The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX
THE FORTUNE MAKES PORT
OH, glory!— Think of it, think of it!" Alan sighed; not of the feast this time, for that was long past, but of miracles in general.
For he and Mark—and the fortune of the Ingrams—were aboard a boat that puffed and inched its way into the canal under the young stars. They sat up late, watching the slow progress along the ancient waterway, catching through the darkness dim gleams of single-arched bridges spanning the water with high-flung, graceful curves; mulberry orchards sighing in the night-wind; shrines half seen; villages passed in mantling purple gloom. There was a compelling mystery about the canal, so magnificent even in its decay, the triumph of its crumbling masonry half-shrouded by the night.
And they were going to Shanghai—to Shanghai, with sycee silver in their pockets and the treasure at their feet. And Ping-Pong was safe asleep in a white crib at the Mission, Mark thought complacently. He refused to regard her as "bad joss pidgin," despite the confusion she had wrought in their identification. Miss Macdougal had stood with Dr. Rodney and half the settlement to see them off at the landing-place. She had run back and fetched Ping-Pong, and had made her wave a small fist at Mark.
"When ye get to America," Miss Macdougal had shouted, "give my love to Jane! She must be a fine lass!"
Mark smiled vaguely now, half-asleep over a remembered chronicle of the last few hours. The boys turned in at last, and Mark whacked his brother on the shoulder.
"What do you think of my policy now?" he inquired.
"Which policy?" Alan yawned.
"'Wait till something turns up.'"
"Oh, shucks!" said Alan, evasively.
Next day they made their puffing advance through narrow and twisting water-streets of ancient cities, where balconies overhung the stream and crooked stone steps led to steep alleys above. The press of boats here was very great. It was like a traffic jam in New York, Mark said, with no "cop's" whistle to straighten out the tangle. The boats crawled along side by side, some headed up, some down. Their progress was attended by the usual yelling and gong-beating of Chinese water-travel, and the boys watched it all with lazy amusement, thankful that they did not have to pilot the Sham-Poo through this bedlam.
"Poor little old Sham-Poo," Mark mused. "I rather liked her, at the last."
Suddenly Alan seized Mark's arm. He looked almost ghastly.
"In the name of goodness, what's the matter with you?" his brother demanded quickly.
"I say, Mark! Am I so far gone as that? I—oh, nonsense!"
"Easy now, old man. What's up?" Mark urged gently.
Alan, indeed, was white and nervous; he had felt the long strain more heavily than his happy-go-lucky brother.
"It's bosh, of course. I guess it's because of eating nothing but muddy rice for so long. Don't think I'm silly—but—I thought I saw—Jane!"
Mark frowned. Then he clapped Alan on the shoulder.
"That's all right," he said. "You're pretty nearly all in. So am I. Buck up, now. Look at that jolly old house—it looks as if it was holding its skirt up out of the water!"
But Alan hesitated miserably.
"Mark," he said in a low voice, "you look. I don't dare. Sitting in the stern of a launch, to the right, just beyond the next boat."
Mark laughed to humor him.
"All right, I'll look."
The next moment his hand tightened painfully on his brother's arm, and Alan looked up to see him gazing, white-faced, across the waterway.
"It—it is Jane!" he whispered. "We—we couldn't both see it—not even with the rice."
But at that moment the vision changed to reality. Mr. Bolliver, who would scarcely be included in the hallucination, sprang up from beside the little girl whose eyes had met Mark's. They never knew how the space tween them was traversed. Alan had a vague impression of springing to the gunwale of the boat close beside them—of an indignant native outcry—of Mark ahead of him, the box in his grasp. And the next instant warm flesh-and-blood arms were around them both.
"You mustn't! We're too dirty!" Mark heard himself saying, marveling all the while at his commonplace remark, as though he had seen Jane only an hour ago. But it was Jane's own voice that cried:
"You're not dirty. I don't care! Oh, we're not any of us dreaming, are we?"
Things became incoherent. A lump of silver was tossed to the gaping master of the boys' boat, and he presently slipped into a backwater to head round for Changhow. And Mr. Bolliver's launch was ordered to turn around and make back to Shanghai as fast as possible.
"I'm so tired of trying to figure things out," Mark said, holding his head. "Oh, really, this is the worst of all—it can't be true."
But Jane was gazing, sober-eyed, at a canvas-covered box.
"You don't mean to say," she breathed, "that it's really the fortune of the Ingrams!"
"I suppose it's really you I'm talking to," Mark said. "I don't even yet see how on earth you happen to be real. But it is the fortune of the Ingrams. You wait! We don't open it here, with the vulgar eye of the multitude upon us."
"But what about the baby?" Mr. Bolliver demanded suddenly. "I knew there couldn't be one—and there isn't."
"But there was!" the boys cried together, like a Greek chorus. And the tale of Ping-Pong was told.
"Oh, why didn't you keep her!" Jane mourned. "I could have brought her up to be a—a—what is it, now?"
"An ornament to the community?" Mr. Bolliver suggested.
"Yes," Alan said, "I can see the aunts standing for any Chinee baby roaming about their premises!"
"She certainly threw me off the scent," Mr. Bolliver said. And off went the talk at a tangent, leading finally to the discovery of the mixed telegrams. (Mark had read and reread the one which, had puzzled the settlement gentleman.)
