The Hills of Refuge Part 8

Some one was coming. It was the landlady herself. Her face was very grave and full of feeling. She seemed slightly surprised at finding the two men together. Charles explained how they had met at breakfast.

"And he sent you to me?" she said. "He recommended me?"

"Yes, that is how I got the address," Charles returned.

She turned on the young man suddenly. She was trying to smile, though her face was full of contradictory emotions. "Mr. Mason," she faltered, as she touched him on his arm, "I must tell you the truth, and I'll do it right here, facing this gentleman. I hardly slept a wink last night, tired as I was from house-cleaning and beating carpets, because I said what I did yesterday about you leaving. And now I hear in this roundabout way that you have been trying to help me. Humph!" she laughed, making a sound in her throat like a suppressed sob, "do you think I'm going to let you go? Not on your life. I've never had a young man under my roof that I liked better. I'd rather keep you here for nothing than to get money for the room from some of the scamps that are floating about."

"You are very good, Mrs. Reilly," Mason said, with emotion on his part, "but I don't think, owing you for three weeks already, that--"

"Three weeks nothing! Cut that out!" she exclaimed. She strode to a window and examined the tattered shade. "There is no demand for rooms now, anyway. Do you hear me, you are going to stay? I've got to have new shades here, that's all there is about it. Yes, I want you to stay, Mr.

Mason, and that settles it. You will find work, I'm sure of it. It is a dull season, that's all. Business will pick up later. It always does."

Mason was blandly protesting, his color high in his cheeks, when she suddenly whirled from the room.

"You are to stay!" she called back from the head of the stairs. "You talk to him, sir," she added to Charles. "He is a nice young man and needs a home of some sort."

The situation being embarra.s.sing, Charles went into his own room. Mason, now without his coat and his shirt-collar open, stalked in after him.

"Sorry you had to hear all that," he said with wincing, tight-drawn lips. "Great G.o.d! do you know, sir, that the hardest thing on earth for an able-bodied man to do is to receive help from a working-woman? G.o.d!

it stings like fire--it kills me!"

"I see, I see," Charles answered. "Your feeling is natural to your particular temperament. In your case you'd better owe it to a man. I want to be frank with you, Mr. Mason. You can do me a favor. I have the money to spare, and I want you to let me advance it for you."

"You? You? Great G.o.d! man, you are not in earnest! You don't mean it!"

"But I do," Charles said, firmly. "It is selfish on my part, too, for I don't want you to go away. I'm a stranger here and I'm lonely. I'm out of work myself; I want your companionship; strangers though we are to each other, I feel as if we were old friends. I can't tell why this is, but I do."

"I know, I guess," said the astounded man as he sank into the chair near the window. "I suppose we are both troubled to some extent. I thought you looked bothered a little at breakfast this morning. I'd like to be with you, too, but I couldn't start out in any stranger's debt like that, you know. It is--is almost as bad, you see, as owing a woman."

"You mustn't feel as you do in regard to me, at least," Charles said. "I am without a home. I don't want to be alone. I would love to share the little I have with you. Something draws me to you like ties of blood."

It was significant that Mason made no reply. He leaned forward, clasping his big freckled hands between his knees. He dropped his head, his reddish-brown curls lopped over his wide brow. He was silent. Charles saw his shoulders rise and fall convulsively, as if he were trying to suppress a tumult of feeling. Presently he raised his head. His hunger-pinched lips were twisted awry.

"My G.o.d!" he gulped, "I didn't know I'd ever run across a fellow like you. I thank you! I thank you! I thank you!" He got up; his knees, in his frayed, bulging trousers, shook visibly. He moved to the door, pa.s.sed through it, and went into his own room. From his position near the door Charles saw him reel past the trunk, totter, and clutch a post of the old-fashioned bed. Holding it, he stood swaying back and forth, his head hanging low on a limp neck. Charles ran to him, caught his arm, and made him lie down on the bed. Mason was ghastly pale.

