The Surakarta/Chapter 3
III
LORINE
Hereford hurried directly from Max to Lorine's hotel.
He was convinced now that behind all he had heard was an affair which, since it concerned the succession to a throne—if only a Malaysian throne—might indeed have involved his ward in some adventure more fantastically outrageous than all that had gone before.
Every few months, during the thirty in which he had been in charge of her affairs, Hereford had seen his ward's picture staring out at him from the newspapers, which gave generous space to her doings. Only a year before, upon the occasion of her starting the excavation of the Assyrian city, she had attained in the personal pages of one of the magazines the dignity of a careful fullpage halftone, with veil and sunshade, seated upon a camel. Before her father's sudden taking off, Hereford, then known only as banker to the firm but in reality closer in many ways than any other person to old Matthew Regan, had learned to look for the girl's face and figure, more especially in those Sunday papers which gave curious attention to the more extraordinary doings of Chicagoans abroad.
At that time, and even after her father's death he had found a sort of romantic interest in this undisciplined child who sped from corner to corner of the world merely at the dictates of her own caprice. But the events subsequent to his finding himself responsible for the actions of the girl had effaced this feeling, he thought, almost at once and fully.
As Lorine had been kept abroad by her father constantly from the time of Hereford's first association with him, he had never seen her. Once, after Matthew Regan's death, when business had called Hereford abroad, and again when affairs at home had made a holiday in Europe possible, he had offered to call upon her ostensibly to come to a more perfect understanding with her as to his own powers over her expenditures. Before then, however, through no fault of his own, his relations with her already had become strained and both times she had refused.
As an antagonist he had learned to respect her; for she was the only person in the world who had consistently thwarted and defeated him. But he recollected now, as he hurried toward her hotel, that, with all the surprising things she had done, she had never yet gone so far as to try to force her way into society; and he recalled all at once Matthew, her father,—militant and uncouth—with his head and neck of a triumphant bull and his vest spotted with dropped food. No doubt, he told himself, a Malaysian court, with its ten thousand half-clad attendants, might seem to her the easiest way to social distinction; and suddenly Hereford felt that now at last he knew her perfectly.
He was not in the least surprised, therefore, at the length of time she kept him waiting after he had sent up his card.
When finally he was ushered up he found a slender girl in a gray suit, with an abundance of dark hair, busily writing at a desk. She occupied in the rather large room the only chair, though marks upon the heavy hotel carpet here and there showed where other chairs just now had stood. He reddened with annoyance at this obvious attempt to put him at a disadvantage. He crossed, pushed open determinedly the door of an inner room, seized a chair and set it near the desk.
Then for the first time she looked up.
Her gray-blue eyes maliciously and audaciously flashed at him and the blood glowed pink under her clear white skin. "Why, she is beautiful!" he thought in amazement, for her published pictures had shown her no more than pretty. Startled at finding her so different from what he had expected, he remained standing with his hand on the back of the chair.
"After carrying that chair so far you might at least sit down," she offered. She seemed trying not to laugh.
He dropped into the chair.
He was trying unavailingly to reconcile her with his expectations of a flighty, undisciplined child. She was not a child, but a young and bewitching woman whose face showed the determination and tenacity, as the flash of her brilliant eyes showed the daring, of old Matthew Regan—but of Matthew Regan refined, cultured, self-disciplined by contact with many kinds of people; for he saw that to any one other than himself she would have appeared a person of graceful tact and, no matter where it might have been acquired, good breeding.
"So you are Mr. Hereford," she stated, "and—you are not bald?"
"You expected me to be bald?" he asked dryly.
"Just as certainly as your letters to me have shown that you suspected me of being blondined. May I ask to what I owe the honor of this visit?"
"It could have no excuse except business," he retorted curtly.
"Have I overdrawn so much as all that?" A smile hovered upon her lips; her skirts took the delicate outline of her body as she turned slightly.
"Not in money. There is more at present to your credit than you asked for in your letter of this morning."
"Then you mean"
"I have reason to suspect that you are attempting rather to overdraw in your personal activities."
"I prefer people to speak plainly—even people who are personally unpleasant to me." She continued to smile, however, radiating femininity.
"I shall do so," he said directly, "and in return I shall require from you an equally plain and definite answer as to the remarkable and unpleasant story that was brought to me this morning. Have you or have you not come here to receive a certain jewel, an emerald, which is known as the Surakarta?"
"I have." She had stopped smiling.
"I was told that your acceptance of this jewel has a definite and prearranged significance."
"It has." Her eyes flashed at him.
"That it meant betrothal."
"A little more than that; for when I receive the emerald tomorrow my word is given a little more absolutely than in mere betrothal."
"To"
"To the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, as undoubtedly you have been informed."
"A Malay—a Javanese?"
