A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill Part 25

"But where's your mother? I thought you said she was serving tea?"

"She'll be down directly. Now, tell us a story, Decker. A man can't wander around the Orient for a year without having something exciting happen to him."

"I'm afraid I haven't an experiencing nature," said Decker, smiling.

"You ought to have Morley here. He's the fellow that went over with me, Mrs. Queerington. I'll back him against the field for having adventures.

You remember that big fire last year in Tokyo? Don was the first Johnny on the spot, doing the n.o.ble hero act, dragging out women and children and gallantly fighting the flames, while I lay up in bed at the Imperial Hotel and fought mosquitoes! He was in a collision at sea, just off the coast of Korea, got mixed up in a Chinese uprising in Nanking and was arrested for a spy while taking pictures of the fortifications at Miyajima. If I had half his luck I'd be the highest priced man in the syndicate."

"I don't know that I particularly envy him his luck in the incident that happened here just before he left," said Gerald, lighting a fresh cigarette.

"It was nothing to his discredit," said Decker hotly. "He happened to be a witness when that fool Dillingham got into a shooting sc.r.a.pe, and he left town because he did not want to testify against the man his niece was going to marry. He didn't consider the consequences, he never does.

It was a toss up when I met him in 'Frisco whether he would come home, or go on."

"Didn't he know he was indicted?" asked Gerald.

"Certainly not. Neither of us knew it until I got home and found people talking about 'Poor Donald Morley,' and acting as if he were a refugee from justice. Two or three letters came from Mrs. Sequin, but she was so busy urging Don to stay away that she hadn't time to write anything else. We did get one old home paper, somewhere in Java, with an account of the trial. That was the first intimation Don had that Dillingham was throwing off on him. Even then he could scarcely believe it; there's nothing in him to understand a man like Lee Dillingham."

"But he was with him,--that night at the saloon," ventured Miss Lady, sitting up very straight and listening very intently.

Gerald smiled skeptically. "He went in out of the rain, my dear lady; that's what he wrote home, I understand; and he didn't indulge in a single drink. Rather a strain on the imagination in the light of subsequent events."

"See here, Ivy," said Decker, rising and standing before the fire with his square jaw thrust out, and the twinkle gone from his eye. "I happen to know this story from beginning to end, and we both know Don Morley.

He's as full of faults as a porcupine is of quills, but he's neither a liar nor a coward. If he says he was sober that night I'd stake my life he was."

There was an uncomfortable pause during which Gerald tenderly felt his afflicted face, and Decker glared at the chandelier.

"He ought to have stayed to explain," said Miss Lady, not daring to look up; "a man's first duty is to himself and--and to those who care for him."

"That was the trouble," said Decker slowly. "It seems that the one person Don cared most about wouldn't listen to an explanation. He wrote her full particulars, and asked her to telegraph him if he should go or stay. When I met him in 'Frisco he had been waiting for that wire for three days, and he was nearly off his head. I got him on the steamer almost by main force. We laid over ten days in Honolulu, and he got the notion that a letter would be waiting for him in Yokohama, and that he would take the next steamer home. All the way across I heard about that girl from the time the Chino brought our coffee in the morning until we went below again for the night. He all but said his prayers to her; cut out everything to drink; even refused to play a friendly game of poker.

Why, I've tramped so many decks to the tune of that girl's charms that I could write a book about her."

"What is her name?" asked Gerald greatly interested.

"Heavens, I don't know! She was a wood nymth, a dryad, a jewel, a flower, I could keep it up indefinitely. He had a new one for her every day. When we reached j.a.pan, he couldn't wait for the steamer to dock but went ash.o.r.e in the pilot boat, and made a bee line for Cook's. There was nothing there. It was like that at every port we touched. Each time he would get his hopes up to fever heat, and each time he'd be disappointed. I never saw such perseverance and belief. He made excuse after excuse for her. He was too proud to write again, and he got leaner and leaner and more and more homesick. You know that collision I spoke of? Well, he got in that by waiting over a steamer at Nagasaki in the hope of getting a letter before he left j.a.pan."

"What happened next?" asked Gerald; "did another planet swim into his ken?"

"Hardly. The smash came just before I left him, a couple of months ago.

