Foe-Farrell Part 25

"'You're going to look in again, you two?' I asked. The Professor said 'Yes, on the chance that Roddy may turn up'; and he looked at Farrell; and Farrell blinked and said, 'Yes, we owe him an explanation, of course.'

"'Well,' said I,' you'll be lucky if he don't throw you both downstairs for a pair of knockabout artists astray. I've a sense of humour that can stretch some distance, and with the permission of our kind friends in front this matinee performance will be repeated to-night, when Otty's sense of humour will gape for it, no doubt, after being stretched to the Pyrenees and back.'

"The Professor motioned Farrell out to the staircase. Then he came forward to me and said, pretty low and serious, 'You're a good boy, Jimmy. You're so good a boy that I want you to keep out of this.

If Roddy turns up to-night, tell him that my man's for Wimbledon, safe and sound. On second thoughts, we won't bother a tired man, to-night, with any excuses or apologies. By to-morrow he will probably have had my letter, and will understand. He may or may not decide to show it to you. I hope he won't. I hope you'll let us see him alone to-morrow. Good-bye.'

"--Now what do you make of that?" demanded Jimmy helplessly.

"I make it out to be no jest, but pretty serious," said I.

"But luckily Farrell's located at Wimbledon. Where's Jack?" I asked.

"Don't know," answered Jimmy.

"I'm tired enough for this night, anyhow," said I. "And here's Jephson.--'Evening, Jephson."

Jephson came in with a can in one hand and in the other a tray with a telegram upon it.

"Good evening, Sir Roderick! Glad to see you safe home, sir," said Jephson. "Telegram just delivered at the Lodge for Mr. Collingwood."

"For me?" said Jimmy. "I've backed nothing to-day. Been too busy."

He tore upon the envelope, read the message, and after a pause handed it to me, whistling softly. It had been handed in at the Docks Station, Liverpool, and it ran--

"Tell O. that F. and I sail to-night New York S.S. _Emania_.

"Foe."

NIGHT THE TWELFTH.

THE "EMANIA".

I am going to spin the next stretch of this yarn--and maybe the next after it--in my own way. You will wonder how I happened by certain sc.r.a.ps of information: but you will understand before we come to the end.

It comes mainly from later report, but partly from doc.u.ments which I have been too busy, of late, to sift. Here they are, all mixed: and I choose one only out of the heap--and that a pa.s.sage which doesn't help the actual story much, though it may help the understanding of it. It occurs in a letter of Foe's written at sea and posted from New York--

"She had been reading a magazine, borrowed from the s.h.i.+p's library, and when she left me, she left it lying beside her deck-chair. The wind ruffled its pages and threatened to tear them: so I picked the thing up, and was about to close it, and to stow it behind her cus.h.i.+on, when a story-t.i.tle caught my eye and agreeably whetted my curiosity. It was 'The Head Hunter.'

"I don't care greatly for short stories. Fiction as a rule bores me in inverse proportion to its length--which seems a paradox and liable to be reduced to the absurd by any moderately expert logician. Yet you will find it experimentally true of five readers out of six. . . . Moreover the yarn had little or nothing to do with real head-hunting--except in its preamble.

I soon glanced at the end, and had no further use for the story.

"But I turned my attention back to the preamble and reread it twice. The fellow, an American, has a queer c.o.c.ky irregular style: but he can write when he chooses: and in one shot he so fairly hit me between wind and water that I had to steal the book, carry it down to my cabin and copy out the pa.s.sage for your benefit. . . . Yes, for yours: because it conveys something I've been wanting you to understand about this chase of mine, something I couldn't have put into words though I'd tried for a month. I enclose it herewith. . . .

"When I had finished my copying, I took the thing back, meaning to slip it under Miss Denistoun's cus.h.i.+on. But she had returned to her chair, and so I was caught red-handed. 'So it was you?'

said she. 'What have you been doing with my magazine?'

'Skimming it,' said I--which was true enough, literally, but I didn't manage it very well. 'Did you find anything to interest you specially?' she asked. 'Well, yes,' I admitted;' I picked it up and lit on something that promised well: but the story came to nothing.' She gave me a glance and I felt sure she had spotted my awkwardness and was going to pursue the catechism.

But she didn't. To my relief she harked back to our previous talk. At tea-time, however, she remembered to take the magazine away with her. . . . It has not yet been returned to store. . . ."

(ENCLOSURE)

"'_Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen, but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near, with the inevitable hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuits only by such signs as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make--a twig crackling in the awful sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the rushes of a water-level--a hint of death for every mile and every hour--they amused me greatly, those little fellows of one idea._'"

You observe that a lady has come into the story at last, as she was bound to do. (You will hear of another and a very different one by and by.) It is not my fault that she enters it so late--I tell of things as they occurred--though a clever writer would have dragged her in long before this. I wish to G.o.d I hadn't to bring her into it at all. I slipped out her surname just now. . . .

It was through being a friend of mine that she comes into it.

