Black is White 1

Black is White 1

Black is White

Author: George Barr McCutcheon

 

CHAPTER I

 

The two old men sat in the library, eyeing the blue envelope that lay

on the end of the long table nearest the fireplace, where a merry but

unnoticed blaze crackled in the vain effort to cry down the shrieks of

the bleak December wind that whistled about the corners of the house.

 

Someone had come into the room--they did not know who nor when--to poke

up the fire and to throw fresh coals into the grate. No doubt it was the

parlourmaid. She was always doing something of the sort. It seemed to

be her duty. Or, it might have been the housekeeper, in case the

parlourmaid was out for the evening. Whoever it was, she certainly had

poked up the fire, and in doing so had been compelled to push two pairs

of feet out of the way to avoid trampling upon them.

 

Still they couldn’t recall having seen her. For that matter, it wasn’t

of the slightest consequence. Of course, they might have poked it up

themselves and saved her the trouble, but these ancients were not in the

habit of doing anything that could be done by menials in the employ

of Mr Brood. Their minds were centred upon the blue envelope that

had arrived shortly after dinner. The fire was an old story; the blue

envelope was a novelty.

 

From some shifting spot far out upon the broad Atlantic the contents

of that blue envelope had come through the air, invisible, mysterious,

uncanny. They could not understand it at all. A wireless message! It was

the first of its kind they had seen, and they were very old men, who had

seen everything else in the world--if one could believe their boastful

tales.

 

They had sailed the seven seas and they had traversed all the lands of

the earth, and yet here was mystery. A man had spoken out of the air

a thousand miles away, and his words were lying there on the end of a

library-table, in front of a cheerful hearthstone, within reach of their

wistful fingers; and someone had come in to poke up the fire without

their knowledge. How could they be expected to know?

 

There was something maddening in the fact that the envelope would have

to remain unopened until young Frederic Brood came home for the night.

They found themselves wondering if by any chance he would fail to come

in at all. Their hour for retiring was ten o’clock, day in, day out.

As a rule they went to sleep about half-past eight. They seldom retired

unless someone made the act possible by first awakening them.

 

The clock on the wide mantelpiece had declared some time before, in

ominous tones, that half-past ten had arrived, and yet they were not

sleepy. They had not been so thoroughly wideawake in years.

 

Up to half-past nine they discussed the blue envelope with every inmate

of the house, from Mrs John Desmond, the housekeeper, down to the

voiceless but eloquent decanter of port that stood between them, first

on the arm of one chair, then the other. They were very old men;

they could soliloquise without in the least disturbing each other. An

observer would say, during these periods of abstraction, that their

remarks were addressed to the decanter, and that the poor decanter had

something to say in return. But, for all that, their eyes seldom left

the broad blue envelope that had lain there since half-past eight.

 

They knew that it came directly or indirectly from the man to whom

they owed their present condition of comfort and security after half

a century of vicissitudes; from the man whose life they had saved more

than once in those old, evil days when comforts were so few that they

passed without recognition in the maelstrom of events. From mid-ocean

James Brood was speaking to his son. His words--perhaps his cry for

help--were lying there on the end of the table, confined in a flimsy blue

envelope, and no one dared to liberate them.

 

Frederic Brood deserved a thrashing for staying out so late--at least,

so the decanter had been told a dozen times or more, and the clock,

too, for that matter, to say nothing of the confidences reposed in the

coal-scuttle, the fire implements, and other patient listeners of a like

character.

 

It may be well to state that these bosom friends and comrades of half a

hundred years had quarrelled at seven o’clock that evening over a very

important matter--the accuracy of individual timepieces. The watch of

Mr Danbury Dawes had said it was five minutes before seven; that of Mr

Joseph Riggs three minutes after. Since then neither had spoken to the

other, but each slyly had set his watch by the big clock in the hall

before going into dinner, and was prepared to meet any argument.

 

Twenty years ago these two old cronies had met James Brood in one of the

blackest holes of Calcutta, a derelict being swept to perdition with

the swiftness and sureness of a tide that knows no pause. They found him

when the dregs were at his lips and the stupor of defeat in his brain.

Without meaning to be considered Samaritans, good or bad, they dragged

him from the depths and found that they had revived _a man_. Those were

the days when James Brood’s life meant nothing to him, days when he was

tortured by the thought that it would be all too long for him to endure;

yet he was not the kind to murder himself as men do who lack the courage

to go on living.

