DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES

By E. W. Hornung

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.   LOVE ON THE
OCEAN

CHAPTER II.   THE
MYSTERIOUS CARGO

CHAPTER III.   TO
THE WATER'S EDGE

CHAPTER IV.   THE
SILENT SEA

CHAPTER V.   MY
REWARD

CHAPTER VI.   THE
SOLE SURVIVOR

CHAPTER VII.   I
FIND A FRIEND

CHAPTER VIII.   A
SMALL PRECAUTION

CHAPTER IX.   MY
CONVALESCENT HOME

CHAPTER X.   WINE
AND WEAKNESS

CHAPTER XI.   I
LIVE AGAIN

CHAPTER XII.   MY
LADY'S BIDDING

CHAPTER XIII.   THE
LONGEST DAY OF MY LIFE

CHAPTER XIV.
  IN THE GARDEN


CHAPTER XV.   FIRST BLOOD

CHAPTER XVI.   A DEADLOCK


CHAPTER XVII.   THIEVES FALL OUT


CHAPTER XVIII.   A MAN
OF MANY MURDERS

CHAPTER XIX.   MY
GREAT HOUR

CHAPTER XX.   THE
STATEMENT OF FRANCIS RATTRAY

CHAPTER I. LOVE ON THE OCEAN

Nothing is so easy as falling in love on a long sea voyage, except falling
out of love. Especially was this the case in the days when the wooden
clippers did finely to land you in Sydney or in Melbourne under the four
full months. We all saw far too much of each other, unless, indeed, we
were to see still more. Our superficial attractions mutually exhausted, we
lost heart and patience in the disappointing strata which lie between the
surface and the bed-rock of most natures. My own experience was confined
to the round voyage of the Lady Jermyn, in the year 1853. It was no common
experience, as was only too well known at the time. And I may add that I
for my part had not the faintest intention of falling in love on board;
nay, after all these years, let me confess that I had good cause to hold
myself proof against such weakness. Yet we carried a young lady, coming
home, who, God knows, might have made short work of many a better man!

Eva Denison was her name, and she cannot have been more than nineteen
years of age. I remember her telling me that she had not yet come out, the
very first time I assisted her to promenade the poop. My own name was
still unknown to her, and yet I recollect being quite fascinated by her
frankness and self-possession. She was exquisitely young, and yet
ludicrously old for her years; had been admirably educated, chiefly
abroad, and, as we were soon to discover, possessed accomplishments which
would have made the plainest old maid a popular personage on board ship.
Miss Denison, however, was as beautiful as she was young, with the bloom
of ideal health upon her perfect skin. She had a wealth of lovely hair,
with strange elusive strands of gold among the brown, that drowned her
ears (I thought we were to have that mode again?) in sunny ripples; and a
soul greater than the mind, and a heart greater than either, lay sleeping
somewhere in the depths of her grave, gray eyes.

We were at sea together so many weeks. I cannot think what I was made of
then!

It was in the brave old days of Ballarat and Bendigo, when ship after ship
went out black with passengers and deep with stores, to bounce home with a
bale or two of wool, and hardly hands enough to reef topsails in a gale.
Nor was this the worst; for not the crew only, but, in many cases, captain
and officers as well, would join in the stampede to the diggings; and we
found Hobson's Bay the congested asylum of all manner of masterless and
deserted vessels. I have a lively recollection of our skipper's
indignation when the pilot informed him of this disgraceful fact. Within a
fortnight, however, I met the good man face to face upon the diggings. It
is but fair to add that the Lady Jermyn lost every officer and man in the
same way, and that the captain did obey tradition to the extent of being
the last to quit his ship. Nevertheless, of all who sailed by her in
January, I alone was ready to return at the beginning of the following
July.

I had been to Ballarat. I had given the thing a trial. For the most odious
weeks I had been a licensed digger on Black Hill Flats; and I had actually
failed to make running expenses. That, however, will surprise you the less
when I pause to declare that I have paid as much as four shillings and
sixpence for half a loaf of execrable bread; that my mate and I, between
us, seldom took more than a few pennyweights of gold-dust in any one day;
and never once struck pick into nugget, big or little, though we had the
mortification of inspecting the “mammoth masses” of which we found the
papers full on landing, and which had brought the gold-fever to its height
during our very voyage. With me, however, as with many a young fellow who
had turned his back on better things, the malady was short-lived. We
expected to make our fortunes out of hand, and we had reckoned without the
vermin and the villainy which rendered us more than ever impatient of
delay. In my fly-blown blankets I dreamt of London until I hankered after
my chambers and my club more than after much fine gold. Never shall I
forget my first hot bath on getting back to Melbourne; it cost five
shillings, but it was worth five pounds, and is altogether my pleasantest
reminiscence of Australia.

There was, however, one slice of luck in store for me. I found the dear
old Lady Jermyn on the very eve of sailing, with a new captain, a new
crew, a handful of passengers (chiefly steerage), and nominally no cargo
at all. I felt none the less at home when I stepped over her familiar
side.

In the cuddy we were only five, but a more uneven quintette I defy you to
convene. There was a young fellow named Ready, packed out for his health,
and hurrying home to die among friends. There was an outrageously lucky
digger, another invalid, for he would drink nothing but champagne with
every meal and at any minute of the day, and I have seen him pitch raw
gold at the sea-birds by the hour together. Miss Denison was our only
lady, and her step-father, with whom she was travelling, was the one man
of distinction on board. He was a Portuguese of sixty or thereabouts,
Senhor Joaquin Santos by name; at first it was incredible to me that he
had no title, so noble was his bearing; but very soon I realized that he
was one of those to whom adventitious honors can add no lustre. He treated
Miss Denison as no parent ever treated a child, with a gallantry and a
courtliness quite beautiful to watch, and not a little touching in the
light of the circumstances under which they were travelling together. The
girl had gone straight from school to her step-father's estate on the
Zambesi, where, a few months later, her mother had died of the malaria.
Unable to endure the place after his wife's death, Senhor Santos had taken
ship to Victoria, there to seek fresh fortune with results as indifferent
as my own. He was now taking Miss Denison back to England, to make her
home with other relatives, before he himself returned to Africa (as he
once told me) to lay his bones beside those of his wife. I hardly know
which of the pair I see more plainly as I write—the young girl with
her soft eyes and her sunny hair, or the old gentleman with the erect
though wasted figure, the noble forehead, the steady eye, the parchment
skin, the white imperial, and the eternal cigarette between his shrivelled
lips.

No need to say that I came more in contact with the young girl. She was
not less charming in my eyes because she provoked me greatly as I came to
know her intimately. She had many irritating faults. Like most young
persons of intellect and inexperience, she was hasty and intolerant in
nearly all her judgments, and rather given to being critical in a crude
way. She was very musical, playing the guitar and singing in a style that
made our shipboard concerts vastly superior to the average of their order;
but I have seen her shudder at the efforts of less gifted folks who were
also doing their best; and it was the same in other directions where her
superiority was less specific. The faults which are most exasperating in
another are, of course, one's own faults; and I confess that I was very
critical of Eva Denison's criticisms. Then she had a little weakness for
exaggeration, for unconscious egotism in conversation, and I itched to
tell her so. I felt so certain that the girl had a fine character
underneath, which would rise to noble heights in stress or storm: all the
more would I long now to take her in hand and mould her in little things,
and anon to take her in my arms just as she was. The latter feeling was
resolutely crushed. To be plain, I had endured what is euphemistically
called “disappointment” already; and, not being a complete coxcomb, I had
no intention of courting a second.

Yet, when I write of Eva Denison, I am like to let my pen outrun my tale.
I lay the pen down, and a hundred of her sayings ring in my ears, with my
own contradictious comments, that I was doomed so soon to repent; a
hundred visions of her start to my eyes; and there is the trade-wind
singing in the rigging, and loosening a tress of my darling's hair, till
it flies like a tiny golden streamer in the tropic sun. There, it is out!
I have called her what she was to be in my heart ever after. Yet at the
time I must argue with her—with her! When all my courage should have
gone to love-making, I was plucking it up to sail as near as I might to
plain remonstrance! I little dreamt how the ghost of every petty word was
presently to return and torture me.

So it is that I can see her and hear her now on a hundred separate
occasions beneath the awning beneath the stars on deck below at noon or
night but plainest of all in the evening of the day we signalled the
Island of Ascension, at the close of that last concert on the
quarter-deck. The watch are taking down the extra awning; they are
removing the bunting and the foot-lights. The lanterns are trailed forward
before they are put out; from the break of the poop we watch the vivid
shifting patch of deck that each lights up on its way. The stars are very
sharp in the vast violet dome above our masts; they shimmer on the sea;
and our trucks describe minute orbits among the stars, for the trades have
yet to fail us, and every inch of canvas has its fill of the gentle steady
wind. It is a heavenly night. The peace of God broods upon His waters. No
jarring note offends the ear. In the forecastle a voice is humming a song
of Eva Denison's that has caught the fancy of the men; the young girl who
sang it so sweetly not twenty minutes since who sang it again and again to
please the crew she alone is at war with our little world she alone would
head a mutiny if she could.

“I hate the captain!” she says again.

“My dear Miss Denison!” I begin; for she has always been severe upon our
bluff old man, and it is not the spirit of contrariety alone which makes
me invariably take his part. Coarse he may be, and not one whom the owners
would have chosen to command the Lady Jermyn; a good seaman none the less,
who brought us round the Horn in foul weather without losing stitch or
stick. I think of the ruddy ruffian in his dripping oilskins, on deck day
and night for our sakes, and once more I must needs take his part; but
Miss Denison stops me before I can get out another word.

“I am not dear, and I'm not yours,” she cries. “I'm only a school-girl—you
have all but told me so before to-day! If I were a man—if I were you—I
should tell Captain Harris what I thought of him!”

“Why? What has he done now?”

“Now? You know how rude he was to poor Mr. Ready this very afternoon!”

It was true. He had been very rude indeed. But Ready also had been at
fault. It may be that I was always inclined to take an opposite view, but
I felt bound to point this out, and at any cost.

“You mean when Ready asked him if we were out of our course? I must say I
thought it was a silly question to put. It was the same the other evening
about the cargo. If the skipper says we're in ballast why not believe him?
Why repeat steerage gossip, about mysterious cargoes, at the cuddy table?
Captains are always touchy about that sort of thing. I wasn't surprised at
his letting out.”

My poor love stares at me in the starlight. Her great eyes flash their
scorn. Then she gives a little smile—and then a little nod—more
scornful than all the rest.

“You never are surprised, are you, Mr. Cole?” says she. “You were not
surprised when the wretch used horrible language in front of me! You were
not surprised when it was a—dying man—whom he abused!”

I try to soothe her. I agree heartily with her disgust at the epithets
employed in her hearing, and towards an invalid, by the irate skipper. But
I ask her to make allowances for a rough, uneducated man, rather clumsily
touched upon his tender spot. I shall conciliate her presently; the divine
pout (so childish it was!) is fading from her lips; the starlight is on
the tulle and lace and roses of her pretty evening dress, with its
festooned skirts and obsolete flounces; and I am watching her, ay, and
worshipping her, though I do not know it yet. And as we stand there comes
another snatch from the forecastle:—

       “What will you do, love, when I am going.
            With white sail flowing,
            The seas beyond?
        What will you do, love—”
 

“They may make the most of that song,” says Miss Denison grimly; “it's the
last they'll have from me. Get up as many more concerts as you like. I
won't sing at another unless it's in the fo'c'sle. I'll sing to the men,
but not to Captain Harris. He didn't put in an appearance tonight. He
shall not have another chance of insulting me.”

Was it her vanity that was wounded after all? “You forget,” said I, “that
you would not answer when he addressed you at dinner.”

“I should think I wouldn't, after the way he spoke to Mr. Ready; and he
too agitated to come to table, poor fellow!”

“Still, the captain felt the open slight.”

“Then he shouldn't have used such language in front of me.”

“Your father felt it, too, Miss Denison.”

I hear nothing plainer than her low but quick reply:

“Mr. Cole, my father has been dead many; many years; he died before I can
remember. That man only married my poor mother. He sympathizes with
Captain Harris—against me; no father would do that. Look at them
together now! And you take his side, too; oh! I have no patience with any
of you—except poor Mr. Ready in his berth.”

“But you are not going.”

“Indeed I am. I am tired of you all.”

And she was gone with angry tears for which I blamed myself as I fell to
pacing the weather side of the poop—and so often afterwards! So
often, and with such unavailing bitterness!

Senhor Santos and the captain were in conversation by the weather rail. I
fancied poor old Harris eyed me with suspicion, and I wished he had better
cause. The Portuguese, however, saluted me with his customary courtesy,
and I thought there was a grave twinkle in his steady eye.

“Are you in deesgrace also, friend Cole?” he inquired in his all but
perfect English.

“More or less,” said I ruefully.

He gave the shrug of his country—that delicate gesture which is done
almost entirely with the back—a subtlety beyond the power of British
shoulders.

“The senhora is both weelful and pivish,” said he, mixing the two vowels
which (with the aspirate) were his only trouble with our tongue. “It is
great grif to me to see her growing so unlike her sainted mother!”

He sighed, and I saw his delicate fingers forsake the cigarette they were
rolling to make the sacred sign upon his breast. He was always smoking one
cigarette and making another; as he lit the new one the glow fell upon a
strange pin that he wore, a pin with a tiny crucifix inlaid in mosaic. So
the religious cast of Senhor Santos was brought twice home to me in the
same moment, though, to be sure, I had often been struck by it before. And
it depressed me to think that so sweet a child as Eva Denison should have
spoken harshly of so good a man as her step-father, simply because he had
breadth enough to sympathize with a coarse old salt like Captain Harris.

I turned in, however, and I cannot say the matter kept me awake in the
separate state-room which was one luxury of our empty saloon. Alas? I was
a heavy sleeper then.

CHAPTER II. THE MYSTERIOUS CARGO

“Wake up, Cole! The ship's on fire!”

It was young Ready's hollow voice, as cool, however, as though he were
telling me I was late for breakfast. I started up and sought him wildly in
the darkness.

“You're joking,” was my first thought and utterance; for now he was
lighting my candle, and blowing out the match with a care that seemed in
itself a contradiction.

“I wish I were,” he answered. “Listen to that!”

He pointed to my cabin ceiling; it quivered and creaked; and all at once I
was as a deaf man healed.

One gets inured to noise at sea, but to this day it passes me how even I
could have slept an instant in the abnormal din which I now heard raging
above my head. Sea-boots stamped; bare feet pattered; men bawled; women
shrieked; shouts of terror drowned the roar of command.

“Have we long to last?” I asked, as I leaped for my clothes.

“Long enough for you to dress comfortably. Steady, old man! It's only just
been discovered; they may get it under. The panic's the worst part at
present, and we're out of that.”

But was Eva Denison? Breathlessly I put the question; his answer was
reassuring. Miss Denison was with her step-father on the poop. “And both
of 'em as cool as cucumbers,” added Ready.

They could not have been cooler than this young man, with death at the
bottom of his bright and sunken eyes. He was of the type which is all
muscle and no constitution; athletes one year, dead men the next; but
until this moment the athlete had been to me a mere and incredible
tradition. In the afternoon I had seen his lean knees totter under the
captain's fire. Now, at midnight—the exact time by my watch—it
was as if his shrunken limbs had expanded in his clothes; he seemed hardly
to know his own flushed face, as he caught sight of it in my mirror.

“By Jove!” said he, “this has put me in a fine old fever; but I don't know
when I felt in better fettle. If only they get it under! I've not looked
like this all the voyage.”

And he admired himself while I dressed in hot haste: a fine young fellow;
not at all the natural egotist, but cast for death by the doctors, and
keenly incredulous in his bag of skin. It revived one's confidence to hear
him talk. But he forgot himself in an instant, and gave me a lead through
the saloon with a boyish eagerness that made me actually suspicious as I
ran. We were nearing the Line. I recalled the excesses of my last
crossing, and I prepared for some vast hoax at the last moment. It was
only when we plunged upon the crowded quarter-deck, and my own eyes read
lust of life and dread of death in the starting eyes of others, that such
lust and such dread consumed me in my turn, so that my veins seemed filled
with fire and ice.

To be fair to those others, I think that the first wild panic was
subsiding even then; at least there was a lull, and even a reaction in the
right direction on the part of the males in the second class and steerage.
A huge Irishman at their head, they were passing buckets towards the
after-hold; the press of people hid the hatchway from us until we gained
the poop; but we heard the buckets spitting and a hose-pipe hissing into
the flames below; and we saw the column of white vapor rising steadily
from their midst.

At the break of the poop stood Captain Harris, his legs planted wide
apart, very vigorous, very decisive, very profane. And I must confess that
the shocking oaths which had brought us round the Horn inspired a kind of
confidence in me now. Besides, even from the poop I could see no flames.
But the night was as beautiful as it had been an hour or two back; the
stars as brilliant, the breeze even more balmy, the sea even more calm;
and we were hove-to already, against the worst.

In this hour of peril the poop was very properly invaded by all classes of
passengers, in all manner of incongruous apparel, in all stages of fear,
rage, grief and hysteria; as we made our way among this motley nightmare
throng, I took Ready by the arm.

“The skipper's a brute,” said I, “but he's the right brute in the right
place to-night, Ready!”

“I hope he may be,” was the reply. “But we were off our course this
afternoon; and we were off it again during the concert, as sure as we're
not on it now.”

His tone made me draw him to the rail.

“But how do you know? You didn't have another look, did you?”

“Lots of looks-at the stars. He couldn't keep me from consulting them; and
I'm just as certain of it as I'm certain that we've a cargo aboard which
we're none of us supposed to know anything about.”

The latter piece of gossip was, indeed, all over the ship; but this
allusion to it struck me as foolishly irrelevant and frivolous. As to the
other matter, I suggested that the officers would have had more to say
about it than Ready, if there had been anything in it.

“Officers be damned!” cried our consumptive, with a sound man's vigor.
“They're ordinary seamen dressed up; I don't believe they've a second
mate's certificate between them, and they're frightened out of their
souls.”

“Well, anyhow, the skipper isn't that.”

“No; he's drunk; he can shout straight, but you should hear him try to
speak.”

I made my way aft without rejoinder. “Invalid's pessimism,” was my private
comment. And yet the sick man was whole for the time being; the virile
spirit was once more master of the recreant members; and it was with
illogical relief that I found those I sought standing almost unconcernedly
beside the binnacle.

My little friend was, indeed, pale enough, and her eyes great with dismay;
but she stood splendidly calm, in her travelling cloak and bonnet, and
with all my soul I hailed the hardihood with which I had rightly credited
my love. Yes! I loved her then. It had come home to me at last, and I no
longer denied it in my heart. In my innocence and my joy I rather blessed
the fire for showing me her true self and my own; and there I stood,
loving her openly with my eyes (not to lose another instant), and bursting
to tell her so with my lips.

But there also stood Senhor Santos, almost precisely as I had seen him
last, cigarette, tie-pin, and all. He wore an overcoat, however, and
leaned upon a massive ebony cane, while he carried his daughter's guitar
in its case, exactly as though they were waiting for a train. Moreover, I
thought that for the first time he was regarding me with no very favoring
glance.

“You don't think it serious?” I asked him abruptly, my heart still
bounding with the most incongruous joy.

He gave me his ambiguous shrug; and then, “A fire at sea is surely
sirrious,” said he.

“Where did it break out?”

“No one knows; it may have come of your concert.”

“But they are getting the better of it?”

“They are working wonders so far, senhor.”

“You see, Miss Denison,” I continued ecstatically, “our rough old diamond
of a skipper is the right man in the right place after all. A tight man in
a tight place, eh?” and I laughed like an idiot in their calm grave faces.

“Senhor Cole is right,” said Santos, “although his 'ilarity sims a leetle
out of place. But you must never spik against Captain 'Arrees again,
menma.”

“I never will,” the poor child said; yet I saw her wince whenever the
captain raised that hoarse voice of his in more and more blasphemous
exhortation; and I began to fear with Ready that the man was drunk.

My eyes were still upon my darling, devouring her, revelling in her, when
suddenly I saw her hand twitch within her step-father's arm. It was an
answering start to one on his part. The cigarette was snatched from his
lips. There was a commotion forward, and a cry came aft, from mouth to
mouth:

“The flames! The flames!”

I turned, and caught their reflection on the white column of smoke and
steam. I ran forward, and saw them curling and leaping in the hell-mouth
of the hold.

The quarter-deck now staged a lurid scene: that blazing trap-door in its
midst; and each man there a naked demon madly working to save his roasting
skin. Abaft the mainmast the deck-pump was being ceaselessly worked by
relays of the passengers; dry blankets were passed forward, soaking
blankets were passed aft, and flung flat into the furnace one after
another. These did more good than the pure water: the pillar of smoke
became blacker, denser: we were at a crisis; a sudden hush denoted it;
even our hoarse skipper stood dumb.

I had rushed down into the waist of the ship—blushing for my delay—and
already I was tossing blankets with the rest. Looking up in an enforced
pause, I saw Santos whispering in the skipper's ear, with the expression
of a sphinx but no lack of foreign gesticulation—behind them a
fringe of terror-stricken faces, parted at that instant by two more
figures, as wild and strange as any in that wild, strange scene. One was
our luckless lucky digger, the other a gigantic Zambesi nigger, who for
days had been told off to watch him; this was the servant (or rather the
slave) of Senhor Santos.

The digger planted himself before the captain. His face was reddened by a
fire as consuming as that within the bowels of our gallant ship. He had a
huge, unwieldy bundle under either arm.

“Plain question—plain answer,” we heard him stutter. “Is there any
—— chance of saving this —— ship?”

His adjectives were too foul for print; they were given with such a
special effort at distinctness, however, that I was smiling one instant,
and giving thanks the next that Eva Denison had not come forward with her
guardian. Meanwhile the skipper had exchanged a glance with Senhor Santos,
and I think we all felt that he was going to tell us the truth.

He told it in two words—“Very little.”

Then the first individual tragedy was enacted before every eye. With a
yell the drunken maniac rushed to the rail. The nigger was at his heels—he
was too late. Uttering another and more piercing shriek, the madman was
overboard at a bound; one of his bundles preceded him; the other dropped
like a cannon-ball on the deck.

The nigger caught it up and carried it forward to the captain.

Harris held up his hand. We were still before we had fairly found our
tongues. His words did run together a little, but he was not drunk.

“Men and women,” said he, “what I told that poor devil is Gospel truth;
but I didn't tell him we'd no chance of saving our lives, did I? Not me,
because we have! Keep your heads and listen to me. There's two good boats
on the davits amidships; the chief will take one, the second officer the
other; and there ain't no reason why every blessed one of you shouldn't
sleep in Ascension to-morrow night. As for me, let me see every soul off
of my ship and perhaps I may follow; but by the God that made you, look
alive! Mr. Arnott—Mr. McClellan—man them boats and lower away.
You can't get quit o' the ship too soon, an' I don't mind tellin' you why.
I'll tell you the worst, an' then you'll know. There's been a lot o'
gossip goin', gossip about my cargo. I give out as I'd none but ship's
stores and ballast, an' I give out a lie. I don't mind tellin' you now. I
give out a cussed lie, but I give it out for the good o' the ship! What
was the use o' frightenin' folks? But where's the sense in keepin' it back
now? We have a bit of a cargo,” shouted Harris; “and it's gunpowder—every
damned ton of it!”

The effect of this announcement may be imagined; my hand has not the
cunning to reproduce it on paper; and if it had, it would shrink from the
task. Mild men became brutes, brutal men, devils, women—God help
them!—shrieking beldams for the most part. Never shall I forget them
with their streaming hair, their screaming open mouths, and the cruel
ascending fire glinting on their starting eyeballs!

Pell-mell they tumbled down the poop-ladders; pell-mell they raced
amidships past that yawning open furnace; the pitch was boiling through
the seams of the crackling deck; they slipped and fell upon it, one over
another, and the wonder is that none plunged headlong into the flames. A
handful remained on the poop, cowering and undone with terror. Upon these
turned Captain Harris, as Ready and I, stemming the torrent of maddened
humanity, regained the poop ourselves.

“For'ard with ye!” yelled the skipper. “The powder's underneath you in the
lazarette!”

They were gone like hunted sheep. And now abaft the flaming hatchway there
were only we four surviving saloon passengers, the captain, his steward,
the Zambesi negro, and the quarter-master at the wheel. The steward and
the black I observed putting stores aboard the captain's gig as it
overhung the water from the stern davits.

“Now, gentlemen,” said Harris to the two of us, “I must trouble you to
step forward with the rest. Senhor Santos insists on taking his chance
along with the young lady in my gig. I've told him the risk, but he
insists, and the gig'll hold no more.”

“But she must have a crew, and I can row. For God's sake take me,
captain!” cried I; for Eva Denison sat weeping in her deck chair, and my
heart bled faint at the thought of leaving her, I who loved her so, and
might die without ever telling her my love! Harris, however, stood firm.

“There's that quartermaster and my steward, and José the nigger,” said he.
“That's quite enough, Mr. Cole, for I ain't above an oar myself; but, by
God, I'm skipper o' this here ship, and I'll skip her as long as I remain
aboard!”

I saw his hand go to his belt; I saw the pistols stuck there for
mutineers. I looked at Santos. He answered me with his neutral shrug, and,
by my soul, he struck a match and lit a cigarette in that hour of life and
death! Then last I looked at Ready; and he leant invertebrate over the
rail, gasping pitiably from his exertions in regaining the poop, a dying
man once more. I pointed out his piteous state.

“At least,” I whispered, “you won't refuse to take him?”

“Will there be anything to take?” said the captain brutally.

Santos advanced leisurely, and puffed his cigarette over the poor wasted
and exhausted frame.

“It is for you to decide, captain,” said he cynically; “but this one will
make no deeference. Yes, I would take him. It will not be far,” he added,
in a tone that was not the less detestable for being lowered.

“Take them both!” moaned little Eva, putting in her first and last sweet
word.

“Then we all drown, Evasinha,” said her stepfather. “It is impossible.”

“We're too many for her as it is,” said the captain. “So for'ard with ye,
Mr. Cole, before it's too late.”

But my darling's brave word for me had fired my blood, and I turned with
equal resolution on Harris and on the Portuguese. “I will go like a lamb,”
said I, “if you will first give me five minutes' conversation with Miss
Denison. Otherwise I do not go; and as for the gig, you may take me or
leave me, as you choose.”

“What have you to say to her?” asked Santos, coming up to me, and again
lowering his voice.

I lowered mine still more. “That I love her!” I answered in a soft
ecstasy. “That she may remember how I loved her, if I die!”

His shoulders shrugged a cynical acquiescence.

“By all mins, senhor; there is no harm in that.”

I was at her side before another word could pass his withered lips.

“Miss Denison, will you grant me five minutes', conversation? It may be
the last that we shall ever have together!”

Uncovering her face, she looked at me with a strange terror in her great
eyes; then with a questioning light that was yet more strange, for in it
there was a wistfulness I could not comprehend. She suffered me to take
her hand, however, and to lead her unresisting to the weather rail.

“What is it you have to say?” she asked me in her turn. “What is it that
you—think?”

Her voice fell as though she must have the truth.

“That we have all a very good chance,” said I heartily.

“Is that all?” cried Eva, and my heart sank at her eager manner.

She seemed at once disappointed and relieved. Could it be possible she
dreaded a declaration which she had foreseen all along? My evil first
experience rose up to warn me. No, I would not speak now; it was no time.
If she loved me, it might make her love me less; better to trust to God to
spare us both.

“Yes, it is all,” I said doggedly.

She drew a little nearer, hesitating. It was as though her disappointment
had gained on her relief.

“Do you know what I thought you were going to say?”

“No, indeed.”

“Dare I tell you?”

“You can trust me.”

Her pale lips parted. Her great eyes shone. Another instant, and she had
told me that which I would have given all but life itself to know. But in
that tick of time a quick step came behind me, and the light went out of
the sweet face upturned to mine.

“I cannot! I must not! Here is—that man!”

Senhor Santos was all smiles and rings of pale-blue smoke.

“You will be cut off, friend Cole,” said he. “The fire is spreading.”

“Let it spread!” I cried, gazing my very soul into the young girl's eyes.
“We have not finished our conversation.

