The Surakarta/Chapter 9
IX
MR. HEREFORD ENTERTAINS MISS REGAN
Wade Hereford, after an extraordinarily busy afternoon, the incidents and interviews of which were quite out of the ordinary course of business in a Chicago banking office, took an automobile to his apartments on the North Side. He had a five-room suite in a large and fashionable apartment building near Lincoln Park, looking, from his windows upon one of the upper floors, across the park to the lake.
Hereford, who when he dined at home, usually had his table set either in the restaurant on the first floor or in the roof garden, almost equally well could be served from the restaurant in his own dining room and waited upon by his man. There he took dinner alone this evening. He refused the newspaper reporters who, in turn and en masse, demanded over the house telephone to see him; and half an hour later he sent his man to refuse to converse with the city editors over the city 'phone. He excused himself to the four or five of his friends and twice as many of his acquaintances, curious about it all, who dropped in or telephoned; but these interruptions made his dinner progress slowly, and he was not through until after eight o'clock.
He selected an after dinner cigar, lit his reading lamp, and from force of habit, took a book. He could not read, however.
Presently, stooping to a low shelf under his table, he pulled out a thick book of tough paper pasted three-quarters full of newspaper clippings. As he laid it upon the table it flew open to a Sunday newspaper's colored half-page portrait of his ward in vivid costume.
He drew back angrily at sight of it and with hands behind his back paced up and down the rug until his cigar was half gone. Coming back to the table then as abruptly as he had spun away from it, he sat down and, holding the book upon his knees, turned page after page proclaiming the many adventures, risks, proclamations and other doings of Lorine Regan—all illustrated. Here and there he stopped and read carefully some considerable section of the text accompanying the pictures; but over most of the clippings he stopped only long enough to recall the nature of the adventure it chronicled—then he turned on.
Wade Hereford knew his ward mostly through this book. Thirty months before, when he had found himself the only one who could be considered responsible for the girl, he had subscribed—during his first vain efforts to check her—to a clipping service for all published information about her doings, which he had pasted here and kept. Its pages now recalled the curiously personal, almost romantic interest she had had at first for him; the long expostulatory letters he had written her in the beginning. Once or twice, here in his rooms, when some of his friends had happened upon the book—for he had never deliberately shown it—he had laughed with them over its startling pictures and its impertinent comment. They had come to mean to him by then—in his disappointment and anger over her—only the successive mad acts of a headstrong, foolish child. He was not quite certain what they meant to him tonight. But he could find no blanket explanation to cover them now, and he asked himself what he had seen in her which made it so.
He had been prepared for her caprice, for her self-will. He had not been at all prepared for that something else, which these pictures seemed to desecrate. Tonight they angered him because they looked so like her and yet had failed to catch that something which he himself had seen. He hastily put away the book, as he heard a knock upon his outer door and a woman's voice inquiring for him in his reception room.
He listened, heard no other voice except that of his man, and flushed with annoyance which he told himself was only that of the trustee—that she should have come alone.
He halted at the door of his reception room, relieved by his first glimpse of her which seemed to tell him that she had stopped only for a moment on her way to some evening entertainment. But he was perplexed and dazed by his second and longer look, for which he was now suddenly certain she had been fully prepared. He felt the conviction, for which he could in no way account, that she was expected nowhere and had dressed in this way for him. Since the only other time he had seen her she had been in a simple dress of gray, she wished now, for some purpose of her own, that he should see her in evening dress. Jewels blazed at her throat and hair; her beauty by the change had become opulent and rare. He sought swiftly for some explanation of her purpose in this; but in his knowledge of his ward he found no clew to that or to the meaning of her present manner.
She controlled herself with difficulty to answer his greeting in a tone like his own; but now, as she advanced toward him, she was rather pale and her small hand clutched tightly about her the cloak that had slipped from her white shoulders.
"When my father found he had underrated—or overrated—a man's ability," she began evenly, "he told him so; it was the only kind of apology my father ever made."
Hereford smiled.
"I remember that as a characteristic of your father."
"It is also mine. I thought, Mr. Hereford, that an emerald which had been kept in safety for six hundred years among an intriguing and savage people, to whom it represented not only wealth but power, could be kept with equal safety for twenty-four hours in Chicago, where it had only an intrinsic value. I find I was mistaken; that I underrated and had formed a wholly false idea of your ability from my correspondence with you. Now that I have admitted that, does that satisfy you?"
"I do not understand," said Hereford honestly. His pulses were progressively quickening as he watched her here in these rooms of his, which never before had known a woman's presence. Why had she come? For the first time he noted in her eyes the same concentration of purpose he had seen so often in the eyes of Matthew Regan when determinedly pitted against a feared adversary.
"However, I make it quite plain, I think."
"Not quite," he deliberately forced her on.