 

Weeks after the rescue in Calcutta, these two soldiers of fortune, and

another John Desmond, learned from the lips of the man himself that he

was not such as they, but rich in this world’s goods, richer than the

Solomon of their discreet imagination. Shaken, battered, but sobered, he

related portions of his life’s story to them, and they guessed the rest,

being men who had lived by correctly guessing for half the years of

their adventurous lives.

 

Like Brood they were Americans. But, unlike him, they had spent most of

their lives in the deserts of time and had sown seeds which could

never be reaped except in the form of narrative. Ever in pursuit of the

elusive thing called luck, they had found it only in hairbreadth escapes

from death, in the cunning avoidance of catastrophe, in devil-may-care

leaps in the dark, in all the ways known to men who find the world too

small.

 

Never had luck served them on a golden platter. For twenty-five years

and more these three men, Dawes, Riggs, and poor John Desmond, had

thrashed through the world in quest of the pot of gold at the foot of

the rainbow, only to find that the rainbow was for ever lifting, for

ever shifting; yet they complained not. They throve on misfortune, they

courted it along with the other things in life, and they were unhappy

only when ill luck singled one of them out and spared the others.

 

What Brood told them of his life brought the grim smile of appreciation

to the lips of each. He had married a beautiful foreigner--an Austrian,

they gathered--of excellent family, and had taken her to his home in

New York City, a house in lower Fifth Avenue where his father and

grandfather had lived before him. And that was the very house in

which two of the wayfarers, after twenty years, now sat in rueful

contemplation of a blue envelope.

 

A baby boy came to the Broods in the second year of their wedded life,

but before that there had come a man--a music-master, dreamy-eyed,

handsome, Latin; a man who played upon the harp as only the angels are

believed to play. In his delirious ravings Brood cursed this man and the

wife he had stolen away from him; he reviled the baby boy, even denying

him; he laughed with blood-curdling glee over the manner in which he had

cast out the woman who had broken his heart and crushed his pride; he

wailed in anguish over the mistake he had made in allowing the man to

live that he might gloat in triumph.

 

This much the three men who lifted him from hell were able to learn from

lips that knew not what they said, and they were filled with pity. Later

on, in a rational weakness, he told them more, and without curses. A

deep, silent, steadfast bitterness succeeded the violent ravings. He

became a wayfarer with them, quiet, dogged, fatal; where they went he

also went; what they did so also did he.

 

Soon he led, and they followed. Into the dark places of the world they

plunged. Perils meant little to him, death even less. They no longer

knew days of privation, for he shared his wealth with them; but they

knew no rest, no peace, no safety. Life had been a whirlwind before they

came upon James Brood; it was a hurricane afterward.

 

Twice John Desmond, younger than Dawes and Riggs, saved the life of

James Brood by acts of unparalleled heroism: once in a South African

jungle when a lioness fought for her young, and again in upper India

when, single-handed, he held off a horde of Hindus for days while his

comrade lay wounded in a cavern. Dawes and Riggs, in the Himalayas,

crept down the wall of a precipice, with five thousand feet between them

and the bottom of the gorge, to drag him from a narrow ledge upon which

he lay unconscious after a misstep in the night. More than once--aye,

more than a dozen times--one or the other of these loyal friends stood

between him and death, and times without number he, too, turned the grim

reaper aside from them.

 

John Desmond, gay, handsome, and still young as men of his kind go, met

the fate that brooks no intervention. He was the first to drop out of

the ranks. In Cairo, during a curious period of inactivity some ten

months after the advent of James Brood, he met the woman who conquered

his venturesome spirit; a slim, clean, pretty English governess in the

employ of a British admiral’s family. They were married inside of a

fortnight. After the quiet little ceremony, from which the sinister

presence of James Brood was missing, he shook the bronzed hands of his

older comrades, and gave up the life he had led for the new one she

promised. At the pier Brood appeared and wished him well, and he sailed

away on a sea that bade fair to remain smooth to the end of time. He

was taking her home to the little Maryland town that had not seen him in

years.

 

Ten years passed before James Brood put his foot on the soil of his

native land. Then he came back to the home of his fathers, to the home

that had been desecrated, and with him came the two old men who now sat

in his huge library before the crackling fire. He could go on with life,

but they were no longer fit for its cruel hardships. His home became

theirs. They were to die there when the time came.

 

Brood’s son was fifteen years of age before he knew, even by sight, the

man whom he called father. Up to the time of the death of his mother who

died heart-broken in her father’s home--he had been kept in seclusion.

 

There had been deliberate purpose in the methods of James Brood in so

far as this unhappy child was concerned. When he cast out the mother he

set his hand heavily upon her future.