Hearts of Three 2

Hearts of Three 2

CHORUS:

 

Roaring wind and deep blue water!

We’re the jolly devils who,

Back to back against the mainmast,

Held at bay the entire crew.

 

Here’s to ships that we have taken!

They have seen which men were best.

We have lifted maids and cargo,

And the sharks have had the rest.

 

CHORUS:

 

Roaring wind and deep blue water!

We’re the jolly devils who,

Back to back against the mainmast,

Held at bay the entire crew.

 

—_George Sterling._

 

 

 

 

HEARTS OF THREE

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER I.

 

 

Events happened very rapidly with Francis Morgan that late spring

morning. If ever a man leaped across time into the raw, red drama and

tragedy of the primitive and the medieval melodrama of sentiment and

passion of the New World Latin, Francis Morgan was destined to be that

man, and Destiny was very immediate upon him.

 

Yet he was lazily unaware that aught in the world was stirring, and was

scarcely astir himself. A late night at bridge had necessitated a late

rising. A late breakfast of fruit and cereal had occurred along the

route to the library—the austerely elegant room from which his father,

toward the last, had directed vast and manifold affairs.

 

“Parker,” he said to the valet who had been his father’s before him,

“did you ever notice any signs of fat on R.H.M. in his last days?”

 

“Oh, no, sir,” was the answer, uttered with all the due humility of the

trained servant, but accompanied by an involuntarily measuring glance

that scanned the young man’s splendid proportions. “Your father, sir,

never lost his leanness. His figure was always the same,

broad-shouldered, deep in the chest, big-boned, but lean, always lean,

sir, in the middle. When he was laid out, sir, and bathed, his body

would have shamed most of the young men about town. He always took good

care of himself; it was those exercises in bed, sir. Half an hour every

morning. Nothing prevented. He called it religion.”

 

“Yes, he was a fine figure of a man,” the young man responded idly,

glancing to the stock-ticker and the several telephones his father had

installed.

 

“He was that,” Parker agreed eagerly. “He was lean and aristocratic in

spite of his shoulders and bone and chest. And you’ve inherited it, sir,

only on more generous lines.”

 

Young Francis Morgan, inheritor of many millions as well as brawn,

lolled back luxuriously in a huge leather chair, stretched his legs

after the manner of a full-vigored menagerie lion that is overspilling

with vigor, and glanced at a headline of the morning paper which

informed him of a fresh slide in the Culebra Cut at Panama.

 

“If I didn’t know we Morgans didn’t run that way,” he yawned, “I’d be

fat already from this existence.... Eh, Parker?”

 

The elderly valet, who had neglected prompt reply, startled at the

abrupt interrogative interruption of the pause.

 

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said hastily. “I mean, no, sir. You are in the pink

of condition.”

 

“Not on your life,” the young man assured him. “I may not be getting

fat, but I am certainly growing soft.... Eh, Parker?”

 

“Yes, sir. No, sir; no, I mean no, sir. You’re just the same as when you

came home from college three years ago.”

 

“And took up loafing as a vocation,” Francis laughed. “Parker!”

 

Parker was alert attention. His master debated with himself ponderously,

as if the problem were of profound importance, rubbing the while the

bristly thatch of the small toothbrush moustache he had recently begun

to sport on his upper lip.

 

“Parker, I’m going fishing.”

 

“Yes, sir!”

 

“I ordered some rods sent up. Please joint them and let me give them the

once over. The idea drifts through my mind that two weeks in the woods

is what I need. If I don’t, I’ll surely start laying on flesh and

disgrace the whole family tree. You remember Sir Henry?—the old original

Sir Henry, the buccaneer old swashbuckler?”

 

“Yes, sir; I’ve read of him, sir.”

 

Parker had paused in the doorway until such time as the ebbing of his

young master’s volubility would permit him to depart on the errand.

 

“Nothing to be proud of, the old pirate.”

 

“Oh, no, sir,” Parker protested. “He was Governor of Jamaica. He died

respected.”

 

“It was a mercy he didn’t die hanged,” Francis laughed. “As it was, he’s

the only disgrace in the family that he founded. But what I was going to

say is that I’ve looked him up very carefully. He kept his figure and he

died lean in the middle, thank God. It’s a good inheritance he passed

down. We Morgans never found his treasure; but beyond rubies is the

lean-in-the-middle legacy he bequeathed us. It’s what is called a fixed

character in the breed—that’s what the profs taught me in the biology

course.”

 

Parker faded out of the room in the ensuing silence, during which

Francis Morgan buried himself in the Panama column and learned that the

canal was not expected to be open for traffic for three weeks to come.

