Treasure and Trouble Therewith Part 29

"Now, my dear girl, don't talk like that. It's not true in the first place, it's stupid in the second, and in the third it only tends to make bad feeling between us that there's no cause for."

"Oh, yes, there's cause, lots of cause."

He found her steady eyes more discomfiting than ever, and looking at his cigarette said:

"Panchita, you're not yourself. You're overworked and overwrought, imagining things that don't exist. Instead of standing there slanging me you ought to go home and take a rest."

She paid no attention to this suggestion, but suddenly, moving nearer, said:

"What did you do it for, Boye?"

"Do what?"

"Make love to me--make me think you loved me. Why did you come? Why did you say what you did? Why did you kiss me? Why, when you saw the way I felt, did you keep on? What good was it to you?"

To gain a moment's time, and to hide his face from her haggard gaze, he turned and put the cigarette carefully on the stand of the matchsafe. He found it difficult to keep the soothing note in his voice.

"Why--why--why? I don't see any need for these questions? What _did_ I do? A kiss! What's that? And you talk as if I'd ceased to care for you.

Of course I haven't. I always will. I don't know anyone I think more of than I do of you. That's why I want you to go. You don't look well, and as I told you before, it's not the right thing for you to be here."

She was beside him and he laid his hand on her arm, gentle and persuasive. She s.n.a.t.c.hed the arm away, and with a small, feeble fist struck him in the chest and gasped out an epithet of the people.

For a still moment they stood looking at one another. Both faces showed that bitterest of antagonisms--the hate of one-time lovers. She saw it in his and it increased her desperation, he in her's, and in the uprush of his anger he forgot his fear. She spoke first, her voice low, her breathing loud on the room's stillness.

"You could fool me once, but it's too late now. There's no coming over me any more with soft talk."

"Then I'll not try it. Take it from me straight. I've come to the end of my patience. I've had enough of you and your exactions."

"Oh, you needn't tell me _that_," she cried. "I know it, and I know why.

I know the secret of _your_ change of heart, Mr. Boye Mayer."

She saw the alarm in his face, the sudden arrested attention.

"What are you talking about?" he said, too startled to feign indifference.

"Oh, you thought no one was on," she cried, backing away from him, "but _I_ was. I've been for the past month. Four hundred thousand dollars!

Think of it, Boye! You're getting on in the world. Some difference between that and an actress at the Albion."

If Pancha had still cherished a hope that she might have been mistaken, the sight of Mayer's rage would have extinguished it. He made a step toward her, hard-eyed, pale as she was.

"You're mad. That's what's the matter with you. I might have known it when you came. Now go--I don't want any lunatics here."

She stood her ground and tried to laugh, a horrible sound.

"You don't even like me to know that. Won't even share a secret with me--me, the friend that you care for so much."

"Go!" he thundered and pointed to the door.

"Not till I hear more, I'm curious. Is it just the money, or would you like the lady even if she hadn't any?"

Exasperated beyond reason he made a pounce at her and caught her by the arm. This time his grasp was too strong for her to shake off. His fingers closed on the slender stem and closing shook it.

"Since you won't go, I'll have to help you," he breathed in his fury.

She squirmed in his grip, trying to pull his fingers away with her free hand, and in this humiliating fas.h.i.+on felt herself drawn toward the door.

It was the last consummate insult, his superior strength triumphing. If he had loosed her she would have gone, but anything he did she was bound to resist, most of all his hand upon her. That, once the completest comfort, was now the crowning ignominy.

As he pushed her, short sentences of savage hostility flashed between them, sparks struck from a mutual hate. Hers betrayed the rude beginnings she had tried to hide, his the falseness of his surface finish. It was as if for the first time they had established a real understanding. At grips, filled with fury, they attained a sudden intimacy, the hidden self of each at last plain to the other.

