'Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!'
Teck Van Dyck's a pirate. He's gone daffy over something, and we're all going to heaven in a hand-basket."
Of course this was all froth; pure froth. But there was usually a little clear liquor in the bottom of Billy's stein.
"What ails you?" I asked.
An impish grin spread itself over his smooth, boyish face.
"I'm in love, if anybody should ask you. Everything looks green to me, and I want to chew slate-pencils.Ergo—which is college slang for 'Ah, there, stay there'—I'm as daffy as Teck. Don't laugh or I'll set Tige on you. Say, Prebby, do I look like an invalid?"
"Yes; about as much as Mr. John Sullivan did when he carried the world heavy-weight wallop in his good right hand."
"Yet I am an invalid. Doc Fanning says I am, and he's like George Washington. He might lie if he could, but he can't because he's lost the combination."
"What on earth are you gibbering about, Billy?"
"Facts; iron-clad, brass-bound, blown-in-the-bottle, sold-only-in-the-original-package facts. Fanning's the family physician, you know, and he has gone on record as declaring that I need half a winter off in a mild climate. And I don't know to this good minute whether I succeeded in fooling him, or whether he was just plain good-naturedenough to size the thing up and fool the governor—I don't, really, Prebby."
"But why?" I persisted.
"The 'why' is a girl, of course; you ought to know that without being told. She's a lulu and a charmer, and if I can't marry her I'll end it all with a bare bodkin. Her name? I'm going to tell you, Prebby; and, again, if you laugh, I'll make Tige bite you. It's Edith."
"Not Edie Van Tromp!"
"Prebby, you're the one only and original wizard. You could make your fortune if you should set up as a guesser."
"Ye gods and little children!" I commented. "Edie Van Tromp is eighteen, if I remember correctly; and you are——"
"I was twenty a few days ago, if you don't mind," he returned, tickling the cropped ears of the bull pup. And then: "'Crazy,' you say? Maybe so—quite likely so. I've got to keep the pace, you know. This little ship's full of crazy people. I'm crazy about Edie, and, if you listen to what you hear, Jerry Dupuyster's crazy about Conetta Kincaide—just like you used to be—and Jack Grey's crazy about his Annette, and Ingerson and Teck are both crazy about Madeleine Barclay. So there you are. And if the wind gets around into the sour east, Teck's going to sink the ship in the deep-blue Caribbean, and drown us all—all but Madeleine—and live happily ever after. Apropos of nothing at all, Prebby, this is a rotten cigar you gave me, and I'm all mussed up and discouraged. What's that bell clanging about?"
"It is striking five bells in the first night watch—otherwise, or landsman-wise, half-past ten o'clock."
"Good!—excellent good. Let's turn in, so we can turn out bright and early for our first shot at the blue water. What do you say?"
I said the required word, and we went below to our respective staterooms. The next morning when I turned out and drew aside the curtain shading the stateroom port light, the sun was shining brightly, and for a horizon there were only the tumbling wavelets of the Gulf of Mexico.
Thefirst morning in blue water developed the fact that breakfast on theAndromedawas destined to be a broken meal. In the white-lacquered dining-saloon, only three members of the ship's company, Major Terwilliger, Madeleine Barclay's father, and Professor Sanford were at table, though Van Dyck and Billy Grisdale had been still earlier, had already breakfasted and had gone on deck.
As I took my place, the major, affecting the bluff heartiness which was merely a mask for an ease-loving, self-centered habit which never for a moment lost sight of the creature comforts, was trying, quite ineffectually, to draw Sanford into a discussion of the merits and demerits of certain French liqueurs—a subject upon which the clean-living, abstemious professor of mathematics was as poorly informed as any anchorite of the desert.
"Vermuth, now; a dash of vermuth in your morning bitters," the major expatiated; "there's nothing like it for an appetiser. I'm not saying anything against the modern cocktail, properly compounded; it has its place. But for a morning eye-opener it is crude. Believe me, a Frenchman knows the meaning of the wordapéritifmuch better than we do."
"Yes?" said the professor, with a palpable effort to galvanize an interest which he was evidently far from feeling.
"Quite so," declared the major; after which he proceeded to enlarge upon American backwardness in the matter of picking and choosing among the potables, inveighing with all the warmth of a past master in the art of good living against the barbarism of taking one's liquor raw.
While the major was giving his alcoholic homily, and not omitting, meanwhile, to keep his plate well supplied with the crispest bits of bacon and the hottest of the rolls, I had an opportunity to observe the silent man whose place was opposite my own. Holly Barclay had changed greatly in the three years which had elapsed since I had last seen him in New York. I never knew—I do not yet know—what particular form his dissipation took, but it had left its indubitable record in the haggard face, the deep-sunken eyes, and in the womanish hands which trembled a bit in spite of an evident effort to hold them steady.
Fragmentary gossip of former days had said that Holly Barclay's bane was women; other whispers had it that it was the gaming table; still others that it was the larger gaming table of the Street. Whatever it was, it had apparently left him a rather ghastly wreck of a man; a prey, not to remorse, perhaps, but certainly to fear. And with the fear in the deep-set eyes there was a hint of childish petulance; the irritable humor of a man who has fought a losing battle with life and expects to be waited upon and coddled as a reward for his defeat and humiliation.
It was a relief to turn from this haggard wreck, and from the sham-hearty major, to the mild-eyed professor. Sanford I had known in the university, and a less self-conscious or more lovable man neverlived. Deeply immersed in the natural sciences, which were his hobby, and absent-minded at times to a degree that put to shame the best efforts of the college-professor-joke makers, he was nevertheless the most human of men; a faculty member whose door was always hospitably open to the homesick Freshman, and whose influence for good in the lush field of the college campus was second only to that of his plain-featured, motherly wife.
"Ah, yes," he was saying, in answer to the major's eulogy of chartreuse as a cordial, "it is said to be a distillation from the leaves ofUrtica pilulifera, the much-abused nettle, I believe. Those old Alpine monks had a wonderful knowledge of the scanty flora of the high altitudes where they built their monasteries. Which reminds me: I hope Bonteck will give us an opportunity to study some of the remarkable plant forms peculiar to the tropics before we return. It would be most enlightening to a stay-at-home like myself."
The major's facial expression was that of a person who has been basely betrayed into casting pearls before swine. That any one could be so benighted as to associate a divine cordial only with the crude materials out of which it might be made was quite beyond his powers of comprehension.
"Hum," he muttered, "I've always understood that the process of chartreuse-making was a secret that was most jealously guarded." And with that he let the pearl casting stop abruptly.