 

A telephone buzzed, and, through the electric nerves of a consummate

civilization, Destiny made the first out-reach of its tentacles and

contacted with Francis Morgan in the library of the mansion his father

had builded on Riverside Drive.

 

“But my dear Mrs. Carruthers,” was his protest into the transmitter.

“Whatever it is, it is a mere local flurry. Tampico Petroleum is all

right. It is not a gambling proposition. It is legitimate investment.

Stay with. Tie to it.... Some Minnesota farmer’s come to town and is

trying to buy a block or two because it looks as solid as it really

is.... What if it is up two points? Don’t sell. Tampico Petroleum is not

a lottery or a roulette proposition. It’s bona fide industry. I wish it

hadn’t been so almighty big or I’d have financed it all myself....

Listen, please, it’s not a flyer. Our present contracts for tanks is

over a million. Our railroad and our three pipe-lines are costing more

than five millions. Why, we’ve a hundred millions in producing wells

right now, and our problem is to get it down country to the

oil-steamers. This is the sober investment time. A year from now, or two

years, and your shares will make government bonds look like something

the cat brought in....”

 

“Yes, yes, please. Never mind how the market goes. Also, please, I

didn’t advise you to go in in the first place. I never advised a friend

to that. But now that they are in, stick. It’s as solid as the Bank of

England.... Yes, Dicky and I divided the spoils last night. Lovely

party, though Dicky’s got too much temperament for bridge.... Yes, bull

luck.... Ha! ha! My temperament? Ha! Ha!... Yes?... Tell Harry I’m off

and away for a couple of weeks.... Fishing, troutlets, you know, the

springtime and the streams, the rise of sap, the budding and the

blossoming and all the rest.... Yes, good-bye, and hold on to Tampico

Petroleum. If it goes down, after that Minnesota farmer’s bulled it, buy

a little more. I’m going to. It’s finding money.... Yes.... Yes,

surely.... It’s too good to dare sell on a flyer now, because it mayn’t

ever again go down.... Of course I know what I’m talking about. I’ve

just had eight hours’ sleep, and haven’t had a drink.... Yes, yes....

Good-bye.”

 

He pulled the ticker tape into the comfort of his chair and languidly

ran over it, noting with mildly growing interest the message it

conveyed.

 

Parker returned with several slender rods, each a glittering gem of

artisanship and art. Francis was out of his chair, ticker flung aside

and forgotten as with the exultant joy of a boy he examined the toys

and, one after another, began trying them, switching them through the

air till they made shrill whip-like noises, moving them gently with

prudence and precision under the lofty ceiling as he made believe to

cast across the floor into some unseen pool of trout-lurking mystery.

 

A telephone buzzed. Irritation was swift on his face.

 

“For heaven’s sake answer it, Parker,” he commanded. “If it is some

silly stock-gambling female, tell her I’m dead, or drunk, or down with

typhoid, or getting married, or anything calamitous.”

 

After a moment’s dialogue, conducted on Parker’s part, in the discreet

and modulated tones that befitted absolutely the cool, chaste, noble

dignity of the room, with a “One moment, sir,” into the transmitter, he

muffled the transmitter with his hand and said:

 

“It’s Mr. Bascom, sir. He wants you.”

 

“Tell Mr. Bascom to go to hell,” said Francis, simulating so long a

cast, that, had it been in verity a cast, and had it pursued the course

his fascinated gaze indicated, it would have gone through the window and

most likely startled the gardener outside kneeling over the rose bush he

was planting.

 

“Mr. Bascom says it’s about the market, sir, and that he’d like to talk

with you only a moment,” Parker urged, but so delicately and subduedly

as to seem to be merely repeating an immaterial and unnecessary message.

 

“All right.” Francis carefully leaned the rod against a table and went

to the ‘phone.

 

“Hello,” he said into the telephone. “Yes, this is I, Morgan. Shoot,

What is it?”

 

He listened for a minute, then interrupted irritably: “Sell—hell.

Nothing of the sort.... Of course, I’m glad to know. Even if it goes up

ten points, which it won’t, hold on to everything. It may be a

legitimate rise, and it mayn’t ever come down. It’s solid. It’s worth

far more than it’s listed. I know, if the public doesn’t. A year from

now it’ll list at two hundred ... that is, if Mexico can cut the

revolution stuff.... Whenever it drops you’ll have buying orders from

me.... Nonsense. Who wants control? It’s purely sporadic ... eh? I beg

your pardon. I mean it’s merely temporary. Now I’m going off fishing for

a fortnight. If it goes down five points, buy. Buy all that’s offered.

Say, when a fellow’s got a real bona fide property, being bulled is

almost as bad as having the bears after one ... yes.... Sure ... yes. Good-bye.”