The Breath of the Gods Part 29

Something is bound to turn up soon."

"If Prince Hagane is in it, it will be worse than a turn-up; it will be a heave," said Dodge, shaking his head also.

"But, dad, I _have_ been patient. You know how I hate being patient. I'm perfectly on edge when I have to wait. Every little bit of me begs to be cut off, and allowed to run in sc.r.a.ps. Oh, don't look so solemn! I'm only a girl. I can't upset the earth. Everything has gone wrong this morning from the minute I stepped out of bed on a tailless cat. You can make it well, daddy. My heart simply tugs in me toward Yuki."

At mention of her heart Dodge gave a prolonged and envious sigh. Todd smiled, but Gwendolen only looked indignant. Tears stood in her pretty eyes, and Dodge felt himself to be a brute.

"Your Excellency," he said, "if I might be allowed to suggest, why not let me be Miss Todd's escort? If I am along, I think, perhaps--" He broke off with a significant intonation. The two men exchanged glances, and the elder, catching his chin with a characteristic gesture, walked away thoughtfully.

"Oh, when dad looks like that, he is going over the entire American Const.i.tution before he answers," cried Gwendolen, in despair. "May I not sit somewhere, Mr. Dodge?"

There were but three chairs in the room, the two revolving desk-chairs, and one suggestively rigid and slippery, meant for visitors. Generally, as now, it was heaped with a tottering ma.s.s of papers. Dodge, with suspicious alacrity, leaned forward to wheel the minister's chair.

Before he could reach it, Gwendolen had thrown herself into the other, and faced the open vitals of his private desk.

In the very centre, just out of range of the minister's eye, stood an unframed photograph of Carmen Gil y Niestra, a languorous Spanish beauty lately arrived in Tokio. The picture had come that morning by mail, and was only waiting to be carried to Dodge's rooms; but Gwendolen could not know that. She was humiliated and annoyed to feel a deep, dry sob rise to her throat. At another time, when her best friend was not in trouble, and she hadn't stepped on the cat, she would have made some bright remark about it; but now she dared not trust her voice.

Dodge, carefully removing the papers to the floor, seated himself on the visitor's chair, and let his eyes rest with a curious, half-triumphant look upon Gwendolen's downcast face. This young man, unlike others to whom she had chosen to show favor, had not hastened to throw himself at her feet, pleading to be sat upon, trod upon, built upon, anything but the one obvious suggestion that he rise and walk away. He had never tried to take her hand; never once said that he loved her, though the girl until this moment had felt certain of it. Sometimes she had tried to flatter him into the declaration; again she would pique and goad him.

The result had been the same. Dodge followed her everywhere, paid her all possible attentions, and said everything but the one thing she had determined to hear. With an instinctive coquette, the desire is not so much to overcome her quarry, as to feel that there is no quarry she cannot overcome. But even from the seductive moonlit decks of the steams.h.i.+p Dodge had escaped, uncommitted. The situation was both piquant and exciting.

"Well, Dodge," said the amba.s.sador, at length. "I am willing to take your suggestion. Is the carriage ready, Gwen?"

"It's been at your door for hours."

"I'll let you go, since you seem to feel so set on it. But be careful of what you say or do, and don't promise anything. Give little Snowflake my love, and tell her I miss her about the house."

Gwendolen, without a word of thanks, walked toward the door. "Now, Dodge, remember," warned her father, in a semi-whisper.

"If Mr. Dodge is being sent along as a sort of diplomatic nurse, or a keeper to an idiot, I won't have him," flashed the girl.

"Nonsense, child!" said her father. "You'd better run along in a hurry before I change my mind. I don't know but as I'm weak--"

Without waiting for more, the girl literally ran from the room. Clerks and visitors in the outside offices looked up in wonder. That dry sob in her throat had stirred again. Even her dad, on this horrid day, was cross.

Outside the sun had begun to s.h.i.+ne brilliantly. The high winds, those scourges of the Tokio winter, were, for the time, at rest. The people in the streets appeared contented and happy enough, trudging along on wooden clogs, or trotting with noiseless, straw-sandalled feet between the shafts of vehicles. The small boys wore miniature flags in their caps.