Constantia Denistoun and I had ridden ponies, tickled for trout, bird-nested, tumbled off trees, out of duck-punts, through forbidden ice, and into every form of juvenile disgrace, together as boy and girl. Her father and mine had been college friends, and (I believe) had both fallen in love with my mother, at a College ball, and my father won--but all on an understanding of honourable combat.

Denistoun set out to travel, quite in the traditional way of the Rejected One. He was a Yorks.h.i.+re squire with plenty of money, and could afford the prescribed cure. He travelled as far as to Virginia, U.S.A., where he halted, and wooed and won the heiress of a wide estate of cotton and tobacco and a great Palladian house, all devastated and ruined by the War, in which her father had fallen, one of Lee's pet leaders of cavalry. . . . Yes, I know it sounds like a tale out of Ouida: but such things happen, and this thing happened. . . . Denistoun scaled the twenty steps of the Ionic portico, cleft his way through the cobwebs and briers that were living and dying for Dixie, kicked over the grand piano that Dinah's duster still reverentially spared, and carried off the enchanted Princess across the seas to Yorks.h.i.+re: where in due course she bore him a daughter, Constantia, and, some years later, a son who eventually came into the property but doesn't come into the story.

In the meantime it had happened that _I_ saw the light. . . .

My mother died, a year later: and after seven years of widowhood my father married again. My sister Sally--the recipient of those long letters you see me inditing o' nights--is my step-sister, and an adored one at that.

There you have the family history, or enough of it. The old friends.h.i.+p between my father and Squire Denistoun had never been broken; and now that death had taken away the last excuse for a rivalry which had been felt but to be renounced, Constantia and I-- unconscious brats--shared holidays, as it chanced at my home or hers, in nefarious poaching beside Avon or in gallops between her northern moors and the sea.

That is all, or almost all. I have to add that, having fallen into most sc.r.a.pes with her, I ended by proposing one in which she gently but decisively declined to share the risk. . . . I am inclined to think that, having been so frank with her, and so frequent, in confidences about others to whom my heart was lost, she may have missed the bloom on the recital. . . . But there it was; and that's that, as they say.

I accused her at the time of a priggish, unnatural craving for things of the intellect. All my excuse was that at a certain time of her life she took a sudden turn for reading and setting queer new values on things. But she was always a sportswoman, a woman of the open air, and--here's the point--always knowledgeable with animals and always beloved by them, but always (as it seemed to me) inclined to be severe and disciplinary. To a lean pack she was Diana; they fawned behind her for no pay but hope of her word to let slip.

But she would beat them off the piled platter, and from a fed lap-dog she could scarcely restrain her hands. If you think this hasn't to do with the story, I can only a.s.sure you that it has.

One thing more--She had met Foe; for the first time at a luncheon-party in my rooms at Cambridge, in May Week; a second time, it may be, at a May Week ball--but that wouldn't count, for she danced divinely and Foe couldn't compete for nuts. She may have met him once or twice afterwards, in London. It's not likely.

Anyhow (as she has told me since) she recognised him at once when he turned up on the _Emania_.

She and her mother were bound out to visit some friends at Was.h.i.+ngton, thence to fare South and stay a while with a cousin who held the old homestead in which her mother retained some sort of dower share.

Thus she recognised Foe as soon as he appeared on deck.

But he did not appear on deck until the _Emania_ was well out from Queenstown; having made sure that Farrell didn't bolt there.

The two--need I tell it?--had not taken pa.s.sage in collusion.

Farrell was escaping, Foe on his trail. But Foe had no idea of any dramatic surprise on board. Having made sure of his man, he just took a remnant first-cla.s.s berth at the last moment, turned in, and went to sleep.

In all their commerce (you will have begun to remark) Foe and Farrell were apt to yield, at intervals, to an abandonment of weariness, but so that they alternated, the exhaustion of one seeming ever to double the other's fever. Foe sought his bunk and lay there like a log.

Farrell, after the first shock of reading his pursuer's name in the Pa.s.sengers' Book--where it sprang to his eyes fair and square--fell to haunting the pa.s.sage-way, low down in the vessel, on which one dreadful door refused to open. His terror of it so preoccupied him that he forgot to feel sea-sick. But the steward of those nether regions marked him, by the electric lamps, as a lurking pa.s.senger to be watched; and wondered who, at that depth in the s.h.i.+p, could be carrying valuables to tempt a middle-aged gentleman who (if looks were any guide) ought to be up and losing money to the regular card-sharpers.

It was not until the second day out, and pretty late in the afternoon, that Foe emerged from his cabin, neatly dressed and hale.

(Unlike some Professors I have known, Jack kept his clothes brushed and his hair cut.) As he opened his door his ear caught a slight shuffling sound; whereupon he smiled and stepped quickly down the pa.s.sage to the turn of the companion way.

"No hurry, Farrell!" he called; and Farrell, arrested, turned slowly about on the stair. "Man, you're like the swain in Thackeray:"

Although I enter not, Yet round about the spot Oft-times I hover--

"Solicitous, were you?--thought I might be sea-sick?"

"I was wondering," Farrell stammered. "Seeing that you didn't turn up at meals--"

(Here I must read you a queer remark from the letter in which Jack reported this encounter. Here's the extract:--)