New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Prostitutes -- Fiction
That same evening, his crisp brown mustache hiding the meaning of his
mouth, and his drooping lids concealing the purpose of his steel-gray
eyes, Wesley Dyker, from the rooms he had rented in an East Side
Assembly district, took a cab northwestward through the rain to
Riverside Drive. He was dressed precisely as he dressed to go to the
house of Rose Légère, but he was bound for the house of Joshua Lennox.
There he had plainly been expected. The liveried, tight-lipped
servant, who opened the iron grill-work door for him, showed him
deferentially down a long tiled hall and into, not the formal white
and gilt reception-room, but a comfortable, dimly-lighted apartment,
a smoking-room, hung with fading mediæval tapestries, the floor
covered with deep rugs of the Orient, and the chairs wide,
broad-armed, and upholstered in soft leather.
"Miss Lennox will be down in a moment, sir," said the servant. "May
I bring you anything, Mr. Dyker?"
Wesley shook his well-shaped head.
"No, thank you, Charles," he answered, and then, nodding to a
decanter that, under a wide, soft-shaded lamp, stood upon a corner
table: "Irish?" he asked.
Charles bowed, brought a tray, and, when Dyker had poured the
whiskey, added some seltzer, and lighted the cigarette that the guest
had taken from a wrought silver box on a nearby tabouret.
"That is all, Charles," said Dyker, and the servant silently left him
alone.
Wesley sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort. He liked the
house of the philanthropic merchant so well that he could have wished
its master liked him better, and when, within a few minutes, the
master himself chanced into the room, Dyker was prepared to be
diplomatic.
Joshua N. Lennox was the explanation of that Mr. Porter who held so
much power under him. The latter was tall and thin, the former short
and compact, but there all physical differences ended: Mr. Porter had
found his model in his employer. Here was the source of the
seneschal's gray hair and side-whiskers, his trap mouth tortured to
the line of benevolence, his calm gaze and his manner that combined
the precision of the surgeon with the gravity of the head of a
Sunday-school. Mr. Lennox, in fact, conducted the second largest
Bible Class in New York. He knew its textbook from the first chapter
of Genesis to the twenty-second chapter of the Revelation, and he
believed in the literal inspiration of every verse of the original
and of every syllable of the English translation.
It was in the voice in which he habitually addressed his Bible Class,
the voice of one uttering a benediction, that he said:
"Good-evening, Mr. Dyker."
Wesley put down his glass and rose to his feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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