THE RED LEDGER. Frank L. Packard

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      Chapter III.

       A Month Later

       Table of Contents

      It was night in the Red Room of 2½ Dominic Court; but it was Ewen Stranway, not Henri Raoul Charlebois, who sat now at the antique desk under the soft glow of the red-shaded lamp. A strange, quickened sense of excitement was upon him. Before him lay a note written in Charlebois' angular, crabbed hand. So the time had come at last! This was to be his first active participation in——

      He leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head, and stared musingly around him. A month had gone since that morning when, following his strange afternoon experience in this same room here, he had entered the service of Henri Raoul Charlebois. He had done so after a night of troubled mental debate, prompted to his final decision by he could not exactly have explained what, except that perhaps a dogged determination to see the thing through, a vividly aroused curiosity, and, perhaps too, a haunting recollection of brown eyes that had looked at him very steadily, had all played their part. And, having come to Dominic Court, he had remained—he smiled gravely—because almost from the first moment he had become lost, engrossed in his surroundings and his work, and because as the days went by he had come more and more to know and respect and admire that little old white-haired gentleman in the red velvet jacket and shoes, and the red skull-cap with its bobbing tassel, whom once he had thought mad.

      His mind, harking back now over the weeks that were gone, lingered upon the picture that was conjured up. Reality and unreality seemed curiously blended. The composite picture was strange indeed! Far from being all that it seemed was this row of four old-fashioned, ivy-coloured houses here that faced the neatly kept, but obscure little courtyard. True, to the outsider, it was but a row of four quaint old Dutch dwellings, each with its separate stoop and porch, each with its separate door and ponderous brass knocker, each with its separate and distinct ménage. And so, too, it was to the tradesmen, the grocers and the butchers; to the postman in his daily rounds; to the patrolman who, strolling leisurely along Sixth Avenue, turned off, walked up the few yards of passageway between the buildings abutting on that thoroughfare, cast an accustomed glance around the court, perfunctorily twirled his stick, and went back to his beat again. Four to all of these; one to those within! The mail delivered at 1, 1½ or 2 Dominic Court came quickly through the inconspicuous connecting doors at the lower end of each hallway to this desk here in the Red Room where he sat to-night.

      Curious, too, were the inmates! Of many walks in life, of many nationalities, they came and went, bewildering, almost kaleidoscopic in their shifting changes—changes that embraced both numbers and personnel. And here, too, should this by any chance be remarked by the profane, a most commonplace, uninteresting explanation blunted at once the edge of one's appetite for information. At 1 Dominic Court, Mrs. Morrison, a middle-aged widow, kept lodgers; at 1½ Dominic Court, a young French couple, Pierre Verot and his wife, kept lodgers; at 2 Dominic Court, Miss Priscilla Bates, an elderly lady from whose gracious air of dignity and culture one said at once, "she must have seen better days, poor soul," kept lodgers. And 2½ Dominic Court? Ah, that was apart! There an eccentric little old gentleman, who bothered no one and was bothered by no one in return, lived alone with a housekeeper and his books.

      Who would have dreamed that, behind its mask of peace and quiet, slumbering old Dominic Court, in the dead of night, at noontime, at dawn, at all hours and as a single entity, would suddenly and often awake to busy and restless activity, not with confusion or commotion, but as some high-powered, sleek and well-groomed piece of machinery, confident in its own mighty force, starts with eloquent serenity into motion!

      Charlebois! Stranway's face softened. He had come to know Charlebois. He had come to understand the meaning of that massive, brass-bound Red Ledger which contained those strange accounts contracted in the years before when, sick and destitute, without means of sustenance, some in sympathy and love and kindness had held out a helping hand to Charlebois—and some had spurned him in his misery, callously, indifferently, plunging him into still blacker depths of despair, turning from him as from an unclean, leprous thing, remembering never the tie of human kinship, and even using his helplessness on occasions to further their own nefarious ends. He had come to understand how the stumbling upon gold in the far Northland, the foundation of that fortune which had multiplied and re-multiplied into untold wealth, had been devoted to the building up of a stupendous system whose ramifications spread out limitlessly, secretly keeping Charlebois in intimate touch with those, widely scattered now, whose names were written on the Red Ledger's pages. And thus, lavishing thousands if need be, lavishing endless time and effort, where perhaps the original obligation had been no more than a cheery word of comfort and encouragement, Charlebois counted never the cost that at the psychological moment he might bring joy and happiness and peace into the lives of those who once, in his dire need, had brought a ray of sunlight into his own; and, too, as red was neither warm nor cold, the symbol of impartiality which Charlebois had adopted, with equal tenacity of purpose, with an equal outpouring of his wealth, immutably, yet without malice or vindictiveness, governed only by a broad and discerning sense of justice, where only retribution was merited an hundredfold, he settled at maturity those grimmer entries on the debit side.

      Mad? Charlebois mad because of this? Stranway shook his head. Was there anyone, indeed, into whose mind this very idea had not come as a fascinating subject for speculation—what it would be like if all the good and all the ill one enjoyed and suffered through life at the hands of others should be tabulated and repaid in kind? He, Stranway, had thought of it. Everybody had! But only Charlebois out of all the world had put into practice what dreamers dreamed of. Mad? He had found Charlebois a strange and complex character perhaps, eccentric perhaps; but a man full of sterling honour, of wondrous human sympathy and love, gentle, tender-hearted as a woman, fleeing in almost ridiculous dismay from a word of thanks, panic-stricken at the first expression of gratitude from those he so nobly served—and yet ever ruled by the same inflexible purpose to pay impartially each and every account no matter what it might be, a purpose from which he neither СКАЧАТЬ