The Surakarta/Chapter 15
XV
THE GUNSHOT WOUND AGAIN
She was in furs when she came in the first time he had seen her so. Furs, which by contrast give a look of daintiness even to coarse women, increased with her the natural delicacy of her face. Hereford felt that, though she had just come in out of the sharp October air, she gave the impression of being paler and even more determined than when he had seen her the evening before. Whatever uneasiness or agitation McAdams thought he had observed in her manner now was gone.
Hereford had risen, surrendering the slight advantage over her it would have given him to receive her seated at his desk. He set for her the chair she had occupied the evening before near his round table in the center of the room; but he continued to stand.
If she was at all embarrassed by the knowledge that he must have fully realized the result of his expedition with her in the evening before, she did not show a trace of it.
"Mr. Farren, who is still waiting outside, tells me you have recognized him," she commenced in an even voice.
"Yes," he answered, "but as yet, I have not recognized the reason for his presence here more definitely than I was able to recognize it last evening."
"For the present," she returned in the same tone, "you may regard it as merely to lend emphasis to what I have to say."
"Later, then," he smiled, "in some terrible contingency, Farren may be called in—as he might have been called in last night if I had wished to return before the search of my rooms was accomplished?"
She disregarded him. For some moments she sat with her gloved hands crossed on her lap, not as though she did not know how to begin, but as though taking care that what she said should be presented in the way to give it its greatest effect.
"The police have not locked you up," she went on at last, "because they consider it—or at least so they have told me—a superfluous proceeding to arrest prematurely anyone in a position like yours. Their theory is that a man of large affairs is always under bond. They can get you when they want you; meanwhile they prefer, before taking action, to accumulate their proofs. For that reason they yesterday dissuaded Baraka from swearing out a warrant against you and today they have given the same advice to me."
"I beg pardon. Am I to understand that you have done me the honor to apply to the police for an arrest warrant for me?"
"At my question, the police have made it very plain to me that it is in my power to take out a warrant for you if I wish."
"You mean for the theft of the emerald?"
"Yes. Or if I wish to avoid making a direct charge of that, I could point out that—in case you tried to escape consequences here and fled—an indefinite proportion of my collaterals would be at your mercy."
"So our visit here last evening was not entirely a blind?" he returned. "Thank you for comforting me with the information. You not only accomplished the object of drawing me away from home, but also made an examination of my books which could be fabricated into a basis for legal action at least temporarily inconvenient. Did your future countrymen suggest that to you? It was very clever, if you devised it without their advice."
"Devised it without—" She stopped, and he saw upon her face only a baffling expression—the same he had seen once and then again in their interview at his rooms the night before; and now, as then, suddenly it brought the hot blood unbidden to beating in his hands and temples.
"I am to understand then," he said when he had commanded himself, "that you propose accusing me?"
"I have not said so."
"At least, you are threatening me with arrest."
"No; I am not threatening you at all. I am merely making sure, before I say what I have come to say, that all the circumstances and possibilities of the case are perfectly plain to you."
Again, for several moments, she sat silent—neither agitated nor embarrassed and looking at him steadily.
"Baraka does not want you arrested," she observed.
"No?" he questioned with a smile.
"It must be plain to you that your arrest would prevent his carrying out his threat of personal violence upon you."
"Well?"
"To Baraka, a campaign of personal violence now appears the one probably successful means of getting back the emerald."
He inclined his head in acknowledgment. "Since even with your most effective cooperation he was unable to find it in his search of my effects."
"Let us not go into that again," she said. It was the first time she had in any way referred to their expedition to his office. "I learned from you last night that it was a mistake to ask you to avoid danger for your own sake. To repeat now such a request as I made to you at your apartment would simply make you more determined to undergo the danger—particularly as you refuse fully to recognize your risk."
"You, yourself, do not threaten me with Baraka, then?"
"Please do not forget that I am not threatening you at all—either with Baraka or with anything else."
"Then that is only another of the circumstances of the case which you wish to have plain to me."
"Yes; that is the second."
"Is there a third?"
"The third concerns the effect of your course of action upon myself."
"Upon yourself?"
"You understand that, in this consideration, it makes no difference what your motives were in regard to the emerald. Even if I assumed them to be the most ignoble possible—if I believed, like Baraka, that it was to keep the control of my property in your hands—still, you were one of my father's closest and most devoted agents; you have performed your duties toward myself faithfully, as it seemed to you, though unpleasantly. Your death must therefore be a dismal, a distressing beginning of my betrothal. I must think of my wedding dress as stained with your blood."
He studied her intently with tightening of his pulses.
"What do you mean?" he exclaimed, moving near.
