XVIII
MISS REGAN WILL MARRY THE SOESOEHOENAN
The confused half consciousness, in which Hereford had been only dimly aware that others were moving about him and that he, himself, was being moved, gave place to a restless sleep. He awoke in Max Schimmel's house—in Max's own bed. Clean clothes of his own, saw, had been brought and laid upon a chair. He tried at first to piece together his recollections, confused by the blows upon his head. Then finally he got up, impeded by the pain of his shoulder and a splitting headache, and drew further back the heavy curtains with which Max, when he wished, made a solitude for himself even in the city's heart. When he attempted to dress, the noise he made brought to him the Chinese boy. The boy, deft and evidently appointed as his nurse, helped him to dress and brought him soup and some kind of hard but pleasant-tasting crackers which Hereford had never seen before. Max, he said, was out. Hereford, feeling stronger when he had eaten and now seeing the Chinese boy nowhere about, made his way through Max's little sitting room into the hall and to the front door. This door at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to the entrance door below, he found locked. The rear door was locked, as he discovered when he tried it, and there was no window opening out upon the little back porch.
In a room to one side, Hereford heard noises; but when he opened the door to this, he found only the Chinese boy again, who was now giving the ocelot some sort of dry bath. The boy and the great cat rolled together on the floor, as the boy rubbed what seemed sawdust mixed with a white powder into the ocelot's fur. He sat up at Hereford's question how he was to get out and answered with Oriental indifference.
"No glet out at all. No kley!"
Then he rose at Hereford's request for a drink and brought whiskey and a glass, the big cat as he went following him like a dog. Hereford took a swallow of the whiskey and went back to the bedroom and lay down upon the lounge.
Presently he heard someone ascend the stairs and knock. The Chinese boy unlocked and opened the door from within and locked it again. Angry now that he knew the boy had lied to him, Hereford got up and made his way once more into the sitting room. Here, with her wraps still on and evidently just come in, he found Lorine.
"Mr. Schimmel asked me to meet him here at this time," she explained without embarrassment. "I hardly expected to see you, as I did not think you could get up."
Hereford's realization that he loved his ward made him for the first time ill at ease in her presence. He flushed uncomfortably, as his look at her told him that she was perfectly self-possessed while he himself was not.
"You knew I was here then," he said nervously. "Perhaps you can also tell me why I am not allowed to go out—why I am locked in here?"
"That is a partnership affair, Mr. Hereford. You can place the responsibility as you wish. I suggested it and Mr. Schimmel carried it out."
He flushed again.
"No doubt, in suggesting it, you had reasons that seemed sufficient to yourself?"
"Quite. You were equally in demand last night, Mr. Hereford, by Baraka and the police. Mr. Schimmel saw to it that the police did not get you, and Baraka—" she hesitated—"well, was prevented," she finished.
He turned unhappily away from her, and sat down in front of the fire which burned in Max's little grate.
"Where is Max now?" he asked at last.
"Mr. Schimmel—if I understand his somewhat indefinite message to me over the 'phone—was very busy up till noon with the police. Since then, I do not know. I thought he would be here."
"And Annis?"
"Busy with the police likewise—in a less pleasant way, Mr. Hereford. Mr. Annis has been locked up at the police station ever since he recovered consciousness last night. He has made to the police what he claims is a full statement of his implication in the affair, including your participation with him in the attempt to get the emerald."
Hereford turned suddenly to face her.
"My participation with Annis?" he exclaimed.
"Yes. But that has not solved the mystery, of course. For he claims also that the plan you had made together to get possession of the stone failed."
"My participation with Annis!" Hereford cried again. "Do you believe that?"
She smiled rather tremulously. "No."
Hereford saw that their positions had been reversed. It had been he that had had the upper hand in their last interview; now that position was—or she was making it seem—hers. Events, whose nature and extent were unknown to him, had moved forward while he slept.
"At least," he said, after a long pause, "some explanation from me is due you now."
"I hardly think an explanation is necessary now, Mr. Hereford," she returned. "It is quite plain now, is it not, that you believed Mr. Annis had the stone? That because of that you protected him—through collusion, he says. He is not telling the truth in that, I think. But at any rate you did protect him by shooting yourself through the hand, so that suspicion could be directed only toward yourself. And after all you found he did not have the emerald. Quite plain, all of that—is it not, Mr. Hereford? Everything except how you and Mr. Annis came so strangely to be together last night in the room from which the emerald was stolen."
"Because we thought the stone there!" Hereford burst out. "We both thought it!"
"But it was not."
Hereford was silent.