“We have!” said she, with sudden decision. “Go—go—for my sake—for
your own sake—go at once!”

She gave me her hand. I merely clasped it. And so I left her at the
rail—ah, heaven! how often we had argued on that very spot! So I left her,
with the greatest effort of all my life (but one); and yet in passing,
full as my heart was of love and self, I could not but lay a hand on poor
Ready's shoulders.

“God bless you, old boy!” I said to him.

He turned a white face that gave me half an instant's pause.

“It's all over with me this time,” he said. “But, I say, I was right about
the cargo?”

And I heard a chuckle as I reached the ladder; but Ready was no longer in
my mind; even Eva was driven out of it, as I stood aghast on the top-most
rung.

CHAPTER III. TO THE WATER'S EDGE

It was not the new panic amidships that froze my marrow; it was not that
the pinnace hung perpendicularly by the fore-tackle, and had shot out
those who had swarmed aboard her before she was lowered, as a cart shoots
a load of bricks. It was bad enough to see the whole boat-load struggling,
floundering, sinking in the sea; for selfish eyes (and which of us is all
unselfish at such a time?) there was a worse sight yet; for I saw all this
across an impassable gulf of fire.

The quarter-deck had caught: it was in flames to port and starboard of the
flaming hatch; only fore and aft of it was the deck sound to the lips of
that hideous mouth, with the hundred tongues shooting out and up.

Could I jump it there? I sprang down and looked. It was only a few feet
across; but to leap through that living fire was to leap into eternity. I
drew back instantly, less because my heart failed me, I may truly say,
than because my common sense did not.

Some were watching me, it seemed, across this hell. “The bulwarks!” they
screamed. “Walk along the bulwarks!” I held up my hand in token that I
heard and understood and meant to act. And as I did their bidding I
noticed what indeed had long been apparent to idler eyes: the wind was
not; we had lost our southeast trades; the doomed ship was rolling in a
dead calm.

Rolling, rolling, rolling so that it seemed minutes before I dared to move
an inch. Then I tried it on my hands and knees, but the scorched bulwarks
burned me to the bone. And then I leapt up, desperate with the pain; and,
with my tortured hands spread wide to balance me, I walked those few
yards, between rising sea and falling fire, and falling sea and rising
fire, as an acrobat walks a rope, and by God's grace without mishap.

There was no time to think twice about my feat, or, indeed, about anything
else that befell upon a night when each moment was more pregnant than the
last. And yet I did think that those who had encouraged me to attempt so
perilous a trick might have welcomed me alive among them; they were
looking at something else already; and this was what it was.

One of the cabin stewards had presented himself on the poop; he had a
bottle in one hand, a glass in the other; in the red glare we saw him
dancing in front of the captain like an unruly marionette. Harris appeared
to threaten him. What he said we could not hear for the deep-drawn blast
and the high staccato crackle of the blazing hold. But we saw the
staggering steward offering him a drink; saw the glass flung next instant
in the captain's face, the blood running, a pistol drawn, fired without
effect, and snatched away by the drunken mutineer. Next instant a smooth
black cane was raining blow after blow on the man's head. He dropped; the
blows fell thick and heavy as before. He lay wriggling; the Portuguese
struck and struck until he lay quite still; then we saw Joaquin Santos
kneel, and rub his stick carefully on the still thing's clothes, as a man
might wipe his boots.

Curses burst from our throats; yet the fellow deserved to die. Nor, as I
say, had we time to waste two thoughts upon any one incident. This last
had begun and ended in the same minute; in another we were at the
starboard gangway, tumbling helter-skelter aboard the lowered long-boat.

She lay safely on the water: how we thanked our gods for that! Lower and
lower sank her gunwale as we dropped aboard her, with no more care than
the Gadarene swine whose fate we courted. Discipline, order, method,
common care, we brought none of these things with us from our floating
furnace; but we fought to be first over the bulwarks, and in the bottom of
the long-boat we fought again.

And yet she held us all! All, that is, but a terror-stricken few, who lay
along the jibboom like flies upon a stick: all but two or three more whom
we left fatally hesitating in the forechains: all but the selfish savages
who had been the first to perish in the pinnace, and one distracted couple
who had thrown their children into the kindly ocean, and jumped in after
them out of their torment, locked for ever in each other's arms.

Yes! I saw more things on that starry night, by that blood-red glare, than
I have told you in their order, and more things than I shall tell you now.
Blind would I gladly be for my few remaining years, if that night's
horrors could be washed from these eyes for ever. I have said so much,
however, that in common candor I must say one thing more. I have spoken of
selfish savages. God help me and forgive me! For by this time I was one
myself.

In the long-boat we cannot have been less than thirty; the exact number no
man will ever know. But we shoved off without mischance; the chief mate
had the tiller; the third mate the boat-hook; and six or eight oars were
at work, in a fashion, as we plunged among the great smooth sickening
mounds and valleys of fathomless ink.

Scarcely were we clear when the foremast dropped down on the fastenings,
dashing the jib-boom into the water with its load of demented human
beings. The mainmast followed by the board before we had doubled our
distance from the wreck. Both trailed to port, where we could not see
them; and now the mizzen stood alone in sad and solitary grandeur, her
flapping idle sails lighted up by the spreading conflagration, so that
they were stamped very sharply upon the black add starry sky. But the
whole scene from the long-boat was one of startling brilliancy and horror.
The fire now filled the entire waist of the vessel, and the noise of it
was as the rumble and roar of a volcano. As for the light, I declare that
it put many a star clean out, and dimmed the radiance of all the rest, as
it flooded the sea for miles around, and a sea of molten glass reflected
it. My gorge rose at the long, low billows-sleek as black satin—lifting
and dipping in this ghastly glare. I preferred to keep my eyes upon the
little ship burning like a tar barrel as the picture grew. But presently I
thanked God aloud: there was the gig swimming like a beetle over the
bloodshot rollers in our wake.

In our unspeakable gladness at being quit of the ship, some minutes passed
before we discovered that the long-boat was slowly filling. The water was
at our ankles before a man of us cried out, so fast were our eyes to the
poor lost Lady Jermyn. Then all at once the ghastly fact dawned upon us;
and I think it was the mate himself who burst out crying like a child. I
never ascertained, however, for I had kicked off my shoes and was busy
baling with them. Others were hunting for the leak. But the mischief was
as subtle as it was mortal—as though a plank had started from end to
end. Within and without the waters rose equally—then lay an instant
level with our gunwales—then swamped us, oh! so slowly, that I
thought we were never going to sink. It was like getting inch by inch into
your tub; I can feel it now, creeping, crawling up my back. “It's coming!
O Christ!” muttered one as it came; to me it was a downright relief to be
carried under at last.

But then, thank God, I have always been a strong swimmer. The water was
warm and buoyant, and I came up like a cork, as I knew I should. I shook
the drops from my face, and there were the sweet stars once more; for many
an eye they had gone Out for ever; and there the burning wreck.

A man floundered near me, in a splutter of phosphorescence. I tried to
help him, and in an instant he had me wildly round the neck. In the end I
shook him off, poor devil, to his death. And he was the last I tried to
aid: have I not said already what I was become?

In a little an oar floated my way: I threw my arms across it and gripped
it with my chin as I swam. It relieved me greatly. Up and down I rode
among the oily black hillocks; I was down when there was a sudden flare as
though the sun had risen, and I saw still a few heads bobbing and a few
arms waving frantically around me. At the same instant a terrific
detonation split the ears; and when I rose on the next bald billow, where
the ship lay burning a few seconds before, there remained but a red-hot
spine that hissed and dwindled for another minute, and then left a
blackness through which every star shone with redoubled brilliance.

And now right and left splashed falling missiles; a new source of danger
or of temporary respite; to me, by a merciful Providence, it proved the
latter.

Some heavy thing fell with a mighty splash right in front of me. A few
more yards, and my brains had floated with the spume. As it was, the oar
was dashed from under my armpits; in another moment they had found a more
solid resting-place.

It was a hen-coop, and it floated bars upwards like a boat. In this calm
it might float for days. I climbed upon the bars-and the whole cage rolled
over on top of me.

Coming to the surface, I found to my joy that the hen-coop had righted
itself; so now I climbed up again, but this time very slowly and gingerly;
the balance was undisturbed, and I stretched myself cautiously along the
bars on my stomach. A good idea immediately occurred to me. I had jumped
as a matter of course into the flannels which one naturally wears in the
tropics. To their lightness I already owed my life, but the common
cricket-belt which was part of the costume was the thing to which I owe it
most of all. Loosening this belt a little, as I tucked my toes tenaciously
under the endmost bar, I undid and passed the two ends under one of the
middle bars, fastening the clasp upon the other side. If I capsized now,
well, we might go to the bottom together; otherwise the hen-coop and I
should not part company in a hurry; and I thought, I felt, that she would
float.

Worn out as I was, and comparatively secure for the moment, I will not say
that I slept; but my eyes closed, and every fibre rested, as I rose and
slid with the smooth, long swell. Whether I did indeed hear voices,
curses, cries, I cannot say positively to this day. I only know that I
raised my head and looked sharply all ways but the way I durst not look
for fear of an upset. And, again, I thought I saw first a tiny flame, and
then a tinier glow; and as my head drooped, and my eyes closed again, I
say I thought I smelt tobacco; but this, of course, was my imagination
supplying all the links from one.

CHAPTER IV. THE SILENT SEA

Remember (if indeed there be any need to remind you) that it is a flagrant
landsman who is telling you this tale. Nothing know I of seamanship, save
what one could not avoid picking up on the round voyage of the Lady
Jermyn, never to be completed on this globe. I may be told that I have
burned that devoted vessel as nothing ever burned on land or sea. I answer
that I write of what I saw, and that is not altered by a miscalled spar or
a misunderstood manouvre. But now I am aboard a craft I handle for myself,
and must make shift to handle a second time with this frail pen.

The hen-coop was some six feet long, by eighteen or twenty inches in
breadth and depth. It was simply a long box with bars in lieu of a lid;
but it was very strongly built.

I recognized it as one of two which had stood lashed against either rail
of the Lady Jermyn's poop; there the bars had risen at right angles to the
deck; now they lay horizontal, a gridiron six feet long-and my bed. And as
each particular bar left its own stripe across my wearied body, and yet
its own comfort in my quivering heart, another day broke over the face of
the waters, and over me.

Discipline, what there was of it originally, had been the very first thing
to perish aboard our ill-starred ship; the officers, I am afraid, were not
much better than poor Ready made them out (thanks to Bendigo and
Ballarat), and little had been done in true ship-shape style all night.
All hands had taken their spell at everything as the fancy seized them;
not a bell had been struck from first to last; and I can only conjecture
that the fire raged four or five hours, from the fact that it was midnight
by my watch when I left it on my cabin drawers, and that the final
extinction of the smouldering keel was so soon followed by the first deep
hint of dawn. The rest took place with the trite rapidity of the
equatorial latitudes. It had been my foolish way to pooh-pooh the old
saying that there is no twilight in the tropics. I saw more truth in it as
I lay lonely on this heaving waste.

The stars were out; the sea was silver; the sun was up.

And oh! the awful glory of that sunrise! It was terrific; it was
sickening; my senses swam. Sunlit billows smooth and sinister, without a
crest, without a sound; miles and miles of them as I rose; an oily grave
among them as I fell. Hill after hill of horror, valley after valley of
despair! The face of the waters in petty but eternal unrest; and now the
sun must shine to set it smiling, to show me its cruel ceaseless
mouthings, to reveal all but the ghastlier horrors underneath.

How deep was it? I fell to wondering! Not that it makes any difference
whether you drown in one fathom or in ten thousand, whether you fall from
a balloon or from the attic window. But the greater depth or distance is
the worse to contemplate; and I was as a man hanging by his hands so high
above the world, that his dangling feet cover countries, continents; a man
who must fall very soon, and wonders how long he will be falling, falling;
and how far his soul will bear his body company.

In time I became more accustomed to the sun upon this heaving void; less
frightened, as a child is frightened, by the mere picture. And I have
still the impression that, as hour followed hour since the falling of the
wind, the nauseous swell in part subsided. I seemed less often on an
eminence or in a pit; my glassy azure dales had gentler slopes, or a
distemper was melting from my eyes.

At least I know that I had now less work to keep my frail ship trim,
though this also may have come by use and practice. In the beginning one
or other of my legs had been for ever trailing in the sea, to keep the
hen-coop from rolling over the other way; in fact, as I understand they
steer the toboggan in Canada, so I my little bark. Now the necessity for
this was gradually decreasing; whatever the cause, it was the greatest
mercy the day had brought me yet. With less strain on the attention,
however, there was more upon the mind. No longer forced to exert some
muscle twice or thrice a minute, I had time to feel very faint, and yet
time to think. My soul flew homing to its proper prison. I was no longer
any unit at unequal strife with the elements; instincts common to my kind
were no longer my only stimulus. I was my poor self again; it was my own
little life, and no other, that I wanted to go on living; and yet I felt
vaguely there was some special thing I wished to live for, something that
had not been very long in my ken; something that had perhaps nerved and
strengthened me all these hours. What, then, could it be? I could not
think.

For moments or for minutes I wondered stupidly, dazed as I was. Then I
remembered—and the tears gushed to my eyes. How could I ever have
forgotten? I deserved it all, all, all! To think that many a time we must
have sat together on this very coop! I kissed its blistering edge at the
thought, and my tears ran afresh, as though they never would stop.

Ah! how I thought of her as that cruel day's most cruel sun climbed higher
and higher in the flawless flaming vault. A pocket-handkerchief of all
things had remained in my trousers pocket through fire and water; I
knotted it on the old childish plan, and kept it ever drenched upon the
head that had its own fever to endure as well. Eva Denison! Eva Denison! I
was talking to her in the past, I was talking to her in the future, and
oh! how different were the words, the tone! Yes, I hated myself for having
forgotten her; but I hated God for having given her back to my tortured
brain; it made life so many thousandfold more sweet, and death so many
thousandfold more bitter.

She was saved in the gig. Sweet Jesus, thanks for that! But I—I was
dying a lingering death in mid-ocean; she would never know how I loved
her, I, who could only lecture her when I had her at my side.

Dying? No—no—not yet! I must live—live—live—to
tell my darling how I had loved her all the time. So I forced myself from
my lethargy of despair and grief; and this thought, the sweetest thought
of all my life, may or may not have been my unrealized stimulus ere now;
it was in very deed my most conscious and perpetual spur henceforth until
the end.

From this onward, while my sense stood by me, I was practical,
resourceful, alert. It was now high-noon, and I had eaten nothing since
dinner the night before. How clearly I saw the long saloon table, only
laid, however, abaft the mast; the glittering glass, the cool white
napery, the poor old dried dessert in the green dishes! Earlier, this had
occupied my mind an hour; now I dismissed it in a moment; there was Eva, I
must live for her; there must be ways of living at least a day or two
without sustenance, and I must think of them.

So I undid that belt of mine which fastened me to my gridiron, and I
straddled my craft with a sudden keen eye for sharks, of which I never
once had thought until now. Then I tightened the belt about my hollow
body, and just sat there with the problem. The past hour I had been wholly
unobservant; the inner eye had had its turn; but that was over now, and I
sat as upright as possible, seeking greedily for a sail. Of course I saw
none. Had we indeed been off our course before the fire broke out? Had we
burned to cinders aside and apart from the regular track of ships? Then,
though my present valiant mood might ignore the adverse chances, they were
as one hundred to a single chance of deliverance. Our burning had brought
no ship to our succor; and how should I, a mere speck amid the waves,
bring one to mine?

Moreover, I was all but motionless; I was barely drifting at all. This I
saw from a few objects which were floating around me now at noon; they had
been with me when the high sun rose. One was, I think, the very oar which
had been my first support; another was a sailor's cap; but another, which
floated nearer, was new to me, as though it had come to the surface while
my eyes were turned inwards. And this was clearly the case; for the thing
was a drowned and bloated corpse.

It fascinated me, though not with extraordinary horror; it came too late
to do that. I thought I recognized the man's back. I fancied it was the
mate who had taken charge of the long-boat. Was I then the single survivor
of those thirty souls? I was still watching my poor lost comrade, when
that happened to him against which even I was not proof. Through the deep
translucent blue beneath me a slim shape glided; three smaller fish led
the way; they dallied an instant a fathom under my feet, which were
snatched up, with what haste you may imagine; then on they went to surer
prey.

He turned over; his dreadful face stared upwards; it was the chief
officer, sure enough. Then he clove the water with a rush, his dead hand
waved, the last of him to disappear; and I had a new horror to think over
for my sins. His poor fingers were all broken and beaten to a pulp.

The voices of the night came back to me—the curses and the cries.
Yes, I must have heard them. In memory now I recognized the voice of the
chief mate, but there again came in the assisted imagination. Yet I was
not so sure of this as before. I thought of Santos and his horrible heavy
cane. Good God! she was in the power of that! I must live for Eva indeed;
must save myself to save and protect my innocent and helpless girl.

Again I was a man; stronger than ever was the stimulus now, louder than
ever the call on every drop of true man's blood in my perishing frame. It
should not perish! It should not!

Yet my throat was parched; my lips were caked; my frame was hollow. Very
weak I was already; without sustenance I should surely die. But as yet I
was far enough from death, or I had done disdaining the means of life that
all this time lay ready to my hand. A number of dead fowls imparted
ballast to my little craft.

Yet I could not look at them in all these hours; or I could look, but that
was all. So I must sit up one hour more, and keep a sharper eye than ever
for the tiniest glimmer of a sail. To what end, I often asked myself? I
might see them; they would never see me.

Then my eyes would fail, and “you squeamish fool!” I said at intervals,
until my tongue failed to articulate; it had swollen so in my mouth.
Flying fish skimmed the water like thick spray; petrels were so few that I
could count them; another shark swam round me for an hour. In sudden panic
I dashed my knuckles on the wooden bars, to get at a duck to give the
monster for a sop. My knuckles bled. I held them to my mouth. My cleaving
tongue wanted more. The duck went to the shark; a few minutes more and I
had made my own vile meal as well.

CHAPTER V. MY REWARD

The sun declined; my shadow broadened on die waters; and now I felt that
if my cockle-shell could live a little longer, why, so could I.

I had got at the fowls without further hurt. Some of the bars took out, I
discovered how. And now very carefully I got my legs in, and knelt; but
the change of posture was not worth the risk one ran for it; there was too
much danger of capsizing, and failing to free oneself before she filled
and sank.

With much caution I began breaking the bars, one by one; it was hard
enough, weak as I was; my thighs were of more service than my hands.

But at last I could sit, the grating only covering me from the knees
downwards. And the relief of that outweighed all the danger, which, as I
discovered to my untold joy, was now much less than it had been before. I
was better ballast than the fowls.

These I had attached to the lashings which had been blown asunder by the
explosion; at one end of the coop the ring-bolt had been torn clean out,
but at the other it was the cordage that had parted. To the frayed ends I
tied my fowls by the legs, with the most foolish pride in my own cunning.
Do you not see? It would keep them fresh for my use, and it was a trick I
had read of in no book; it was all my own.

So evening fell and found me hopeful and even puffed up; but yet, no sail.

Now, however, I could lie back, and use had given me a strange sense of
safety; besides, I think I knew, I hope I felt, that the hen-coop was in
other Hands than mine.

All is reaction in the heart of man; light follows darkness nowhere more
surely than in that hidden self, and now at sunset it was my heart's
high-noon. Deep peace pervaded me as I lay outstretched in my narrow
rocking bed, as it might be in my coffin; a trust in my Maker's will to
save me if that were for the best, a trust in His final wisdom and
loving-kindness, even though this night should be my last on earth. For
myself I was resigned, and for others I must trust Him no less. Who was I
to constitute myself the protector of the helpless, when He was in His
Heaven? Such was my sunset mood; it lasted a few minutes, and then,
without radically changing, it became more objective.

The west was a broadening blaze of yellow and purple and red. I cannot
describe it to you. If you have seen the sun set in the tropics, you would
despise my description; and, if not, I for one could never make you see
it. Suffice it that a petrel wheeled somewhere between deepening carmine
and paling blue, and it took my thoughts off at an earthy tangent. I
thanked God there were no big sea-birds in these latitudes; no
molly-hawks, no albatrosses, no Cape-hens. I thought of an albatross that
I had caught going out. Its beak and talons were at the bottom with the
charred remains of the Lady Jermyn. But I could see them still, could feel
them shrewdly in my mind's flesh; and so to the old superstition,
strangely justified by my case; and so to the poem which I, with my
special experience, not unnaturally consider the greatest poem ever
penned.

But I did not know it then as I do now—and how the lines eluded me!
I seemed to see them in the book, yet I could not read the words!

             “Water, water, everywhere,
              Nor any drop to drink.”
 

That, of course, came first (incorrectly); and it reminded me of my
thirst, which the blood of the fowls had so very partially appeased. I see
now that it is lucky I could recall but little more. Experience is less
terrible than realization, and that poem makes me realize what I went
through as memory cannot. It has verses which would have driven me mad. On
the other hand, the exhaustive mental search for them distracted my
thoughts until the stars were back in the sky; and now I had a new
occupation, saying to myself all the poetry I could remember, especially
that of the sea; for I was a bookish fellow even then. But I never was
anything of a scholar. It is odd therefore, that the one apposite passage
which recurred to me in its entirety was in hexameters and pentameters:

   Me miserum, quanti montes volvuntur aquarum!
   Jam jam tacturos sidera summa putes.
   Quantae diducto subsidunt aequore valles!
   Jam jam tacturas Tartara nigra putes.
   Quocunque adspicio, nihil est nisi pontus et aether;
   Fluctibus hic tumidis, nubibus ille minax....

More there was of it in my head; but this much was an accurate statement
of my case; and yet less so now (I was thankful to reflect) than in the
morning, when every wave was indeed a mountain, and its trough a Tartarus.
I had learnt the lines at school; nay, they had formed my very earliest
piece of Latin repetition. And how sharply I saw the room I said them in,
the man I said them to, ever since my friend! I figured him even now
hearing Ovid rep., the same passage in the same room. And I lay saying it
on a hen-coop in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!

At last I fell into a deep sleep, a long unconscious holiday of the soul,
undefiled by any dream.

They say that our dreaming is done as we slowly wake; then was I out of
the way of it that night, for a sudden violent rocking awoke me in one
horrid instant. I made it worse by the way I started to a sitting posture.
I had shipped some water. I was shipping more. Yet all around the sea was
glassy; whence then the commotion? As my ship came trim again, and I saw
that my hour was not yet, the cause occurred to me; and my heart turned so
sick that it was minutes before I had the courage to test my theory.

It was the true one.

A shark had been at my trailing fowls; had taken the bunch of them
together, dragging the legs from my loose fastenings. Lucky they had been
no stronger! Else had I been dragged down to perdition too.

Lucky, did I say? The refinement of cruelty rather; for now I had neither
meat nor drink; my throat was a kiln; my tongue a flame; and another day
at hand.

The stars were out; the sea was silver; the sun was up!

         .        .         .         .         .

Hours passed.

I was waiting now for my delirium.

It came in bits.

I was a child. I was playing on the lawn at home. I was back on the
blazing sea.

I was a schoolboy saying my Ovid; then back once more.

The hen-coop was the Lady Jermyn. I was at Eva Denison's side. They were
marrying us on board. The ship's bell was ringing for us; a guitar in the
background burlesqued the Wedding March under skinny fingers; the air was
poisoned by a million cigarettes, they raised a pall of smoke above the
mastheads, they set fire to the ship; smoke and flame covered the sea from
rim to rim, smoke and flame filled the universe; the sea dried up, and I
was left lying in its bed, lying in my coffin, with red-hot teeth, because
the sun blazed right above them, and my withered lips were drawn back from
them for ever.

So once more I came back to my living death; too weak now to carry a
finger to the salt water and back to my mouth; too weak to think of Eva;
too weak to pray any longer for the end, to trouble or to care any more.

Only so tired.

         .         .         .         .         .

Death has no more terrors for me. I have supped the last horror of the
worst death a man can die. You shall hear now for what I was delivered;
you shall read of my reward.

My floating coffin was many things in turn; a railway carriage, a pleasure
boat on the Thames, a hammock under the trees; last of all it was the
upper berth in a not very sweet-smelling cabin, with a clatter of knives
and forks near at hand, and a very strong odor of onions in the Irish
stew.

My hand crawled to my head; both felt a wondrous weight; and my head was
covered with bristles no longer than those on my chin, only less stubborn.

“Where am I?” I feebly asked.

The knives and forks clattered on, and presently I burst out crying
because they had not heard me, and I knew that I could never make them
hear. Well, they heard my sobs, and a huge fellow came with his mouth
full, and smelling like a pickle bottle.

“Where am I?”

“Aboard the brig Eliza, Liverpool, homeward bound; glad to see them eyes
open.”

“Have I been here long?”

“Matter o' ten days.”

“Where did you find me?”

“Floating in a hen-coop; thought you was a dead 'un.”

“Do you know what ship?”

“Do we know? No, that's what you've got to tell us!”

“I can't,” I sighed, too weak to wag my head upon the pillow.

The man went to my cabin door.

“Here's a go,” said he; “forgotten the name of his blessed ship, he has.
Where's that there paper, Mr. Bowles? There's just a chance it may be the
same.”

“I've got it, sir.”

“Well, fetch it along, and come you in, Mr. Bowles; likely you may think
o' somethin'.”

A reddish, hook-nosed man, with a jaunty, wicked look, came and smiled
upon me in the friendliest fashion; the smell of onions became more than I
knew how to endure.

“Ever hear of the ship Lady Jermyn?” asked the first corner, winking at
the other.

I thought very hard, the name did sound familiar; but no, I could not
honestly say that I had beard it before.

The captain looked at his mate.

“It was a thousand to one,” said he; “still we may as well try him with
the other names. Ever heard of Cap'n Harris, mister?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Of Saunderson-stooard?”

“No.”

“Or Crookes-quartermaster.”

“Never.”

“Nor yet of Ready—a passenger?”

“No.”

“It's no use goin' on,” said the captain folding up the paper.

“None whatever, sir,” said the mate

“Ready! Ready!” I repeated. “I do seem to have heard that name before.
Won't you give me another chance?”

The paper was unfolded with a shrug.

“There was another passenger of the name of San-Santos. Dutchman,
seemin'ly. Ever heard o' him?”

My disappointment was keen. I could not say that I had. Yet I would not
swear that I had not.

“Oh, won't you? Well, there's only one more chance. Ever heard of Miss Eva
Denison—”

“By God, yes! Have you?”

I was sitting bolt upright in my bunk. The skipper's beard dropped upon
his chest.

“Bless my soul! The last name o' the lot, too!”

“Have you heard of her?” I reiterated.

“Wait a bit, my lad! Not so fast. Lie down again and tell me who she was.”

“Who she was?” I screamed. “I want to know where she is!”

“I can't hardly say,” said the captain awkwardly. “We found the gig o' the
Lady Jermyn the week arter we found you, bein' becalmed like; there wasn't
no lady aboard her, though.”

“Was there anybody?”

“Two dead 'uns—an' this here paper.”

“Let me see it!”

The skipper hesitated.

“Hadn't you better wait a bit?”

“No, no; for Christ's sake let me see the worst; do you think I can't read
it in your face?”

I could—I did. I made that plain to them, and at last I had the
paper smoothed out upon my knees. It was a short statement of the last
sufferings of those who had escaped in the gig, and there was nothing in
it that I did not now expect. They had buried Ready first—then my
darling—then her step-father. The rest expected to follow fast
enough. It was all written plainly, on a sheet of the log-book, in
different trembling hands. Captain Harris had gone next; and two had been
discovered dead.

How long I studied that bit of crumpled paper, with the salt spray still
sparkling on it faintly, God alone knows. All at once a peal of nightmare
laughter rattled through the cabin. My deliverers started back. The laugh
was mine.

CHAPTER VI. THE SOLE SURVIVOR

A few weeks later I landed in England, I, who no longer desired to set
foot on any land again.

At nine-and-twenty I was gaunt and gray; my nerves were shattered, my
heart was broken; and my face showed it without let or hindrance from the
spirit that was broken too. Pride, will, courage, and endurance, all these
had expired in my long and lonely battle with the sea. They had kept me
alive-for this. And now they left me naked to mine enemies.

