The Vultures

H >> Henry Seton Merriman >> The Vultures

THE VULTURES

A NOVEL

By Henry Seton Merriman




I

ALL AT SEA

Mr. Joseph P. Mangles, at his ease in a deck-chair on the broad
Atlantic, was smoking a most excellent cigar. Mr. Mangles was a tall,
thin man, who carried his head in the manner curtly known at a girls'
school as "poking." He was a clean-shaven man, with bony forehead,
sunken cheeks, and an underhung mouth. His attitude towards the world
was one of patient disgust. He had the air of pushing his way, chin
first, doggedly through life. The weather had been bad, and was now
moderating. But Mr. Mangles had not suffered from sea-sickness. He was
a dry, hard person, who had suffered from nothing but chronic
dyspepsia--had suffered from it for fifty years or so.

"Fine weather," he said. "Women will be coming on deck--hang the fine
weather."

And his voice was deep and low like a growl.

"Joseph," said Miss Mangles, "growls over his meals like a dog."

The remark about the weather and the women was addressed to a man who
leaned against the rail. Indeed, there was no one else near--and the
man made no reply. He was twenty-five or thirty years younger than Mr.
Mangles, and looked like an Englishman, but not aggressively so. The
large majority of Britons are offensively British. Germans are no
better; so it must be racial, this offensiveness. A Frenchman is at
his worst, only comically French--a matter of a smile; but Teutonic
characteristics are conducive to hostility.

The man who leaned against the rail near to Joseph P. Mangles was six
feet high, and rather heavily built, but, like many big men, he seemed
to take up no more than his due share of room in this crowded world.
There was nothing distinctive about his dress. His demeanor was quiet.
When he spoke he was habitually asked to repeat his remark, which he
did, with patience, in the same soft, inaudible voice.

There were two men on board this great steamer who were not business
men--Joseph P. Mangles and Reginald Cartoner; and, like two ships on a
sea of commercial interests, they had drifted together during the four
days that had elapsed since their departure from New York. Neither made
anything, or sold anything, or had a card in his waistcoat-pocket ready
for production at a moment's notice, setting forth name and address and
trade. Neither was to be suspected of a desire to repel advances, and
yet both were difficult to get on with. For human confidences must
be mutual. It is only to God that man can continue telling, telling,
telling, and getting never a word in return. These two men had nothing
to tell their fellows about themselves; so the other passengers drifted
away into those closely linked corporations characteristic of steamer
life and left them to themselves--to each other.

And they had never said things to each other--had never, as it were, got
deeper than the surface of their daily life.

Cartoner was a dreamy man, with absorbed eyes, rather deeply sunk under
a strong forehead. His eyelids had that peculiarity which is rarely seen
in the face of a man who is a nonentity. They were quite straight, and
cut across the upper curve of the pupil. This gave a direct, stern look
to dreamy eyes, which was odd. After a pause, he turned slowly, and
looked down at his companion with a vague interrogation in his glance.
He seemed to be wondering whether Mr. Mangles had spoken. And Mangles
met the glance with one of steady refusal to repeat his remark. But
Mangles spoke first, after all.

"Yes," he said, "the women will be on deck soon--and my sister Jooly.
You don't know Jooly?"

He spoke with a slow and pleasant American accent.

"I saw you speaking to a young lady in the saloon after luncheon," said
Cartoner. "She had a blue ribbon round her throat. She was pretty."

"That wasn't Jooly," said Mr. Mangles, without hesitation.

"Who was it?" asked Cartoner, with the simple directness of those who
have no self-consciousness--who are absorbed, but not in themselves, as
are the majority of men and women.

"My niece, Netty Cahere."

"She is pretty," said Cartoner, with a spontaneity which would have
meant much to feminine ears.

"You'll fall in love with her," said Mangles, lugubriously. "They all
do. She says she can't help it."

Cartoner looked at him as one who has ears but hears not. He made no
reply.

"Distresses her very much," concluded Mangles, dexterously shifting his
cigar by a movement of the tongue from the port to the starboard side
of his mouth. Cartoner did not seem to be very much interested in Miss
Netty Cahere. He was a man having that air of detachment from personal
environments which is apt to arouse curiosity in the human heart, more
especially in feminine hearts. People wanted to know what there was in
Cartoner's past that gave him so much to think about in the present.

