"I never could touch it," Katrine said, with an emphatic shake of her head. "I should think a baby brought up on goat's milk would run round and bleat. Why, I think the idea of it is horrid!"
Her eyes sparkled and her whole air was full of a delicious animation, so that it was no wonder Jack threw back his head and laughed, as much in sheer admiration as from amusement. He was in high spirits this morning, the excitement of a mighty resolve stirring in his blood.
"How do you know that you haven't been having goat's milk at the hotel?" he demanded. "Aren't you afraid you'll begin to break out in a baa yourself all of a sudden?"
"Why, how rude you are!" she cried, her dimples deepening and shoaling. "Of course they wouldn't dare to give it to us, and we should know it if they did!"
The young people were being driven in aNeapolitanvetturato the tomb of Vergil. Jack had mentioned the spot that morning at breakfast as being well worth a visit, if only for the view, and said that the ladies ought to see it. Mrs. Fairhew had, for reasons perhaps not wholly unconnected with remembrances of her own youth and the late Mr. Fairhew, declined to make the jaunt, on the score that it was too hot and that she had a thousand trifles to attend to. She had refused her niece's prompt offer of assistance, and so left that young woman free to accept Jack's invitation that she take the drive with him.
Their talk was light enough, the lighter because Jack at least hardly dared to venture to be serious lest he betray how terribly in earnest he was. The sight of a little flock of goats, which had scattered at the pistol-like crack of their driver's whip, had given them a theme for a moment. The agile brown animals skipped along the gutters, assailed by the effervescent profanity of their conductor, a half-naked, slim-limbed lad browner than the beasts themselves; and with more detonations of the whiplash the carriage whirled up the hill with hardly diminished speed as the grade grew steeper. Through picturesque, squalid streets, braver in their poverty than many a splendid thoroughfare, through nooks that seemed to be privatecourtyards with entire families disposed about them, the carriage took its way noisily; it turned now to the left, now to the right, continually ascending; it brought them to the top of narrow ways down which they looked as through a kaleidoscope gleaming with a confusion of gay colors; it seemed about to land them on the roof of some building which lay directly before them, and then at the last moment whisked around some unseen corner and carried them still higher.
"Isn't it wonderful," Katrine said. "I never saw such a city. I feel almost as if we were in a flying-machine,—we keep going up so and see such wonderful sights all the time. Oh, do look down that street! Did you ever see such colors?"
"It is stunning," Castleport answered, his eyes on her face.
"You didn't look at it at all," she said half pouting, as the carriage whirled them past.
"Oh, I could see it all in your eyes," he returned. "You don't know what excellent mirrors they are."
"What nonsense! How silly you are this morning!"
Her color deepened, however, and Jack did not feel that his remark had missed fire. He smiled to himself, and just then the carriage brought upwith a jerk on the left side of the way, in front of a small green door in a gray retaining-wall. Over the door was printed in black letters:Tomba di Virgilio.
"Here we are," Jack said.
He got out with the field-glasses he had brought, and extended his hand to assist Katrine. She hardly touched his arm with her finger-tips, but the air was electric, and he felt the thrill like a pulse of warm blood from head to foot. He did not speak to the driver, but with a manner that made that piratical Neapolitan regard him with a new respect simply ordered him in the sign-language of the town to remain in waiting. A soldier came slouching out of a shop near by wherein he was evidently lounging, took the prescribed gate-fees, and then opened the narrow door. This disclosed a staircase, strait and steep, cut from the living rock, which led upward and to the right.
They climbed the stone stairs without speaking, but at the top the wonderful beauty of the view which burst upon them called from Katrine an involuntary exclamation of surprise and delight. Below them, red-roofed and multi-colored, Naples lay bathed in the strong white light of the southern sun; beyond, marvelously blue and ruffled by a gentle breeze, the waters of the bay flashed andsparkled; and beyond again, farther yet, stood purple Capri and the piled-up southern shore, luminous and mistily azure. To the eastward, brooding and tragic, yet with a thrilling beauty of its own in softly flowing curves and wavering outline, showed Vesuvius, and stupendous as it was, seemed crouching sinister and awful, the incarnation of pitiless power.
