Hearts of Three by Jack London Chapter XXVI
FRANCIS had left orders for Parker to call him at eight o'clock, and when Parker softly entered he found his master still asleep. Turning on the water in the bathroom and preparing the shaving gear, the valet re-entered the bedroom. Still moving softly about so that his master would have the advantage of the last possible second of sleep, Parker's eyes lighted on the strange dagger that stood upright, its point pinning through a note and a photograph and into the hard wood of the dresser-top. For a long time he gazed at the strange array, then, without hesitation, carefully opened the door to Mrs. Morgan's room and peeped in. Next, he firmly shook Francis by the shoulder.
The latter's eyes opened, for a second betraying the incomprehension of the sleeper suddenly awakened, then lighting with recognition and memory of the waking order he had left the previous night.
"Time to get up, sir," the valet murmured.
"Which is ever an ill time," Francis yawned with a smile. He closed his eyes with a, "Let me lie a minute, Parker. If I doze, shake me."
But Parker shook him immediately.
"You must get up right away, sir. I think something has happened to Mrs. Morgan. She is not in her room, and there is a queer note and a knife here that may explain. I don't know, sir…"
Francis was out of bed in a bound, staring one moment at the dagger, and next, drawing it out, reading the note over and over as if its simple meaning, contained in two simple words, were too abstruse for his comprehension.
"Adios forever," said the note.
What shocked him even more, was the dagger thrust between Leoncia's eyes, and, as he stared at the wound made in the thin cardboard, it came to him that he had seen this very thing before, and he remembered back to the lake-dwelling of the Queen when all had gazed into the golden bowl and seen variously, and when he had seen Leoncia's face on the strange liquid metal with the knife thrust between the eyes. He even put the dagger back into the cardboard wound and stared at it some more.
The explanation was obvious. The Queen had betrayed jealousy against Leoncia from the first, and here, in New York, finding her rival's photograph on her husband's dresser, had no more missed the true conclusion than had she missed the pictured features with her point of steel. But where was she? Where had she gone? she who was the veriest stranger that had ever entered the great city, who called the telephone the magic of the flying speech, who thought of Wall Street as a temp'le, and regarded Business as the New York man's god. For all the world she was as unsophisticated and innocent of a great city as had she been a traveler from Mars. Where and how had she passed the night? Where was she now? Was she even alive?
Visions of the Morgue with its unidentified dead, and of bodies drifting out to sea on the ebb, rushed into his brain. It was Parker who steadied him back to himself.
"Is there anything I can do, sir? Shall I call up the detective bureau? Your father always…"
"Yes, yes," Francis interrupted quickly. "There was one man he employed more than all others, a young man with the Pinkertons do you remember his name?"
"Birchman, sir," Parker answered promptly, moving away. "I shall send for him to come at once."
And thereupon, in the quest after his wife, Francis entered upon a series of adventures that were to him, a born New Yorker, a liberal education in conditions and phases of New York of which, up to that time, he had been profoundly ignorant. Not alone did Birchman search, but he had at work a score of detectives under him who fine-tooth-combed the city, while in Chicago and Boston, he directed the activities of similar men.
Between his battle with the unguessed enemy of Wall Street, and the frequent calls he received to go here and there and everywhere, on the spur of the moment, to identify what might possibly be his wife, Francis led anything but a boresome existence. He forgot what regular hours of sleep were, and grew accustomed to being dragged from luncheon or dinner, or of being routed out of his bed, to respond to hurry calls to come and look over new-found missing ladies,
No trace of one answering her description, who had left the city by train or steamer had been discovered, and Birchman assiduously pursued his fine-tooth combing, convinced that she was still in the city.
Thus, Francis took trips to Mattenwan and down Blackwell's, and the Tombs and the Ail-Night court knew his presence. Nor did he escape being dragged to countless hospitals nor to the Morgue. Once, a fresh-caught shoplifter, of whom there was no criminal record and to whom there was no clew of identity, was brought to his notice. He had adventures with mysterious women cornered by Birchman's satellites in the back rooms of Eaines' Hotels, and, on the West Side, in the Fifties, was guilty of trespassing upon two comparatively innocent love-idyls, to the embarrassment of all concerned including himself.