We were at Raffles Hotel in Singapore having tea with some French girls from the steamer. Our purser happened along and gave Don a letter which I recognized as being from Mrs. Sequin. He read the first sheet, then looked up in a wild sort of way, and asked if we'd mind excusing him as he had something he wanted to see to before the steamer sailed. At five o'clock he'd never shown up, and I had to hustle our bags ash.o.r.e and start out to look for him. He'd been awfully seedy for a couple of months and when he got left I knew something serious had happened. I found him late that night in the foreign hospital out of his head with a fever. It seems the letter had told him that his girl was going to be married, and half beside himself he had gotten into a rikisha, and ridden for hours in the tropical sun, trying to face the fact. Of course in the run-down state he was in, it put him out of business, and by the time he got back to Raffles', he didn't know who he was, nor where he was. I stayed with him until the _Herald-Post_ sent for me to come home. Maybe you don't think I hated to leave the old chap, in that G.o.d-forsaken country, lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, with all his illusions smashed."

"Did he want to come with you?" asked Gerald.

"He didn't want anything. He had wanted one thing so long there was no more want left in him. I tried to get him to let me engage pa.s.sage for him on the next home-bound steamer. But he said he doubted if he'd ever come back, that as soon as he was able to travel he would go on around the world, and that it didn't make much difference where he landed."

"Quite a tragic little romance," Gerald said. "What a lot of mischief you women have to answer for, Mrs. Q.!"

But Miss Lady did not hear him, she was still leaning forward absorbed in Decker's narrative.

"If he comes home, in answer to your cable, when can he get here?" she asked.

"Not before Christmas I should say."

"If I were Lee Dillingham I should go South for the winter," Gerald said, going to the piano and striking a few random chords.

After Cropsie Decker left, Miss Lady sat very quiet in the big chair, while Gerald played to her. It was well that only the kindly old bust of Liszt looked down on her tense white face, and clasped hands.

For over two months she had been fighting a specter, never daring to lift her eyes to it, but fighting it blindly, pa.s.sionately, unceasingly.

She had denied its existence, refuted every memory, filled her life to the brim with other interests, other affections, and here suddenly she had met it face to face, and it was no longer horrible, but a beautiful, radiant vision, a thing to be buried in her innermost being, a sacred, solemn thing, not to be looked at, or dwelt upon, but no longer to be denied.

The stormy, insistent strains of the "Appa.s.sionata" filled the room, surging through every fiber of her, lifting and abasing her by turns.

How could she get hold of herself while Gerald played like that? She was sinking in a great sea of emotion and the music swept about her like a mighty gale, shutting out everything in the world but Donald Morley. He had not failed her, it was she who had failed him. He was coming home, and it was too late. She would have to meet him face to face, to see all that he had suffered in his eyes and speak no word. Surely she might give him this one hour, just while the music lasted; give it to him and to herself for the lifetime together they had missed.

She did not know when the music stopped, she did not know when Gerald came back to the ha.s.sock at her feet. He had evidently been there some time when she was aware of his elbow on the arm of her chair, and his head buried in it.

"Gerald!" she said, starting up; "what's the matter?"

"Everything. Is that your trouble?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that you are unhappy," he said, catching her hand.

She sprang to her feet and snapped on the electric lights.

"Do I look as if I were unhappy?" she demanded, flashing on him her old, bright smile. "It was the music, and the twilight, and the way you played. That sonata ought never to be played except in a crowded room with all the lights on."

"It wasn't the music," Gerald persisted; "you know it wasn't.

Something's troubling you, and something is troubling me. May I tell you what is the matter with me, Miss Lady?"

He was looking at her very intently across the table, and Miss Lady for the first time recognized the danger signals in his eyes.

"Let me guess!" she cried, her wits springing to her rescue. "I think I know. I thought so when I first came in. It's mumps!"

Gerald's hand flew instinctively to his face, and his eyes sought the mirror. Miss Lady, in applying to Gerald Ivy, Uncle Jimpson's remedy for a balking mule, had averted a disaster.

CHAPTER XV

Time was an abstraction of which the inhabitants of Bean Alley took little notice. The arbitrary division of one's life into weeks and days and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day.

As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every corner of the world.

On this particular fall afternoon, just outside Phineas Flathers'

cottage, a lively game was in progress. It was a game known in Bean Alley as "Sockabout," and it had to do with caps or battered hats laid in a row, and with a small rubber ball that was thrown into them from a distance. Like many other apparently simple diversions, Sockabout had its complexities. In fact, the rules admitted of so many interpretations that an umpire was indispensable.

Under ordinary circ.u.mstances Chick Flathers would have scorned so pa.s.sive a role as umpire, but to-day he was handicapped. In the first place he had no cap to contribute to the row on the ground, and in the second he was burdened with a very large and wriggly bundle, which gave evidence of marked disfavor the moment he ceased to jolt it violently on his knees.

In the midst of an unusually fierce altercation, in which four boys contended for the same cap, Skeeter Sheeley's voice rose above the clamor.