Chapter 6
Miss Brewster looked at him in surprise. It was borne in upon her, as she looked, that this man was not accustomed to being lightly regarded by other men, however busy or important; that his own concerns in life were quite as weighty to him, and in his esteem, perhaps, to others, as were the interests of any magnate; and that, man to man, there would be no shyness or indecision or purposelessness anywhere in his make-up.
“If it was important,” she began hesitantly, “my father would be—”
“It was of no importance to me,” he cut in. “To others—Perhaps I could see some one else of your party.”
“Well, here I am.” She smiled. “Why won’t I do?”
Behind the obscuring disks she could feel his glance read her. The grimness at the mouth’s corners relaxed.
“I really don’t know why you shouldn’t.”
“Dad says I’d have made a man of affairs,” she remarked.
“Why, it’s just this. You should be planning to leave this country.”
Miss Brewster bewailed her harsh lot with drooping lip.
“Every one wants to drive me away!”
“Who else?”
“That railroad man, Mr. Galpy, was offering us special inducements to leave, in the form of special trains any time we liked. It isn’t hospitable.”
“A jail is hospitable. But one doesn’t stay in it when one can get out.”
“If Caracuña were the jail and I the ‘one,’ one might. I quite love it here.”
He made a sharp gesture of annoyance.
“Don’t be childish,” he said.
“Childish? You come down like Freedom from the mountain heights, and unfurl your warnings to the air, and complain of lost time and all that sort of thing, and what does it all amount to?” she demanded, with spirit. “That we should sail away, when you know perfectly well that the Dutch won’t let us sail away! Childish, indeed! Don’t you be _beetlish!_”
“There’s a way out, without much risk, but some discomfort. You could strike south-east to the Bird Reefs, take a small boat, and get over to the mainland. As soon as the blockade is off, the yacht can take your luggage around. The trip would be rough for you, but not dangerous. Not as dangerous as staying here may be.”
“Do you really think it so serious?”
“Most emphatically.”
“Will you come with us and show us the way?” she inquired, gazing with exaggerated appeal into his goggles.
“I? No.”
“What shall you do?”
“Stick.”
“Pins through scarabs,” she laughed, “while beneath you Caracuña riots and revolutes and massacres foreigners. Nero with his fiddle was nothing to you.”
“Miss Brewster, I’m afraid you are suffering from a misplaced sense of humor. Will you believe me when I tell you that I have certain sources of information in local matters both serviceable and reliable?”
“You seem to have bet on a certainty in the Dutch blockade matter.”
“Well, it’s equally certain that there is bubonic plague here.”
“A _bola_. You told me so yourself.”
“Perhaps there was nothing to be gained then by letting you know, as you were bottled up, with no way out. Now, through the good offices of a foreign official, who, of course, couldn’t afford to appear, this opportunity to reach the mainland is open to you.”
“Had you anything to do with that?” she inquired suspiciously.
“Oh, the official is a friend of mine,” he answered carelessly.
“And you really believe that there is an epidemic of plague here? Don’t you think that I’d make a good Red Cross nurse?”
His voice was grave and rather stern.
“You’ve never seen bubonic plague,” he said, “or you wouldn’t joke about it.”
“I’m sorry. But it wasn’t wholly a joke. If we were really cooped up with an epidemic, I’d volunteer. What else would there be to do?”
“Nothing of the sort,” he cried vehemently. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Anyway, isn’t the wonderful Luther Pruyn on his way to exorcise the demon, or something of the sort?”
“What about Luther Pruyn? Who says he’s coming here?”
“It’s the gossip of the diplomatic set and the clubs. He’s the favorite mystery of the day.”
“Well, if he does come, it won’t improve matters any, for the first case he verifies he’ll clap on a quarantine that a mouse couldn’t creep through. I know something of the Pruyn method.”
“And don’t wholly approve it, I judge.”
“It may be efficacious, but it’s extremely inconvenient at times.”
Again the cathedral clock boomed.
