The Fifth Ace Part 31

"Are you in such haste? I've come on purpose to escort you back over the bridge and have a little chat with you. There is something almost comic in the situation, don't you think?"

"If there is, Mr. Wiley, it is discernible only to you." She shrugged.

"I will leave you to the enjoyment of it."

"Not yet, my dear! Our bird has flown, I know, but I am curious to learn why you haunt the empty cage."

Willa paused, eying him steadily.

"What is it to you, as long as the Senora Reyes is not here?"

"Because I believe that you will lead me to her more quickly than my agents can!" Wiley's smile became a knowing leer. "Very clever, your conversation over the telephone the other night, designed for Angie's benefit! You knew that she would report it faithfully to me and you counted on it to throw me off the track, but it didn't quite serve its purpose."

Willa's heart gave a leap, and then sank in a sick wave of fear for Tia Juana. She did not realize until that moment how certain she had been that the old woman was in the hands of those whose interest it would be to keep her safe.

Wiley's att.i.tude betrayed the fact that he knew no more than the girl herself where Tia Juana was. What, then, could have happened to her?

"I really must congratulate you once more!" he went on, ironically.

"It was a master stroke, a flash of genius, to spirit the old lady away from this latest retreat of hers, and pretend that you, too, were in the dark as to her whereabouts. It was not your fault that the shot fell short of its mark!"

Willa hesitated. Should she tell him the truth? That would, of course, give him equal ground with her and he would move heaven and earth to beat her in the search, but in her hideous new anxiety she would almost rather know that Tia Juana was in antagonistic hands than face the vague but terrible possibilities confronting her.

Starr Wiley accepted her silence as an admission and on the instant his manner changed.

"I have followed you here to tell you that the time is past for quibbling, and no mere ruse will suffice longer to put me off!" He moved close to her and glared down implacably into her unwavering eyes.

"You refused to meet me half way, and now you shall hear my ultimatum: You will produce Tia Juana or take me to her within three days, or I shall tell what I know!"

"Mr. Wiley--" Willa drew herself up very straight and tall--"I have no statement to make about Tia Juana, save that I cannot and will not take you to her. I have listened to your threats and innuendoes until my patience is exhausted and I warn you not to approach me again on this or any other matter. What you know is immaterial to me, you must tell it to whom you please. Will you leave me now, or permit me to depart without a further scene?"

He bowed and stepped back.

"As you desire. Remember you have three days. Think it over well, my dear Billie. It is your present position, the Murdaugh money, a brilliant future and a name, against the Pool of the Lost Souls!"

CHAPTER XVII

ANGIE SCORES

"I was sorry to have missed you at my sister's, although I do not think you would have welcomed my appearance!" laughed Kearn Thode. "I was striped with plaster like a savage in war paint."

"I had the pleasure of seeing the other victim of that motor accident,"

Willa remarked demurely. "He was even less prepossessing than usual.

I--I knew something of what occurred as I think you could understand from my note. I think that I have again to thank you for your champions.h.i.+p."

They were sitting out a dance in the Allardyce's conservatory at their first meeting the night of the Erskine dinner and for some reason speech was difficult to them both. Her eyes, usually so candid, were veiled from him, but Thode swept her with a hungrily wistful gaze.

"You are mistaken. You have nothing to thank me for. I am sorry that any idle gossip reached your ears, but believe me, no other course was open to me. No man could have helped himself--"

"Oh, I understand, of course." Willa blundered helplessly in her haste. "You would have done as much, under the same circ.u.mstances, for any other girl, but it is good to feel that there are real men in the world who will protect the name of a friend as though it were that of an own sister."

"It wasn't exactly that, Willa." His voice was very low and his eyes had dropped from her face. "A man would naturally resent any insinuation against a good woman, whether she were his sister or not.

There is only one woman in the world for whom a man fights with the primitive blind rage of a human creature for his mate: only, fool that he is, he does not always recognize the feeling which consumes him for what it really is."

He paused, and Willa, too, was silent, but she feared that the very beating of her heart would be audible to his ears. The dreamy waltz had given way to the syncopation of a fox-trot, yet neither was aware of the pa.s.sing minutes.

"I was blind in Limasito!" he went on. "No woman has come deeply into my life except my sister and I did not know, I did not realize what you had come to mean to me in our few meetings until you were going away into this new existence which was awaiting you, and then I could not speak. I did not follow you then because I had nothing to offer, but I made up my mind to succeed in what I had set out to do, if honest endeavor and the hardest kind of work could achieve it and then, if I were not too late, I meant to come to you and ask you to be my wife."

Willa stirred tremulously, but still her lips were dumb, and Thode misinterpreted her silence.

"Please, don't be afraid!" he a.s.sured her, bitterly. "I am not going to ask you that now, for I have failed! I'm not even going to ask you to wait for me, to give me any hope, for I am losing faith in myself; not in my love for you, Willa, but in the success which alone would make it possible for me to approach you. I only wanted you to know that I had awakened to the truth. No girl was ever yet displeased at one more victim bound to her chariot wheels."

