Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26)

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Tarzan knew that discovery would be inevitable. Rokoff still stood on the threshold a foot from him, but he was looking in the opposite direction, toward Gernois. Then the officer evidently reconsidered his decision, and resumed his downward course. Tarzan could hear Rokoff’s sigh of relief. A moment later the Russian went back into the room and closed the door.

  Tarzan waited until Gernois had had time to get well out of hearing, then he pushed open the door and stepped into the room. He was on top of Rokoff before the man could rise from the chair where he sat scanning the paper Gernois had given him. As his eyes turned and fell upon the ape-man’s face his own went livid.

  “You!” he gasped.

  “I,” replied Tarzan.

  “What do you want?” whispered Rokoff, for the look in the ape-man’s eyes frightened him. “Have you come to kill me? You do not dare. They would guillotine you. You do not dare kill me.”

  “I dare kill you, Rokoff,” replied Tarzan, “for no one knows that you are here or that I am here, and Paulvitch would tell them that it was Gernois. I heard you tell Gernois so. But that would not influence me, Rokoff. I would not care who knew that I had killed you; the pleasure of killing you would more than compensate for any punishment they might inflict upon me. You are the most despicable cur of a coward, Rokoff, I have ever heard of. You should be killed. I should love to kill you,” and Tarzan approached closer to the man.

  Rokoff’s nerves were keyed to the breaking point. With a shriek he sprang toward an adjoining room, but the ape-man was upon his back while his leap was yet but half completed. Iron fingers sought his throat — the great coward squealed like a stuck pig, until Tarzan had shut off his wind. Then the ape-man dragged him to his feet, still choking him. The Russian struggled futilely — he was like a babe in the mighty grasp of Tarzan of the Apes.

  Tarzan sat him in a chair, and long before there was danger of the man’s dying he released his hold upon his throat. When the Russian’s coughing spell had abated Tarzan spoke to him again.

  “I have given you a taste of the suffering of death,” he said. “But I shall not kill — this time. I am sparing you solely for the sake of a very good woman whose great misfortune it was to have been born of the same woman who gave birth to you. But I shall spare you only this once on her account. Should I ever learn that you have again annoyed her or her husband — should you ever annoy me again — should I hear that you have returned to France or to any French possession, I shall make it my sole business to hunt you down and complete the choking I commenced tonight.” Then he turned to the table, on which the two pieces of paper still lay. As he picked them up Rokoff gasped in horror.

  Tarzan examined both the check and the other. He was amazed at the information the latter contained. Rokoff had partially read it, but Tarzan knew that no one could remember the salient facts and figures it held which made it of real value to an enemy of France.

  “These will interest the chief of staff,” he said, as he slipped them into his pocket. Rokoff groaned. He did not dare curse aloud.

  The next morning Tarzan rode north on his way to Bouira and Algiers. As he had ridden past the hotel Lieutenant Gernois was standing on the veranda. As his eyes discovered Tarzan he went white as chalk. The ape-man would have been glad had the meeting not occurred, but he could not avoid it. He saluted the officer as he rode past. Mechanically Gernois returned the salute, but those terrible, wide eyes followed the horseman, expressionless except for horror. It was as though a dead man looked upon a ghost.

  At Sidi Aissa Tarzan met a French officer with whom he had become acquainted on the occasion of his recent sojourn in the town.

  “You left Bou Saada early?” questioned the officer. “Then you have not heard about poor Gernois.”

  “He was the last man I saw as I rode away,” replied Tarzan. “What about him?”

  “He is dead. He shot himself about eight o’clock this morning.”

  Two days later Tarzan reached Algiers. There he found that he would have a two days’ wait before he could catch a ship bound for Cape Town. He occupied his time in writing out a full report of his mission. The secret papers he had taken from Rokoff he did not inclose, for he did not dare trust them out of his own possession until he had been authorized to turn them over to another agent, or himself return to Paris with them.

  As Tarzan boarded his ship after what seemed a most tedious wait to him, two men watched him from an upper deck. Both were fashionably dressed and smooth shaven. The taller of the two had sandy hair, but his eyebrows were very black. Later in the day they chanced to meet Tarzan on deck, but as one hurriedly called his companion’s attention to something at sea their faces were turned from Tarzan as he passed, so that he did not notice their features. In fact, he had paid no attention to them at all.

  Following the instructions of his chief, Tarzan had booked his passage under an assumed name — John Caldwell, London. He did not understand the necessity of this, and it caused him considerable speculation. He wondered what role he was to play in Cape Town.

  “Well,” he thought, “thank Heaven that I am rid of Rokoff. He was commencing to annoy me. I wonder if I am really becoming so civilized that presently I shall develop a set of nerves. He would give them to me if any one could, for he does not fight fair. One never knows through what new agency he is going to strike. It is as though Numa, the lion, had induced Tantor, the elephant, and Histah, the snake, to join him in attempting to kill me. I would then never have known what minute, or by whom, I was to be attacked next. But the brutes are more chivalrous than man — they do not stoop to cowardly intrigue.”

  At dinner that night Tarzan sat next to a young woman whose place was at the captain’s left. The officer introduced them.

