The Port of Adventure Part 23

Nick could hardly speak for joy, but he managed to reply, "All right; Billy shall be the man to go."

The going was easier to propose than to carry out: for in bygone days, when the Padres of Old Spain were building New Spain, Mission churches had to protect their flocks against the devil incarnate as well as excarnate. Windows were made few and high; and now, when the brave builders sleep, it is n.o.body's business to worry about the free pa.s.sage of air. Such windows as San Miguel possesses were hermetically closed that night when Angela di Sereno and Nick Hilliard were imprisoned; and Billy, standing on Nick's shoulders, had to work a few tedious moments before he could induce one of these windows to open. By the time the wiry, slim figure was ready to straddle the window-sill, slip out, dangling, and drop on the gra.s.s, night had closed in, fragrant and purple in the open, heavy and black in the church.

Angela came and stood close to Nick. She had never been a timid girl; but since the night when she had lain watching a thief who slowly, slowly raised her window, twelve storeys above the ground, foolish and hitherto unknown terrors crept through her veins if she happened to wake in the dark. And now there certainly was a rustling which stirred the silence, then died, as if it had never been.

"Don't go away from me," she said. "It's so dark that if we're separated we may be ages finding each other."

This sounded like an allegory!

"No, we mustn't be separated," Nick answered, struck by her words, as if by a prophecy. Then he, too, heard the rustling--faint, winged, and mysterious.

They stood still and close together, listening. There was no sound from outside--not a call for the Padre, not a rea.s.suring shout that Billy had succeeded in finding him.

Angela groped with her hand, and, by accident, touched Nick's. To save his soul he could not have resisted pressing the small cold fingers!

Wonderful! She did not s.n.a.t.c.h them away! Often they had shaken hands, or Nick had taken hers to help her in or out of the motor-car; but there had been nothing like this. He felt the thrill of the touch go through him as though electric wires flashed a message to his heart. He was afraid of himself--afraid he should kiss her hand, or stammer out "I love you!" And that would be fatal, for she would never trust herself to him again.

Besides, it would not be fair. She was like a child asking his protection, here in the dark, and he must treat her as a man treats a child who has come to him because it is afraid. But he could not think of her as a child. He thought of the night in New York when she had knocked on his door, and called to him, a stranger, for help. He thought how he had seen her, drowned in the waves of her hair, like the angel of his dreams.

"Do you hear that?" she whispered, letting him keep her hand, even clasping his with her fingers. "There's something alive in this church, something besides ourselves."

Nick felt giddy. It was all he could do to keep himself from catching her in his arms, no matter what might be the consequences, no matter how she might hate him a moment afterward. But he resisted, and the strain of temptation pa.s.sed.

"A bird has got in, perhaps," he said.

"You--you--don't think it could be the Padre himself ill, or--or----"

Nick understood her hesitation and fear.

"No," he soothed her. "We'd have seen any but some small thing. I've got two or three matches in my box, I guess. We'll have a look around." This was supreme self-sacrifice on his part, for to find matches and "look around" meant letting Angela's hand go. To let it go was tempting Providence, since almost certainly she would never, of her own accord, slip it into his again.

"Yes, do let us," she said, and drew the hand away. Nick supposed she had hardly been conscious that he had held her fingers in his, and even pressed them. But this was not the fact. True, Angela had mechanically groped for a protecting touch. Nevertheless, she was aware of Nick's hand on hers, and glad of it, with a gladness made up of several conflicting feelings: such as surprise, some slight shame, and defiance of that shame.

She was afraid of the rustling in the dark, which might mean a lurking thief, a man half murdered, or one of a dozen things each more unpleasant than the other. Yet she half liked being afraid in the dark, with Nick Hilliard to rea.s.sure her, though she would have hated it with Billy. No unknown horror she could conjure up would have made her want to touch Billy. She was almost sorry when Nick found his matches and together they began moving about the church, she keeping a little behind.

The last match but one lit up something white that stirred beside the altar; and as the flame died down, leaving only a red glowing point, a pair of eyes like two points of fire stared up from the floor.

"Oh!" murmured Angela, and clutched Nick's coat sleeve, like a girl of early Victorian days. But, after all, women have not changed in essentials. They are much the same now in the dark, when pale things stir or s.h.i.+ne unexpectedly; and they are still glad to have with them at such times a man, preferably a handsome man, they happen to like better than any other.

"Great Scot, it's an owl!" said Nick, profiting by the last match of all.

It was, or appeared to be, a white owl; and it seemed to him for a second or two as if the witch-bird of the Grapevine man at Los Angeles had come to give the advice it had refused. But this was a childish idea, he knew!