The two men had not spoken again when Miss Netty Cahere came on deck.
She was accompanied by the fourth officer, a clean-built, clean-shaven
young man, who lost his heart every time he crossed the Atlantic. He
was speaking rather earnestly to Miss Cahere, who listened with an
expression of puzzled protest on her pretty face. She had wondering blue
eyes and a complexion of the most delicate pink and white which never
altered. She was slightly built, and carried herself in a subtly
deprecating manner, as if her own opinion of herself were small, and she
wished the world to accept her at that valuation. She made no sign
of having perceived her uncle, but nevertheless dismissed the fourth
officer, who reluctantly mounted the ladder to the bridge, looking back
as he went.

Mr. Mangles threw his cigar overboard.

"She don't like smoke," he growled.

Cartoner looked at the cigar, and absent-mindedly threw his cigarette
after it. He had apparently not made up his mind whether to go or stay,
when Miss Cahere approached her uncle, without appearing to notice that
he was not alone.

"I suppose," she said, "that that was one of the officers of the ship,
though he was very young--quite a boy. He was telling me about his
mother. It must be terrible to have a near relation a sailor."

She spoke in a gentle voice, and it was evident that she had a heart
full of sympathy for the suffering and the poor.

"I wish some of my relations were sailors," replied Mr. Mangles, in his
deepest tones. "Could spare a whole crew. Let me introduce my friend,
Mr. Cartoner--Miss Cahere."

He completed the introduction with an old-fashioned and ceremonious wave
of the hand. Miss Cahere smiled rather shyly on Cartoner, and it was his
eyes that turned away first.

"You have not been down to meals," he said, in his gentle, abrupt way.

"No; but I hope to come now. Are there many people? Have you friends on
board?"

"There are very few ladies. I know none of them."

"But I dare say some of them are nice," said Miss Cahere, who evidently
thought well of human nature.

"Very likely."

And Cartoner lapsed into his odd and somewhat disconcerting
thoughtfulness.

Miss Cahere continued to glance at him beneath her dark lashes--dark
lashes around blue eyes--with a guileless and wondering admiration. He
certainly was a very good-looking man, well set up, with that quiet air
which bespeaks good breeding.

"Have you seen the ship on the other side?" she asked, after a pause; "a
sailing ship. You cannot see it from here."

As she spoke she made a little movement, as if to show him the spot
from whence the ship was visible. Cartoner followed her meekly, and Mr.
Mangles, left behind in his deck-chair, slowly sought his cigar-case.

"There," said Miss Cahere, pointing out a sail on the distant horizon.
"One can hardly see it now. When I first came on deck it was much
nearer. That ship's officer pointed it out to me."

Cartoner looked at the ship without much enthusiasm.

"I think," said Miss Cahere, in a lower voice--she had a rather
confidential manner--"I think sailors are very nice, don't you?
But . . . well, I suppose one ought not to say that, ought one?"

"It depends what you were going to say."

Miss Cahere laughed, and made no reply. Her laugh and a glance seemed,
however, to convey the comfortable assurance that whatever she had been
about to say would not have been applicable to Cartoner himself. She
glanced at his trim, upright figure.

"I think I prefer soldiers," she said, thoughtfully.

Cartoner murmured something inaudible, and continued to gaze at the ship
he had been told to look at.

"Did you know my uncle before you came on board, or were you brave
enough to force him to speak? He is so silent, you know, that most
people are afraid of him. I suppose you had met him before."

"No. It was a mere accident. We were neither of us ill. We were both
hungry, and hurried down to a meal. And the stewards placed us next to
each other."

Which was a long explanation, without much information in it.

"Oh, I thought perhaps you were in the diplomatic service," said Miss
Cahere, carelessly.

For an instant Cartoner's eyes lost all their vagueness. Either Miss
Cahere had hit the mark with her second shot, or else he was making a
mental note of the fact that Mr. Mangles belonged to that amiable body
of amateurs, the American Diplomatic Corps.

Mr. Mangles had naturally selected the leeward side of the deck-house
for his seat, and Miss Cahere had brought Cartoner round to the weather
side, where a cold Atlantic breeze made the position untenable. Without
explanation, and for her own good, he led the way to a warmer quarter.
But at the corner of the deck-house a gust caught Miss Cahere, and held
her there in a pretty attitude, with her two hands upraised to her hat,
looking at him with frank and laughing eyes, and waiting for him to come
to her assistance. The same gust of wind made the steamer lurch so that
Cartoner had to grasp Miss Cahere's arm to save her from falling.