For every hand seemed raised against me, though in reality it was the hand
of fellowship that the world stretched out, and the other was the reading
of a jaundiced eye. I could not help it: there was a poison in my veins
that made me all ingratitude and perversity. The world welcomed me back,
and I returned the compliment by sulking like the recaptured runaway I was
at heart. The world showed a sudden interest in me; so I took no further
interest in the world, but, on the contrary, resented its attentions with
unreasonable warmth and obduracy; and my would-be friends I regarded as my
very worst enemies. The majority, I feel sure, meant but well and kindly
by the poor survivor. But the survivor could not forget that his name was
still in the newspapers, nor blink the fact that he was an unworthy hero
of the passing hour. And he suffered enough from brazenly meddlesome and
self-seeking folk, from impudent and inquisitive intruders, to justify
some suspicion of old acquaintances suddenly styling themselves old
friends, and of distant connections newly and unduly eager to claim
relationship. Many I misjudged, and have long known it. On the whole,
however, I wonder at that attitude of mine as little as I approve of it.

If I had distinguished myself in any other way, it would have been a
different thing. It was the fussy, sentimental, inconsiderate interest in
one thrown into purely accidental and necessarily painful prominence—the
vulgarization of an unspeakable tragedy—that my soul abhorred. I
confess that I regarded it from my own unique and selfish point of view.
What was a thrilling matter to the world was a torturing memory to me. The
quintessence of the torture was, moreover, my own secret. It was not the
loss of the Lady Jermyn that I could not bear to speak about; it was my
own loss; but the one involved the other. My loss apart, however, it was
plain enough to dwell upon experiences so terrible and yet so recent as
those which I had lived to tell. I did what I considered my duty to the
public, but I certainly did no more. My reticence was rebuked in the
papers that made the most of me, but would fain have made more. And yet I
do not think that I was anything but docile with those who had a manifest
right to question me; to the owners, and to other interested persons, with
whom I was confronted on one pretext or another, I told my tale as fully
and as freely as I have told it here, though each telling hurt more than
the last. That was necessary and unavoidable; it was the private
intrusions which I resented with all the spleen the sea had left me in
exchange for the qualities it had taken away.

Relatives I had as few as misanthropist could desire; but from
self-congratulation on the fact, on first landing, I soon came to keen
regret. They at least would have sheltered me from spies and busybodies;
they at least would have secured the peace and privacy of one who was no
hero in fact or spirit, whose noblest deed was a piece of self
preservation which he wished undone with all his heart.

Self-consciousness no doubt multiplied my flattering assailants. I have
said that my nerves were shattered. I may have imagined much and
exaggerated the rest. Yet what truth there was in my suspicions you shall
duly see. I felt sure that I was followed in the street, and my every
movement dogged by those to whom I would not condescend to turn and look.
Meanwhile, I had not the courage to go near my club, and the Temple was a
place where I was accosted in every court, effusively congratulated on the
marvellous preservation of my stale spoilt life, and invited right and
left to spin my yarn over a quiet pipe! Well, perhaps such invitations
were not so common as they have grown in my memory; nor must you confuse
my then feelings on all these matters with those which I entertain as I
write. I have grown older, and, I hope, something kindlier and wiser since
then. Yet to this day I cannot blame myself for abandoning my chambers and
avoiding my club.

For a temporary asylum I pitched upon a small, quiet, empty, private hotel
which I knew of in Charterhouse Square. Instantly the room next mine
became occupied.

All the first night I imagined I heard voices talking about me in that
room next door. It was becoming a disease with me. Either I was being
dogged, watched, followed, day and night, indoors and out, or I was the
victim of a very ominous hallucination. That night I never closed an eye
nor lowered my light. In the morning I took a four-wheel cab and drove
straight to Harley Street; and, upon my soul, as I stood on the
specialist's door-step, I could have sworn I saw the occupant of the room
next mine dash by me in a hansom!

“Ah!” said the specialist; “so you cannot sleep; you hear voices; you
fancy you are being followed in the street. You don't think these fancies
spring entirely from the imagination? Not entirely—just so. And you
keep looking behind you, as though somebody were at your elbow; and you
prefer to sit with your back close to the wall. Just so—just so.
Distressing symptoms, to be sure, but—but hardly to be wondered at
in a man who has come through your nervous strain.” A keen professional
light glittered in his eyes. “And almost commonplace,” he added, smiling,
“compared with the hallucinations you must have suffered from on that
hen-coop! Ah, my dear sir, the psychological interest of your case is very
great!”

“It may be,” said I, brusquely. “But I come to you to get that hen-coop
out of my head, not to be reminded of it. Everybody asks me about the
damned thing, and you follow everybody else. I wish it and I were at the
bottom of the sea together!”

This speech had the effect of really interesting the doctor in my present
condition, which was indeed one of chronic irritation and extreme
excitability, alternating with fits of the very blackest despair. Instead
of offending my gentleman I had put him on his mettle, and for half an
hour he honored me with the most exhaustive inquisition ever elicited from
a medical man. His panacea was somewhat in the nature of an anti-climax,
but at least it had the merits of simplicity and of common sense. A change
of air—perfect quiet—say a cottage in the country—not
too near the sea. And he shook my hand kindly when I left.

“Keep up your heart, my dear sir,” said he. “Keep up your courage and your
heart.”

“My heart!” I cried. “It's at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”

He was the first to whom I had said as much. He was a stranger. What did
it matter? And, oh, it was so true—so true.

Every day and all day I was thinking of my love; every hour and all hours
she was before me with her sunny hair and young, young face. Her wistful
eyes were gazing into mine continually. Their wistfulness I had never
realized at the time; but now I did; and I saw it for what it seemed
always to have been, the soft, sad, yearning look of one fated to die
young. So young—so young! And I might live to be an old man,
mourning her.

That I should never love again I knew full well. This time there was no
mistake. I have implied, I believe, that it was for another woman I fled
originally to the diggings. Well, that one was still unmarried, and when
the papers were full of me she wrote me a letter which I now believe to
have been merely kind. At the time I was all uncharitableness; but words
of mine would fail to tell you how cold this letter left me; it was as a
candle lighted in the full blaze of the sun.

With all my bitterness, however, you must not suppose that I had quite
lost the feelings which had inspired me at sunset on the lonely ocean,
while my mind still held good. I had been too near my Maker ever to lose
those feelings altogether. They were with me in the better moments of
these my worst days. I trusted His wisdom still. There was a reason for
everything; there were reasons for all this. I alone had been saved out of
all those souls who sailed from Melbourne in the Lady Jermyn. Why should I
have been the favored one; I with my broken heart and now lonely life?
Some great inscrutable reason there must be; at my worst I did not deny
that. But neither did I puzzle my sick brain with the reason. I just
waited for it to be revealed to me, if it were God's will ever to reveal
it. And that I conceive to be the one spirit in which a man may
contemplate, with equal sanity and reverence, the mysteries and the
miseries of his life.

CHAPTER VII. I FIND A FRIEND

The night after I consulted the specialist I was quite determined to
sleep. I had laid in a bundle of the daily papers. No country cottage was
advertised to let but I knew of it by evening, and about all the likely
ones I had already written. The scheme occupied my thoughts. Trout-fishing
was a desideratum. I would take my rod and plenty of books, would live
simply and frugally, and it should make a new man of me by Christmas. It
was now October. I went to sleep thinking of autumn tints against an
autumn sunset. It must have been very early, certainly not later than ten
o'clock; the previous night I had not slept at all.

Now, this private hotel of mine was a very old fashioned house, dark and
dingy all day long, with heavy old chandeliers and black old oak, and dead
flowers in broken flower-pots surrounding a grimy grass-plot in the rear.
On this latter my bedroom window looked; and never am I likely to forget
the vile music of the cats throughout my first long wakeful night there.
The second night they actually woke me; doubtless they had been busy long
enough, but it was all of a sudden that I heard them, and lay listening
for more, wide awake in an instant. My window had been very softly opened,
and the draught fanned my forehead as I held my breath.

A faint light glimmered through a ground-glass pane over the door; and was
dimly reflected by the toilet mirror, in its usual place against the
window. This mirror I saw moved, and next moment I had bounded from bed.

The mirror fell with a horrid clatter: the toilet-table followed it with a
worse: the thief had gone as he had come ere my toes halted aching amid
the debris.

A useless little balcony—stone slab and iron railing—jutted
out from my window. I thought I saw a hand on the railing, another on the
slab, then both together on the lower level for one instant before they
disappeared. There was a dull yet springy thud on the grass below. Then no
more noise but the distant thunder of the traffic, and the one that woke
me, until the window next mine was thrown up.

“What the devil's up?”

The voice was rich, cheery, light-hearted, agreeable; all that my own was
not as I answered “Nothing!” for this was not the first time my next-door
neighbor had tried to scrape acquaintance with me.

“But surely, sir, I heard the very dickens of a row?”

“You may have done.”

“I was afraid some one had broken into your room!”

“As a matter of fact,” said I, put to shame by the undiminished good-humor
of my neighbor, “some one did; but he's gone now, so let him be.”

“Gone? Not he! He's getting over that wall. After him—after him!”
And the head disappeared from the window next mine.

I rushed into the corridor, and was just in time to intercept a singularly
handsome young fellow, at whom I had hardly taken the trouble to look
until now. He was in full evening dress, and his face was radiant with the
spirit of mischief and adventure.

“For God's sake, sir,” I whispered, “let this matter rest. I shall have to
come forward if you persist, and Heaven knows I have been before the
public quite enough!”

His dark eyes questioned me an instant, then fell as though he would not
disguise that he recollected and understood. I liked him for his good
taste. I liked him for his tacit sympathy, and better still for the
amusing disappointment in his gallant, young face.

“I am sorry to have robbed you of a pleasant chase,” said I. “At one time
I should have been the first to join you. But, to tell you the truth, I've
had enough excitement lately to last me for my life.”

“I can believe that,” he answered, with his fine eyes full upon me. How
strangely I had misjudged him! I saw no vulgar curiosity in his flattering
gaze, but rather that very sympathy of which I stood in need. I offered
him my hand.

“It is very good of you to give in,” I said. “No one else has heard a
thing, you see. I shall look for another opportunity of thanking you
to-morrow.”

“No, no!” cried he, “thanks be hanged, but—but, I say, if I promise
you not to bore you about things—won't you drink a glass of
brandy-and-water in my room before you turn in again?”

Brandy-and-water being the very thing I needed, and this young man
pleasing me more and more, I said that I would join him with all my heart,
and returned to my room for my dressing-gown and slippers. To find them,
however, I had to light my candles, when the first thing I saw was the
havoc my marauder had left behind him. The mirror was cracked across; the
dressing-table had lost a leg; and both lay flat, with my brushes and
shaving-table, and the foolish toilet crockery which no one uses (but I
should have to replace) strewn upon the carpet. But one thing I found that
had not been there before: under the window lay a formidable sheath-knife
without its sheath. I picked it up with something of a thrill, which did
not lessen when I felt its edge. The thing was diabolically sharp. I took
it with me to show my neighbor, whom I found giving his order to the
boots; it seemed that it was barely midnight, and that he had only just
come in when the clatter took place in my room.

“Hillo!” he cried, when the man was gone, and I produced my trophy. “Why,
what the mischief have you got there?”

“My caller's card,” said I. “He left it behind him. Feel the edge.”

I have seldom seen a more indignant face than the one which my new
acquaintance bent over the weapon, as he held it to the light, and ran his
finger along the blade. He could have not frowned more heavily if he had
recognized the knife.

“The villains!” he muttered. “The damned villains!”

“Villains?” I queried. “Did you see more than one of them, then?”

“Didn't you?” he asked quickly. “Yes, yes, to be sure! There was at least
one other beggar skulking down below.” He stood looking at me, the knife
in his hand, though mine was held out for it. “Don't you think, Mr. Cole,
that it's our duty to hand this over to the police? I—I've heard of
other cases about these Inns of Court. There's evidently a gang of them,
and this knife might convict the lot; there's no saying; anyway I think
the police should have it. If you like I'll take it to Scotland Yard
myself, and hand it over without mentioning your name.”

“Oh, if you keep my name out of it,” said I, “and say nothing about it
here in the hotel, you may do what you like, and welcome! It's the proper
course, no doubt; only I've had publicity enough, and would sooner have
felt that blade in my body than set my name going again in the
newspapers.”

“I understand,” he said, with his well-bred sympathy, which never went a
shade too far; and he dropped the weapon into a drawer, as the boots
entered with the tray. In a minute he had brewed two steaming jorums of
spirits-and-water; as he handed me one, I feared he was going to drink my
health, or toast my luck; but no, he was the one man I had met who seemed,
as he said, to “understand.” Nevertheless, he had his toast.

“Here's confusion to the criminal classes in general,” he cried; “but
death and damnation to the owners of that knife!”

And we clinked tumblers across the little oval table in the middle of the
room. It was more of a sitting-room than mine; a bright fire was burning
in the grate, and my companion insisted on my sitting over it in the
arm-chair, while for himself he fetched the one from his bedside, and drew
up the table so that our glasses should be handy. He then produced a
handsome cigar-case admirably stocked, and we smoked and sipped in the
cosiest fashion, though without exchanging many words.

You may imagine my pleasure in the society of a youth, equally charming in
looks, manners and address, who had not one word to say to me about the
Lady Jermyn or my hen-coop. It was unique. Yet such, I suppose, was my
native contrariety, that I felt I could have spoken of the catastrophe to
this very boy with less reluctance than to any other creature whom I had
encountered since my deliverance. He seemed so full of silent sympathy:
his consideration for my feelings was so marked and yet so unobtrusive. I
have called him a boy. I am apt to write as the old man I have grown,
though I do believe I felt older then than now. In any case my young
friend was some years my junior. I afterwards found out that he was
six-and-twenty.

I have also called him handsome. He was the handsomest man that I have
ever met, had the frankest face, the finest eyes, the brightest smile. Yet
his bronzed forehead was low, and his mouth rather impudent and bold than
truly strong. And there was a touch of foppery about him, in the enormous
white tie and the much-cherished whiskers of the fifties, which was only
redeemed by that other touch of devilry that he had shown me in the
corridor. By the rich brown of his complexion, as well as by a certain
sort of swagger in his walk, I should have said that he was a naval
officer ashore, had he not told me who he was of his own accord.

“By the way,” he said, “I ought to give you my name. It's Rattray, of one
of the many Kirby Halls in this country. My one's down in Lancashire.”

“I suppose there's no need to tell my name?” said I, less sadly, I
daresay, than I had ever yet alluded to the tragedy which I alone
survived. It was an unnecessary allusion, too, as a reference to the
foregoing conversation will show.

“Well, no!” said he, in his frank fashion; “I can't honestly say there
is.”

We took a few puffs, he watching the fire, and I his firelit face.

“It must seem strange to you to be sitting with the only man who lived to
tell the tale!”

The egotism of this speech was not wholly gratuitous. I thought it did
seem strange to him: that a needless constraint was put upon him by
excessive consideration for my feelings. I desired to set him at his ease
as he had set me at mine. On the contrary, he seemed quite startled by my
remark.

“It is strange,” he said, with a shudder, followed by the biggest sip of
brandy-and-water he had taken yet. “It must have been horrible—horrible!”
he added to himself, his dark eyes staring into the fire.

“Ah!” said I, “it was even more horrible than you suppose or can ever
imagine.”

I was not thinking of myself, nor of my love, nor of any particular
incident of the fire that still went on burning in my brain. My tone was
doubtless confidential, but I was meditating no special confidence when my
companion drew one with his next words. These, however, came after a
pause, in which my eyes had fallen from his face, but in which I heard him
emptying his glass.

“What do you mean?” he whispered. “That there were other circumstances—things
which haven't got into the papers?”

“God knows there were,” I answered, my face in my hands; and, my grief
brought home to me, there I sat with it in the presence of that stranger,
without compunction and without shame.

He sprang up and paced the room. His tact made me realize my weakness, and
I was struggling to overcome it when he surprised me by suddenly stopping
and laying a rather tremulous hand upon my shoulder.

“You—It wouldn't do you any good to speak of those circumstances, I
suppose?” he faltered.

“No: not now: no good at all.”

“Forgive me,” he said, resuming his walk. “I had no business—I felt
so sorry—I cannot tell you how I sympathize! And yet—I wonder
if you will always feel so?”

“No saying how I shall feel when I am a man again,” said I. “You see what
I am at present.” And, pulling myself together, I rose to find my new
friend quite agitated in his turn.

“I wish we had some more brandy,” he sighed. “I'm afraid it's too late to
get any now.”

“And I'm glad of it,” said I. “A man in my state ought not to look at
spirits, or he may never look past them again. Thank goodness, there are
other medicines. Only this morning I consulted the best man on nerves in
London. I wish I'd gone to him long ago.”

“Harley Street, was it?”

“Yes.”

“Saw you on his doorstep, by Jove!” cried Rattray at once. “I was driving
over to Hampstead, and I thought it was you. Well, what's the
prescription?”

In my satisfaction at finding that he had not been dogging me
intentionally (though I had forgotten the incident till he reminded me of
it), I answered his question with unusual fulness.

“I should go abroad,” said Rattray. “But then, I always am abroad; it's
only the other day I got back from South America, and I shall up anchor
again before this filthy English winter sets in.”

Was he a sailor after all, or only a well-to-do wanderer on the face of
the earth? He now mentioned that he was only in England for a few weeks,
to have a look at his estate, and so forth; after which he plunged into
more or less enthusiastic advocacy of this or that foreign resort, as
opposed to the English cottage upon which I told him I had set my heart.

He was now, however, less spontaneous, I thought, than earlier in the
night. His voice had lost its hearty ring, and he seemed preoccupied, as
if talking of one matter while he thought upon another. Yet he would not
let me go; and presently he confirmed my suspicion, no less than my first
impression of his delightful frankness and cordiality, by candidly telling
me what was on his mind.

“If you really want a cottage in the country,” said he, “and the most
absolute peace and quiet to be got in this world, I know of the very thing
on my land in Lancashire. It would drive me mad in a week; but if you
really care for that sort of thing—”

“An occupied cottage?” I interrupted.

“Yes; a couple rent it from me, very decent people of the name of
Braithwaite. The man is out all day, and won't bother you when he's in;
he's not like other people, poor chap. But the woman 's all there, and
would do her best for you in a humble, simple, wholesome sort of way.”

“You think they would take me in?”

“They have taken other men—artists as a rule.”

“Then it's a picturesque country?”

“Oh, it's that if it's nothing else; but not a town for miles, mind you,
and hardly a village worthy the name.”

“Any fishing?”

“Yes—trout—small but plenty of 'em—in a beck running
close behind the cottage.”

“Come,” cried I, “this sounds delightful! Shall you be up there?”

“Only for a day or two,” was the reply. “I shan't trouble you, Mr. Cole.”

“My dear sir, that wasn't my meaning at all. I'm only sorry I shall not
see something of you on your own heath. I can't thank you enough for your
kind suggestion. When do you suppose the Braithwaites could do with me?”

His charming smile rebuked my impatience.

“We must first see whether they can do with you at all,” said he. “I
sincerely hope they can; but this is their time of year for tourists,
though perhaps a little late. I'll tell you what I'll do. As a matter of
fact, I'm going down there to-morrow, and I've got to telegraph to my
place in any case to tell them when to meet me. I'll send the telegram
first thing, and I'll make them send one back to say whether there's room
in the cottage or not.”

I thanked him warmly, but asked if the cottage was close to Kirby Hall,
and whether this would not be giving a deal of trouble at the other end;
whereupon he mischievously misunderstood me a second time, saying the
cottage and the hall were not even in sight of each other, and I really
had no intrusion to fear, as he was a lonely bachelor like myself, and
would only be up there four or five days at the most. So I made my
appreciation of his society plainer than ever to him; for indeed I had
found a more refreshing pleasure in it already than I had hoped to derive
from mortal man again; and we parted, at three o'clock in the morning,
like old fast friends.

“Only don't expect too much, my dear Mr. Cole,” were his last words to me.
“My own place is as ancient and as tumble-down as most ruins that you pay
to see over. And I'm never there myself because—I tell you frankly—I
hate it like poison!”

CHAPTER VIII. A SMALL PRECAUTION

My delight in the society of this young Squire Rattray (as I soon was to
hear him styled) had been such as to make me almost forget the sinister
incident which had brought us together. When I returned to my room,
however, there were the open window and the litter on the floor to remind
me of what had happened earlier in the night. Yet I was less disconcerted
than you might suppose. A common housebreaker can have few terrors for one
who has braved those of mid-ocean single-handed; my would-be visitor had
no longer any for me; for it had not yet occurred to me to connect him
with the voices and the footsteps to which, indeed, I had been unable to
swear before the doctor. On the other hand, these morbid imaginings (as I
was far from unwilling to consider them) had one and all deserted me in
the sane, clean company of the capital young fellow in the next room.

I have confessed my condition up to the time of this queer meeting. I have
tried to bring young Rattray before you with some hint of his freshness
and his boyish charm; and though the sense of failure is heavy upon me
there, I who knew the man knew also that I must fail to do him justice.
Enough may have been said, however, to impart some faint idea of what this
youth was to me in the bitter and embittering anti-climax of my life.
Conventional figures spring to my pen, but every one of them is true; he
was flowers in spring, he was sunshine after rain, he was rain following
long months of drought. I slept admirably after all; and I awoke to see
the overturned toilet-table, and to thrill as I remembered there was one
fellow-creature with whom I could fraternize without fear of a rude
reopening of my every wound.

I hurried my dressing in the hope of our breakfasting together. I knocked
at the next door, and, receiving no answer, even ventured to enter, with
the same idea. He was not there. He was not in the coffee-room. He was not
in the hotel.

I broke my fast in disappointed solitude, and I hung about disconsolate
all the morning, looking wistfully for my new-made friend. Towards mid-day
he drove up in a cab which he kept waiting at the curb.

“It's all right!” he cried out in his hearty way. “I sent my telegram
first thing, and I've had the answer at my club. The rooms are vacant, and
I'll see that Jane Braithwaite has all ready for you by to-morrow night.”

I thanked him from my heart. “You seem in a hurry!” I added, as I followed
him up the stairs.

“I am,” said he. “It's a near thing for the train. I've just time to stick
in my things.”

“Then I'll stick in mine,” said I impulsively, “and I'll come with you,
and doss down in any corner for the night.”

He stopped and turned on the stairs.

“You mustn't do that,” said he; “they won't have anything ready. I'm going
to make it my privilege to see that everything is as cosey as possible
when you arrive. I simply can't allow you to come to-day, Mr. Cole!” He
smiled, but I saw that he was in earnest, and of course I gave in.

“All right,” said I; “then I must content myself with seeing you off at
the station.”

To my surprise his smile faded, and a flush of undisguised annoyance made
him, if anything, better-looking than ever. It brought out a certain
strength of mouth and jaw which I had not observed there hitherto. It gave
him an ugliness of expression which only emphasized his perfection of
feature.

“You mustn't do that either,” said he, shortly. “I have an appointment at
the station. I shall be talking business all the time.”

He was gone to his room, and I went to mine feeling duly snubbed; yet I
deserved it; for I had exhibited a characteristic (though not chronic)
want of taste, of which I am sometimes guilty to this day. Not to show
ill-feeling on the head of it, I nevertheless followed him down again in
four or five minutes. And I was rewarded by his brightest smile as he
grasped my hand.

“Come to-morrow by the same train,” said he, naming station, line, and
hour; “unless I telegraph, all will be ready and you shall be met. You may
rely on reasonable charges. As to the fishing, go up-stream—to the
right when you strike the beck—and you'll find a good pool or two. I
may have to go to Lancaster the day after to-morrow, but I shall give you
a call when I get back.”

With that we parted, as good friends as ever. I observed that my regret at
losing him was shared by the boots, who stood beside me on the steps as
his hansom rattled off.

“I suppose Mr. Rattray stays here always when he comes to town?” said I.

“No, sir,” said the man, “we've never had him before, not in my time; but
I shouldn't mind if he came again.” And he looked twice at the coin in his
hand before pocketing it with evident satisfaction.

Lonely as I was, and wished to be, I think that I never felt my loneliness
as I did during the twenty-four hours which intervened between Rattray's
departure and my own. They dragged like wet days by the sea, and the
effect was as depressing. I have seldom been at such a loss for something
to do; and in my idleness I behaved like a child, wishing my new friend
back again, or myself on the railway with my new friend, until I blushed
for the beanstalk growth of my regard for him, an utter stranger, and a
younger man. I am less ashamed of it now: he had come into my dark life
like a lamp, and his going left a darkness deeper than before.

In my dejection I took a new view of the night's outrage. It was no common
burglar's work, for what had I worth stealing? It was the work of my
unseen enemies, who dogged me in the street; they alone knew why; the
doctor had called these hallucinations, and I had forced myself to agree
with the doctor; but I could not deceive myself in my present mood. I
remembered the steps, the steps—the stopping when I stopped—the
drawing away in the crowded streets—-the closing up in quieter
places. Why had I never looked round? Why? Because till to-day I had
thought it mere vulgar curiosity; because a few had bored me, I had
imagined the many at my heels; but now I knew—I knew! It was the few
again: a few who hated me even unto death.

The idea took such a hold upon me that I did not trouble my head with
reasons and motives. Certain persons had designs upon my life; that was
enough for me. On the whole, the thought was stimulating; it set a new
value on existence, and it roused a certain amount of spirit even in me. I
would give the fellows another chance before I left town. They should
follow me once more, and this time to some purpose. Last night they had
left a knife on me; to-night I would have a keepsake ready for them.

Hitherto I had gone unarmed since my landing, which, perhaps, was no more
than my duty as a civilized citizen. On Black Hill Flats, however, I had
formed another habit, of which I should never have broken myself so
easily, but for the fact that all the firearms I ever had were reddening
and rotting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I now went out and bought
me such a one as I had never possessed before.

The revolver was then in its infancy; but it did exist; and by dusk I was
owner of as fine a specimen as could be procured in the city of London. It
had but five chambers, but the barrel was ten inches long; one had to cap
it, and to put in the powder and the wadded bullet separately; but the
last-named would have killed an elephant. The oak case that I bought with
it cumbers my desk as I write, and, shut, you would think that it had
never contained anything more lethal than fruit-knives. I open it, and
there are the green-baize compartments, one with a box of percussion caps,
still apparently full, another that could not contain many more
wadded-bullets, and a third with a powder-horn which can never have been
much lighter. Within the lid is a label bearing the makers' names; the
gentlemen themselves are unknown to me, even if they are still alive;
nevertheless, after five-and-forty years, let me dip my pen to Messrs.
Deane, Adams and Deane!

That night I left this case in my room, locked, and the key in my
waistcoat pocket; in the right-hand side-pocket of my overcoat I carried
my Deane and Adams, loaded in every chamber; also my right hand, as
innocently as you could wish. And just that night I was not followed! I
walked across Regent's Park, and I dawdled on Primrose Hill, without the
least result. Down I turned into the Avenue Road, and presently was
strolling between green fields towards Finchley. The moon was up, but
nicely shaded by a thin coating of clouds which extended across the sky:
it was an ideal night for it. It was also my last night in town, and I did
want to give the beggars their last chance. But they did not even attempt
to avail themselves of it: never once did they follow me: my ears were in
too good training to make any mistake. And the reason only dawned on me as
I drove back disappointed: they had followed me already to the gunsmith's!

Convinced of this, I entertained but little hope of another midnight
visitor. Nevertheless, I put my light out early, and sat a long time
peeping through my blind; but only an inevitable Tom, with back hunched up
and tail erect, broke the moonlit profile of the back-garden wall; and
once more that disreputable music (which none the less had saved my life)
was the only near sound all night.

I felt very reluctant to pack Deane and Adams away in his case next
morning, and the case in my portmanteau, where I could not get at it in
case my unknown friends took it into their heads to accompany me out of
town. In the hope that they would, I kept him loaded, and in the same
overcoat pocket, until late in the afternoon, when, being very near my
northern destination, and having the compartment to myself, I locked the
toy away with considerable remorse for the price I had paid for it. All
down the line I had kept an eye for suspicious characters with an eye upon
me; but even my self-consciousness failed to discover one; and I reached
my haven of peace, and of fresh fell air, feeling, I suppose, much like
any other fool who has spent his money upon a white elephant.