“See how I’ve kept you from your own affairs!” cried Miss Polly contritely. “What are you going to do now? Go back to your mountains?”
“Yes. As soon as you tell me that your father will go out by the reefs.”
“Do you expect him to make up his mind, on five minutes’ notice, to abandon his yacht?”
“I thought great magnates were supposed to be men of instant and unalterable decisions. I don’t know the type.”
“Anyway, dad has gone out. I saw him drive away. Wouldn’t to-morrow do?”
“Why, yes; I suppose so.”
“I’ll tell you. The Voice will report at the rock to-morrow, at four.”
“No.”
“What a very uncompromising ‘no’!”
“I can’t be there at four. Make it five.”
“What a very arbitrary beetle man! Well, as I’ve wasted so much of your time to-day, I’ll accept your orders for to-morrow.”
“And please impress your father with the extreme advisability of your getting off this island.”
“Yes, sir,” she said meekly. “You’ll be most awfully glad to get rid of us, won’t you?”
“Very greatly relieved.”
“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 glasses,” 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 mañana,” 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 mediæval 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 spaces 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 assured 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.”
“It would have to be done quickly, dad. They may quarantine at any time.”
“Dr. Pruyn ought to be here any day now. Let’s leave that matter for him. There’s a man I have confidence in.”
“Mr. Perkins says that Dr. Pruyn will bottle up the port tighter than the Dutch.”
“Let him, so long as we get out first. Now, Polly, you tell this man Perkins that I’ll pay all expenses and give him a round hundred for himself if he’ll bring me a receipt showing that my cablegram has been dispatched to Washington.”
“I don’t think I’d quite like to do that, dad. He isn’t the sort of man one offers money to.”
“Every one’s the sort of man one offers money to—if it’s enough,” retorted her father. “And a hundred dollars will look pretty big to a scientific man. I know something about their salaries. You try him.”
“So far as expenses go, I will. But I won’t hurt his feelings by trying to pay him for something that he would do for friendship or not at all.”
“Have it your own way. When is he coming in?”
“He isn’t coming in.”
“Then where are you going to see him?”
“Up on the mountain trail, when I ride tomorrow afternoon.”
“With Carroll?”
“No; I’m going alone.”
“I don’t quite like to have you knocking about mountain roads by yourself, though Mr. Sherwen says you’re safe anywhere here. Where’s that little automatic revolver I gave you?”
“In my trunk. I’ll carry that if it will make you feel any easier.”
“Yes, do. But I can’t see why you can’t send word to Perkins that I want to see him here.”
“I can. And I can guess just what his answer would be.”
“Well, guess ahead.”
“He’d tell you to go to the bad place, or its scientific equivalent.” She laughed.
“Would he?” Mr. Brewster did not laugh. “And perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me why.”
“Because you sent word that you were out when he called.”
“Humph! I see people when _I_ want to see _them_, not when they want to see me.”
“Then Mr. Perkins is likely to prove permanently invisible to you, if I’m any judge of character.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Brewster impatiently, “manage it yourself. Only impress on him the necessity of getting the message on the wire. I’ll write it out to-night and give it to you with the money to-morrow.”
After luncheon on the following day, Polly, with the cablegram and money in her purse and her automatic safely disposed in her belt, walked in the plaza with Carroll. The legless beggar whined at them for alms. Handing him a _quartillo_, the Southerner would have passed on, but his companion stood eyeing the mendicant.
“Now, what can there be in that poor wreck to captivate the scientific intellect?” she marveled.
“If you mean Mr. Perkins—” began Carroll.
“I do.”
“Then I think perhaps the reason for some of that gentleman’s associations will hardly stand inquiry.”
The girl turned her eyes on him and searched the handsome, serious face.
“Fitz, you’re not the man to say that of another man without some good reason.”
“I am not, Miss Polly.”
“You think that Mr. Perkins is not the kind of man for me to have anything to do with?”
“I—I’m afraid he isn’t.”
“Don’t you think that, having gone so far, you ought to tell me why?”
