The House of a Thousand Candles | Page 6

wishes in his lifetime, but now that he's dead his last wish is mandatory. I'm going out there to spend a year if I die for it. Do you get my idea?"
"Humph! You always were a stormy petrel," he sneered. "I fancy it will be safer to keep our most agreeable acquaintance on a strictly business basis. If you accept the terms of the will--"
"Of course I accept them! Do you think I am going to make a row, refuse to fulfil that old man's last wish! I gave him enough trouble in his life without disappointing him in his grave. I suppose you'd like to have me fight the will; but I'm going to disappoint you."
He said nothing, but played with his pencil. I had never disliked him so heartily; he was so smug and comfortable. His office breathed the very spirit of prosperity. I wished to finish my business and get away.
"I suppose the region out there has a high death-rate. How's the malaria?"
"Not alarmingly prevalent, I understand. There's a summer resort over on one side of Lake Annandale. The place is really supposed to be wholesome. I don't believe your grandfather had homicide in mind in sending you there."
"No, he probably thought the rustication would make a man of me. Must I do my own victualing? I suppose I'll be allowed to eat."
"Bates can cook for you. He'll supply the necessities. I'll instruct him to obey your orders. I assume you'll not have many guests--in fact,"--he studied the back of his hand intently--"while that isn't stipulated, I doubt whether it was your grandfather's intention that you should surround yourself--"
"With boisterous companions!" I supplied the words in my cheerfullest tone. "No; my conduct shall be exemplary, Mr. Pickering," I added, with affable irony.
He picked up a single sheet of thin type-written paper and passed it across the table. It was a formal acquiescence in the provisions of the will. Pickering had prepared it in advance of my coming, and this assumption that I would accept the terms irritated me. Assumptions as to what I should do under given conditions had always irritated me, and accounted, in a large measure, for my proneness to surprise and disappoint people. Pickering summoned a clerk to witness my signature.
"How soon shall you take possession?" he asked. "I have to make a record of that."
"I shall start for Indiana to-morrow," I answered.
"You are prompt," he replied, deliberately folding in quarters the paper I had just signed. "I hoped you might dine with me before going out; but I fancy New York is pretty tame after the caf??s and bazaars of the East."
His reference to my wanderings angered me again; for here was the point at which I was most sensitive. I was twenty-seven and had spent my patrimony; I had tasted the bread of many lands, and I was doomed to spend a year qualifying myself for my grandfather's legacy by settling down on an abandoned and lonely Indiana farm that I had never seen and had no interest in whatever.
As I rose to go Pickering said:
"It will be sufficient if you drop me a line, say once a month, to let me know you are there. The post-office is Annandale."
"I suppose I might file a supply of postal cards in the village and arrange for the mailing of one every month."
"It might be done that way," be answered evenly.
"We may perhaps meet again, if I don't die of starvation or ennui. Good-by."
We shook hands stiffly and I left him, going down in an elevator filled with eager-eyed, anxious men. I, at least, had no cares of business. It made no difference to me whether the market rose or fell. Something of the spirit of adventure that had been my curse quickened in my heart as I walked through crowded Broadway past Trinity Church to a bank and drew the balance remaining on my letter of credit. I received in currency slightly less than one thousand dollars.
As I turned from the teller's window I ran into the arms of the last man in the world I expected to see.
This, let it be remembered, was in October of the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and one.
CHAPTER II
A FACE AT SHERRY'S
"Don't mention my name an thou lovest me!" said Laurance Donovan, and he drew me aside, ignored my hand and otherwise threw into our meeting a casual quality that was somewhat amazing in view of the fact that we had met last at Cairo.
"Allah il Allah!"
It was undoubtedly Larry. I felt the heat of the desert and heard the camel-drivers cursing and our Sudanese guides plotting mischief under a window far away.
"Well!" we both exclaimed interrogatively.
He rocked gently back and forth, with his hands in his pockets, on the tile floor of the banking-house.