Read Ebook: Captivating Mary Carstairs by Harrison Henry Sydnor

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Ebook has 1986 lines and 85794 words, and 40 pages

"My sister," said Townes, "as perhaps you don't know, wedded a foreigner--Willy Harcourt, born and raised in Brooklyn. Therefore, I am now leaving to go to a party in Brooklyn. Say that to yourself slowly--'a party in Brooklyn!' Sounds sort of ominous, doesn't it? If the worst happens, I look to you fellows to break it to my mother. Please mention that I was smiling to the last."

He waved a farewell and disappeared into the hall. Varney dropped into the chair Townes had left empty, and elevated his feet to the lounge where sprawled the length of Peter Maginnis. Peter looked up and the eyes of the two men met.

"Well, Laurence? What is the proposition?" "Proposition? What do you mean?"

"An ass," replied Maginnis, pumping seltzer into a tall glass, "could see that you have something on your mind."

Peter nodded.

"New and interesting?"

"There are men in this town who would run themselves to death trying to get in it on the ground floor."

Maginnis shook his head.

"I have done everything in this world," he said almost sadly, "except, I may say, the felonies."

"But this," said Varney, "is a felony."

Struck by his tone, Peter glanced up. "Mean it?"

"Sure thing."

"As I remarked before, what is the proposition?"

"To sum it all up in a word," said Varney, "there's a job of kidnapping on and I happened to get the contract. That's all there is to the little trifle."

Peter swung his feet around to the floor, and sat up. His conviction that Varney was trying to be funny died hard.

Varney laughed. "I need a pal," he added. "Five minutes ago I telephoned and got permission to offer the place to you."

"Stop being so confounded mysterious," Peter broke out, "and go ahead!"

Varney blew smoke thoughtfully and said, "I will. In fact, that's what I came for. It's a devil of a delicate little matter to talk about to anybody, as it happens. Of course, what I tell you must never go an inch further, whether you come along or not."

"Naturally."

"You know my Uncle Elbert?"

"Old Carstairs?"

Peter looked up quickly. "Hunston? Ha! But fire away."

"She and Uncle Elbert have stayed pretty good friends all through it. They exchange letters now and then, and once or twice when she has been in the city, I believe they have met--though not in recent years. My private suspicion is that she has never entirely got over being in love with him. Anyhow, there's their general relationship in a nutshell--parted but friendly. It might have stayed just like that till they were both in their graves, but for one accidental complication. There is a child."

"I seem to remember," said Peter. "A little boy."

"On the contrary. A little girl. Uncle Elbert," said Varney, "is a bit of a social butterfly. Mrs. Carstairs is an earnest domestic character. As I gather, that was what they clashed on--the idea of what a home ought to be. When the split came, Mrs. Carstairs took the child and Uncle Elbert was willing enough to have her do it. That was natural enough, Peter. He had his friends and his clubs and his little dinners, and he was no more competent to raise a girl baby than you are, which is certainly going some for a comparison. I suppose the fact was that he was glad to be free of the responsibility. But it's mighty different now.

"You see," said Varney, lighting one cigarette from another and throwing the old one away, "he must be pretty lonely all by himself in that big house of his. On top of that he's getting old and isn't in very good health. Explain it any way you like. The simple fact is that within this last year or so, it's gradually gotten to be a kind of obsession with him, an out-and-out, down-and-out monomania, to know that kid--to have her come and spend part of every year with him. That's natural, too, I should say."

"H'm. Mrs. Carstairs sticks to her like fly-paper, I suppose?"

"Not at all. She admits Uncle Elbert's rights and is entirely willing to let him have Mary--for such is our little heroine's name--for part of the time. It is the child who is doing the fly-paper business. The painful fact is that she declines to have anything whatever to do with her father. Invitations, commands, entreaties--she spurns them all. Yes, I asked him if they had tried spanking, but he didn't answer--seemed rather miffed, in fact. The child simply will not come, and that is point number one. Now, of course, Uncle Elbert realizes that he has not been what the world would call a good father. And he has figured it out that Mary, evidently a young precocity, has judged him, found him guilty, and sentenced him to banishment from her affections. That hurts, you know. Well, he is certain that if he could once see her and be thrown with her for a few days, she would find that he is not such an old ogre, after all, would take him back as a father, as we might say, and that after that everything would be plain sailing. That's his theory. The point is how to see her and be thrown with her for the necessary few days."

"Why does n't he get on the train and go to Hunston? Or, if Mrs. Carstairs is really so decent about the thing, why doesn't she get on the train and bring Mary down here?"