Jack focused the glasses, and handed them to Katrine. Then he began to point here and there, showing her the different things of interest visible from the spur of the hill on which they were standing. As she was looking toward the Mole and the New Harbor, suddenly she uttered a little cry of surprise.
"There's the Merle," she said. "I'm sure it is. At least she's flying the American flag."
"Yes," Jack responded. "That's she, fast enough."
"Doesn't it seem like a bit of home to see her down there?" Katrine went on. "I think it was perfectly wonderful that Mr. Drake let you take her this summer."
Jack gave a quick movement of the shoulders, and then set his lips together more firmly.
"I shall have to tell her the whole thing," he thought to himself. Aloud he said, "I shouldn'thave been here when you were if it hadn't been for having the Merle."
"I suppose not," she answered, and the change in her tone showed most clearly that she understood in the words more than met the ear.
After they had stood for a time in admiration of the magnificent view before them, they turned to go to the tomb, twenty yards away. The uneven path, bordered by beautiful wild poppies and violets, was shaded by gnarled fig and plum trees. A splendid stone-pine rose superb on the left, crowned by its dome-shaped cluster of branches.
"Oh," Katrine cried, "it's perfectly beautiful, isn't it? It makes you feel solemn, it's so lovely."
"Yes," he assented, and unwonted emotion left him with no word to add.
"Just look at those flowers," she went on. "What a pity it is that we don't have them like that at home."
"It's a fitting place for Vergil to be buried in, isn't it?" Jack said. "I thought you would like it."
"It is a place I shall remember all my life," she replied. Her eyes met his as she spoke, and her glance fell with quick consciousness. Before he could speak, she added hurriedly, "Is this the tomb?"
"Yes," he answered, entirely undisturbed by any chilling scholastic doubts on the subject, "this is the tomb."
Before them was a lowly structure of old rubble, four square, and a narrow door, at which the path, with a sudden dip, came to an end.
"Will you go in?" he said, standing aside.
Katrine entered, and he followed. The place was as simple within as without. The floor seemed to be of beaten earth; the single room, orcella, was lighted by a small window, and it contained only two or three cinerary urns of dark red clay, which leaned against the wall opposite the door. Above these, in brown letters on a tablet of white marble, was an inscription set there by the Academy of France.
The pair stood silent for a minute, Katrine reading the tablet, and Jack, his head bared, standing beside her. As she turned her head she caught for a second time his glance. She colored, and moved quickly to the small window.
"Isn't the view wonderful!" she said, as if she had caught at the first words that came into her mind.
"Yes," he returned absently. "Fine, isn't it?"
She looked a moment out of the window, and then, avoiding his eyes, she turned back to theLatin distich cut in the tablet, and by tradition assigned to Vergil himself:—
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nuncParthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces.
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nuncParthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces.
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nuncParthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces.
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
Parthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces.
"You'll think I am unspeakably stupid," she said, "but I confess I cannot make it out. 'Mantua gave me birth,' I can read that."
"'The Calabrian winds carried me away,'" Jack went on.
"Oh, yes; but I don't understand the Parthenope."
"That's Naples," he answered. "'Naples holds me.'"
"Oh, is that it? I know the rest. 'I sang pastures, fields, leaders.'"
"Good! You shall have an A in the examination in spite of Parthenope," he assured her. "Perhaps 'heroes' is a better word forduces, though."
"I'm afraid I don't deserve an A," she laughed, "but I am satisfied if I pass at all."
As they came out of the tomb Jack picked a spray from the beautiful laurel growing beside the entrance, and held it out to her. She took it with a murmured word of thanks, and put it in her gown. Not far away on the right of the path was a rude seat or bench, shaded by fig and olivetrees, and partially screened from the path by dwarf plums. It was slightly higher than the way by which they had come.
"Here," Jack said, "let's go up and rest a bit. The view is worth seeing."
They turned to the seat and took their places in silence. The view was not perceptibly different from that which they had on the path, but as Jack looked at Katrine and Katrine cast down her eyes, this was not a matter which they were likely to notice.
