The House of a Thousand Candles - Meredith Nicholson

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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.

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      “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 he had other sons; he granted Larry an allowance and told him to keep away from home until he got ready to be respectable. So, from Constantinople, after a tour of Europe, we together crossed the Mediterranean in search of the flesh-pots of lost kingdoms, spending three years in the pursuit. We parted at Cairo on excellent terms. He returned to England and later to his beloved Ireland, for he had blithely sung the wildest Gaelic songs in the darkest days of our adventures, and never lost his love for The Sod, as he apostrophized—and capitalized—his adopted country.

      Larry had the habit of immaculateness. He emerged from his East-side lodging-house that night clothed properly, and wearing the gentlemanly air of peace and reserve that is so wholly incompatible with his disposition to breed discord and indulge in riot. When we sat down for a leisurely dinner at Sherry’s we were not, I modestly maintain, a forbidding pair. We—if I may drag myself into the matter—are both a trifle under the average height, sinewy, nervous, and, just then, trained fine. Our lean, clean-shaven faces were well-browned—mine wearing a fresh coat from my days on the steamer’s deck.

      Larry had never been in America before, and the scene had for both of us the charm of a gay and novel spectacle. I have always maintained, in talking to Larry of nations and races, that the Americans are the handsomest and best put-up people in the world, and I believe he was persuaded of it that night as we gazed with eyes long unaccustomed to splendor upon the great company assembled in the restaurant. The lights, the music, the variety and richness of the costumes of the women, the many unmistakably foreign faces, wrought a welcome

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