Here was a striking example, one would say, of the ill-assortment of our mixed ship's company manifesting itself at the introductory breakfast at sea. Throughout the meal Barclay said nothing to any of us. His few remarks were addressed to theserving steward, and they were all in the nature of complaints. His coffee was too weak, the bacon was too crisp, the cold meats were underdone. What with the gourmet appetite of the major, and Barclay's apparent lack of any appetite at all, the broken meal was anything but a feast of reason and a flow of soul, and I was glad to break away to the freedom of the decks.
Finding the after-deck untenanted, I strolled forward. TheAndromedawas loafing along over a sea as calm as a mill-pond, and her course, as nearly as I could guess it from the position of the sun, was a little to the east of south. Van Dyck and Billy Grisdale were on the bridge, and one of the foreign-looking sailormen had the wheel. On the main-deck forward three members of the crew were swabbing down, and two others were polishing brass. As I paused at the rail in the shadow of the bridge overhang, Goff, the sailing-master, came stumping along. Though no one had as yet told me that he was a Gloucesterman, I took a shot at it.
"This is not much like cracking on with a schooner for the Banks, is it, Captain?" was the form the shot took; and the grizzled veteran of the sea stopped and looked me over with an eye militantly appraisive.
"What you know about the Banks?" he inquired hostilely.
"Little enough," I admitted. "One trip, made when I was a boy, in the schoonerMaria Ann, of Gloucester, Captain Standifer."
"I want to know!" he said, thawing perceptibly. "OldMaria Ann'safloat yit, but Standifer's gone; run down in a dory in a fog." Then, loweringhis voice: "You don't belong to this New York clanjamfry, do ye?"
"Not strictly speaking; I signed on in New Orleans."
"Know these waters putty middlin' well?"
"I've sailed them a few times."
"Friend o' Cap'n Van Dyck's, I cal'late?"
"As good a friend as he has on earth, I hope."
At this the old sea dog thrust an arm in mine and led me aft until we were out of earshot from the bridge.
"What d' ye know about this here winter cruise?" He fired the question at me belligerently.
"About its course and destination? Little or much, as you choose to put it. What should I know?"
He paid no attention to my question.
"Cap'n Van Dyck's all right, only he's too dum hardheaded," he confided. "Picked up his 'tween-decks lackeys in New York an' Havana. Don't like the looks o' some on 'em. If you're a friend of the Cap'n's, you keep a weather eye on that slick lookin' yaller boy that waits on table in the dinin'-saloon."
"How am I to keep an eye on him?" I asked.
"When you're eatin' with the folks, you keep 'em from talkin' about things that yaller boy hadn't ought to hear," he bit out, and with that he left me.
Here was a little mystery on our first day at sea. What was it, in particular, that the mulatto serving boy shouldn't hear? My mind went back to the talk of the previous evening, across the table in the dining-room of the New Orleans hotel. Now that I came to analyze it, I realized that it had been only cursorily explanatory on Van Dyck's part.While he seemed at the time to be perfectly frank with me, it occurred to me now that I had all along been conscious of certain reservations. A winter cruise in the Caribbean; for the ship's company a gathering of people whom he had threatened to know better before the cruise ended; these were about the only definite objects he had set forth.
But two things were pretty plainly evident. Goff was deeper in Van Dyck's confidence than I was; and, beyond this, the sailing-master was making the mistake of thinking that I knew as much as he did. It was no great matter, I thought. If the mulatto under-steward needed watching, I'd watch him, trusting to the future to reveal the reason—if any there were—why he should be watched.
Making my way to the awning-sheltered after-deck lounge, which was still untenanted, I picked out the easiest of the wicker chairs and sat down to fill my pipe for an after-breakfast smoke. Before the pipe had burned out, Ingerson put in his appearance, lighting a black cigar as he came up the cabin stair. If I had been free to select, he was the last man in our curious assortment whom I should have chosen as a tobacco companion, but short of a pointed retreat to some other part of the ship, there was no escape.
"Hello, Preble," he grunted, casting his gross body into a chair. "Monopolizing the view, are you? Seen anything of Madeleine?"
"Miss Barclay hadn't appeared when I breakfasted," I returned; and if I bore down a bit hard on the courtesy prefix it was because I hated to hear Madeleine's Christian name come so glibly off his tongue.
"How many days of this are we in for?" was his next attempt.
"That, I suppose, will be left to the wishes of the ship's company."
"All right," he grinned; "I guess I can stand it as long as Van Dyck can."
I stole a glance aside at his heavy featured, half-bestial face. It was the face of a man prematurely aged, or aging, by the simple process of giving free rein to his passions and appetites. Though he couldn't have been more than thirty-two or three, the telltale pouches were already forming under the bibulous eyes. Though I suppose he was fresh from his morning bath, I fancied I could detect the aroma of many and prolonged midnight carousals about him. Van Dyck's intimation that there was even a possibility of Madeleine Barclay's throwing herself away upon this gross piece of flesh came back to me with a tingling shock of repugnance. Surely she would never do such a thing of her own free will.
We had been sitting in uncomradely silence for maybe five minutes when Mrs. Van Tromp, mother of marriageable, and as yet unmarried, daughters came waddling aft to join us. How far she might go in letting Ingerson's wealth atone for his many sins, I neither knew nor cared, but that the wealth had its due and proper weight with her was proved by the alacrity with which she relieved me of the necessity of taking any part in a three-cornered talk. So, when I got up to empty my pipe ashes over the rail, I kept on going, quite willingly abandoning the field to inherited money and its avid worshiper.
With such an unfruitful beginning, one might predicate an introductory day little less thanstupefying. But later on there were ameliorations. After luncheon, which, like the breakfast, was a straggling meal with only three or four of us at table at the same time, I found myself lounging on the port promenade with Beatrice, the middle member of the Van Tromp trio, a fair-haired, self-contained young woman with a slant toward bookish things which set her well apart from her athletic older sister and tomboyish younger.
"'Westward Ho!'?" I said, glancing at the title of the book lying in her lap.
"Yes; I've been trying to get the atmosphere. But Kingsley takes too much time with his introductions. Whereabouts are we now?"
I marked the slow rise and fall of the ship as it swung along making its leisurely southing. As in the early morning, theAndromedawas logging only loafing speed.
"We are still a long way from the scene of Sir Francis Drake's more or less piratical exploits," I told her. "Do you take Kingsley at his face value?"
"He calls it war, but it seems to me more like legalized buccaneering," she rejoined. Then: "How much of it do you suppose is true?"
I laughed.
"Have you already learned to distrust history, at your tender age?" I mocked. "Isn't it all set down in the books?"
She turned large and disparaging eyes upon me.
"Of course you know well enough that all history is distorted; especially war history where the victors are the only source of information. The other people can't tell their side of it."
