The House of a Thousand Candles | Page 7

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. I had seen him stand thus once on a
time when we had eaten nothing in four days--it was in Abyssinia, and
our guides had lost us in the worst possible place--with the same
untroubled look in his eyes.
"Please don't appear surprised, or scared or anything, Jack," he said,
with his delicious intonation. "I saw a fellow looking for me an hour or
so ago. He's been at it for several months; hence my presence on these
shores of the brave and the free. He's probably still looking, as he's a
persistent devil. I'm here, as we may say, quite incog. Staying at an
East-side lodging-house, where I shan't invite you to call on me. But I
must see you."
"Dine with me to-night, at Sherry's--"
"Too big, too many people--"
"Therein lies security, if you're in trouble. I'm about to go into exile,
and I want to eat one more civilized dinner before I go."
"Perhaps it's just as well. Where are you off for-- not Africa again?"
"No. Just Indiana--one of the sovereign American states, as you ought
to know."
"Indians?"
"No; warranted all dead."
"Pack-train--balloon--automobile--camels--how do you get there?"
"Varnished ears. It's easy. It's not the getting there; it's the not dying of
ennui after you're on the spot."

"Humph! What hour did you say for the dinner?"
"Seven o'clock. Meet me at the entrance."
"If I'm at large! Allow me to precede you through the door, and don't
follow me on the street please!"
He walked away, his gloved hands clasped lazily behind him, lounged
out upon Broadway and turned toward the Battery. I waited until he
disappeared, then took an up-town car.
My first meeting with Laurance Donovan was in Constantinople, at a
café where I was dining. He got into a row with an Englishman and
knocked him down. It was not my affair, but I liked the ease and
definiteness with which Larry put his foe out of commission. I learned
later that it was a way he had. The Englishman meant well enough, but
he could not, of course, know the intensity of Larry's feeling about the
unhappy lot of Ireland. In the beginning of my own acquaintance with
Donovan I sometimes argued with him, but I soon learned better
manners. He quite converted me to his own notion of Irish affairs, and I
was as hot an advocate as he of head-smashing as a means of restoring
Ireland's lost prestige.
My friend, the American consul-general at Constantinople, was not
without a sense of humor, and I easily enlisted him in Larry's behalf.
The Englishman thirsted for vengeance and invoked all the powers. He
insisted, with reason, that Larry was a British subject and that the
American consul had no right to give him asylum--a point that was, I
understand, thoroughly well-grounded in law and fact. Larry
maintained, on the other hand, that he was not English but Irish, and
that, as his country maintained no representative in Turkey, it was his
privilege to find refuge wherever it was offered. Larry was always the
most plausible of human beings, and between us--he, the American
consul and I--we made an impression, and got him off.
I did not realize until later that the real joke lay in the fact that Larry
was English-born, and that his devotion to Ireland was purely
sentimental and quixotic. His family had, to be sure, come out of

Ireland some time in the dim past, and settled in England; but when
Larry reached years of knowledge, if not of discretion, he cut Oxford
and insisted on taking his degree at Dublin. He even believed--or
thought he believed-- in banshees. He allied himself during his
university days with the most radical and turbulent advocates of a
separate national existence for Ireland, and occasionally spent a month
in jail for rioting. But Larry's instincts were scholarly; he made a
brilliant record at the University; then, at twenty-two, he came forth to
look at the world, and liked it exceedingly well. His father was a busy
man, and