When again she felt mistress of her voice, she said, with an attempt at her usual gay levity, "Now, Mr. Dodge, I intend to know what all that mysterious interchange of glances in the office was supposed to convey."

Dodge seemed to think. "I should fancy you'd know by instinct," he answered. "j.a.pan and Russia are at war. America is neutral."

"Yes," challenged Gwendolen, "and the earth goes around the sun, and the moon around the earth. But what is that to Yuki and to me?"

"You are the daughter of the American minister, and Miss Yuki is under the protection of Prince Hagane. It's the bother of marriage. You must see that she can never marry Le Beau. The worst of it all is that Le Beau's such an a.s.s!"

"I don't consider my friend, Mr. Le Beau, an--er--animal," said Gwendolen, all the more stiffly that her statement was not quite true.

"I beg your pardon," said her companion, meekly, and relapsed into careful silence.

Gwendolen fidgeted. This did not suit her mood at all. She wanted to quarrel. "Yuki and Pierre are frantically in love, poor things! But of course an incipient diplomat doesn't take into consideration anything so trivial as--love."

Dodge smiled into her petulant eyes, a sort of elder-brother smile that stung her. "If I am the incipient referred to, you have missed your mark."

"You pretend to be Pierre's friend, but you never did like him."

"When have I pretended?"

"You are jealous because he is so good-looking. All men are that way."

"Aren't girls sometimes that way too?" asked he, with elaborate innocence.

The shot told. She reddened angrily. "You are very disagreeable this morning, Mr. Dodge."

Again fell silence.

"Come," said the girl, changing her tactics swiftly. "It is I who am beastly, I know it. I'm going to try now to be good. Tell me honestly, as a friend, do you think that Pierre has absolutely no chance of marrying Yuki?"

Dodge studied the restless eyes for sincerity before he answered. "He has a chance. If she is willing to throw over her parents, her Emperor, and her native land, in order to run away to him,--they may find protection. But if I know j.a.panese character at all, Miss Yuki would die first--and she ought to. The one decent thing for Le Beau is to release her."

"But to run away, by night perhaps, in actual danger of her life--oh, how romantic!" sighed Gwendolen, clasping her hands. It was done to irritate, and it succeeded.

"Romantic? Damfoolic!" sniffed Dodge, before he could stop himself.

"Mr. Dodge!"

"By George, it slipped out! I beg your pardon, Miss Todd, I should not have said it."

"For what do you ask pardon--the expression, or the thought?"

"The expression, of course. I was a mucker to use it in your presence."

"Am I to understand that the thought underlying your remarkable utterance is unchanged?"

"Why, er--that such a step would be foolish, and--er--unworthy?"

stammered the wretched youth, now as greatly disconcerted as even Gwendolen could wish; "why, of course I still think it. I have to think it!"

"I approved of it openly. I demand retraction of the thought also."

Gwendolen's chance had come. Here was a bone,--a flimsy cartilage, it is true, but still a thing to pick her quarrel over. In the making-up she might find compensation for other recent chagrins. Gwendolen liked to make up. The magnanimous yielding, the condescension on her part, added to the humble grat.i.tude of the recipient, brought a sense of pleasant power.

"You demand retraction of the thought," repeated Dodge. He faced her slowly. She was deliberately studying the two American flags embroidered between the blue cotton shoulders of the carriage-driver, high on the box. The delicate profile, uplifted in sunlight, had a translucency in the outline like the petal of a rose. Dodge gazed with hungry heart, but deepening frown. "You didn't mean that." He said it soothingly. "You couldn't insist on anything so utterly childish as the retraction of a personal thought. I've apologized for the words."

"Do you refuse, then?" said Gwendolen, with a toss of the head she had seen Julia Marlowe give.

"You really mean such a thing?"

"I mean it."

"Then--I refuse."

The girl turned. This time it was Dodge's somewhat ragged profile held against the sky. "You dare to refuse me?" she gasped. Her hazel eyes grew inky; they seemed to shoot off sparkles of jet.