  Miss Strong! Where had he heard the name before? It was very familiar. And then the girl’s mother gave him the clew, for when she addressed her daughter she called her Hazel.

  Hazel Strong! What memories the name inspired. It had been a letter to this girl, penned by the fair hand of Jane Porter, that had carried to him the first message from the woman he loved. How vividly he recalled the night he had stolen it from the desk in the cabin of his long-dead father, where Jane Porter had sat writing it late into the night, while he crouched in the darkness without. How terror-stricken she would have been that night had she known that the wild jungle beast squatted outside her window, watching her every move.

  And this was Hazel Strong — Jane Porter’s best friend!

  Chapter 12

  Ships That Pass

  Let us go back a few months to the little, windswept platform of a railway station in northern Wisconsin. The smoke of forest fires hangs low over the surrounding landscape, its acrid fumes smarting the eyes of a little party of six who stand waiting the coming of the train that is to bear them away toward the south.

  Professor Archimedes Q. Porter, his hands clasped beneath the tails of his long coat, paces back and forth under the ever-watchful eye of his faithful secretary, Mr. Samuel T. Philander. Twice within the past few minutes he has started absent-mindedly across the tracks in the direction of a near-by swamp, only to be rescued and dragged back by the tireless Mr. Philander.

  Jane Porter, the professor’s daughter, is in strained and lifeless conversation with William Cecil Clayton and Tarzan of the Apes. Within the little waiting room, but a bare moment before, a confession of love and a renunciation had taken place that had blighted the lives and happiness of two of the party, but William Cecil Clayton, Lord Greystoke, was not one of them.

  Behind Miss Porter hovered the motherly Esmeralda. She, too, was happy, for was she not returning to her beloved Maryland? Already she could see dimly through the fog of smoke the murky headlight of the oncoming engine. The men began to gather up the hand baggage. Suddenly Clayton exclaimed.

  “By Jove! I’ve left my ulster in the waiting-room,” and hastened off to fetch it.

  “Good-bye, Jane,” said Tarzan, extending his hand. “God bless you!
”

  “Good-bye,” replied the girl faintly. “Try to forget me — no, not that — I could not bear to think that you had forgotten me.”

  “There is no danger of that, dear,” he answered. “I wish to Heaven that I might forget. It would be so much easier than to go through life always remembering what might have been. You will be happy, though; I am sure you shall — you must be. You may tell the others of my decision to drive my car on to New York — I don’t feel equal to bidding Clayton good-bye. I want always to remember him kindly, but I fear that I am too much of a wild beast yet to be trusted too long with the man who stands between me and the one person in all the world I want.”

  As Clayton stooped to pick up his coat in the waiting room his eyes fell on a telegraph blank lying face down upon the floor. He stooped to pick it up, thinking it might be a message of importance which some one had dropped. He glanced at it hastily, and then suddenly he forgot his coat, the approaching train — everything but that terrible little piece of yellow paper in his hand. He read it twice before he could fully grasp the terrific weight of meaning that it bore to him.

  When he had picked it up he had been an English nobleman, the proud and wealthy possessor of vast estates — a moment later he had read it, and he knew that he was an untitled and penniless beggar. It was D’Arnot’s cablegram to Tarzan, and it read:

  Finger prints prove you Greystoke. Congratulations.

  D’ARNOT.

  He staggered as though he had received a mortal blow. Just then he heard the others calling to him to hurry — the train was coming to a stop at the little platform. Like a man dazed he gathered up his ulster. He would tell them about the cablegram when they were all on board the train. Then he ran out upon the platform just as the engine whistled twice in the final warning that precedes the first rumbling jerk of coupling pins. The others were on board, leaning out from the platform of a Pullman, crying to him to hurry. Quite five minutes elapsed before they were settled in their seats, nor was it until then that Clayton discovered that Tarzan was not with them.

  “Where is Tarzan?” he asked Jane Porter. “In another car?”

  “No,” she replied; “at the last minute he determined to drive his machine back to New York. He is anxious to see more of America than is possible from a car window. He is returning to France, you know.”

  Clayton did not reply. He was trying to find the right words to explain to Jane Porter the calamity that had befallen him — and her. He wondered just what the effect of his knowledge would be on her. Would she still wish to marry him — to be plain Mrs. Clayton? Suddenly the awful sacrifice which one of them must make loomed large before his imagination. Then came the question: Will Tarzan claim his own? The ape-man had known the contents of the message before he calmly denied knowledge of his parentage! He had admitted that Kala, the ape, was his mother! Could it have been for love of Jane Porter?

  There was no other explanation which seemed reasonable. Then, having ignored the evidence of the message, was it not reasonable to assume that he meant never to claim his birthright? If this were so, what right had he, William Cecil Clayton, to thwart the wishes, to balk the self-sacrifice of this strange man? If Tarzan of the Apes could do this thing to save Jane Porter from unhappiness, why should he, to whose care she was intrusting her whole future, do aught to jeopardize her interests?

