CHAPTER XVIII
CASA FUERTE
Winter would have said that he was too old a man to stay awake all night, when he had a normal temperature; yet he saw the stars come out and the stars fade on that fateful April night. He entered his room at the hour when midnight brushes the pale skirts of dawn and misguided cocks are vociferating their existence to an indifferent world. Before he came there had been a long council with Mercer and his aunt. Mercer, who had been successful in his mission, had barely seen his chief for a moment before a gentle but imperious nurse ordered him away. Winter caught a queer, abrupt laugh from the financier. The latter beckoned to him. “See you are as obedient as I am when your time comes,” he chuckled; and he chuckled again when both the soldier and Miss Smith blushed over his awkward jocoseness. Yet, the next moment he extended his hand with his formal, other-generation courtesy and took Miss Janet’s shapely, firm fingers in his own lean and nervous grasp. “Allow me to offer you both my sincere congratulations,” began he, and halted, his eyes, which seemed so incurious but were so keen, traveling from the woman’s confusion to the man’s. “I beg your pardon; I understood—Archie who was here, gave me to understand—and I heard you singing; you will hardly believe it, but years ago I sang that to my wife.”
“So far as I am concerned, it is settled,” said the colonel steadily.
“We are all,” Keatcham continued, no longer with any trace of embarrassment, as he touched the hand which he still held with his own other hand, “we are all, as you know, my dear young lady, in considerable personal peril; I regret that it should be on my account; but it really is not my fault; it is because I will not relax my pursuit of a great scoundrel who is dangerous to all decent people. But being in such danger, I think you will be glad afterward if you are generously frank, and give up something of the sex’s prerogative to keep a lover on the anxious seat. Excuse me if—if I presume on my age and my privileges as a patient.”
Janet lifted her sweet eyes and sent one glance as fleeting and light as the flash of a bird’s wing. “I—I—reckon it is settled,” murmured she; but immediately she was the nurse again. “Mr. Keatcham, you are staying awake much too late. Here is Colvin, who will see to anything you want. Good night.”
It was then that Mr. Keatcham had taken the colonel’s breath away by kissing Janet’s hand; after which he shook hands with the colonel with a strange new cordiality, and watched them both go away together with a look on his gaunt face unlike any known to Colvin.
Only three minutes in the hall, with the moon through the arched window; and his arm about her and the fragrance of her loosened hair against his cheek and her voice stirring his heartstrings with an exquisite pang. Only time for the immemorial questions of love: “Are you sure, dear, it is really I?” and “When did you first—” To this last she had answered with her half-humorous, adorable little lilt of a laugh. “Oh, I reckon it was—a—little—all along, ever since I read about your saving that poor little Filipino boy, like Archie; the one who was your servant in Manila, and going hungry for him on the march and jumping into the rapids to save him—when you were lame, too—”
Here the colonel burst in with a groan: “Oh, that monstrous newspaper liar! The ‘dear little Filipino boy’ was a married man; and I didn’t go hungry for him, and I didn’t jump into the river to save him. It wasn’t more than wading depth—I only swore at him for an idiot and told him to walk out when he tipped over his boat and was floundering about. And he did! He was the limit as a liar—”
To his relief, the most sensible as well as the most lovable woman in the world had burst into a delicious fit of laughter; and returned: “Oh, well, you would have jumped in and saved him if the water had been deep; it wasn’t your fault it was shallow!” And just at this point Mercer and Aunt Rebecca must needs come with a most unusual premonitory racket, and Janet had fled.
Afterward had come the council. All the coil had been unraveled. Birdsall appeared in person, as sleek, smiling and complacent over his blunders as ever. One of his first sentences was a declaration of trust in Miss Smith.