Carroll flushed.
“I would rather tell your father.”
“Are you implying a scandal in connection with my timid, little dried-up scientist?”
“I’m only saying,” said the other doggedly, “that there’s something secret and underhanded about that place of his in the mountains. It’s a matter of common gossip.”
The girl laughed outright.
“The poor beetle man! Why, he’s so afraid of a woman that he goes all to pieces if one speaks to him suddenly. Just to see his expression, I’d like to tell him that he’s being scandalized by all Caracuña.”
“You’re going to see him again?”
“Certainly. This afternoon.”
“I don’t think you should, Miss Polly.”
“Have you any actual facts against him? Anything but casual gossip?”
“No; not yet.”
“When you have, I’ll listen to you. But you couldn’t make me believe it, anyway. Why, Fitz, look at him!”
“Take me with you,” insisted the other, “and let me ask him a question or two that any honorable man could answer. They don’t call him the Unspeakable Perk for nothing, Miss Polly.”
“It’s just because they don’t understand his type. Nor do you, Fitz, and so you mistrust him.”
“I understand that you’ve shown more interest in him than in any one you know,” said the other miserably.
Her laugh rang as free and frank as a child’s.
“Interest? That’s true. But if you mean sentiment, Fitz, after once having looked into the depths of those absurd goggles, can you, _could_ you think of sentiment and the beetle man in the same breath?”
“No, I couldn’t,” he confessed, relieved. “But, then, I never have been able to understand you, Miss Polly.”
“Therein lies my fatal charm,” she said saucily. “Now, to the beetle man, I’m a specimen. _He_ understands as much as he wants to. Probably I shall never see him after to-day, anyway. He’s going to get a message through for us that will deliver us from this land of bondage.”
“He can’t do it—too soon for me,” declared Carroll. “And, Miss Polly, you don’t think the worse of me for having said behind his back what I’m just waiting to say to his face?”
“Not a bit,” said the girl warmly. “Only I know it’s nonsense.”
“I hope so,” said Carroll, quite honestly. “I would hate to think anything low-down of a man you’d call your friend.”
Carroll had learned more than he had told, but less than enough to give him what he considered proper evidence to lay before Polly’s father. After some deliberation as to the point of honor involved, he decided to go to Raimonda, who, alone in Caracuña City, seemed to be on personal terms with the hermit. He found the young man in his office. With entire frankness, Carroll stated his errand and the reason for it. The Caracuñan heard him with grave courtesy.
“And now, señor,” concluded the American, “here’s my question, and it’s for you to determine whether, under the circumstances, you are justified in giving me an answer. Is there a woman living in Mr. Perkins’s _quinta_ on the mountains?”
“I cannot answer that question,” said the other, after some deliberation.
“I’m sorry,” said Carroll simply.
“I also. The more so in that my attitude may be misconstrued against Mr. Perkins. I am bound by confidence.”
“So I infer,” returned his visitor courteously. “Then I have only to ask your pardon—”
“One moment, if you please, señor. Perhaps this will serve to make easy your mind. On my word, there is nothing in Mr. Perkins’s life on the mountain in any manner dishonorable or—or irregular.”
In a flash, the simple solution crossed Carroll’s mind. That a woman was there, and a woman not of the servant class, could hardly be doubted, in view of almost direct evidence from eyewitnesses. If there was nothing irregular about her presence, it was because she was Perkins’s wife. In view of Raimonda’s attitude, he did not feel free to put the direct query. Another question would serve his purpose.
“Is it advisable, and for the best interests of Miss Brewster, that she should associate with him under the circumstances?”
The Caracuñan started and shot a glance at his interlocutor that said, as plainly as words, “How much do you know that you are not telling?” had the latter not been too intent upon his own theory to interpret it.
“Ah, that,” said Raimonda, after a pause,—“that is another question. If it were my sister, or any one dear to me—but”—he shrugged—“views on that matter differ.”
“I hardly think that yours and mine differ, señor. I thank you for bearing with me with so much patience.”
