But even this slight development could not hold his thoughts…. Bedient wondered if the captive would ever die; and if he should die, would he not rise again at the memory of that first kiss in the June sunlight?… And so he sat, until the day. Then he noted another letter had been slipped under his door. It was of course from Señor Rey:
May I trouble you, my really delightful friend (it read), not to bestow any favors larger than a peso upon my servants? They are really very well paid, and do not expect it. Ten dollar gold-pieces for any slight service are disorganizing and increase the tension. I beg to be considered,
In a really mellowing friendship,
CELESTINO REY.
TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER
THE ART OF MISS MALLORY
Bedient was not a student of disease. Perhaps he would have granted that destructive principles are pregnant with human interest in the abstract, but his intelligence certainly was not challenged by these dark systems of activity. He saw that even if his mind were not held in anguish, he lacked the equipment to cope with Pleiad affairs. As it was, his attention positively would not concentrate upon the rapid undercurrents, where the real energy of the habitues seemed to operate. It was all like a game of evil children, or rather of queer unfinished beings, a whirring everywhere of the topsy-turvy and the perverse—sick and insane to his weary brain.
It was clear that the Chinese had not carried the message to Framtree, but had consulted the Spaniard instead. Had Bedient told Rey that he had come to The Pleiad to find Jenkins, or Jones, or Judd, he would doubtless have been permitted to see Framtree at once.
None of the matters made the impression upon his mind as that one glimpse of Jim Framtree at the far-end of the hall. It was not that he was in the building, though this was of course important; but the magnificent figure of the man in evening wear was the formidable impression The Pleiad furnished. This concerned his real life; the rest was without vitality.
By this time, however, Bedient was willing to grant that The Pleiad, and even Coral City, formed a nervous system of which Celestino Rey was the brain…. He had given up hope of writing a note to Jim Framtree, realizing it would have no more chance of getting past the Spaniard than a clicking infernal-box.