"I am not displeased, but I--I am distressed!" Willa stammered through stiffened lips. "You think because I accepted the name and the fortune of the grandfather I never knew, and apparently forgot the old life and all that Dad had done for me, that I am just coldly mercenary! You think I am that sort, ambitious and pus.h.i.+ng and soulless! I thought you knew and understood me, I thought that we were friends!"

"That, I hope, we shall always be," he said gently. "It would have been quixotic, absurd for you to refuse the golden opportunity when it came. I did not think of that, nor did I believe you mercenary. I did not mean to whine about my failure, either; it was the chance of fortune and I have lost. You will forgive my having spoken--I had to tell you! I could not keep silent any longer, it was as if you, all unconsciously, were twisting the heart from my breast. You could not help it if you wanted to, you are so sweet, so wonderful! Please, don't be sorry for me, either, it is the greatest thing that ever happened to me and I shall be glad of it, always, even when I have to stand aside and see you turn to a better, bigger man. No matter what happens I shall, all my life through, be at your service."

"Oh, I am not the least bit sorry for you!" Willa cried. "I am exasperated with you! Do you suppose I am the sort of woman to care what a man has, rather than what he is? Am I a painted pampered doll that I must be approached with gifts and sweets and dangled before the highest bidder? My mother married the man she loved and starved with him and died working to take care of his child! Am I less a woman than she?"

"Willa!" He breathed her name in a fervent whisper and caught her two hands in his. "Willa, look at me!"

She raised her blazing eyes and the flame died to a soft luminous glow, while the rich color mantled to her brow.

"Willa, do you mean that you care, really?--Oh, I vowed I would not ask you until I had proved myself worthy, and now, when everything is at a standstill, an impa.s.se, and you yourself have warned me of the impossibility of winning out in my plan for the future, I--I forget all my resolutions! It is unfair for me to speak now, it is not playing the game, but will you tell me at least that you won't be displeased with me if sometime I come to you, when I have won the right? I will ask no promise now, I cannot, but if I could know that you cared ever so little--"

"How can you know if--if you don't ask?" Willa's downright honesty had gotten the better of her timidity and with characteristic fearlessness she disclosed all that was in her own wildly throbbing heart. "I don't know how a man could prove himself more worthy of any woman than by taking his life in his hands on a hundred-to-one chance of saving hers!

I don't know what difference the loss or finding of the Pool makes in the happiness of you and me. Go ahead and make a martyr of yourself over your silly pride if you want to! If I thought you didn't care, that you were just trying to carry on the ghastly game they call flirtation up here, I wouldn't be so angry with you. I'm not Willa Murdaugh down inside of me, and you know it!--I'm just Gentleman Geoff's Billie, a waif raised by the greatest-hearted man that ever lived, but I've got some pride myself. I don't want any man who hasn't s-s.p.u.n.k enough to ask me!"

"Willa! Oh, my dearest, will you--!"

"Here comes Winnie Mason!" She drew her hands from his and sprang up with a nervous tinkle of laughter. "That means we've missed three dances, and you were to have had two of them with Angie! You'll be in for a dreadful panning--"

"You wicked little--adorable little--girl o' mine!" he exclaimed softly, as Winnie's mildly inquiring face appeared around a narrow alley between the close-packed flowering plants. "I'm coming to-morrow, before breakfast--"

Willa shook her head, the light waning in her eyes.

"No, not to-morrow, Kearn. There is something that I must do, something I cannot put aside even--even for you."

"In the evening, then? I must see you to-morrow sometime! It's going to be hard enough to live through to-night!"

She nodded, and, not trusting herself to speak again, turned and slipped away to meet Winnie Mason.

That placidly dense young man was mightily pleased with the effusive greeting with which she favored him, and had she vision enough to note it, she might have read in his wors.h.i.+ping eyes a like message to that which she had just heard.

But she was blind, dazed in the light of her own swiftly gained wondrous happiness. The music, the dancers, the little crystal-laden supper-tables, the final romp all pa.s.sed in a kaleidoscopic dream before her, and only the wintry night wind beating upon her in a frigid blast, as she stepped from the awninged pa.s.sage-way to the limousine, awakened her to a sense of reality.

Just then, the flash of a street-lamp in at the window fell for a pa.s.sing moment on Angie's face as she sat half-turned from her cousin and Willa caught her breath to stifle a sudden startled exclamation.

She had seen Angie in many fits of temper, sullen and raging, but never had the girl's expression been so fiendis.h.!.+ The doll-like beauty was gone in a distortion of anger, but there was a suggestion of malignant triumph, too, which aroused Willa's apprehension.

She knew that in her heart Angie despised her as an upstart and bitterly resented her small success in the social world, beside blaming her for the episode with Starr Wiley. She remembered, too, how Angie had betrayed her to him. In her maddening anxiety for Tia Juana's safety, Willa had given no thought to the means Wiley must have used to reinstate himself once more in her cousin's willing eyes.