Parrot & Co. Part 26

The great heart ache and the greater disillusion would not have fallen to his lot had Elsa been frank in Rangoon, had she but told him that she was to sail on the same steamer. He would have put over his sailing. He would have gone his way, still believing himself to be a Bayard, a Galahad, or any other of those simple dreamers who put honor and chivalry above and before all other things.

Elsa! He covered his face with his hands and remained in that position for a long while, so long indeed that the coolies, whose business it was to scrub the tilings every morning at four, went about their work quietly for fear of disturbing him.

Elsa had retired almost immediately after dinner. She endeavored to finish some initial-work on old embroideries, but the needle insisted upon pausing and losing st.i.tch after st.i.tch. She went to bed and tried to concentrate her thoughts upon a story, but she could no more follow a sentence to the end than she could fly. Then she strove to sleep, but that sweet healer came not to her wooing. Nothing she did could overcome the realization of the shock she had received. It had left her dull and bewildered.

The name echoed and reechoed through her mind: Paul Ellison. It should have been an illumination; instead, she had been thrust into utter darkness. Neither Arthur nor his mother had ever spoken of a brother, and she had known them for nearly ten years. Two men, who might be twin-brothers, with the same name: it was maddening. What could it mean? The beautiful white-haired mother, the handsome charming son, who idolized each other; and this adventurer, this outcast, this patient, brave and kindly outcast, with his funny parrakeet, what was he to them and they to him? It must be, it must be! They _were_ brothers. Nature, full of amazing freaks as she was, had not perpetrated this one without calling upon a single strain of blood.

She lay back among her pillows, her eyes leveled at the few stars beyond her door, opened to admit any cooling breeze. Her head ached.

It was like the computations of astronomers; to a certain extent the human mind could grasp the distances but could not comprehend them. It was more than chance. Chance alone had not brought him to the crumbling ledge. There was a strain of fatalism in Elsa. She was positive that all these things had been written long before and that she was to be used as the key.

Paul Ellison.

She drew from the past those salient recollections of Arthur and his mother: first, the day the two had called regarding the purchase of a house that her father had just put on the market,--a rambling old colonial affair, her own mother's birth-place. Sixteen: she had not quite been that, just free from her school-days in Italy. With the grand air of youth she had betrayed the fact almost instantly, while waiting for her father to come into the livingroom.

"Italy!" said Arthur's mother, whom Elsa mentally adopted at once. The stranger spoke a single phrase, which Elsa answered in excellent if formal Italian. This led from one question to another. Mrs. Ellison turned out to be a schoolmate of her mother's, and she, Elsa, had inherited their very room. What more was needed?

The Ellisons bought the house and lived quietly within it. Society, and there was a good deal of it in that small Kentuckian city, society waited for them to approach and apply for admittance, but waited in vain. Mrs. Ellison never went anywhere. Her son Arthur was a student and preferred his books. So eventually society introduced itself.

Persons who ignored it must be interesting. When it became known that Mrs. Ellison had been the schoolmate of the beautiful and aristocratic wife of General Chetwood; when the local banker quietly spread the information that the Ellisons were comfortably supplied with stocks and bonds of a high order, society concluded that it could do very well without past history. That could come later.

When her father died, Elsa became as much at home in the Ellison house as in her own. But never, never anywhere in the house, was there indication of the existence of a brother, so like Arthur that under normal conditions it would have been difficult to tell them apart.

Even when she used to go up to the garret with Mrs. Ellison, to aid her in rummaging some old trunk, there came to light none of those trifling knickknacks which any mother would have secretly clung to, no matter to what depth her flesh and blood had fallen. Never had she seen among the usual amateur photographs one presenting two boys. Once she had come across a photograph of a smooth-faced youth who was in the act of squinting along the top of an engineer's tripod. Arthur had laughingly taken it away from her, saying that it represented him when he had had ambitions to build bridges.

To build bridges. The phrase awoke something in Elsa's mind. Bridges.

She sat up in bed, mentally keen for the first time since dinner. "I have built bridges in my time over which trains are pa.s.sing at this moment. I have fought torrents, and floods, and hurricanes, and myself."