  And so he reasoned until the first generous impulse to proclaim the truth and relinquish his titles and his estates to their rightful owner was forgotten beneath the mass of sophistries which self-interest had advanced. But during the balance of the trip, and for many days thereafter, he was moody and distraught. Occasionally the thought obtruded itself that possibly at some later day Tarzan would regret his magnanimity, and claim his rights.

  Several days after they reached Baltimore Clayton broached the subject of an early marriage to Jane.

  “What do you mean by early?” she asked.

  “Within the next few days. I must return to England at once — I want you to return with me, dear.”

  “I can’t get ready so soon as that,” replied Jane. “It will take a whole month, at least.”

  She was glad, for she hoped that whatever called him to England might still further delay the wedding. She had made a bad bargain, but she intended carrying her part loyally to the bitter end — if she could manage to secure a temporary reprieve, though, she felt that she was warranted in doing so. His reply disconcerted her.

  “Very well, Jane,” he said. “I am disappointed, but I shall let my trip to England wait a month; then we can go back together.”

  But when the month was drawing to a close she found still another excuse upon which to hang a postponement, until at last, discouraged and doubting, Clayton was forced to go back to England alone.

  The several letters that passed between them brought Clayton no nearer to a consummation of his hopes than he had been before, and so it was that he wrote directly to Professor Porter, and enlisted his services. The old man had always favored the match. He liked Clayton, and, being of an old southern family, he put rather an exaggerated value on the advantages of a title, which meant little or nothing to his daughter.

  Clayton urged that the professor accept his invitation to be his guest in London, an invitation which included the professor’s entire little family — Mr. Philander, Esmeralda, and all. The Englishman argued that once Jane was there, and home ties had been broken, she would not so dread the step which she had so long hesitated to take.

  So the evening that he received Clayton’s letter Professor Porter announced that they would leave for London the following week.

  But once in London Jane Porter was no more tractable than she had been in Baltimore. She found one excuse after another, and when, finally, Lord Tennington invited the party to cruise around Africa in his yacht, she expressed the greatest delight in the idea, but absolutely refused to be married until they had returned to London. As the cruise was to consume a year at least, for they were to stop for indefinite periods at various points of interest, Clayton mentally anathematized Tennington for ever suggesting such a ridiculous trip.

  It was Lord Tennington’s plan to cruise through the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and thus down the East Coast, putting in at every port that was worth the seeing.

  And so it happened that on a certain day two vessels passed in the Strait of Gibraltar. The smaller, a trim white yacht, was speeding toward the east, and on her deck sat a young woman who gazed with sad eyes upon a diamond-studded locket which she idly fingered. Her thoughts were far away, in the dim, leafy fastness of a tropical jungle — and her heart was with her thoughts.

  She wondered if the man who had given her the beautiful bauble, that had meant so much more to him than the intrinsic value which he had not even known could ever have meant to him, was back in his savage forest.

  And upon the deck of the larger vessel, a passenger steamer passing toward the east, the man sat with another young woman, and the two idly speculated upon the identity of the dainty craft gliding so gracefully through the gentle swell of the lazy sea.

  When the yacht had passed the man resumed the conversation that her appearance had broken off.

  “Yes,” he said, “I like America very much, and that means, of course, that I like Americans, for a country is only what its people make it. I met some very delightful people while I was there. I recall one family from your own city, Miss Strong, whom I liked particularly — Professor Porter and his daughter.”

  “Jane Porter!” exclaimed the girl. “Do you mean to tell me that you know Jane Porter? Why, she is the very best friend I have in the world. We were little children together — we have known each other for ages.”

  “Indeed!” he answered, smiling. “You would have difficulty in persuading any one of the fact who had seen either of you.”

  “I’ll qualify the statement, then,” she answered, with a laugh. “We have known each other for two ages — hers and mine. B
ut seriously we are as dear to each other as sisters, and now that I am going to lose her I am almost heartbroken.”

  “Going to lose her?” exclaimed Tarzan. “Why, what do you mean? Oh, yes, I understand. You mean that now that she is married and living in England, you will seldom if ever see her.”

  “Yes,” replied she; “and the saddest part of it all is that she is not marrying the man she loves. Oh, it is terrible. Marrying from a sense of duty! I think it is perfectly wicked, and I told her so. I have felt so strongly on the subject that although I was the only person outside of blood relations who was to have been asked to the wedding I would not let her invite me, for I should not have gone to witness the terrible mockery. But Jane Porter is peculiarly positive. She has convinced herself that she is doing the only honorable thing that she can do, and nothing in the world will ever prevent her from marrying Lord Greystoke except Greystoke himself, or death.”

  “I am sorry for her,” said Tarzan.

  “And I am sorry for the man she loves,” said the girl, “for he loves her. I never met him, but from what Jane tells me he must be a very wonderful person. It seems that he was born in an African jungle, and brought up by fierce, anthropoid apes. He had never seen a white man or woman until Professor Porter and his party were marooned on the coast right at the threshold of his tiny cabin. He saved them from all manner of terrible beasts, and accomplished the most wonderful feats imaginable, and then to cap the climax he fell in love with Jane and she with him, though she never really knew it for sure until she had promised herself to Lord Greystoke.”