A Transient Guest, and Other Episodes Part 3

Liance lowered her eyes, and with the point of her shoe tormented a tuft of gra.s.s.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because--well, because I feel an intruder."

The girl raised her eyes at once, her lips quivered.

"You are wrong, so wrong."

And then, curiously enough, as such things happen, Tancred--who was not a bit stupider than the rest of us--felt an oracle within him. It was more than probable, he told himself, that widow and maid, being nearly of an age, had, in their Sumatran idleness, become the fastest friends; and at once, with that logic which is peculiar to those that love, he decided that, being friends, they must be confidantes as well, and he concluded that two fair heads had come together and determined he should remain. That woman is variable, was a song he knew by heart, and he also knew that woman is apt to do one thing and mean another--to dismiss, for instance, the very man whom she wishes most at her feet.

These ruminations, however long in the telling, did not in reality outlast a moment's s.p.a.ce. It was all very clear to him now, and his blood pulsed quickly.

"If _you_ tell me so, I must indeed be wrong," he answered. "And let me add," he continued, impetuously, "it is a boon to know it."

To his face a flush had come, and his eyes were eager. He had never been accounted anything else than good-looking, but now he was attractive as well.

"You will not be in haste to go, then?"

"In haste to go--" His face completed the sentence. "Tell her from me,"

he was about to say, when from the girl's loosening fingers the basket fell; she drooped like a flower, her eyes half closed, and he had but the time to hold out his arm when she sank unconscious on it.

The gra.s.s seemed an inviting couch, and very gently he let her from him.

"It is the heat," he reflected, and kneeling at her side he took her small hand and beat it with his own. "What shall I do?" he wondered.

Her cheeks were colorless, though her lips were red, and as, in his perplexity, he gazed at them, he saw them move. "Kiss me," they seemed to say. Her eyes opened and she smiled.

And still he stared. "Merciful heaven!" he thought; "she thinks I am in love with _her_;" and feigning that the invitation had pa.s.sed unheard he sprang to his feet.

"Help me," she murmured, smiling still; and as he bent again to aid her, before him in the coppice stood Mrs. Lyeth. Already the girl was on her feet. Whether she had been aware of Mrs. Lyeth's approach, who shall say? She patted out a rumpled fold of her frock, and picking the basket up, glanced over at her father's choice.

"I almost fell," she announced. "Mr. Ennever was gallant enough to prevent me."

In single file all three then returned to tiffin at the bungalow.

IV.

The afternoon slipped by like a chapter in a fairy tale. It promised but it did not fulfil, and at dinner the champagne sparkled, but the conversation was flat. When the cloth was removed the general manifested a desire to look over some papers, and Tancred and the ladies retreated to the pavilion beyond. Yet even there the wheels of talk were clogged.

Mrs. Lyeth indeed discoursed amiably enough on the subject of nothing at all, and now and then Liance interjected an apposite sally; but Tancred was taciturn. He divided his time between biting his moustache and bidding Zut be still. And when at last through some channel of thought Mrs. Lyeth anch.o.r.ed herself in the shallows of Anglo-Saxon verse, for a moment the young man fancied that the girl was about to go. Liance made a movement, but whether some signal from her future step-mother detained her, or whether of her own accord she reconsidered her purpose, Tancred was unable to decide. The girl resumed her seat, and, one arm extended on the woodwork, the other pendent at her side, her feet crossed, her head thrown back, she sat staring at the stars in that abstracted att.i.tude which powder and shot are alone qualified to disturb.

There is much in an opportunity that might be and is not. In recollection it appears more fecund in possibilities than any other opportunity ever enjoyed. And later on, when Tancred, without having had the opportunity to exchange in private so much as a word with Mrs.

Lyeth, found himself in his room, he ravened at fate and at his own ill-luck. Nothing that he could imagine would have been sweeter to him than to have sat the evening through alone with that human flower. There would have been no need of speech; the languors of the night, the caress of the stars, the scent of palms and of orchids, the accent of the waves beyond, these things would have spoken for him more subtly than words could do. Through their silence the breeze would have whispered, and who does not know what a breeze can say? Though they sat apart, the stars that the old G.o.ds used as go-betweens were there to join their hands.

They might be timid, but is not the surge of the sea a call that stirs the pulse? And the palms had their secrets to tell, and they would have told them, too; nay, the very fire-flies would have conspired together and made the night more dark. And, instead of a communion such as that, there had been an aimless chit-chat, an awkwardness that was sentient, and an embarra.s.sment terminated only by a chill "Good-night." Truly Zut, who had treed a hedgehog, was to be envied. His evening at least had not been squandered and misspent.