"Katrine," the captain began,—for they had come, almost by insensible degrees, to call each other by their Christian names,—"I've got to tell you something. It isn't altogether pleasant for me, but it's only fair that you should know."
She looked up at him in evident surprise and with some disquiet.
"Why, what is it?" she asked. "I hope it isn't anything really terrible."
He hesitated, and began to scrape the ground with his foot nervously.
"I—er—Well, to be honest, I don't know exactly how to tell you so you won't be too hard on me," he answered frankly.
"Is it so bad?" she queried in a tone which showed some concern under its assumed lightness.
"What in the world have you been doing? You haven't been murdering anybody, I hope."
"What would you say," asked Jack, "what would you think of a man that acted like this? Suppose a case. Suppose the chap was, in the first place, in America. Suppose he had a friend, a friend he cared a lot about, one he thought more of than anybody else in the world, and that friend was on this side. Suppose the man's property was all tied up,—in trust, you know,—and he'd promised not to borrow, so he couldn't honorably raise the money to come over unless his trustee would let him. The trustee, we'll say, is a nice old fellow,—really nice, you know, only rather crotchety,—who wouldn't hear a word of the chap's going."
He stopped as if for encouragement, and Katrine, with evident appreciation of this, murmured, "Yes, I understand."
"And suppose," Castleport went on, a new hesitancy coming into his voice, "that this trustee—of course the chap is his nearest relative, you know—has an able schooner yacht. Now if the chap simply couldn't stand it, but captured that yacht—not violently, of course, but by stratagem,—and came over to see his friend, and to ask her"—
"Why, Jack Castleport!" cried Katrine, with eyes open to their widest. "You don't mean that you ran away with the Merle! I never can believe it!"
"It's true, though," he responded. "Do you blame me so very much?"
Her glance dropped before his, and her manner instantly lost its boldness.
"I—Why, of course that depends," she murmured.
"Depends on what?"
"On—how—how necessary it was for him to see his friend."
"Oh," Jack cried. "I had to see her! You know I had to come, Katrine! I had to tell you I love you, and I stole Uncle Randolph's yacht because he wouldn't let me come any other way. I had to come."
He sprang up in his excitement, and stood before her, his hands twisting each other in a way odd enough for one of so much self-control.
"You must have known how I cared for you, Katrine. I couldn't tell you without making a clean breast of this, but don't be too hard on me. I had to come."
She flashed up at him the merest hair's-breadth of a glance, and with her hands pressed to herbosom, said softly, "I never could have forgiven you if you hadn't come."
He simply stooped over and took her unceremoniously in his arms, and it was several moments before she had breath and presence of mind to protest.
"Heavens!" she cried with mock terror. "Am I in the arms of a pirate? Jack, I never knew anything so shocking in my life! How could you do it?"
"I had to get across the Atlantic to you," he answered, as if that were an excuse all-sufficient.
And the sun shone down on the sea and on Vesuvius and on Vergil's tomb, and on that which is more enduring than all these,—the sweetness of young love.
While the captain was looking with Katrine down on the Merle, as the yacht lay quietly at anchor in the harbor, a notable conversation was taking place on board. At no very early hour Tab had risen, tubbed with difficulty, and, with some aid, got into his clothes. His left arm was stiff and very sore, but beyond that he felt no discomfort. His magnificent physique, improved by the hardy life he had been leading, saved him from any consequences more serious; so that the archæologist, who was in capital spirits, rallied him on the prodigious appetite he displayed at breakfast.
"I have to eat double to make up for the blood I lost last night," Jerry said, with a grin. "I find there's nothing for the appetite like a regular brush with the police. I've found it so before, when I was in college."
