“Yes.”
“What time will the New York sail?”
“In three-quarters of an hour. Who’s
speaking?”
“Mr. Oscar Fischer. Keep anything you have
for me.”
He threw down the receiver for fear of a refusal,
packed a few things feverishly in a dressing bag,
dashed the rest of his correspondence into his pocket,
and with the bag in one hand, and an overcoat over
the other arm, he hastened out into the street.
He was obliged at first to board a street car.
Afterwards he found a taxicab, and drove under the
great wooden shed as the last siren was blowing.
He hurried up the gangway, a grim, remorseful figure,
a sense of defeat gnawing at his heart, a bitter,
haunting fear still with him even when, with a shriek
of the tugs, the great steamer swung into the river.
He was leaving forever the work to which he had given
so much of his life, leaving it a fugitive and dishonoured.
The blaze of lights, the screaming of the great ferry-boats,
all the triumphant, brazen noises of the mighty city,
sounded like a requiem to him as in the darkest part
of the promenade deck he leaned over the railing and
nursed his agony, the supreme agony of an ambitious
man—failure.
“What has become,” Mrs. Theodore Hastings
asked her niece one afternoon about a month later,
“of your delightful friend, Mr. Lutchester?”
Pamela laid down her book and looked across at her
aunt with wide-open eyes.
“Why, I thought you didn’t like him, aunt?”
“I cannot remember saying so, my dear,”
Mrs. Hastings replied. “I had nothing against
the man himself. It was simply his attitude with
regard to some of your uncle’s plans, of which
we disapproved.”
Pamela nodded. They were seated on the piazza
of the Hastings’ country house at Manchester.
“I see!... And uncle’s plans,”
she went on reflectively, “have become a little
changed, haven’t they?”
Mrs. Hastings coughed.
“There is no doubt,” she admitted, “that
your Uncle Theodore was inveigled into supporting,
to a certain extent, a party whose leaders have shown
themselves utterly irresponsible. The moment these
horrible things began to come out, however, your uncle
finally cut himself loose from them.”
“Very wise of him,” Pamela murmured.
“Who could have believed,” Mrs. Hastings
demanded, “that men like Oscar Fischer, Max
Bookam and a dozen other well-known and prominent
millionaires, would have stooped to encourage the destruction
of American property and lives, simply through blind
devotion to the country of their birth. I could
understand,” she went on, “both your uncle
and I perfectly understood that their sympathies were
German rather than English, but we shared a common
belief that notwithstanding this they were Americans
first and foremost. It was in this belief that
your uncle was led into temporary association with
them.”