"True enough," I admitted. "I fancy old SirFrancis was a good bit more than half a pirate, if all the facts were known. That story about his burning of the Spanish galleon at Pirates' Hope, for example."
"I haven't heard it. Tell it to me," she urged.
I gave her the story as Van Dyck had given it to me, omitting—for no good reason that I could have offered—all mention of my own unnerving experiences on the island of the legend.
"Left those poor wretches to starve because they wouldn't buy their lives off him?" she commented, with a belated horror in her voice.
"It is only a legend, you must remember," I hastened to say. "Most likely there isn't a word of truth in it."
Her gaze was upon the distant merging line of sea and sky, and there was a dreamy look in her eyes.
"I should like to see that island," she said. "I wonder if we shall go anywhere near it?"
If I smiled it was only at the hold the ancient tale had apparently taken upon her.
"Bonteck will doubtless make it a port of call, if you ask him to. But it is hundreds of miles from here."
"What does it look like?"
"Very much like any or all of the coral islands you may have seen pictured in your school geographies, only it is long and narrow instead of being circular, like the Pacific atolls. But it is a true coral island, for all that; a strip of land possibly a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long, densely wooded—jungled, you might say—with tropical vegetation; a beach of white sand running all the way around; beyond the beach, a lagoon; and enclosingthe lagoon, and with only a few passages through it here and there, the usual coral reef. The lagoon is shallow for the greater part of it, but outside of the reef the bottom goes down like the side of a mountain."
"Why, you must have seen the island!" she said.
"I have," I answered, rather grimly.
"Did you land on it when you were there?—but of course you must have, to be able to describe it so well."
"Oh, yes; I landed upon it," I admitted.
Again she let her gaze go adrift to leeward. She was evidently reveling in something that seemed to her more tangible than Kingsley's famous story of Amyas Leigh and his voyagings.
"You say it is called Pirates' Hope. Was that on account of Sir Francis Drake's battle with the Spanish galleon?"
"Oh, no; I imagine it got its name at a much later date; in the time of the bold buccaneers. There are two little bays, one on the north and another on the south. Either would be a good place in which to careen the little cockleshell ships of our ancestors and scrape their bottoms. Possibly Morgan or some of the others put in there for that purpose and thus gave the island its name."
"Did you find any relics when you were there?"
It didn't seem necessary to tell this open-minded young woman about the bones, so I turned her question aside.
"The last of the buccaneers was permanently hanged some time in the closing decade of the seventeenth century, if I remember rightly. You'd scarcely expect to find any traces of them or their works now."
"No; that's so," she conceded.
Into the pause that followed I thrust a query of my own.
"Where has Conetta been keeping herself all day?"
"She is with her aunt. It seems that Miss Gilmore isn't a very good sailor."
I laughed because I couldn't help it. If the dragoness was upset by the easy swinging of theAndromedaover a sea that was more like a gently undulating mirror than anything else, what would happen to her if we should encounter a gale, or even half a gale?
"You needn't laugh," Beatrice put in reproachfully. "There is nothing funny about seasickness."
"I was laughing at the idea of anybody's being seasick in weather like the present," I explained. "But I fancy it is the old story in the case of Miss Mehitable. If she had nothing worse than a toothache, Conetta would have to play the part of a nurse."
"My-oh!" said my pretty lounging-companion; "it is perfectly easy to see that there is no love lost between you and Miss Mehitable."
"There isn't," I replied shortly; and there that matter rested.
Still later in the day—just at sunset, to be strictly accurate as to the time—there was another compensation for a day which had been hanging rather heavily on my hands. I had gone alone into the yacht's fore-peak, and was wondering if I should have time to smoke another pipe before the dinner call should sound, when a mocking voice behind me said: "Isn't it about time we were quarreling some more?"
I went on filling my pipe without looking around.
"You've been careful not to give me an earlier chance," I said. "How is your Aunt Mehitable by this time?"
"She is able to sit up and take a bit of nourishment." Then: "How you do hate poor Aunt Mehitable, don't you?"
"As I see it, I haven't any particularly good reason to squander any part of my scanty store of affection upon her. Did she know I was going to make one of this mixed-up ship's-quota?"
"Honestly, I don't think she did. She said a tremendous lot of things last night when she saw you with Bonteck. Aren't you going to be decent to her?"
"She is Bonteck's guest, or one of them, and I'm another. South America and the tropics haven't sacked me of quite all of the conventionalities."
"How nice! Of course, we've all been supposing they had. When are you going to tell me some more about the Castilian princess? the one you could have married, and didn't—to your later sorrow."
Strange as it may seem, all this light-hearted mockery cut into me much more deeply than any real bitterness could have. Because, let me explain, it was precisely the attitude she used to hold toward me in the old days when the mockeries were only so many love taps, as one might say; a sort of joyous letting down, or keying up, for her, after a day-long immurement with a crotchety, sharp-tongued maiden aunt.
"I've told you all there is to tell," I said, as gruffly as I could.
"Oh, dear, no; I'm sure you haven't. Was she—is she—very beautiful? But of course she must be; luminous dark eyes burning with—er—with all sorts of things; midnight hair; an olive skin so clear and transparent that you can almost see through it; little aristocratic hands—blue-blooded hands; and a figure . . . tell me, is she large and queenly? or petite and child-like?"
I laughed derisively.
"You seem to have forgotten that not all Spaniards are black. There are some among them as fair as you are. The 'princess,' as you call her, has hair about the color of yours, and her eyes are blue, even bluer than yours. But I don't see what interest you can have in her. I didn't marry her."
"But you may go back there—wherever it is—and correct that dreadful mistake."
"In that case I should first be obliged to murder her present husband. Perhaps I omitted to tell you last night that she was very successfully married to a wealthy young coffee planter, just before I left Trujillo."
"Well, you wouldn't let a little thing like that stop you if you wanted to go back, would you?"
"Oh, no; certainly not. Don Jesus Maria Diego de Traviano would probably do the stopping act—with a soft-nosed bullet. He is a crack shot with a Mauser, as I happen to know."
"Poor you!" she murmured. Then, with the lightning-like change of front which had been one of her chief attractions—for me—in the old days: "Why don't you quarrel?—say something that I'll have to get mad and bitter at?"
I turned to face her and the sheer beauty of hershook me. Yet I did contrive to strike back, after a fashion.
"The voyage is yet young. There will doubtless be many quarrelsome occasions. Just now I don't think of anything more vital than this: if you are meaning to keep Jerry Dupuyster in hand, you are going the wrong way about it. If you seem to prefer my company to his, I have an idea that he would be just Quixotic enough to let you have your own way."