After breakfast the two went on deck, and seated under the awning, with the beautiful bay beforethem and a soft air to bring a delicious coolness, they talked over the adventure of the previous night. Then from this they branched off to more general matters. Mr. Wrenmarsh was a man of wide experience and of good observation, and was well informed on almost every topic the talk touched upon. His tricks and eccentricities had been for the time being laid aside, or showed only as a flavor of personality piquant and attractive. Jerry found himself soothed and entertained, although, remembering his previous experience with the collector, he was not without a feeling that Wrenmarsh had a propensity to use speech as a squid does his ink, to conceal his course, and so wondered what the collector had still to gain. Wrenmarsh suddenly took to intricate and unintelligible sentences without warning and equally without apparent excuse, when Jerry brought him back to earth with a question what he intended to do next.
"Do?" exclaimed Wrenmarsh, as if shocked and astonished by such an inquiry. "Of course I shan't think of setting foot on shore again till I get to England."
Jerry hardly suppressed an instinctive whistle, and for a brief instant he had nothing to say; but after all he was not without a shrewdness ofhis own. He was still chagrined to remember that the archæologist had played upon him once for his own purposes, and he had at least learned that in dealing with this man it was necessary to be cautious.
"To England?" he repeated in a voice so casual as to rouse Wrenmarsh and to tickle himself inwardly. "How do you go?"
"Go?" once more echoed the other. "With you, of course."
"Oh, are we going to England?" Jerry asked more carelessly than before.
"Surely you are," Wrenmarsh retorted with some sharpness.
"Are we really?" was Jerry's comment. A refrain from a song in a Pudding play popped into his head, and he hummed it in derision hardly disguised,—
"You surprise me!"
"Will you—er—say that again?" asked the collector most courteously.
"Oh, quite unnecessary," Tab returned, not to be trapped into an apology. "It was only a bit of a song."
He was filled with a pleasant feeling that he was bothering the collector, astute as that person was, and he determined, as the circumstances certainlywere in his favor, to hold his own with him this time at least.
"I don't think you have a very clear view of the case," Wrenmarsh said, after a moment of silent musing with contracted brow. "If you had, you'd see that it isn't possible for me to go ashore now, after that beastly business of last night. I assure you, I'm awfully sorry for that mess. There's another thing,—I couldn't get those boxes ashore from the yacht without their being examined, and then there'd be the devil of a row."
"That must have occurred to you before you left Pæstum," Jerry remarked with coolness.
Mr. Wrenmarsh did not move a muscle.
"So it did," he said blandly; "but of course I knew it must have been evident to you also."
Jerry laughed in spite of himself at the cool impudence of this.
"I confess that it wasn't," he responded.
"Even if it wasn't," the other went on, as smoothly as ever, "I never for an instant supposed that when once you'd started out to help me, you'd funk. That is a contingency, I confess, never occurred to my mind. I thought you were made of different stuff. You were clear game last night."
Jerry looked at his guest and burst into deep-throated laughter.
"Well, for clean cheek!" he cried. "Do you think I'm going to tote you about in a yacht I don't own for the rest of my life?"
"Would you like to?" asked the collector, with a fresh aspect of interest. "Because in the Ægean Sea I've a"—
"Whatever it is, please keep it to yourself, or you'll insist that I promised to help you with it," interrupted Tab grimly. "As for going to England in the present case, that's quite out of the question. What are you going to do? If you stay on board, you'll land in Boston."
Mr. Wrenmarsh's face took on for an instant a look distinctly ugly. It suddenly occurred to Taberman that the collector was in rather an evil plight,—worse, indeed, than that from which the Merle had rescued him.
"Surely you're not serious?" Wrenmarsh asked slowly.
"I think I am," Jerry responded pleasantly. "What are you going to do?"
"Damn!" the other broke out explosively, lying back in his chair and running his fingers through his gray-sprinkled locks.
Jerry was too soft-hearted not to be touchedby the other's perplexity, but an involuntary movement of sympathy which he made happened to give him a painful twinge in the arm, and he hardened his heart. There was a silence of some minutes, during which he tried to make out from the face of his companion what thoughts were passing behind that mask. Suddenly the cloud lifted from the face of Wrenmarsh, and he flashed a bright glance on Jerry.
"Bless me," he cried gayly. "I might have thought! Plutus—Mammon—filthy lucre! But how extraordinary in an American—not to ask for it, you know! What'll you take for it?"
"For what?" responded Tab, not catching his drift.
