The Mystery of Murray Davenport by Robert Neilson Stephens

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"Father can't go out because of his rheumatism, and I stay to keep him
company," replies Florence.

"Oh, dear me, Mr. Kenby," says Edna, looking at the gentleman rather
skeptically, as if she knew him of old and suspected a habit of
exaggerating his ailments, "can't you pass the time reading or
something? Florence _must_ go out every day; she'll ruin her looks if
she doesn't,--her health, too. I should think you could manage to
entertain yourself alone an hour or two."

"It isn't that," explains Florence; "he often wants little things done,
and it's painful for him to move about. In a house like this, the
servants aren't always available, except for routine duties."

"Well, I'll tell you what," proposes Edna, blithely; "you get on your
things, dear, and we'll run around and have tea with Aunt Clara at
Purcell's. Mr. Larcher and I were to meet her there, but you come with
me, and Mr. Larcher will stay and look after your father. He'll be very
glad to, I know."

Mr. Larcher is too much taken by surprise to be able to say how very
glad he will be. Mr. Kenby, with Miss Hill's sharp glance upon him,
seems to feel that he would cut a poor figure by opposing. So Florence
is rushed by her friend's impetuosity into coat and hat, and carried
off, Miss Hill promising to return with her for Mr. Larcher "in an hour
or two." Before Mr. Larcher has had time to collect his scattered
faculties, he is alone with the pettish-looking old man to whom he has
felt himself an object of perfect indifference. He glares, with a defiant
sense of his own worth, at the old man, until the old man takes notice of
his existence.

"Oh, it's kind of you to stay, Mr.--ahem. But they really needn't have
troubled you. I can get along well enough myself, when it's absolutely
necessary. Of course, my daughter will be easier in mind to have some
one here."

"I am very glad to be of service--to so charming a young woman," says
Larcher, very distinctly.

"A charming girl, yes. I'm very proud of my daughter. She's my constant
thought. Children are a great care, a great responsibility."

"Yes, they are," asserts Larcher, jumping at the chance to show this
uninterested old person that wise young men may sometimes be entertained
unawares. "It's a sign of progress that parents are learning on which
side the responsibility lies. It used to be universally accepted that
the obligation was on the part of the children. Now every writer on the
subject starts on the basis that the obligation is on the side of the
parent. It's hard to see how the world could have been so idiotic
formerly. As if the child, summoned here in ignorance by the parents for
their own happiness, owed them anything!"

Mr. Kenby stares at the young man for a time, and then says, icily:

"I don't quite follow you."

"Why, it's very clear," says Larcher, interested now for his argument.
"You spoke of your sense of responsibility toward your child."

("The deuce I did!" thinks Mr. Kenby.)

"Well, that sense is most natural in you, and shows an enlightened mind.
For how can parents feel other than deeply responsible toward the being
they have called into existence? How can they help seeing their
obligation to make existence for that being as good and happy as it's in
their power to make it? Who dare say that there is a limit to their
obligation toward that being?"

"And how about that being's obligations in return?" Mr. Kenby demands,
rather loftily.

"That being's obligations go forward to the beings it in turn summons to
life. The child, becoming in time a parent, assumes a parent's debt. The
obligation passes on from generation to generation, moving always to the
future, never back to the past."

"Somewhat original theories!" sniffs the old man. "I suppose, then, a
parent in his old age has no right to look for support to his children?"

"It is the duty of people, before they presume to become parents, to
provide against the likelihood of ever being a burden to their children.
In accepting from their children, they rob their children's children.
But the world isn't sufficiently advanced yet to make people so
far-seeing and provident, and many parents do have to look to their
children for support. In such cases, the child ought to provide for the
parent, but out of love or humanity, not because of any purely logical
claim. You see the difference, of course."

Mr. Kenby gives a shrug, and grunts ironically.

"The old-fashioned idea still persists among the multitude," Larcher
goes on, "and many parents abuse it in practice. There are people who
look upon their children mainly as instruments sent from Heaven for them
to live by. From the time their children begin to show signs of
intelligence, they lay plans and build hopes of future gain upon them.
It makes my blood boil, sometimes, to see mothers trying to get their
pretty daughters on the stage, or at a typewriter, in order to live at
ease themselves. And fathers, too, by George! Well, I don't think there's
a more despicable type of humanity in this world than the able-bodied
father who brings his children up with the idea of making use of them!"

