Part 3 (2/2)

However, aesthetics, like everything else, has its place in human economy and no more. No one aboard the _Cypriani_ became so absorbed in the marvels of nature as to become insensible to other pleasures. The air, new and fine from the hands of its Maker, acquired a distinct flavor of nicotine as it flitted past the yacht. From some hidden depth rose the subdued and convalescent snores of that early retirer, the sailing-master's wife. Below forward, two deck-hands were thoughtfully playing set-back for pennies, while a machinist sat by and read a sporting extra by a swinging bulb. Above forward, on a coil of rope, McTosh, the head steward and one of Mr. Carstairs's oldest servants, smoked a bad pipe, and expectorated stoically into the Hudson.

The thought of the essential commonplaceness of this sort of thing recurred to Peter Maginnis. For all his life of idleness, which was, as it were, accidental, Peter was essentially a man of action; and life's sedentary movements irked him sorely.

”Who is the individual monkeying around at the bow?” he asked presently.

”It is Mr. Bissett, the s.h.i.+p's engineer, who is putting a coat of white lead over the yacht's name.”

”Aha! Aren't we old-sleuthy, though! And what's that piece of stage-play for?”

”All these little hookers,” said Varney, ”are listed in a book, which many persons own. Why have the local press tell everybody to-morrow that the yacht _Cypriani_ belonging to Mr. Carstairs, husband once-removed to our own Mrs. Elbert Carstairs, is anch.o.r.ed off these sh.o.r.es?”

”It seems,” said Peter, ”like a lot of smoke for such a little fire.”

He got up and sprawled on the rail, his yellow Panama pulled far over his eyes, his gaze fixed on the s.h.i.+ning water.

”First and last, I've seen rivers in my time,” he said presently, ”big and little, pretty and not, clean and soiled, decent and indecent. Yes, boy,” said he, ”you can take it from me that I've seen the world's darnedest in the matter of rivers, and I have liked them all from Ganges to the Sacramento and back again. There was a time when I didn't have that sort of personal feeling for 'em, but a little chap up in Canada, he helped me to the light. He was the keenest on rivers I ever knew.”

He broke off to yawn greatly, started to resume, thought better of it, checked himself, and presently said in an absent voice:

”No, that's too long to tell.”

”There's two hours till bedtime.”

Peter straightened and began strolling aimlessly about the deck, half regretting that they had decided to spend the evening on the yacht.

Varney looked after him with a certain sense of guilt. Against this background of quiet night and moonlit peace, his enterprise began to look very small and easy. A ramble through the pleasant woods over there, a little girl met and played with, a leisurely stroll hand-in-hand down a woodland path to the yacht--was it for this that he had begged the a.s.sistance of Peter Maginnis, of the large administrative abilities and the teeming energies? Varney began to be a little ashamed of himself. To follow out Peter's own figure, it appeared that he had called out the fire department to help him put out a smoking sheet of note-paper on a hearth.

Soon, in one of his goings and comings, Peter halted. ”There was another Hunston dispatch in the paper this morning,” he vouchsafed.

”Politics?”

”Said the reform movement was a joke.”

”Good one?”

”Good movement, you mean?”

”No--good joke.”

”No reform movement is ever a good joke, under any circ.u.mstances whatsoever. Where it appears a joke at all, it is the kind that would appeal only to pinheads of the dottiest nature.”

”I see.”

”I'm going up there to-morrow,” said Peter, nodding toward the town, ”and look into it a little. If there is time, I may even decide to show these fellows how a reform proposition ought to be handled to ensure results.”

Far off on the hill a single light twinkled through the trees, very yellow against the pale moonlight. Varney's eye fell upon it and absently held it. It was Mary Carstairs's light, though, of course, he had no means of knowing that.

Presently Peter lolled around and looked at him. ”H'm! Sunk in a sodden slumber, I suppose?”

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