"It is nothing," he said, trying to smile carelessly. "It will pa.s.s over. I had it once yesterday in the street."

"I know what it is." Charles bent over him tenderly. "You are weak from hunger."

"Do you think that is it?" Mason asked, resignedly, doggedly.

"Yes, and it has to end right here and now. We are friends, aren't we?

I'm going down and bring you something this minute. It is not a woman that is offering it, Mason. It is a friend who knows what suffering is.

Wait! Lie still. I'll hurry back."

From the restaurant where he had breakfasted that morning Charles secured some hot chicken broth with bread and coffee. As he was hurrying back, he met a newsboy selling afternoon papers. The thought darted through his brain that the papers might contain an account of his flight which had been telegraphed from Boston, and he bought a paper and thrust it into his pocket. He met Mrs. Reilly as he was entering the front door. Hurriedly he explained the reason for his bringing the food.

"Good gracious!" she cried. "I thought he looked bad. One of my roomers said it was dope, but I didn't believe him. And I was turning him out in that condition! Think of it--just think of it!"

"I am to pay the back rent he owes, Mrs. Reilly," Charles said, putting the things down on a step of the chair and taking out his purse.

"You? Not on your life!" she threw back, warmly. "Do you think I'll let a stranger come and do more for that poor boy than I've done, when he was going about drumming up trade for me after what I said to him? Not on your life! I'll feed him, too, from this on. I'll bring him his breakfast if he ain't able to come down in the morning."

Seeing that she would not receive the money, Charles took up the things and ascended the stairs. He found Mason seated at the window in the cooling breeze from the open s.p.a.ce in the rear.

His eyes held the eager gleam of a starving man shipwrecked on a raft.

He tried to make light of his hunger as Charles hurriedly placed a small table near him and filled a soup-plate with the rich broth, which contained tender fragments of chicken.

"Here, tackle this, you chump!" said Charles, and he laughed as he used to laugh in his school-days. "The idea of your letting yourself starve in this great, enlightened, Christian city!"

Mason obeyed. A warm look of reviving health was in his face as he drank the soup. The plate was soon empty. Charles filled it again, and poured out the hot coffee. As he did so he felt the folded newspaper in his pocket, and a sudden cool shock of dismay went through him. What might not the paper say? Some one might have seen him take the train in Boston. Some one might have watched him on his arrival in New York. The very house he was in might already be shadowed by instructed officials.

Men nowadays were captured easily enough in the vast network of the detective system.

As he crumbled his bread into the broth Mason's satisfied glance swept the face of his companion. "What are you worried about?" he asked. "I saw you change all at once like you was thinking of something unpleasant. I hope it ain't me. My G.o.d! I don't want to be a burden on a man as kind as you are!"

"You? No, no! But I have my little troubles, Mason," Charles admitted, frankly. "I try to keep my mind off of them, but they will sneak back at times. Don't think it is money; it is not that, and instead of being a burden you are just the reverse. You are a great help to me."

"I'm sorry you have worries," Mason responded, with a sigh. "But it seems to me that every one I meet has some trouble or other. The thing has its funny side, too. I could dance and sing with this feed in me, thanks to you. This morning, after I left you, I went looking for a job, as usual. I had failed to see the firms I had in view in Wall Street, and was standing in front of an old church down there when a shabbily dressed man with a red nose came up to me.

"'Say, boss,' he began, 'can you give a feller a dime to pay his carfare home? I'm stranded here and got to get back.'

"It struck me as funny--his wanting money to get booze with, and me without bread, and I laughed in his face. 'Say,' I said, 'I was about to ask you the same question, but I've never begged in my life, and I don't know how to go about it.'