Perhaps his most interesting and tragic adventure was in the ten-million-dollar mansion of Philip January, the Telluride mining king. The strange woman, a lady slender, had wandered in upon the Januarys a week before, ere Francis came to see her. And, as she had heartbreakingly done for the entire week, so she heartbreakingly did for Francis, wringing her hands, perpetually weeping, and murmuring beseechingly: "Otho, you are wrong. On my knees I tell you you are wrong. Otho, you, and you only, do I love. There is no one but you, Otho. There has never been any one but you. It is all a dreadful mistake. Believe me, Otho, believe me, or I shall die…"
And through it all, the Wall Street battle went on against the undiscoverable and powerful enemy who had launched what Francis and Bascom could not avoid acknowledging was a catastrophic, war-to-the-death raid on his fortune.
"If only we can avoid throwing Tampico Petroleum into the whirlpool," Bascom prayed.
"I look to Tampico Petroleum to save me," Francis replied. "When every security I can lay hand to has been engulfed, then, throwing in Tampico Petroleum will be like the eruption of a new army upon a losing field.
And suppose your unknown foe is powerful enough to swallow down that final, splendid asset and clamor for more?" Bascom queried.
Francis shrugged his shoulders.
"Then I shall be broke. But my father went broke half a dozen times before he won out. Also was he born broke. I should worry about a little thing like that." For a time, in the Solano hacienda, events had been moving slowly. In fact, following upon the rescue of Leoncia by Henry along his dynamite-sown trail, there had been no events. Not even had Yi Poon appeared with a perfectly fresh and entirely brand new secret to sell. Nothing had happened, save that Leoncia drooped and was apathetic, that neither Enrico nor Henry, her full brother, nor her Solano brothers who were not her brothers at all, could cheer her.
But, while Leoncia drooped, Henry and the tall sons of Eurico worried and perplexed themselves about the treasure in the Valley of the Lost Souls, into which Torres was even then dynamiting his way. One thing they did know, namely, that the Torres' expedition had sent Augustino and Vicente back to San Antonio to get two more mule-loads of dynamite.
It was Henry, after conferring with Enrico and obtaining his permission, who broached the matter to Leoncia.
"Sweet sister," had been his way, "we're going to go up and see what the scoundrel Torres and his gang are doing. We do know, thanks to you, their objective. The dynamite is to blow an entrance into the Valley. We know where the Lady Who Dreams sank her treasure when her house burned. Torres does not know this. The idea is that we can follow them into the Valley, when they have drained the Maya caves, and have as good a chance, if not a better chance than they in getting possession of that marvelous chest of gems. And the very tip of the point is that we'd like to take you along on the expedition. I fancy, if we managed to get the treasure ourselves, that you wouldn't mind repeating that journey down the subterranean river."
But Leoncia shook her head wearily.
"No," she said, after further urging. "I never want to see the Valley of the Lost Souls again, nor ever to hear it mentioned. There is where I lost Francis to that woman."
"It was all a mistake, darling sister. But who was to know? I did not. You did not. Nor did Francis. He played the man's part fairly and squarely. Not knowing that you and I were brother and sister, believing that we were truly betrothed as we were at the time he refrained from trying to win you from me, and he rendered further temptation impossible and saved the lives of all of us by marrying the Queen."
"I miss you and Francis singing your everlasting "Back to back against the mainmast,' "she murmured sadly and irrelevantly.
Quiet tears welled into her eyes and brimmed over as she turned away, passed down the steps of the veranda, crossed the grounds, and aimlessly descended the hill. For the twentieth time since she had last seen Francis she pursued the same course, covering the same ground from the time she first espied him rowing to the beach from the Angelique, through her dragging him into the jungle to save him from her irate men-folk, to the moment, with drawn revolver, when she had kissed him and urged him— into the boat and away. This had been his first visit.
Next, she covered every detail of his second visit from the moment, coming from behind the rock after her swim in the lagoon, she had gazed upon him leaning against the rock as he scribbled his first note to her, through her startled flight into the jungle, the bite on her knee of the labarri (which she had mistaken for a deadly viperine), to her recoiling collision against Francis and her faint on the sand. And, under her parasol, she sat down on the very spot where she had fainted and come to, to find him preparing to suck the poison from the wound which he had already excoriated. As she remembered back, she realized that it had been the pain of the excoriation which brought her to her senses.
