The Quality of Mercy Part 12

"Land! Why she ain't a day older, if she's that. He's their nephew."

"Oh, I see: second wife. Then _he's_ the young man, heigh!"

The hostess looked at the reporter with admiration. "Well, you do beat the witch. If he hain't, I guess he might 'a' b'en."

The reporter said he guessed he would take another piece of that pie, and some more coffee if she had it, and before he had finished them he had been allowed to understand that if it was not for his being Mrs.

Wilmington's nephew Mr. Jack would have been Miss Northwick's husband long ago; and that the love lost between the two ladies was not worth crying for.

The reporter, who had fallen into his present calling by a series of accidents not necessarily of final result in it, did not use arts so much as instincts in its exercise. He liked to talk of himself and his own surroundings, and he found that few men, and no women could resist the lure thrown out by his sincere expansiveness. He now commended himself to the hostess by the philosophical view he took of the popular belief that Mrs. Wilmington was keeping her nephew from marrying any one else so as to marry him herself when her husband died. He said that if you were an old man and you married a young woman he guessed that was what you had got to expect. This gave him occasion to enlarge upon the happiness to be found only in the married state if you were fitly mated, and on his own exceptional good fortune in it.

He was in the full flow of an animated confidence relating to the flat he had just taken and furnished in Boston, when the door opened, and the pale young man whom Louise Hilary had noticed at the station, came in.

The reporter broke off with a laugh of greeting. "h.e.l.lo, Maxwell! You onto it, too?"

"Onto what?" said the other, with none of the reporter's effusion.

"This labor-trouble business," said the reporter, with a wink for him alone.

"Pshaw, Pinney! You'd grow a bush for the pleasure of beating about it."

Maxwell hung his hat on a hook above the table, but sat down fronting Pinney with his overcoat on; it was a well-worn overcoat, irredeemably shabby at the b.u.t.tonholes. "I'd like some tea," he said to the hostess, "some English breakfast tea, if you have it; and a little toast." He rested his elbows on the table, and took his head between his hands, and pressed his fingers against his temples.

"Headache?" asked Pinney, with the jocose sympathy men show one another's sufferings, as if they could be joked away. "Better take something substantial. Nothing like ham and eggs for a headache."

The other unfolded his paper napkin. "Have you got anything worth while?"

"Lots of public opinion and local color," said Pinney. "Have you?"

"I've been half crazy with this headache. I suppose we brought most of the news with us," he suggested.

"Well, I don't know about that," said Pinney.

"I do. You got your tip straight from headquarters. I know all about it, Pinney, so you might as well save time, on that point, if time's an object with you. They don't seem to know anything here; but the consensus in Hatboro' is that he was running away."

"The what is?" asked Pinney.

"The consensus."

"Anything like the United States Census?"

"It isn't spelt like it."

Pinney made a note of it. "I'll get a head-line out of that. I take my own wherever I find it, as George Was.h.i.+ngton said."

"Your own, you thief!" said Maxwell, with sardonic amus.e.m.e.nt. "You don't know what the word means."

"I can make a pretty good guess, thank you," said Pinney, putting up his book.

"Do you want to trade?" Maxwell asked, after his tea came, and he had revived himself with a sip or two.

"Any scoops?" asked Pinney, warily. "Anything exclusive?"

"Oh, come!" said Maxwell. "No, I haven't; and neither have you. What do you make mysteries for? I've been over the whole ground, and so have you. There are no scoops in it."

"I think there's a scoop if you want to work it," said Pinney, darkly.

Maxwell received the vaunt with a sneer. "You ought to be a detective--in a novel." He b.u.t.tered his toast and ate a little of it, like a man of small appet.i.te and invalid digestion.

"I suppose you've interviewed the family?" suggested Pinney.

"No," said Maxwell, gloomily, "there are some things that even a s.p.a.ce-man can't do."

"You ought to go back on a salary," said Pinney, with compa.s.sion and superiority. "You'll ruin yourself trying to fill s.p.a.ce, if you stick at trifles."

"Such as going and asking a man's family whether they think he was burnt up in a railroad accident, and trying to make copy out of their emotions? Thank you, I prefer ruin. If that's your scoop, you're welcome to it."

"They're not obliged to see you," urged Pinney. "You send in your name and--"

"They shut the door in your face, if they have the presence of mind."

"Well! What do you care if they do? It's all in the way of business, anyhow. It's not a personal thing."

"A snub's a pretty personal thing, Pinney. The reporter doesn't mind it, but it makes the man's face burn."

"Oh, very well! If you're going to let uncleanly scruples like that stand in your way, you'd better retire to the poet's corner, and stay there. You can fill that much s.p.a.ce, any way; but you are not built for a reporter. When are you going to Boston?"

"Six, fifteen. I've got a scoop of my own."

"What is it?" asked Pinney, incredulously.

"Come round in the morning, and I'll tell you."

"Perhaps I'll go in with you, after all. I'll just step out into the cold air, and see if I can harden my cheek for that interview. Your diffidence is infectious, Maxwell."

XIV.

Pinney was really somewhat dashed by Maxwell's att.i.tude, both because it appealed to the more delicate and generous self, which he was obliged to pocket so often in the course of business, and because it made him suspect that Maxwell had already interviewed Northwick's family. They would be forewarned, in that case, and would, of course, refuse to see him. But he felt that as a s.p.a.ce-man, with the privilege of filling all the s.p.a.ce he chose with this defalcation, his duty to his family required him to use every means for making copy.

He encouraged himself by thinking of his wife, and what she was probably doing at that moment in their flat in Boston, and he was feeling fairly well when he asked for Miss Northwick at the door of the great wooden palace. He had time to take in its characteristics, before James, the inside-man, opened the door and scanned him for a moment with a sort of baffled intelligence. To the experience of the inside-man his appearance gave no proof that he was or was not an agent, a peddler in disguise, or a genteel mendicant of the sort he was used to detecting and deterring.

"I don't know, sir, I'll go and see." He let rather than invited Pinney in, and in his absence, the representative of the _Events_ made note of the interior, both of the hall which he had been allowed to enter, and of the library, where he found himself upon his own responsibility. The inside-man discovered him there with his back to the fire, when he returned with his card still in his hand.

"Miss Northwick thinks it's her father you wish to see. He's not at home."

"Yes, I knew that. I did wish to see Mr. Northwick, and I asked to see Miss Northwick because I knew he wasn't at home."