Mr. Larcher has worked himself into a genuine and very hearty
indignation. Before he can entirely calm down, he is put to some wonder
by seeing his auditor rise, in spite of rheumatism, and walk to the door
at the side of the room. "I think I'll lie down awhile," says Mr. Kenby,
curtly, and disappears, closing the door behind him. Mr. Larcher, after
standing like a statue for some time by the fire, ensconces himself in a
great armchair before it, and gazes into it until, gradually stolen upon
by a sense of restful comfort in the darkening room, he falls asleep.

He is awakened by the gay laugh of Edna Hill, as she and Florence enter
the room. He is on his feet in time to keep his slumbers a secret, and
explains that Mr. Kenby has gone for a nap. When the gas is lit, he sees
that Florence, too, is bright-faced from the outer air, that her eye has
a fresher sparkle, and that she is more beautiful than before. As it is
getting late, and Edna's Aunt Clara is to be picked up in a shop in
Twenty-third Street where the girls have left her, Larcher is borne off
before he can sufficiently contemplate Miss Kenby's beauty. Florence is
no sooner alone than Mr. Kenby comes out of the little chamber.

"I hope you feel better for your nap, father."

"I didn't sleep any, thank you," says Mr. Kenby. "What an odious young
man that was! He has the most horrible principles. I think he must be an
anarchist, or something of that sort. Did you enjoy your tea?"

The odious young man, walking briskly up the lighted avenue, past piano
shops and publishing houses, praises Miss Kenby's beauty to Edna Hill,
who echoes the praise without jealousy.

"She's perfectly lovely," Edna asserts, "and then, think of it, she has
had a romance, too; but I mustn't tell that."

"It's strange you never mentioned her to me before, being such good
friends with her."

"Oh, they've only just got settled back in town," answers Edna,
evasively. "What do you think of the old gentleman?"

"He seems a rather queer sort. Do you know him very well?"

"Well enough. He's one of those people whose dream in life is to make
money out of their children."

"What! Then I _did_ put my foot in it!" Larcher tells of the brief
conversation he had with Mr. Kenby. It makes Edna laugh heartily.

"Good for him!" she cries. "It's a shame, his treatment of Florence. Her
brother out West supports them, and is very glad to do so on her account.
Yet the covetous old man thinks she ought to be earning money, too. She's
quite too fond of him--she even gave up a nice young man she was in love
with, for her father's sake. But listen. I don't want you to mention
these people's names to anybody--not to _anybody_, mind! Promise."

"Very well. But why?"

"I won't tell you," she says, decidedly; and, when he looks at her in
mute protest, she laughs merrily at his helplessness. So they go on up
the avenue.

CHAPTER V.

A LODGING BY THE RIVER

The day after his introduction to the Kenbys, Larcher went with Murray
Davenport on one of those expeditions incidental to their collaboration
as writer and illustrator. Larcher had observed an increase of the
strange indifference which had appeared through all the artist's
loquacity at their first interview. This loquacity was sometimes
repeated, but more often Davenport's way was of silence. His apathy, or
it might have been abstraction, usually wore the outer look of
dreaminess.

"Your friend seems to go about in a trance," Barry Tompkins said of him
one day, after a chance meeting in which Larcher had made the two
acquainted.

This was a near enough description of the man as he accompanied Larcher
to a part of the riverfront not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, on the
afternoon at which we have arrived. The two were walking along a squalid
street lined on one side with old brick houses containing junk-shops,
shipping offices, liquor saloons, sailors' hotels, and all the various
establishments that sea-folk use. On the other side were the wharves,
with a throng of vessels moored, and glimpses of craft on the broad
river.

"Here we are," said Larcher, who as he walked had been referring to a
pocket map of the city. The two men came to a stop, and Davenport took
from a portfolio an old print of the early nineteenth century,
representing part of the river front. Silently they compared this with
the scene around them, Larcher smiling at the difference. Davenport then
looked up at the house before which they stood. There was a saloon on
the ground floor, with a miniature ship and some shells among the bottles
in the window.

"If I could get permission to make a sketch from one of those windows up
there," said Davenport, glancing at the first story over the saloon.

"Suppose we go in and see what can be done," suggested Larcher.

They found the saloon a small, homely place, with only one attendant
behind the bar at that hour, two marine-looking old fellows playing some
sort of a game amidst a cloud of pipe-smoke at a table, and a third old
fellow, not marine-looking but resembling a prosperous farmer, seated
by himself in the enjoyment of an afternoon paper that was nearly all
head-lines.