"Thank you," she said, quietly, and with downcast eyes, when the
incident had passed. For in some matters she held old-fashioned notions,
and was not one of the modern race of hail-fellow-well-met girls who are
friendly in five minutes with men and women alike.

When she came within sight of her uncle, she suddenly hurried towards
him, and made an affectionate, laughing attempt to prevent his returning
his cigar-case to his jacket pocket. She even took possession of the
cigar-case, opened it, and with her own fingers selected a cigar.

"No," she said, firmly, "you are going to smoke again at once. Do you
think I did not see you throw away the other? Mr. Cartoner--is it not
foolish of him? Because I once said, without reflecting, that I did not
care about the smell of tobacco, he never lets me see him smoke now."

As she spoke she laid her hand affectionately on the old man's shoulder
and looked down at him.

"As if it mattered whether I like it or not," she said. "And I do like
it--I like the smell of your cigars."

Mr. Mangles looked from Cartoner to his niece with an odd smile, which
was perhaps the only way in which that lean countenance could express
tenderness.

"As if it mattered what I think," she said, humbly, again.

"Always like to conciliate a lady," said Mr. Mangles, in his deep voice.

"Especially when that lady is dependent on you for her daily bread and
her frocks," answered Netty, in an affectionate aside, which Cartoner
was, nevertheless, able to overhear.

"Where is your aunt Jooly?" inquired the old man, hurriedly. "I thought
she was coming on deck."

"So she is," answered Netty. "I left her in the saloon. She is quite
well. She was talking to some people."

"What, already?" exclaimed the lady's brother. And Netty nodded her head
with a mystic gravity. She was looking towards the saloon stairway, from
whence she seemed to expect Miss Mangles.

"My sister Jooly, sir," explained Mr. Mangles to Cartoner, "is no doubt
known to you--Miss Julia P. Mangles, of New York City."

Cartoner tried to look as if he had heard the name before. He had lived
in the United States during some months, and he knew that it is possible
to be famous in New York and quite without honor in Connecticut.

"Perhaps she has not come into your line of country?" suggested Mr.
Mangles, not unkindly.

"No--I think not."

"Her line is--at present--prisons."

"I have never been in prison," replied Cartoner.

"No doubt you will get experience in course of time," said Mr. Mangles,
with his deep, curt laugh. "No, sir, my sister is a lecturer. She gets
on platforms and talks."

"What about?" asked Cartoner.

Mr. Mangles described the wide world, with a graceful wave of his cigar.

"About most things," he answered, gravely; "chiefly about women, I take
it. She is great on the employment of women, and the payment of them.
And she is right there. She has got hold of the right end of the stick
there. She had found out what very few women know--namely, that when
women work for nothing, they are giving away something that nobody
wants. So Jooly goes about the world lecturing on women's employment,
and pointing out to the public and the administration many ways in which
women may be profitably employed and paid. She leaves it to the gumption
of the government to discover for themselves that there is many a nice
berth for which Jooly P. Mangles is eminently suited, but governments
have no gumption, sir. And--"

"Here is Aunt Julie," interrupted Miss Cahere, walking away.

Mr. Mangles gave a short sigh, and lapsed into silence.

As Miss Cahere went forward, she passed another officer of the ship, the
second in command, a dogged, heavy man, whose mind was given to the ship
and his own career. He must have seen something to interest him in Netty
Cahere's face--perhaps he caught a glance from the dark-lashed eyes--for
he turned and looked at her again, with a sudden, dull light in his
face.




II

SIGNAL HOUSE

Where Gravesend merges into Northfleet--where the spicy odors of
chemical-fertilizing works mingle with the dry dust of the cement
manufactories which throw their tall chimneys into an ever-gray
sky--there stands a house known as the Signal House. Why it is so called
no one knows and very few care to inquire. It is presumably a square
house of the Jacobean period--presumably because it is so hidden by
trees, so wrapped in grimy ivy, so dust-laden and so impossible to get
at, that its outward form is no longer to be perceived.