"Poor Nick!" Mr. Bolliver murmured. "Really, if all his business is transacted along these lines! He's no older than I am, but—upon my soul!"
Alan was too weary for more thought. He could only shake his head at intervals and mutter:
"Think of it! It's not possible, you know—none of it!"
Mr. Nicholas Tyler paced his office in a more desperate frame of mind than ever. Here lay the good tidings, in his hand—and Bart and Jane were steaming away from them. How could he catch them now? How stop them from an anxious and vain chase all over Changhow? Another telegram to the settlement—that would be the thing to do!
"Yes, yes, that's it," Mr. Tyler agreed with himself distractedly, and he despatched his message.
It was answered by one which said that the boys had left for Shanghai.
"Tut, tut," Mr. Tyler mused in annoyance. "All the journey for nothing, and no way to turn them back. My faith, I've not handled any of this too well."
He was still pondering over his various blunders when a motley and joyous party burst into his office.
"Upon my soul! My faith!" was all that he could ejaculate, alternately.
Mark and Alan thought they would succumb soon if there must be many more explanations. But explanations were inevitable; all weary and dirty as they were, they found themselves caught once more in the net of talk. To steady himself, and get back to reality, Mark sometimes let his eyes rest wonderingly on the familiar figure of his sister—familiar, and yet so strange, too. It seemed good to see her earnest face, her straight tawny hair—the blue tape that somehow took him back to Resthaven still in evidence upon it—good to meet the steady blue gaze of her eyes, filled now with pride and eagerness. And at the end of all the talk, there was the canvas-covered box still to be accounted for.
Mark rose and slipped off the duck casing, and there stood revealed the little polished lacquer chest, with, the seal that he had broken in the house of Huen—was it years ago?
"Open it, old Jane," he said.
So Jane lifted the cover, and there floated up to her unbelieving eyes the dusky gleam of gold, the cloudy radiance of pearls, the deep fire of rubies, the cool sea-green of jade. She touched the things cautiously, but they remained as solid as before.
"Oh, who could imagine it!" she said in a hushed voice. "I—I thought it would be bank-notes!"
Mr. Tyler was peering over one shoulder and Mr. Bolliver over the other.
"Unless I'm very much mistaken," Mr. Tyler said, "these things are worth more than two hundred thousand taels to-day. My soul, Bart, look at that ruby alone!"
"Please take 'em all away," said Mark wearily, "and put them in your safe before something more happens to them. And the sooner they're turned into solid, secure money in the bank, the happier I'll be."
"But oh!" said Jane, looking wistfully within the closing lid, "it's such a wonderful treasure, just the way it is!"
"Yes," Alan commented, "I suppose you'd like to keep 'em to put around on the mantel-piece and look at, wouldn't you?"
"You are just the same, aren't you!" Jane remarked.
That evening at sunset, when the boys had gleefully changed into hastily purchased clothes and dined leisurely off a meal in which everything but rice figured, they all went out upon the bund to stroll and talk yet a little more.
"I wonder what will become of Chun Lon?" Jane mused.
"There he lies now, for all I know or care," Mark said, "in his precious dead city. I suppose his boat-coolies untied him when they woke up, and everybody was in a frightful stew."
"He won't find Shanghai a hospitable spot," (Mr. Bolliver said, "nor another job as mess-boy so easy to get. Tyler'll see to that. And if the Sikhs ever get him, he'll bewail the day he met you."
"Think of its being all over," Alan sighed.
"And the old thing coming true after all," Mark added.
"What old thing?" asked Jane.
"About the fortune of the Ingrams coming and going with the Fortune of the Indies. Jane, you certainly did start a ball rolling when you began prying into that story."
"I'm glad I did now, I think," she said. "If China was any more wild and exciting when Great-grandfather Mark had dealings with it," said Alan, "why I'm glad I didn't live a century earlier."
"Oh, I don't know," Jane said, dreamily.
She was staring out over the bund at the busy Whangpoo with its moving traffic of vessels. Was it a trick of the blinding sunset on this tangle of masts and funnels? She saw vaguely, yet clearly, too, a lofty ship that towered, all gold across the sun, above the other boats. They were setting sail aboard her. How strange! There was not a breath of wind, yet one by one they shimmered into place—inclusive of the moonsail. . . . A mail leaned at the taffrail, with his blue eyes set eastward. "Haul on the bowlin', the bowlin' haul!" She was weighing for home—to run before the trades, to fight around the Horn, to thunder up and up the long Atlantic seas till she dropped anchor in a gray harbor on a gray shore. A pillared house would watch for her from among its elms, and two little ladies would run down from the curved stone steps to the wharf. They would be very old ladies, in little gray gowns. Was it Jane they were watching for, and not Great-grandfather Mark, after all? There was no clipper ship there in the Whangpoo River. How could there be?
"Dear, dear little aunties!" murmured Jane.
"Wake up," said Mark, putting an arm suddenly over her shoulder. "This is no place to sleep, though I'd like to. Think of a real bed, Alan. Ai-ya!"
Jane slid her hand through his arm. She looked back at the darkening river. The Fortune of the Indies was gone, standing out with a fair breeze for Resthaven.