"Both, and likewise a most interesting and attractive gentleman who has done me the honor to pay me perfect respect—a respect which in some ways I have never received from those who had a greater right to call themselves gentlemen in Europe and—America."
"You mean that I have not respected you?" he said after a pause.
"You among others."
He surveyed her intently. "That is, however, a very different matter from allowing you to degrade your womanhood by a marriage such as this."
She stood up, looking him between the eyes. "But my womanhood, since you put it in that way, is something with which you have no concern." Then she went on quickly and caustically. "Let us have that plain between us. With my marriage you have absolutely nothing to do. You insisted upon a direct answer to your question and I have given it. Now, Mr. Hereford, if you feel inclined to return to your office it will leave me at liberty to finish the letter I was writing."
He stared as she turned away from him, for he was not used to such treatment from women. He had noted while she was speaking the willful and triumphant lifting of her chin, but now that she had averted her face every line of her body seemed wholly—and softly, deliciously—feminine. He was obliged to control himself in a way to which he was not used.
"Miss Regan," he said more coldly than he felt was diplomatic but in the only way he could, "you have always made it very plain to me that you would accept no interference from me outside of financial matters. On my part I have attempted more than once to limit or modify certain of your extraordinary activities by the assertion of authority I did not possess. I thought I owed it to your father. I do not know exactly how much you know of my start with your father. I do not know what gave him so great confidence in me when I first met him. I know only that he had it and expressed it. His putting his affairs into my hands gave me my real start six years ago—attracted to me other business which has since made me."
"And it would undoubtedly do very much to unmake you if now by my marriage my affairs were taken out of your hands," she asserted.
"Fortunately I am already so placed that the removal of the administration of your estate would scarcely cripple me. However, as I said, your father's friendship for me in the past made me. On account of him I made those attempts to check you after he was dead—to check you from things he himself, if he were alive, might have encouraged you in, but the certain results of which I could see. However, as you have more than once astutely observed, I made those attempts without power to control you. The present matter is different."
"Will you tell me how it is different?" She had turned back to him uneasily.
"There is definitely provided, Miss Regan, in a clause of some three or four lines in the papers that gave me charge of your father's estate, the power for me to prevent you from any irreparable act. None of your many adventures of foolishness and vanity from which I have previously tried to check you have been such that, in court, I could expect to hold them as coming under the provisions of that clause. So far, then, my hands were tied; but this adventure you threaten would be quite irreparable. There is no court in the country that would not sustain my right to hold you from it under my powers."
"You think you—or the courts— could prevent my doing something to which I have made up my mind? The courts could not prevent my father." Her uneasiness, however, seemed increased.
He rose, picking up his hat, now that he was about to crush her.
"I am obliged, as you have found out, to furnish you funds in addition to your regular allowance up to the total of your income for the year, for you to spend in any manner you choose," he went on dryly, "except in case you undertake something in which you risk irreparable injury. I am left to decide for myself what would be irreparable; if you appeal it must be left to two other friends whom your father appointed. There is no question that they will agree with me in recognizing that this intended marriage of yours is no real marriage at all, but only a more reckless and defiant adventure in which you will be done irreparable injury. I have, therefore, the power and I shall exercise it."
"To do what?" she questioned swiftly.
"To cut you off immediately, without a cent of your ordinary or extraordinary income," he said roughly as he turned away—"or any other funds until you give up this marriage!"
She laughed long and merrily, throwing back her head, and he turned back to her in amazement.
"Your powers are tremendous, Mr. Hereford."
"They will suffice to keep you from funds not only now, but, if you are mad enough to go farther with this, I will keep your money from you indefinitely."
She stood up suddenly.
"You seem to think you have disguised your real nature so that I could not foresee you would do this—and therefore keep by me rather more than enough for all personal expenses before my marriage," she said.
"I amuse you?" he demanded angrily.
"It is rather amusing to find you counting upon a million or so, as an added inducement to the Soesoehoenan to marry me, when he is ready to pay for me the Surakarta. So that is all you can do, Mr. Hereford?"
"That is all I can do legally," he blurted out.
"Ah, legally!" she teased. "I really had done you the honor to forget for a moment that, besides being a banker, you were a lawyer."
Suddenly he lost his self-control. He was allured and repulsed at the same time by this girl who for thirty months had irritated, vexed, thwarted, baffled him. She was charming and exasperating. The Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, who had been to him until this moment merely a name, became suddenly a personality, a threat.
"You shall not debase yourself like this!" he cried. "This emerald shall not reach you tomorrow!"
"You are without doubt a very clever man, Mr. Hereford; but you are not so clever that I shall not receive the emerald."
"Legally, illegally, however it is done, you shall not receive it!"
"No?" she mocked.
"No!" he shouted furiously.
"You are not so clever that I shall not receive the emerald"
Page 50