CHAPTER IX. MY CONVALESCENT HOME

The man Braithwaite met me at the station with a spring cart. The very
porters seemed to expect me, and my luggage was in the cart before I had
given up my ticket. Nor had we started when I first noticed that
Braithwaite did not speak when I spoke to him. On the way, however, a more
flagrant instance recalled young Rattray's remark, that the man was “not
like other people.” I had imagined it to refer to a mental, not a
physical, defect; whereas it was clear to me now that my prospective
landlord was stone-deaf, and I presently discovered him to be dumb as
well. Thereafter I studied him with some attention during our drive of
four or five miles. I called to mind the theory that an innate physical
deficiency is seldom without its moral counterpart, and I wondered how far
this would apply to the deaf-mute at my side, who was ill-grown, wizened,
and puny into the bargain. The brow-beaten face of him was certainly
forbidding, and he thrashed his horse up the hills in a dogged,
vindictive, thorough-going way which at length made me jump out and climb
one of them on foot. It was the only form of protest that occurred to me.

The evening was damp and thick. It melted into night as we drove. I could
form no impression of the country, but this seemed desolate enough. I
believe we met no living soul on the high road which we followed for the
first three miles or more. At length we turned into a narrow lane, with a
stiff stone wall on either hand, and this eventually led us past the
lights of what appeared to be a large farm; it was really a small hamlet;
and now we were nearing our destination. Gates had to be opened, and my
poor driver breathed hard from the continual getting down and up. In the
end a long and heavy cart-track brought us to the loneliest light that I
have ever seen. It shone on the side of a hill—in the heart of an
open wilderness—as solitary as a beacon-light at sea. It was the
light of the cottage which was to be my temporary home.

A very tall, gaunt woman stood in the doorway against the inner glow. She
advanced with a loose, long stride, and invited me to enter in a voice
harsh (I took it) from disuse. I was warming myself before the kitchen
fire when she came in carrying my heaviest box as though it had nothing in
it. I ran to take it from her, for the box was full of books, but she
shook her head, and was on the stairs with it before I could intercept
her.

I conceive that very few men are attracted by abnormal strength in a
woman; we cannot help it; and yet it was not her strength which first
repelled me in Mrs. Braithwaite. It was a combination of attributes. She
had a poll of very dirty and untidy red hair; her eyes were set close
together; she had the jowl of the traditional prize-fighter. But far more
disagreeable than any single feature was the woman's expression, or rather
the expression which I caught her assuming naturally, and banishing with
an effort for my benefit. To me she was strenuously civil in her uncouth
way. But I saw her give her husband one look, as he staggered in with my
comparatively light portmanteau, which she instantly snatched out of his
feeble arms. I saw this look again before the evening was out, and it was
such a one as Braithwaite himself had fixed upon his horse as he flogged
it up the hills.

I began to wonder how the young squire had found it in his conscience to
recommend such a pair. I wondered less when the woman finally ushered me
upstairs to my rooms. These were small and rugged, but eminently snug and
clean. In each a good fire blazed cheerfully; my portmanteau was already
unstrapped, the table in the sitting-room already laid; and I could not
help looking twice at the silver and the glass, so bright was their
condition, so good their quality. Mrs. Braithwaite watched me from the
door.

“I doubt you'll be thinking them's our own,” said she. “I wish they were;
t'squire sent 'em in this afternoon.”

“For my use?”

“Ay; I doubt he thought what we had ourselves wasn't good enough. An' it's
him 'at sent t' armchair, t'bed-linen, t'bath, an' that there
lookin'-glass an' all.”

She had followed me into the bedroom, where I looked with redoubled
interest at each object as she mentioned it, and it was in the glass—a
masqueline shaving-glass—that I caught my second glimpse of my
landlady's evil expression—levelled this time at myself.

I instantly turned round and told her that I thought it very kind of Mr.
Rattray, but that, for my part, I was not a luxurious man, and that I felt
rather sorry the matter had not been left entirely in her hands. She
retired seemingly mollified, and she took my sympathy with her, though I
was none the less pleased and cheered by my new friend's zeal for my
comfort; there were even flowers on my table, without a doubt from Kirby
Hall.

And in another matter the squire had not misled me: the woman was an
excellent plain cook. I expected ham and eggs. Sure enough, this was my
dish, but done to a turn. The eggs were new and all unbroken, the ham so
lean and yet so tender, that I would not have exchanged my humble, hearty
meal for the best dinner served that night in London. It made a new man of
me, after my long journey and my cold, damp drive. I was for chatting with
Mrs. Braithwaite when she came up to clear away. I thought she might be
glad to talk after the life she must lead with her afflicted husband, but
it seemed to have had the opposite effect on her. All I elicited was an
ambiguous statement as to the distance between the cottage and the hall;
it was “not so far.” And so she left me to my pipe and to my best night
yet, in the stillest spot I have ever slept in on dry land; one heard
nothing but the bubble of a beck; and it seemed very, very far away.

A fine, bright morning showed me my new surroundings in their true colors;
even in the sunshine these were not very gay. But gayety was the last
thing I wanted. Peace and quiet were my whole desire, and both were here,
set in scenery at once lovely to the eye and bracing to the soul.

From the cottage doorstep one looked upon a perfect panorama of healthy,
open English country. Purple hills hemmed in a broad, green, undulating
plateau, scored across and across by the stone walls of the north, and all
dappled with the shadows of rolling leaden clouds with silver fringes.
Miles away a church spire stuck like a spike out of the hollow, and the
smoke of a village dimmed the trees behind. No nearer habitation could I
see. I have mentioned a hamlet which we passed in the spring-cart. It lay
hidden behind some hillocks to the left. My landlady told me it was better
than half a mile away, and “nothing when you get there; no shop; no
post-office; not even a public-house.”

I inquired in which direction lay the hall. She pointed to the nearest
trees, a small forest of stunted oaks, which shut in the view to the
right, after quarter of a mile of a bare and rugged valley. Through this
valley twisted the beck which I had heard faintly in the night. It ran
through the oak plantation and so to the sea, some two or three miles
further on, said my landlady; but nobody would have thought it was so
near.

“T'squire was to be away to-day,” observed the woman, with the broad vowel
sound which I shall not attempt to reproduce in print. “He was going to
Lancaster, I believe.”

“So I understood,” said I. “I didn't think of troubling him, if that's
what you mean. I'm going to take his advice and fish the beck.”

And I proceeded to do so after a hearty early dinner: the keen, chill air
was doing me good already: the “perfect quiet” was finding its way into my
soul. I blessed my specialist, I blessed Squire Rattray, I blessed the
very villains who had brought us within each other's ken; and nowhere was
my thanksgiving more fervent than in the deep cleft threaded by the beck;
for here the shrewd yet gentle wind passed completely overhead, and the
silence was purged of oppression by the ceaseless symphony of clear water
running over clean stones.

But it was no day for fishing, and no place for the fly, though I went
through the form of throwing one for several hours. Here the stream merely
rinsed its bed, there it stood so still, in pools of liquid amber, that,
when the sun shone, the very pebbles showed their shadows in the deepest
places. Of course I caught nothing; but, towards the close of the
gold-brown afternoon, I made yet another new acquaintance, in the person
of a little old clergyman who attacked me pleasantly from the rear.

“Bad day for fishing, sir,” croaked the cheery voice which first informed
me of his presence. “Ah, I knew it must be a stranger,” he cried as I
turned and he hopped down to my side with the activity of a much younger
man.

“Yes,” I said, “I only came down from London yesterday. I find the spot so
delightful that I haven't bothered much about the sport. Still, I've had
about enough of it now.” And I prepared to take my rod to pieces.

“Spot and sport!” laughed the old gentleman. “Didn't mean it for a pun, I
hope? Never could endure puns! So you came down yesterday, young
gentleman, did you? And where may you be staying?”

I described the position of my cottage without the slightest hesitation;
for this parson did not scare me; except in appearance he had so little in
common with his type as I knew it. He had, however, about the shrewdest
pair of eyes that I have ever seen, and my answer only served to intensify
their open scrutiny.

“How on earth did you come to hear of a God-forsaken place like this?”
said he, making use, I thought, of a somewhat stronger expression than
quite became his cloth.

“Squire Rattray told me of it,” said I.

“Ha! So you're a friend of his, are you?” And his eyes went through and
through me like knitting-needles through a ball of wool.

“I could hardly call myself that,” said I. “But Mr. Rattray has been very
kind to me.”

“Meet him in town?”

I said I had, but I said it with some coolness, for his tone had dropped
into the confidential, and I disliked it as much as this string of
questions from a stranger.

“Long ago, sir?” he pursued.

“No, sir; not long ago,” I retorted.

“May I ask your name?” said he.

“You may ask what you like,” I cried, with a final reversal of all my
first impressions of this impertinent old fellow; “but I'm hanged if I
tell it you! I am here for rest and quiet, sir. I don't ask you your name.
I can't for the life of me see what right you have to ask me mine, or to
question me at all, for that matter.”

He favored me with a brief glance of extraordinary suspicion. It faded
away in mere surprise, and, next instant, my elderly and reverend friend
was causing me some compunction by coloring like a boy.

“You may think my curiosity mere impertinence, sir,” said he; “you would
think otherwise if you knew as much as I do of Squire Rattray's friends,
and how little you resemble the generality of them. You might even feel
some sympathy for one of the neighboring clergy, to whom this godless
young man has been for years as a thorn in their side.”

He spoke so gravely, and what he said was so easy to believe, that I could
not but apologize for my hasty words.

“Don't name it, sir,” said the clergyman; “you had a perfect right to
resent my questions, and I enjoy meeting young men of spirit; but not when
it's an evil spirit, such as, I fear, possesses your friend! I do assure
you, sir, that the best thing I have heard of him for years is the very
little that you have told me. As a rule, to hear of him at all in this
part of the world, is to wish that we had not heard. I see him coming,
however, and shall detain you no longer, for I don't deny that there is no
love lost between us.”

I looked round, and there was Rattray on the top of the bank, a long way
to the left, coming towards me with a waving hat. An extraordinary
ejaculation brought me to the right-about next instant.

The old clergyman had slipped on a stone in mid-stream, and, as he dragged
a dripping leg up the opposite bank, he had sworn an oath worthy of the
“godless young man” who had put him to flight, and on whose demerits he
had descanted with so much eloquence and indignation.

CHAPTER X. WINE AND WEAKNESS

“Sporting old parson who knows how to swear?” laughed Rattray. “Never saw
him in my life before; wondered who the deuce he was.”

“Really?” said I. “He professed to know something of you.”

“Against me, you mean? My dear Cole, don't trouble to perjure yourself. I
don't mind, believe me. They're easily shocked, these country clergy, and
no doubt I'm a bugbear to 'em. Yet, I could have sworn I'd never seen this
one before. Let's have another look.”

We were walking away together. We turned on the top of the bank. And there
the old clergyman was planted on the moorside, and watching us intently
from under his hollowed hands.

“Well, I'm hanged!” exclaimed Rattray, as the hands fell and their owner
beat a hasty retreat. My companion said no more; indeed, for some minutes
we pursued our way in silence. And I thought that it was with an effort
that he broke into sudden inquiries concerning my journey and my comfort
at the cottage.

This gave me an opportunity of thanking him for his little attentions. “It
was awfully good of you,” said I, taking his arm as though I had known him
all my life; nor do I think there was another living man with whom I would
have linked arms at that time.

“Good?” cried he. “Nonsense, my dear sir! I'm only afraid you find it
devilish rough. But, at all events, you're coming to dine with me
to-night.”

“Am I?” I asked, smiling.

“Rather!” said he. “My time here is short enough. I don't lose sight of
you again between this and midnight.”

“It's most awfully good of you,” said I again.

“Wait till you see! You'll find it rough enough at my place; all my
retainers are out for the day at a local show.”

“Then I certainly shall not give you the trouble.”

He interrupted me with his jovial laugh.

“My good fellow,” he cried, “that's the fun of it! How do you suppose I've
been spending the day? Told you I was going to Lancaster, did I? Well,
I've been cooking our dinner instead—laying the table—getting
up the wines—never had such a joke! Give you my word, I almost
forgot I was in the wilderness!”

“So you're quite alone, are you?”

“Yes; as much so as that other beggar who was monarch of all he surveyed,
his right there was none to dispute, from the what-is-it down to the glade—”

“I'll come,” said I, as we reached the cottage. “Only first you must let
me make myself decent.”

“You're decent enough!”

“My boots are wet; my hands—”

“All serene! I'll give you five minutes.”

And I left him outside, flourishing a handsome watch, while, on my way
upstairs, I paused to tell Mrs. Braithwaite that I was dining at the hall.
She was busy cooking, and I felt prepared for her unpleasant expression;
but she showed no annoyance at my news. I formed the impression that it
was no news to her. And next minute I heard a whispering below; it was
unmistakable in that silent cottage, where not a word had reached me yet,
save in conversation to which I was myself a party.

I looked out of window. Rattray I could no longer see. And I confess that
I felt both puzzled and annoyed until we walked away together, when it was
his arm which was immediately thrust through mine.

“A good soul, Jane,” said he; “though she made an idiotic marriage, and
leads a life which might spoil the temper of an archangel. She was my
nurse when I was a youngster, Cole, and we never meet without a yarn.”
Which seemed natural enough; still I failed to perceive why they need yarn
in whispers.

Kirby Hall proved startlingly near at hand. We descended the bare valley
to the right, we crossed the beck upon a plank, were in the oak-plantation
about a minute, and there was the hall upon the farther side.

And a queer old place it seemed, half farm, half feudal castle: fowls
strutting at large about the back premises (which we were compelled to
skirt), and then a front door of ponderous oak, deep-set between walls
fully six feet thick, and studded all over with wooden pegs. The facade,
indeed, was wholly grim, with a castellated tower at one end, and a number
of narrow, sunken windows looking askance on the wreck and ruin of a once
prim, old-fashioned, high-walled garden. I thought that Rattray might have
shown more respect for the house of his ancestors. It put me in mind of a
neglected grave. And yet I could forgive a bright young fellow for never
coming near so desolate a domain.

We dined delightfully in a large and lofty hall, formerly used (said
Rattray) as a court-room. The old judgment seat stood back against the
wall, and our table was the one at which the justices had been wont to
sit. Then the chamber had been low-ceiled; now it ran to the roof, and we
ate our dinner beneath a square of fading autumn sky, with I wondered how
many ghosts looking down on us from the oaken gallery! I was interested,
impressed, awed not a little, and yet all in a way which afforded my mind
the most welcome distraction from itself and from the past. To Rattray, on
the other hand, it was rather sadly plain that the place was both a burden
and a bore; in fact he vowed it was the dampest and the dullest old ruin
under the sun, and that he would sell it to-morrow if he could find a
lunatic to buy. His want of sentiment struck me as his one deplorable
trait. Yet even this displayed his characteristic merit of frankness. Nor
was it at all unpleasant to hear his merry, boyish laughter ringing round
hall and gallery, ere it died away against a dozen closed doors.

And there were other elements of good cheer: a log fire blazing heartily
in the old dog-grate, casting a glow over the stone flags, a reassuring
flicker into the darkest corner: cold viands of the very best: and the
finest old Madeira that has ever passed my lips.

Now, all my life I have been a “moderate drinker” in the most literal
sense of that slightly elastic term. But at the sad time of which I am
trying to write, I was almost an abstainer, from the fear, the temptation—of
seeking oblivion in strong waters. To give way then was to go on giving
way. I realized the danger, and I took stern measures. Not stern enough,
however; for what I did not realize was my weak and nervous state, in
which a glass would have the same effect on me as three or four upon a
healthy man.

Heaven knows how much or how little I took that evening! I can swear it
was the smaller half of either bottle—and the second we never
finished—but the amount matters nothing. Even me it did not make
grossly tipsy. But it warmed my blood, it cheered my heart, it excited my
brain, and—it loosened my tongue. It set me talking with a freedom
of which I should have been incapable in my normal moments, on a subject
whereof I had never before spoken of my own free will. And yet the will to—speak—to
my present companion—was no novelty. I had felt it at our first
meeting in the private hotel. His tact, his sympathy, his handsome face,
his personal charm, his frank friendliness, had one and all tempted me to
bore this complete stranger with unsolicited confidences for which an
inquisitive relative might have angled in vain. And the temptation was the
stronger because I knew in my heart that I should not bore the young
squire at all; that he was anxious enough to hear my story from my own
lips, but too good a gentleman intentionally to betray such anxiety.
Vanity was also in the impulse. A vulgar newspaper prominence had been my
final (and very genuine) tribulation; but to please and to interest one so
pleasing and so interesting to me, was another and a subtler thing. And
then there was his sympathy—shall I add his admiration?—for my
reward.

I do not pretend that I argued thus deliberately in my heated and excited
brain. I merely hold that all these small reasons and motives were there,
fused and exaggerated by the liquor which was there as well. Nor can I say
positively that Rattray put no leading questions; only that I remember
none which had that sound; and that, once started, I am afraid I needed
only too little encouragement to run on and on.

Well, I was set going before we got up from the table. I continued in an
armchair that my host dragged from a little book-lined room adjoining the
hall. I finished on my legs, my back to the fire, my hands beating wildly
together. I had told my dear Rattray of my own accord more than living man
had extracted from me yet. He interrupted me very little; never once until
I came to the murderous attack by Santos on the drunken steward.

“The brute!” cried Rattray. “The cowardly, cruel, foreign devil! And you
never let out one word of that!”

“What was the good?” said I. “They are all gone now—all gone to
their account. Every man of us was a brute at the last. There was nothing
to be gained by telling the public that.”

He let me go on until I came to another point which I had hitherto kept to
myself: the condition of the dead mate's fingers: the cries that the sight
of them had recalled.

“That Portuguese villain again!” cried my companion, fairly leaping from
the chair which I had left and he had taken. “It was the work of the same
cane that killed the steward. Don't tell me an Englishman would have done
it; and yet you said nothing about that either!”

It was my first glimpse of this side of my young host's character. Nor did
I admire him the less, in his spirited indignation, because much of this
was clearly against myself. His eyes flashed. His face was white. I
suddenly found myself the cooler man of the two.

“My dear fellow, do consider!” said I. “What possible end could have been
served by my stating what I couldn't prove against a man who could never
be brought to book in this world? Santos was punished as he deserved; his
punishment was death, and there's an end on't.”

“You might be right,” said Rattray, “but it makes my blood boil to hear
such a story. Forgive me if I have spoken strongly;” and he paced his hall
for a little in an agitation which made me like him better and better.
“The cold-blooded villain!” he kept muttering; “the infernal, foreign,
blood-thirsty rascal! Perhaps you were right; it couldn't have done any
good, I know; but—I only wish he'd lived for us to hang him, Cole!
Why, a beast like that is capable of anything: I wonder if you've told me
the worst even now?” And he stood before me, with candid suspicion in his
fine, frank eyes.

“What makes you say that?” said I, rather nettled.

“I shan't tell you if it's going to rile you, old fellow,” was his reply.
And with it reappeared the charming youth whom I found it impossible to
resist. “Heaven knows you have had enough to worry you!” he added, in his
kindly, sympathetic voice.

“So much,” said I, “that you cannot add to it, my dear Rattray. Now, then!
Why do you think there was something worse?”

“You hinted as much in town: rightly or wrongly I gathered there was
something you would never speak about to living man.”

I turned from him with a groan.

“Ah! but that had nothing to do with Santos.”

“Are you sure?” he cried.

“No,” I murmured; “it had something to do with him, in a sense; but don't
ask me any more.” And I leaned my forehead on the high oak mantel-piece,
and groaned again.

His hand was upon my shoulder.

“Do tell me,” he urged. I was silent. He pressed me further. In my fancy,
both hand and voice shook with his sympathy.

“He had a step-daughter,” said I at last.

“Yes? Yes?”

“I loved her. That was all.”

His hand dropped from my shoulder. I remained standing, stooping, thinking
only of her whom I had lost for ever. The silence was intense. I could
hear the wind sighing in the oaks without, the logs burning softly away at
my feet And so we stood until the voice of Rattray recalled me from the
deck of the Lady Jermyn and my lost love's side.

“So that was all!”

I turned and met a face I could not read.

“Was it not enough?” cried I. “What more would you have?”

“I expected some more-foul play!”

“Ah!” I exclaimed bitterly. “So that was all that interested you! No,
there was no more foul play that I know of; and if there was, I don't
care. Nothing matters to me but one thing. Now that you know what that is,
I hope you're satisfied.”

It was no way to speak to one's host. Yet I felt that he had pressed me
unduly. I hated myself for my final confidence, and his want of sympathy
made me hate him too. In my weakness, however, I was the natural prey of
violent extremes. His hand flew out to me. He was about to speak. A moment
more and I had doubtless forgiven him. But another sound came instead and
made the pair of us start and stare. It was the soft shutting of some
upstairs door.

“I thought we had the house to ourselves?” cried I, my miserable nerves on
edge in an instant.

“So did I,” he answered, very pale. “My servants must have come back. By
the Lord Harry, they shall hear of this!”

He sprang to a door, I heard his feet clattering up some stone stairs, and
in a trice he was running along the gallery overhead; in another I heard
him railing behind some upper door that he had flung open and banged
behind him; then his voice dropped, and finally died away. I was left some
minutes in the oppressively silent hall, shaken, startled, ashamed of my
garrulity, aching to get away. When he returned it was by another of the
many closed doors, and he found me awaiting him, hat in hand. He was
wearing his happiest look until he saw my hat.

“Not going?” he cried. “My dear Cole, I can't apologize sufficiently for
my abrupt desertion of you, much less for the cause. It was my man, just
come in from the show, and gone up the back way. I accused him of
listening to our conversation. Of course he denies it; but it really
doesn't matter, as I'm sorry to say he's much too 'fresh' (as they call it
down here) to remember anything to-morrow morning. I let him have it, I
can tell you. Varlet! Caitiff! But if you bolt off on the head of it, I
shall go back and sack him into the bargain!”

I assured him I had my own reasons for wishing to retire early. He could
have no conception of my weakness, my low and nervous condition of body
and mind; much as I had enjoyed myself, he must really let me go. Another
glass of wine, then? Just one more? No, I had drunk too much already. I
was in no state to stand it. And I held out my hand with decision.

Instead of taking it he looked at me very hard.

“The place doesn't suit you,” said he. “I see it doesn't, and I'm devilish
sorry! Take my advice and try something milder; now do, to-morrow; for I
should never forgive myself if it made you worse instead of better; and
the air is too strong for lots of people.”

I was neither too ill nor too vexed to laugh outright in his face.

“It's not the air,” said I; “it's that splendid old Madeira of yours, that
was too strong for me, if you like! No, no, Rattray, you don't get rid of
me so cheaply-much as you seem to want to!”

“I was only thinking of you,” he rejoined, with a touch of pique that
convinced me of his sincerity. “Of course I want you to stop, though I
shan't be here many days; but I feel responsible for you, Cole, and that's
the fact. Think you can find your way?” he continued, accompanying me to
the gate, a postern in the high garden wall. “Hadn't you better have a
lantern?”

No; it was unnecessary. I could see splendidly, had the bump of locality
and as many more lies as would come to my tongue. I was indeed burning to
be gone.

A moment later I feared that I had shown this too plainly. For his final
handshake was hearty enough to send me away something ashamed of my
precipitancy, and with a further sense of having shown him small gratitude
for his kindly anxiety on my behalf. I would behave differently to-morrow.
Meanwhile I had new regrets.

At first it was comparatively easy to see, for the lights of the house
shone faintly among the nearer oaks. But the moon was hidden behind heavy
clouds, and I soon found myself at a loss in a terribly dark zone of
timber. Already I had left the path. I felt in my pocket for matches. I
had none.

My head was now clear enough, only deservedly heavy. I was still
quarrelling with myself for my indiscretions and my incivilities, one and
all the result of his wine and my weakness, and this new predicament
(another and yet more vulgar result) was the final mortification. I swore
aloud. I simply could not see a foot in front of my face. Once I proved it
by running my head hard against a branch. I was hopelessly and
ridiculously lost within a hundred yards of the hall!

Some minutes I floundered, ashamed to go back, unable to proceed for the
trees and the darkness. I heard the beck running over its stones. I could
still see an occasional glimmer from the windows I had left. But the light
was now on this side, now on that; the running water chuckled in one ear
after the other; there was nothing for it but to return in all humility
for the lantern which I had been so foolish as to refuse.

And as I resigned myself to this imperative though inglorious course, my
heart warmed once more to the jovial young squire. He would laugh, but not
unkindly, at my grotesque dilemma; at the thought of his laughter I began
to smile myself. If he gave me another chance I would smoke that cigar
with him before starting home afresh, and remove, from my own mind no
less than from his, all ill impressions. After all it was not his fault
that I had taken too much of his wine; but a far worse offence was to be
sulky in one's cups. I would show him that I was myself again in all
respects. I have admitted that I was temporarily, at all events, a
creature of extreme moods. It was in this one that I retraced my steps
towards the lights, and at length let myself into the garden by the
postern at which I had shaken Rattray's hand not ten minutes before.

Taking heart of grace, I stepped up jauntily to the porch. The weeds
muffled my steps. I myself had never thought of doing so, when all at once
I halted in a vague terror. Through the deep lattice windows I had seen
into the lighted hall. And Rattray was once more seated at his table, a
little company of men around him.

I crept nearer, and my heart stopped. Was I delirious, or raving mad with
wine? Or had the sea given up its dead?

CHAPTER XI. I LIVE AGAIN

Squire Rattray, as I say, was seated at the head of his table, where the
broken meats still lay as he and I had left them; his fingers, I remember,
were playing with a crust, and his eyes fixed upon a distant door, as he
leant back in his chair. Behind him hovered the nigger of the Lady Jermyn,
whom I had been the slower to recognize, had not her skipper sat facing me
on the squire's right. Yes, there was Captain Harris in the flesh, eating
heartily between great gulps of wine, instead of feeding the fishes as all
the world supposed. And nearer still, nearer me than any, with his back to
my window but his chair slued round a little, so that he also could see
that door, and I his profile, sat Joaquin Santos with his cigarette!

None spoke; all seemed waiting; and all were silent but the captain, whose
vulgar champing reached me through the crazy lattice, as I stood
spellbound and petrified without.

They say that a drowning man lives his life again before the last; but my
own fight with the sea provided me with no such moments of vivid and rapid
retrospect as those during which I stood breathless outside the lighted
windows of Kirby Hall. I landed again. I was dogged day and night. I set
it down to nerves and notoriety; but took refuge in a private hotel. One
followed me, engaged the next room, set a watch on all my movements;
another came in by the window to murder me in my bed; no party to that,
the first one nevertheless turned the outrage to account, wormed himself
into my friendship on the strength of it, and lured me hither, an easy
prey. And here was the gang of them, to meet me! No wonder Rattray had not
let me see him off at the station; no wonder I had not been followed that
night. Every link I saw in its right light instantly. Only the motive
remained obscure. Suspicious circumstances swarmed upon my slow
perception: how innocent I had been! Less innocent, however, than wilfully
and wholly reckless: what had it mattered with whom I made friends? What
had anything mattered to me? What did anything matter—

I thought my heart had snapped!

Why were they watching that door, Joaquin Santos and the young squire?
Whom did they await? I knew! Oh, I knew! My heart leaped, my blood danced,
my eyes lay in wait with theirs. Everything began to matter once more. It
was as though the machinery of my soul, long stopped, had suddenly been
set in motion; it was as though I was born again.

How long we seemed to wait I need not say. It cannot have been many
moments in reality, for Santos was blowing his rings of smoke in the
direction of the door, and the first that I noticed were but dissolving
when it opened—and the best was true! One instant I saw her very
clearly, in the light of a candle which she carried in its silver stick;
then a mist blinded me, and I fell on my knees in the rank bed into which
I had stepped, to give such thanks to the Almighty as this heart has never
felt before or since. And I remained kneeling; for now my face was on a
level with the sill; and when my eyes could see again, there stood my
darling before them in the room.

