The second call energized her into action. She dropped the
manuscripts and swiftly brought the coat to him, noting that a
button hung loose. Later, she would sew it on.
"What is it you want?" she asked, as she held out the coat.
"Fold it ... under the pillow."
This she did carefully, but inwardly commenting that he was still
in the realm of strange fancies. Wanting his coat, when he must
have known that the pockets were empty! But the effort to talk had
cost him something. The performance over, he relaxed and closed his
eyes. Even as she watched, the sweat of weakness began to form on
his forehead and under the nether lip. She wet some absorbent
cotton with alcohol and refreshed his face and neck. This done, she
waited at the side of the bed; but he gave no sign that he was
conscious of her nearness.
The poor boy, wanting his empty coat! The incident, however, caused
her to review the recent events. It was now evident that he had not
been normal that first day. Perhaps he had had money in the coat,
back in Hong-Kong, and had been robbed without knowing it. Perhaps
these few words were the first real conscious words he had uttered
in days. His letter of credit; probably that was it; and, observing
the strangeness of the room he was in, his first concern on
returning to consciousness would naturally relate to his letter of
credit. How would he act when he learned that it had vanished?
She gathered up the manuscripts and restored them to the envelope.
This she put into the trunk. She noticed that this trunk was not
littered with hotel labels. These little squares of coloured paper
interested her mightily--hotel labels. She was for ever scanning
luggage and finding her way about the world, via these miniature
pictures. London, Paris, Rome! There were no hotel labels on the
patient's trunk, but there were ship labels; and by these she was
able to reconstruct the journey: from New York to Naples, thence to
Alexandria; from Port Saïd to Colombo; from Colombo to Bombay; from
Calcutta to Rangoon, thence down to Singapore; from Singapore to
Hong-Kong. The great world outside!
She stood motionless beside the trunk, deep in speculation; and
thus the doctor found her.
"Well?" he whispered.
"I believe he is conscious," she answered. "He just asked for his
coat, which he wanted under his pillow."
"Conscious; well, that's good news. He'll be able to help us a
little now. I hope that some day he'll understand how much he owes
you."
"Oh, that!" she said, with a deprecating gesture.
"Miss Enschede, you're seven kinds of a brick!"
"A brick?"
He chuckled. "I forgot. That's slang, meaning you're splendid."
"I begin to see that I shall have to learn English all over again."
"You have always spoken it?"
"Yes; except for some native. I wasn't taught that; I simply fell
into it from contact."
"I see. So he's come around, then? That's fine."
He approached the bed and laid his palm on the patient's forehead,
and nodded. Then he took the pulse.
"He will pull through?"
"Positively. But the big job for you is yet to come. When he begins
to notice things, I want you to trap his interest, to amuse him,
keep his thoughts from reverting to his misfortunes."
"Then he has been unfortunate?"
"That's patent enough. He's had a hard knock somewhere; and until
he is strong enough to walk, we must keep his interest away from
that thought. After that, we'll go our several ways."
"What makes you think he has had a hard knock?"
"I'm a doctor, young lady."
"You're fine, too. I doubt if you will receive anything for your
trouble."
"Oh, yes I will. The satisfaction of cheating Death again. You've
been a great help these five days; for he had to have attendance
constantly, and neither Wu nor I could have given that. And yet,
when you offered to help, it was what is to come that I had in
mind."
"To make him forget the knock?"
"Precisely. I'm going to be frank; we must have a clear
understanding. Can you afford to give this time? There are your own
affairs to think of."
"There's no hurry."
"And money?"
"I'll have plenty, if I'm careful."
"It has done me a whole lot of good to meet you. Over here a man
quickly loses faith, and I find myself back on solid ground once
more. Is there anything you'd like?"
"Books."
"What kind?"
"Dickens, Hugo."
"I'll bring you an armful this afternoon. I've a lot of old
magazines, too. There are a thousand questions I'd like to ask you,
but I sha'n't ask them."
"Ask them, all of them, and I will gladly answer. I mystify you; I
can see that. Well, whenever you say, I promise to do away with the
mystery."
"All right. I'll call for you this afternoon when Wu is on. I'll
show you the Sha-mien; and we can talk all we want."
"I was never going to tell anybody," she added. "But you are a good
man, and you'll understand. I believed I was strong enough to go on
in silence; but I'm human like everybody else. To tell someone who
is kind and who will understand!"
