THE three sat brooding in silence for several minutes, until one of the native clerks came in and held the door open respectfully. That meant that the chief was coming, and Murray slid off his perch and slipped quietly out as Gregory came slowly in.
In the unsparing afternoon light he looked a broken lion—an old king-beast with sagging skin and weakened mouth, but with fierce fight still in his tired and anxious eyes.
Hunters know that the smaller breeds of lions are the most dangerous. Robert Gregory was not a large man—he barely reached his wife’s good inches. But he was jungle-fierce and jungle-strong. He had fought many a hard fight and had been torn and scarred in fights, but he had never lost one yet. He had pounded his way through the world, butted his way to victory and wealth. He had no finesse and no super-judgment, but he had splendid pluck, lion courage, bulldog pertinacity; and often for his wife, and for his daughter always, he had the charming tenderness that bulldogs show to children.
There was a hint of unscrupulousness in his face, and he had a jaw of iron. He was a very thin man, and it saved him from looking a very common one.
He was scrupulously dressed—now as ever—and, now as ever, just a shade over-dressed. His appearancewould have gained had his watch-chain been a trifle slenderer, his cummerbund a less youthful rose, the canary-colored diamond in his ring half its size, or, better still, not worn. But his small, well-kept hands were dark, and unmistakably the hands of a man. He wore a bangle—just a thread of twined gold set with two or three inferior turquoise, and it kept slipping down his arm, almost over his knuckles—a cheap thing that had cost less than his cravat. Hilda had given it to him several years ago.
He came in deliberately—almost as if he too were very tired or beaten by the day’s terrific heat—but with a determined air of briskness, and nodded crisply to Carruthers and Holman as he took his own chair at his own desk.
He was at bay. And he was going to fight—to the very end, let the end be what it might. But, in spite of his fierce self-control and genuine grit, he did not look a man “fit” to put up a big fight. For two nights he had had little sleep, and none that was restful. And to Holman’s friendly, searching eyes he betrayed several signs of the hideous strain and worry with which he was battling. The business catastrophes that had heaped up about him were bad enough—enough to unnerve any man, and he was palpably unnerved—but the first thought in his mind, the burning object of its ceaseless search, was—his son. He was holding his head defiantly, but the veins at his temples were twitching.
Holman took the telegram out of his pocket, and, with emotion that he could not quite conceal, leaned across the desk, holding it out to Gregory.
“Mr. Gregory,” he said—“theFeima——” But he did not have to finish.
“Oh, yes! I know, I know,” Gregory said listlessly.
“I’m sorry,” Tom Carruthers began; “I’m awfully sorry for this, Mr. Gregory.”
Robert Gregory swung round in his chair and banged the desk fiercely with his clenched fist. “Sorry—Tom! By God, I’ll make some one pay for this—butwho? What have we got to fight? Holman, you still think it’s this man Wu? Eh?”
“I don’t think, governor,” Holman said, leaning across the desk in his earnestness, “I’m positive. In some way we’ve run up against the most powerful man in China.”
“Well, I’m testing your theory, Holman. I’m having that cursed Chinaman here.”
Tom Carruthers turned in his insecure seat on the window-ledge, so astonished that he very nearly slid off it; and Holman was distinctly perturbed.
“I sent him a chit this morning from the club, telling him I wished to see him here urgently at two o’clock on a matter of the gravest importance.”
William Holman shook his head.
“Take it from me, sir, Wu Li Chang is not the man to call upon any one,” he said; “they must go to him.”
“Indeed!” Gregory snapped.
“And did you see him at two?” Tom said eagerly.
“No, Tom; he sent a coolie with a chit to say that he would call here at three—unless he found it inconvenient—unless he found it inconvenient! Look. I’ve hurried over from the club to see him.”
Tom came across the room and picked up the note Gregory had tossed towards him, and stood studying it closely.
The trouble on Holman’s face thickened. “If Mr. Wu condescends to answer such a summons,” he said earnestly, “why, that very fact strengthens my belief. Itell you he never discusses anything outside his own offices—never! And if for once he breaks that rule, he has some terrible reason for doing it—some damnably sinister motive.”
“Pretty cool sort of johnnie, anyway,” Tom commented, still scrutinizing Wu’s note. “But I say, what an educated, professional sort of fist he writes.”
“Oh!” Holman said impatiently, “he’s got us both ways. He has all the advantages of a Western education without having lost a scrap of his Eastern cunning. I came out once with the skipper who took Wu to Europe—Wu and an English tutor he’d had for years—he was only a kid then, but Watson said he played a better game of chess than any white man on board—unless it was the tutor chap—had ever seen played before, bar none. Wu was nine or ten then. He’s forty now, and no doubt his chess has been improving every day since.”
Gregory smiled nastily. “Well,” he said, “you may be perfectly correct in all you say, Holman, but it seems to me that you’re all afraid of these Chinamen.”
“I am, for one then,” Holman muttered. “And I’ve been here twenty years.”
“Unnecessarily afraid. I think you’ll find that I’m perfectly capable of dealing with the fellow when he comes—and he’ll come all right—oh, yes! he’ll come.”
“I wonder,” Holman said.
“I’m sure I hope so,” Tom Carruthers said heartily.
Holman devoutly hoped not, but he did not say it.
“He’ll come,” Gregory repeated didactically, almost truculently; “he’ll come, as full of oil as a pound of butter. What the devil!” he added, with a displeased change of voice, as silk skirts and high-heeled shoes sounded in the hall. “I told you not to leave the hotel,” he complained, with affection and dismay mingled in hisvoice, as his wife and daughter came through the door.
