II
Josephine Stone switched on the hall light, opened the door leading to the porch and drew back with a startled exclamation.
“Mr. Smith!”
But it was no longer fright that was upon her. Something was so daringly appropriate in his appearance, so grotesque on the part of the picturesque master of Nannabijou camps that she had to smile in spite of herself. She had never seen him thus garbed before; quite debonaire and at ease in a dark, tailored suit and the habiliments of a man of fashion—a handsome, compelling type, faultlessly groomed from his close-cropped, crisp black hair and clean-shaven face to the tips of his fine black shoes. Even his flicker of a smile, which usually had something grim and sinister in it, now radiated goodwill in its becoming elegance. Frank admiration shone in the lustre of his great black eyes.
He was bowing graciously, hat in hand. “I heard you playing,” he said, “and I could not resist the temptation of looking in a moment.”
She stood to one side holding the door for him. “Then you invited yourself over; I suppose I must let you come in.”
She knew it was not the proper thing at this hour, but then Josephine Stone was an unusual girl who had a ready confidence in herself. What she meant to do was to demand of him why she was being held a prisoner here—why she had been forcibly carried off from Amethyst Island by his band of Indians.
He accompanied her to the library. There she turned upon him, her whole demeanour intensely frigid. “Now then,” she demanded, “I want you to tell me what all this means! Why have I been brought to this place against my will by your gang of cut-throats?”
She had meant to be acid, but there was that in his bantering smile that disarmed her, made her impotent to find the words that would humiliate him.
“No—not to-night,” he declined. “It would take too long. To-morrow I will come to explain everything to you; then you may condemn me, excoriate me at your will. For these few rare moments to-night let us—just be friends.”
“You choose rather unconventional hours for your friendly calls, Mr. Smith.”
He laughed outright at the scornful thrust, a ringing, boyish laugh, totally unlike the sterner man she had known. “Perhaps you are right,” he conceded, “but beggars can’t be choosers, you know. I came in the first place because of the storm. I thought you might be nervous.”
“And you came to entertain.” Her glance travelled unconsciously to his clothing.
“I’m glad if I add to the gaiety of nations,” he offered whimsically, “but my other clothing got soaked in the downpour coming here and these city decorations were the only things I had by that were dry. Catering to a whim over the success of certain ventures, I put them on as a sort of celebration. Then I saw your light over here and heard you playing, and I thought I’d step over and see if everything was all right.”
“All dressed up and you simply had to have some place to go,” flashed Josephine Stone, but in a better nature that he made contagious.
“Likely that was it. Even in the bush people are vain once in awhile.”
“But since you came to entertain and not to explain, Mr. Smith, wouldn’t it have been really thoughtful to have brought along your Indian friend, Ogima Bush?”
“That might have proved quite difficult. Did you find Ogima entertaining?”
“In a Satanic way, yes. He has at least one virtue.”
“Yes?”
“Consistency. He has no fickle moods; he is always just what he is—a savage.”
That subtle thrust, she saw, went under the skin. “That’s because you don’t know Ogima,” he observed gravely. “He is faithful to his friends and he has the rare quality of being sincere. Yes, and he is consistent. With the exception of those artificial red gashes under his eyes, Ogima is one hundred per cent. what he appears to be.
“But come,” he urged with an apparent desire to change the subject, “aren’t you going to play for me?”
She shook her head. A spirit of contrariness prompted her to tantalise him, to make this audacious, dandified czar of the big timber feel ill at ease.
“I had taken it for granted I was to be entertained,” she insisted, smiling in spite of herself at the conceit of the tiny, scintillating white diamond in his tie.
But even in his present playful mood Acey Smith had his nimble wits with him. “To-morrow is your birthday,” he observed irrelevantly, his flashing black orbs resting on hers momentarily. “You will be twenty-one and have reached a woman’s estate.”
It was she who was caught perplexed. “How—how did you know that?” she cried.
“The proverbial little bird must have been tattling to me. At any rate, it just now struck me that this being the eve of so important an anniversary your slightest whim should be gratified.”
“Meaning what?” She was trying hard to feign indifference.
“That I must entertain you as you have insisted.”
She watched him stride across the room. She thought at first he was going to the piano; instead he leant over the back of the instrument and brought up a black case from which he extracted a violin and bow.
“Now, what shall it be?” he asked with the bow poised.
“Oh, something light and lively—a popular air.”
The shade of a frown flickered at his brows. “What I know is rather ancient; but it shall be as you command, Milady Caprice.”
He struck up a bit from an old comic opera. Josephine Stone sank to a seat. There she lost sense of the bizarre nature of this scene. This man was no mean amateur airing a mechanical talent. He executed no flourishes; his form scarcely swayed as the bow rode the responding strings like a thing possessed of life.
The girl sat enraptured till he had concluded two rollicking melodies.
“Oh, you wonderful man!” It came from her spontaneously as she clapped her little hands in sheer delight. “Where did you learn to play so exquisitely?”
“An old man who once lived here taught me the rudiments. The rest I picked up.”
“But it must have taken years of practice.”
“It has been my one genuine diversion. I often come here when the mood seizes me and play for a solid evening—but never before to a living audience.”
He was replacing bow and instrument in the case. “Oh, don’t do that,” she entreated. “Just one more selection anyway, please.”
Without show of diffidence he prepared to comply. “More light stuff?” he asked.
“No. Something serious—your own choice this time.”
It was “Unrequited Love,” from the opera Rigoletto, that he played, a rendition Josephine Stone was destined never to quite forget.
From the first tragic note the man before her seemed metamorphosed—seemed one with his exquisite violin; and, as the wailing, beseeching soul-cry of the rejected lover rose and fell, cried out in the volume of those notes the depths of its anguish, and tremulously swooned its everlasting despair, the player ceased for her to be Acey Smith, the piratical, sinister timber boss. He swayed before her fascinated gaze a beautiful disembodied spirit of melancholy calling to the subtlest deeps of her being. Once again, as on that memorable morning at the beach, the soul that looked out at her from those great, dark eyes was the soul of an untarnished boy—a soul brilliant and aspiring, no longer shackled to the clay of iniquity.
Unconscious she was that he drew nearer and nearer, a new light in his black, masterful eyes that was devouring, mesmeric. Unconscious she was in the spell of it that she had fluttered back on the divan—inert, a helpless thing, hopelessly enmeshed in the web of his romantic magnetism.
“Josephine!”
Bow and violin dropped heedlessly to the floor. He drew her hungrily to his arms, swept her from the divan, from her feet and up to him till her panting form was folded to his own.
“Josephine, Josephine, Josephine!”
His voice was low and hoarse with passion, his face close to hers.
Then: “Great God, what a cad I am!”