"There, there!" he said. There was a hint of tears in her voice.
"That's all right. We'll get together this afternoon; and you can
pretend that I am your father."
"No! I have run away from my father. I shall never go back to him;
never, never!"
Distressed, embarrassed beyond measure by this unexpected tragic
revelation, the doctor puttered about among the bottles on the
stand.
"We're forgetting," he said. "We mustn't disturb the patient. I'll
call for you after lunch."
"I'm sorry."
She began to prepare the room for Wu's coming, while the doctor
went downstairs. As he was leaving the hotel, Ah Cum stepped up to
his side.
"How is Mr. Taber?"
"Regained consciousness this morning."
Ah Cum nodded. "That is good."
"You are interested?"
"In a way, naturally. We are both graduates of Yale."
"Ah! Did he tell you anything about himself?"
"Aside from that, no. When will he be up?"
"That depends. Perhaps in two or three weeks. Did he talk a little
when you took him into the city?"
"No. He appeared to be strangely uncommunicative, though I tried to
draw him out. He spoke only when he saw the sing-song girl he
wanted to buy."
"Why didn't you head him off, explain that it couldn't be done by a
white man?"
Ah Cum shrugged. "You are a physician; you know the vagaries of men
in liquor. He was a stranger. I did not know how he would act if I
obstructed him."
"We found all his pockets empty."
"Then they were empty when he left," replied Ah Cum, with dignity.
"I was only commenting. Did he act to you that day as if he knew
what he was doing?"
"Not all of the time."
"A queer case;" and the doctor passed on.
Ah Cum made a movement as though to follow, but reconsidered. The
word of a Chinaman; he had given it, so he must abide. There was
now no honest way of warning Taber that the net had been drawn. Of
course, it was ridiculous, this inclination to assist the fugitive,
based as it was upon an intangible university idea. And yet,
mulling it over, he began to understand why the white man was so
powerful in the world: he was taught loyalty and fair play in his
schools, and he carried this spirit the world which his forebears
had conquered.
Suddenly Ah Cum laughed aloud. He, a Chinaman, troubling himself
over Occidental ideas! With his hands in his sleeves, he proceeded
on his way.
* * * * *
Ruth and the doctor returned to the hotel at four. Both carried
packages of books and magazines. There was an air of repressed
gaiety in her actions: the sense of freedom had returned; her heart
was empty again. The burden of decision had been transferred.
And because he knew it was a burden, there was no gaiety upon the
doctor's face; neither was there speech on his tongue. He knew not
how to act, urged as he was in two directions. It would be useless
to tell her to go back, even heartless; and yet he could not advise
her to go on, blindly, not knowing whether her aunt was dead or
alive. He was also aware that all his arguments would shatter
themselves against her resolutions. There was a strange quality of
steel in this pretty creature. He understood now that it was a part
of her inheritance. The father would be all steel. One point in her
narrative stood out beyond all others. To an unthinking mind the
episode would be ordinary, trivial; but to the doctor, who had had
plenty of time to think during his sojourn in China, it was basic
of the child's unhappiness. A dozen words, and he saw Enschede as
clearly as though he stood hard by in the flesh.
To preach a fine sermon every Sunday so that he would lose neither
the art nor the impulse; and this child, in secret rebellion,
taking it down in long hand during odd hours in the week! Preaching
grandiloquently before a few score natives who understood little
beyond the gestures, for the single purpose of warding off
disintegration! It reminded the doctor of a stubborn retreat; from
barricade to barricade, grimly fighting to keep the enemy at bay,
that insidious enemy of the white man in the South Seas--inertia.
The drunken beachcombers; the one-sided education; the utter
loneliness of a white child without playfellows, human or animal,
without fairy stories, who for days was left alone while the father
visited neighbouring islands, these pictures sank far below their
actual importance. He would always see the picture of the huge,
raw-boned Dutchman, haranguing and thundering the word of God into
the dull ears of South Sea Islanders, who, an hour later, would be
carrying fruit penitently to their wooden images.