"Thanks, awfully," she laughed, but behind the laugh the slate-blue eyes were saying things out of a very different vocabulary. "That will do very nicely for a beginning. I suppose I shall have to give Jerry a few lessons in the proper reactions. Isn't that the tinkle-tinkle of the dinner gong?"
It was; and a few minutes later our ship's company, lacking only Miss Mehitable, who was still confined to her stateroom, gathered for the first time as a whole around the long table in the dining-saloon of theAndromeda. And in the seating I took blessed good care to have Beatrice Van Tromp on my left and motherly Mrs. Sanford for a bulwark on my right.
Duringthe first few days of our southward voyaging the routine on board fell easily into the rut predicted by Van Dyck in the talk across the dinner-table in the New Orleans hotel; three meals a day, a good bit of more or less listless lounging under the awnings between times, and rather half-hearted battles with the cards in the evenings.
Day after day we had the same cloudless skies, and the same gentle breeze quartering over the port bow; and each morning there was apparently the same school of porpoises tumbling in the swell under the yacht's forefoot. Marking the course, I saw little change in it from day to day. We were still steering either south or a few points east of south, and if Van Dyck had any intention of touching at any of the Central American ports, the telltale compass in the ceiling of the dining-saloon did not indicate it.
Of the growth of Bonteck's cynical scheme of human analysis there were as yet no signs visible to the casual bystander. Mrs. Eager Van Tromp and Conetta's dragoness aunt sat in the shade of the after-deck awning, reading novels, and fanning themselves in moments when the breeze failed; and the Van Tromp trio, sometimes with Conetta and Madeleine Barclay, and always with Billy Grisdale and his bull pup, when they were not pointedly driven away, roamed the ship from bow to stern,and from bridge to engine-room. The Greys, prolonging their honeymoon, hid themselves in out-of-the way corners like a pair of lovers; and the Sanfords, serenely enjoying their first real vacation, could be stumbled upon now and then—so Billy Grisdale averred—holding hands quite like the younger pair.
As for the men, candor compels the admission that the deadly blight ofennuiseemed to be slowly settling down upon at least four of us. Van Dyck, though scrupulously careful of his responsibilities as host, was anything but good company when he was off duty. The major and Holly Barclay, with Ingerson and anybody who could be dragooned into taking a fourth hand, played cards hours on end in the yacht's smoking-room; for nominal stakes, John Grey hinted, when neither Ingerson nor Van Dyck was sitting in, but with the sky for the limit when either of the two really rich men was present and betting.
The second time Grey mentioned this I thought it might be well to dig a little deeper.
"You are Bonteck's guest, Jack, and so am I," I said bluntly. "Are you making charges?"
"Not me," returned the married lover, with a lapse into prematrimonial carelessness of speech. And then, after a reflective moment, "But for that matter, I don't have to make them, Preble. Everybody buys wisdom of the major now and then over the card table. It has come to be a proverb, back home. For a supposedly rich man he plays a mighty thrifty game—and that remark is not original with me, not by a long shot."
"Possibly the major is saving his money forGerald," I suggested, more to see what Grey would say than for any other reason.
Grey's slow wink was more expressive than many words.
"That worn-out joke doesn't fool you any more than it does me," he asserted baldly. "You've never seen Major Terwilliger in his great and unapproachable act of coupon-clipping, have you?"
I was obliged to admit that I had not.
"Well, neither has anyone else, I venture to say. He is a shrewd, shifty old rounder, Preble; no more and no less. And there are men in New York who will tell you that he sails pretty close to the wind a good bit of the time—that he has to to save his face. It's a nasty thing to say, but I more than half believe he is playing Gerald up to Conetta for purely fiduciary reasons."
"But Conetta has no money," I protested.
"No; but Aunt Mehitable has—a barrel of it. And it will come to Conetta, sooner or later—always provided Conetta marries to please Aunt Mehitable."
Now this statement was not exactly in accordance with the facts, as I knew them, or thought I knew them, and I said so.
"Miss Mehitable's will is already made, and I happen to know that her money will not go to Conetta. It will be divided among a number of charitable institutions."
We were on the starboard promenade forward, and Grey looked around as if to make sure there were no overhearers.
"I'm going to breach a professional confidence and tell you something, Preble, taking it for granted that it will go no farther. One day about threeyears ago, while I was reading for my Bar examinations in the office of Maxim, Townsend and Maxim, Miss Mehitable did make just such a will as you mention; I know it because I made the transcript of it. That will was left in the office safe, and something like a week later she came back, asked for it, got it, and destroyed it. Then she had Townsend draw another—which I also copied. That one, so far as I know, is still in existence and unchanged. It leaves a few bequests to the charity folk, and the bulk of the property to Conetta."
If Grey had drawn off and hit me in the face I could scarcely have been more dumfounded. For some inscrutable—and wicked—reason of her own, Aunt Mehitable had wanted to break our engagement, Conetta's and mine, and the loss of my patrimony had given her an easy half of the means. Upon hearing of my loss she had quickly supplied the other half by making the will which she didn't mean to let stand—which she had promptly destroyed as soon as I had been safely eliminated. The grim irony of her expedient might have been amusing if I hadn't been so angry. She might easily have lied to me about the disposition of her property, but that would have been against her principles. To quiet what she was probably calling her conscience, she had actually made the will with which she had clubbed me to death; a will which she fully intended to revoke, and did revoke—after I was out of the way.
How much or how little Grey suspected the turmoil he had stirred up in me by his breach of office confidence I do not know, but he was good enough to give me a chance to get back to normal, searching his pockets for a cigar, and, when he had foundone, turning his back to me—and the breeze—while he lighted it.
"Do you think Miss Gilmore believes in the major's coupon clipping?" I asked, after I had contrived to swallow the shock he had given me.
Again he let me see the slow wink.
"That is the farcical part of it. For a sharp-eyed, keen-witted maiden lady who has made a good bit of real money buying and selling in the Street, it is little less than wonderful. But it's a fact, Preble; shedoesbelieve in it. She lets the major write himself off at his own valuation, and never dreams of asking to see a certified check. She seems to regard Jerry Dupuyster as one of the few really desirable matrimonial propositions on the market. That is why she is here—with Conetta."
This last assertion of Grey's told me nothing that I had not already set down as an obvious fact, but his gossipy talk afforded a luminous commentary upon the manner in which an isolated group of human beings will secrete all sorts of small uncharities, if the isolation be only complete enough. These little incidents to the contrary notwithstanding, however, I could not see that Van Dyck was making much progress in his unmasking experiment. Up to this time, and outwardly, at least, we were still only a party of winter loiterers, pleasurers, decently grateful to our host and decently and conventionally well-behaved. If there were any plots or conspiracies of the money-hunting sort in the air, they were not suffered to become unpleasantly obtrusive.