He had a dreadful feeling that by becoming incomprehensible, the other might be getting the better of him.
"What's to pay for a passage of myself and my boxes to—let us say Plymouth?"
Indignation for the instant flared up in Jerry.
"This is not a passenger ship," he responded brusquely.
"Oh, of course not, my dear fellow; but as every man has his price, I suppose a yacht has too."
Common-sense and indignation worked together now to keep Taberman from an angry retort. Itflashed upon him that here was a chance, one in a thousand, to pay off the hands of the Merle without troubling the President; it was a chance, too, to score off this cheeky archæologist. Taberman had already noted that Wrenmarsh was a penurious soul who hated to part with money, and he felt something of the godly joy of the departing Israelites when Moses announced the project for the spoiling of the Egyptians. England was not such an impossible distance off. They might take the Great Circle track home. Surely if Jack—
"Don't you see my position, Mr. Wrenmarsh?" he asked. "I haven't the power to dispose of the Merle. I'm simply in charge of her while the captain's ashore, don't you see? Still"—
He paused dramatically.
"Well?" ejaculated Wrenmarsh, apparently keeping his gaze fixed in the closest interest on the red sails of a big felucca that was standing in toward the Mole.
"Well, I think I might be right in making a sort of conditional—a purely conditional"—he repeated the word for caution, wondering if he ought to make it any stronger—"arrangement. It wouldn't be valid without the sanction of the captain. You see that, of course."
"Well?" repeated the other.
"Do you see—merely conditional?" insisted Taberman.
"Yes, I suppose so," assented the other grudgingly.
"I might make a sort of conditional arrangement, then, to go to Plymouth, or perhaps to any other English port not too much out of the way, for a consideration of"—He paused again.
"Ten pounds," suggested the archæologist.
"Two hundred," said Jerry coolly.
He could have hugged himself with joy at the sound of his own voice naming the sum in such a matter-of-fact fashion. He knew well enough that but for the enormous handicap which circumstances had put upon the archæologist he would have had no chance whatever to outmanœuvre him, but this he did not bother to reflect on at the moment and might have had scruples about if he had. He gave himself up to the delight of feeling that he had distinctly the better of the man who had so carried him off his feet at Pæstum, and who had involved him in an affair of the seriousness of which Jerry had had good reason to meditate in the times in the night when his arm kept him awake. It was certainly something to have the upper hand now; and two hundred pounds, whichhe had named almost at random, multiplied itself in his head into a most satisfactory number of dollars.
"Two hundred pounds!" cried out the archæologist, nearly jumping out of his chair.
His affected surprise was dramatic, but unfortunately for its effect it was overdone, so that even Jerry felt it to be theatrical.
"Shall we call it two hundred and fifty?" the mate asked, enjoying himself more every minute.
"Two hundred and fifty devils!" shouted Wrenmarsh, who appeared more irritated, it seemed to Jerry, on account of being outmanœuvred than because the price was so high.
"Not devils—pounds," Tab responded, smiling at his own wit.
"Leave off the two hundred," begged the collector.
"The agreement is only conditional anyway," Jerry said, with something of an air, "but if it seems to you fairer, we'll leave off the fifty, and call it an even two hundred—one for you and one for those precious boxes, to be paid on arrival. I'm not a Neapolitan. Will you go ashore here or wait for the captain?"
"I'll wait for the captain, Mr. Taberman," Wrenmarsh replied. He glowered across the bayfor a moment, and then added, "He may not be so infernally exorbitant as you are."
Jerry smiled secretly to himself, and resolved that at least Jack should be persuaded to make no easier terms. Then he went to write a note to summon the captain to come aboard to consider this proposition of taking a passenger.
When Jack appeared on the Merle, rather late that afternoon, Jerry met him by the steps, his arm in a sling.
"Good heavens, Tab," cried the captain, "what's the matter? What have you done to your arm, boy?"
"Nothing much," Jerry answered. "Just got a little piece of the cutter in it in a night engagement. What the deuce kept you so long?"
"But was it last night?" Jack insisted. "Did you get into trouble?"
