Pirates' Hope. Lynde Francis

Pirates' Hope

      I

      INTRODUCING MR. MACHIAVELLI VAN DYCK

      To those who knew him best and had known him longest, Bonteck Van Dyck, sometime captain of his university eleven, a ball player with the highest batting average on the university nine, a large-lettered star in everything pertaining to athletic accomplishments, and above and beyond this the fortunate – or unfortunate, as one chooses to view it – inheritor of the obese Van Dyck fortune, figured, like the dead kitten discovered on the ash heap by the investigative infant, as "a perfectly good cat, spoiled."

      As was most natural, the spoiling was usually charged in a lump sum to the exaggerated fortune. In the university Van Dyck was a breezy, whole-souled, large-hearted man's man, the idol of his set and fraternity and a pathetically easy mark for the college borrower. Past the college period, however, there came rumors of a radical change; sharp-edged hints that the easy mark was becoming an increasingly hard mark; vague intimations that this prince of good fellows of an earlier day was attaining a certain stony indifference to suffering on the part of those who sought to relieve him of some portion of the money burden. Nay, more; it was whispered that he was not above using the bloated bank account as a club wherewith to dash out the brains of his opponents, not only in the market-place, but at the social fireside, where, as a handsome young Croesus, owning a goodly handful of Manhattan frontages, sailing his own yacht, and traveling in his own private car, he was the legitimate quarry of the match-making mothers – or fathers.

      Though we had been reasonably close friends in the university days, it so chanced that I had seen next to nothing of Van Dyck during the three years immediately following the doling out of the coveted sheepskins in Commencement Week; and the echoes of these derogatory stories – echoes were all that had drifted out to me in the foreign field to which, as a constructing engineer, I had gone soon after my graduation – were somehow vastly unconvincing. But on a certain memorable autumn evening in a New Orleans hotel, when I found myself sitting across a table for two as Van Dyck's guest, listening while he explained, or tried to explain, why he had cabled me from Havana to meet him at this particular time and place, it was disconcertingly evident that the golden youth of the old university days had really developed into something different – different, and just a shade puzzling.

      "You see, Preble, you are the one man I was most anxious to find," he was saying, for the third time since the half-shell oysters had been served. "By the sheerest good luck I happened to run across Bertie Witherspoon in Havana, and he told me that you were, or had been, running the blockade, or something of that sort, down on the Venezuela coast, and that a wire to the Barcado Brothers' New Orleans headquarters would probably reach you."

      "Running the blockade!" I broke in derisively. "That is about as near as a New York provincial like Bertie Witherspoon could come to any fact outside of his native Borough of Manhattan! There is no blockade on the Venezuelan coast; and I've been building a railroad from Trujillo up into the Sierra Nevada de Merida. Does this trifling difference make me any less the man you were anxious to find?"

      "Not in the least," he returned, with the old-time, boyish smile wrinkling at the corners of his fine eyes. "But I do hope you've got your railroad built and are footloose and free to take another commission."

      "No," I said; "the railroad isn't finished. But as it probably never will be, under the present Venezuelan administration, we can leave it out of the question."

      "Then you could take a month or so off, if you should feel like it?"

      "I could, yes; if the hotel bills wouldn't prove to be too high."

      Again the good-natured smile identified the Teck Van Dyck of other days for me.

      "There won't be any hotel bills," he said gently. "You are to be my guest on the Andromeda for a little cruise."

      "On the Andromeda?" I exclaimed. "You don't mean to say you've got that baby Cunarder with you down here in these waters?"

      "Yea, verily, and for a fact," was the smiling reply. "I came up the big river in her this afternoon. Been knocking about a bit among the islands to dodge the country-house invitations up home."

      "Out of tune with the little social gods and goddesses?" I ventured.

      "Out of tune with a good many things, Dick. This is a sorry old world, and the people in it are sorrier – most of 'em. Everything's a bore."

      I laughed.

      "Since when have you been soaking Diogenes and the later Cynics?"

      "Chortle if you want to," he returned. "Old Man Socrates had it about right when he said that virtue is knowledge, and Antisthenes went him one better when he said, 'Let men gain wisdom – or buy a rope.' Another time he says, 'A horse I can see, but horsehood I can not see.' That applies to humanity, as well."

      "Meaning that things – and people – are not always what they seem?"

      "Meaning that people are so seldom what they seem that you can ignore the exceptions. Somebody has said that there are two distinct entities in the ego; the man as he sees himself, and the man as God sees him. That is only a fraction of a great truth. There are as many entities as the man has human contacts; he is not precisely the same man to any two of his acquaintances, and he is a hypocrite with most."

      "Bosh!" said I, thinking I had the key to all this hard-bitted, and lately acquired, philosophy. "You have too much money, Bonteck; that is all that is the matter with you."

      He put down his oyster fork and looked me squarely in the eye. He was the same handsome, upstanding young Hercules that he had always been, but there was something new and more or less provocative in the contemptuous set of the mouth and the half belligerent emphasis of the well-defined jaw.

      "You've said it, Dick; I have too much money, and other people haven't enough," was his rather enigmatical retort. Then: "You may call it madman raving if you like, but I've lost my sense of perspective; I can't tell an honest man – or woman – when I see one."

      "All of which leads up to? – "

      "To the thing which has brought me to New Orleans, and to my reason for wiring you from Havana. My philosophy has led me to the jumping-off place, Dick. Before I am two months older I am going to know at least one small bunch of people for what they really are under their skins. And you are going to help me to acquire this invaluable information. How does that proposal strike you?"

      "It strikes me a trifle remindfully, if you insist on knowing," I said. "I haven't been altogether out of touch with the home people, and quite a few of them have had something to say about this loss of perspective that you've just confessed to. I've been writing most of the gossip off to profit and loss, but – "

      "You needn't," was his brusque interruption. "As I've said, this is a pretty rotten world, if anybody should ask."

      "Is it, indeed? How many millions does it take to give a man that point of view?"

      "That is the devil of it," he said, with a touch of bitterness. "Will you believe me when I say that, apart from yourself and two or three other honest money-despisers like you, I don't really know, as man to man, or man to woman, half a dozen people on the face of the planet?"

      "I'll believe that you think so. Still, that is all piffle, as you very well know. So far as the women are concerned, it merely means that you haven't met the one and only."

      Van Dyck was silent while the waiter was placing the meat course. During the plate-changing interval I became unpleasantly conscious of the presence – the curiously obtrusive presence – of a dark-faced, black-mustachioed little man sitting two tables away, and apparently engrossed in his dinner. Why this one foreign-looking individual, out of the many late diners comfortably filling the large room, should disturb me, I could not determine; but the vague disquietude came – and remained. Twice I thought I caught the small man watching my tablemate furtively from beneath his heavy eyebrows; and when Van Dyck began to speak again, I was almost certain I detected that half mechanical cocking of an ear which betrays the intentional and eager eavesdropper.

      "The one and only woman," said Van Dyck musingly, taking up the thread of the table talk at the point where it had been broken by the shifting of plates. "That is