"Good. I put both of those up to him, and they seemed to embarrass him a little. I gathered that he had suggested them both to Mrs. Carstairs, and that she had turned them down hard. The ground seemed delicate. You see, we must allow for the personal equation in all this. No matter where they met, he couldn't hang around the house getting acquainted with Mary without coming into sort of intimate contact with Mrs. Carstairs, and giving a kind of domestic touch to their relations. You see how that is. She wants to be fair and generous about it, but if she is in love with him, that would be a little more than flesh and blood could bear, I suppose. Then, as I say, there is the pig-headedness of the child. Anyway, Uncle Elbert assures me that both those plans are simply out of the question. So there is the situation. Mary won't come to see him by herself. Mrs. Carstairs won't bring Mary to see him, and she won't let him come to see Mary. Well, what remains?"

Peter said nothing. In a room overhead a manifestly improvised quartet struck up "Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot?" with great enthusiasm.

"You see there is only one thing. The old gentleman," said Varney, "has brooded over the matter till it's broken him all up. He was in bed when I was there just now. He asked me to go to Hunston and bring his daughter to him. I told him that kidnapping was a little out of my line. 'Kidnapping is rather a harsh word,' he said. 'Yes,' said I, 'it's a criminal word, I believe.' But--"

Peter looked up, interrupting. "Is this all straight? Is that really what he wants you to do?"

"Naturally, Peter. Why not? You cling to the theory that such heroic measures are entirely unnecessary? So did I till I had threshed the whole thing up and down with Uncle Elbert for an hour and a half, trying to suggest some alternative that didn't look so silly. Kindly get the facts well into your head, will you? The man must pursue Mary's affection either there or here, mustn't he? He can't do it there because his wife won't let him. In order to do it here, one would say offhand that Mary would have to be here, and since her mother declines to bring her, it does look to me as if the job would have to be done by somebody else. However, if my logic is wrong, kindly let your powerful--"

"I don't say it's wrong. I merely say that it sounds like a cross between a modern pork-king's divorce suit and a seventeenth century peccadillo."

"And I reply that I don't care a hoot how it sounds. The only question of any interest to me, Peter, is whether or not Uncle Elbert has a moral right to a share in his own child. I say that he has such a right, and I say further that this is the only way in the world that he can assert his right. Oh, hang how it sounds! I'm the nearest thing to a son that he has in this world, and I mean for him to have his rights. So--"

"Very fine," said Peter dryly. "But what's the matter with Carstairs getting his rights for himself? Why doesn't he sneak up there and pull the thing off on his own?"

Varney laughed. "Evidently you don't know Uncle Elbert, after all. He's as temperamentally unfit to carry through a job of this sort as a hysterical old lady. Besides, even though they haven't met for so long, I suppose his own daughter would recognize him, wouldn't she? I never gave that idea a thought. Like his wife, he says he wants to have nothing whatever to do with it. In fact, I made him put that in the form of a promise--he's to give me an absolutely free hand, subject to the conditions, and not interfere in any way. In return I ended by swearing a great iron-clad oath not only to go, but to bring the child back with me. The swear was Uncle Elbert's idea, and I didn't mind. Confound it!--this is getting rather intimate, but here is Mrs. Carstairs's letter giving a partial consent to the thing. It just got in this afternoon; he sent for me the minute he'd read it, I believe, and I never saw a man more excited."

He pulled a scrawled and crossed note-sheet from his pocket, and read in a guarded and slightly embarrassed voice:

HUNSTON, 25th of September.

A.E.C.

"H'm. No force is to be used," said Peter. "May I ask just how you expect to get Mary on the choo-choo?"

Peter said nothing. Varney feared that he looked rather bored.

"At first," he went on promptly, "I'll confess that I didn't see so much in the thing. But the more I've thought of it the more its unique charm has appealed to me. It is nothing more nor less than a novel, piquant little adventure. Exactly the sort of thing to attract a man who likes to take a sporting chance. Look at the difficulties of it. Go to a strange town where there are thousands and millions of strange children, locate Mary, isolate her, make friends with her, coax her to the yacht--captivate her, capture her! How are we to do all that, you ask? I reply, the Lord knows. That is where the sport comes in. We are forbidden to use force. We are forbidden to use Mrs. Carstairs or bring her into it in any way. We are forbidden, of course, to let the child know who we are. Everything must be done by almost diabolical craft, while dodging suspicion at every step. Can you beat it for a fascinating little expedition?"

Peter relit his pipe and meditatively dropped the match on the floor. "How old is Mary?"

"Old?" said Varney, surprised at the question, "Oh, I don't know. The separation took place--h'm--say eight years ago, and my guess is that she was about four at the time. From this and the way Uncle Elbert spoke of her, I daresay twelve would hit it fair and square. A grand age for kidnapping, what?"

"On the contrary," said Peter, "it makes it mere baby-work. Turn it over as you will, it all boils down to spanking a naughty child."

"Never! Think of slipping a cog in our plans--making a false start, having somebody get on to us! Why, man, there may be jail for us both in this!"

He examined Peter's face hopefully, but found unaffected apathy there.

Maginnis perked up visibly at this. "There is no chance of that really, do you think?"

"None in the world," said Varney desperately.

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