



Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive







BLACK IS WHITE

By George Barr Mccutcheon

Author Of “Graustark,” “Brewster's Millions,” “Truxton King,” “Rose In
The Ring,” “Mary Midthorne,” Etc.

London

Everett & Co., Ltd.

1915





BLACK IS WHITE




CHAPTER I

The two old men sat in the library, eyeing the blue envelope that lay
on the end of the long table nearest the fireplace, where a merry but
unnoticed blaze crackled in the vain effort to cry down the shrieks of
the bleak December wind that whistled about the corners of the house.

Someone had come into the room--they did not know who nor when--to poke
up the fire and to throw fresh coals into the grate. No doubt it was the
parlourmaid. She was always doing something of the sort. It seemed to
be her duty. Or, it might have been the housekeeper, in case the
parlourmaid was out for the evening. Whoever it was, she certainly had
poked up the fire, and in doing so had been compelled to push two pairs
of feet out of the way to avoid trampling upon them.

Still they couldn't recall having seen her. For that matter, it wasn't
of the slightest consequence. Of course, they might have poked it up
themselves and saved her the trouble, but these ancients were not in the
habit of doing anything that could be done by menials in the employ
of Mr Brood. Their minds were centred upon the blue envelope that
had arrived shortly after dinner. The fire was an old story; the blue
envelope was a novelty.

From some shifting spot far out upon the broad Atlantic the contents
of that blue envelope had come through the air, invisible, mysterious,
uncanny. They could not understand it at all. A wireless message! It was
the first of its kind they had seen, and they were very old men, who had
seen everything else in the world--if one could believe their boastful
tales.

They had sailed the seven seas and they had traversed all the lands of
the earth, and yet here was mystery. A man had spoken out of the air
a thousand miles away, and his words were lying there on the end of a
library-table, in front of a cheerful hearthstone, within reach of their
wistful fingers; and someone had come in to poke up the fire without
their knowledge. How could they be expected to know?

There was something maddening in the fact that the envelope would have
to remain unopened until young Frederic Brood came home for the night.
They found themselves wondering if by any chance he would fail to come
in at all. Their hour for retiring was ten o'clock, day in, day out.
As a rule they went to sleep about half-past eight. They seldom retired
unless someone made the act possible by first awakening them.

The clock on the wide mantelpiece had declared some time before, in
ominous tones, that half-past ten had arrived, and yet they were not
sleepy. They had not been so thoroughly wideawake in years.

Up to half-past nine they discussed the blue envelope with every inmate
of the house, from Mrs John Desmond, the housekeeper, down to the
voiceless but eloquent decanter of port that stood between them, first
on the arm of one chair, then the other. They were very old men;
they could soliloquise without in the least disturbing each other. An
observer would say, during these periods of abstraction, that their
remarks were addressed to the decanter, and that the poor decanter had
something to say in return. But, for all that, their eyes seldom left
the broad blue envelope that had lain there since half-past eight.

They knew that it came directly or indirectly from the man to whom
they owed their present condition of comfort and security after half
a century of vicissitudes; from the man whose life they had saved more
than once in those old, evil days when comforts were so few that they
passed without recognition in the maelstrom of events. From mid-ocean
James Brood was speaking to his son. His words--perhaps his cry for
help--were lying there on the end of the table, confined in a flimsy blue
envelope, and no one dared to liberate them.

Frederic Brood deserved a thrashing for staying out so late--at least,
so the decanter had been told a dozen times or more, and the clock,
too, for that matter, to say nothing of the confidences reposed in the
coal-scuttle, the fire implements, and other patient listeners of a like
character.

It may be well to state that these bosom friends and comrades of half a
hundred years had quarrelled at seven o'clock that evening over a very
important matter--the accuracy of individual timepieces. The watch of
Mr Danbury Dawes had said it was five minutes before seven; that of Mr
Joseph Riggs three minutes after. Since then neither had spoken to the
other, but each slyly had set his watch by the big clock in the hall
before going into dinner, and was prepared to meet any argument.

Twenty years ago these two old cronies had met James Brood in one of the
blackest holes of Calcutta, a derelict being swept to perdition with
the swiftness and sureness of a tide that knows no pause. They found him
when the dregs were at his lips and the stupor of defeat in his brain.
Without meaning to be considered Samaritans, good or bad, they dragged
him from the depths and found that they had revived _a man_. Those were
the days when James Brood's life meant nothing to him, days when he was
tortured by the thought that it would be all too long for him to endure;
yet he was not the kind to murder himself as men do who lack the courage
to go on living.

Weeks after the rescue in Calcutta, these two soldiers of fortune, and
another John Desmond, learned from the lips of the man himself that he
was not such as they, but rich in this world's goods, richer than the
Solomon of their discreet imagination. Shaken, battered, but sobered, he
related portions of his life's story to them, and they guessed the rest,
being men who had lived by correctly guessing for half the years of
their adventurous lives.

Like Brood they were Americans. But, unlike him, they had spent most of
their lives in the deserts of time and had sown seeds which could
never be reaped except in the form of narrative. Ever in pursuit of the
elusive thing called luck, they had found it only in hairbreadth escapes
from death, in the cunning avoidance of catastrophe, in devil-may-care
leaps in the dark, in all the ways known to men who find the world too
small.

Never had luck served them on a golden platter. For twenty-five years
and more these three men, Dawes, Riggs, and poor John Desmond, had
thrashed through the world in quest of the pot of gold at the foot of
the rainbow, only to find that the rainbow was for ever lifting, for
ever shifting; yet they complained not. They throve on misfortune, they
courted it along with the other things in life, and they were unhappy
only when ill luck singled one of them out and spared the others.

What Brood told them of his life brought the grim smile of appreciation
to the lips of each. He had married a beautiful foreigner--an Austrian,
they gathered--of excellent family, and had taken her to his home in
New York City, a house in lower Fifth Avenue where his father and
grandfather had lived before him. And that was the very house in
which two of the wayfarers, after twenty years, now sat in rueful
contemplation of a blue envelope.

A baby boy came to the Broods in the second year of their wedded life,
but before that there had come a man--a music-master, dreamy-eyed,
handsome, Latin; a man who played upon the harp as only the angels are
believed to play. In his delirious ravings Brood cursed this man and the
wife he had stolen away from him; he reviled the baby boy, even denying
him; he laughed with blood-curdling glee over the manner in which he had
cast out the woman who had broken his heart and crushed his pride; he
wailed in anguish over the mistake he had made in allowing the man to
live that he might gloat in triumph.

This much the three men who lifted him from hell were able to learn from
lips that knew not what they said, and they were filled with pity. Later
on, in a rational weakness, he told them more, and without curses. A
deep