Captivating Mary Carstairs

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

THE CHIEF CONSPIRATOR SECURES A PAL

In a rear room of a quaint little house uptown, a great bronzed-faced man sat at a piano, a dead pipe between his teeth, and absently played the most difficult of Beethoven's sonatas. Though he played it divinely, the three men who sat smoking and talking in a near-by corner paid not the least attention to him. The player, it seemed, did not expect them to: he paid very little attention himself.

Next to the selection of members, that is, no doubt, the most highly prized thing about the Curzon Club: you are not expected to pay attention unless you want to. It is a sanctuary where no one can bore you, except yourself. The members have been chosen with this in mind, and not chosen carelessly.

Lord Pembroke, who married a Philadelphian, is quoted as saying that the Curzon is the most democratic club in a too confoundedly democratic country. M. Arly, the editor, has told Paris that it is the most exclusive club in the world. Probably both were right. The electing board is the whole club, and a candidate is stone-dead at the first blackball; but no stigma attaches to him for that. Of course, it is a small club. Also, though money is the least of all passports there, it is a wealthy club. No stretch of the imagination could describe its dues as low. But through its sons of plutocracy, and their never-ending elation at finding themselves in, has arisen the Fund, by which poor but honest men can join, and do join, with never a thought of ways and means. Of these Herbert Horning, possibly the best-liked man in the club, who supported a large family off the funny department of a magazine, was one. He had spurned the suggestion when it was first made to him, and had reluctantly foregone his election; whereon Peter Maginnis had taken him aside, a dash of red in his ordinarily composed eye.

"How much?" he demanded brutally.

"How much for what?"

"How much for you?" roared Peter. "How much must the club pay you to get you in?"

Horning stared, pained.

"God meant no man to be a self-conscious ass," said Peter more mildly. "The club pays you a high compliment, and you have the nerve to reply that you don't take charity. I suppose if Congress voted you a medal for writing the funniest joke in America, you'd have it assayed and remit the cash. Chuck it, will you? Once in a year we find a man we want, and then we go ahead and take him. We don't think much of money here but—as I say, how much?"

The "but" implied that Horning did, and hurt as it was meant to. He came into the club, took cheerfully what they offered him that way, and felt grateful ever afterwards that Maginnis had steered him to the light.

The big man, Maginnis himself, sat on at the piano, his great fingers rambling deftly over the keys. He was playing Brahms now and doing it magnificently. He was fifteen stone, all bone and muscle, and looked thirty pounds heavier, because you imagined, mistakenly, that he carried a little fat. He was the richest man in the club, at least so far as prospects went, but he wore ready-made clothes, and one inferred, correctly, that a suit of them lasted him a long time....