first meeting of Elijah Lockwood and Harriet Forrester took place in the stuffy little parlor of the boarding house on Broad Street, Charleston, under the very shadow of St. Michael's Church.
All the way South, Lockwood's nervous tension had been drawing more and more taut. He had hardly slept or eaten, but had been sustained by a fevered eagerness that was pitiable to behold. Each of the three nights spent on the road, Veazie had staged a ghastly farce in hotel rooms—a trance, with the skull of Burrum Gao as his “control.”
On the second night, at the Exchange Hotel in Oxford, North Carolina, this had taken place in a room on the ground floor, at the rear of the building. Andrew Todd, the chauffeur, peeping beneath a badly drawn shade, had witnessed part of the extraordinary performance. Terror had gripped his soul.
“No, sir, I ain't goin' no farther South!” he told the professor, next morning. “I'm goin' to quit this job right here. I'm through!”
“What's the idea?” the professor snarled.
“I'm scared, boss! I'm quittin'!”
“Nonsense, you damned fool! Here, take this, and forget it!” The professor shoved a greenback into Andrew's yellow paw. “There's another for you every day you stick, and a good bonus when you land us back in Boston; so I don't want to hear any more such rubbish. Mind, now!”
Thus had Andrew been held in line; but not by any means had the panic in his heart been lessened.
The next night, at Columbia, he had struck up acquaintance with some of “the race”—by which name the sons of Ham denote themselves. They had given him a few sniffs of “coke.” He had spent hours with them, talking of skulls and voodoos and various dark matters which, even from jungle days, lurk in many an African heart.
Brooding blackly on the monstrous portent of the skull, he had driven the limousine on the last lap of the journey. Now, even in the very hour of old Lockwood's joy, he was holding mumbled converse with three or four dusky folk lounging on a doorstep near the car. One of them, at that, was not so very dusky, being a saffron Jamaica personage. Fate, thereby, was weaving ebon threads in the already somber pattern meshing half a dozen lives.
Nothing somber, however, seemed to cloud the old man's spirit as he stood trembling in the shabby boarding house parlor, hearing a woman's step along the hallway. For was not this the felicitous hour and minute of his glory and his joy, crowning a lifetime's search?
“She's coming now!” the professor whispered, pale and anxious of mien—for even at the lip, cups have been known to waver and slip. “She's coming! Calm yourself, Mr. Lockwood!”
The old man's fingers twitched, his bushy gray brows contracted. His throat gulped with a spasm of terrible emotion.
“Oh, my God, my God!” he murmured, with a gust of breath.
Then, as Mrs. Forrester appeared in the doorway, all strength forsook him. The parlor with its dim lights, the doorway, the woman's figure, all blent to gray confusion, as if gossamers had drawn before them.
“Where is she, Veazie?” he gasped. “Where—where's my girl?”
“Why, here she is! Don't you see her?” The professor beckoned Mrs. Forrester. He caught her savagely by the arm, whispering: “Come on, now! Play up, or—” He urged her forward. “Call him father!”
“Father!” she tremulously articulated.
Old Lockwood began to sob with strange and unlovely noises, with the slow and scant tears of senility. How painful, how deplorable a scene! In it the delusions of a broken old man were blent with the shuddering aversion of a woman constrained to imposture by harsh duress, and with the chicanery and greed of a wolfish charlatan.
“Say something, can't you?” Veazie whispered again. His clutch tightened on her arm. “Play up!”
Mrs. Forrester sank on her knees beside the old Bostonian. Through all her loathing of this forced deception, through all her hate and fear of the professor, Lockwood's tragedy moved the woman's heart within her. Might she not, after all, bring a little happiness to this starved soul? With a gesture of sincere pity, she took one of Lockwood's thin, veined hands in both her own, and kissed it.
“Father!” she said again.
Blindly he drew her to him. His trembling arms encircled her. He tried to speak, but could find no words. His scant and senile tears fell on her hair, already gray.