She bit her lip, which whitened under her small teeth. "You are ungenerous. Yesterday, when you threatened to prevent me from receiving the emerald, I answered you with—with a sort of challenge, did I not?"
He studied her. "Exactly."
"To-day I withdraw that challenge, Mr. Hereford. If what I said yesterday has piqued you into doing something which otherwise you would not have done, I"
She flushed painfully; but he did not feel that sense of triumph which comes to a man in the presence of a woman who concedes something against her will, which is not aroused by any other form of contest. He noted, quite coldly and speculatively, it seemed to him, the changes of her face and skin and her deliberate and, he thought, simulated frankness.
"You mean you wish me to put aside my pique and consider, in what might be called a normal state of mind, what I have done?" he inquired evenly.
She nodded.
"Very well. I have considered."
"Then tell me what difference your consideration has made."
"None. I have done nothing yesterday or today or last night, as you seem to think"—he smiled—"that I would not do again now after hearing what you just have said."
"At least," she said, pale and looking steadily at him, "you will not deny to me that you have the emerald? It is perhaps flattery to myself to believe that you got up your extremely effective campaign to learn the secret of the box, and afterward planned some still more clever method of taking the stone, solely to oppose me; but, from whatever motive you acted, the action itself can scarcely be questioned. There are only two possible explanations of the disappearance of the emerald. You know them both."
"Still I would like to hear them."
"Only two persons—yourself and Baraka—could possibly get into the box. Baraka tells me there is a total of seventy-two manipulations, eighteen of which must be chosen and performed in their right order to raise the cover. The complete impossibility of any one's hitting by chance upon the correct eighteen in the correct order proves perfectly who it was that opened the box last night—even without that!" She pointed to his bandaged hand.
"If it is proved," he said with the same noncommittal smile, "there is no use in my denying it."
She drew back, while he watched her closely. He wondered whether it was real perplexity that wrinkled her smooth forehead.
"You have seen Baraka?" she asked at last.
His eyes flashed comprehendingly. "Won't you sit down, Miss Regan?" he said in a conventional tone. "This conversation is stretching to a length I never expected." Then he placed a chair for her with his uninjured hand; but she completely disregarded his action and only repeated her question.
"You have seen Baraka?"
"I see no harm in telling you," he said after an instant's consideration, "that Baraka and myself appear to be upon the closest terms of social intercourse. I called upon him twice yesterday; he called upon me twice this morning. I returned his calls about noon and he paid me another visit at three o'clock this afternoon at my office."
"And the object of this last visit?"
"Some remarks of a friend of mine—a naturalist—Max Schimmel, whose name fails to conceal his nationality, appear to have removed Baraka's last doubts, if he had any, as to what has become of the emerald."
"Then he came to request you to return it?"
"That was what I gathered from his somewhat excited conversation."
"Within how many hours?"
"Miss Regan—really you should have studied for the bar," he said quietly. "Don't think I am impertinent or am mocking at you when I say that your faculty of cross-questioning is an unusual ability either in man or woman."
She paid no heed to the interruption. "Within how many hours?" she repeated imperatively.
"To tell the truth I have forgotten his exact words; but the time set falls, I believe, about seven o'clock tomorrow night."
"In default of which—?"
He made no answer. She studied him long and impersonally, and in her fixed scrutiny he seemed to detect dimly a new respect.
"Mr. Hereford, I have been disingenuous with you," she said at last, with a note of sincerity which now he could not doubt. "I know why Baraka visited your office this afternoon and what the very private message was he left there with you; for Baraka himself sent me word of it quite frankly. Don't you understand that that is why I came here tonight? Baraka gave you, as you have said, something over twenty-four hours in which to return the emerald; in default of which he assured you of your death. He left upon your desk when he went away a knife as witness of his purpose and the method. You see—I do know."
"Yes; you seem to have the facts," Hereford returned.
"But his threat did not frighten you?"
"It did not find me mentally unprepared. I suspected, this noon, when I saw that Baraka had changed halfway from the European clothing in which I saw him first to the native jacket—the cabaya, I believe it is called in your future country—that in his bewilderment and terror he had reverted to primeval ways in more than dress alone. I expected to receive some such message. However, Miss Regan, we are not in Java. We are in Chicago, where, surrounded by a strong and reasonably efficient force of police, assassination is not easily carried out."
She came nearer impulsively.
"I hope you are not counting upon that in your refusal to return the emerald?"
He smiled again quietly.
"No; for the circumstances of the case, Miss Regan, make it quite impossible for me to return the emerald."