The morrow differed from the day preceding merely in this, that not for one instant during it did Tancred have an opportunity of seeing either Mrs. Lyeth or Liance alone. After tiffin they were inseparate. And Tancred, who had made plans for the afternoon, then made plans for the evening. But the hope which buoyed him was idle. The evening which followed was a counterpart of the one that had gone before, save in this, the general, having no papers to look over, held forth as generals will, and Zut searched for a hedgehog in vain. That night, for the first time, Tancred entered fully into the feelings of Tantalus and those of Sisyphus too. He was dumbly exasperated, the more so perhaps in that he divined that to one cleverer than he no obstacle would exist. If a woman has an ear, and as a rule women have, there is always a way to get at it. Unfortunately for Tancred, the way in this case was by no means clear, and what helped to confuse him was the fact that he was impatient to find it at once, no, but there and then, and without delay. And as in his exasperation he dashed his head against the pillow, he told himself that he had been abrupt, that he had unmasked his batteries too soon, that he had frightened where he had meant to charm. Of Liance he gave no thought whatever, except to decide that she was a nuisance. And such is the selfishness of man, that he wished she would topple over again and sprain a joint; in short, that anything might happen which would keep her to her room and out of the way of Mrs. Lyeth. The idea that the general's bride-elect might be keeping her purposely at her side was one that never occurred to him. She is a nuisance, he decided, and dismissed her from his thoughts.

Before he fell asleep his mind was clear as to one thing; to wit, that in a small household it is more difficult to be alone with one particular person than in a household where there are many. Whether he was correct or not is a matter of the smallest possible importance. The next morning, when Atcheh appeared with coffee and fruit, he was aware that he had wandered through an a.s.sortment of dreams in which the rafflesia and the general were confusedly connected; at one moment the general had changed into that unhallowed flower, at another the rafflesia had bristled with the moustaches of his host. And as he rose from these fancies to his coffee he encountered a scheme which he detained and examined. It was not particularly shrewd, yet at the moment it seemed luminous to him. It was to the effect that if he were inhibited from private speech with Mrs. Lyeth, there was no reason in the world why he should not write. And as he mused, from the porch beyond rose the sound of her voice.

He was too far away to hear what she was saying, and, parenthetically, had he been nearer he would not have listened. But now the intonation, the trailing accent of her speech affected him as a balm. The irritation faded, as irritation ever does; he found some paper, and as, to the accompaniment of her voice, he prepared to write one of those letters in which punctuation is disregarded and sequence of idea forgot, he heard her waving inflection cut by a harsher note. It was the general, he knew. For the moment he wondered why he had not already gone to the consulate, but presently the noise of hoofs, the creak of wheels, a shrill cry, and the hiss of a whip seemed to announce that the conveyance which took the consul each morning to Siak was at the door.

Tancred's window did not give on the road, but on the coppice and the pavilion, yet when again he caught the creak of wheels it demanded little imagination on his part to picture the general sitting bolt upright in a gharry, driving to the sun-smitten town beyond. And as the clatter of hoofs fainted in the distance, Tancred took up the pen again.

The letter which he then succeeded in producing was one similar to what we have all of us written and all of us received--a clear call of love, in which the words are less jotted than shaken from the end of the pen.

Its transcription here is needless.

A love-letter which can pleasure anyone save the recipient proceeds not from the heart but the head. Moreover, when Tancred began it he had not the faintest idea what he intended to say, and when it was finished he did not remember what he had written. Oh, sweethearts and swains! mind ye of this: when a love-letter differs from that, it emanates from a poet or a fraud. Tancred was neither. He was simply a young man suddenly enthralled by the charm of a woman older than himself. He intended no wrong, and if you or I or any other implacable moralist had happened that way and told him, as would have been our duty, that he was betraying the sacredest of trusts, the confidence of a host, he would have exhibited the surprise of a child frowned at for innocent prattle.

Bear with him then; of wrong he intended none. It is the essence of crime that it be committed with malice aforethought, that the intention to commit it be clear. In the present case the intention was wholly lacking. Tancred was carried along by one of those unreasoning impulses which the psychologist recognizes and cannot explain. And that impulse, after throwing him at Mrs. Lyeth's feet and dictating a letter to her, left his conscience unruffled and at peace.

His pulse, however, still was stirred. And, the letter completed, he was not in a greater hurry to do anything else than to get it safely in her hand. The manner in which this was to be accomplished was another matter. He might offer it to her in person, or he might leave it in her room. He might even watch his opportunity and slip it into her hand; but, for that, he immediately reflected he would have to wait the opportunity--a tedious operation at best; and, moreover, was he not in haste? And as he mused he remembered that Dugald Maule, a New Yorker like himself, finding himself in similar strait, had, under the very nose of a duenna, deliberately abstracted a handkerchief from his inamorata's pocket, and, wrapping a letter up in it, handed it back with the civilest inquiry as to whether she had not just let the handkerchief fall? That was a remarkably neat trick, Tancred told himself, but somehow it seemed to demand a degree of a.s.surance of which he felt unpossessed. Besides, it was a trick, and as such distasteful to him.