But for one member of the party I was conscious of a great and growing contempt. In former days we of the younger set had known Holly Barclayas a sort of reincarnation of the Beau Brummell type; an idler of the clubs who lived upon his wife's money, and who was much too indolent to be even manfully vicious. Good-looking, in a way, self-centered, and even more finically careful for the creature comforts and luxuries than Major Terwilliger, I remember it had seemed grossly incredible to us younger folk that he could be the father of the thoughtful, high-minded and convincingly beautiful young woman who paid him the compliment of being his daughter.
From the beginning of the voyage Barclay's attitude had been sufficiently apparent to me, or I thought it was. I decided that he was somewhat anxiously weighing the pros and cons as between Van Dyck and Ingerson in the matrimonial scale; weighing them strictly with reference to the results as they might affect him, individually, and quite without concern for his daughter's future happiness. That Bonteck was a clean man and a gentleman, while his rival was everything that Van Dyck was not, appeared to cut no figure.
It was hugely farcical, if one could but shut his eyes to the possible tragedies involved. Holly Barclay had joined theAndromeda'scompany to dispose of his daughter. Ingerson had come as a cold-blooded buyer to the market. Miss Mehitable was hoping to corner the major and Gerald Dupuyster; and Mrs. Van Tromp, yielding precedence, of course, to Barclay and his schemings, had come on the chance of dividing the spoils, since one of the two chief matrimonial prizes would be left after Madeleine—or rather Madeleine's father—had secured the other.
That Mrs. Van Tromp's armament was only a secondary battery might have been denied by some.Alicia, the oldest of the trio, was, as I may have said, an attractive young woman of the athletic type, a rider to hounds, a champion swimmer, and a good comrade where men were concerned. In the modern meaning of the term she was a man's woman, with a sort of compelling charm that was all her own.
Beatrice, the second daughter, had, as has been noted, a bookish turn. If she had chosen to study surgery she would have been a ruthless vivisector. As a result of this inquiring bent, she had an astonishing, and sometimes rather disconcerting, knowledge of things as they are. But to offset the touch of the blue-stocking, she owned a pair of long-lashed eyes that kindled quickly at any torch of sentiment, and they were set in a face of uncommon sweetness—winsomeness, one would say, if the word were not so desperately outworn.
Edith, for whose sake Billy Grisdale was cutting a good half of his Sophomore year, was a replica, in rounder lines and easier curves, of her sister Alicia. Having been carefully held back to give her older sisters a clear field, she was still something of a tomboy, but her very roughnesses were lovable, and Billy's callow folly found, it must be admitted, its full and sufficient excuse in its object.
It was Edie Van Tromp, roaming the yacht like a restless bit of misdirected energy, as was her custom, who came to fling herself into the steamer chair next to mine; this in the afternoon of the day when John Grey had given me still less cause to love Miss Mehitable Gilmore.
"I'm bored, Mr. Richard Preble—bored to extinction!" she gasped, fanning herself with avigor that was all her own. "Is nothing ever going to happen on this tiresome ship?"
"There are things happening all the time, if we only have eyes to perceive them," I told her, laughing. "In your own case, for example, there is Billy Grisdale. To an interested and sympathetic onlooker like myself it would seem that he is constantly happening in as many different ways as he can devise."
"Oh, Billy—yes," she admitted, with pouting emphasis. Then, with a great show of confidence: "Uncle Dick—I may call you Uncle Dick, if I want to, mayn't I?—if you were only a little older and grayer I might tell you something."
"Tell me anyhow," I urged. "I am old enough to be perfectly safe, don't you think?"
"It's Billy, and you started it," she went on pertly. "That boy is fairly worrying the life out of me. Positively, I'm getting the dreadful habit of carrying my head on my shoulder. He—he's always just there, you know, if I look around."
"Is that why you are bored?"
"I suppose it is; it must be. Nothing can ever come of it, of course. Billy is nothing but just a handsome, good-natured, sweet-temperedboy. It would be years and years, and then more years before——"
"So it would," I agreed. "And, besides, Billy has three brothers and two sisters coming along, and Grisdalepèreis only moderately well-to-do, as fortunes go nowadays."
Instantly Miss Edith's straight-browed eyes flashed blue fire.
"Money—always and forever money!" she flamed out. "I haven't heard anything else all mylife! One would think that heaven itself was paved with it and that the angels wear gold coins for charmstrings. Ihateit!"
"Oh, no, you don't," I hastened to say. "It's a good, broad-backed little beast, and you can always count upon it for carrying the load. And Billy will probably have to make his own way, without even so much as a loan of the little beast."
"I don't care! I think it is perfectly frightful the way we bow down and kowtow to your beast—the great god Cash! I'd rather wash dishes and make bread—for two!"
This seemed to be verging toward the edge of things serious. I knew that Mrs. Van Tromp was suffering Billy only because he was so absurdly young as to be supposedly harmless. But if Edith, the healthy-bodied and strong-willed, were even beginning to take notice, there was trouble ahead.
"We can none of us afford to defy the conventions, my dear girl," I cautioned, taking the avuncular rôle she had tried to thrust upon me. "And we mustn't let ourselves get into narrow little ruts. The play's the thing, and we are only a part of the audience—you and I."
"The play?" she echoed doubtfully. "You mean the—the——"
"I mean the great human comedy, of course. It is going on all around us, all the time."
"I don't get you," she said, in the free phrase which may have been her own, or may have been a Billy Grisdale transplantation.
"You are too young and inexperienced," I asserted in mock gravity. "Otherwise you could hardly have lived a week in theAndromedawithout realizing that the stage is set, with the call-boymaking his last hasty round, beating upon the doors of the dressing-rooms and summoning the people of the play to come and take their places."
"I can't understand a word you say!" she protested petulantly. "Do you mean Conetta and Jerry Dupuyster?"
"Miss Kincaide and Jerry are only two, and the cast of characters is large. Wait patiently, Edie, and you shall see. Meanwhile, if I am not mistaken, that long, low streak in the west—you can just make it out if you shade your eyes from the sun glare on the water—is land."
She was up and gone at the word, flying to the bridge and crying her discovery—or mine. What the land was, I could not tell. Van Dyck had made a joking mystery of the yacht's course, which, naturally, none of us could determine with any degree of accuracy merely by looking now and then at the telltale compass in the cabin ceiling. I fancied that Van Dyck's object in keeping us in the dark was chiefly to add something to the zest of the cruise, the interest lying in the uncertainty as to what landfall we should first make. As to this, however, nobody seemed to care greatly where we were going, or when we should arrive, so, as one may say, the small mystery had hitherto fallen flat.
