SUSPENSE
The three sat brooding in silence for several minutes, until one of the
native clerks came in and held the door open respectfully. That meant
that the chief was coming, and Murray slid off his perch and slipped
quietly out as Gregory came slowly in.
In the unsparing afternoon light he looked a broken lion--an old
king-beast with sagging skin and weakened mouth, but with fierce fight
still in his tired and anxious eyes.
Hunters know that the smaller breeds of lions are the most dangerous.
Robert Gregory was not a large man--he barely reached his wife’s good
inches. But he was jungle-fierce and jungle-strong. He had fought many
a hard fight and had been torn and scarred in fights, but he had never
lost one yet. He had pounded his way through the world, butted his way
to victory and wealth. He had no finesse and no super-judgment, but he
had splendid pluck, lion courage, bulldog pertinacity; and often for
his wife, and for his daughter always, he had the charming tenderness
that bulldogs show to children.
There was a hint of unscrupulousness in his face, and he had a jaw of
iron. He was a very thin man, and it saved him from looking a very
common one.
He was scrupulously dressed--now as ever--and, now as ever, just
a shade over-dressed. His appearance would have gained had his
watch-chain been a trifle slenderer, his cummerbund a less youthful
rose, the canary-colored diamond in his ring half its size, or,
better still, not worn. But his small, well-kept hands were dark,
and unmistakably the hands of a man. He wore a bangle--just a thread
of twined gold set with two or three inferior turquoise, and it kept
slipping down his arm, almost over his knuckles--a cheap thing that had
cost less than his cravat. Hilda had given it to him several years ago.
He came in deliberately--almost as if he too were very tired or beaten
by the day’s terrific heat--but with a determined air of briskness, and
nodded crisply to Carruthers and Holman as he took his own chair at his
own desk.
He was at bay. And he was going to fight--to the very end, let the end
be what it might. But, in spite of his fierce self-control and genuine
grit, he did not look a man “fit” to put up a big fight. For two nights
he had had little sleep, and none that was restful. And to Holman’s
friendly, searching eyes he betrayed several signs of the hideous
strain and worry with which he was battling. The business catastrophes
that had heaped up about him were bad enough--enough to unnerve any
man, and he was palpably unnerved--but the first thought in his mind,
the burning object of its ceaseless search, was--his son. He was
holding his head defiantly, but the veins at his temples were twitching.
Holman took the telegram out of his pocket, and, with emotion that he
could not quite conceal, leaned across the desk, holding it out to
Gregory.
“Mr. Gregory,” he said--“the _Feima_----” But he did not have to
finish.
“Oh, yes! I know, I know,” Gregory said listlessly.
“I’m sorry,” Tom Carruthers began; “I’m awfully sorry for this, Mr.
Gregory.”
Robert Gregory swung round in his chair and banged the desk fiercely
with his clenched fist. “Sorry--Tom! By God, I’ll make some one pay
for this--but _who_? What have we got to fight? Holman, you still
think it’s this man Wu? Eh?”
“I don’t think, governor,” Holman said, leaning across the desk in his
earnestness, “I’m positive. In some way we’ve run up against the most
powerful man in China.”
“Well, I’m testing your theory, Holman. I’m having that cursed Chinaman
here.”
Tom Carruthers turned in his insecure seat on the window-ledge, so
astonished that he very nearly slid off it; and Holman was distinctly
perturbed.
“I sent him a chit this morning from the club, telling him I wished
to see him here urgently at two o’clock on a matter of the gravest
importance.”
William Holman shook his head.
“Take it from me, sir, Wu Li Chang is not the man to call upon any
one,” he said; “they must go to him.”
“Indeed!” Gregory snapped.
“And did you see him at two?” Tom said eagerly.
“No, Tom; he sent a coolie with a chit to say that he would call here
at three--unless he found it inconvenient--_unless he found it
inconvenient_! Look. I’ve hurried over from the club to see him.”
Tom came across the room and picked up the note Gregory had tossed
towards him, and stood studying it closely.
The trouble on Holman’s face thickened. “If Mr. Wu condescends to
answer such a summons,” he said earnestly, “why, that very fact
strengthens my belief. I tell you he never discusses anything outside
his own offices--never! And if for once he breaks that rule, he has
some terrible reason for doing it--some damnably sinister motive.”
“Pretty cool sort of johnnie, anyway,” Tom commented, still
scrutinizing Wu’s note. “But I say, what an educated, professional sort
of fist he writes.”
“Oh!” Holman said impatiently, “he’s got us both ways. He has all
the advantages of a Western education without having lost a scrap of
his Eastern cunning. I came out once with the skipper who took Wu to
Europe--Wu and an English tutor he’d had for years--he was only a
kid then, but Watson said he played a better game of chess than any
white man on board--unless it was the tutor chap--had ever seen played
before, bar none. Wu was nine or ten then. He’s forty now, and no doubt
his chess has been improving every day since.”
Gregory smiled nastily. “Well,” he said, “you may be perfectly correct
in all you say, Holman, but it seems to me that you’re all afraid of
these Chinamen.”
“I am, for one then,” Holman muttered. “And I’ve been here twenty
years.”
“Unnecessarily afraid. I think you’ll find that I’m perfectly capable
of dealing with the fellow when he comes--and he’ll come all right--oh,
yes! he’ll come.”
“I wonder,” Holman said.
“I’m sure I hope so,” Tom Carruthers said heartily.
Holman devoutly hoped not, but he did not say it.
“He’ll come,” Gregory repeated didactically, almost truculently; “he’ll
come, as full of oil as a pound of butter. What the devil!” he added,
with a displeased change of voice, as silk skirts and high-heeled
shoes sounded in the hall. “I told you not to leave the hotel,” he
complained, with affection and dismay mingled in his voice, as his
wife and daughter came through the door.