He went out with his suspicions hardened into certainty.
VII. “THAT WHICH THY SERVANT IS—”
A man that you’d call your friend. Such had been Fitzhugh Carroll’s reference to the Unspeakable Perk. With that characterization in her mind. Miss Brewster let herself drift, after her suitor had left her, into a dreamy consideration of the hermit’s attitude toward her. She was not prone lightly to employ the terms of friendship, yet this new and casual acquaintance had shown a readiness to serve—not as cavalier, but as friend—none too common in the experience of the much-courted and a little spoiled beauty. Being, indeed, a “lady nowise bitter to those who served her with good intent,” she reflected, with a kindly light in her eyes, that it was all part and parcel of the beetle’s man’s amiable queerness.
Still musing upon this queerness, she strolled back to find her mount waiting at the corner of the plaza. In consideration of the heat she let her cream-colored mule choose his own pace, so they proceeded quite slowly up the hill road, both absorbed in meditation, which ceased only when the mule started an argument about a turn in the trail. He was a well-bred trotting mule, worth six hundred dollars in gold of any man’s money, and he was self-appreciative in knowledge of the fact. He brought a singular firmness of purpose to the support of the negative of her proposition, which was that he should swing north from the broad into the narrow path. When the debate was over, St. John the Baptist—this, I hesitate to state, yet must, it being the truth, was the spirited animal’s name—was considerably chastened, and Miss Brewster more than a trifle flushed. She left him tied to a ceiba branch at the exit from the dried creek bed, with strict instructions not to kick, lest a worse thing befall him. Miss Brewster’s fighting blood was up, when, ten minutes late, because of the episode, she reached the summit of the rock.
“Oh, Mr. Beetle Man, are you there?” she called.
“Yes, Voice. You sound strange. What is it?”
“I’ve been hurrying, and if you tell me I’m late, I’ll—I’ll fall on your neck again and break it.”
“Has anything happened?”
“Nothing in particular. I’ve been boxing the compass with a mule. It’s tiresome.”
He reflected.
“You’re not, by any chance, speaking figuratively of your respected parent?”
“Certainly _not!_” she disclaimed indignantly. “This was a real mule. You’re very impertinent.”
“Well, you see, he was impertinent to me, saying he was out when he was in. What is his decision—yes or no?”
“No.”
A sharp exclamation came from the nook below.
“Is that the entomological synonym for ‘damn’?” she inquired.
“It’s a lament for time wasted on a—Well, never mind that.”
“But he wants you to carry a message by that secret route of yours. Will you do it for him?”
“_No!_”
“That’s not being a very kind or courteous beetle man.”
“I owe Mr. Brewster no courtesy.”
“And you pay only where you owe? Just, but hardly amiable. Well, you owe me nothing—but—will you do it for me?”
“Yes.”
“Without even knowing what it is?”
“Yes.”
“In return you shall have your heart’s desire.”
“Doubted.”
“Isn’t the dearest wish of your soul to drive me out of Caracuña?”
“Hum! Well—er—yes. Yes; of course it is.”
“Very well. If you can get dad’s message on the wire to Washington, he thinks the Secretary of State, who is his friend, can reach the Dutch and have them open up the blockade for us.”
“Time apparently meaning nothing to him.”
“Would it take much time?”
“About four days to a wire.”
She gazed at him in amazement.
“And you were willing to give up four days to carry my message through, ‘unsight—unseen,’ as we children used to say?”
“Willing enough, but not able to. I’d have got a messenger through with it, if necessary. But in four days, there’ll be other obstacles besides the Dutch.”
“Quarantine?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that had to wait for Dr. Pruyn.”
“Pruyn’s here. That’s a secret, Miss Brewster.”
“Do you know _everything?_ Has he found plague?”
“Ah, I don’t say that. But he will find it, for it’s certainly here. I satisfied myself of that yesterday.”
“From your beggar friend?”
“What made you think that, O most acute observer?”
“What else would you be talking to him of, with such interest?”