But now there was a stir among the after-deck idlers, and Major Terwilliger, thrifty grasper at opportunity, immediately made a pool upon the name of the landfall—with Jack Grey whispering to me that the major had already fortified himself by casually questioning the hard-faced sailing-master as to the yacht's latest quadrant-reading—fromwhich he had doubtless been able privately to prick off the latitude and approximate position of theAndromedaupon the cabin chart.
Asan easy matter of course, Major Terwilliger won the pool. The land sighted proved to be Cape Gracias á Dios, the easternmost point of Nicaragua. It would say itself that the Mosquito Coast, low, swampy, and with only three practicable harbors along its three-hundred-mile sweep, could have no attractions for a party of winter pleasurers, and we were leaving Cape Gracias astern when theAndromeda'scourse was suddenly changed and she was headed for land.
Climbing to the bridge a little later, where I found Van Dyck setting the course for the Madeira-man who had the wheel, I learned the reason for the unannounced change.
"Trouble in the engine-room," Van Dyck explained. "The port propeller shaft is running hot and threatening to quit on us. We'll have to lay up for a few hours until Haskell can find out what has gone wrong."
"The shaft hasn't been giving any trouble heretofore, has it?" I asked.
"No; Haskell says it began to heat all at once, shortly after we sighted land."
"You'll put in at Gracias?"
He nodded. "The harbor isn't much, and the town is still less. But we don't need anything but an anchorage. Haskell thinks we won't be held up very long."
That was a cheering prediction, but the event proved it to be too optimistic. The mechanical trouble turned out to be in the thrust bearing of the propeller shaft, and it was more serious than Haskell, chief of the engine-room squad, had supposed it would be. The bearing which, like everything else on the yacht, had been cared for with warship thoroughness, had apparently run dry and it was badly scored and "cut," as a machinist would say. The repair called for hours of patient scraping and filing, and Haskell, who had served as an assistant engineer in the Navy, was properly humiliated.
"It sure gets my goat, Mr. Preble," he confided to me when I climbed down into his bailiwick some three or four hours after we had dropped anchor in Gracias á Dios harbor. "It looks as if it was on me, and maybe it is, but I've never had anything like this happen to me before—not since I began as an oiler on one of the old Cunarders. We have automatic lubrication; all the latest wrinkles; and yet that cussed shaft's tore up like it had been runnin' dry for a week. You're an engineer—I just wish you'd look at it."
To oblige him I donned overalls and crawled down into the shaft tunnel. A glance at the excoriated bearing showed that Haskell hadn't exaggerated. Quinby, Haskell's first assistant, was scraping and smoothing in a space that was too confined to let a man take the kinks out of his back, and in which there was no room for two men to work.
"That is no hurry job," I told Haskell, after I had crawled out. "I think I may safely tell ourpeople that they may have shore leave, if they want it."
"You can that," Haskell grinned. "We'll be right here to-morrow morning, and blamed lucky if we can heave up the mud hook by some time to-morrow afternoon."
It was too late to spread the news after I left the engine-room. When I reached the main deck all of our ship's company had apparently turned in, though there were lights in the smoking-room to hint that the card-players were still at their favorite pastime. But as I went aft to smoke a bed-time pipe I found Madeleine Barclay curled up in one of the deep wicker chairs.
"Pardon me," I said; "I didn't know there was any one here. Don't let me disturb your maiden meditations. I'll vanish."
"You needn't," she returned quite amiably; then, seeing the pipe: "And you may smoke if you want to. You know well enough that I don't mind. How long do we stay here?"
"That is upon the knees of the gods. I've just been below, and I should say we are good for twenty-four hours, or maybe more, though Haskell thinks we may get out by to-morrow afternoon."
"Do we go ashore?"
I shook my head. "The others may if they want to; I shan't."
"Why not?"
"TheAndromedaafter-deck is much more comfortable than anything to be found ashore in this corner of Nicaragua."
"You have been here before?"
"Yes; I came around here once, something over a year ago, on a steamer from Belize. We madea stop of a few hours and I was besotted enough to leave the ship. I shan't make any such mistake again."
"Gracias á Dios," she said musingly. "I wonder who said it first—and why he was thanking God—particularly?"
I laughed. "Some storm-tossed mariner of the early centuries, I imagine, who was glad enough to make a landfall of any sort."
"Storm-tossed," she repeated. "Aren't we all more or less storm-tossed, Richard?"
"I suppose we are, either mentally, morally, or physically. It's a sad enough world, if you want to take that angle."
"But I don't want to take that angle. When I do take it, it's because I have to."
Being as much of a hypocrite as any of those whom Van Dyck had proposed putting under his analytical microscope, I said: "But there are no constraining influences at work upon any of us aboard this beautiful little pleasure ship—there can't be."
"Do you think not?" she threw in; and then, without warning: "How about you and Conetta, Richard?"
In common justice to Conetta I had to feign an indifference I was far from feeling—which was more of the hypocrisy.
"That was all over and done with three years ago, as you must know, Madeleine. She wasn't aware of the fact that I was to be in theAndromedaparty; and I didn't know she was to be—at least, not until after I had committed myself to Bonteck. Of course we promptly quarreled the moment wemet. Perhaps you may have noticed that we've been quarreling ever since."
She smiled soberly.
"You have made it obvious—both of you; perhaps a little too obvious." Then, after a momentary silence: "Did Miss Mehitable give the real reason for that other and mortal quarrel, three years ago, Richard?"
"The reason she gave was enough, wasn't it?"
"Some of us thought it wasn't. I don't know how you were acting, but Conetta didn't give a very good imitation of a person who has 'agreed to disagree.'"
"I can fill out the picture for you," I said grimly. "I was acting like a man who had been fool enough to lose his temper at the invitation of a crabbed and rather spiteful person who was old enough to be his mother."
"Ah!" she said; "I thought it was Miss Mehitable." Then: "Was it because you had lost your money?"
"Yes," I said, merely because the simple affirmative seemed to afford the easiest way of brushing aside explanations which might not explain.
It was then that Miss Madeleine Barclay became a plagiarist, stealing the very words uttered so hotly by Edie Van Tromp only a few hours earlier.
"Money—always money! Ihateit, Dick Preble!"
I did not answer her as I had answered Edith.
"It is a holy hatred, Madeleine. The love of money, and what money will buy, has proved the undoing of—but I don't need to preach to you. Let's talk about something pleasant. Have you ever seen a finer night than this?"
"A fine night, and ideal conditions. In a way, we've almost left the strugglesome, toiling, avariciously dollar-chasing old world behind us, haven't we?"
"You say 'almost'; why not quite?"
She made a little gesture inclusive of theAndromedaas a whole.