The scene was interrupted in an unexpected and ridiculous manner--the telephone rang. As the bell whirred he stopped irresolute, his fingers tight on her arm. Then, as it rang again, he looked at her with a sort of enraged helplessness, and made a movement to draw her to the phone. An outsider would have laughed, but the two protagonists were beyond comedy, and glared at one another in dumb defiance. Finally, the bell filling the room with its clamor, there was nothing for it but to answer. With grim lips and a murderous eye on his opponent, Mayer dropped her arm, and going to the phone, took down the receiver. From the other end, plaintive and apologetic, came Chrystie's voice.

Pancha retreated to the door, opened it and came to a halt on the sill.

Out of the corner of his eye he was aware of her watching him, a baleful figure. He feared to employ the tenderness of tone necessary in his conversations with Chrystie, and as he listened and made out that she wanted to break her next engagement, he turned and fastened a gorgon's glance on the woman in the doorway, jerking his head in a gesture of dismissal.

She answered it with ominous quiet, "When I've finished. I've just one more thing to say."

In desperation he turned to the mouthpiece and said as softly as he dared:

"Wait a minute. The window's open and I can't hear. I must shut it," then put the receiver against his chest and muttered:

"Do you want me to kill you?"

"Not yet--after I get square you can. I won't care then what you do. But I've got to get square and I'm going to. There's Indian in me and that's the blood that doesn't forget. And there's something else you don't know--yes, there _was_ something I never told you. I've someone to fight my fights and hit my enemies, and if I can't get you, they can. Watch out and see."

She retreated, closing the door. Mayer had to resume his conversation with the blood drumming in his ears, uplift Chrystie's flagging spirit, and s.h.i.+ft their engagement to another day. When it was over he fell on the sofa, limp and exhausted. He lay there till dinner time, thinking over what Pancha had said, and what she could do, a.s.suring himself it was only bluff, the impotent threatenings of a discarded woman. He felt certain that the champion she had alluded to was her one-time admirer, the bandit. This being the case, there was nothing to be feared from him, in hiding in the wilderness. It would be many a day before he'd venture forth. But the girl herself, full of venom, burning with the sense of her wrongs, was a new factor in the perils of his position.

Stronger now than ever was this conviction that he must hurry his schemes to their climax.

CHAPTER XXII

THEREBY HANGS A TALE

That same evening the audience at the Albion had a disappointment. At half past eight the manager appeared before the curtain and said that Miss Lopez was ill and could not appear. As they all knew, she had been an unremitting worker, had given them of her best, and in her love of her art and her public had worn herself out and suffered a nervous breakdown.

A week or two of rest would restore her, and meantime her place would be taken by Miss Lottie Vere.

The audience, not knowing what was expected of them, applauded and then looked at one another in aggrieved surprise. They felt rather peevish, for they had come to regard Pancha Lopez as a permanent inst.i.tution devised for their amus.e.m.e.nt. They no more expected her to fail them than the clock in the Ferry Tower to be wrong. Charlie Crowder heard it at the _Despatch_ office next morning--Mrs. Wesson, who picked up local news like a wireless, met him on the stairs and told him.

"I'm glad she's given in at last," said the good-natured society reporter. "She's been running down hill for the past month, and if she'd kept on much longer she'd have run to the place where you jump off."

That afternoon Crowder went round to see her. There was no use phoning, the Vallejo was still in that archaic stage where the only telephone was in the lower hall and guests were called to it by the clerk. Besides, you never could tell about a girl like Pancha; she was half a savage, liable to lie curled up in a corner and never think of a doctor.

He found her on the sofa in her sitting-room, a box of crackers and a bottle of milk on the table, a ragged Navajo blanket over her feet. When she saw who it was she sat up with a cry of welcome, her wrapper falling loose from her brown neck. She looked very ill, her eyes dark-circled and sunken in her wasted face.

He sat beside her on the sofa's edge--she was so thin there was plenty of room--and taking her hand held it while he tried to hide the concern that seized him. After the first sentence of greeting she fell back on the crumpled pillow, and lay still, the little flicker of animation dying out.

"Well, well, Panchita," he said, patting her hand, a kindly awkward figure hunched up in his big overcoat; "this is something new for you."