The owl was a plain, ordinary owl, which no doubt lived in the neighbourhood of San Miguel, and had flopped in, perhaps in search of the proverbial church mouse. It was afraid of the other intruders, and afraid of the match, so afraid that it flapped its wings and hooted dismally. It hooted three times, which, if it had been the witch fortune-teller, might really have meant something, though there was no time just then to think what. Nick was somewhat alarmed lest, in its anger and fear, it should dash at Angela's face, but she would not let him strike the creature with his hat.

"No, poor thing, it's worse off than we are, because it's alone, and we're together," she said. "We'll go, and leave it in peace now we know what it is." And she kept beside Nick in the dark by holding daintily to his coat sleeve.

He found the steps of the gallery, and made her sit down on the lower one, rolling up for a cus.h.i.+on his coat, on which she had knelt as she looked at the vestments. It began to seem odd that Billy had not come back, but it was difficult for Nick to regret the delay as much as he ought, for Angela's sake, to have regretted it.

When she s.h.i.+vered and confessed that she was cold, Nick fetched her a priest's coat from the gallery, a rare piece of brocade, embroidered perhaps by queen's fingers, and smelling of incense.

"What can have happened to Billy?" Angela wondered. "It's the strangest thing that he doesn't come back. I begin to be frightened about him."

Nick rea.s.sured her once more. Things often seemed queer that were simple when explained, as doubtless this would be. "I suppose you'd not like me to go----" he began, only to be cut short before he could finish his sentence.

"No--if you mean, would I like you to go and look. While you're here----"

"Yes, Mrs. May?"

"Why, of course, nothing matters so much. And I wish you wouldn't stand where I can't see you. Do sit down on this step by me."

So Nick sat down on the step, and her shoulder touched his arm. They talked in low voices, he telling her things to "keep her mind off" the situation: things about the Mission and other Missions. Then the conversation turned to Nick's ranch and the oil gusher which had given him fortune out of threatening ruin; and he described the queer little oil city which had grown up on his land.

"I should like to see it," Angela said, when he had pictured Lucky Star City and ranch in a simple way, which was nevertheless curiously graphic.

He caught up her words eagerly. "Would you let me take you there?" he begged. "Mrs. Gaylor'd invite you to stay at her house. You know I've told you about that, and how----"

"Yes, I know." Angela could hardly have explained why, but somehow she did not want to hear Mrs. Gaylor talked of just then. She was no longer indifferent to the idea of seeing Nick's home, and the woman who had helped him to make it, yet she was not sure that she wished to go there.

Certainly she did not wish to visit Mrs. Gaylor. But--she would like to know whether the mistress of the Gaylor ranch was really so very beautiful.

"What we must think about now, is how to get out of this church," she went on, laughing faintly in the dark. "It seems as if we might have to stay here all the rest of our lives."

"Are you hungry?" Nick inquired.

"A little."

In his enraged disgust at not being able to procure a meal, Nick would gladly have killed and cooked the owl.

"Are _you?_" Angela asked.

"Am I--what?"

"Hungry."

"Good heavens, no!"

Time pa.s.sed vaguely, as time does pa.s.s in the dark, when there are no means of counting the minutes. They could hear their watches ticking, if they listened, but they never listened long enough to know how the seconds went by. And all the matches were gone.

"It's like being lost in a cave, or a mine, or the catacombs," Angela reflected aloud, "with your only candle burnt out. You can't tell whether it's minutes or hours."

"It must be mighty tedious for you, I'm afraid; though Billy's sure to come back soon," said Nick.

"No, somehow it isn't tedious," she answered as if puzzled. "I suppose I'm rather excited. And you----"

"Well, I suppose I'm rather excited, too," said Nick, in his low, quiet voice, that did not betray what he felt. Angela's voice told more of what went on in her soul. It was, as Nick often thought, a voice of lights and shadows.

At last--what time it might be they could not tell--there came a sound of a key turning in a lock. The door opened, and a yellow ray from a lantern streamed into the church, making the owl in its corner flutter wildly.

Billy's face showed in a frame of dull gold, as he peered about, blinking.

Then, for the first time, Angela knew that Nick had been angry with the chauffeur. There was something in his tone as he said, "Well! So you have come!" which suggested that, if she had not been there, the "forest creature" might have added some strong and primitive language.

"Couldn't help it, Mr. Hilliard. I done the best I could," Billy explained hastily. "When I got out there, I was up against a tough proposition, and I guess it would have been tougher yet if I'd stopped to do much thinking."