Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 4
IV
“There's something uncommonly ugly in the wind,” Wyatt told John Lomax, a couple of nights later, in the bone yard of the Messenger.
“There's always something uncommonly ugly in the wind, when you're talking news,” Lomax assured him. “If everything was clean and pretty, the newspapers could be printed on a handkerchief. What particular brand of ugliness are you digging up just now?”
“That Lockwood-Veazie thing. The old mutt's been up to see the prof. It's a spider and fly game, right enough—some long-lost daughter stuff, or I'm a bum guesser!”
“Your perspicacity amazes me!” smiled Lomax, striking a match on a “Positively No Smoking” sign. “At the dénouement, I suppose, noble writer exposes villain, thus saving aged millionaire from brutal shake-down. Grateful millionaire bestows two nickels and one blessing on noble reporter, and—”
“Oh, cut the comedy! This is a serious proposition.”
“You mean you're really going to stick to the trail and make a story of it?”
“Why not?”
“Why not monkey with a cobra? I'm asking you! No, Wy, it's too chancy. There's plenty of good stories without crossing Professor Veazie's slimy trail. You do him out of his graft, and he'll be so darned mad that he'll knife you, one way or another, sure as guns. Better butt into a tiger's den and grab the cubs, as Dona Who's-This says in ' Hernani,' than mix up with the prof!”
Wyatt made a spacious, danger defying gesture.
“It's too good a job to chuck,” he declared. “ Veazie seems to be the damnedest skunk unskinned, and I'm going to skin him, by gad! You take a crook like Veazie and a half cracked old boy like Lockwood, and the answer's liable to be anything from blackmail to murder; so—”
“Veazie's out of town. Know that?”
“Yes. I called around at his apartment, this p.m. Gone! Maid didn't even know when he'd be back. Said so, anyhow. He'll be back, though. Buzzards and bad pennies always—”
“Working up some kind of a plant, most likely?”
“Yes, that's how I figure it; but where he is—”
Where he was, at this precise moment, bore little relation to a February night in Boston. Very far removed from sleet and muddy slush, from blood chilling winds that whistle around Bay State gables, the professor was just then walking eastward on Broad Street, in the ancient and goodly city of Charleston, South Carolina.
Walking rather jauntily he was, for a man of his fifty-six years. Unhampered by any overcoat—the winter sea breeze through Charleston's palmettoes being mild as a Northern April—he swung along at a round pace, glancing at the house numbers with the air of an obvious seeker. One by one he scrutinized the old-time houses with their porch doors, their wrought-iron balconies and grilles, their worn steps, and their mossy and crooked yard walls, over which ivy trailed, rustling palms nodded, and glossy-leaved magnolias towered.
Loungers and passers-by lazily scrutinized him, for his pace declared him a stranger. Not thus do native Charleston- ians walk. A withered negro “mawma,” shuffling along the damp brick sidewalk with a vast bundle of washing on her padded head, moved toward the curb to let him pass. A tar-black beggar, seated under a dim street light on marble steps, stretched out a hand and whined:
“Ah'm hongry an' down, an' needs a few paynies!”
Veazie gave no heed. On, ever on he held, with the purposeful direction of a man who quests a much desired goal.
He crossed King Street, in a temporary glare of shops, and reached a quiet section hard by historic St. Michael's Church. His pace slackened, and presently he stopped.
“Ah, here we are!” he murmured. “Here we are!”
Hard of eye, he stood to take cognizance of the place—a tall, shabby brick house with a brass-knockered door. Unlike so many in Charleston, it had no porch door giving access to a piazza at right angles to the street. The door was raised above the pavement level only by two stone steps as worn and ravaged as the building itself—a building which in the piping times before 1861 had sheltered fashion and beauty, but which now had rather obviously fallen to the shabby estate of a lodging or boarding house.
One of the front windows stood open, and through this the professor heard the sound of a piano—a poor piano, yet played with a certain youthful joyance. The piece was the Ballet Intermezzo from “Sylvia.” Veazie knew nothing of music, except that it induced spirits to arrive, and also helped to loosen pockets for silver offerings; but none the less he realized that here was music very different from his chemical-haired assistant's.
“Ah, now,” thought he, “if I only had something of that sort—not so lively, of course, but played with just that touch!”
Looking through the window, he saw a slender, black-haired girl at the piano. Her back was nearly toward him. He could see the rounded grace of a bare forearm, the élan of strong young fingers, sure of their skill.
“Fine!” murmured the professor. For a moment he stood pondering, and then turned toward the door. ' Not much of a joint. Harriet must have come down in the world!” A wry smile twisted his lips. “So much the better, though—a few dollars will go a long way here!”
Sharply he knocked. The music broke off, and a light step sounded. Then the door swung, and Veazie found himself face to face with the black-haired girl.
A dim light in the hall, behind her, revealed her as perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, a gracile and slender figure with a shapely throat, and with eyes steady and dark. By contrast with the crop-haired style of the day, her heavily coiled masses of black hair gave her almost the distinction of some archaic portrait. An air, a fashion as of other and more courtly days enhaloed her.
“Yes, sir?” she queried, a little slowly.
“Mrs. Forrester live here?”
The girl nodded gravely.
“I'd like to see her, please.”
“Come right in!” She stood aside to let him pass, and gestured toward the parlor. “This way.” She pronounced it with the inimitable, fascinating accent of Charleston, impossible to put on paper. “Who shall I tell her?”
“Tourist,” answered the professor, hat in hand. “Might want a room for a week. She lets rooms, don't she?”
“Yes, sir—mother lets rooms. I don't reckon”—she called it “re'n”—“she's got any vacant just now, though.” Soft-modulated, her voice made the Southern dialect a thing of joy. “But I'll ask her.”
“A beauty!” he was thinking. “And the way she talks! What a medium she'd make—musical medium!” But he said: “If you will, please; and tell her it's rather important.”
The girl withdrew silently, moving with flexuous grace. Veazie knit his sandy brows, as he stood there in the dimly lit parlor. His brooding air held a sinister grimness of determination.
“So that's Harriet's daughter!” he pondered. “Well”—he smiled a bit thinly—“she's all wheat in the bin, too. She'll help a lot. A pretty girl—ah, that's a best bet it's always safe to gamble on!”
He remained pensive, hardly seeing the old horsehair scfa and chairs, the marble-topped table, the sheaf of gilded wheat over the smoldering fire of soft coal in the grate, the oil painting of “The Lost Cause,” the framed poem about “The War Between the States.” In Dixie there's no “Civil War.” “Between the States” is the recognized phrase.
“Musical, eh?” he murmured, glancing at the piano, over which hung a colored print of a sheaf of Confederate flags—a print you will find in nearly every Charleston house. “She gets that from her father—about the only thing he left her, I guess. H-m-m-m! A woman down on her luck, and a pretty daughter!” His smile, which had widened under his red mustache, was evil. “Things seem to be coming my way!”
A step grew audible down the stairs, along the hall, paused in the parlor door.
“You wish to see me, sir?”
Veazie turned sharply.
“Yes—and alone!” His voice cut. “You know me, Harriet, I suppose? If you don't, I'll introduce myself. I'm Brackett, and I want just a few minutes of your valuable time!”