Larcher ordered drinks, and asked the barkeeper if he knew who lived
overhead. The barkeeper, a round-headed young man of unflinching aspect,
gazed hard across the bar at the two young men for several seconds, and
finally vouchsafed the single word:

"Roomers."

"I should like to see the person that has the front room up one flight,"
began Larcher.

"All right; that won't cost you nothing. There he sets." And the
barkeeper pointed to the rural-looking old man with the newspaper, at
the same time calling out, sportively: "Hey, Mr. Bud, here's a couple o'
gents wants to look at you."

Mr. Bud, who was tall, spare, and bent, about sixty, and the possessor
of a pleasant knobby face half surrounded by a gray beard that stretched
from ear to ear beneath his lower jaw, dropped his paper and scrutinized
the young men benevolently. They went over to him, and Larcher explained
their intrusion with as good a grace as possible.

"Why, certainly, certainly," the old man chirped with alacrity. "Glad to
have yuh. I'll be proud to do anything in the cause of literature. Come
right up." And he rose and led the way to the street door.

"Take care, Mr. Bud," said the jocular barkeeper. "Don't let them sell
you no gold bricks or nothin'. I never see them before, so you can't
hold me if you lose your money."

"You keep your mouth shut, Mick," answered the old man, "and send me up
a bottle o' whisky and a siphon o' seltzer as soon as your side partner
comes in. This way, gentlemen."

He conducted them out to the sidewalk, and then in through another door,
and up a narrow stairway, to a room with two windows overlooking the
river. It was a room of moderate size, provided with old furniture, a
faded carpet, mended curtains, and lithographs of the sort given away
with Sunday newspapers. It had, in its shabbiness, that curious effect
of cosiness and comfort which these shabby old rooms somehow possess,
and luxurious rooms somehow lack. A narrow bed in a corner was covered
with an old-fashioned patchwork quilt. There was a cylindrical stove,
but not in use, as the weather had changed since the day before; and
beside the stove, visible and unashamed, was a large wooden box partly
full of coal. While Larcher was noticing these things, and Mr. Bud was
offering chairs, Davenport made directly for the window and looked out
with an interest limited to the task in hand, and perfunctory even so.

"This is my city residence," said the host, dropping into a chair. "It
ain't every hard-worked countryman, these times, that's able to keep up
a city residence." As this was evidently one of Mr. Bud's favorite jests,
Larcher politically smiled. Mr. Bud soon showed that he had other
favorite jests. "Yuh see, I make my livin' up the State, but every now
and then I feel like comin' to the city for rest and quiet, and so I keep
this place the year round."

"You come to New York for rest and quiet?" exclaimed Larcher, still
kindly feigning amusement.

"Sure! Why not? As fur as rest goes, I just loaf around and watch other
people work. That's what I call rest with a sauce to it. And as fur as
quiet goes, I get used to the noises. Any sound that don't concern me,
don't annoy me. I go about unknown, with nobody carin' what my business
is, or where I'm bound fur. Now in the country everybody wants to know
where from, and where to, and what fur. The only place to be reely alone
is where thur's so many people that one man don't count for anything. And
talk about noise!--What's all the clatter and bang amount to, if it's got
nothin' to do with your own movements? Now at my home where the noise
consists of half a dozen women's voices askin' me about this, and wantin'
that, and callin' me to account for t'other,--that's the kind o' noise
that jars a man. Yuh see, I got a wife and four daughters. They're very
good women--very good women, the whole bunch--but I do find it restful
and refreshin' to take the train to New York about once a month, and loaf
around a week or so without anybody takin' notice, and no questions ast."

"And what does your family say to that?"

"Nothin', now. They used to say considerable when I first fell into the
habit. I hev some poultry customers here in the city, and I make out I
got to come to look after business. That story don't go fur with the
fam'ly; but they hev their way about everything else, so they got to
gimme my way about this."

Davenport turned around from the window, and spoke for the first time
since entering:

"Then you don't occupy this room more than half the time?"

"No, sir, I close it up, and thank the Lord there ain't nothin' in it
worth stealin'."

"Oh, in that case," Davenport went on, "if I began some sketches here,
and you left town before they were done, I should have to go somewhere
else to finish them."

It was a remark that made Larcher wonder a little, at the moment, knowing
the artist's usual methods of work. But Mr. Bud, ignorant of such
matters, replied without question:

"Well, I don't know. That might be fixed all right, I guess."