Like a queen she stood, in the very travelling cloak in which I had seen
her last; it was tattered now, but she held it close about her as though a
shrewd wind bit her to the core. Her sweet face was all peeked and pale in
the candle-light: she who had been a child was come to womanhood in a few
weeks. But a new spirit flashed in her dear eyes, a new strength hardened
her young lips. She stood as an angel brought to book by devils; and so
noble was her calm defiance, so serene her scorn, that, as I watched and
listened; all present fear for her passed out of my heart.

The first sound was the hasty rising of young Rattray; he was at Eva's
side next instant, essaying to lead her to his chair, with a flush which
deepened as she repulsed him coldly.

“You have sent for me, and I have come,” said she. “But I prefer not to
sit down in your presence; and what you have to say, you will be good
enough to say as quickly as possible, that I may go again before I am—stifled!”

It was her one hot word; aimed at them all, it seemed to me to fall like a
lash on Rattray's cheek, bringing the blood to it like lightning. But it
was Santos who snatched the cigarette from his mouth, and opened upon the
defenceless girl in a torrent of Portuguese, yellow with rage, and a very
windmill of lean arms and brown hands in the terrifying rapidity of his
gesticulations. They did not terrify Eva Denison. When Rattray took a step
towards the speaker, with flashing eyes, it was some word from Eva that
checked him; when Santos was done, it was to Rattray that she turned with
her answer.

“He calls me a liar for telling you that Mr. Cole knew all,” said she,
thrilling me with my own name. “Don't you say anything,” she added, as the
young man turned on Santos with a scowl; “you are one as wicked as the
other, but there was a time when I thought differently of you: his
character I have always known. Of the two evils, I prefer to speak to
you.”

Rattray bowed, humbly enough, I thought; but my darling's nostrils only
curled the more.

“He calls me a liar,” she continued; “so may you all. Since you have found
it out, I admit it freely and without shame; one must be false in the
hands of false fiends like all of you. Weakness is nothing to you;
helplessness is nothing; you must be met with your own weapons, and so I
lied in my sore extremity to gain the one miserable advantage within my
reach. He says you found me out by making friends with Mr. Cole. He says
that Mr. Cole has been dining with you in this very room, this very night.
You still tell the truth sometimes; has that man—that demon—told
it for once?”

“It is perfectly true,” said Rattray in a low voice.

“And poor Mr. Cole told you that he knew nothing of your villany?”

“I found out that he knew absolutely nothing—after first thinking
otherwise.”

“Suppose he had known? What would you have done?”

Rattray said nothing. Santos shrugged as he lit a fresh cigarette. The
captain went on with his supper.

“Ashamed to say!” cried Eva Denison. “So you have some shame left still!
Well, I will tell you. You would have murdered him, as you murdered all
the rest; you would have killed him in cold blood, as I wish and pray that
you would kill me!”

The young fellow faced her, white to the lips. “You have no right to say
that, Miss Denison!” he cried. “I may be bad, but, as I am ready to answer
for my sins, the crime of murder is not among them.”

Well, it is still some satisfaction to remember that my love never
punished me with such a look as was the young squire's reward for this
protestation. The curl of the pink nostrils, the parting of the proud
lips, the gleam of the sound white teeth, before a word was spoken, were
more than I, for one, could have borne. For I did not see the grief
underlying the scorn, but actually found it in my heart to pity this poor
devil of a Rattray: so humbly fell those fine eyes of his, so like a dog
did he stand, waiting to be whipped.

“Yes; you are very innocent!” she began at last, so softly that I could
scarcely hear. “You have not committed murder, so you say; let it stand to
your credit by all means. You have no blood upon your hands; you say so;
that is enough. No! you are comparatively innocent, I admit. All you have
done is to make murder easy for others; to get others to do the dirty
work, and then shelter them and share the gain; all you need have on your
conscience is every life that was lost with the Lady Jermyn, and every
soul that lost itself in losing them. You call that innocence? Then give
me honest guilt! Give me the man who set fire to the ship, and who sits
there eating his supper; he is more of a man than you. Give me the wretch
who has beaten men to death before my eyes; there's something great about
a monster like that, there's something to loathe. His assistant is only
little—mean—despicable!” Loud and hurried in its wrath, low
and deliberate in its contempt, all this was uttered with a furious and
abnormal eloquence, which would have struck me, loving her, to the ground.
On Rattray it had a different effect. His head lifted as she heaped abuse
upon it, until he met her flashing eye with that of a man very thankful to
take his deserts and something more; and to mine he was least despicable
when that last word left her lips. When he saw that it was her last, he
took her candle (she had put it down on the ancient settle against the
door), and presented it to her with another bow. And so without a word he
led her to the door, opened it, and bowed yet lower as she swept out, but
still without a tinge of mockery in the obeisance.

He was closing the door after her when Joaquin Santos reached it.

“Diablo!” cried he. “Why let her go? We have not done with her.”

“That doesn't matter; she is done with us,” was the stern reply.

“It does matter,” retorted Santos; “what is more, she is my step-daughter,
and back she shall come!”

“She is also my visitor, and I'm damned if you're going to make her!”

An instant Santos stood, his back to me, his fingers working, his neck
brown with blood; then his coat went into creases across the shoulders,
and he was shrugging still as he turned away.

“Your veesitor!” said he. “Your veesitor! Your veesitor!”

Harris laughed outright as he raised his glass; the hot young squire had
him by the collar, and the wine was spilling on the cloth, as I rose very
cautiously and crept back to the path.

“When rogues fall out!” I was thinking to myself. “I shall save her yet—I
shall save my darling!”

Already I was accustomed to the thought that she still lived, and to the
big heart she had set beating in my feeble frame; already the continued
existence of these villains, with the first dim inkling of their villainy,
was ceasing to be a novelty in a brain now quickened and prehensile beyond
belief. And yet—but a few minutes had I knelt at the window—but
a few more was it since Rattray and I had shaken hands!

Not his visitor; his prisoner, without a doubt; but alive! alive! and,
neither guest nor prisoner for many hours more. O my love! O my heart's
delight! Now I knew why I was spared; to save her; to snatch her from
these rascals; to cherish and protect her evermore!

All the past shone clear behind me; the dark was lightness and the crooked
straight. All the future lay clear ahead it presented no difficulties yet;
a mad, ecstatic confidence was mine for the wildest, happiest moments of
my life.

I stood upright in the darkness. I saw her light!

It was ascending the tower at the building's end; now in this window it
glimmered, now in the one above. At last it was steady, high up near the
stars, and I stole below.

“Eva! Eva!”

There was no answer. Low as it was, my voice was alarming; it cooled and
cautioned me. I sought little stones. I crept back to throw them. Ah God!
her form eclipsed that lighted slit in the gray stone tower. I heard her
weeping high above me at her window.

“Eva! Eva!”

There was a pause, and then a little cry of gladness.

“Is it Mr. Cole?” came in an eager whisper through her tears.

“Yes! yes! I was outside the window. I heard everything.”

“They will hear you!” she cried softly, in a steadier voice.

“No-listen!” They were quarrelling. Rattray's voice was loud and angry.
“They cannot hear,” I continued, in more cautious tones; “they think I'm
in bed and asleep half-a-mile away. Oh, thank God! I'll get you away from
them; trust me, my love, my darling!”

In my madness I knew not what I said; it was my wild heart speaking. Some
moments passed before she replied.

“Will you promise to do nothing I ask you not to do?”

“Of course.”

“My life might answer for it—”

“I promise—I promise.”

“Then wait—hide—watch my light. When you see it back in the
window, watch with all your eyes! I am going to write and then throw it
out. Not another syllable!”

She was gone; there was a long yellow slit in the masonry once more; her
light burnt faint and far within.

I retreated among some bushes and kept watch.

The moon was skimming beneath the surface of a sea of clouds: now the
black billows had silver crests: now an incandescent buoy bobbed among
them. O for enough light, and no more!

In the hall the high voices were more subdued. I heard the captain's tipsy
laugh. My eyes fastened themselves upon that faint and lofty light, and on
my heels I crouched among the bushes.

The flame moved, flickered, and shone small but brilliant on the very
sill. I ran forward on tip-toe. A white flake fluttered to my feet. I
secured it and waited for one word; none came; but the window was softly
shut.

I stood in doubt, the treacherous moonlight all over me now, and once more
the window opened.

“Go quickly!”

And again it was shut; next moment I was stealing close by the spot where
I had knelt. I saw within once more.

Harris nodded in his chair. The nigger had disappeared. Rattray was
lighting a candle, and the Portuguese holding out his hand for the match.

“Did you lock the gate, senhor?” asked Santos.

“No; but I will now.”

As I opened it I heard a door open within. I could hardly let the latch
down again for the sudden trembling of my fingers. The key turned behind
me ere I had twenty yards' start.

Thank God there was light enough now! I followed the beck. I found my way.
I stood in the open valley, between the oak-plantation and my desolate
cottage, and I kissed my tiny, twisted note again and again in a paroxysm
of passion and of insensate joy. Then I unfolded it and held it to my eyes
in the keen October moonshine.

CHAPTER XII. MY LADY'S BIDDING

Scribbled in sore haste, by a very tremulous little hand, with a pencil,
on the flyleaf of some book, my darling's message is still difficult to
read; it was doubly so in the moonlight, five-and-forty autumns ago. My
eyesight, however, was then perhaps the soundest thing about me, and in a
little I had deciphered enough to guess correctly (as it proved) at the
whole:—

“You say you heard everything just now, and there is no time for further
explanations. I am in the hands of villains, but not ill-treated, though
they are one as bad as the other. You will not find it easy to rescue me.
I don't see how it is to be done. You have promised not to do anything I
ask you not to do, and I implore you not to tell a soul until you have
seen me again and heard more. You might just as well kill me as come back
now with help.

“You see you know nothing, though I told them you knew all. And so you
shall as soon as I can see you for five minutes face to face. In the
meantime do nothing—know nothing when you see Mr. Rattray—unless
you wish to be my death.

“It would have been possible last night, and it may be again to-morrow
night. They all go out every night when they can, except José, who is left
in charge. They are out from nine or ten till two or three; if they are
out to-morrow night my candle will be close to the window as I shall put
it when I have finished this. You can see my window from over the wall. If
the light is in front you must climb the wall, for they will leave the
gate locked. I shall see you and will bribe José to let me out for a turn.
He has done it before for a bottle of wine. I can manage him. Can I trust
to you? If you break your promise—but you will not? One of them
would as soon kill me as smoke a cigarette, and the rest are under his
thumb. I dare not write more. But my life is in your hands.

“EVA DENISON.”

“Oh! beware of the woman Braithwaite; she is about the worst of the gang.”

I could have burst out crying in my bitter discomfiture, mortification,
and alarm: to think that her life was in my hands, and that it depended,
not on that prompt action which was the one course I had contemplated, but
on twenty-four hours of resolute inactivity! I would not think it. I
refused the condition. It took away my one prop, my one stay, that
prospect of immediate measures which alone preserved in me such coolness
as I had retained until now. I was cool no longer; where I had relied on
practical direction I was baffled and hindered and driven mad; on my honor
believe I was little less for some moments, groaning, cursing, and beating
the air with impotent fists—in one of them my poor love's letter
crushed already to a ball.

Danger and difficulty I had been prepared to face; but the task that I was
set was a hundred-fold harder than any that had whirled through my teeming
brain. To sit still; to do nothing; to pretend I knew nothing; an hour of
it would destroy my reason—and I was invited to wait twenty-four!

No; my word was passed; keep it I must. She knew the men, she must know
best; and her life depended on my obedience: she made that so plain. Obey
I must and would; to make a start, I tottered over the plank that spanned
the beck, and soon I saw the cottage against the moonlit sky. I came up to
it. I drew back in sudden fear. It was alight upstairs and down, and the
gaunt strong figure of the woman Braithwaite stood out as I had seen it
first, in the doorway, with the light showing warmly through her rank red
hair.

“Is that you, Mr. Cole?” she cried in a tone that she reserved for me; yet
through the forced amiability there rang a note of genuine surprise. She
had been prepared for me never to return at all!

My knees gave under me as I forced myself to advance; but my wits took new
life from the crisis, and in a flash I saw how to turn my weakness into
account. I made a false step on my way to the door; when I reached it I
leant heavily against the jam, and I said with a slur that I felt unwell.
I had certainly been flushed with wine when I left Rattray; it would be no
bad thing for him to hear that I had arrived quite tipsy at the cottage;
should he discover I had been near an hour on the way, here was my
explanation cut and dried.

So I shammed a degree of intoxication with apparent success, and Jane
Braithwaite gave me her arm up the stairs. My God, how strong it was, and
how weak was mine!

Left to myself, I reeled about my bedroom, pretending to undress; then out
with my candles, and into bed in all my clothes, until the cottage should
be quiet. Yes, I must lie still and feign sleep, with every nerve and
fibre leaping within me, lest the she-devil below should suspect me of
suspicions! It was with her I had to cope for the next four-and-twenty
hours; and she filled me with a greater present terror than all those
villains at the hall; for had not their poor little helpless captive
described her as “about the worst of the gang?”

To think that my love lay helpless there in the hands of those wretches;
and to think that her lover lay helpless here in the supervision of this
vile virago!

It must have been one or two in the morning when I stole to my
sitting-room window, opened it, and sat down to think steadily, with the
counterpane about my shoulders.

The moon sailed high and almost full above the clouds; these were
dispersing as the night wore on, and such as remained were of a beautiful
soft tint between white and gray. The sky was too light for stars, and
beneath it the open country stretched so clear and far that it was as
though one looked out at noonday through slate-colored glass. Down the
dewy slope below my window a few calves fed with toothless mouthings; the
beck was very audible, the oak-trees less so; but for these peaceful
sounds the stillness and the solitude were equally intense.

I may have sat there like a mouse for half an hour. The reason was that I
had become mercifully engrossed in one of the subsidiary problems: whether
it would be better to drop from the window or to trust to the creaking
stairs. Would the creaking be much worse than the thud, and the difference
worth the risk of a sprained ankle? Well worth it, I at length decided;
the risk was nothing; my window was scarce a dozen feet from the ground.
How easily it could be done, how quickly, how safely in this deep,
stillness and bright moonlight! I would fall so lightly on my stocking
soles; a single soft, dull thud; then away under the moon without fear or
risk of a false step; away over the stone walls to the main road, and so
to the nearest police-station with my tale; and before sunrise the
villains would be taken in their beds, and my darling would be safe!

I sprang up softly. Why not do it now? Was I bound to keep my rash, blind
promise? Was it possible these murderers would murder her? I struck a
match on my trousers, I lit a candle, I read her letter carefully again,
and again it maddened and distracted me. I struck my hands together. I
paced the room wildly. Caution deserted me, and I made noise enough to
wake the very mute; lost to every consideration but that of the terrifying
day before me, the day of silence and of inactivity, that I must live
through with an unsuspecting face, a cool head, a civil tongue! The
prospect appalled me as nothing else could or did; nay, the sudden noise
upon the stairs, the knock at my door, and the sense that I had betrayed
myself already even now all was over—these came as a relief after
the haunting terror which they interrupted.

I flung the door open, and there stood Mrs. Braithwaite, as fully dressed
as myself.

“You'll not be very well sir?”

“No, I'm not.”

“What's t' matter wi' you?”

This second question was rude and fierce with suspicion: the real woman
rang out in it, yet its effect on me was astonishing: once again was I
inspired to turn my slip into a move.

“Matter?” I cried. “Can't you see what's the matter; couldn't you see when
I came in? Drink's the matter! I came in drunk, and now I'm mad. I can't
stand it; I'm not in a fit state. Do you know nothng of me? Have they told
you nothing? I'm the only man that was saved from the Lady Jermyn, the
ship that was burned to the water's edge with every soul but me. My nerves
are in little ends. I came down here for peace and quiet and sleep. Do you
know that I have hardly slept for two months? And now I shall never sleep
again! O my God I shall die for want of it! The wine has done it. I never
should have touched a drop. I can't stand it; I can't sleep after it; I
shall kill myself if I get no sleep. Do you hear, you woman? I shall kill
myself in your house if I don't get to sleep!”

I saw her shrink, virago as she was. I waved my arms, I shrieked in her
face. It was not all acting. Heaven knows how true it was about the sleep.
I was slowly dying of insomnia. I was a nervous wreck. She must have heard
it. Now she saw it for herself.

No; it was by no means all acting. Intending only to lie, I found myself
telling little but the strictest truth, and longing for sleep as
passionately as though I had nothing to keep me awake. And yet, while my
heart cried aloud in spite of me, and my nerves relieved themselves in
this unpremeditated ebullition, I was all the time watching its effect as
closely as though no word of it had been sincere.

Mrs. Braithwaite seemed frightened; not at all pitiful; and as I calmed
down she recovered her courage and became insolent. I had spoilt her
night. She had not been told she was to take in a raving lunatic. She
would speak to Squire Rattray in the morning.

“Morning?” I yelled after her as she went. “Send your husband to the
nearest chemist as soon as it's dawn; send him for chloral, chloroform,
morphia, anything they've got and as much of it as they'll let him have.
I'll give you five pounds if you get me what'll send me to sleep all
to-morrow—and to-morrow night!”

Never, I feel sure, were truth and falsehood more craftily interwoven; yet
I had thought of none of it until the woman was at my door, while of much
I had not thought at all. It had rushed from my heart and from my lips.
And no sooner was I alone than I burst into hysterical tears, only to stop
and compliment myself because they sounded genuine—as though they
were not! Towards morning I took to my bed in a burning fever, and lay
there, now congratulating myself upon it, because when night came they
would all think me so secure; and now weeping because the night might find
me dying or dead. So I tossed, with her note clasped in my hand underneath
the sheets; and beneath my very body that stout weapon that I had bought
in town. I might not have to use it, but I was fatalist enough to fancy
that I should. In the meantime it helped me to lie still, my thoughts
fixed on the night, and the day made easy for me after all.

If only I could sleep!

About nine o'clock Jane Braithwaite paid me a surly visit; in half an hour
she was back with tea and toast and an altered mien. She not only lit my
fire, but treated me the while to her original tone of almost fervent
civility and respect and determination. Her vagaries soon ceased to puzzle
me: the psychology of Jane Braithwaite was not recondite. In the night it
had dawned upon her that Rattray had found me harmless and was done with
me, therefore there was no need for her to put herself out any further on
my account. In the morning, finding me really ill, she had gone to the
hall in alarm; her subsequent attentions were an act of obedience; and in
their midst came Rattray himself to my bedside.

CHAPTER XIII. THE LONGEST DAY OF MY LIFE

The boy looked so blithe and buoyant, so gallant and still so frank, that
even now I could not think as meanly of him as poor Eva did. A rogue he
must be, but surely not the petty rogue that she had made him out. Yet it
was dirty work that he had done by me; and there I had to lie and take his
kind, false, felon's hand in mine.

“My poor dear fellow,” he cried, “I'm most sorry to find you like this.
But I was afraid of it last night. It's all this infernally strong air!”

How I longed to tell him what it was, and to see his face! The thought of
Eva alone restrained me, and I retorted as before, in a tone I strove to
make as friendly, that it was his admirable wine and nothing else.

“But you took hardly any.”

“I shouldn't have touched a drop. I can't stand it. Instead of soothing me
it excites me to the verge of madness. I'm almost over the verge—for
want of sleep—my trouble ever since the trouble.”

Again I was speaking the literal truth, and again congratulating myself as
though it were a lie: the fellow looked so distressed at my state; indeed
I believe that his distress was as genuine as mine, and his sentiments as
involved. He took my hand again, and his brow wrinkled at its heat. He
asked for the other hand to feel my pulse. I had to drop my letter to
comply.

“I wish to goodness there was something I could do for you,” he said.
“Would you—would you care to see a doctor?”

I shook my head, and could have smiled at his visible relief.

“Then I'm going to prescribe for you,” he said with decision. “It's the
place that doesn't agree with you, and it was I who brought you to the
place; therefore it's for me to get you out of it as quick as possible. Up
you get, and I'll drive you to the station myself!”

I had another work to keep from smiling: he was so ingenuously
disingenuous. There was less to smile at in his really nervous anxiety to
get me away. I lay there reading him like a book: it was not my health
that concerned him, of course: was it my safety? I told him he little knew
how ill I was—an inglorious speech that came hard, though not by any
means untrue. “Move me with this fever on me?” said I; “it would be as
much as my miserable life is worth.”

“I'm afraid,” said he, “that it may be as much as your life's worth to
stay on here!” And there was such real fear, in his voice and eyes, that
it reconciled me there and then to the discomfort of a big revolver
between the mattress and the small of my back. “We must get you out of
it,” he continued, “the moment you feel fit to stir. Shall we say
to-morrow?”

“If you like,” I said, advisedly; “and if I can get some sleep to-day.”

“Then to-morrow it is! You see I know it's the climate,” he added, jumping
from tone to tone; “it couldn't have been those two or three glasses of
sound wine.”

“Shall I tell you what it is?” I said, looking him full in the face, with
eyes that I dare say were wild enough with fever and insomnia. “It's the
burning of the Lady Jermyn!” I cried. “It's the faces and the shrieks of
the women; it's the cursing and the fighting of the men; it's boat-loads
struggling in an oily sea; it's husbands and wives jumping overboard
together; it's men turned into devils, it's hell-fire afloat—”

“Stop! stop!” he whispered, hoarse as a crow. I was sitting up with my hot
eyes upon him. He was white as the quilt, and the bed shook with his
trembling. I had gone as far as was prudent, and I lay back with a glow of
secret satisfaction.

“Yes, I will stop,” said I, “and I wouldn't have begun if you hadn't found
it so difficult to understand my trouble. Now you know what it is. It's
the old trouble. I came up here to forget it; instead of that I drink too
much and tell you all about it; and the two things together have bowled me
over. But I'll go to-morrow; only give me something to put me asleep till
then.”

“I will!” he vowed. “I'll go myself to the nearest chemist, and he shall
give me the very strongest stuff he's got. Good-by, and don't you stir
till I come back—for your own sake. I'll go this minute, and I'll
ride like hell!” And if ever two men were glad to be rid of each other,
they were this young villain and myself.

But what was his villany? It was little enough that I had overheard at the
window, and still less that poor Eva had told me in her hurried lines. All
I saw clearly was that the Lady Jermyn and some hundred souls had perished
by the foulest of foul play; that, besides Eva and myself, only the
incendiaries had escaped; that somehow these wretches had made a second
escape from the gig, leaving dead men and word of their own death behind
them in the boat. And here the motive was as much a mystery to me as the
means; but, in my present state, both were also matters of supreme
indifference. My one desire was to rescue my love from her loathsome
captors; of little else did I pause to think. Yet Rattray's visit left its
own mark on my mind; and long after he was gone I lay puzzling over the
connection between a young Lancastrian, of good name, of ancient property,
of great personal charm, and a crime of unparalleled atrocity committed in
cold blood on the high seas. That his complicity was flagrant I had no
room to doubt, after Eva's own indictment of him, uttered to his face and
in my hearing. Was it then the usual fraud on the underwriters, and was
Rattray the inevitable accomplice on dry land? I could think of none but
the conventional motive for destroying a vessel. Yet I knew there must be
another and a subtler one, to account not only for the magnitude of the
crime, but for the pains which the actual perpetrators had taken to
conceal the fact of their survival, and for the union of so diverse a
trinity as Senhor Santos, Captain Harris, and the young squire.

It must have been about mid-day when Rattray reappeared, ruddy, spurred,
and splashed with mud; a comfort to sick eyes, I declare, in spite of all.
He brought me two little vials, put one on the chimney-piece, poured the
other into my tumbler, and added a little water.

“There, old fellow,” said he; “swallow that, and if you don't get some
sleep the chemist who made it up is the greatest liar unhung.”

“What is it?' I asked, the glass in my hand, and my eyes on those of my
companion.

“I don't know,” said he. “I just told them to make up the strongest
sleeping-draught that was safe, and I mentioned something about your case.
Toss it off, man; it's sure to be all right.”

Yes, I could trust him; he was not that sort of villain, for all that Eva
Denison had said. I liked his face as well as ever. I liked his eye, and
could have sworn to its honesty as I drained the glass. Even had it been
otherwise, I must have taken my chance or shown him all; as it was, when
he had pulled down my blind, and shaken my pillow, and he gave me his hand
once more, I took it with involuntary cordiality. I only grieved that so
fine a young fellow should have involved himself in so villainous a
business; yet for Eva's sake I was glad that he had; for my mind failed
(rather than refused) to believe him so black as she had painted him.

The long, long afternoon that followed I never shall forget. The opiate
racked my head; it did not do its work; and I longed to sleep till evening
with a longing I have never known before or since. Everything seemed to
depend upon it; I should be a man again, if only I could first be a log
for a few hours. But no; my troubles never left me for an instant; and
there I must lie, pretending that they had! For the other draught was for
the night; and if they but thought the first one had taken due effect, so
much the less would they trouble their heads about me when they believed
that I had swallowed the second.

Oh, but it was cruel! I lay and wept with weakness and want of sleep; ere
night fell I knew that it would find me useless, if indeed my reason
lingered on. To lie there helpless when Eva was expecting me, that would
be the finishing touch. I should rise a maniac if ever I rose at all. More
probably I would put one of my five big bullets into my own splitting
head; it was no small temptation, lying there in a double agony, with the
loaded weapon by my side.

Then sometimes I thought it was coming; and perhaps for an instant would
be tossing in my hen-coop; then back once more. And I swear that my
physical and mental torments, here in my bed, would have been incomparably
greater than anything I had endured on the sea, but for the saving grace
of one sweet thought. She lived! She lived! And the God who had taken care
o me, a castaway, would surely deliver her also from the hands of
murderers and thieves. But not through me—I lay weak and helpless—and
my tears ran again and yet again as I felt myself growing hourly weaker.

I remember what a bright fine day it was, with the grand open country all
smiles beneath a clear, almost frosty sky, once when I got up on tip-toe
and peeped out. A keen wind whistled about the cottage; I felt it on my
feet as I stood; but never have I known a more perfect and invigorating
autumn day. And there I must lie, with the manhood ebbing Out of me, the
manhood that I needed so for the night! I crept back into bed. I swore
that I would sleep. Yet there I lay, listening sometimes to that vile
woman's tread below; sometimes to mysterious whispers, between whom I
neither knew nor cared; anon to my watch ticking by my side, to the heart
beating in my body, hour after hour—hour after hour. I prayed as I
have seldom prayed. I wept as I have never wept. I railed and blasphemed—not
with my lips, because the woman must think I was asleep—but so much
the more viciously in my heart.

Suddenly it turned dark. There were no gradations—not even a
tropical twilight. One minute I aw the sun upon the blind; the next—thank
God! Oh, thank God! No light broke any longer through the blind; just a
faint and narrow glimmer stole between it and the casement; and the light
that had been bright golden was palest silver now.

It was the moon. I had been in dreamless sleep for hours.

The joy of that discovery! The transport of waking to it, and waking
refreshed! The swift and sudden miracle that it seemed! I shall never,
never forget it, still less the sickening thrill of fear which was cruelly
quick to follow upon my joy. The cottage was still as the tomb. What if I
had slept too long!

With trembling hand I found my watch.

Luckily I had wound it in the early morning. I now carried it to the
window, drew back the blind, and held it in the moonlight. It was not
quite ten o'clock. And yet the cottage was so still—so still.

I stole to the door, opened it by cautious degrees, and saw the reflection
of a light below. Still not a sound could I hear, save the rapid drawing
of my own breath, and the startled beating of my own heart.

I now felt certain that the Braithwaites were out, and dressed hastily,
making as little noise as possible, and still hearing absolutely none from
below. Then, feeling faint with hunger, though a new being after my sleep,
I remembered a packet of sandwiches which I had not opened on my journey
north. These I transferred from my travelling-bag (where they had lain
forgotten to my jacket pocket), before drawing down the blind, leaving the
room on tip-toe, and very gently fastening the door behind me. On the
stairs, too, I trod with the utmost caution, feeling the wall with my left
hand (my right was full), lest by any chance I might be mistaken in
supposing I had the cottage to myself. In spite of my caution there came a
creak at every step. And to my sudden horror I heard a chair move in the
kitchen below.

My heart and I stood still together. But my right hand tightened on stout
wood, my right forefinger trembled against thin steel. The sound was not
repeated. And at length I continued on my way down, my teeth set, an
excuse on my lips, but determination in every fibre of my frame.

