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                           THE PACE THAT KILLS

                               A Chronicle

                             By EDGAR SALTUS


    "_Pourquoi la mort? Dites, plutot, pourquoi la vie?_"
    --RADUSSON

    CHICAGO, NEW YORK, AND SAN FRANCISCO
    BELFORD, CLARKE & COMPANY
    PUBLISHERS
    London: H. J. DRANE, Lovell's Court, Paternoster Row

    Copyright, 1889,
    BY EDGAR SALTUS.


    TO
    JOHN A. RUTHERFURD.
    NEW YORK, _June 10, 1889_.




PART I.




I.


"I wish you a happy New Year, sir."

It was the servant, green of livery, the yellow waistcoat slashed with
black, bearing the coffee and fruit.

"Put it there, please," Roland answered. And then, in recognition of the
salutation, he added, "Thanks: the same to you."

"H'm," he mused, as the man withdrew, "I ought to have tipped him, I
suppose."

He leaned from the bed, poured some milk into a cup, and for a second
nibbled at a slice of iced orange. Through the transom came a faint odor
of home-made bread, and with it the rustle of a gown and a girl's clear
laugh. The room itself was small. It was furnished in a fashion which
was unsuggestive of an hotel, and yet did not resemble that of a
private house. The curtain had been already drawn. Beyond was a lake,
very blue in the sunlight, bulwarked by undulant hills. Below, on the
road, a dogcart fronted by a groom was awaiting somebody's pleasure.

"It is late," he reflected, and raised a napkin to his lips. As he did
so he noticed a package of letters which the napkin must have concealed.
He took up the topmost and eyed it. It had been addressed to the
Athenaeum Club, Fifth Avenue; but the original direction was erased, and
Tuxedo Park inserted in its stead. On the upper left-hand corner the
impress of a firm of tailors shone in blue. Opposite was the engraving
of a young woman supported by 2-1/2_d._ He put it down again and glanced
at the others. The superscriptions were characterless enough; each bore
a foreign stamp, and to one as practised as was he, each bore the token
of the dun.

"If they keep on bothering me like this," he muttered, "I shall
certainly place the matter in the hands of my attorney." And thereat,
with the air of a man who had said something insultingly original, he
laughed aloud, swallowed some coffee, and dashed his head in the pillow.
In and out of the corners of his mouth a smile still played; but
presently his fancy must have veered, for the muscles of his lips
compressed, and as he lay there, the arms clasped behind the head, the
pink silk of his sleeves framing and tinting his face, and in the eyes
the expression of one prepared to meet Fate and outwit it, a possible
observer who could have chanced that way would have sat himself down to
study and risen up perplexed.

Anyone who was at Columbia ten years ago will remember Roland
Mistrial,--Roland Mistrial 3d, if you please,--and will recall the wave
of bewilderment which swept the campus when that young gentleman, on the
eve of graduation, popularity on one side and honors on the other,
suddenly, without so much as a p. p. c., left everything where it was
and betook himself to other shores. The flight was indeed erratic, and
numerous were the rumors which it excited; but Commencement was at hand,
other issues were to be considered, bewilderment subsided as
bewilderment ever does, the college dispersed, and when it assembled
again the Mistrial mystery, though unelucidated, was practically forgot.

In the neighborhood of Washington Square, however, on the northwest
corner of Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue to be exact, there were others
whose memories were more retentive. Among them was Roland's grandfather,
himself a graduate, founder of the Mistrial fellowship, and judge of the
appellate court. And there was Roland's father, a graduate too, a
gentleman widely respected, all the more so perhaps because he had run
for the governorship and lost it. And again there was Roland's aunt, a
maiden lady of whom it is recorded that each day of her life she got
down on her knees and thanked God he had made her a Mistrial. In
addition to these, there were, scattered along the Hudson, certain
maternal relatives--the Algaroths, the Baxters, and the Swifts; Bishop
Algaroth in particular, who possessed such indomitable vigor that when
at the good old age of threescore and ten he decided to depart this
life, the impression prevailed that he had died very young for him. None
of these people readily forgot. They were a proud family and an
influential one--influential not merely in the social sense, but
influential in political, legal, in church and university circles as
well; a fact which may have had weight with the Faculty when it was
called upon to deal with Roland Mistrial 3d. But be that as it may, the
cause of the young man's disappearance was never officially given. Among
the rumors which it created was one to the effect that his health was
affected; in another his mind was implicated; and in a third it was his
heart. Yet as not one of these rumors had enough evidential value behind
it to concoct an anonymous letter on, they were suffered to go their way
undetained, very much as Roland had already gone his own.