"I see you have a library," said Davenport, abruptly, walking over to a
row of well-worn books on a wooden shelf near the bed. His sudden
interest, slight as it was, produced another transient surprise in
Larcher.

"Yes, sir," said the old man, with pride and affection, "them books is my
chief amusement. Sir Walter Scott's works; I've read 'em over again and
again, every one of 'em, though I must confess there's two or three
that's pretty rough travellin'. But the others!--well, I've tried a good
many authors, but gimme Scott. Take his characters! There's stacks of
novels comes out nowadays that call themselves historical; but the people
in 'em seems like they was cut out o' pasteboard; a bit o' wind would
blow 'em away. But look at the _body_ to Scott's people! They're all the
way round, and clear through, his characters are.--Of course, I'm no
literary man, gentlemen. I only give my own small opinion." Mr. Bud's
manner, on his suddenly considering his audience, had fallen from its
bold enthusiasm.

"Your small opinion is quite right," said Davenport. "There's no doubt
about the thoroughness and consistency of Scott's characters." He took
one of the books, and turned over the leaves, while Mr. Bud looked on
with brightened eyes. "Andrew Fairservice--there's a character. 'Gude
e'en--gude e'en t' ye'--how patronizing his first salutation! 'She's a
wild slip, that'--there you have Diana Vernon sketched by the old servant
in a touch. And what a scene this is, where Diana rides with Frank to the
hilltop, shows him Scotland, and advises him to fly across the border as
fast as he can."

"Yes, and the scene in the Tolbooth where Rob Roy gives Bailie Nicol
Jarvie them three sufficient reasons fur not betrayin' him." The old man
grinned. He seemed to be at his happiest in praising, and finding another
to praise, his favorite author.

"Interesting old illustrations these are," said Davenport, taking up
another volume. "Dryburgh Abbey--that's how it looks on a gray day. I
was lucky enough to see it in the sunshine; it's loveliest then."

"What?" exclaimed Mr. Bud. "You been to Dryburgh Abbey?--to Scott's
grave?"

"Oh, yes," said Davenport, smiling at the old man's joyous wonder, which
was about the same as he might have shown upon meeting somebody who had
been to fairy-land, or heaven, or some other place equally far from New
York.

"You don't say! Well, to think of it! I _am_ happy to meet you. By
George, I never expected to get so close to Sir Walter Scott! And maybe
you've seen Abbotsford?"

"Oh, certainly. And Scott's Edinburgh house in Castle Street, and the
house in George Square where he lived as a boy and met Burns."

Mr. Bud's excitement was great. "Maybe you've seen Holyrood Palace, and
High Street--"

"Why, of course. And the Canongate, and the Parliament House, and the
Castle, and the Grass-market, and all the rest. It's very easy; thousands
of Americans go there every year. Why don't you run over next summer?"

The old man shook his head. "That's all too fur away from home fur me.
The women are afraid o' the water, and they'd never let me go alone. I
kind o' just drifted into this New York business, but if I undertook to
go across the ocean, that _would_ be the last straw. And I'm afraid I
couldn't get on to the manners and customs over there. They say
everything's different from here. To tell the truth, I'm timid where I
don't know the ways. If I was like you--I shouldn't wonder if you'd been
to some of the other places where things happen in his novels?"

With a smile, Davenport began to enumerate and describe. The old man sat
enraptured. The whisky and seltzer came up, and the host saw that the
glasses were filled and refilled, but he kept Davenport to the same
subject. Larcher felt himself quite out of the talk, but found
compensation in the whisky and in watching the old man's greedy enjoyment
of Davenport's every word. The afternoon waned, and all opportunity of
making the intended sketches passed for that day. Mr. Bud was for
lighting up, or inviting the young men to dinner, but they found pretexts
for tearing themselves away. They did not go, however, until Davenport
had arranged to come the next day and perform his neglected task. Mr. Bud
accompanied them out, and stood on the corner looking after them until
they were out of sight.

"You've made a hit with the agriculturist," said Larcher, as they took
their way through a narrow street of old warehouses toward the region of
skyscrapers and lower Broadway.

"Scott is evidently his hobby," replied Davenport, with a careless smile,
"and I liked to please him in it."

He lapsed into that reticence which, as it was his manner during most of
the time, made his strange seasons of communicativeness the more
remarkable. A few days passed before another such talkative mood came on
in Larcher's presence.