"Too many reminders of the money and what it will buy. We'd need to be shipwrecked upon some uninhabited island to make the isolation perfect. As that isn't going to happen, I think I'll make the most of what we have and go to bed. Good-night." And she left me.
My pipe had gone out and I refilled it. While I had called the night fine, it was measurably warm. With the yacht at anchor there was little breeze, and what little there was came from sea. My stateroom was on the port side, and as theAndromedawas lying with that side toward the land, I was reluctant to leave the open air for the closer quarters between decks.
It was while I was smoking a second pipe in comfortable solitude that I fell asleep. The lapse into unconsciousness seemed only momentary, but when I picked up the pipe which had fallen into my lap there was no fire in it and the bowl had grown cold. Also, in the interval, long or short, the yacht's lights had been switched off and the after-deck was shrouded in the soft darkness of the tropical night. From somewhere in the under-depths came a faint clatter of tools to tell me that Haskell and his men were still at work on the disabled shaft, but apart from this the silence was unbroken.
Descending the cabin stair I groped my way tothe door of my room, which was the farthest forward on the port side, and I remembered afterward that I thought it odd that the saloon lights were all off. On all other occasions when I had been up late I had found a single incandescent left on; one, at least.
Inside of the luxurious little sleeping-room that had been assigned to me I felt for the wall switch and snapped it. Nothing happened. I snapped it back and on again, and still nothing happened. Down in the machinery hold I could hear the fluttering murmur of the small auxiliary engine which ran the lighting dynamo, and since it was running, there seemed to be no reason why the lights shouldn't come on. But they wouldn't.
While I was speculating upon this curious failure of the lighting system and wondering if it were worth while to go below to ask Haskell what was the matter with the cabin circuit, sounds like the subdued splashing of oars cautiously handled came floating in through the open port. Since I judged it must be midnight or worse, it was only natural that I should want to know why a boat should be coming off to theAndromedaafter all the yacht's people save myself were abed and asleep. Not being able to see anything from the stateroom port-light, I hurried back through the darkened saloon and up to the deck. From the rail on the shoreward side I could make out the dim shape of the approaching craft. As nearly as I could determine, it was a large row-boat with at least four men in it; at all events there were four oars. I could see and count the phosphorescent swirls as the blades were dipped.
It was evident at once that the boat was coming off to theAndromeda. We were anchored well out in the harbor, and there was nothing beyond us; nothing but the harbor mouth and the open sea. Visions of banditry began to flit through my brain. When I had been last in the Caribbean, some three months earlier, Nicaragua had been in the throes of one of its perennial guerrilla wars. A rich man's yacht, offering dazzling loot, might easily be a tempting bait to any lawless band happening to be within striking distance.
While I was straining my eyes to get a better sight of the approaching boat, and deliberating as to whether or not I hadn't better call Van Dyck or the sailing-master, a voice at my elbow said: "So you are up late, too, are you, Dick?" and I faced about with a prickling shock of surprise to find Bonteck standing beside me.
"I must be getting weak-kneed and nervous," I said. "I thought I was the only person awake at this end of things, and you gave me a start. What boat is that?"
"A shore boat, I suppose," he answered evenly. "After I found that we were likely to be delayed until to-morrow, I told Goff he might give some of his men shore leave for a few hours. They were asking for it."
"But that isn't one of theAndromeda'sboats," I objected.
"No; they didn't take one of our boats; they hailed a harbor craft of some sort. I fancied they'd make a night of it, but it seems they didn't."
"What time is it now?" I asked.
"Two bells in the middle watch—otherwise one o'clock."
While we were talking, the boat was pulled up to the port bows of the yacht and a number of men, some half-dozen or more, came aboard. We could see dark figures climbing the rail, but since the yacht was painted white, and Van Dyck and I were both wearing yachting flannels, I suppose we were invisible to the group at the bows. In a minute or so the boat pushed off, cut a clumsy half circle in turning, and headed for the shore, and there was just enough of my foolish nervousness left to suggest that the oarsmen were still trying not to make any more noise than they could help. But the second thought made me smile at the remains of the nervousness. What more natural than that our returning shore-leave men had cautioned the boatmen against making a racket and waking everybody on theAndromeda?
"I take it you've been down with Haskell," I said to Bonteck, after the shore boat had become a vanishing blur in the darkness.
"Yes. He is as sore as a boil about that propeller shaft. Says he never had anything like that happen to him before, and that it reflects upon him as chief. He tried to tell me how unaccountable it was, but I hardly know enough about mechanical things to keep me from spoiling."
"It is rather unaccountable," I offered. "I was down a few hours ago and crawled into the shaft tunnel to have a look at it. Ordinarily, when a bearing as large as that begins to run dry, it gives warning some little time beforehand. But Quinby, Haskell's second, says he put his hand on it less than an hour before it began to complain, and it was perfectly cool."
"Oh, well," was Van Dyck's easy-going rejoinder,"such things are all in a life-time. We're in luck that it didn't 'seize,' as Haskell says, and twist itself off. You're yawning as if you were sleepy. Better turn in and get whatever this hot night will let you have. Good-night."
That was the end of the day for me, save that when I went to my stateroom and once more tried the wall switch the lights came on as usual.
The next morning, after a breakfast so early that I sat alone at the long table in the white-lacquered saloon, I went below and offered my services as those of a highly educated jack-of-all-trades to Haskell.
"By golly, you're saving my life, Mr. Preble," said our chief mechanic, whose eyes were looking like two burned holes in a blanket. "If you'll boss the job and let me get about a couple of hours in the hay——"
"Sure," I agreed; and crawling into the extra suit of overclothes, I proceeded to do it, becoming so mechanically interested in a short time that I not only neglected to call Haskell when his two hours were up, but also let the luncheon hour go by unheeded.
By keeping faithfully at it, our gang got the recalcitrant thrust bearing in shape by the middle of the afternoon, the fires were broken out and the blowers put on, and by four o'clock theAndromedawas once more under way and pointing her sharp nose for the open water. As I came up out of the engine-hold to make a bolt for a bath and clean clothes, I saw that Van Dyck had the wheel and was apparently heading the ship straight out toward the Mosquito Cays. As the trim little vessel—which was little only by comparison with thegreat liners of which it was a copy in the small—went shearing its way at full speed through the heaving ground swell with the westering sun fairly astern, I could not help wondering what our next port of call would be, and if it would be a disabled piece of machinery which would drive us into it.
Withthe Nicaraguan coast fairly astern, and theAndromedapicking her way gingerly among the cays and reefs which extend from fifty to one hundred miles off the eastern hump of the Central American camel, we soon made the open Caribbean, and our course was once more laid indefinitely to the south and east. If we were to hold this general direction we should bring up in due time somewhere upon the Colombian or Venezuelan coast of South America.