It is within sound of the bells that jingle dismally on the heads of
the tram-car horses, plying their trade on the high-road, and yet it is
haunted. Its two great iron gates stand on the very pavement, and they
are never opened. Indeed, a generation or two of painters have painted
them shut, and grime and dirt have laid their seals upon the hinges. A
side gate gives entrance to such as come on foot. A door in the wall,
up an alley, is labelled "Tradesman's Entrance," but the tradesmen never
linger there. No merry milkman leaves the latest gossip with his thin,
blue milk on that threshold. The butcher's chariot wheels never tarry at
the corner of that alley. Indeed, the local butcher has no chariot. His
clients mostly come in a shawl, and take their purchases away with them
wrapped in a doubtful newspaper beneath its folds. The better-class
buyers wear a cloth cricketing cap, coquettishly attached to a knob of
hair by a hat-pin.

The milkman, moreover, is not a merry man, hurrying on his rounds. He
goes slowly and pessimistically, and likes to see the halfpenny before
he tips his measure.

This, in a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could
live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it--a
noble wreck on a barren, social shore. For the Signal House was once a
family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as
a quaint and interesting demesne. Finally its price fell with a crash,
and an elderly lady of weak intellect was sent by her relations to live
in it, with two servants, who were frequently to be met in Gravesend in
the evening hours, at which time, it is to be presumed, the elderly lady
of weak intellect was locked in the Signal House alone. But the house
never had a ghost. Haunted houses very seldom have. The ghost was the
mere invention of some kitchen-maid.

Haunted or not, the house stood empty for years, until suddenly a
foreigner took it--a Russian banker, it was understood. A very nice,
pleasant-spoken little gentleman this foreigner, who liked quiet and
the river view. He was quite as broad as he was long, though he was not
preposterously stout. There was nothing mysterious about him. He was
well known in the City. He had merely mistaken an undesirable suburb for
a desirable one, a very easy mistake for a foreigner to make; and he was
delighted at the cheapness of the house, the greenness of the old lawn,
the height of the grimy trees within the red brick wall.

He lived there all one summer, and the cement smoke got into his throat
in the autumn and gave him asthma, for which complaint he had obviously
been designed by Providence, for he had no neck. He used the Signal
House occasionally from Saturday till Monday. Then he gave it up
altogether, and tried to sell it. It stood empty for some years, while
the Russian banker extended his business and lived virtuously elsewhere.
Then he suddenly began using the house again as a house of recreation,
and brought his foreign servants, and his foreign friends and their
foreign servants, to stay from Saturday till Monday.

And all these persons behaved in an odd, Continental way, and played
bowls on the lawn at the back of the house on Sundays. The neighbors
could hear them but could see nothing, owing to the thickness of the
grimy trees and the height of the old brick wall. But no one worried
much about the Signal House; for they were a busy people who lived all
around, and had to earn their living, in addition to the steady and
persistent assuagement of a thirst begotten of cement dust and the
pungent smell of bone manure. One or two local amateurs had made sure
of the fact that there was nothing in the house that would repay a
burglarious investigation, which, added to the fact that the police
station is only a few doors off, tended to allay a natural curiosity as
to the foreign gentleman's possessions.

When he came he drove in a close cab from Gravesend Station, and usually
told the cabman when his services would again be required. He came
thus with three friends one summer afternoon, some years ago, and came
without luggage. The servants, who followed in a second cab, carried
some parcels, presumably of refreshments. These grave gentlemen were,
it appeared, about to enjoy a picnic at the Signal House--possibly a
tea-picnic in the Russian fashion.

The afternoon was fine, and the gentlemen walked in the garden at the
back of the house. They were walking thus when another cab stopped at
the closed iron gate, and the banker hurried, as fast as his build would
allow, to open the side door and admit a seafaring man, who seemed to
know his bearings.

"Well, mister," he said, in a Northern voice, "another of your little
jobs?"

The two men shook hands, and the banker paid the cabman. When the
vehicle had gone the host turned to his guest and replied to the
question.

"Yes, my fren'," he said, "another of my little jobs. I hope you are
well, Captain Cable?"

But Captain Cable was not a man to waste words over the social
conventions. He was obviously well--as well as a hard, seafaring life
will make a man who lives simply and works hard. He was a short man,
with a red face washed very clean, and very well shaven, except for a
little piece of beard left fantastically at the base of his chin. His
eyes were blue and bright, like gimlets. He may have had a soft heart,
but it was certainly hidden beneath a hard exterior. He wore a thick
coat of blue pilot-cloth, not because the July day was cold, but because
it was his best coat. His hat was carefully brushed and of hard, black
felt. It had perhaps been the height of fashion in Sunderland five years
earlier. He wore no gloves--Captain Cable drew the line there. As for
the rest, he had put on that which he called his shore-going rig.