That way led him straight to the Golden Gate and out of it to Japan.
Before he reached Yeddo his grandfather left the planet and a round sum
of money behind. Of that round sum the grandson came in for a portion.
It was not fabulous in dimensions, but in the East money goes far. In
this case it might have gone on indefinitely had not the beneficiary
seen fit to abandon the languors of the Orient for the breezier
atmosphere of the west. The Riviera has charms of its own. So, too, have
Paris and Vienna. Roland enjoyed them to the best of his ability. He
even found London attractive, and became acclimated in Pall Mall. In the
latter region he learned one day that his share of the round sum had
departed and his father as well. The conjunction of these incidents was
of such a character that he at once took ship for New York.

It was not that he was impatient to revisit the misgoverned city which
he had deserted ten years before. He had left it willingly enough, and
he had seldom regretted it since. The pins and needles on which he sat
were those of another make. He was uninformed of the disposition of his
father's property, and he felt that, were not every penny of it
bequeathed to him, he would be in a tight box indeed.

He was at that time just entering his thirtieth year--that age in which
a man who has led a certain life begins to be particular about the
quality of his red pepper, and anxious too that the supply of it shall
not tarry. Though meagre of late, the supply had been sufficient. But at
present the palate was a trifle impaired. Where a ten-pound note had
sufficed for its excitement, a hundred now were none too strong. Roland
Mistrial--3d no longer--wanted money, and he wanted plenty of it. He
had exact ideas as to its usefulness, and none at all regarding its
manufacture. He held, as many have done and will continue to do, that
the royal road to it leads through a testament; and it was in view of
the opening vistas which that road displayed that he set sail for New
York.

And now, six weeks later, on this fair noonday of a newer year, as he
lay outstretched in bed, you would have likened him to one well
qualified to keep a mother awake and bring her daughter dreams. Our
canons of beauty may be relative, but, such as they are, his features
accorded with them--disquietingly even; for they conveyed the irritating
charm of things we have hoped for, striven for, failed to get, and then
renounced with thanksgiving. They made you anxious about their
possessor, and fearful too lest the one dearly-beloved might chance to
see them, and so be subjugated by their spell. They were features that
represented good stock, good breeding, good taste, good looks--every
form of goodness, in fact, save, it may be, the proper one. But the
possible lack of that particular characteristic was a matter over which
hesitation well might be. We have all of us a trick of flattering
ourselves with the fancy that, however obtuse our neighbor is, we at
least are gifted with the insight of a detective--a faculty so rare and
enviable that the blunders we make must be committed with a view to its
concealment; yet, despite presumable shrewdness, now and then a face
will appear that eludes cataloguing, and leaves the observer perplexed.
Roland Mistrial's was one of these.

And now, as the pink silk of his shirt-sleeves tinted it, the expression
altered, and behind his contracted brows hurried processions of shifting
scenes. There was that initial catastrophe which awaited him almost on
the wharf--the discovery that his father had left him nothing, and that
for no other reason in the world than because he had nothing whatever
to leave--nothing, in fact, save the hereditary decoration of and right
of enrolment in the Society of the Cincinnati, the which, handed down
since Washingtonian days from one Mistrial to another, he held, as his
forefathers had before him, in trust for the Mistrials to be.

No, he could not have disposed of that, even had he so desired; but
everything else, the house on Tenth Street,--built originally for a
country-seat, in times when the Astor House was considered rather far
uptown,--bonds, scrip, and stocks, disappeared as utterly as had they
never been; for Roland's father, stricken with that form of dementia
which, to the complete discouragement of virtue, battens on men that
have led the chastest lives, had, at that age in which the typical rake
is forced to haul his standard down, surrendered himself to senile
debauchery, and in the lap of a female of uncertain attractions--of
whose mere existence no one had been previously aware--placed
title-deeds and certificates of stock. In a case such as this the
appeal of the rightful heir is listened to with such patience that judge
and jury too have been known to pass away and leave the tale unended.
And Roland, when the earliest dismay had in a measure subsided, saw
himself closeted with lawyers who offered modicums of hope in return for
proportionate fees. Then came a run up the Hudson, the welcomeless
greeting which waited him there, and the enervating imbecility of his
great aunt, whose fingers, mummified by gout, were tenacious enough on
the strings of her purse. That episode flitted by, leaving on memory's
camera only the degrading tableau of coin burrowed for and unobtained.
And through it all filtered torturesome uncertainties, the knowledge of
his entire inability to make money, the sense of strength misspent, the
perplexities that declined to take themselves away, forebodings of the
morrow, nay of the day even as well, the unbanishable dread of want.