Deep she was in the sweet recollections of how she had slapped his cheek even as his lips approached her knee, blushed with her face hidden in her hands, laughed because her foot had been made asleep by his too-efficient tourniquet, turned white with anger when he reminded her that she considered him the murderer of her uncle, and repulsed his offer to untie the tourniquet. So deep was she in such fond recollections of only the other day that yet seemed separated from the present by half a century, such was the wealth of episode, adventure, and tender passages which had intervened, that she did not see the rattletrap rented carriage from San Antonio drive up the beach road. Nor did she see a lady, fashionably clad in advertisement that she was from New York, dismiss the carriage and proceed toward her on foot. This lady, who was none other than the Queen, Francis' wife, likewise sheltered herself beneath a parasol from the tropic sun.
Standing directly behind Leoncia, she did not realize that she had surprised the girl in a moment of high renunciation. All that she did know was that she saw Leoncia draw from her breast and gaze long at a tiny photograph. Over her shoulder the Queen made it out to be a snapshot of Francis, whereupon her mad jealousy raged anew. A poinard flashed to her hand from its sheath within the bosom of her dress. The quickness of this movement was sufficient to warn Leoncia, who tilted her parasol forward so as to look up at whatever person stood at her back. Too utterly dreary even to feel surprise, she greeted the wife of Francis Morgan as casually as if she had parted from her an hour before. Even the poinard failed to arouse in her curiosity or fear. Perhaps, had she displayed startlement and fear, the Queen might have driven the steel home to her. As it was, she could only cry out.
"You are a vile woman! A vile, vile woman!"
To which Leoncia merely shrugged her shoulders, and said:
"You would better keep your parasol between you and the sun."
The Queen passed round in front of her, facing her and staring down at her w r ith woman's wrath compounded of such jealousy as to be speechless.
"Why?" Leoncia was the first to speak, after a long pause. "Why am I a vile woman?"
"Because you are a thief," the Queen flamed. "Because you are a stealer of men, yourself married. Because you are unfaithful to your husband in heart, at least, since more than that has so far been impossible."
"I have no husband," Leoncia answered quietly.
"Husband to be, then I thought you were to be married the day after our departure."
"I have no husband to be," Leoncia continued with the same quietness.
So swiftly tense did the other woman become that Leoncia idly thought of her as a tigress.
"Henry Morgan!" the Queen cried.
"He is my brother."
"A word which I have discovered is of wide meaning, Leoncia Solano. In New York there are worshippers at certain altars who call all men in the world 'brothers,' all women "sisters."
"His father was my father," Leoncia explained with patient explicitness. "His mother was my mother. We are full brother and sister."
"And Francis?" the other queried, convinced, with sudden access of interest. "Are you, too, his sister?"
Leoncia shook her head.
"Then you do love Francis!" the Queen charged, smarting with disappointment.
"You have him," said Leoncia.
"No; for you have taken him from me."
Leoncia slowly and sadly shook her head and sadly gazed out over the heat-shimmering surface of Chili qui Lagoon.
After a long lapse of silence, she said, wearily, "Believe that. Believe anything."
"I divined it in you from the first," the Queen cried. "You have a strange power over men. I am a woman not unbeautiful. Sine I have been out in the world I have watched the eyes of men looking at me. I know I am not all undesirable. Even have the wretched males of my Lost Valley with downcast eyes looked love at me. On dared more than look, and he died for me, or because of me, and was flung into the whirl of waters to his fate. And yet you, with this woman's power of yours, strangely exercise it over my Francis so that in my very arms he thinks of you. I know it. I know that even then he thinks of you!"
Her last words were the cry of a passion-stricken and breaking heart. And the next moment, though very little to Leoncia's surprise, being too hopelessly apathetic to b surprised at anything, the Queen dropped her knife in th sand and sank down, buried her face in her hands, and surrendered to the weakness of hysteric grief. Almost idly, and quit mechanically, Leoncia put her arm around her and comforted her. For many minutes this continued, when th Queen, growing more cairn, spo^e with sudden determination.
"I left Francis the moment I knew he loved you," she said. "I drove my knife into the photograph of you he keeps in his bedroom, and returned here to do the same to you in person. But I was wrong. It is not your fault, nor Francis'. It is my fault that I have failed to win his love. Not you, but I it is who must die. But first, I must go back to my valley and recover my treasure. In the temple called Wall Street, Francis is in great trouble. His fortune may be taken away from him, and he requires another fortune to save his fortune. I have that fortune, and there is no time to lose. Will you and yours help me? It is for Francis' sake."