"And yourself?" he answered, mechanically.

"I am very well, thank you," replied the polite banker, who, it will
have been perceived, was nameless to Captain Cable, as he is to the
reader. The truth being that his name was so absurdly and egregiously
Russian that the plain English tongue never embarked on that sea of
consonants. "It is an affair, as usual. My friends are here to meet you,
but I think they do not speak English, except your colleague, the other
captain, who speaks a little--a very little."

As he spoke he led the way to the garden, where three gentlemen were
awaiting them.

"This is Captain Cable," he said, and the three gentlemen raised their
hats, much to the captain's discomfiture. He did not hold by foreign
ways; but he dragged his hat off and then expectorated on the lawn,
just to show that he felt quite at home. He even took the lead in the
conversation.

"Tell 'em," he said, "that I'm a plain man from Sun'land that has a
speciality, an' that's transshipping cargo at sea, but me hands are
clean."

He held them out and they were not, so he must have spoken
metaphorically.

The banker translated, addressing himself to one of his companions,
rather markedly and with much deference.

"You're speakin' French," interrupted Captain Cable.

"Yes, my fren', I am. Do you know French?"

"Not me," returned Captain Cable, affably. "They're all one to me.
They're all damn nonsense."

He was, it seemed, that which is called in these days of blatant
patriotism a thorough Englishman, or a true Blue, according to the
social station of the speaker.

The gentleman to whom the translation had been addressed smiled. He was
a tall and rather distinguished-looking man, with bushy white hair and
mustache. His features were square-cut and strong. His eyes were dark,
and he had an easy smile. He led the way to some chairs which had been
placed near a table at the far end of the lawn beneath a cedar-tree, and
his manner had something faintly regal in it, as if in his daily life he
had always been looked up to and obeyed without question.

"Tell him that we also are plain men with clean hands," he said.

And the banker replied:

"Oui, mon Prince."

But the interpretation was taken out of his mouth by one of the others,
the youngest of the group--a merry-eyed youth, with a fluffy, fair
mustache and close-cropped, flaxen hair.

"My father," he said, in perfect English, "says that we also are plain
men, and that your hands will not be hurt by touching ours."

He held out his hand as he spoke, and refused to withdraw it until it
had been grasped, rather shame-facedly, by Captain Cable, who did not
like these effusive foreign ways, but, nevertheless, rather liked the
young man.

The banker ranged the chairs round the table, and the oddly assorted
group seated themselves. The man who had not yet spoken, and who sat
down last, was obviously a sailor. His face was burned a deep brown,
and was mostly hidden by a closely cut beard. He had the slow ways of a
Northerner, the abashed manner of a merchant skipper on shore. The mark
of the other element was so plainly written upon him that Captain Cable
looked at him hard and then nodded. Without being invited to do so they
sat next to each other at one side of the table, and faced the three
landsmen. Again Captain Cable spoke first.

"Provided it's nothing underhand," he said, "I'm ready and willing.
Or'nary risks of the sea, Queen's enemies, act o' God--them's my risks!
I am uninsured. Ship's my own. I don't mind explosives--"

"There are explosives," admitted the banker.

"Then they must be honest explosives, or they don't go below my hatches.
Explosives that's to blow a man up honest, before his face."

"There are cartridges," said the young man who had shaken hands.

"That'll do," said the masterful sailor. And pointing a thick finger
towards the banker, added, "Now, mister," and sat back in his chair.

"It is a very simple matter," explained the banker, in a thick, suave
voice. "We have a cargo--a greater part of it weight, though there is
some measurement--a few cases of light goods, clothing and such. You
will load in the river, and all will be sent to you in lighters.
There is nothing heavy, nothing large. There is also no insurance, you
understand. What falls out of the slings and is lost overside is lost."

The banker paused for breath.

"I understand," said Captain Cable. "It's the same with me and my ship.
There is no insurance, no tricking underwriters into unusual risks. It's
neck or nothing with me."

And he looked hard at the breathless banker, with whom it was, in this
respect, nothing.

"I understand right enough," he added, with an affable nod to the three
foreigners.

"You will sail from London with a full general cargo for Malmo or
Stockholm, or somewhere where officials are not wide-awake. You meet in
the North Sea, at a point to be fixed between yourselves, the _Olaf_,
Captain Petersen--sitting by your side."