But that for the moment had gone. He turned on his elbow and glanced
over at a card-case which lay among the silver-backed brushes beyond,
and at once the shock he had resummoned fled. Ah, yes! it had gone
indeed, but at the moment it had been appalling enough. The morrow at
least was secure; and as he pondered over its possibilities they faded
before certain episodes of the previous day--that chance encounter with
Alphabet Jones, who had insisted he should pack a valise and go down
with Trement Yarde and himself to Tuxedo; and at once the incidents
succeeding the arrival paraded through his thoughts. There had been the
late dinner to begin with; then the dance; the girl to whom some one had
presented him, and with whom he had sat it out; the escape of the year,
the health that was drunk to the new one, and afterwards the green baize
in the card-room; the bank which Trement Yarde had held, and finally the
successful operation that followed, and which consisted in cutting that
cherub's throat to the tune of three thousand dollars. It was all there
now in the card-case; and though, as sums of money go, it was hardly
quotable, yet in the abstract, forethought and economy aiding, it
represented several months of horizons solid and real. The day was
secure; as for the future, who knew what it might contain? A grave
perhaps, and in it his aunt.




II.


"If I had been killed in a duel I couldn't be better." It was Jones the
novelist describing the state of his health. "But how is my friend and
brother in virtue?"

"Utterly ramollescent," Roland answered, confidingly. "What the French
call _gaga_."

The mid-day meal was in progress, and the two men, seated opposite each
other, were dividing a Demidorf salad. They had been schoolmates at
Concord, and despite the fact that until the day before they had not met
for a decennium, the happy-go-lucky intimacy of earlier days had eluded
Time and still survived. Throughout the glass-enclosed piazza other
people were lunching, and every now and then Jones, catching a wandering
eye, would bend forward a little and smile. Though it was but the first
of the year, the weather resembled that of May. One huge casement was
wide open. There was sunlight everywhere, flowers too, and beyond you
could see the sky, a dome of opal and sapphire blent.

"Well," Jones replied, "I can't say you have altered much. But then who
does? You remember, don't you"--and Jones ran on with some anecdote of
earlier days.

But Roland had ceased to listen. It was very pleasant here, he told
himself. There was a freedom about it that the English country-house,
however charming, lacked. There was no one to suggest things for you to
do, there was no host or hostess to exact attention, and the women were
prettier, better dressed, less conventional, and yet more assured in
manner than any that he had encountered for years. The men, too, were a
good lot; and given one or two more little surprises, such as he had
found in the card-room, he felt willing to linger on indefinitely--a
week at least, a month if the fare held out. His eyes roamed through the
glitter of the room. Presently, at a neighboring table, he noticed the
girl with whom he had seen the old year depart: she was nodding to him;
and Roland, with that courtesy that betokens the foreigner a mile away,
rose from his seat as he bowed in return.

Jones, whom little escaped, glanced over his shoulder. "By the way, are
you on this side for good?" he asked; and Roland answering with the
vague shrug the undetermined give, he hastened to add--"or for bad?"

"That depends. I ran over to settle my father's estate, but they seem to
have settled it for me. After all, this is no place for a pauper, is
it?"

"The wolf's at the door, is he?"

Roland laughed shortly. "At the door? Good Lord! I wish he were! He's in
the room."

"There, dear boy, never mind. Wait till spring comes and marry an
heiress. There are so many hereabouts that we use them for export
purposes. They are a glut in the market. There's a fair specimen. Ever
meet her before?"

"Meet whom?"

"That girl you just bowed to. They call her father Honest Paul. Oh, if
you ask me why, I can't tell. It's a nick-name, like another. It may be
because he says Amen so loud in church. A number of people have made him
trustee, but whether on that account or not they never told. However,
he's a big man, owns a mile or two up there near the Riverside. I should
rate him at not a penny less than ten million."

"What did you say his name was?"

"Dunellen--the Hon. Paul Dunellen. At one time--"

Jones rambled on, and again Roland had ceased to listen. But it was not
the present now that claimed him. At the mention of the plutocrat
something from the past came back and called him there--a thing so
shadowy that, when he turned to interrogate, it eluded him and
disappeared. Then at once, without conscious effort, an episode which
he had long since put from him arose and detained his thought. But what
on earth, he wondered, had the name of Dunellen to do with that? And for
the moment dumbly perplexed, yet outwardly attentive, he puzzled over
the connection and tried to find the link; yet that too was elusive: the
name seemed to lose its suggestiveness, and presently it sank behind the
episode it had evoked.

"Of course," Jones was saying, in reference, evidently, to what had gone
before--"of course as millionaires go he is not first chop. Jerolomon
could match him head or tail for all he has, and never miss it if he
lost. Ten million, though, is a tidy sum--just enough to entertain on. A
penny less and you are pinched. Why, you would be surprised--"

"Has he any