And as he twirled his moustache, vaguely perplexed, undecided in what way to act, determining that it were better perhaps to leave it all to chance, he caught a glimpse of Mrs. Lyeth entering the pavilion alone.

She was in white from head to foot, alluring as spring, and doubtless every whit as fragrant; she moved easily, her body erect and unswayed, and as Tancred caught sight of her he would have taken his chances then and there, but almost simultaneously he saw Liance following behind. In the annoyance he filliped forefinger and thumb together, and tried to possess his soul with patience. It was not impossible that in a moment the girl might go, and then his time would come. Meanwhile it behooved him to be careful and to remain unseen. But no, Liance must have seated herself at the other side of the pavilion, for he could hear Mrs. Lyeth address her, and the murmurs of the girl's replies. Presumably they would remain together until tiffin, and if before tiffin the note was not delivered, another afternoon, the evening too, perhaps, would be wasted and lost.

And as he thought of this, behind him he divined rather than heard Atcheh's noiseless tread. He turned at once. Another idea had come to him, one on which he determined to act at once. The "boy" was already retreating, a tray in his hand.

"Dja keno," Tancred called.

On s.h.i.+pboard he had not been altogether idle. The Malay tongue is as easy to speak badly as Italian, and Tancred had found slight difficulty in acquiring enough mouthfuls for ordinary needs. "Dja keno--come here."

The sultry savage wheeled and obeyed.

"Ba gnio inong--take this to the lady." And as Tancred spoke he pointed through the lattice to Mrs. Lyeth.

The Malay took the note and bowed.

"Bae, Tuan," he answered. "Your lords.h.i.+p, it is well."

In a moment the man had gone, and in another moment Tancred saw him approach Mrs. Lyeth and place the letter in her hand. He could see that she was eying it, wonderingly no doubt, for now she turned her head, but already the Malay had disappeared. And as she still looked about her, holding the letter unopened before her, Tancred felt as though something were clutching at his throat. From out the coppice, not a dozen yards distant, the general had suddenly emerged.

In a state similar to that mental paralysis which visits us in dream, Tancred marked his advance. It seemed perfectly natural that he should be there; without an effort he recalled the fact, forgotten albeit until now, yet still the unaccountable fact that it was Sunday; and presently, as the general halted, his thin figure erect, a bamboo switch in his hand, his cavalry moustache more bristling than ever, and proprietor-fas.h.i.+on surveyed the grounds, it was to Tancred as though he had been there for all of time. Then at once the cerebral swoon departed, in a confusion of visions, with that thing still clutching at his throat and his heart beating like mad, he saw on one side Mrs. Lyeth open the letter, and on the other the general decapitate a poppy with his switch.

Already Mrs. Lyeth had turned the initial page; she had read the second and was beginning at the last, when the general, to whose presence behind her she was obviously oblivious, advanced on tiptoe to where she sat. Tancred saw him raise a warning finger to his lips, beneath the moustache he divined a smile, invisible to him, yet apparent, doubtless, to Liance, at whom the warning gesture must have been made, and then, bending over his _fiancee's_ shoulder, he peered at the letter which she held. Yet before he could have deciphered so much as a line of it, Mrs. Lyeth started, as we all do when taken unaware. In an instant, however, she recovered her self-possession. She turned to the general, her mouth compressed into a pout.

"Do you know," she said, from the tips of her lips, "you are as bad as Atcheh. A cat would make more noise."

At this reproof the general laughed aloud, and, as though in sheer excess of glee, beat his leg with the switch. Tancred could see it was, indeed, a merry jest to him.

"My bonny Kate!" he gurgled. "I frightened her, did I not?" And again he beat his leg and laughed. "And whom is the missive from?" he asked. "I heard the gharry's wheels an hour ago. Will you pay me if I wager and I win? Will you pay me? I wager it is from--h'm--let me see. I wager it is from that coffee planter's wife you met at Singapore."

And Mrs. Lyeth, with her bravest smile, answered:

"You have lost."

"From whom is it then? There is no European mail to-day." He eyed her, laughing still. "From whom is it?" he repeated. And as he spoke he bent again and looked down at the letter, which still lay open in her hand.

"Tancred Ennever!" he exclaimed. "Why, what has he to write to you about?"

"Don't ask me," she answered, airily; and then, presumably, she must have understood the uselessness of further parry, for she added, carelessly enough, "It is to Liance, not to me."

From the window Tancred could see the general turn to where his daughter sat. And as he watched he saw the girl issue from the shadow, take the letter from Mrs. Lyeth, and escape with it to the house. During the entire scene she had not uttered a word. She had been a witness, not an actor, and now as she crossed the lawn, the letter rumpled in her hold, there was an alertness in her step and such expectance in her face that you would have thought her hastening to a rendez-vous. It was evident that she, too, had taken the fib for truth.