He now understood her interest in Taber, as he called himself:
habit, a twice-told tale. A beachcomber in embryo, and she had lent
a hand through habit as much as through pity. The grim mockery of
it!--those South Sea loafers, taking advantage of Enschede's
Christianity and imposing upon him, accepting his money and
medicines and laughing behind his back! No doubt they made the name
a byword and a subject for ribald jest in the waterfront bars. And
this clear-visioned child had comprehended that only half the
rogues were really ill. But Enschede took them as they came,
without question. Charity for the ragtag and the bobtail of the
Seven Seas, and none for his own flesh and blood.
This started a thought moving. There must be something behind the
missioner's actions, something of which the girl knew nothing nor
suspected. It would not be possible otherwise to live in daily
contact with this level-eyed, lovely girl without loving her.
Something with iron resolve the father had kept hidden all these
years in the lonely citadel of his heart. Teaching the word of God
to the recent cannibal, caring for the sick, storming the
strongholds of the plague, adding his own private income to the
pittance allowed him by the Society, and never seeing the angel
that walked at his side! Something the girl knew nothing about;
else Enschede was unbelievable.
It now came to him with an added thrill how well she had told her
story; simply and directly, no skipping, no wandering hither and
yon: from the first hour she could remember, to the night she had
fled in the proa, a clear sustained narrative. And through it all,
like a golden thread on a piece of tapestry, weaving in and out of
the patterns, the unspoken longing for love.
"Well," she said, as they reached the hotel portal, "what is your
advice?"
"Would you follow it?"
"Probably not. Still, I am curious."
"I do not say that what you have done is wrong in any sense. I do
not blame you for the act. There are human limitations, and no
doubt you reached yours. For all that, it is folly. If you knew
your aunt were alive, if she expected you, that would be different.
But to plunge blindly into the unknown!"
"I had to! I had to!"
She had told him only the first part of her story. She wondered if
the second part would overcome his objections? Several times the
words had rushed to her tongue, to find her tongue paralysed. To a
woman she might have confided; but to this man, kindly as he was,
it was unthinkable. How could she tell him of the evil that drew
her and drew her, as a needle to the magnet?--the fascinating evil
that even now, escaped as it was, went on distilling its poison in
her mind?
"Yes, yes!" said the doctor. "But if you do not find this aunt,
what will you do? What can you do to protect yourself against
hunger?"
"I'll find something."
"But warn the aunt, prepare her, if she lives."
"And have her warn my father! No. If I surprised her, if I saw her
alone, I might make her understand."
He shook his head. "There's only one way out of the muddle, that I
can see."
"And what is that?"
"I have relatives not far from Hartford. I may prevail upon them to
take you in until you are full-fledged, providing you do not find
this aunt. You say you have twenty-four hundred in your letter of
credit. It will not cost you more than six hundred to reach your
destination. The pearls were really yours?"
"They were left to me by my mother. I sometimes laid away my
father's clothes in his trunk. I saw the metal box a hundred times,
but I never thought of opening it until the day I fled. I never
even burrowed down into the trunk. I had no curiosity of that kind.
I wanted something _alive_." She paused.
"Go on."
"Well, suddenly I knew that I must see the inside of that box,
which had a padlock. I wrenched this off, and in an envelope
addressed to me in faded ink, I found the locket and the pearls. It
is queer how ideas pop into one's head. Instantly I knew that I was
going to run away that night before he returned from the
neighbouring island. At the bottom of the trunk I found two of my
mother's dresses. I packed them with the other few things I owned.
Morgan the trader did not haggle over the pearls, but gave me at
once what he judged a fair price. You will wonder why he did not
hold the pearls until Father returned. I didn't understand then,
but I do now. It was partly to pay a grudge he had against father."
"And partly what else?"
"I shall never tell anybody that."
"I don't know," said the doctor, dubiously. "You're only twenty--not
legally of age."
"I am here in Canton," she replied, simply.
"Very well. I'll cable to-night, and in a few days we'll have some
news. I'm a graybeard, an old bachelor; so I am accorded certain
privileges. Sometimes I am frightfully busy; and then there will be
periods of dullness. I have a few regular patients, and I take care
of them in the morning. Every afternoon, from now on, I will teach
you a little about life--I mean the worldly points of view you're
likely to meet. You are queerly educated; and it strikes me that
your father had some definite purpose in thus educating you. I'll
try to fill in the gaps."
The girl's eyes filled. "I wonder if you will understand what this
kindness means to me? I am so terribly wise--and so wofully
ignorant!"