A shadow lay across the kitchen floor; it was that of the deaf mute, as he
stood on a chair before the fire, supporting himself on the chimney piece
with one puny arm, while he reached overhead with the other. I stood by
for an instant, glorying in the thought that he could not hear me; the
next, I saw what it was he was reaching up for—a bell-mouthed
blunderbuss—and I knew the little devil for the impostor that he
was.

“You touch it,” said I, “and you'll drop dead on that hearth.”

He pretended not to hear me, but he heard the click of the splendid spring
which Messrs. Deane and Adams had put into that early revolver of theirs,
and he could not have come down much quicker with my bullet in his spine.

“Now, then,” I said, “what the devil do you mean by shamming deaf and
dumb?”

“I niver said I was owt o' t' sort,” he whimpered, cowering behind the
chair in a sullen ague.

“But you acted it, and I've a jolly good mind to shoot you dead!”
(Remember, I was so weak myself that I thought my arm would break from
presenting my five chambers and my ten-inch barrel; otherwise I should be
sorry to relate how I bullied that mouse of a man.) “I may let you off,” I
continued, “if you answer questions. Where's your wife?”

“Eh, she'll be back directly!” said Braithwaite, with some tact; but his
look was too cunning to give the warning weight. “I've a bullet to spare
for her,” said I, cheerfully; “now, then, where is she?”

“Gone wi' the oothers, for owt I knaw.”

“And where are the others gone?”

“Where they allus go, ower to t' say.”

“Over to the sea, eh? We're getting on! What takes them there?”

“That's more than I can tell you, sir,” said Braithwaite, with so much
emphasis and so little reluctance as to convince me that for once at least
he had spoken the truth. There was even a spice of malice in his tone. I
began to see possibilities in the little beast.

“Well,” I said, “you're a nice lot! I don't know what your game is, and
don't want to. I've had enough of you without that. I'm off to-night.”

“Before they get back?” asked Braithwaite, plainly in doubt about his
duty, and yet as plainly relieved to learn the extent of my intention.

“Certainly,” said I; “why not? I'm not particularly anxious to see your
wife again, and you may ask Mr. Rattray from me why the devil he led me to
suppose you were deaf and dumb? Or, if you like, you needn't say anything
at all about it,” I added, seeing his thin jaw fall; “tell him I never
found you out, but just felt well enough to go, and went. When do you
expect them back?”

“It won't be yet a bit,” said he.

“Good! Now look here. What would you say to these?” And I showed him a
couple of sovereigns: I longed to offer him twenty, but feared to excite
his suspicions. “These are yours if you have a conveyance at the end of
the lane—the lane we came up the night before last—in an
hour's time.”

His dull eyes glistened; but a tremor took him from top to toe, and he
shook his head.

“I'm ill, man!” I cried. “If I stay here I'll die! Mr. Rattray knows that,
and he wanted me to go this morning; he'll be only too thankful to find me
gone.”

This argument appealed to him; indeed, I was proud of it.

“But I was to stop an' look after you,” he mumbled; “it'll get me into
trooble, it will that!”

I took out three more sovereigns; not a penny higher durst I go.

“Will five pounds repay you? No need to tell your wife it was five, you
know! I should keep four of them all to myself.”

The cupidity of the little wretch was at last overcoming his abject
cowardice. I could see him making up his miserable mind. And I still
flatter myself that I took only safe (and really cunning) steps to
precipitate the process. To offer him more money would have been madness;
instead, I poured it all back into my pocket.

“All right!” I cried; “you're a greedy, cowardly, old idiot, and I'll just
save my money.” And out I marched into the moonlight, very briskly,
towards the lane; he was so quick to follow me that I had no fears of the
blunderbuss, but quickened my step, and soon had him running at my heels.

“Stop, stop, sir! You're that hasty wi' a poor owd man.” So he whimpered
as he followed me like the little cur he was.

“I'm hanged if I stop,” I answered without looking back; and had him
almost in tears before I swung round on him so suddenly that he yelped
with fear. “What are you bothering me for?” I blustered. “Do you want me
to wring your neck?”

“Oh, I'll go, sir! I'll go, I'll go,” he moaned.

“I've a good mind not to let you. I wouldn't if I was fit to walk five
miles.”

“But I'll roon 'em, sir! I will that! I'll go as fast as iver I can!”

“And have a conveyance at the road-end of the lane as near an hour hence
as you possibly can?”

“Why, there, sir!” he cried, crassly inspired; “I could drive you in our
own trap in half the time.”

“Oh, no, you couldn't! I—I'm not fit to be out at all; it must be a
closed conveyance; but I'll come to the end of the lane to save time, so
let him wait there. You needn't wait yourself; here's a sovereign of your
money, and I'll leave the rest in the jug in my bedroom. There! It's worth
your while to trust me, I think. As for my luggage, I'll write to Mr.
Rattray about that. But I'll be shot if I spend another night on his
property.”

I was rid of him at last; and there I stood, listening to his headlong
steps, until they stumbled out of earshot down the lane; then back to the
cottage, at a run myself, and up to my room to be no worse than my word.
The sovereigns plopped into the water and rang together at the bottom of
the jug. In another minute I was hastening through the plantation, in my
hand the revolver that had served me well already, and was still loaded
and capped in all five chambers.

CHAPTER XIV. IN THE GARDEN

It so happened that I met nobody at all; but I must confess that my luck
was better than my management. As I came upon the beck, a new sound
reached me with the swirl. It was the jingle of bit and bridle; the beat
of hoofs came after; and I had barely time to fling myself flat, when two
horsemen emerged from the plantation, riding straight towards me in the
moonlight. If they continued on that course they could not fail to see me
as they passed along the opposite bank. However, to my unspeakable relief,
they were scarce clear of the trees when they turned their horses' heads,
rode them through the water a good seventy yards from where I lay, and so
away at a canter across country towards the road. On my hands and knees I
had a good look at them as they bobbed up and down under the moon; and my
fears subsided in astonished curiosity. For I have already boasted of my
eyesight, and I could have sworn that neither Rattray nor any one of his
guests was of the horsemen; yet the back and shoulders of one of these
seemed somehow familiar to me. Not that I wasted many moments over the
coincidence, for I had other things to think about as I ran on to the
hall.

I found the rear of the building in darkness unrelieved from within; on
the other hand, the climbing moon beat so full upon the garden wall, it
was as though a lantern pinned me as I crept beneath it. In passing I
thought I might as well try the gate; but Eva was right; it was locked;
and that made me half inclined to distrust my eyes in the matter of the
two horsemen, for whence could they have come, if not from the hall? In
any case I was well rid of them. I now followed the wall some little
distance, and then, to see over it, walked backwards until I was all but
in the beck; and there, sure enough, shone my darling's candle, close as
close against the diamond panes of her narrow, lofty window! It brought
those ready tears back to my foolish, fevered eyes. But for sentiment
there was no time, and every other emotion was either futile or premature.
So I mastered my full heart, I steeled, my wretched nerves, and braced my
limp muscles for the task that lay before them.

I had a garden wall to scale, nearly twice my own height, and without
notch or cranny in the ancient, solid masonry. I stood against it on my
toes, and I touched it with my finger-tips as high up as possible. Some
four feet severed them from the coping that left only half a sky above my
upturned eyes.

I do not know whether I have made it plain that the house was not
surrounded by four walls, but merely filled a breach in one of the four,
which nipped it (as it were) at either end. The back entrance was
approachable enough, but barred or watched, I might be very sure. It is
ever the vulnerable points which are most securely guarded, and it was my
one comfort that the difficult way must also be the safe way, if only the
difficulty could be overcome. How to overcome it was the problem. I
followed the wall right round to the point at which it abutted on the
tower that immured my love; the height never varied; nor could my hands or
eyes discover a single foot-hole, ledge, or other means of mounting to the
top.

Yet my hot head was full of ideas; and I wasted some minutes in trying to
lift from its hinges a solid, six-barred, outlying gate, that my weak arms
could hardly stir. More time went in pulling branches from the oak-trees
about the beck, where the latter ran nearest to the moonlit wall. I had an
insane dream of throwing a long forked branch over the coping, and so
swarming up hand-over-hand. But even to me the impracticability of this
plan came home at last. And there I stood in a breathless lather, much
time and strength thrown away together; and the candle burning down for
nothing in that little lofty window; and the running water swirling
noisily over its stones at my back.

This was the only sound; the wind had died away; the moonlit valley lay as
still as the dread old house in its midst but for the splash and gurgle of
the beck. I fancied this grew louder as I paused and listened in my
helplessness. All at once—was it the tongue of Nature telling me the
way, or common gumption returning at the eleventh hour? I ran down to the
water's edge, and could have shouted for joy. Great stones lay in equal
profusion on bed and banks. I lifted one of the heaviest in both hands. I
staggered with it to the wall. I came back for another; for some twenty
minutes I was so employed; my ultimate reward a fine heap of boulders
against the wall.

Then I began to build; then mounted my pile, clawing the wall to keep my
balance. My fingers were still many inches from the coping. I jumped down
and gave another ten minutes to the back-breaking work of carrying more
boulders from the water to the wall. Then I widened my cairn below, so
that I could stand firmly before springing upon the pinnacle with which I
completed it. I knew well that this would collapse under me if I allowed
my weight to rest more than an instant upon it. And so at last it did; but
my fingers had clutched the coping in time; had grabbed it even as the
insecure pyramid crumbled and left me dangling.

Instantly exerting what muscle I had left, and the occasion gave me, I
succeeded in pulling myself up until my chin was on a level with my hands,
when I flung an arm over and caught the inner coping. The other arm
followed; then a leg; and at last I sat astride the wall, panting and
palpitating, and hardly able to credit my own achievement. One great
difficulty had been my huge revolver. I had been terribly frightened it
might go off, and had finally used my cravat to sling it at the back of my
neck. It had shifted a little, and I was working it round again,
preparatory to my drop, when I saw the light suddenly taken from the
window in the tower, and a kerchief waving for one instant in its place.
So she had been waiting and watching for me all these hours! I dropped
into the garden in a very ecstasy of grief and rapture, to think that I
had been so long in coming to my love, but that I had come at last. And I
picked myself up in a very frenzy of fear lest, after all, I should fail
to spirit her from this horrible place.

Doubly desolate it looked in the rays of that bright October moon.
Skulking in the shadow of the wall which had so long baffled me, I looked
across a sharp border of shade upon a chaos, the more striking for its
lingering trim design. The long, straight paths were barnacled with weeds;
the dense, fine hedges, once prim and angular, had fattened out of all
shape or form; and on the velvet sward of other days you might have waded
waist high in rotten hay. Towards the garden end this rank jungle merged
into a worse wilderness of rhododendrons, the tallest I have ever seen. On
all this the white moon smiled, and the grim house glowered, to the
eternal swirl and rattle of the beck beyond its walls.

Long enough I stood where I had dropped, listening with all my being for
some other sound; but at last that great studded door creaked and shivered
on its ancient hinges, and I heard voices arguing in the Portuguese
tongue. It was poor Eva wheedling that black rascal José. I saw her in the
lighted porch; the nigger I saw also, shrugging and gesticulating for all
the world like his hateful master; yet giving in, I felt certain, though I
could not understand a word that reached me.

And indeed my little mistress very soon sailed calmly out, followed by
final warnings and expostulations hurled from the step: for the black
stood watching her as she came steadily my way, now raising her head to
sniff the air, now stooping to pluck up a weed, the very picture of a
prisoner seeking the open air for its own sake solely. I had a keen eye
apiece for them as I cowered closer to the wall, revolver in hand. But ere
my love was very near me (for she would stand long moments gazing ever so
innocently at the moon), her jailer had held a bottle to the light, and
had beaten a retreat so sudden and so hasty that I expected him back every
moment, and so durst not stir. Eva saw me, however, and contrived to tell
me so without interrupting the air that she was humming as she walked.

“Follow me,” she sang, “only keep as you are, keep as you are, close to
the wall, close to the wall.”

And on she strolled to her own tune, and came abreast of me without
turning her head; so I crept in the shadow (my ugly weapon tucked out of
sight), and she sauntered in the shine, until we came to the end of the
garden, where the path turned at right angles, running behind the
rhododendrons; once in their shelter, she halted and beckoned me, and next
instant I had her hands in mine.

“At last!” was all that I could say for many a moment, as I stood there
gazing into her dear eyes, no hero in my heroic hour, but the bigger
love-sick fool than ever. “But quick—quick—quick!” I added, as
she brought me to my senses by withdrawing her hands. “We've no time to
lose.” And I looked wildly from wall to wall, only to find them as barren
and inaccessible on this side as on the other.

“We have more time than you think,” were Eva's first words. “We can do
nothing for half-an-hour.”

“Why not?”

“I'll tell you in a minute. How did you manage to get over?”

“Brought boulders from the beck, and piled 'em up till I could reach the
top.”

I thought her eyes glistened.

“What patience!” she cried softly. “We must find a simpler way of getting
out—and I think I have. They've all gone, you know, but José.”

“All three?”

“The captain has been gone all day.”

Then the other two must have been my horse-men, very probably in some
disguise; and my head swam with the thought of the risk that I had run at
the very moment when I thought myself safest. Well, I would have finished
them both! But I did not say so to Eva. I did not mention the incident, I
was so fearful of destroying her confidence in me. Apologizing, therefore,
for my interruption, without explaining it, I begged her to let me hear
her plan.

It was simple enough. There was no fear of the others returning before
midnight; the chances were that they would be very much later; and now it
was barely eleven, and Eva had promised not to stay out above
half-an-hour. When it was up José would come and call her.

“It is horrid to have to be so cunning!” cried little Eva, with an angry
shudder; “but it's no use thinking of that,” she was quick enough to add,
“when you have such dreadful men to deal with, such fiends! And I have had
all day to prepare, and have suffered till I am so desperate I would
rather die to-night than spend another in that house. No; let me finish!
José will come round here to look for me. But you and I will be hiding on
the other side of these rhododendrons. And when we hear him here we'll
make a dash for it across the long grass. Once let us get the door shut
and locked in his face, and he'll be in a trap. It will take him some time
to break in; time enough to give us a start; what's more, when he finds us
gone, he'll do what they all used to do in any doubt.”

“What's that?”

“Say nothing till it's found out; then lie for their lives; and it was
their lives, poor creatures on the Zambesi!” She was silent a moment, her
determined little face hard—set upon some unforgotten horror. “Once
we get away, I shall be surprised if it's found out till morning,”
concluded Eva, without a word as to what I was to do with her; neither,
indeed, had I myself given that question a moment's consideration.

“Then let's make a dash for it now!” was all I said or thought.

“No; they can't come yet, and José is strong and brutal, and I have heard
how ill you are. That you should have come to me notwithstanding—”
and she broke off with her little hands lying so gratefully on my
shoulders, that I know not how I refrained from catching her then and
there to my heart. Instead, I laughed and said that my illness was a pure
and deliberate sharp, and my presence there its direct result. And such
was the virtue in my beloved's voice, the magic of her eyes, the healing
of her touch, that I was scarce conscious of deceit, but felt a whole man
once more as we two stood together in the moonlight.

In a trance I stood there gazing into her brave young eyes. In a trance I
suffered her to lead me by the hand through the rank, dense rhododendrons.
And still entranced I crouched by her side near the further side, with
only unkempt grass-plot and a weedy path between us and that ponderous
door, wide open still, and replaced by a section of the lighted hail
within. On this we fixed our attention with mingled dread and impatience,
those contending elements of suspense; but the black was slow to reappear;
and my eyes stole home to my sweet girl's face, with its glory of moonlit
curls, and the eager, resolute, embittered look that put the world back
two whole months, and Eva Denison upon the Lady Jermyn's poop, in the
ship's last hours. But it was not her look alone; she had on her cloak, as
the night before, but with me (God bless her!) she found no need to clasp
herself in its folds; and underneath she wore the very dress in which she
had sung at our last concert, and been rescued in the gig. It looked as
though she had worn it ever since. The roses were crushed and soiled, the
tulle all torn, and tarnished some strings of beads that had been gold: a
tatter of Chantilly lace hung by a thread: it is another of the relics
that I have unearthed in the writing of this narrative.

“I thought men never noticed dresses?” my love said suddenly, a pleased
light in her eyes (I thought) in spite of all. “Do you really remember
it?”

“I remember every one of them,” I said indignantly; and so I did.

“You will wonder why I wear it,” said Eva, quickly. “It was the first that
came that terrible night. They have given me many since. But I won't wear
one of them—not one!”

How her eyes flashed! I forgot all about José.

“I suppose you know why they hadn't room for you in the gig?” she went on.

“No, I don't know, and I don't care. They had room for you,” said I;
“that's all I care about.” And to think she could not see I loved her!

“But do you mean to say you don't know that these—murderers—set
fire to the ship?”

“No—yes! I heard you say so last night.”

“And you don't want to know what for?”

Out of politeness I protested that I did; but, as I live, all I wanted to
know just then was whether my love loved me—whether she ever could—whether
such happiness was possible under heaven!

“You remember all that mystery about the cargo?” she continued eagerly,
her pretty lips so divinely parted!

“It turned out to be gunpowder,” said I, still thinking only of her.

“No—gold!”

“But it was gunpowder,” I insisted; for it was my incorrigible passion for
accuracy which had led up to half our arguments on the voyage; but this
time Eva let me off.

“It was also gold: twelve thousand ounces from the diggings. That was the
real mystery. Do you mean to say you never guessed?”

“No, by Jove I didn't!” said I. She had diverted my interest at last. I
asked her if she had known on board.

“Not until the last moment. I found out during the fire. Do you remember
when we said good-by? I was nearly telling you then.”

Did I remember! The very letter of that last interview was cut deep in my
heart; not a sleepless night had I passed without rehearsing it word for
word and look for look; and sometimes, when sorrow had spent itself, and
the heart could bleed no more, vain grief had given place to vainer
speculation, and I had cudgelled my wakeful brains for the meaning of the
new and subtle horror which I had read in my darling's eyes at the last.
Now I understood; and the one explanation brought such a tribe in its
train, that even the perilous ecstasy of the present moment was
temporarily forgotten in the horrible past.

“Now I know why they wouldn't have me in the gig!” I cried softly.

“She carried four heavy men's weight in gold.”

“When on earth did they get it aboard?”

“In provision boxes at the last; but they had been filling the boxes for
weeks.”

“Why, I saw them doing it!” I cried. “But what about the gig? Who picked
you up?”

She was watching that open door once more, and she answered with notable
indifference, “Mr. Rattray.”

“So that's the connection!” said I; and I think its very simplicity was
what surprised me most.

“Yes; he was waiting for us at Ascension.”

“Then it was all arranged?”

“Every detail.”

“And this young blackguard is as bad as any of them!”

“Worse,” said she, with bitter brevity. Nor had I ever seen her look so
hard but once, and that was the night before in the old justice hall, when
she told Rattray her opinion of him to his face. She had now the same
angry flush, the same set mouth and scornful voice; and I took it finally
into my head that she was unjust to the poor devil, villain though he was.
With all his villainy I declined to believe him as bad as the others. I
told her so in as many words. And in a moment we were arguing as though we
were back on the Lady Jermyn with nothing else to do.

“You may admire wholesale murderers and thieves,” said Eva. “I do not.”

“Nor I. My point is simply that this one is not as bad as the rest. I
believe he was really glad for my sake when he discovered that I knew
nothing of the villainy. Come now, has he ever offered you any personal
violence?”

“Me? Mr. Rattray? I should hope not, indeed!”

“Has he never saved you from any?”

“I—I don't know.”

“Then I do. When you left them last night there was some talk of bringing
you back by force. You can guess who suggested that—and who set his
face against it and got his way. You would think the better of Rattray had
you heard what passed.”

“Should I?” she asked half eagerly, as she looked quickly round at me; and
suddenly I saw her eyes fill. “Oh, why will you speak about him?” she
burst out. “Why must you defend him, unless it's to go against me, as you
always did and always will! I never knew anybody like you—never! I
want you to take me away from these wretches, and all you do is to defend
them!”

“Not all,” said I, clasping her hand warmly in mine. “Not all—not
all! I will take you away from them, never fear; in another hour God grant
you may be out of their reach for ever!”

“But where are we to go?” she whispered wildly. “What are you to do with
me? All my friends think me dead, and if they knew I was not it would all
come out.”

“So it shall,” said I; “the sooner the better; if I'd had my way it would
all be out already.”

I see her yet, my passionate darling, as she turned upon me, whiter than
the full white moon.

“Mr. Cole,” said she, “you must give me your sacred promise that so far as
you are concerned, it shall never come out at all!”

“This monstrous conspiracy? This cold blooded massacre?”

And I crouched aghast.

“Yes; it could do no good; and, at any rate, unless you promise I remain
where I am.”

“In their hands?”

“Decidedly—to warn them in time. Leave them I would, but betray them—never!”

What could I say? What choice had I in the face of an alternative so
headstrong and so unreasonable? To rescue Eva from these miscreants I
would have let every malefactor in the country go unscathed: yet the
condition was a hard one; and, as I hesitated, my love went on her knees
to me, there in the moonlight among the rhododendrons.

“Promise—promise—or you will kill me!” she gasped. “They may
deserve it richly, but I would rather be torn in little pieces than—than
have them—hanged!”

“It is too good for most of them.”

“Promise!”

“To hold my tongue about them all?”

“Yes—promise!”

“Promise!”

“When a hundred lives were sacrificed—”

“Promise!”

“I can't,” I said. “It's wrong.”

“Then good-by!” she cried, starting to her feet.

“No—no—” and I caught her hand.

“Well, then?”

“I—promise.”

CHAPTER XV. FIRST BLOOD

So I bound myself to a guilty secrecy for Eva's sake, to save her from
these wretches, or if you will, to win her for myself. Nor did it strike
me as very strange, after a moment's reflection, that she should intercede
thus earnestly for a band headed by her own mother's widower, prime
scoundrel of them all though she knew him to be. The only surprise was
that she had not interceded in his name; that I should have forgotten, and
she should have allowed me to forget, the very existence of so
indisputable a claim upon her loyalty. This, however, made it a little
difficult to understand the hysterical gratitude with which my unwilling
promise was received. Poor darling! she was beside herself with sheer
relief. She wept as I had never seen her weep before. She seized and even
kissed my hands, as one who neither knew nor cared what she did,
surprising me so much by her emotion that this expression of it passed
unheeded. I was the best friend she had ever had. I was her one good
friend in all the world; she would trust herself to me; and if I would but
take her to the convent where she had been brought up, she would pray for
me there until her death, but that would not be very long.

All of which confused me utterly; it seemed an inexplicable breakdown in
one who had shown such nerve and courage hitherto, and so hearty a
loathing for that damnable Santos. So completely had her presence of mind
forsaken her that she looked no longer where she had been gazing hitherto.
And thus it was that neither of us saw José until we heard him calling,
“Senhora Evah! Senhora Evah!” with some rapid sentences in Portuguese.

“Now is our time,” I whispered, crouching lower and clasping a small hand
gone suddenly cold. “Think of nothing now but getting out of this. I'll
keep my word once we are out; and here's the toy that's going to get us
out.” And I produced my Deane and Adams with no small relish.

A little trustful pressure was my answer and my reward; meanwhile the
black was singing out lustily in evident suspicion and alarm.

“He says they are coming back,” whispered Eva; “but that's impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because if they were he couldn't see them, and if he heard them he would
be frightened of their hearing him. But here he comes!”

A shuffling quick step on the path; a running grumble of unmistakable
threats; a shambling moonlit figure seen in glimpses through the leaves,
very near us for an instant, then hidden by the shrubbery as he passed
within a few yards of our hiding-place. A diminuendo of the shuffling
steps; then a cursing, frightened savage at one end of the rhododendrons,
and we two stealing out at the other, hand in hand, and bent quite double,
into the long neglected grass.

“Can you run for it?” I whispered.

“Yes, but not too fast, for fear we trip.'

“Come on, then!”

The lighted open doorway grew greater at every stride.

“He hasn't seen us yet—”

“No, I hear him threatening me still.”

“Now he has, though!”

A wild whoop proclaimed the fact, and upright we tore at top speed through
the last ten yards of grass, while the black rushed down one of the side
paths, gaining audibly on us over the better ground. But our start had
saved us, and we flew up the steps as his feet ceased to clatter on the
path; he had plunged into the grass to cut off the corner.

“Thank God!” cried Eva. “Now shut it quick.”

The great door swung home with a mighty clatter, and Eva seized the key in
both hands.

“I can't turn it!”

To lose a second was to take a life, and unconsciously I was sticking at
that, perhaps from no higher instinct than distrust of my aim. Our
pursuer, however, was on the steps when I clapped my free hand on top of
those little white straining ones, and by a timely effort bent both them
and the key round together; the ward shot home as José hurled himself
against the door. Eva bolted it. But the thud was not repeated, and I
gathered myself together between the door and the nearest window, for by
now I saw there was but one thing for us. The nigger must be disabled, if
I could manage such a nicety; if not, the devil take his own.

Well, I was not one tick too soon for him. My pistol was not cocked before
the crash came that I was counting on, and with it a shower of small glass
driving across the six-foot sill and tinkling on the flags. Next came a
black and bloody face, at which I could not fire. I had to wait till I saw
his legs, when I promptly shattered one of them at disgracefully short
range. The report was as deafening as one upon the stage; the hall filled
with white smoke, and remained hideous with the bellowing of my victim. I
searched him without a qualm, but threats of annihilation instead, and
found him unarmed but for that very knife which Rattray had induced me to
hand over to him in town. I had a grim satisfaction in depriving him of
this, and but small compunction in turning my back upon his pain.

“Come,” I said to poor Eva, “don't pity him, though I daresay he's the
most pitiable of the lot; show me the way through, and I'll follow with
this lamp.”

One was burning on the old oak table. I carried it along a narrow passage,
through a great low kitchen where I bumped my head against the black oak
beams; and I held it on high at a door almost as massive as the one which
we had succeeded in shutting in the nigger's face.

“I was afraid of it!” cried Eva, with a sudden sob.

“What is it?”

“They've taken away the key!”

Yes, the keen air came through an empty keyhole; and my lamp, held close,
not only showed that the door was locked, but that the lock was one with
which an unskilled hand might tamper for hours without result. I dealt it
a hearty kick by way of a test. The heavy timber did not budge; there was
no play at all at either lock or hinges; nor did I see how I could spend
one of my four remaining bullets upon the former, with any chance of a
return.

“Is this the only other door?”

“Then it must be a window.”

“All the back ones are barred.”

“Securely?”

“Yes.”

“Then we've no choice in the matter.”

And I led the way back to the hall, where the poor black devil lay
blubbering in his blood. In the kitchen I found the bottle of wine
(Rattray's best port, that they were trying to make her take for her
health) with which Eva had bribed him, and I gave it to him before laying
hands on a couple of chairs.

“What are you going to do?”'

“Go out the way we came.”

“But the wall?”

“Pile up these chairs, and as many more as we may need, if we can't open
the gate.”

But Eva was not paying attention any longer, either to me or to José; his
white teeth were showing in a grin for all his pain; her eyes were fixed
in horror on the floor.

“They've come back,” she gasped. “The underground passage! Hark—hark!”

There was a muffled rush of feet beneath our own, then a dull but very
distinguishable clatter on some invisible stair.

“Underground passage!” I exclaimed, and in my sheer disgust I forgot what
was due to my darling. “Why on earth didn't you tell me of it before?”

“There was so much to tell you! It leads to the sea. Oh, what shall we do?
You must hide—upstairs—anywhere!” cried Eva, wildly. “Leave
them to me—leave them to me.”

“I like that,” said I; and I did; but I detested myself for the tears my
words had drawn, and I prepared to die for them.

“They'll kill you, Mr. Cole!”

“It would serve me right; but we'll see about it.”

And I stood with my revolver very ready in my right hand, while with the
other I caught poor Eva to my side, even as a door flew open, and Rattray
himself burst upon us, a lantern in his hand, and the perspiration shining
on his handsome face in its light.

I can see him now as he stood dumfounded on the threshold of the hall; and
yet, at the time, my eyes sped past him into the room beyond.

