The Luck of the Irish/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVII
WILLIAM sat sprawled in a comfortable canvas chair before the door of his room. The long veranda-gallery was deserted except for himself. He smoked, but only enough to keep the coal alive in his pipe. He was watching the rickshaw road through the interstices of the veranda rail.
It was difficult to believe that this was the middle of March. All over New York State, including the great city, there would be alternately rain, snow, sleet, sunshine, and blizzards. If you had offered William his choice he would have selected a blizzard of Wyoming dimensions. This weather here in Singapore took the starch out of a man. No matter how strong and healthy you were, you got tired quickly, the least exertion enervated you. At this moment it was picturesque enough—a bit of blue sea out yonder, and all the rest of the world dusted with gold of a late afternoon.
He fell to musing. He was always doing that nowadays. His wonder was undiminished; in fact, it went on growing and growing. He, William Grogan, here in Singapore, with scarcely a dream left unfulfilled! He worried a little. Things didn't work out that way, not even in his favorite novels.
Two little tan shoes flitting past his cellar window … and then this! A seven-dollar meerschaum pipe and a ticket around the world in his pocket! He laughed. Instead of the usual "God bless our home" he was going to have "The luck of the Irish" done in blue and red yarn—that is, if Ruth did not object.
Where were Greenwood and Clausen, the lovable old archæologists? Would he ever see them again? He recalled the Arab boy in Cairo, the ride to Suez, the big storm. … Married and settled down! And when he came home nights she'd play for him on the piano, those strange skin-tingling melodies she knew so much about. And there was that Jaipur elephant with the rheumatic leg!
Ruth, who had gone shopping, ought to be coming along soon. They were to sail at nine that night for Hong-Kong and home.
Ambition. How he was going to work when he got back to New York! Burns, Dolan & Co. had loomed very big once upon a time; but now he knew it to be only a step; and there would be other steps, each one higher than the other; and before he rested he was going up high. He knew it; there wasn't a particle of doubt in his mind.
There was only a speck in the amber. They would have to wait a little while for that home with the garden. Four thousand; that was a lot of money just then. That and a small mortgage would have built his castle from moat to turret. Well, they were young; they could wait. She wanted it so, and she was captain. When a woman got such an idea in her head, arguments were useless. He could get her point of view readily enough, but she could not get his. She paid for those pearls a thousand times over, but he couldn't convince her of that. One thing, he would never look upon a pearl again without a glow of anger. Sixteen little round white pebbles worth four thousand dollars!
He heard a footfall. He turned and saw Ruth coming toward him. There was a look on her face that quickened his pulse. She forced him back into the chair and perched herself upon the arm, curling her fingers in his hair.
"William Grogan," she said.
"Well, friend wife, what's happened?"
She told him.
Ruth laid the little box on the jeweler's counter. "I should like to price sixteen pearls to match these and fill out the string."
The jeweler emptied the box on a bit of velours. He rolled the pearls about with the tip of his finger, picked one up and scrutinized it carefully. Then he walked over to the window, where he adjusted his glass. More scrutiny. He returned.
"Are you under the impression, madam, that these are real pearls?" he asked, staring curiously at Ruth's pale but interesting face.
"Impression?" she echoed.
"Yes. I can give you sixteen that will match up these for about a hundred rupees, madam. These were originally made here in Singapore. Admirable imitations made of fish-scale."
"Fish scale?" Suddenly Ruth laughed.
The jeweler caught the hysterical note. "Yes, madam." His thought was: here is another American tourist who has been rooked.
"Thank you," she said, steadily. "You need not bother to match them, under the circumstances."
"Very well, madam." Deftly he replaced the artificial pearls in the box, which he extended to her with a bow.
Ruth went out into the street, into the mellowing sunshine. She paused at the curb irresolutely. The whole drama unrolled itself before her eyes, and then receded forever. She took off the lid of the box, poured the pearls into her hand, and then let them trickle into the gutter.
THE END