The Unspeakable Perk Part 23

"And a little bit sorry?"

The begoggled face turned toward her. There was a perceptible tensity in the line of the jaw. But the beetle man made no answer.

"Now, if I could see behind those gla.s.ses," said Miss Polly Brewster to her wicked little self, "I'd probably BITE myself rather than say it again. Just the same--And a little bit sorry?" she persisted aloud.

"Does that matter?" said the man quietly.

Miss Polly Brewster forthwith bit herself on her pink and wayward tongue.

"Don't think I'm not grateful," she employed that chastened member to say. "I am, most deeply. So will father be, even if he decides not to leave. I'm afraid that's what he will decide."

"He mustn't."

"Tell him that yourself."

"I will, if it becomes necessary."

"Let me be present at the interview. Most people are afraid of dad.

Perhaps you'd be, too."

"I could always run away," he remarked, unsmiling. "You know how well I do it."

"I must do it now myself, and get arrayed for the daily tea sacrifice.

Au revoir."

"Hasta manana," he said absently.

She had turned to go, but at the word she came slowly back a pace or two, smiling.

"What a strange beetle man you are!" she said softly. "I have no other friends like you. You ARE a friend, aren't you, in your queer way?" She did not wait for an answer, but went on: "You don't come to see me when I ask you. You don't send me any word. You make me feel that, compared to your concerns with beetles and flies, I'm quite hopelessly unimportant. And yet here I find you giving up your own pursuits and wasting your time to plan and watch and think for us."

"For you," he corrected.

"For me," she accepted sweetly. "What an ungrateful little pig you must think me! But truly inside I appreciate it and thank you, and I think--I feel that perhaps it amounts to a lot more than I know."

He made a gesture of negation.

"No great thing," he said. "But it's the best I can do, anyway. Do you remember what the mediaeval mummer said, when he came bearing his poor homage?"

"No. Tell it to me."

"It runs like this: 'Lady, who art nowise bitter to those who serve you with a good intent, that which thy servant is, that he is for you.'"

"Polly Brewster," said the girl to herself, as she walked, slowly and musingly, back to her room, "the busy haunts of men are more suited to your style than the free-and-untrammeled s.p.a.ces of nature, and well you know it. But you'll go to-morrow and you'll keep on going until you find out what is behind those brown-green goblin spectacles. If only he didn't look so like a gnome!"

The clause conditional, introduced by the word "if," does not always imply a conclusion, even in the mind of the propounder. Miss Brewster would have been hard put to it to round out her subjunctive.

VI

FORKED TONGUES

"Pooh!" said Thatcher Brewster.

Thatcher Brewster's "Pooh!" is generally recognized in the realm of high finance as carrying weight. It is not derisive or contemptuous; it is dismissive. The subject of it simply ceases to exist. In the present instance, it was so mild as scarcely to stir the smoke from his after-dinner cigar, yet it had all the intent, if not the effect, of finality. The reason why it hadn't the effect was that it was directed at Thatcher Brewster's daughter.

"Perhaps not quite so much 'Pooh!' as you think," was that damsel's reception of the pregnant monosyllable.

"A bug-hunter from nowhere! Don't I know that type?" said the magnate, who confounded all scientists with inventors, the capital-seeking inventor being the bane and torment of his life.

"He knew about the Dutch blockade."

"Or pretended he did. I'm afraid my Pollipet has let herself romanticize a little."

"Romanticize!" The girl laughed. "If you could see him, dad! Romance and my poor little beetle man don't live in the same world."

Out of the realm of memory, where the echoes come and go by no known law, sounded his voice in her ear: "'That which thy servant is, that he is for you.'" Dim doubt forthwith began to cloud the bright certainty of Miss Brewster's verdict.

"If he's gone to all the trouble that I told you of, it must be that he has some good reason for wanting to get us safely out," she argued to her father.

"Perhaps he feels that his peace of mind would be more a.s.sured if you were in some other country," he teased. "No, my dear, I'm not leaving a full-manned yacht in a foreign harbor and smuggling myself out of a friendly country on the say-so of an unknown adviser, whose chief ability seems to lie in the hundred-yard dash."

"I think that's unfair and ungrateful. If a man with a sword--"

"When I begin a row, I stay with it," said Mr. Brewster grimly.

"Quitters and I don't pull well together."

"Then I'm to tell him 'No'?"

"Positively."

"Not so positively at all. I shall say, 'No, thank you,' in my very nicest way, and say that you're very grateful and appreciative and not at all the growly old bear of a dad that you pretend to be when one doesn't know and love you. And perhaps I'll invite him to dine here and go away on the yacht with us--"

"And graciously accept a couple of hundred thousand dollars bonus, and come into the company as first vice-president," chuckled her father.

"And then he'll wake up and find he's been sitting on a cactus. See here," he added, with a sharpening of tone, "do you suppose he could get a cablegram for transmission to Washington over to the mainland for us by this mysterious route of his?"

"Very likely."

"You're really sure you want to go, Pollipet? This is your cruise, you know."

"Yes, I do."

Hitherto Miss Polly had been declaring to all and sundry, including the beetle man himself, that it was her firm intent and pleasure to stay on the island and observe the presumptively interesting events that promised. That she had reversed this decision, on the unsolicited counsel of an extremely queer stranger, was a phenomenon the peculiarity of which did not strike her at the time. All that she felt was a settled confidence in the beetle man's sound reason for his advice.

"Very good," said Mr. Brewster. "If I can get through a message to the State Department, they'll bring pressure to bear on the Dutch, and we can take the yacht through the blockade. It's only a question of finding a way to lay the matter before the Dutch authorities, anyway. I've been making inquiries here, and I find there's no intention of bottling up neutral pleasure craft. I dare say we could get out now. Only it's possible that the Hollanders might shoot first and ask questions afterward."