He was Paul Ellison, son and brother, and they had blotted him out of their lives by destroying all physical signs of him. There was something inhuman in the deliberateness of it, something unforgivable.

They had made no foolish attempt to live under an a.s.sumed name. They had come from New York to the little valley in order to leave behind the scene of their disgrace and all those who had known them. And they had been extremely fortunate. They were all gently born, Elsa's friends and acquaintances, above ordinary inquisitiveness, and they had respected the aloofness of the Ellisons. Arthur was an inveterate traveler. Half the year found him in Europe, painting a little, writing a little less, frequenting the lesser known villages in France and Italy. He let it be understood that he abhorred cities. In the ten years they had appeared at less than a dozen social affairs.

Arthur did not care for horses, for hunting, for sports of any kind.

And yet he was st.u.r.dy, clear-eyed, fresh-skinned. He walked always; he was forever tramping off to the pine-hooded hills, with his painting-kit over his shoulders and his camp-stool under his arm.

Later, Elsa began to understand that he was a true scholar, not merely an educated man. He was besides a linguist of amazing facility, a pianist who invariably preferred as his audience his own two ears.

Arthur would have been a great dramatist or a great poet, if . . . If what? If what? Ah, that had been the crux of it all, of her doubt, of her hesitance. If he had fought for prizes coveted by mankind, if he had thrown aside his dreams and gone into the turmoil, if he had taken up a man's burden and carried it to success. Elsa, daughter of a man who had fought in the great arena from his youth to his death, Elsa was not meant for the wife of a dreamer.

Paul Ellison. What was his crime in comparison to his expiation of it?

He had built bridges, fought torrents, hurricanes, himself. No, he was not a scholar; he saw no romance in the multifarious things he had of necessity put his hand to: these had been daily matter-of-fact occupations. A strange gladness seemed to loosen the tenseness of her aching nerves.

Then, out of the real world about her, came with startling distinctness, the shriek of a parrot. She would have recognized that piercing cry anywhere. It was Rajah. In the next room, and she had not known that Warrington (she would always know him by that name) was stopping at the same hotel! She listened intently. Presently she heard m.u.f.fled sounds: a clatter of metal. A few minutes later came a softer tinkle, scurry of pattering feet, then silence.

Elsa ran to the door and stood motionless by the jamb, waiting, ethereally white in the moons.h.i.+ne. Suddenly upon the gallery pillars flashed yellow light. She should have gone back to bed, but a thrill of unknown fear held her. By and by the yellow light went out with that quickness which tricks the hearing into believing that the vanis.h.i.+ng had been accompanied by sound. She saw Warrington, fully dressed, issue forth cautiously, glance about, then pa.s.s down the gallery, stepping with the lightness of a cat.

She returned hastily to her room, threw over her shoulders a kimono, and went back to the door, hesitating there for a breath or two. She stepped out upon the gallery. What had roused him at this time of night? She leaned over the railing and peered down into the roadway which in daytime was given over to the rickshaw coolies. She heard the crunch of wheels, a low murmur of voices; beyond this, nothing more.

But as the silence of the night became tense once more, she walked as far as Warrington's door, and paused there.

The gallery floor was trellised with moonlight and shadow. She saw something lying in the center of a patch of light, and she stooped.

The light was too dim for her to read; so she reentered her own room and turned on the lights. It was Warrington's letter of credit. She gave a low laugh, perhaps a bit hysterical. There was no doubt of it.

Some one had entered his room. There had been a struggle in which he had been the stronger, and the thief had dropped his plunder. (As a matter of fact, the Chinaman, finding himself closed in upon, had thrown the letter of credit toward the railing, in hope that it would fall over to the ground below, where, later, he could recover it.) Elsa pressed it to her heart as another woman might have pressed a rose, and laughed again. Something of his; something to give her the excuse to see and to speak to him again. To-morrow she would know; and he would tell her the truth, even as her heart knew it now. For what other reason had he turned away from her that first day out of Rangoon, hurt and broken? Paul Ellison; and she had told him that she was going home to marry his brother!