"We were under fire," Jerry laughed; "but I had the only casualty."
"The devil you did! What sort of a trap did your infernal Englishman lead you into?"
"That's just what I want to tell you before you see him. What in the world made you so late? I've been waiting all the afternoon."
The captain's face grew radiant.
"Well, you see," he returned, with a little laugh in his throat, "time passed so quickly, and Katrine and I had so much to talk about"—
"Jacko! You've done it!" shouted Tab, loud enough to be heard from one end of the yacht to the other.
The captain grinned warmly, and nodded with sparkling eyes.
"Oh, good man!" cried Tab, wringing his hand. "Good old Jack! Long life and all happiness to you, you dear old pirate!"
His words tumbled out helter-skelter, and his honest blue eyes were moist with pure joy at his friend's happiness. He admired Miss Marchfield from the bottom of his heart, and Jack was the dearest friend he could ever have. He rejoiced as sincerely and as warmly as if the good fortune of the captain had been his own.
"Thank you, old man," laughed Jack, bubbling over with good spirits; "but if it hadn't been for you, I—I'd never have done it."
"Tush!" flouted Jerry. "Don't talk bosh! It was only a matter of time anyway. But I'm glad it's all right."
They had been standing at the head of the steps, and now the captain moved along the deck.
"What did you send for me to come out in such a hurry for?" he inquired.
"Hurry!" ejaculated Jerry. "Do you call this coming out in a hurry? If it hadn't been that you left a born diplomat in charge, you might have lost two hundred pounds by being so slow."
"Two hundred pounds?" the other echoed. "What on earth are you talking about?"
"Come into the cabin before you go aft," was Jerry's answer. "I want to tell you about that."
"And about your arm, old man. What is the matter with you?"
"That's part of it," Tab returned, as they went below together. "I'm trying among other things to recover damages."
When some little time later the two friends came on deck and went aft to where the guest was sitting, Jack was in full possession of the whole situation.
"Jack, Mr. Gordon Wrenmarsh; Mr. Wrenmarsh, Captain John Castleport," Jerry said.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Wrenmarsh," Jack said, extending his hand.
He was evidently in the best of humor. His spirits on that day could hardly be other than at their highest, and he had been vastly amused by Jerry's plan of raising funds to pay off the men.
"Thanks," responded the archæologist. "I was afraid the pleasure was largely mine. I've been expecting you all day."
"Well," Jack said, seating himself comfortably, "I am here at last. I am sorry if I kept you waiting. You might have arranged anything with Mr. Taberman, though."
"I tried to," Mr. Wrenmarsh responded dryly, "but he seemed to me so unpractical in his ideas that I thought it better to wait for you."
"I hope you won't find me unsatisfactory in the same way," Jack returned. "At least I am practical enough to know that in this weather it will be more comfortable if we have something."
He summoned Gonzague, and the trio were soon furnished with tall glasses of sangaree, which they sipped with relish.
"Mr. Taberman has suggested,—though I fancy he's half in jest," began the collector, when these preliminaries had been attended to, "that two hundred pounds is a fair price for such a trivial service as running up to England and landing me and my boxes."
"I am glad you think the matter trivial," observed Jack, with a smile; "it makes it so much easier for me to say that I do not find it convenient to go to England at all."
"Oh, I say now," Wrenmarsh responded, with a sudden keen glance at Jack as if he were surprised at the quickness with which his remark had been met and turned against him; "of course you'll go to England. That was settled long ago, you know."
"Was it? I supposed that I, as captain of the Merle, had some voice in such a matter."
"Of course nothing was settled," broke in Jerry. "I made a conditional arrangement—entirely conditional, mind you—with Mr. Wrenmarsh that you would take him to England."
"Yes; that is what I said," the collector asserted imperturbably. "Only the price that you named"—
"Seems to me a very reasonable one," interpolated Jack.