"You are in danger!"
"Perhaps!"
"No; it is certain! You are in great, immediate danger!"
He stood over her. She looked down, avoiding his gaze.
"I brought it upon you!" she continued.
"Is it merely responsibility for it that you feel?"
"I will tell you that I did not realize it would bring danger of this sort to you."
"That is all there is to this third circumstance?" he asked, gently.
"Yes; and there are only those three."
"Then you are ready, no doubt, to make the request of me which you said you had come here to make?"
"Yes." She sat still, paling and reddening in turn; then she looked swiftly up at him. "Yesterday I asked you to return the emerald to Baraka and you refused. So I have no intention of asking that again. But—Mr. Hereford, will you please give it to me?"
Her lip trembled and she stretched out her hands. He stiffened and drew back from her, shaking his head. She whitened suddenly; when she stood up she had regained in every way the look and bearing of the girl who planned to marry the Soesoehoenan.
"Then you will send for Farren," she commanded.
He moved toward the desk to do as she had asked, but halted with his finger on the button and turned back to her.
"Miss Regan," he said hesitatingly, "nearly every act of yours during the last two days has seemed to me to be open to two constructions. You have continually perplexed me, and you do so now."
"You mean as regards Farren?" she questioned.
"Yes, I recognized Farren a half hour ago not merely as a police officer with whom I had once had dealings but—as I indicated to you—also as the man I saw lurking in the shadows of the street opposite my rooms and
"Tell me," he burst out, "that you have not really meant to marry this—the Soesoehoenan!" Page 235
who afterwards followed us here. I can well realize that, at your direction, he was keeping watch over me after our interview at my home. Is that correct?"
She reddened once more and nodded.
"Then of the two constructions that can be put upon that, which one shall I accept? Was he there merely to protect your interest in the emerald or—was it to protect me against the Javanese?"
She had risen, but stood silent, looking at him with level eyes.
"Tell me," he burst out, "that you have not really meant to marry this—the Soesoehoenan!"
"Will you send for Farren, Mr. Hereford?"
He pressed the button and summoned the police officer. The man came rather nervously into the room as though his position in the business at hand was not yet wholly clear to himself. He returned Hereford's silent nod and looked at the girl.
"Take him, Farren," she directed.
"You see," Hereford said to her, quietly now, "you were all the time threatening me with arrest. Now that that is made quite plain to us both, may I ask what connection this has with your visit to the Hotel Tonty late last night and the very peculiar conversation you had there with Baraka?"
She started and looked at him intently.
"Then you do appreciate something of your risk since you see that there is a connection between that and this!" she declared sharply. "You must understand that, if Baraka were threatening yesterday and prepared to break into your rooms, since last night he must be mad—mad—a deadly menace to you at every moment!"
"It was to remove this menace to me that you went there after the fire last night?" he demanded, his blood warmly throbbing.
But she paid no heed, but hurried on.
"He is in such state that he will stop at nothing now. He is at every instant a menace to you in person himself and also through his agents. Night before last, when the emerald was taken, at least there was no attempt made upon Baraka's life; but now you have made an attempt at his life; or at least he has interpreted the fire last night as such! He is certain that the fire in his rooms was started by you, or an agent of yours, either as retaliation for the breaking into your rooms or to injure or kill him in order to prevent his carrying out his threat against you. He will lose no time in retaliating on his own part; and here—anywhere where a man can get at you—you can not be safe!"
"Because of the fire?" Hereford questioned.
"Yes. You certainly know that the last outsider who entered Baraka's rooms last night—the only one possible to suspect who was there just before the fire started—was your friend Max Schimmel!"
Hereford turned quickly to the police officer for confirmation.
"True enough, Mr. Hereford," Farren corroborated. "Schimmel was there and Baraka seems to have put that construction on his visit. We—the police are of a different opinion. In the first place, Schimmel went there in company with your private detective McAdams. In the second place, the police are following a clue of their own which—so far—they have been able to keep from the reporters and the public. They arrested in the tenth floor corridor of the Tonty last night just after the fire and under what looks like very suspicious circumstances a man named Lund."
"They arrested—whom?" Hereford demanded, uneasily.
"Lund's the name. The man used to be a United States secret service operative, but he's been out of a job a long while and is suspected of having fallen into bad ways. His arrest probably makes it unnecessary for you to establish your innocence of the fire, whatever may be your implication in the disappearance of the emerald."
"It certainly makes it very necessary for me to go out from here at once," Hereford returned anxiously.
"Go—where?" Lorine demanded. "If it is in my interest my interest—or in what you conceive to be my interest—you can best serve that by staying here."