It was the one I have described as being lined with books; there was a
long rent in this lining, where the books had opened with a door, through
which Captain Harris, Joaquin Santos, and Jane Braithwaite followed
Rattray in quick succession, the men all with lanterns, the woman scarlet
and dishevelled even for her. It was over the squire's shoulders I saw
their faces; he kept them from passing him in the doorway by a free use of
his elbows; and when I looked at him again, his black eyes were blazing
from a face white with passion, and they were fixed upon me.

“What the devil brings you here?” he thundered at last.

“Don't ask idle questions,” was my reply to that.

“So you were shamming to-day!”

“I was taking a leaf out of your book.”

“You'll gain nothing by being clever!” sneered the squire, taking a
threatening step forward. For at the last moment I had tucked my revolver
behind my back, not only for the pleasure, but for the obvious advantage
of getting them all in front of me and off their guard. I had no idea that
such eyes as Rattray's could be so fierce: they were dancing from me to my
companion, whom their glitter frightened into an attempt to disengage
herself from me; but my arm only tightened about her drooping figure.

“I shall gain no more than I expect,” said I, carelessly. “And I know what
to expect from brave gentlemen like you! It will be better than your own
fate, at all events; anything's better than being taken hence to the place
of execution, and hanged by the neck until you're dead, all three of you
in a row, and your bodies buried within the precincts of the prison!”

“The very thing for him,” murmured Santos. “The—very—theeng!”

“But I'm so soft-hearted,” I went insanely on, “that I should be sorry to
see that happen to such fine fellows as you are. Come out of that, you
little fraud behind there!” It was my betrayer skulking in the room. “Come
out and line up with the rest! No, I'm not going to see you fellows dance
on nothing; I've another kind of ball apiece for you, and one between 'em
for the Braithwaites!”

Well, I suppose I always had a nasty tongue in me, and rather enjoyed
making play with it on provocation; but, if so, I met with my deserts that
night. For the nigger of the Lady Jermyn lay all but hid behind Eva and
me; if they saw him at all, they may have thought him drunk; but, as for
myself, I had fairly forgotten his existence until the very moment came
for showing my revolver, when it was twisted out of my grasp instead, and
a ball sang under my arm as the brute fell back exhausted and the weapon
clattered beside him. Before I could stoop for it there was a dead weight
on my left arm, and Squire Rattray was over the table at a bound, with his
arms jostling mine beneath Eva Denison's senseless form.

“Leave her to me,” he cried fiercely. “You fool,” he added in a lower key,
“do you think I'd let any harm come to her?”

I looked him in the bright and honest eyes that had made me trust him in
the beginning. And I did not utterly distrust him yet. Rather was the
guile on my side as I drew back and watched Rattray lift the young girl
tenderly, and slowly carry her to the door by which she had entered and
left the hall just twenty-four hours before. I could not take my eyes off
them till they were gone. And when I looked for my revolver, it also had
disappeared.

José had not got it—he lay insensible. Santos was whispering to
Harris. Neither of them seemed armed. I made sure that Rattray had picked
it up and carried it off with Eva. I looked wildly for some other weapon.
Two unarmed men and a woman were all I had to deal with, for Braithwaite
had long since vanished. Could I but knock the worthless life out of the
men, I should have but the squire and his servants to deal with; and in
that quarter I still had my hopes of a bloodless battle and a treaty of
war.

A log fire was smouldering in the open grate. I darted to it, and had a
heavy, half-burned brand whirling round my head next instant. Harris was
the first within my reach. He came gamely at me with his fists. I sprang
upon him, and struck him to the ground with one blow, the sparks flying
far and wide as my smoking brand met the seaman's skull. Santos was upon
me next instant, and him, by sheer luck, I managed to serve the same; but
I doubt whether either man was stunned; and I was standing ready for them
to rise, when I felt myself seized round the neck from behind, and a mass
of fluffy hair tickling my cheek, while a shrill voice set up a lusty
scream for the squire.

I have said that the woman Braithwaite was of a sinister strength; but I
had little dreamt how strong she really was. First it was her arms that
wound themselves about my neck, long, sinuous, and supple as the tentacles
of some vile monster; then, as I struggled, her thumbs were on my windpipe
like pads of steel. Tighter she pressed, and tighter yet. My eyeballs
started; my tongue lolled; I heard my brand drop, and through a mist I saw
it picked up instantly. It crashed upon my skull as I still struggled
vainly; again and again it came down mercilessly in the same place; until
I felt as though a sponge of warm water had been squeezed over my head,
and saw a hundred withered masks grinning sudden exultation into mine; but
still the lean arm whirled, and the splinters flew, till I was blind with
my blood and the seven senses were beaten out of me.

CHAPTER XVI. A DEADLOCK

It must have been midnight when I opened my eyes; a clock was striking as
though it never would stop. My mouth seemed fire; a pungent flavor filled
my nostrils; the wineglass felt cold against my teeth. “That's more like
it!” muttered a voice close to my ear. An arm was withdrawn from under my
shoulders. I was allowed to sink back upon some pillows. And now I saw
where I was. The room was large and poorly lighted. I lay in my clothes on
an old four-poster bed. And my enemies were standing over me in a group.

“I hope you are satisfied!” sneered Joaquin Santos, with a flourish of his
eternal cigarette.

“I am. You don't do murder in my house, wherever else you may do it.”

“And now better lid 'im to the nirrest polissstation; or weel you go and
tell the poliss yourself?” asked the Portuguese, in the same tone of
mordant irony.

“Ay, ay,” growled Harris; “that's the next thing!”

“No,” said Rattray; “the next thing's for you two to leave him to me.”

“We'll see you damned!” cried the captain.

“No, no, my friend,” said Santos, with a shrug; “let him have his way. He
is as fond of his skeen as you are of yours; he'll come round to our way
in the end. I know this Senhor Cole. It is necessary for 'im to die. But
it is not necessary this moment; let us live them together for a leetle
beet.”

“That's all I ask,” said Rattray.

“You won't ask it twice,” rejoined Santos, shrugging. “I know this Senhor
Cole. There is only one way of dilling with a man like that. Besides, he
'as 'alf-keeled my good José; it is necessary for 'im to die.”

“I agree with the senhor,” said Harris, whose forehead was starred with
sticking-plaster. “It's him or us, an' we're all agen you, squire. You'll
have to give in, first or last.”

And the pair were gone; their steps grew faint in the corridor; when we
could no longer hear them, Rattray closed the door and quietly locked it.
Then he turned to me, stern enough, and pointed to the door with a hand
that shook.

“You see how it is?”

“Perfectly.”

“They want to kill you!”

“Of course they do.”

“It's your own fault; you've run yourself into this. I did my best to keep
you out of it. But in you come, and spill first blood.”

“I don't regret it,” said I.

“Oh, you're damned mule enough not to regret anything!” cried Rattray. “I
see the sort you are; yet but for me, I tell you plainly, you'd be a dead
man now.”

“I can't think why you interfered.”

“You've heard the reason. I won't have murder done here if I can prevent
it; so far I have; it rests with you whether I can go on preventing it or
not.”

“With me, does it?”

He sat down on the side of the bed. He threw an arm to the far side of my
body, and he leaned over me with savage eyes now staring into mine, now
resting with a momentary gleam of pride upon my battered head. I put up my
hand; it lit upon a very turban of bandages, and at that I tried to take
his hand in mine. He shook it off, and his eyes met mine more fiercely
than before.

“See here, Cole,” said he; “I don't know how the devil you got wind of
anything to start with, and I don't care. What I do know is that you've
made bad enough a long chalk worse for all concerned, and you'll have to
get yourself out of the mess you've got yourself into, and there's only
one way. I suppose Miss Denison has really told you everything this time?
What's that? Oh, yes, she's all right again; no thanks to you. Now let's
hear what she did tell you. It'll save time.”

I repeated the hurried disclosures made by Eva in the rhododendrons. He
nodded grimly in confirmation of their truth.

“Yes, those are the rough facts. The game was started in Melbourne. My
part was to wait at Ascension till the Lady Jermyn signalled herself,
follow her in a schooner we had bought and pick up the gig with the gold
aboard. Well, I did so; never mind the details now, and never mind the
bloody massacre the others had made of it before I came up. God knows I
was never a consenting party to that, though I know I'm responsible. I'm
in this thing as deep as any of them. I've shared the risks and I'm going
to share the plunder, and I'll swing with the others if it ever comes to
that. I deserve it hard enough. And so here we are, we three and the
nigger, all four fit to swing in a row, as you were fool enough to tell
us; and you step in and find out everything. What's to be done? You know
what the others want to do. I say it rests with you whether they do it or
not. There's only one other way of meeting the case.”

“What's that?”

“Be in it yourself, man! Come in with me and split my share!”

I could have burst out laughing in his handsome, eager face; the good
faith of this absurd proposal was so incongruously apparent; and so
obviously genuine was the young villain's anxiety for my consent. Become
accessory after the fact in such a crime! Sell my silence for a price! I
concealed my feelings with equal difficulty and resolution. I had plans of
my own already, but I must gain time to think them over. Nor could I
afford to quarrel with Rattray meanwhile.

“What was the haul?” I asked him, with the air of one not unprepared to
consider the matter.

“Twelve thousand ounces!”

“Forty-eight thousand pounds, about?”

“Yes-yes.”

“And your share?”

“Fourteen thousand pounds. Santos takes twenty, and Harris and I fourteen
thousand each.”

“And you offer me seven?”

“I do! I do!”

He was becoming more and more eager and excited. His eyes were brighter
than I had ever seen them, but slightly bloodshot, and a coppery flush
tinged his clear, sunburnt skin. I fancied he had been making somewhat
free with the brandy. But loss of blood had cooled my brain; and, perhaps,
natural perversity had also a share in the composure which grew upon me as
it deserted my companion.

“Why make such a sacrifice?” said I, smiling. “Why not let them do as they
like?”

“I've told you why! I'm not so bad as all that. I draw the line at bloody
murder! Not a life should have been lost if I'd had my way. Besides, I've
done all the dirty work by you, Cole; there's been no help for it. We
didn't know whether you knew or not; it made all the difference to us; and
somebody had to dog you and find out how much you did know. I was the only
one who could possibly do it. God knows how I detested the job! I'm more
ashamed of it than of worse things. I had to worm myself into your
friendship; and, by Jove, you made me think you did know, but hadn't let
it out, and might any day. So then I got you up here, where you would be
in our power if it was so; surely you can see every move? But this much
I'll swear—I had nothing to do with José breaking into your room at
the hotel; they went behind me there, curse them! And when at last I found
out for certain, down here, that you knew nothing after all, I was never
more sincerely thankful in my life. I give you my word it took a load off
my heart.”

“I know that,” I said. “I also know who broke into my room, and I'm glad
I'm even with one of you.”

“It's done you no good,” said Rattray. “Their first thought was to put you
out of the way, and it's more than ever their last. You see the sort of
men you've got to deal with; and they're three to one, counting the
nigger; but if you go in with me they'll only be three to two.”

He was manifestly anxious to save me in this fashion. And I suppose that
most sensible men, in my dilemma, would at least have nursed or played
upon good-will so lucky and so enduring. But there was always a twist in
me that made me love (in my youth) to take the unexpected course; and it
amused me the more to lead my young friend on.

“And where have you got this gold?” I asked him, in a low voice so
promising that he instantly lowered his, and his eyes twinkled naughtily
into mine.

“In the old tunnel that runs from this place nearly to the sea,” said he.
“We Rattrays have always been a pretty warm lot, Cole, and in the old days
we were the most festive smugglers on the coast; this tunnel's a relic of
'em, although it was only a tradition till I came into the property. I
swore I'd find it, and when I'd done so I made the new connection which
you shall see. I'm rather proud of it. And I won't say I haven't used the
old drain once or twice after the fashion of my rude forefathers; but
never was it such a godsend as it's been this time. By Jove, it would be a
sin if you didn't come in with us, Cole; but for the lives these
blackguards lost the thing's gone splendidly; it would be a sin if you
went and lost yours, whereas, if you come in, the two of us would be able
to shake off those devils: we should be too strong for 'em.”

“Seven thousand pounds!” I murmured. “Forty-eight thousand between us!”

“Yes, and nearly all of it down below, at this end of the tunnel, and the
rest where we dropped it when we heard you were trying to bolt. We'd got
it all at the other end, ready to pop aboard the schooner that's lying
there still, if you turned out to know anything and to have told what you
knew to the police. There was always the possibility of that, you see; we
simply daren't show our noses at the bank until we knew how much you knew,
and what you'd done or were thinking of doing. As it is, we can take 'em
the whole twelve thousand ounces, or rather I can, as soon as I like, in
broad daylight. I'm a lucky digger. It's all right. Everybody knows I've
been out there. They'll have to pay me over the counter; and if you wait
in the cab, by the Lord Harry, I'll pay you your seven thousand first! You
don't deserve it, Cole, but you shall have it, and between us we'll see
the others to blazes!”

He jumped up all excitement, and was at the door next instant.

“Stop!” I cried. “Where are you going?”

“Downstairs to tell them.”

“Tell them what?”

“That you're going in with me, and it's all right.”

“And do you really think I am?”

He had unlocked the door; after a pause I heard him lock it again. But I
did not see his face until he returned to the bedside. And then it
frightened me. It was distorted and discolored with rage and chagrin.

“You've been making a fool of me!” he cried fiercely.

“No, I have been considering the matter, Rattray.”

“And you won't accept my offer?”

“Of course I won't. I didn't say I'd been considering that.”

He stood over me with clenched fists and starting eyes.

“Don't you see that I want to save your life?” he cried. “Don't you see
that this is the only way? Do you suppose a murder more or less makes any
difference to that lot downstairs? Are you really such a fool as to die
rather than hold your tongue?”

“I won't hold it for money, at all events,” said I. “But that's what I was
coming to.”

“Very well!” he interrupted. “You shall only pretend to touch it. All I
want is to convince the others that it's against your interest to split.
Self-interest is the one motive they understand. Your bare word would be
good enough for me.”

“Suppose I won't give my bare word?” said I, in a gentle manner which I
did not mean to be as irritating as it doubtless was. Yet his proposals
and his assumptions were between them making me irritable in my turn.

“For Heaven's sake don't be such an idiot, Cole!” he burst out in a
passion. “You know I'm against the others, and you know what they want,
yet you do your best to put me on their side! You know what they are, and
yet you hesitate! For the love of God be sensible; at least give me your
word that you'll hold your tongue for ever about all you know.”

“All right,” I said. “I'll give you my word—my sacred promise,
Rattray—on one condition.”

“What's that?”

“That you let me take Miss Denison away from you, for good and all!”

His face was transformed with fury: honest passion faded from it and left
it bloodless, deadly, sinister.

“Away from me?” said Rattray, through his teeth.

“From the lot of you.”

“I remember! You told me that night. Ha, ha, ha! You were in love with her—you—you!”

“That has nothing to do with it,” said I, shaking the bed with my anger
and my agitation.

“I should hope not! You, indeed, to look at her!”

“Well,” I cried, “she may never love me; but at least she doesn't loathe
me as she loathes you—yes, and the sight of you, and your very
name!”

So I drew blood for blood; and for an instant I thought he was going to
make an end of it by incontinently killing me himself. His fists flew out.
Had I been a whole man on my legs, he took care to tell me what he would
have done, and to drive it home with a mouthful of the oaths which were
conspicuously absent from his ordinary talk.

“You take advantage of your weakness, like any cur,” he wound up.

“And you of your strength—like the young bully you are!” I retorted.

“You do your best to make me one,” he answered bitterly. “I try to stand
by you at all costs. I want to make amends to you, I want to prevent a
crime. Yet there you lie and set your face against a compromise; and there
you lie and taunt me with the thing that's gall and wormwood to me
already. I know I gave you provocation. And I know I'm rightly served. Why
do you suppose I went into this accursed thing at all? Not for the gold,
my boy, but for the girl! So she won't look at me. And it serves me right.
But—I say—do you really think she loathes me, Cole?”

“I don't see how she can think much better of you than of the crime in
which you've had a hand,” was my reply, made, however, with as much
kindness as I could summon. “The word I used was spoken in anger,” said I;
for his had disappeared; and he looked such a miserable, handsome dog as
he stood there hanging his guilty head—in the room, I fancied, where
he once had lain as a pretty, innocent child.

“Cole,” said he, “I'd give twice my share of the damned stuff never to
have put my hand to the plough; but go back I can't; so there's an end of
it.”

“I don't see it,” said I. “You say you didn't go in for the gold? Then
give up your share; the others'll jump at it; and Eva won't think the
worse of you, at any rate.”

“But what's to become of her if I drop out?

“You and I will take her to her friends, or wherever she wants to go.”

“No, no!” he cried. “I never yet deserted my pals, and I'm not going to
begin.”

“I don't believe you ever before had such pals to desert,” was my reply to
that. “Quite apart from my own share in the matter, it makes me positively
sick to see a fellow like you mixed up with such a crew in such a game.
Get out of it, man, get out of it while you can! Now's your time. Get out
of it, for God's sake!”

I sat up in my eagerness. I saw him waver. And for one instant a great
hope fluttered in my heart. But his teeth met. His face darkened. He shook
his head.

“That's the kind of rot that isn't worth talking, and you ought to know
it,” said he. “When I begin a thing I go through with it, though it lands
me in hell, as this one will. I can't help that. It's too late to go back.
I'm going on and you're going with me, Cole, like a sensible chap!”

I shook my head.

“Only on the one condition.”

“You—stick—to—that?” he said, so rapidly that the words
ran into one, so fiercely that his decision was as plain to me as my own.

“I do,” said I, and could only sigh when he made yet one more effort to
persuade me, in a distress not less apparent than his resolution, and not
less becoming in him.

“Consider, Cole, consider!”

“I have already done so, Rattray.”

“Murder is simply nothing to them!”

“It is nothing to me either.”

“Human life is nothing!”

“No; it must end one day.”

“You won't give your word unconditionally?”

“No; you know my condition.”

He ignored it with a blazing eye, his hand upon the door.

“You prefer to die, then?” “Infinitely.”

“Then die you may, and be damned to you!”

CHAPTER XVII. THIEVES FALL OUT

The door slammed. It was invisibly locked and the key taken out. I
listened for the last of an angry stride. It never even began. But after a
pause the door was unlocked again, and Rattray re-entered.

Without looking at me, he snatched the candle from the table on which it
stood by the bedside, and carried it to a bureau at the opposite side of
the room. There he stood a minute with his back turned, the candle, I
fancy, on the floor. I saw him putting something in either jacket pocket.
Then I heard a dull little snap, as though he had shut some small morocco
case; whatever it was, he tossed it carelessly back into the bureau; and
next minute he was really gone, leaving the candle burning on the floor.

I lay and heard his steps out of earshot, and they were angry enough now,
nor had he given me a single glance. I listened until there was no more to
be heard, and then in an instant I was off the bed and on my feet. I
reeled a little, and my head gave me great pain, but greater still was my
excitement. I caught up the candle, opened the unlocked bureau, and then
the empty case which I found in the very front.

My heart leapt; there was no mistaking the depressions in the case. It was
a brace of tiny pistols that Rattray had slipped into his jacket pockets.

Mere toys they must have been in comparison with my dear Deane and Adams;
that mattered nothing. I went no longer in dire terror of my life; indeed,
there was that in Rattray which had left me feeling fairly safe, in spite
of his last words to me, albeit I felt his fears on my behalf to be
genuine enough. His taking these little pistols (of course, there were but
three chambers left loaded in mine) confirmed my confidence in him.

He would stick at nothing to defend me from the violence of his
bloodthirsty accomplices. But it should not come to that. My legs were
growing firmer under me. I was not going to lie there meekly without
making at least an effort at self-deliverance. If it succeeded—the
idea came to me in a flash—I would send Rattray an ultimatum from
the nearest town; and either Eva should be set instantly and
unconditionally free, or the whole matter be put unreservedly in the hands
of the local police.

There were two lattice windows, both in the same immensely thick wall; to
my joy, I discovered that they overlooked the open premises at the back of
the hall, with the oak-plantation beyond; nor was the distance to the
ground very great. It was the work of a moment to tear the sheets from the
bed, to tie the two ends together and a third round the mullion by which
the larger window was bisected. I had done this, and had let down my
sheets, when a movement below turned my heart to ice. The night had
clouded over. I could see nobody; so much the greater was my alarm.

I withdrew from the window, leaving the sheets hanging, in the hope that
they also might be invisible in the darkness. I put out the candle, and
returned to the window in great perplexity. Next moment I stood aghast—between
the devil and the deep sea. I still heard a something down below, but a
worse sound came to drown it. An unseen hand was very quietly trying the
door which Rattray had locked behind him.

“Diablo!” came to my horrified ears, in a soft, vindictive voice.

“I told ye so,” muttered another; “the young swab's got the key.”

There was a pause, in which it would seem that Joaquin Santos had his ear
at the empty keyhole.

“I think he must be slipping,” at last I heard him sigh. “It was not
necessary to awaken him in this world. It is a peety.”

“One kick over the lock would do it,” said Harris; “only the young swab'll
hear.”

“Not perhaps while he is dancing attendance on the senhora. Was it not
good to send him to her? If he does hear, well, his own turn will come the
queecker, that is all. But it would be better to take them one at a time;
so keeck away, my friend, and I will give him no time to squil.”

While my would-be murderers were holding this whispered colloquy, I had
stood half-petrified by the open window; unwilling to slide down the
sheets into the arms of an unseen enemy, though I had no idea which of
them it could be; more hopeful of slipping past my butchers in the
darkness, and so to Rattray and poor Eva; but not the less eagerly looking
for some hiding-place in the room. The best that offered was a recess in
the thick wall between the two windows, filled with hanging clothes: a
narrow closet without a door, which would shelter me well enough if not
too curiously inspected. Here I hid myself in the end, after a moment of
indecision which nearly cost me my life. The coats and trousers still
shook in front of me when the door flew open at the first kick, and Santos
stood a moment in the moonlight, looking for the bed. With a stride he
reached it, and I saw the gleam of a knife from where I stood among the
squire's clothes; it flashed over my bed, and was still.

“He is not 'ere!”

“He heard us, and he's a-hiding.”

“Make light, my friend, and we shall very soon see.”

Harris did so.

“Here's a candle,” said Santos; “light it, and watch the door. Perro mal
dicto! What have we here?”

I felt certain he had seen me, but the candle passed within a yard of my
feet, and was held on high at the open window.

“We are too late!” said Santos. “He's gone!”

“Are you sure

“Look at this sheet.”

“Then the other swab knew of it, and we'll settle with him.”

“Yes, yes. But not yet, my good friend—not yet. We want his
asseestance in getting the gold back to the sea; he will be glad enough to
give it, now that his pet bird has flown; after that—by all mins.
You shall cut his troth, and I will put one of 'is dear friend's bullets
in 'im for my own satisfaction.”

There was a quick step on the stairs-in the corridor.

“I'd like to do it now,” whispered Harris; “no time like the present.”

“Not yet, I tell you!”

And Rattray was in the room, a silver-mounted pistol in each hand; the
sight of these was a surprise to his treacherous confederates, as even I
could see.

“What the devil are you two doing here?” he thundered.

“We thought he was too quite,” said Santos. “You percive the rizzon.”

And he waved from empty bed to open window, then held the candle close to
the tied sheet, and shrugged expressively.

“You thought he was too quiet!” echoed Rattray with fierce scorn. “You
thought I was too blind—that's what you mean. To tell me that Miss
Denison wished to see me, and Miss Denison that I wished to speak to her!
As if we shouldn't find you out in about a minute! But a minute was better
than nothing, eh? And you've made good use of your minute, have you.
You've murdered him, and you pretend he's got out? By God, if you have,
I'll murder you! I've been ready for this all night!”

And he stood with his back to the window, his pistols raised, and his head
carried proudly—happily—like a man whose self-respect was
coming back to him after many days. Harris shrank before his fierce eyes
and pointed barrels. The Portuguese, however, had merely given a
characteristic shrug, and was now rolling the inevitable cigarette.

“Your common sense is almost as remarkable as your sense of justice, my
friend,” said he. “You see us one, two, tree meenutes ago, and you see us
now. You see the empty bed, the empty room, and you imagine that in one,
two, tree meenutes we have killed a man and disposed of his body. Truly,
you are very wise and just, and very loyal also to your friends. You treat
a dangerous enemy as though he were your tween-brother. You let him escape—let
him, I repit—and then you threaten to shoot those who, as it is, may
pay for your carelessness with their lives. We have been always very loyal
to you, Senhor Rattray. We have leestened to your advice, and often taken
it against our better judgment. We are here, not because we think it wise,
but because you weeshed it. Yet at the first temptation you turn upon us,
you point your peestols at your friends.”

“I don't believe in your loyalty,” rejoined Rattray. “I believe you would
shoot me sooner than I would you. The only difference would be than I
should be shot in the back!”

“It is untrue,” said Santos, with immense emotion. “I call the saints to
witness that never by thought or word have I been disloyal to you”—and
the blasphemous wretch actually crossed himself with a trembling, skinny
hand. “I have leestened to you, though you are the younger man. I have
geeven way to you in everything from the moment we were so fullish as to
set foot on this accursed coast; that also was your doeeng; and it will be
your fault if ivil comes of it. Yet I have not complained. Here in your
own 'ouse you have been the master, I the guest. So far from plotting
against you, show me the man who has heard me brith one treacherous word
behind your back; you will find it deeficult, friend Rattray; what do you
say, captain?”

“Me?” cried Harris, in a voice bursting with abuse. And what the captain
said may or may not be imagined. It cannot be set down.

But the man who ought to have spoken—the man who had such a chance
as few men have off the stage—who could have confounded these
villains in a breath, and saved the wretched Rattray at once from them and
from himself—that unheroic hero remained ignobly silent in his
homely hiding-place. And, what is more, he would do the same again!

The rogues had fallen out; now was the time for honest men. They all
thought I had escaped; therefore they would give me a better chance than
ever of still escaping; and I have already explained to what purpose I
meant to use my first hours of liberty. That purpose I hold to have
justified any ingratitude that I may seem now to have displayed towards
the man who had undoubtedly stood between death and me. Was not Eva
Denison of more value than many Rattrays? And it was precisely in relation
with this pure young girl that I most mistrusted the squire: obviously
then my first duty was to save Eva from Rattray, not Rattray from these
traitors.

Not that I pretend for a moment to have been the thing I never was: you
are not so very grateful to the man who pulls you out of the mud when he
has first of all pushed you in; nor is it chivalry alone which spurs one
to the rescue of a lovely lady for whom, after all, one would rather live
than die. Thus I, in my corner, was thinking (I will say) of Eva first;
but next I was thinking of myself; and Rattray's blood be on his own hot
head! I hold, moreover, that I was perfectly right in all this; but if any
think me very wrong, a sufficient satisfaction is in store for them, for I
was very swiftly punished.

The captain's language was no worse in character than in effect: the bed
was bloody from my wounded head, all tumbled from the haste with which I
had quitted it, and only too suggestive of still fouler play. Rattray
stopped the captain with a sudden flourish of one of his pistols, the
silver mountings making lightning in the room; then he called upon the
pair of them to show him what they had done with me; and to my horror,
Santos invited him to search the room. The invitation was accepted. Yet
there I stood. It would have been better to step forward even then. Yet I
cowered among his clothes until his own hand fell upon my collar, and
forth I was dragged to the plain amazement of all three.

Santos was the first to find his voice.

“Another time you will perhaps think twice before you spik, friend
squire.”

Rattray simply asked me what I had been doing in there, in a white flame
of passion, and with such an oath that I embellished the truth for him in
my turn.

“Trying to give you blackguards the slip,” said I.

“Then it was you who let down the sheet?”

“Of course it was.”

“All right! I'm done with you,” said he; “that settles it. I make you an
offer. You won't accept it. I do my best; you do your worst; but I'll be
shot if you get another chance from me!”

Brandy and the wine-glass stood where Rattray must have set them, on an
oak stool beside the bed; as he spoke he crossed the room, filled the
glass till the spirit dripped, and drained it at a gulp. He was twitching
and wincing still when he turned, walked up to Joaquin Santos, and pointed
to where I stood with a fist that shook.

“You wanted to deal with him,” said Rattray; “you're at liberty to do so.
I'm only sorry I stood in your way.”