"Not seriously?" Wrenmarsh said, evidently determined not to show that he was at all ruffled. "Only consider, if I go ashore here, I may get—I might become a national complication. And you wouldn't want to be mixed up in that sort of a thing," he added, with a chuckle. "An international complication," he murmured to himself, as if the idea appealed so strongly to his vanity that he was half tempted to be put on land at once to take up the part. Then he recalled his wanderingthoughts, and looked Captain Castleport in the eye. "If you land me in any country except England, I am quite done for, as you Americans would say. It stands to reason if there is any paying to be done, you should pay me for keeping you out of a scrape; for of course if I go ashore it will be known that the Merle ran away from thecarabinieriat Pæstum, and"—
"Rubbish!" interrupted Jack brusquely. "Don't talk that kind of poppy-cock! Even if there were any truth in it, it wouldn't be decent for you to say so after getting the Merle into the scrape."
"And giving me your word that the yacht was in no possible danger," put in Jerry indignantly.
"Oh, no real danger, of course," Wrenmarsh said hurriedly, "only it might be unpleasant for you, and you might not like to be detained."
"Why must you go to England?" asked Castleport. "Why not to Malta or Cyprus or Korfu even? They're protectorates and English ground."
"The sun never sets, you know," responded Wrenmarsh, with his extraordinary ventral chuckle. "The truth is they won't do. Korfu and Cyprus would be as bad for me as Naples, on account of my reputation. I'm known to have run out a lotof things, you see. Gibraltar or Malta would suit me well enough—if it weren't for the same reason. There isn't a hotel on the entire shores of the Mediterranean that I could put up at with those boxes in safety."
"I hardly suppose I'm expected to take that too literally," Jack said, with a smile.
He reflected a moment. He could see that the collector certainly had good reason for wishing to remain on the yacht, and that it could not but be of very great convenience to him to be taken to England. He was no less convinced from what Jerry had told him that the antiquities which the archæologist had on board must be worth thousands of pounds, and that their possessor could afford to pay well for their safety. He was thoroughly stirred up, moreover, by the thought of the episode of the night before. That Jerry should have been put in actual peril of his life by Wrenmarsh for his own purposes was to Jack so outrageous that he was half tempted to order the collector and his boxes off the Merle at once to take his chances with the officials on the quays of Naples. As Jerry had planned reprisals along another line, however, and as after all Jack could not have brought himself to desert a man in extremity, the captain determined to go on as they had begun.
"Two hundred pounds strikes me as fair enough," he said.
"Too much—too much! Make it fifty," responded Wrenmarsh.
"Two hundred!" repeated Jack.
"I'm sorry; I can't do that," the collector said, with a great show of decision. "You'll have to take me to Malta. What'll you do that for?"
"Three hundred," Jack returned quietly, although he could not refrain from a secret exchange of glances with Jerry.
"What!" the other cried, in an exaggerated shriek. "A run like that? Three hundred pounds! It's not a twentieth the distance to England."
"That's so," was the captain's answer, "but you see we should have a good deal less value in your company. Besides, you'd get your boxesex territorioa great deal quicker."
He had by this time become so interested in the game he was playing that the beating of the collector seemed in itself a thing worth straining every nerve to gain.
"They'reex territorionow," Mr. Wrenmarsh said, "as they're on a foreign yacht. But no matter about that. What'll you take to set me over to Gibraltar?"
"Oh, that would cost you three hundred and fifty, because there you're so much nearer England than you'd be at Malta."
He glanced again at Jerry, with an inward chuckle at the utter balderdash he was talking and a consciousness how closely it resembled the nature of the arguments with which Wrenmarsh had beguiled Tab. For a minute there was silence, and then the archæologist spoke angrily.
"You're too commercial," he said, with an unconcealed sneer. "I see no way in which we can come to an agreement. I never was equal to trading with a dollar-getting Yankee."
Tab started and looked to hear Jack break out at an insult so gross, but the captain merely smiled.
"As you are our guest," he said, "there's no chance for me to answer you properly, but you must remember we're not looking for a job. Shall I send you ashore now, or would it suit you to take a boat with me in half an hour? Or perhaps," he added, his manner most elaborately courteous, "on account of your boxes, it would suit you better to be set ashore after dark."
"Give you one hundred pounds," the collector said, still fighting, and ignoring the captain's words entirely.