“Of course you did, poor old dear,” Hilda told him soothingly, seating
herself on the corner of his desk and patting him encouragingly on
his shoulder. “But Mother can’t rest. How can she? And if she isn’t
scouring the island--she must know every inch of it by now--she is
hunting on the mainland with Ah Wong.”
“Oh! I know, I know,” Florence Gregory said wearily, subsiding
indifferently into the chair Holman placed for her.
“You’ll wear yourself out,” her husband said roughly, but not unkindly.
The mother smiled, contemptuous of the fatigue from which she was wan
and trembling. “It’s no use saying anything to me. I can’t rest. Have
you heard anything? That’s all I’ve come for.”
“Not yet, dear. I’ve seen the Governor again. He was most kind--really
very kind. Everything is being done--everything--and will be--and it is
foolish to go on wearing yourself out like this.”
“I am not wearing myself out,” his wife returned petulantly. “The
suspense is wearing my heart out--and no one seems to care--no one!”
“Yes, I know how you feel, dear,” her husband answered her gently, “and
what you must be suffering. But try to spare yourself just a little,
for my sake. And believe me--you can--all that is possible is being
done--and this--this is man’s work.”
“Is it?” the mother said dully. “I’m not so sure, I’m not so sure.” She
closed her eyes and leaned back in the big office chair, burning and
shivering with excitement, and terribly, terribly tired.
Ah Wong looked about the office desperately. She wanted cushions,
but there were no cushions there, and she went and stood very close
behind her mistress; and when Mrs. Gregory moved her head restlessly,
the Chinese woman slid her hand between it and the sharp edge of the
chair’s hard back.
And they might well be tired--the amah too, as well as the frailer,
fairer woman. For they had indeed been beating the island and the
mainland for days now--searching, searching, and often in quarters of
whose existence the English woman could not have suspected, and whose
nature she had but dimly grasped--some of them quarters into which no
European woman, nice or otherwise, had penetrated before. But Mrs.
Gregory had been in no peril. She had not suffered rudeness even. Ah
Wong had guarded her well. Ah Wong had known how to do it.
But not one clew, not even the hint of a clew, had they found. Nor had
John Bradley, who, in a different and quieter way, had been hunting as
indefatigably--and was hunting now.
Robert Gregory sat crouched a little forward now, leaning on the
desk, watching his wife miserably, but saying no more--tortured for
her (almost forgetting his own pain in hers, or feeling his own only
through hers), but pathetically glad to have her rest even this little.
Holman slipped over to the window and stood looking moodily out to the
Chinese-and-Mongol-teeming dockside. Tom Carruthers sat quietly down on
the big desk too and took Hilda’s hand in his.
For several moments there was a silence in the room that was broken
only by the ticking of the clock and the incessant echo of hubbub that
buzzed in through the windows, the other five all conspiring eagerly
to hold and guard Mrs. Gregory’s rest undisturbed until she broke it
herself. Even the Chinese clerk who had come in just after Ah Wong,
and who sat, with his face to the wall, writing in the farthest corner,
began to drive a noiseless pen, without looking round.
But the clock struck three, and after a startled glance thrown up at
it, Mr. Gregory said softly, “Florence.”
“Yes?” his wife answered drearily, without moving; she did not even
open her eyes.
The husband sighed remorsefully. “Dear, I’m afraid you’ll have to go.”
“Why?” she asked indifferently, as if the answer could not interest
her, and still without moving her head or opening her eyes.
“Well, you see, I’ve made an appointment here at three--and it may, it
just may, prove important, with--with a man.”
“Who?” Her voice was still devoid of interest.
“I expect Mr. Wu here.”
Before her husband had spoken the last word Mrs. Gregory was bolt
upright in her chair, wide-eyed, alert--as if galvanized, revitalized,
tense and acute.
“Mr. Wu?” she whispered eagerly.
“Yes,” he told her.
And the amah fingered softly something hidden in her gown.
“About Basil!”
“About a lot of things,” Gregory said grimly. “And Basil in particular.”
“Oh! and he can help us! You think so, don’t you, Robert?”
“He can help us all right, Mrs. Gregory,” William Holman said sternly,
“if he will.”
“Oh! he must. He shall!” she said hoarsely.
“At any rate, he’s coming. And that’s more than I thought,” Holman
said, as a new degree and quality of hubbub belched up from the yard.
And as he spoke Murray came in with two cards--a long, thin slip of
crimson paper, the mandarin’s name and title inscribed on it in black
Chinese characters, and an ordinary English visiting card, simply
engraved “Mr. Wu.”
“He’s getting out of his rickshaw, sir,” Murray told his employer.
“And every man jack of the coolies is ko’towing to him as if he was a
god,” Holman grunted from the window.
Gregory rose to his feet with a careful show of calm. “Well,” he
remarked cheerfully, “we’ll soon see now what sort of stuff this
well-advertised Chinaman is made of. Show him in, Murray. Holman, take
my wife to the den near the counting-house. She’ll want to stay, of
course, to hear the result. Now, please, off you all go.”
The others turned to the door to which he had pointed--not the door
that led to the hall, but at the other end of the long room--but
Florence Gregory went up to her husband. “Robert----” she began, but
she could not say more, and her eyes were swimming.
Her husband cupped her face in his hands. “There, Mother, there,” he
said tenderly, and just a little brokenly, “I know, dear, I know. I
understand. There--there. It’s all right. I’ll be careful--very, very
careful. Ah Wong!” But he need not have called Ah Wong--she was there
already, waiting to serve; and though Hilda turned to her mother as if
to help her, and Tom Carruthers and Holman did too, it was Ah Wong who
led her out, Ah Wong to whose hand she held and leaned on a little as
she went.