"Mr. Hereford," she said earnestly and eagerly, "you do not know these men. I myself have just seen Baraka. Rulogi, one of the most devoted of his servants, has gone from him. Rulogi is instructed to keep watch of you and, I have no doubt, to carry out his master's threat at the appointed time if any steps you take prevent Baraka himself from performing it. Rulogi would be absolutely reckless of any consequences to himself—a Malay running amuck against you. Consider, too, that if by any chance news of this has reached the Soesoehoenan today, and Baraka hears that the sultan has been killing one or two of his children, or a wife, as an indication of what further will happen if Baraka cannot recover the emerald, he may not even await the time he himself appointed."
"The Soesoehoenan may be killing Baraka's children—that interesting and attractive gentleman, as you described him to me yesterday?" Hereford asked caustically. "And the Soesoehoenan would not regard this as a possible objection on your part to marrying him?"
"You misunderstand me," she said with sudden coldness.
"I beg pardon then."
"I did not say the Soesoehoenan would be killing Baraka's children. I said merely that word might come to Baraka that it was being done—the effect of which would be the same for you."
"For Baraka, if now I understand you rightly, being on close terms with the Soesoehoenan, would find nothing necessarily unconvincing in such news?"
She seemed to change before his eyes, losing suddenly this strange, new, earnest manner of hers which had surprised and held him. She drew the opera cloak over her shoulders.
"I did not think you would quibble with me," she said angrily; "and since that is the case I will not keep the friends who came here with me waiting any longer."
The sudden change in her angered and pained him—he did not know why.
"Your visit does not seem to have accomplished much," he could not resist saying.
"I have freed myself from any responsibility for the danger you run," she returned promptly. "Since nothing I can say appears to have any effect on you, I do not care what motives make you resolved to keep the emerald. For you understand, of course, Mr. Hereford, that I consider you to have interfered in an affair which concerns only myself in a manner uncalled for and unwarranted even by your trusteeship in my estate. I hope you also understand that my only reason for coming here was to clear my conscience of blame for your fate; and that is fully cleared now, since you have forced me to lower myself to apologize and request in order to mock at me."
He frowned perplexedly. Had she really come here, as she had said, only to make plain his peril to him? Or had she come, as he all along had thought, to scare from him—if he had it—the stone, the loss of which was endangering her defiant plan?
"If I thought—" he began hesitatingly.
"You mean you think I resemble him also in that?"
Page 157
But she flashed upon him the daring, adventurous smile of the girl who, to shock the discreet world that refused her, was to marry the Malay Sultan of Java; and his anger rose as she moved toward the door.
"Miss Regan," he said, "you began this interview with a reference to your father. Let me end it in the same way. In spite of your father's private generosity, I never knew him openly to yield a point, as you would have me think you just have done, except to gain some subsequent advantage for himself. Great as are my gratitude and respect for him, I know this to have been the case."
Her eyes flashed angrily now.
"You mean you think I resemble him also in that?"
"That is it."
Then he closed the door behind her as she went out.
From the door, he crossed quickly to the window to see her leaving the building. He told himself it was merely to see whether, as she had said, she had come with companions or alone. A man and a woman—the woman certainly middle-aged—left the building and entered the motor waiting in the street. He waited with some impatience at the window to see Lorine leave.
Wade Hereford seeing other men he knew fall in love and marry, had sometimes asked himself why, after his youthful, brief but wide experience of women, they had suddenly lost interest for him. He had told himself it was because he had found his chief pleasure in contest. It must be, he thought, that he had found the contest too easy with a sex taught from earliest infancy that its chief duty is to love—which therefore is vanquished from the beginning. He had laid to this the strange piquancy that he had found at all times in his relations with his ward. She—at least it appeared to him—was not to be classed among those women who ask only to be loved; for she defied all men—himself most particularly—as openly and frankly as she appeared also in all other ways to defy convention. In their correspondence she usually had had the better of it; and he felt now that she had bested him in the only two personal interviews he ever had had with her.
He flushed as he recollected that in both these interviews, he—whose reputation was that he never lost his temper—had ended with being furiously and impotently angry with her. Even now he was conscious of a continuance of that impatience with her as he still stood at the window waiting to see her pass from the building. For she had not yet appeared; and, as he looked up and down the street he saw no vehicle for her. It was now later in the evening than the time when most pedestrians were upon the street and when the motorcars bound for the theatres were passing.
Hereford could count the walking figures that crossed under the street lamps. On the other side of the street and nearly opposite the spot where the motor had disappeared, he noticed the tall figure of a man appear and vanish, appear and glance about, and again retreat. With an unconscious quickening of the pulse, Hereford turned out the light behind him and went back to the window. The same figure, always keeping in the darker shadows, could just be seen. Hereford's impulse was to rush down and see the man; next he thought it would be enough to send his man down to determine whether the watcher were a Javanese. The return of curiosity concerning Lorine replaced both these impulses. She had not left the building; he was certain of it; why had she not? With a fresh cigar bitten tight between his teeth, he settled himself at his window, watching.