well in the hall, and making their way toward the private office, when the elder man said, with an air of casual explanation, “Lookin' for the American consul; I reckon this yer's the consulate?”

“It is the consulate,” said the official dryly, “and I am the consul; but”--

“That's all right,” interrupted the stranger, pushing past him, and opening the door of the private office, into which he shoved his companion. “Thar now!” he continued to the diffident youth, pointing to a chair, and quite ignoring the presence of the consul; “thar's a bit of America. Sit down thar. You're under the flag now, and can do as you darn please.” Nevertheless, he looked a little disappointed as he glanced around him, as if he had expected a different environment and possibly a different climate.

“I presume,” said the consul suavely, “you wish to see me on some urgent matter; for you probably know that the consulate is closed on Sunday to ordinary business. I am here myself quite accidentally.”

“Then you don't live here?” said the visitor disappointedly.

“No.”

“I reckon that's the reason why we didn't see no flag a-flyin' when we was a-huntin' this place yesterday. We were directed here, but I says to Malcolm, says I, 'No; it ain't here, or you'd see the Stars and Stripes afore you'd see anythin' else.' But I reckon you float it over your house, eh?”

The consul here explained smilingly that he did NOT fly a flag over his lodgings, and that except on national holidays it was not customary to display the national ensign on the consulate.

“Then you can't do here--and you a CONSUL--what any nigger can do in the States, eh? That's about how it pans out, don't it? But I didn't think YOU'D tumble to it quite so quick, Jack.”

At this mention of his Christian name, the consul turned sharply on the speaker. A closer scrutiny of the face before him ended with a flash of reminiscence. The fog without and within seemed to melt away; he was standing once more on a Western hillside with this man; a hundred miles of sparkling sunshine and crisp, dry air stretching around him, and above a blue and arched sky that roofed the third of a continent with six months' summer. And then the fog seemed to come back heavier and thicker to his consciousness. He emotionally stretched out his hand to the stranger. But it was the fog and his personal surroundings which now seemed to be unreal.