But no answer, and for once no rings of smoke came from those shrivelled
lips: the man had rolled and lighted a cigarette since Rattray entered,
but it was burning unheeded between his skinny fingers. I had his
attention, all to myself. He knew the tale that I was going to tell. He
was waiting for it; he was ready for me. The attentive droop of his head;
the crafty glitter in his intelligent eyes; the depth and breadth of the
creased forehead; the knowledge of his resource, the consciousness of my
error, all distracted and confounded me so that my speech halted and my
voice ran thin. I told Rattray every syllable that these traitors had been
saying behind his back, but I told it all very ill; what was worse, and
made me worse, I was only too well aware of my own failure to carry
conviction with my words.

“And why couldn't you come out and say so,” asked Rattray, as even I knew
that he must. “Why wait till now?”

“Ah, why!” echoed Santos, with a smile and a shake of the head; a
suspicious tolerance, an ostentatious truce, upon his parchment face. And
already he was sufficiently relieved to suck his cigarette alight again.

“You know why,” I said, trusting to bluff honesty with the one of them who
was not rotten to the core: “because I still meant escaping.”

“And then what?” asked Rattray fiercely.

“You had given me my chance,” I said; “I hould have given you yours.”

“You would, would you? Very kind of you, Mr. Cole!”

“No, no,” said Santos; “not kind, but clever! Clever, spicious, and
queeck-weeted beyond belif! Senhor Rattray, we have all been in the dark;
we thought we had fool to die with, but what admirable knave the young man
would make! Such readiness, such resource, with his tongue or with his
peestol; how useful would it be to us! I am glad you have decided to live
him to me, friend Rattray, for I am quite come round to your way of
thinking. It is no longer necessary for him to die!”

“You mean that?” cried Rattray keenly.

“Of course I min it. You were quite right. He must join us. But he will
when I talk to him.”

I could not speak. I was fascinated by this wretch: it was reptile and
rabbit with us. Treachery I knew he meant; my death, for one; my death was
certain; and yet I could not speak.

“Then talk to him, for God's sake,” cried Rattray, “and I shall be only
too glad if you can talk some sense into him. I've tried, and failed.”

“I shall not fail,” said Santos softly. “But it is better that he has a
leetle time to think over it calmly; better steel for 'im to slip upon it,
as you say. Let us live 'im for the night, what there is of it; time
enough in the morning.”

I could hardly believe my ears; still I knew that it was treachery, all
treachery; and the morning I should never see.

“But we can't leave him up here,” said Rattray; “it would mean one of us
watching him all night.”

“Quite so,” said Santos. “I will tell you where we could live him,
however, if you will allow me to wheesper one leetle moment.”

They drew aside; and, as I live, I thought that little moment was to be
Rattray's last on earth. I watched, but nothing happened; on the contrary,
both men seemed agreed, the Portuguese gesticulating, the Englishman
nodding, as they stood conversing at the window. Their faces were
strangely reassuring. I began to reason with myself, to rid my mind of
mere presentiment and superstition. If these two really were at one about
me (I argued) there might be no treachery after all. When I came to think
of it, Rattray had been closeted long enough with me to awake the worst
suspicions in the breasts of his companions; now that these were allayed,
there might be no more bloodshed after all (if, for example, I pretended
to give in), even though Santos had not cared whose blood was shed a few
minutes since. That was evidently the character of the wretch: to compass
his ends or to defend his person he would take life with no more
compunction than the ordinary criminal takes money; but (and hence) murder
for murder's sake was no amusement to him.

My confidence was further restored by Captain Harris; ever a gross
ruffian, with no refinements to his rascality, he had been at the brandy
bottle after Rattray's example; and now was dozing on the latter's bed,
taking his watch below when he could get it, like the good seaman he had
been. I was quite sorry for him when the conversation at the window ceased
suddenly, and Rattray roused the captain up.

“Watches aft!” said he. “We want that mattress; you can bring it along,
while I lead the way with the pillows and things. Come on, Cole!”

“Where to?” I asked, standing firm.

“Where there's no window for you to jump out of, old boy, and no clothes
of mine for you to hide behind. You needn't look so scared; it's as dry as
a bone, as cellars go. And it's past three o'clock. And you've just got to
come.”

CHAPTER XVIII. A MAN OF MANY MURDERS

It was a good-sized wine-cellar, with very little wine in it; only one
full bin could I discover. The bins themselves lined but two of the walls,
and most of them were covered in with cobwebs, close-drawn like
mosquito-curtains. The ceiling was all too low: torpid spiders hung in
disreputable parlors, dead to the eye, but loathsomely alive at an
involuntary touch. Rats scuttled when we entered, and I had not been long
alone when they returned to bear me company. I am not a natural historian,
and had rather face a lion with the right rifle than a rat with a stick.
My jailers, however, had been kind enough to leave me a lantern, which,
set upon the ground (like my mattress), would afford a warning, if not a
protection, against the worst; unless I slept; and as yet I had not lain
down. The rascals had been considerate enough, more especially Santos, who
had a new manner for me with his revised opinion of my character; it was a
manner almost as courtly as that which had embellished his relations with
Eva Denison, and won him my early regard at sea. Moreover, it was at the
suggestion of Santos that they had detained me in the hall, for
much-needed meat and drink, on the way down. Thereafter they had conducted
me through the book-lined door of my undoing, down stone stairs leading to
three cellar doors, one of which they had double-locked upon me.

As soon as I durst I was busy with this door; but to no purpose; it was a
slab of solid oak, hung on hinges as massive as its lock. It galled me to
think that but two doors stood between me and the secret tunnel to the
sea: for one of the other two must lead to it. The first, however, was all
beyond me, and I very soon gave it up. There was also a very small grating
which let in a very little fresh air: the massive foundations had been
tunnelled in one place; a rude alcove was the result, with this grating at
the end and top of it, some seven feet above the earth floor. Even had I
been able to wrench away the bars, it would have availed me nothing, since
the aperture formed the segment of a circle whose chord was but a very few
inches long. I had nevertheless a fancy for seeing the stars once more and
feeling the breath of heaven upon my bandaged temples, which impelled me
to search for that which should add a cubit to my stature. And at a glance
I descried two packing-cases, rather small and squat, but the pair of them
together the very thing for me. To my amazement, however, I could at first
move neither one nor the other of these small boxes. Was it that I was
weak as water, or that they were heavier than lead? At last I managed to
get one of them in my arms—only to drop it with a thud. A side
started; a thin sprinkling of yellow dust glittered on the earth. I
fetched the lantern: it was gold-dust from Bendigo or from Ballarat.

To me there was horror unspeakable, yet withal a morbid fascination, in
the spectacle of the actual booty for which so many lives had been
sacrificed before my eyes. Minute followed minute in which I looked at
nothing, and could think of nothing, but the stolen bullion at my feet;
then I gathered what of the dust I could, pocketed it in pinches to hide
my meddlesomeness, and blew the rest away. The box had dropped very much
where I had found it; it had exhausted my strength none the less, and I
was glad at last to lie down on the mattress, and to wind my body in
Rattray's blankets.

I shuddered at the thought of sleep: the rats became so lively the moment
I lay still. One ventured so near as to sit up close to the lantern; the
light showed its fat white belly, and the thing itself was like a dog
begging, as big to my disgusted eyes. And yet, in the midst of these
horrors (to me as bad as any that had preceded them), nature overcame me,
and for a space my torments ceased.

“He is aslip,” a soft voice said.

“Don't wake the poor devil,” said another.

“But I weesh to spik with 'im. Senhor Cole! Senhor Cole!”

I opened my eyes. Santos looked of uncanny stature in the low yellow
light, from my pillow close to the earth. Harris turned away at my glance;
he carried a spade, and began digging near the boxes without more ado, by
the light of a second lantern set on one of them: his back was to me from
this time on. Santos shrugged a shoulder towards the captain as he opened
a campstool, drew up his trousers, and seated himself with much
deliberation at the foot of my mattress.

“When you 'ave treasure,” said he, “the better thing is to bury it, Senhor
Cole. Our young friend upstairs begs to deefer; but he is slipping; it is
peety he takes such quantity of brandy! It is leetle wikness of you
Engleesh; we in Portugal never touch it, save as a liqueur; therefore we
require less slip. Friend squire upstairs is at this moment no better than
a porker. Have I made mistake? I thought it was the same word in both
languages; but I am glad to see you smile, Senhor Cole; that is good sign.
I was going to say, he is so fast aslip up there, that he would not hear
us if we were to shoot each other dead!”

And he gave me his paternal smile, benevolent, humorous, reassuring; but I
was no longer reassured; nor did I greatly care any more what happened to
me. There is a point of last, as well as one of least resistance, and I
had reached both points at once.

“Have you shot him dead?” I inquired, thinking that if he had, this would
precipitate my turn. But he was far from angry; the parchment face
crumpled into tolerant smiles; the venerable head shook a playful
reproval, as he threw away the cigarette that I am tired of mentioning,
and put the last touch to a fresh one with his tongue.

“What question?” said he; “reely, Senhor Cole! But you are quite right: I
would have shot him, or cut his troth” (and he shrugged indifference on
the point), “if it had not been for you; and yet it would have been your
fault! I nid not explain; the poseetion must have explained itself
already; besides, it is past. With you two against us—but it is
past. You see, I have no longer the excellent José. You broke his leg, bad
man. I fear it will be necessary to destroy 'im.” Santos made a pause;
then inquired if he shocked me.

“Not a bit,” said I, neither truly nor untruly; “you interest me.” And
that he did.

“You see,” he continued, “I have not the respect of you Engleesh for 'uman
life. We will not argue it. I have at least some respect for prejudice. In
my youth I had myself such prejudices; but one loses them on the Zambesi.
You cannot expect one to set any value upon the life of a black nigger;
and when you have keeled a great many Kaffirs, by the lash, with the
crocodiles, or what-not, then a white man or two makes less deeference. I
acknowledge there were too many on board that sheep; but what was one to
do? You have your Engleesh proverb about the dead men and the stories; it
was necessary to make clin swip. You see the result.”

He shrugged again towards the boxes; but this time, being reminded of them
(I supposed), he rose and went over to see how Harris was progressing. The
captain had never looked round; neither did he look at Santos. “A leetle
dipper,” I heard the latter say, “and, perhaps, a few eenches—” but
I lost the last epithet. It followed a glance over the shoulder in my
direction, and immediately preceded the return of Santos to his
camp-stool.

“Yes, it is always better to bury treasure,” said he once more; but his
tone was altered; it was more contemplative; and many smoke-rings came
from the shrunk lips before another word; but through them all, his dark
eyes, dull with age, were fixed upon me.

“You are a treasure!” he exclaimed at last, softly enough, but quickly and
emphatically for him, and with a sudden and most diabolical smile.

“So you are going to bury me?”

I had suspected it when first I saw the spade; then not; but since the
visit to the hole I had made up my mind to it.

“Bury you? No, not alive,” said Santos, in his playfully reproving tone.
“It would be necessary to deeg so dip!” he added through his few remaining
teeth.

“Well,” I said, “you'll swing for it. That's something.”

Santos smiled again, benignantly enough this time: in contemplation also:
as an artist smiles upon his work. I was his!

“You live town,” said he; “no one knows where you go. You come down here;
no one knows who you are. Your dear friend squire locks you up for the
night, but dreenks too much and goes to slip with the key in his pocket;
it is there when he wakes; but the preesoner, where is he? He is gone,
vanished, escaped in the night, and, like the base fabreec of your own
poet's veesion, he lives no trace—is it trace?—be'ind! A
leetle earth is so easily bitten down; a leetle more is so easily carried
up into the garden; and a beet of nice strong wire might so easily be
found in a cellar, and afterwards in the lock! No, Senhor Cole, I do not
expect to 'ang. My schims have seldom one seengle flaw. There was just one
in the Lady Jermyn; there was—Senhor Cole! If there is one this
time, and you will be so kind as to point it out, I will—I will run
the reesk of shooting you instead of—”

A pinch of his baggy throat, between the fingers and thumbs of both hands,
foreshadowed a cleaner end; and yet I could look at him; nay, it was more
than I could do not to look upon that bloodless face, with the two dry
blots upon the parchment, that were never withdrawn from mine.

“No you won't, messmate! If it's him or us for it, let a bullet do it, and
let it do it quick, you bloody Spaniard! You can't do the other without
me, and my part's done.”

Harris was my only hope. I had seen this from the first, but my appeal I
had been keeping to the very end. And now he was leaving me before a word
would come! Santos had gone over to my grave, and there was Harris at the
door!

“It is not dip enough,” said the Portuguese.

“It's as deep as I mean to make it, with you sittin' there talkin' about
it.”

And the door stood open.

“Captain!” I screamed. “For Christ's sake, captain!”

He stood there, trembling, yet even now not looking my way.

“Did you ever see a man hanged?” asked Santos, with a vile eye for each of
us. “I once hanged fifteen in a row; abominable thifs. And I once poisoned
nearly a hundred at one banquet; an untrustworthy tribe; but the hanging
was the worse sight and the worse death. Heugh! There was one man—he
was no stouter than you are captain—”

But the door slammed; we heard the captain on the stairs; there was a
rustle from the leaves outside, and then a silence that I shall not
attempt to describe.

And, indeed, I am done with this description: as I live to tell the tale
(or spoil it, if I choose) I will make shorter work of this particular
business than I found it at the time. Perverse I may be in old age as in
my youth; but on that my agony—my humiliating agony—I decline
to dwell. I suffer it afresh as I write. There are the cobwebs on the
ceiling, a bloated spider crawling in one: a worse monster is gloating
over me: those dull eyes of his, and my own pistol-barrel, cover me in the
lamp-light. The crucifix pin is awry in his cravat; that is because he has
offered it me to kiss. As a refinement (I feel sure) my revolver is not
cocked; and the hammer goes up—up—

He missed me because a lantern was flashed into his eyes through the
grating. He wasted the next ball in firing wildly at the light. And the
last chamber's load became suddenly too precious for my person; for there
were many voices overhead; there were many feet upon the stairs.

Harris came first—head-first—saw me still living as he reeled—hurled
himself upon the boxes and one of these into the hole—all far
quicker than my pen can write it. The manoeuvre, being the captain's,
explained itself: on his heels trod Rattray, with one who brought me to my
feet like the call of silver trumpets.

“The house is surrounded,” says the squire, very quick and quiet; “is this
your doing, Cole?”

“I wish it was,” said I; “but I can't complain; it's saved my life.” And I
looked at Santos, standing dignified and alert, my still smoking pistol in
his hand.

“Two things to do,” says Rattray—“I don't care which.” He strode
across the cellar and pulled at the one full bin; something slid out, it
was a binful of empty bottles, and this time they were allowed to crash
upon the floor; the squire stood pointing to a manhole at the back of the
bin. “That's one alternative,” said he; “but it will mean leaving this
much stuff at least,” pointing to the boxes, “and probably all the rest at
the other end. The other thing's to stop and fight!”

“I fight,” said Santos, stalking to the door. “Have you no more ammunition
for me, friend Cole? Then I must live you alive; adios, senhor!”

Harris cast a wistful look towards the manhole, not in cowardice, I fancy,
but in sudden longing for the sea, the longing of a poor devil of a
sailor-man doomed to die ashore. I am still sorry to remember that Rattray
judged him differently. “Come on, skipper,” said he; “it's all or none
aboard the lugger, and I think it will be none. Up you go; wait a second
in the room above, and I'll find you an old cutlass. I shan't be longer.”
He turned to me with a wry smile. “We're not half-armed,” he said;
“they've caught us fairly on the hop; it should be fun! Good-by, Cole; I
wish you'd had another round for that revolver. Good-by, Eva!”

And he held out his hand to our love, who had been watching him all this
time with eyes of stone; but now she turned her back upon him without a
word. His face changed; the stormlight of passion and remorse played upon
it for an instant; he made a step towards her, wheeled abruptly, and took
me by the shoulder instead.

“Take care of her, Cole,” said he. “Whatever happens—take care of
her.”

I caught him at the foot of the stairs. I do not defend what I did. But I
had more ammunition; a few wadded bullets, caps, and powder-charges, loose
in a jacket pocket; and I thrust them into one of his, upon a sudden
impulse, not (as I think) altogether unaccountable, albeit (as I have
said) so indefensible.

My back was hardly turned an instant. I had left a statue of unforgiving
coldness. I started round to catch in my arms a half-fainting,
grief-stricken form, shaken with sobs that it broke my heart to hear. I
placed her on the camp-stool. I knelt down and comforted her as well as I
could, stroking her hands, my arm about her heaving shoulders, with the
gold-brown hair streaming over them. Such hair as it was! So much longer
than I had dreamt. So soft—so fine—my soul swam with the sight
and touch of it. Well for me that there broke upon us from above such a
sudden din as turned my hot blood cold! A wild shout of surprise; an
ensuing roar of defiance; shrieks and curses; yells of rage and pain; and
pistol-shot after pistol-shot as loud as cannon in the confined space.

I know now that the battle in the hall was a very brief affair; while it
lasted I had no sense of time; minutes or moments, they were (God forgive
me!) some of the very happiest in all my life. My joy was as profound as
it was also selfish and incongruous. The villains were being routed; of
that there could be no doubt or question. I hoped Rattray might escape,
but for the others no pity stirred in my heart, and even my sneaking
sympathy with the squire could take nothing from the joy that was in my
heart. Eva Denison was free. I was free. Our oppressors would trouble us
no more. We were both lonely; we were both young; we had suffered together
and for each other. And here she lay in my arms, her head upon my
shoulder, her soft bosom heaving on my own! My blood ran hot and cold by
turns. I forgot everything but our freedom and my love. I forgot my
sufferings, as I would have you all forget them. I am not to be pitied. I
have been in heaven on earth. I was there that night, in my great bodily
weakness, and in the midst of blood-shed, death, and crime.

“They have stopped!” cried Eva suddenly. “It is over! Oh, if he is dead!”

And she sat upright, with bright eyes starting from a deathly face. I do
not think she knew that she had been in my arms at all: any more than I
knew that the firing had ceased before she told me. Excited voices were
still raised overhead; but some sounded distant, yet more distinct, coming
through the grating from the garden; and none were voices that we knew.
One poor wretch, on the other hand, we heard plainly groaning to his
death; and we looked in each other's eyes with the same thought.

“That's Harris,” said I, with, I fear, but little compassion in my tone or
in my heart just then.

“Where are the others?” cried Eva piteously.

“God knows,” said I; “they may be done for, too.”

“If they are!”

“It's better than the death they would have lived to die.”

“But only one of them was a wilful murderer! Oh, Mr. Cole—Mr. Cole—go
and see what has happened; come back and tell me! I dare not come. I will
stay here and pray for strength to bear whatever news you may bring me. Go
quickly. I will—wait—and pray!”

So I left the poor child on her knees in that vile cellar, white face and
straining hands uplifted to the foul ceiling, sweet lips quivering with
prayer, eyelids reverently lowered, and the swift tears flowing from
beneath them, all in the yellow light of the lantern that stood burning by
her side. How different a picture from that which awaited me overhead!

CHAPTER XIX. MY GREAT HOUR

The library doors were shut, and I closed the secret one behind me before
opening the other and peering out through a wrack of bluish smoke; and
there lay Captain Harris, sure enough, breathing his last in the arms of
one constable, while another was seated on the table with a very wry face,
twisting a tourniquet round his arm, from which the blood was dripping
like raindrops from the eaves. A third officer stood in the porch, issuing
directions to his men without.

“He's over the wall, I tell you! I saw him run up our ladder. After him
every man of you—and spread!”

I looked in vain for Rattray and the rest; yet it seemed as if only one of
them had escaped. I was still looking when the man in the porch wheeled
back into the hall, and instantly caught sight of me at my door.

“Hillo! here's another of them,” cried he. “Out you come, young fellow!
Your mates are all dead men.”

“They're not my mates.”

“Never mind; come you out and let's have a look at you.”

I did so, and was confronted by a short, thickset man, who recognized me
with a smile, but whom I failed to recognize.

“I might have guessed it was Mr. Cole,” said he. “I knew you were here
somewhere, but I couldn't make head or tail of you through the smoke.”

“I'm surprised that you can make head or tail of me at all,” said I.

“Then you've quite forgotten the inquisitive parson you met out fishing?
You see I found out your name for myself!”

“So it was a detective!”

“It was and is,” said the little man, nodding. “Detective or Inspector
Royds, if you're any the wiser.

“What has happened? Who has escaped?” “Your friend Rattray; but he won't
get far.”

“What of the Portuguese and the nigger?”

I forgot that I had crippled José, but remembered with my words, and
wondered the more where he was.

“I'll show you,” said Royds. “It was the nigger let us in. We heard him
groaning round at the back—who smashed his leg? One of our men was
at that cellar grating; there was some of them down there; we wanted to
find our way down and corner them, but the fat got in the fire too soon.
Can you stand something strong? Then come this way.”

He led me out into the garden, and to a tangled heap lying in the
moonlight, on the edge of the long grass. The slave had fallen on top of
his master; one leg lay swathed and twisted; one black hand had but
partially relaxed upon the haft of a knife (the knife) that stood up
hilt-deep in a blacker heart. And in the hand of Santos was still the
revolver (my Deane and Adams) which had sent its last ball through the
nigger's body.

“They slipped out behind us, all but the one inside,” said Royds,
ruefully; “I'm hanged if I know yet how it happened—but we were on
them next second. Before that the nigger had made us hide him in the
grass, but the old devil ran straight into him, and the one fired as the
other struck. It's the worst bit of luck in the whole business, and I'm
rather disappointed on the whole. I've been nursing the job all this week;
had my last look round this very evening, with one of these officers, and
only rode back for more to make sure of taking our gentlemen alive. And
we've lost three out of four of 'em, and have still to lay hands on the
gold! I suppose you didn't know there was any aboard?” he asked abruptly.

“Not before to-night.”

“Nor did we till the Devoren came in with letters last week, a hundred and
thirty days out. She should have been in a month before you, but she got
amongst the ice around the Horn. There was a letter of advice about the
gold, saying it would probably go in the Lady Jermyn; and another about
Rattray and his schooner, which had just sailed; the young gentleman was
known to the police out there.”

“Do you know where the schooner is?”

“Bless you, no, we've had no time to think about her; the man had been
seen about town, and we've done well to lay hands on him in the time.”

“You will do better still when you do lay hands on him,” said I, wresting
my eyes from the yellow dead face of the foreign scoundrel. The moon shone
full upon his high forehead, his shrivelled lips, dank in their death
agony, and on the bauble with the sacred device that he wore always in his
tie. I recovered my property from the shrunken fingers, and so turned away
with a harder heart than I ever had before or since for any creature of
Almighty God.

Harris had expired in our absence.

“Never spoke, sir,” said the constable in whose arms we had left him.

“More's the pity. Well, cut out at the back and help land the young gent,
or we'll have him giving us the slip too. He may double back, but I'm
watching out for that. Which way should you say he'd head, Mr. Cole?”

“Inland,” said I, lying on the spur of the moment, I knew not why. “Try at
the cottage where I've been staying.”

“We have a man posted there already. That woman is one of the gang, and
we've got her safe. But I'll take your advice, and have that side scoured
whilst I hang about the place.”

And he walked through the house, and out the back way, at the officer's
heels; meanwhile the man with the wounded arm was swaying where he sat
from loss of blood, and I had to help him into the open air before at last
I was free to return to poor Eva in her place of loathsome safety.

I had been so long, however, that her patience was exhausted, and as I
returned to the library by one door, she entered by the other.

“I could bear it no longer. Tell me—the worst!”

“Three of them are dead.”

“Which three?”

She had crossed to the other door, and would not have me shut it. So I
stood between her and the hearth, on which lay the captain's corpse, with
the hearthrug turned up on either side to cover it.

“Harris for one,” said I. “Outside lie José and—”

“Quick! Quick!”

“Senhor Santos.”

Her face was as though the name meant nothing to her.

“And Mr. Rattray?” she cried. “And Mr. Rattray—”

“Has escaped for the present. He seems to have cut his way through the
police and got over the wall by a ladder they left behind them. They are
scouring the country—Miss Denison! Eva! My poor love!”

She had broken down utterly in a second fit of violent weeping; and a
second time I took her in my arms, and stood trying in my clumsy way to
comfort her, as though she were a little child. A lamp was burning in the
library, and I recognized the arm-chair which Rattray had drawn thence for
me on the night of our dinner—the very night before! I led Eva back
into the room, and I closed both doors. I supported my poor girl to the
chair, and once more I knelt before her and took her hands in mine. My
great hour was come at last: surely a happy omen that it was also the hour
before the dawn.

“Cry your fill, my darling,” I whispered, with the tears in my own voice.
“You shall never have anything more to cry for in this world! God has been
very good to us. He brought you to me, and me to you. He has rescued us
for each other. All our troubles are over; cry your fill; you will never
have another chance so long as I live, if only you will let me live for
you. Will you, Eva? Will you? Will you?”

She drew her hands from mine, and sat upright in the chair, looking at me
with round eyes; but mine were dim; astonishment was all that I could read
in her look, and on I went headlong, with growing impetus and passion.

“I know I am not much, my darling; but you know I was not always what my
luck, good and bad, has left me now, and you will make a new man of me so
soon! Besides, God must mean it, or He would not have thrown us together
amid such horrors, and brought us through them together still. And you
have no one else to take care of you in the world! Won't you let me try,
Eva? Say that you will!”

“Then—you—owe me?” she said slowly, in a low, awe-struck voice
that might have told me my fate at once; but I was shaking all over in the
intensity of my passion, and for the moment it was joy enough to be able
at last to tell her all.

“Love you?” I echoed. “With every fibre of my being! With every atom of my
heart and soul and body! I love you well enough to live to a hundred for
you, or to die for you to-night!”

“Well enough to—give me up?” she whispered.

I felt as though a cold hand had checked my heart at its hottest, but I
mastered myself sufficiently to face her question and to answer it as
honestly as I might.

“Yes!” I cried; “well enough even to do that, if it was for your
happiness; but I might be rather difficult to convince about that.”

“You are very strong and true,” she murmured. “Yes, I can trust you as I
have never trusted anybody else! But—how long have you been so
foolish?” And she tried very hard to smile.

“Since I first saw you; but I only knew it on the night of the fire. Till
that night I resisted it like an idiot. Do you remember how we used to
argue? I rebelled so against my love! I imagined that I had loved once
already and once for all. But on the night of the fire I knew that my love
for you was different from all that had gone before or would ever come
again. I gave in to it at last, and oh! the joy of giving in! I had fought
against the greatest blessing of my life, and I never knew it till I had
given up fighting. What did I care about the fire? I was never happier—until
now! You sang through my heart like the wind through the rigging; my one
fear was that I might go to the bottom without telling you my love. When I
asked to say a few last words to you on the poop, it was to tell you my
love before we parted, that you might know I loved you whatever came. I
didn't do so, because you seemed so frightened, poor darling! I hadn't it
in my heart to add to your distress. So I left you without a word. But I
fought the sea for days together simply to tell you what I couldn't die
without telling you. When they picked me up, it was your name that brought
back my senses after days of delirium. When I heard that you were dead, I
longed to die myself. And when I found you lived after all, the horror of
your surroundings was nothing to be compared with the mere fact that you
lived; that you were unhappy and in danger was my only grief, but it was
nothing to the thought of your death; and that I had to wait twenty-four
hours without coming to you drove me nearer to madness than ever I was on
the hen-coop. That's how I love you, Eva,” I concluded; “that's how I love
and will love you, for ever and ever, no matter what happens.”

Those sweet gray eyes of hers had been fixed very steadily upon me all
through this outburst; as I finished they filled with tears, and my poor
love sat wringing her slender fingers, and upbraiding herself as though
she were the most heartless coquette in the country.

“How wicked I am!” she moaned. “How ungrateful I must be! You offer me the
unselfish love of a strong, brave man. I cannot take it. I have no love to
give you in return.”

“But some day you may,” I urged, quite happily in my ignorance. “It will
come. Oh, surely it will come, after all that we have gone through
together!”

She looked at me very steadily and kindly through her tears.

“It has come, in a way,” said she; “but it is not your way, Mr. Cole. I do
love you for your bravery and your—love—but that will not
quite do for either of us.”

“Why not?” I cried in an ecstasy. “My darling, it will do for me! It is
more than I dared to hope for; thank God, thank God, that you should care
for me at all!”

She shook her head.

“You do not understand,” she whispered.