"It must have been!" he said finally. "There is no other possible explanation the chain of evidence is too exact, too perfect. I went direct from my office yesterday, when I left you there, to Annis, though I did not find him until evening. I warned him then that it was time for him to leave Chicago. When he refused, I knew he did not have the stone. Then I thought of the fire—the incendiary fire! And Lund! I had warned Lund not to let himself be separated from Annis. If Lund was at the Tonty at the time of the fire, so was Annis. What strange, unbelievable thing went on in that room the night the emerald was stolen, I don't know. I don't know why, since in some unbelievable way Annis himself escaped, the stone had to be left. But I do know that he did not take it! Lorine, the emerald is in that room! If they have not found it, it is because they have not looked sufficiently!"
He had drawn near her while he spoke and bent over her. She looked up swiftly at him and disturbedly shook her head.
"The police thought so too, Mr. Hereford, and last night and this morning they have sifted the contents of the room through their fingers. They have left only the four bare walls, and soaked the paper from those in the hope of finding some crevice in the plaster. If the Surakarta had been the size of a pinhead, it could not have escaped them. But they found it was not there!"
Hereford straightened dismally.
"Then all the way through this I have been—and acted like—a fool!" he said unhappily. He sat down again and put his face into his hands. Then he looked and saw her watching him; and he had the feeling that, as he raised his head, her expression changed. She got up, as though uneasy under his questioning look, and went to the mantel and picked up some strange dried sea-creature from among Max's specimens; but he saw that she did not look at it.
"Why did you say that?" she demanded.
"Certainly," he said, "I must ask myself what your father would have thought, if he could have been here these last two days and watched the actions of the man he had chosen as your trustee."
"He would have been quite satisfied, I think," she said abruptly.
"And you? I mean I do not know exactly how you regard me now since, after my pretense of having the stone, you have found that I had nothing to do with its disappearance."
"You have never, Mr. Hereford—as my trustee—showed very plainly that it mattered to you what I thought."
But she moved around the room now, and he thought—but he could not be sure—that it was because she wished to hide the fact that she was trembling. Hereford for the first time suspected that all along she had not felt the self-possession that she showed—that it was assumed.
"I have sometimes thought," she observed, "that my father understood us both better than we have understood ourselves."
"What do you mean by that?" he cried.
She seemed more interested than before in Max's specimens, and he could not see her face.
"Exactly what I said. My father liked and I know respected you. I know he loved me greatly. So I have thought—sometimes of late—that he may have wished us to be better acquainted with one another and that that was the reason he made you my trustee."
He stared in amazement.
"At least," he burst out bitterly, as he thought how strange it was he should recognize that he loved her only after he had done everything that his position had made possible to offend and estrange her—"At least, he might have picked out someone who would not have done you all—all the injustice I have done you!"
"I do not understand you," she said, not looking at him.
"Yes, you do. I have misjudged you ever since I have had anything to do with you! Some of that you know—for it has been said and sent you—but more of it has been done. I got started wrong with you, I guess. You say your father may have meant to—to start us toward acquaintance. But it was because of your father, I think, that I got started wrong. I saw how anxious you made him, how you troubled him, and it made me think you were not—not worthy of his love, just foolish, reckless. Once I thought this, it made it easy to keep on such thinking—to see in everything you did or tried to do, or proposed doing, just the act of a notoriety-mad"
His lips refused the word.
"Say it!" she commanded. "You mean you thought I was a fool."
"Yes—that is what I thought; and that is what I tried to think. Many times I have deliberately told myself that, when some other reason suggested itself to me for your acts. Often I wrote you as though you were only that. I was—I see now I tried to be—just like everybody else; I saw no more than they did; but it has been growing plain to me now that something drove you to all those things. You showed it in your face yesterday and the night before; I could see it now, if you did not turn your face away. I wonder that I never guessed it before; but perhaps no one ever guessed it before because all the world looked upon you very same way—and I was no different!"
"No!" The girl checked him quickly but gently. She did not raise her head; he could not see her face. "No! That is not true! You believed of me the same as all the rest of them, I know; but—but, though all the rest of them just drove me on, you—you at least tried to check me!"
"But how I did it—the I tried to do it! The assumption—the rotten, cruel assumption in every line I wrote you! The other things I did—the explanations I made for you when I considered that some must be made!"
"I did not mind that!"
"Lorine!" he breathed. "Lorine!"
He craned forward, and now at last he saw her face; and to his amazement it was like a face that he had never seen before—her own yet different. He knew that now finally he saw her as she was—as once, and again, and still again he had divined that she might be; for her face was still turned away from him and he understood she did not know he saw it.
