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Page 20
The diminutive Jap had noiselessly opened the door of the little
dining-room in which the table was set for two.
Keith smiled as he sat down opposite the man who would have sent him to
the executioner had he known the truth. After all, it was but a step
from comedy to tragedy. And just now he was conscious of a bit of
grisly humor in the situation.
VIII
The storm had settled into a steady drizzle when McDowell left the
Shack at two o'clock. Keith watched the iron man, as his tall, gray
figure faded away into the mist down the slope, with a curious
undercurrent of emotion. Before the inspector had come up as his guest
he had, he thought, definitely decided his future action. He would go
west on his furlough, write McDowell that he had decided not to
reenlist, and bury himself in the British Columbia mountains before an
answer could get back to him, leaving the impression that he was going
on to Australia or Japan. He was not so sure of himself now. He found
himself looking ahead to the night, when he would see Miriam Kirkstone,
and he no longer feared Shan Tung as he had feared him a few hours
before. McDowell himself had given him new weapons. He was unofficially
on Shan Tung's trail. McDowell had frankly placed the affair of Miriam
Kirkstone in his hands. That it all had in some mysterious way
something to do with himself--John Keith--urged him on to the adventure.
He waited impatiently for the evening. Wallie, smothered in a great
raincoat, he sent forth on a general foraging expedition and to bring
up some of Conniston's clothes. It was a quarter of eight when he left
for Miriam Kirkstone's home.
Even at that early hour the night lay about him heavy and dark and
saturated with a heavy mist. From the summit of the hill he could no
longer make out the valley of the Saskatchewan. He walked down into a
pit in which the scattered lights of the town burned dully like distant
stars. It was a little after eight when he came to the Kirkstone house.
It was set well back in an iron-fenced area thick with trees and
shrubbery, and he saw that the porch light was burning to show him the
way. Curtains were drawn, but a glow of warm light lay behind them.
He was sure that Miriam Kirkstone must have heard the crunch of his
feet on the gravel walk, for he had scarcely touched the old-fashioned
knocker on the door when the door itself was opened. It was Miriam who
greeted him. Again he held her hand for a moment in his own.
It was not cold, as it had been in McDowell's office. It was almost
feverishly hot, and the pupils of the girl's eyes were big, and dark,
and filled with a luminous fire. Keith might have thought that coming
in out of the dark night he had startled her. But it was not that. She
was repressing something that had preceded him. He thought that he
heard the almost noiseless closing of a door at the end of the long
hall, and his nostrils caught the faint aroma of a strange perfume.
Between him and the light hung a filmy veil of smoke. He knew that it
had come from a cigarette. There was an uneasy note in Miss Kirkstone's
voice as she invited him to hang his coat and hat on an old-fashioned
rack near the door. He took his time, trying to recall where he had
detected that perfume before. He remembered, with a sort of shock. It
was after Shan Tung had left McDowell's office.
She was smiling when he turned, and apologizing again for making her
unusual request that day.
"It was--quite unconventional. But I felt that you would understand,
Mr. Conniston. I guess I didn't stop to think. And I am afraid of
lightning, too. But I wanted to see you. I didn't want to wait until
tomorrow to hear about what happened up there. Is it--so strange?"
Afterward he could not remember just what sort of answer he made. She
turned, and he followed her through the big, square-cut door leading
out of the hall. It was the same door with the great, sliding panel he
had locked on that fateful night, years ago, when he had fought with
her father and brother. In it, for a moment, her slim figure was
profiled in a frame of vivid light. Her mother must have been
beautiful. That was the thought that flashed upon him as the room and
its tragic memory lay before him. Everything came back to him vividly,
and he was astonished at the few changes in it. There was the big chair
with its leather arms, in which the overfatted creature who had been
her father was sitting when he came in. It was the same table, too, and
it seemed to him that the same odds and ends were on the mantel over
the cobblestone fireplace. And there was somebody's picture of the
Madonna still hanging between two windows. The Madonna, like the master
of the house, had been too fat to be beautiful. The son, an ogreish
pattern of his father, had stood with his back to the Madonna, whose
overfat arms had seemed to rest on his shoulders. He remembered that.
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