The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
INGRAM PLUCK
TO Mr. Tyler, in Shanghai, had come a young Chinese student full of grievances about a rickshaw that never arrived. He had been obliged to go to the steamer, after all, and had missed it. He had spent the night in Natigpoo; it had all been most inconvenient. Mr. Tyler managed to draw the whole story from him, in bits, and then he anxiously despatched a message to Nangpoo for Huen. Huen, in his answer, was gravely astounded and much concerned. He had no knowledge of such a plan. He blamed himself deeply for not seeing that the young men had a more efficient guard and that they boarded the steamer safely. He was covered with despair and remorse and beat his miserable breast. He was doing all in his power to trace the unfortunate descendants of the honorable Ingram.
Mr. Tyler threw down the letter and dropped his chin in his hand. There lay before him the disagreeable duty of cabling Mr. Bolliver that the boys were in trouble and missing. He reproached himself for not going in person with them to Nangpoo, but his own business had been such as to keep him in Shanghai, and it had seemed a simple enough expedition.
"They didn't know the people; they didn't know the country, "he mused. "But how could I guess the man would load them with gems? Shall I never learn to understand the Chinese? Eh, dear me—and I must let Bart know."
But first of all he telephoned the consulate and the municipal building and set in motion the slow-turning machinery of the law, in the hope that something might penetrate to that unknown waterway whither the kidnappers' boat had fled.
"They might have done so many things, those villains," Mr. Tyler sighed. "So many!"
And then he wrote his cablegram.
The cable, of course, did not reach Mr. Bolliver at once, nor, fortunately, did it reach the aunts at all, as it was sent to Mr. Bolliver's Boston office and forwarded to him. Those poor old ladies were pitifully distressed enough without any such crashing news as this. The message, flashed from Honolulu, finally reached the Kyoto Maru when the news had nearly returned whence it came. For the big Japanese liner was only three days away from Yokohama now, swinging steadily across the last blue reaches of the Pacific.
A steward brought the message to where Mr. Bolliver and Jane sat over their luncheon. Mr. Bolliver put on his glasses and lifted the slip of paper, where the words which had raced so far to reach him stared up blackly. With admirable restraint he folded the paper and put it, without haste, into his pocket. He picked up his fork and went on eating, with no notion of what was on his plate.
"What was it?" Jane asked, her eyes steadily on his face.
"Business," said Mr. Bolliver; "troublesome business, my dear."
"I can't tell her now," he muttered later, striding fiercely up and down the deck. "Shanghai may have better news. There'll be time before then for much to happen. And if she must know, the tidings will be no more terrible then than now."
But Mr. Bolliver thought that in all his long and hard-fought life he had never had a greater task than to keep an unruffled spirit for Jane, who, with the light come back to her eyes, was counting the hours to Shanghai. It was not so difficult to conceal anxiety, there in Nagasaki, the day they went ashore while the ship coaled. Jane was too much delighted by this fairyland to notice any sort of expression Mr. Bolliver might wear.
They left the big steamer, where hundreds of toiling coolie-women passed the coal up the side in pitifully small baskets, and wandered off through the city. Jane had scarcely believed, till now, that she was really on the other side of the world. It had all been so swift and sudden, and so anxious. Even now she fancied she might be imagining these picture-book people and strange shops. She hadn't believed, for instance, that she must really take off her shoes before she could enter a temple; she was enormously amused at such tales coming true. Her low tan shoes were easily disposed of; Mr. Bolliver preferred to don a pair of gaudy plush slippers over his boots.
In Nagasaki Jane saw all the old, the traditional, and was oblivious to most of the new. Mr. Bolliver, with a sigh, would point out an ancient shrine on the opposite side of the street, while they passed, unseeing, some American atrocity on the near side. But there was still the sliding music of samisens behind paper lattices, still the drone of gourd-beating priests in half-lit temples, the pad of rickshaw runners' feet, the sight of stately robes and obis tied according to a tradition that has lasted a hundred centuries.
They walked back in the dusk, when every rickshaw had lighted a flitting paper lantern and the water beneath the curved bridges gleamed with the reflection of many-colored lights. So brief a glimpse of Japan—yet it had been so very Japanese and so like a thing unreal made actual for a moment. Then the ship again and the outward way once more, this time, at last, for Shanghai!
Jane, curling rapturously to sleep in her cabin, whispered, "We're coming—coming—coming!" with the thrum of the engine.