It was a drizzling, cheerless night. Larcher had been to a dinner in
Madison Avenue, and he thus found himself not far from Davenport's abode.
Going thither upon an impulse, he beheld the artist seated at the table,
leaning forward over a confusion of old books, some of them open. He
looked pallid in the light of the reading lamp at his elbow, and his
eyes seemed withdrawn deep into their hollows. He welcomed his visitor
with conventional politeness.

"How's this?" began Larcher. "Do I find you pondering,

'... weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?'"

"No; merely rambling over familiar fields." Davenport held out the
topmost book.

"Oh, Shakespeare," laughed Larcher. "The Sonnets. Hello, you've marked
part of this."

"Little need to mark anything so famous. But it comes closer to me than
to most men, I fancy." And he recited slowly, without looking down at the
page:

'When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,'--

He stopped, whereupon Larcher, not to be behind, and also without having
recourse to the page, went on:

'Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,'--

"But I think that hits all men," said Larcher, interrupting himself.
"Everybody has wished himself in somebody else's shoes, now and again,
don't you believe?"

"I have certainly wished myself out of my own shoes," replied Davenport,
almost with vehemence. "I have hated myself and my failures, God knows!
I have wished hard enough that I were not I. But I haven't wished I were
any other person now existing. I wouldn't change selves with this
particular man, or that particular man. It wouldn't be enough to throw
off the burden of my memories, with their clogging effect upon my life
and conduct, and take up the burden of some other man's--though I
should be the gainer even by that, in a thousand cases I could name."

"Oh, I don't exactly mean changing with somebody else," said Larcher.
"We all prefer to remain ourselves, with our own tastes, I suppose. But
we often wish our lot was like somebody else's."

Davenport shook his head. "I don't prefer to remain myself, any more
than to be some man whom I know or have heard of. I am tired of myself;
weary and sick of Murray Davenport. To be a new man, of my own
imagining--that would be something;--to begin afresh, with an
unencumbered personality of my own choosing; to awake some morning and
find that I was not Murray Davenport nor any man now living that I know
of, but a different self, formed according to ideals of my own. There
_would_ be a liberation!"

"Well," said Larcher, "if a man can't change to another self, he can at
least change his place and his way of life."

"But the old self is always there, casting its shadow on the new
place. And even change of scene and habits is next to impossible
without money."

"I must admit that New York, and my present way of life, are good enough
for me just now," said Larcher.

Davenport's only reply was a short laugh.

"Suppose you had the money, and could live as you liked, where would
_you_ go?" demanded Larcher, slightly nettled.

"I would live a varied life. Probably it would have four phases,
generally speaking, of unequal duration and no fixed order. For one
phase, the chief scene would be a small secluded country-house in an old
walled garden. There would be the home of my books, and the centre of my
walks over moors and hills. From this, I would transport myself, when
the mood came, to the intellectual society of some large city--that of
London would be most to my choice. Mind you, I say the _intellectual_
society; a far different thing from the Society that spells itself with
a capital S."

"Why not of New York? There's intellectual society here."

"Yes; a trifle fussy and self-conscious, though. I should prefer a
society more reposeful. From this, again, I would go to the life of the
streets and byways of the city. And then, for the fourth phase, to the
direct contemplation of art--music, architecture, sculpture,
painting;--to haunting the great galleries, especially of Italy,
studying and copying the old masters. I have no desire to originate. I
should be satisfied, in the arts, rather to receive than to give; to be
audience and spectator; to contemplate and admire."

"Well, I hope you may have your wish yet," was all that Larcher
could say.

"I _should_ like to have just one whack at life before I finish,"
replied Davenport, gazing thoughtfully into the shadow beyond the
lamplight. "Just one taste of comparative happiness."

"Haven't you ever had even one?"

"I thought I had, for a brief season, but I was deceived." (Larcher
remembered the talk of an inconstant woman.) "No, I have never been
anything like happy. My father was a cold man who chilled all around
him. He died when I was a boy, and left my mother and me to poverty. My
mother loved me well enough; she taught me music, encouraged my
studies, and persuaded a distant relation to send me to the College of
Medicine and Surgery; but her life was darkened by grief, and the
darkness fell over me, too. When she died, my relation dropped me, and
I undertook to make a living in New York. There was first the struggle
for existence, then the sickening affair of that play; afterward,
misfortune enough to fill a dozen biographies, the fatal reputation of
ill luck, the brief dream of consolation in the love of woman, the
awakening,--and the rest of it."

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