Death of an Old Sinner Read Free Page A

military,” he counseled. “I’ll arrange it.” Then as an afterthought: “How is he with the bottle these days?”
    “Moderate,” Jimmie said.
    “And with the automobile?”
    “More cautious than he used to be.”
    The Judge leaned closer to Jimmie after a glimpse around. One of the lady delegates stood nearby, her back to them. “And with the ladies?”
    “More cautious than he used to be.”
    The Judge chuckled, forgetting then the temperate tune he sang himself these days. “I remember him on our first leave after the Battle of the Marne. We were in France together, you know.” He pulled himself up to a creaking attention. “Oh, by God, he was a man!”
    As soon as Judge Turner marched off, Madeline Barker swung around and laid her fingers on Jimmie’s arm. She had been a woman of great beauty, Jimmie thought. Much of it was there still as she ran on for fifty, but it was shadowed with bitterness, and more deeply now for her smile.
    “I was outside London, too, during the war, Mr. Jarvis. I wonder if we do not have some friends in common.”
    Jimmie could feel a prickle at the back of his neck: a legitimate danger signal or merely his own conscience? It was a difficult distinction. “No doubt we call all Englishmen our friends,” he said smiling and taking her hand. “Who could fail to, having lived with them?”
    “And English women?” said Miss Barker.
    Surely she was not that gauche! “What they lack in beauty, they atone in fervor,” he said, tacking into the weather to test it for storm.
    “And what they lack in fervor they atone in discretion,” she said.
    “I admire that quality in all people,” Jimmie said with all the considerable suavity he could muster. He pressed her fingers slightly before releasing them. “I expect I shall lean a great deal on your support, Madeline.”
    She gave his fingers a little squeeze in return. “I am but a fragile Barker on the sea of politics,” she said.
    There was something ludicrous in the bad pun as well as in the notion of her fragility. Miss Barker had run twice for Congress, unsuccessfully. She was all but resigned now to the making and breaking of other candidates, sitting on the State policy committee, and apparently she was not above a bit of intimidation after the candidate was made.
    “Forgive me for running off,” Jimmie said, “but I want very much to catch this train. Call me in New York? I promise an excellent lunch?” He put it all like a question which she must answer for him. If necessary, he could have caught a later train, but he felt it imperative to put Miss Barker congenially in her place. To stay and court her company, even to buy her a drink would, he thought, show alarm at her suggestion of intimacy with his affairs.
    “Thank you, Mr. Jarvis.”
    “Jimmie?” he prompted.
    “Jimmie,” she repeated, “good luck!”
    It was said with such conviction, he once more doubted everything save his conscience. As he got into his coat, he wondered if he was as much a hypocrite as he felt at that moment. The possibility depressed him.

3
    I T WAS THREE DAYS before Jimmie got home to Nyack, what with several things in a personal and business way to be put in quick order before the rumor of his candidacy got too far ahead of him. He talked to Mrs. Norris on the telephone, however, and confided that he was bringing home some rather extraordinary news.
    Consequently the house was aglow with lights when he turned into the driveway, and as soon as he put his foot on the step, he could see the housekeeper bounce across the living room like a robin, pushing her bosom ahead of her. If this was not what some men would call home, Jimmie mused, many a man would settle for it as a better than fair substitute.
    “Was it a provident trip, Mr. James?” the housekeeper inquired, taking his coat.
    “In a way you might say it was, Mrs. Norris. And in another way, you might say it was expensive. Where’s the old fellow?”
    She threw up her