He did not answer, but looked in a troubled way from her to the police officer.
"Farren," he said to the man, disturbedly and glancing at his watch as though in alarm, "I find I must go out upon an urgent and private matter. If you are to be made responsible for my appearance I give you my word I will try to give myself up to you today or at the very latest tonight."
"Perhaps if I were to go with you—" the police officer suggested, appealing to the girl.
"I cannot take you with me where I am going. It is a matter of most urgent and immediate importance. It ought to be sufficient that I promise you, after I am through with it, to put myself at your disposal."
"Then arrest him, Farren," Lorine directed, flushed and determined. "I shall appear against him whenever wanted."
The officer glanced swiftly about the room. He appeared to weigh and to deny the chance of escape through the several rooms of Hereford's offices, whose outer entrance was in the corner furthest from the building elevators, and moved around to place himself in front of the private entrance. "I don't want to appear disagreeable, Mr. Hereford; but orders are orders," he appealed—"and I've had mine from the chief."
"From the chief," Hereford repeated. "You are not acting, then, under Miss Regan's directions except as they concur with the orders of your chief?"
He looked again from the officer back to the girl, and made a doubtful and hesitating pause. The officer made a movement of conciliation or apology, Hereford could not tell which; but Lorine, with head thrown back and flushed with victory met his look with a triumphant smile. He returned it disturbedly and unevenly; for Hereford knew now that he loved her.
He thought, as he stood fumbling with the envelope he had taken from his pocket, how strange it was that he had not known this before; for it was no new thing. It had not sprung up since her return and his learning of her strange, mad project to marry the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta. It had been so longer than he could easily remember. It had begun—before ever he himself had been responsible for the girl—in those long, sometimes unhappy talks about her with old Matthew Regan, who was so apt and capable in all business matters, so bewildered and incompetent in dealing with his daughter. He had grown then to share the old man's anxiety over her, and, ever since, she had been for him a woman apart from all other women. He knew now why none other had ever interested him. Plainly too he saw—now half in mockery at himself—how his own position as her trustee and her difference from the women to whom he was accustomed had disguised his feelings toward her from himself.
Hereford smiled again that queer uneven smile, as he took from its envelope the squarely-folded paper which he felt was going to make it wholly impossible for his ward ever to care for him. Then he turned again to Farren.
"Your orders, Farren, are from your chief," he said quietly, "and so, of course, you know that the only tangible proof of any sort the chief has against me—is this." He indicated his bandaged hand. "Of course also you know that the chief's family physician is Dr. Purvis Whitfield, though I myself did not know that until I inquired yesterday morning. So take this to the chief if you get into any trouble for losing track of me."
He watched while Farren read, and the officer's face showed his struggle with perplexity and amazement. Farren stood his ground, however, until he had handed the paper to the girl. Hereford, not expecting this, and too late to prevent it, tried to forbid her, as she started to read.
Her eyes glanced down the page and she disregarded him.
Lorine's hand, as she read, trembled tensely with the paper it held. She inclined her head so that her hat shaded and hid her face from him. She stood trembling and silent an instant, when she had finished, then suddenly she threw the paper on the table and raised her head. Her tense trembling was gone, her eyes blazed with indignation.
"So you did not take it!" She was pale now with what seemed contempt for him. "You—you had nothing to do with it! You—you— It has been all an assumption on my part that you risked anything to prevent me!"
He met her angry look, the corners of his mouth set grimly.
"Of course you have no objection to my going now?" he questioned.
"Let him go where he wants!" she said to Farren.
Hereford got his hat and coat. At the door he hesitated, turned back, and without comment or even looking toward them, got from the closet a heavy walking-stick. Then he went out—still without looking back at them.
His ward stared down with hot tears of anger in her eyes at the paper, which read:
To whom it may concern: Mr. Wade Hereford, who has sufficiently identified himself to me, came to my offices in home at seven o'clock this morning of October 13, which he desires me to note herein is the morning following the night upon which the emerald known as the Surakarta was taken from the Hotel Tonty, as is reported in the morning papers of today. On my inquiring what need a man apparently in such perfect health could have of a physician, Mr. Hereford—first putting me under seal of professional secrecy—replied that he did not then need a physician's services, but would need them in a few minutes. He then requested me to examine his entire body for evidence of any wound; which I did, finding none—not even the slightest abrasion of the skin. Holding his left hand before the brick grate in my consultation room, Mr. Hereford then shot himself through the fleshy part of his left palm; after which I dressed the wound and, at his request, made for him this written statement of the circumstances.
Below it was attested regularly, as sworn statement, under the seal of a notary public.