"'Oh, is that it? New hand, eh?' he said, very cordially. 'Well, young feller, I don't mind giving you a tip or two to start you out. I was green at it once myself. Now look here. You are too timid. Brace up.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Pick 'em out as they come along. Take the best-dressed first. Learn to know the labels on cigars and make a break for the costly smokers. If you see a feller smiling, he's your game. If you see two prosperous-looking guys chatting in a friendly way, strike 'em both. One will try to outdo the other. I won a dollar in a game like that once out of two fellers getting in a fine auto. Women are all right, too, but when you see one coming you'd better just hang your head and look sadlike, especially if you are at the lead-pencil game.'

"I thanked him," Mason finished, "but I never profited by his advice. I simply can't beg. Say, is that an afternoon paper in your pocket? I wonder if it carries want ads?"

"I don't really know," Charles replied, drawing the paper out slowly and awkwardly, for in some way it seemed to cling to his pocket and his fingers were not apt as usual. He spread it out, and as he held it toward his companion some large head-lines on the first page caught his attention and a cold wave of despair swept over him.

"Robbery of a Boston Bank! Absconding Clerk Makes Away with Sixty Thousand Dollars. Ten Thousand Dollars Reward Offered!"

Mason was taking the paper into his extended hand. It seemed to Charles as if the dismal room were enveloped in a mist. He heard Mason saying something as if from a great height or depth as he opened the rustling sheet.

"Excuse me," Charles managed to say. "I'll come back in a moment."

Mason made some reply which he did not hear, and Charles went into his own room, where he stood at the window, looking out over the back yards below. Why, he asked himself, was he so terribly alarmed all at once?

Was not all this to be expected? To do him full credit, he was not even then thinking of himself. It was William. It was Celeste. It was little Ruth. They were first in his thoughts. Ah, after all, was his vicarious effort at rescue to fail totally? He stood at the window a long time, lost in a flood of reflections. It was now sundown. Lights in the rear rooms of the buildings across the court were flashing up. He heard a match being struck in Mason's room and the rustling of the tell-tale paper. He crept to the door, glanced in, and saw his new friend standing under a flaring gas-jet, with the first page of the paper before his eyes. Was he reading the Boston news? Would he couple his new friend's arrival on that particular train with the events described? Well, what did it matter? Something told him that even were he a murderer his secret would be safe with Mason; and yet, if possible to avoid it, Mason must not know, for Charles had promised his brother that no circ.u.mstances should wring the truth from him. Mason remained at the jet, reading as if wholly absorbed. There could be no doubt now that it was the Boston report that had caught his attention.

Suddenly, while he watched him, Mason lowered the paper, and Charles had barely time to step back to the window before Mason was on the threshold, the paper in his hand.

"Pardon me," he said, staring through the dusk at Charles, "I did not mean to take your paper from you. I was expecting you back every minute and got to reading about--about"--there was a slight pause here as it seemed to Charles's overwrought fancy--"about a poor chap in Boston who got away with a pile of boodle. It is interesting, the whole tale.

Booze, booze! The old, old story--secret speculations, and women. Family broken-hearted. Went back on his best friend, his only brother, who stands at the top socially. Gosh! I've been reckless myself, but not like that, thank G.o.d! I've been my own worst enemy, but I never hurt my people like that. I'm sorry for the poor devil! I really am sorry! This paper speaks of the chap as having had lots of friends before he got to the bottom. They are usually like that, free and easy and kind-hearted.

Oh, I guess he was tempted, poor devil! And he will be caught, they think. Left for New York last night and is hiding here."

Mason was offering him the open paper and Charles took it. Before a man so genuine as his new friend had shown himself to be, he could not bring himself to play a part. Silently he dropped the paper on his bed. He sat down by it, leaving Mason standing with a sort of dumb inquiry in his eyes. It was significant that Mason was now silent. It was significant that he seemed to be studying Charles's features in the dim light from the gas, studying them with an awkward, reluctant stare.

"I'll read it later--later," Charles said, faintly, taking up the paper and laying it on the pillow of his bed. "I hope you feel better since you've eaten," he went on, lamely. "I--I thought the soup would do you good, weak as you are."