Mr. Bolliver, very wide awake in his, paced up and down.
"What a fool an old man can be," he said aloud. "Ah, my poor little Jane Ingram!"
So it was Shanghai at last! The Kyoto Maru left the blue water behind, as the Delphian had done, and nosed into the wide, turbid sea at the mouth of the Yangtze River. How Jane's heart would have leapt if she had realized that those gray funnels were the Delphian's, among the clustering stacks around Woo-sung! The Kyoto Maru passed them swiftly by; the godowns of Woo-sung dropped out of sight; the Whangpoo twisted ahead. Sampans besieged the ship, offering strange food, toys, and trinkets to the sight-seers at the rail. Yellow men swarmed, it seemed, on the face of the river; boats flung themselves perilously across the very bow of the liner. At last she swung around Pu Tung Point and came to anchor off the bund.
Mr. Bolliver shook his head and caught his breath, for many reasons. Crowding memories of many another arrival in Shanghai, terrible anxiety connected with the present one, held him silent and grave as he and Jane stood waiting their turn at the launch. Jane was wondering whether this was like her expectation—these glimpses of clipped green lawns and dark trees, hotels and hongs, consulates and banks, lining the water-front. She could hardly have thought it would be a shore-line of blue porcelain pagodas and golden temples, yet—
But the launch was waiting. Mr. Bolliver took Jane firmly by the arm and they descended the gangway-steps.
Shanghai, to Jane, did not exist until she could see the boys.
"But they're not in Shanghai," Mr. Bolliver explained hastily. "They had to go off to wherever the T'ang Min people live. We can't tell where they are until we've seen my firm."
Then why couldn't she go with him to Tyler, Bolliver & Tyler's? Why must she stay at the hotel, alone? Mr. Bolliver decided that after all she mustn't stay there, alone. So she came along, half-seeing the cool bund, half-wondering at the shops that were so different and at the hurrying foreign crowd, but hardly realizing their existence.
Within the high, shaded office of his firm Mr. Bolliver cried, "Well, Nick!" to the dignified Mr. Tyler, and then laid a quick finger on his lips, with a glance toward Jane. They stood for a few minutes talking of the voyage and of how many years it had been since Bart had last stood in his office; then Mr. Tyler brought a great book with pictures of ships that had sailed in the tea trade and suggested to Jane that it might interest her. He and Mr. Bolliver went quickly into the inner office and closed the door.
"As if I were a baby, rather," Jane thought, "to be amused with picture-books while they talk."
She looked down at the volume, open on her knee. The murmur of voices came from the inner room. Some one's fist crashed down on a table. ". . . Not possible!" Mr. Bolliver's voice cried quickly. Other bits of sentences followed. ". . . All my fault, Nick." . . . "We'll not give up hoping."
Jane could not bear it longer. The book slid off her lap with a crash as she sprang up, and Mr. Bolliver—perhaps warned by the sound—flung open the door.
"What is it?" she demanded, facing him in the doorway. "What is it you haven't been telling me all the time? Something's happened to the boys!"
Mr. Bolliver stood hesitant, and Nicholas Tyler came up behind him.
"Won't she have to know?" he said quietly.
So Mr. Bolliver told her the bare facts, and Mr. Tyler wove in the few strange details of the disappearance that were known to him.
Jane stood quite still, and her mouth grew straighter and her eyes deeper as she heard. She knew, somehow, that she had to hear it, that she had come all the way to China to be told this, that this was what had haunted her in the Resthaven garden and made her pillow fearful by night. Strange things followed one another disjointedly across her mind: Mark saying, "Good-by, old Jane," in the sunset; Grandfather Mark writing steadily in his log-book, "My dear father was lost with his ship, the Fortune of the Indies, and all therein . . ."; the little aunts in Resthaven, who already had lost three Mark Ingrams; the ship model between the sconces. She thought she almost hated the model now, that had held a decree of disaster in its old hull. Its fair sails towered over her and the keen prow bore 
"Now let's go and do something about it"
Jane stooped and picked up the book she had dropped. She smoothed out a ruffled page mechanically and laid the volume on the table.
"Yes, I had to know," she agreed. "Thank you, Mr. Tyler. Now let's go and do something about it."
She walked steadily to the door and stood beside it, waiting. Nicholas Tyler brought his hand down on Mr. Bolliver's shoulder.
"My faith, Bart!" he cried, "I'd rather deal with an Ingram than any other soul on God's earth!"