When at last she turned to him, the look still lingered; but she trembled violently and he saw that she was deeply troubled.
"Thank you," she said simply. "You make it easier for me. I did not tell you the exact truth today. I made you think that Max Schimmel asked me to come here. That was not true. I asked him to arrange that I might see you here, because I had something that I knew now I must tell you. The emerald is gone, and no one knows where it can be; and because of that I am in terrible trouble. But first I wish you would sit down again, because you are weak and hurt; and I will sit here by you. But until I have finished, please do not look at me any more than you can help, and please—until I have quite finished—do not touch me."
He watched her in amazement as she set a chair near his own.
"It is something such as no girl ever should have to tell," she said, not looking at him, and her face deeply crimson. "I should not be able to tell it even now, except that the Surakarta has disappeared because of me, and except that you almost gave your life for me last night—and might have given it but for good fortune."
A little flush came to his face in spite of his pallor. "So you know it was for you?"
"If you wait until I am through you will understand how I knew it. To make you understand, I shall have to go back to the beginning. You better than anyone else, Mr. Hereford, know what sort of man my father was—everybody laughed at and feared him. He did not mind their laughing because he knew that they were afraid. But they were not afraid of me, and so at me they—only laughed. But I did not know then that they were laughing at me. Everybody talked about me and, from the time I was little, the newspapers printed the—the crazy things I did; and I thought it was—smart. Then when I found out they were only laughing at me, I—couldn't change. People wouldn't let me change. Wherever I went, I found that they already knew about me. Even when I tried to do nice things, no one would believe it. It was horrible! So then I tried to think I did not care. And after that father died, and it seemed he had made you my trustee.
"I had heard of you through him, but I did not know much about you; but very soon I saw that you knew a great deal about me—you knew all the dreadful things that I had done and you tried to check me; you were ashamed for me and with me! And at first it angered me; but afterward—afterward I began to see! It was in your letters, even your short letters that I had tried to force you to make only business; it was in everything you did! You alone of all the world had made what I did a matter of your own pride and shame!"
"I cared, Lorine! I must have cared! I know—now—that I must always have cared!"
"But you did not know you cared; you could not understand it then. Oh, I saw! Somehow it had happened that out of all the world there was one person, and only one, who really cared for me. And yet I was more shut off from you than from anyone else, because you better than other one knew all the crazy things I had done. You—you could not think yourself in love with such a girl as—as you were sure I was! So then I—I had to do something that would make you sure!"
"You, Lorine?" he cried in wonder. "You make me sure?"
"Yes; but I did not know then what sort of thing that could be. And then I met those English people in India and went to Java with them and met the Soesoehoenan. He had been at Oxford, you know, and I suppose had learned to admire the English women; and when he saw and heard about me, I suppose he thought that here was a woman of white blood whom he could ask to marry him without her thinking it an insult. And when he did ask me, there came into my mind the maddest, craziest of all the mad and crazy things that I had ever done.
"I arranged for the Soesoehoenan to send the emerald here; I made my plans to be here. I was going to tell you of the Soesoehoenan when you found out from someone else; and when at first you only mentioned cutting off my income to prevent me—Oh, I cannot tell you how I felt! For if you did not realize that you cared more than that I—I did not know what I could do. But if you cared enough, or it made you care enough to stop me, I knew I could send the emerald back; it would do no harm; he would soon forget me. But it did begin to make you know you cared; for you swore to me that I should not receive the emerald—and I was happy! And the next day it was gone—and I was still happier, because I was certain that you had it! And after that I was only afraid for you because of Baraka. I set Farren to watch and guard you; and when I found that Baraka was determined to have your rooms broken into, I came to you in your rooms to beg you to send him back the emerald. But I could do nothing with you.
"I knew Baraka could not be held off long; I thought if he was allowed to break into your rooms, as he was determined, I might save you from personal danger. I knew he was to attempt it that evening; so, when I was waiting below in your building trying to decide what to do and when your man came down and left you alone, I made the excuse of going to your office to take you away from the danger!"
"Lorine! Lorine!" he cried.
"Then, when the fire was started in Baraka's rooms and the danger grew still greater, I even tried to make Baraka think that you had given me the emerald! And all the while you did not have it"
She got up and shrank back from him, as he moved toward her.
"You do not understand!" she cried miserably. "Oh, don't you see what I have done? It is because of me—I have been the means of losing the Surakarta, which means a kingdom! What can I do now, if he still wants me, but—even against my will—marry the Soesoehoenan!"
He took her in his arms.
"Not that, Lorine!" he breathed. "Not that!"