“Of course you did, poor old dear,” Hilda told him soothingly, seating herself on the corner of his desk and patting him encouragingly on his shoulder. “But Mother can’t rest. How can she? And if she isn’t scouring the island—she must know every inch of it by now—she is hunting on the mainland with Ah Wong.”
“Oh! I know, I know,” Florence Gregory said wearily, subsiding indifferently into the chair Holman placed for her.
“You’ll wear yourself out,” her husband said roughly, but not unkindly.
The mother smiled, contemptuous of the fatigue from which she was wan and trembling. “It’s no use saying anything to me. I can’t rest. Have you heard anything? That’s all I’ve come for.”
“Not yet, dear. I’ve seen the Governor again. He was most kind—really very kind. Everything is being done—everything—and will be—and it is foolish to go on wearing yourself out like this.”
“I am not wearing myself out,” his wife returned petulantly. “The suspense is wearing my heart out—and no one seems to care—no one!”
“Yes, I know how you feel, dear,” her husband answered her gently, “and what you must be suffering. But try to spare yourself just a little, for my sake. And believe me—you can—all that is possible is being done—and this—this is man’s work.”
“Is it?” the mother said dully. “I’m not so sure, I’m not so sure.” She closed her eyes and leaned back in the big office chair, burning and shivering with excitement, and terribly, terribly tired.
Ah Wong looked about the office desperately. She wanted cushions, but there were no cushions there, andshe went and stood very close behind her mistress; and when Mrs. Gregory moved her head restlessly, the Chinese woman slid her hand between it and the sharp edge of the chair’s hard back.
And they might well be tired—the amah too, as well as the frailer, fairer woman. For they had indeed been beating the island and the mainland for days now—searching, searching, and often in quarters of whose existence the English woman could not have suspected, and whose nature she had but dimly grasped—some of them quarters into which no European woman, nice or otherwise, had penetrated before. But Mrs. Gregory had been in no peril. She had not suffered rudeness even. Ah Wong had guarded her well. Ah Wong had known how to do it.
But not one clew, not even the hint of a clew, had they found. Nor had John Bradley, who, in a different and quieter way, had been hunting as indefatigably—and was hunting now.
Robert Gregory sat crouched a little forward now, leaning on the desk, watching his wife miserably, but saying no more—tortured for her (almost forgetting his own pain in hers, or feeling his own only through hers), but pathetically glad to have her rest even this little.
Holman slipped over to the window and stood looking moodily out to the Chinese-and-Mongol-teeming dockside. Tom Carruthers sat quietly down on the big desk too and took Hilda’s hand in his.
For several moments there was a silence in the room that was broken only by the ticking of the clock and the incessant echo of hubbub that buzzed in through the windows, the other five all conspiring eagerly to hold and guard Mrs. Gregory’s rest undisturbed until she broke it herself. Even the Chinese clerk who had comein just after Ah Wong, and who sat, with his face to the wall, writing in the farthest corner, began to drive a noiseless pen, without looking round.
But the clock struck three, and after a startled glance thrown up at it, Mr. Gregory said softly, “Florence.”
“Yes?” his wife answered drearily, without moving; she did not even open her eyes.
The husband sighed remorsefully. “Dear, I’m afraid you’ll have to go.”
“Why?” she asked indifferently, as if the answer could not interest her, and still without moving her head or opening her eyes.
“Well, you see, I’ve made an appointment here at three—and it may, it just may, prove important, with—with a man.”
“Who?” Her voice was still devoid of interest.
“I expect Mr. Wu here.”
Before her husband had spoken the last word Mrs. Gregory was bolt upright in her chair, wide-eyed, alert—as if galvanized, revitalized, tense and acute.
“Mr. Wu?” she whispered eagerly.
“Yes,” he told her.
And the amah fingered softly something hidden in her gown.
“About Basil!”
“About a lot of things,” Gregory said grimly. “And Basil in particular.”
“Oh! and he can help us! You think so, don’t you, Robert?”
“He can help us all right, Mrs. Gregory,” William Holman said sternly, “if he will.”
“Oh! he must. He shall!” she said hoarsely.
“At any rate, he’s coming. And that’s more than I thought,” Holman said, as a new degree and quality ofhubbub belched up from the yard. And as he spoke Murray came in with two cards—a long, thin slip of crimson paper, the mandarin’s name and title inscribed on it in black Chinese characters, and an ordinary Englishvisitingcard, simply engraved “Mr. Wu.”
“He’s getting out of his rickshaw, sir,” Murray told his employer.
“And every man jack of the coolies is ko’towing to him as if he was a god,” Holman grunted from the window.
Gregory rose to his feet with a careful show of calm. “Well,” he remarked cheerfully, “we’ll soon see now what sort of stuff this well-advertised Chinaman is made of. Show him in, Murray. Holman, take my wife to the den near the counting-house. She’ll want to stay, of course, to hear the result. Now, please, off you all go.”
The others turned to the door to which he had pointed—not the door that led to the hall, but at the other end of the long room—but Florence Gregory went up to her husband. “Robert——” she began, but she could not say more, and her eyes were swimming.
Her husband cupped her face in his hands. “There, Mother, there,” he said tenderly, and just a little brokenly, “I know, dear, I know. I understand. There—there. It’s all right. I’ll be careful—very, very careful. Ah Wong!” But he need not have called Ah Wong—she was there already, waiting to serve; and though Hilda turned to her mother as if to help her, and Tom Carruthers and Holman did too, it was Ah Wong who led her out, Ah Wong to whose hand she held and leaned on a little as she went.