"We need not go on with the wrangle," Jacksaid, rising. "I'm not bargaining with you. If it's worth two hundred pounds to you, all right. If it isn't, we'll part here, and hope you have the gratitude to appreciate what has already been done for you at the risk of Mr. Taberman's life. Come, we've wasted too much time over this already."
"Do you think my time isn't worth anything?" cried the other,—apparently losing all control of his temper. "I've wasted too much already. Get up your damned anchor, you mercenary Yankee"—
"Come, sir!" broke in Jack sharply, "apologize at once! At once! You have been insulting us this half hour like an utter cad, and I've made all the allowances I'm equal to."
The collector regarded him with furious eyes, but seemed struggling with himself until he could command his manner and his voice.
"I—I beg your pardon," he said in a hard tone. Then he added, in a voice softer and more grave, "Indeed, I beg your pardon most sincerely. My cursed temper got the better of me. Does your offer still hold?"
"If you wish," Jack answered stiffly.
"Then—two hundred pounds—I accept it. Two hundred pounds sterling, to be paid on our safe arrival in port at Plymouth." He sighed, andput out his hand to the captain. "Will you pardon my tongue?" he asked.
There was more ingenuousness in this trifling act than in anything Tab or Jack had yet seen in him. The real man seemed for a moment to show; and as Jack accepted the collector's apology and took his hand, Jerry had a fleeting glimpse—short as a flash of changing light—of another and franker Wrenmarsh, accustomed to hide under a veil of shams and mockeries made necessary by his difficult vocation.
Wrenmarsh then asked if he might have some letters mailed ashore, and Jack offered to take them himself in half an hour's time. While the collector was below writing these, the captain and the mate talked things over on deck. Tab had to congratulate Jack again, and over and over, fairly beaming with delight whenever he thought of the happy stage to which affairs had been brought. When he discovered that the captain had confessed the lifting of the Merle, he was for a moment disconcerted.
"Oh, Jacko, how could you give that away?" he cried.
"I had to be honest," Jack replied, and added, with a little shade of unconscious patronage, "You'll see how it is yourself, old man, when itcomes your turn. You have to make a square deal, of course."
"Yes, I s'pose so," assented the mate humbly. "I hope she won't tell Mrs. Fairhew."
"Oh, we told her together," Jack stated cheerfully. "Katrine thought we'd better. I'm glad I did, too; for she's written home about meeting us, and it's sure to get round to Uncle Randolph sooner or later."
"How did she take it?"
"Oh, do you know," returned Jack, laughing at the remembrance of his talk with Mrs. Fairhew, "I think she was more bothered that she hadn't guessed it than she was shocked at us. She couldn't help letting me see that she thought it an awfully good joke on Uncle Randolph. She said she should write to him to-day and remind him that she'd often told him he tried to keep me in leading strings. She said she did have a suspicion from your jocoseness when we first came over that there was some joke about our coming, but we parried her questions so well she forgot all about it. She said nobody could have dreamed of anything so preposterous, so of course she didn't guess it."
"Didn't she say it was on account of her age she didn't see through us?" queried Jerry, with a grin.
"By Jove, she did; and then turned it off by saying she never supposed a Marchfield would be engaged to a pirate. She says, though, that I've got to cut back at once. She won't have me going about with Katrine in a stolen yacht."
"It's time to start anyway. It'll be getting late by the time we're across, and if she's written home, the sooner the Merle is in Boston harbor the better. I suppose we can get off in a week?"
"We go to-morrow," Jack answered calmly.
"To-morrow! Great Scott! What are we sitting here for? There are oceans of things to be done."
"Of course we can get stores at Plymouth if we need to, and I've already ordered a lot of things to come out to-night. We have to get Wrenmarsh safe, of course, and that'll take some time."
"He's a windfall," commented Jerry.
"And like most windfalls, not entirely sound? Tell Gonzague to fix up the stateroom Bardale had, the one next mine. I must get ashore now; she'll be waiting. You're to come to dinner."
"I'll come fast enough. Oh, you bully old pirate, I'm awfully glad for you!"