XVII

THE ANSWERING CABLE

Next morning, when it became known among the bankers and foreign agencies that a letter of credit for ten thousand pounds had been lost or stolen, there was more than a ripple of excitement. They searched records, but no loss as heavy as this came to light. Add to the flutter a reward of two hundred pounds for the recovery of the letter, and one may readily imagine the scrutinizing alertness of the various clerks and the subsequent embarra.s.sments of peaceful tourists who wished to draw small sums for current expenses. Even the managing director of the Bank of Burma came in for his share of annoyance. He was obliged to send out a dozen cables of notification of the loss, all of which had to be paid out of accrued dividends. Thus Warrington had blocked up the avenues. The marvelous rapidity with which such affairs may be spread broadcast these days is the first wonder in a new epoch of wonders. From Irkoutsh to Aukland, from St. Johns to Los Angeles, wherever a newspaper was published, the news flew. Within twenty-four hours it would be as difficult to draw against that letter as it would be to trans.m.u.te baser metals into gold.

At half past ten Warrington, apparently none the worse for a sleepless night, entered the private office of the consul-general who, gravely and with studied politeness, handed to him an unopened cablegram.

"I rather preferred to let you open it, Mr. Warrington," he said.

"Still, it might be something of your own," replied Warrington. He noted the lack of cordiality, but with pa.s.sive regret.

"No cablegram would come to me from the department, especially as the diplomatic-pouch, as we call the mail-bag, arrives Monday. Open it. I wish you good luck," a little more kindly.

"May I sit down?"

"To be sure you may."

The consul-general recovered his pen and pretended to become absorbed in the litter of papers on his desk. But in truth he could see nothing save the young man's face: calm, unmoved, expressing negligent interest in what should be the most vital thing in his existence, next to life.

If the man hadn't met Elsa, to her interest and to his own alarm, he would have been as affable as deep in his heart he wanted to be. A minute pa.s.sed. It seemed to take a very long time. He tried to resist the inclination to turn his head, but the drawing of curiosity was irresistible. What he saw only added to his general mystification.

The slip of paper hung pendulent in Warrington's hand; the other hand was hidden in his beard, while his eyes seemed to be studying seriously the medallion in the Kirmanshah. A fine specimen of a man, mused the consul-general, incredibly wholesome despite his ten years' knocking about in this unG.o.dly part of the world. It was a pity. They had evidently refused to compromise.

"Bad news?"

Warrington stood up with sudden and surprising animation in his face.

"Read it," he said.

"If Ellison will make rest.i.tution in person, yes.

"ANDES."

The consul-general jumped to his feet and held out his hand. "I am glad, very glad. Everything will turn out all right now. If you wish, I'll tell Miss Chetwood the news."

"I was going to ask you to do that," responded Warrington. The mention of Elsa took the brightness out of his face. "Tell her that Parrot & Co. will always remember her kindness, and ask her to forgive a lonely chap for having caused her any embarra.s.sment through her goodness to him. I have decided not to see Miss Chetwood again."

"You are a strong man, Mr. Warrington."

"Warrington? My name is Ellison, Paul Warrington Ellison. After all, I'm so used to Warrington, that I may as well let well enough alone.

There is one more favor; do not tell Miss Chetwood that my name is Ellison."

"I should use my own name, if I were you. Why, man, you can return to the States as if you had departed but yesterday. The world forgets quickly. People will be asking each other what it was that you did.

Then I shall bid Miss Chetwood good-by for you?"

"Yes. I am going to jog it home. I want to travel first-cla.s.s, here, there, wherever fancy takes me. It's so long since I've known absolute ease and comfort. I wish to have time to readjust myself to the old ways. I was once a luxury-loving chap. I sail at dawn for Saigon. I may knock around in Siam for a few weeks. After that, I don't know where I'll go. Of course I shall keep the Andes advised of my whereabouts, from time to time."

"Another man would be in a hurry." It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Warrington what he knew of the Andes Construction Company, but something held back the words, a fear that Warrington might change his mind about seeing Elsa.