The Blue Wall Part 6

"Why?" said she in the manner of a child.

I could not answer. I merely gazed at her. She was half leaning, half sitting on the retaining wall of the park, and her skin, which was flecked with the shadows of new maple leaves above her, was lighted not only by the yellow rays of the afternoon sun, but also with the bright colors which her brisk walk had brought to the soft surface. I a.s.sure you, she made a pretty picture.

"I would have been glad to see you yesterday," she said slowly, marking with the toe of one shoe upon the gravel. "You have been one of my father's younger friends a long time."

"There is nothing the matter!" I cried.

"I can't tell," she said. "He is old, you know, and I can explain it in no other way."

"He is not ill?"

"No. But if, for instance, his physician had told him he had not long to live, and he felt something give way within him--that might cause it."

I suppressed the anxious note in my voice as I said, "Cause what? You have not said, Miss Colfax."

She laughed. "That is true. I haven't, have I?" Serious again, she went on. "He seems worried. Something seems to follow him about--some thought, some apprehension, some worry."

"It is a new difficulty somewhere that has come up in the trial of a case."

She shook her head.

"Let us walk," she said. "No, it is not that--nothing ordinary. A word from me and he would explain. But this time when I ask, he merely smiles and says, 'Nothing, Julie, nothing.'"

"Can it be that I am the cause?" I said before I could stop myself. "Has he found out that we--"

"I told him," she said, "that we--"

She stopped there, too, and looked at me.

"No," she went on. "It is something else. He went out for a stroll night before last. Usually he is gone a half-hour at least. But this time he had hardly had time to go down the steps before I heard his key in the door again and the feet of 'Laddie' on the hall floor. I ran out to ask if he had forgotten anything, and it was a dreadful shock to me."

"Tell me," said I, touching her fingers with my own.

"In the first place, the dog was acting as I have never seen him act before. I noticed that, the first thing. He was cowering and slinking along as if he feared the most terrible punishment. But that was nothing. It was father who made me draw back. Even in the dim light I could see that he was white--oh, so white! I thought he had been taken ill suddenly and was weak. And yet one hand was clutching his big cane and the muscles and veins stood out on the back as if he were raising the stick to defend himself."

"He was ill!" I cried.

"Yes, I think that must have been it. He was ill. And since then he has brooded so--particularly when he does not know I am watching him.

Margaret has noticed it, too. She has spoken to him as I did and he has laughed her fear away, I suppose."

"Perhaps, after all, it is nothing--just as he says," I suggested, turning toward her as we walked.

"Perhaps not," she said. "I am sure you are a good and cheerful friend to say so. Nevertheless, I have been worried and restless and this afternoon I long for amus.e.m.e.nt. Can't we do something queer and extraordinary--go somewhere--do something?"

I thought her requirement a difficult one to fill at five o'clock in the afternoon, walking through the old, dull, and worn-out part of the city, where we found we had arrived without purpose in our journey. More than that, I am naturally of conservative tastes; the bizarre, the bohemian, and the unconventional forms of amus.e.m.e.nt have never beckoned to me. I am not an adventurer by choice.

"We have less than an hour before us," I said to her. "And I am at a loss to suggest--"

There I hesitated. A thought had come to me. I saw her eyes dance with expectancy--with that expression of eagerness that lights the faces of those to whom the world, with all its goodness and badness, beauty and ugliness, tranquillity and turbulence, is still unexplored.

"The Sheik of Baalbec!" I exclaimed.

"The Sheik of Baalbec!" she repeated. "I have heard so much of him, but have never seen him. That is just the thing!"

"You shall try your skill with him," I said. "You shall meet him face to face, look into his evil gla.s.sy eyes, watch his brown fingers move on mechanical levers, see his lungs and heart of geared wheels and little pulleys and--"

"And what?" she cried.

"Battle with him--wit against wit--skill against skill--and win!"

"You seem to bear the Sheik a grudge," she said, and as we went up the steps of the old Natural History Building, where romping children of the tenements scattered banana peels and papers, she repeated the remark.

"I've taken a dislike to the automaton," I said. "It is an uncanny creature. It gives me the impression of an evil soul attached to a lot of metallic gears. Personally I should be glad to have the opportunity of tearing it to pieces and seeing it scattered on the ground--a heap of red cotton rags, hair stuffing, and broken levers."

My earnestness, however, only caused her to tilt her rounded chin in air and laugh as only she can laugh. Having persuaded the girl at the ticket office that the dog with us would do no harm, we had already entered and were pa.s.sing through the exhibit of figures.

"Possibly you feel the same way toward this waxy Bismarck who looks so much more like a brewer than a general," said she, "or toward this Catherine of Russia who, I understand, was not a very refined queen, and who here shows it by wearing a ruff that should have gone to the laundry a year ago or more."

"No," I replied. "If they let me alone, it matters not to me when they are melted down for candles. My enemy is the fellow in the corner there with the group of country persons around him. Perhaps we shall not have a chance to play a game with him this afternoon."

Fortunately, however, just as we came up toward the gloomy corner, there was a shout of bantering laughter from those whom, offhand, I should have called Aunt Lou, Cousin Becky, Brother Bob, and Milly Snagg, and we saw that the automaton had just dispatched his opponent--the fifth member of the party, a well-bronzed countryman, with a shaved neck and prominent ears. The mechanical eye had drawn down its brown lid in a hideous wink, much to the discomfiture of the champion of some rural village.

For the second time I deposited the coin in the slot, whereupon Julianna, with great delight, watched the opening of the front of the box, the exposure of the internals of the figure, and the jerky motions of the Sheik as he extended his mechanical arm over his lifeless legs to make the first move.

"I like him," she said, and stepped forward toward the chessboard.

Thereupon a strange thing happened. Some part of the contrivance gave forth a sound as if a wheel had been torn from its socket; a whirring sound continued for a moment, then finally the air was filled with a ghastly shriek.

I defy any man to say whether that shriek came from the rasp of an unoiled metal bearing or from a human throat. That it proceeded from the automaton there was no question.

It was followed by a stillness not only of the automaton itself, but also of ourselves.

"Look at his head!" roared the countryman, who had, with his party, lingered to see more of the marvelous creature. He pointed to the figure, and when my eyes followed his gesture, I saw that the Sheik's head had fallen backward like a thing with its throat cut. As I stared, there came a slight noise from the box and out of the slot my coin flew back as if it bore the message that there was no more playing that afternoon.

"Well," said I to Julianna, "apparently the show is over."

She did not answer. I put the coin in my pocket.

"It is too bad," I said. "The Sheik has broken something important in his cosmos."

Again she failed to reply, and I looked up. She was staring, I thought, at the floor.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"Look at the dog!" she whispered.

He was cringing, cowering, with closed eyes, flattened to the ground, and sniffing softly, in an agony of terror!

It was dreadful to see so n.o.ble a beast in such a state, and probably more shocking to Julianna who had affection for him than to me.