Watching my opportunity, I cornered Van Dyck on the bridge at a moment when he had relieved the man at the wheel; this on our second evening out from Gracias á Dios. As I came up, he was changing the course more to the southward, and I asked him if we were slated to do the Isthmus and the Canal.
"I hadn't thought very much about it," he answered half-absently. "Do you think the others would like it?"
"The Isthmus is pretty badly hackneyed, nowadays," I suggested; "and for your particular purpose——"
"Forget it!" he broke in abruptly. And then: "It's a hideous failure, Dick, as you have doubtless found out for yourself."
"Which part of it is a failure—your experiment, or the other thing?"
"I don't know what you mean by 'the other thing'," he bit out.
"Then I'll tell you: You thought it wouldn't be such a bad idea to show Madeleine Barclay what a vast difference there is between yourself and Ingerson as a three-meal-a-day proposition; as a steady diet, so to speak, in an environment which couldn't very well be changed or broken. Wasn't that it?"
"Something of the sort, maybe," he admitted, rather sheepishly, I thought.
"And it isn't working out?"
"You can see for yourself."
"What I see is that you are giving Ingerson a good bit more than a guest's chance."
"You don't understand," he returned gloomily.
"Naturally. I'm no mind reader."
While theAndromedawas shearing her way through three of the long Caribbean swells he was silent. Then he said: "I'm going to tell you, Dick; I shall have a fit if I don't tell somebody. Madeleine has turned me down—not once, you know, but a dozen times. It's the cursed money!"
"But Ingerson has money, too," I put in.
"I know; but that is different. Can't you conceive of such a thing as a young woman's turning down the man she really cares for, and then letting herself be dragooned into marrying somebody else?"
"You are asking too much," I retorted. "You want me to believe that a sane, well-balanced young woman like Madeleine Barclay will refuse a good fellow because he happens to be rich, and marry the other kind of a fellow who has precisely thesame handicap. It may be only my dull wit, but I can't see it."
"I could make you see it if you were a little less thick-headed," he cut in impatiently. And then he added: "Or if you knew Mr. Holly Barclay a little better."
It was just here that I began to see a great light, with Madeleine Barclay threatening to figure as a modern martyr to a mistaken sense of duty. Did she know that her father would make his daughter's husband his banker? And was she generously refusing to involve the man she loved?
"It ought to make you all the more determined, Bonteck," I said, after I had reasoned it out. "It is little less than frightful to think of—the other thing, I mean. Ingerson will buy her for so much cash down; that is about what it will amount to."
"Don't you suppose I know it?" he exclaimed wrathfully. "Good Lord, Dick, I've racked my brain until it is sore trying to think up some way of breaking the combination. You don't know the worst of it. Holly Barclay is in deep water. Strange as it may seem, his sister, Emily Vancourt, named him, of all the incompetents in a silly world, as her executor and the guardian of her son. The boy is in college in California, and next year he will come of age."
"And Barclay can't pay out?"
"You've said it. He has squandered the boy's fortune as he has Madeleine's. I don't know how he did it, but I fancy the bucket-shops have had the most of it. Anyway, it's gone, and when the fatal day of accounting rolls around he will stand a mighty good chance of going to jail."
"Does Madeleine know?" I asked.
"Not the criminal part, you may be sure. She merely knows that her father is in urgent need of money—a good, big chunk of it. And she also knows, without being told, that the man who marries her will be invited to step into the breach. Isn't it horrible?"
"You have discovered the right word for it," I agreed. And then: "You are not letting it stand at that, are you?"
He did not reply at once. From the after-deck came sounds of cheerful laughter, with Alicia Van Tromp's rich contralto dominating; came also the indistinguishable words of a popular song which Billy Grisdale was chanting to his own mandolin accompaniment. Presently Jack Grey's mellow tenor joined in, and in the refrain I could hear Conetta's silver-toned treble. It jarred upon me a little; and yet I tried to make myself believe that I was glad she was happy enough to sing. True to her word, she had consistently maintained the barrier quarrelsome between us; and Jerry Dupuyster was playing his part like an obedient little soldier.
"You'd say it was a chance for a man to do something pretty desperate, wouldn't you, Dick?" Van Dyck said, breaking the long pause in his own good time.
"I think you would be justified in considering the end, rather than the particular means," I conceded.
"I have had a crazy project up my sleeve—a sort of forlorn hope, you know. But after working out all of the details time and again, I've always weakened on it."
"Perhaps some of the details are weak," I suggested, willing to be helpful if I could.
"One of them is, and I can't seem to build it up so that it will seem reasonably plausible. Of course you know that I'd pay the father out of the prison risk in the hollow half of a minute if I could make it appear as anything less than sheer charity. But I can't do anything like that openly; and if I should do it in any other ordinary way, Madeleine would be sure to find out about it and argue that I was merely lowering myself to Ingerson's plane—paving the way with the money that she despises. And she'd turn me down again—with some show of reason. I am still sane enough to foresee that."
"If Miss Barclay only had some money of her own with which to buy her release from that unspeakable father of hers," I began.
"That would break the combination easily," he said. "And she did have money once; half of her mother's fortune was left to her—with her father as trustee. It went the same way as Barclay's own half, and the Vancourt trust fund."
With Conetta's voice in my ears I couldn't think straight enough to help him much. What I said was more an echo of my own growing determination regarding Conetta than anything else.
"I'd fight for my own, Bonteck; and I'd do it with whatever weapon came handiest," I declared; and then the return of the steersman whom Van Dyck had relieved put an end to the confidences for the time being.
With the sea routine resumed, and theAndromedaonce more steaming free and footloose, a night and a day elapsed before I again had privatespeech with Van Dyck. As before, it was after dinner in the evening, and Van Dyck had sent one of the cabin stewards to ask me to join him in his stateroom. It was a matchless night, and I was lounging with the younger members of the ship's company on the after-deck when the steward came and whispered to me. We were all singing college songs with Billy Grisdale's mandolin for an accompaniment, and I was able to slip away unnoticed.
I found Van Dyck sitting at his table, stepping off distances on a spread-out chart with a pair of compasses, and somehow I fancied that the air of the luxuriously fitted little den was surcharged with the electricity of portent.
"You sent for me?" I queried.
"Yes; sit down and light your pipe," and he motioned me to a chair. "What are the others doing?"
"The young people, with the Greys, are on the after-deck, caterwauling with Billy, as you can hear. There is a bridge table in full blast in the saloon, with Mrs. Van Tromp, Aunt Mehitable, Holly Barclay and Ingerson sitting in. The Sanfords have disappeared—gone to bed, I imagine; and the major is in the smoking-room, guzzling hot toddies."