The Ragged Edge Part 14

"Regained consciousness this morning."

Ah c.u.m 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 c.u.m 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 c.u.m, 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 pa.s.sed on.

Ah c.u.m 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 a.s.sist 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 c.u.m 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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!"