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"She's Spanish," said the American, Kenner; "you can bet your bottom dollar on it—and look at her daughter."
The other man, a clean-shaven, long-faced, dark-haired Englishman, sitting before a well-chosen déjeûner on the terrace of the great hotel at Monaco, did not betray any desire to contradict the assertion.
"I've been looking at her daughter for half-an-hour," said he, "and if she'll be pleased to go on breakfasting, I'll make it an hour."
The American laughed cheerily, with a great boyish laugh at the rejoinder, and took a cigar from a lizard-skin case.
"Wal," he remarked, "I've seen worse on canvas than the little girl with the straw hat and the streamers; but fix your eye on the maternal property, and I guess you'll shout glory! Why, man, she must be a hundred and four, and young at that!"
"They made her out fifty in the smoking-room last night," remarked the other, "so she's got the benefit of the doubt, any way. It's a case of Beauty and the Beast, and both of them of the feminine gender. The proprietor here will spin yarns about the pair until you wink with listening. He kept me up on cheroots and bad whiskey until three this morning, and if I hadn't got a head like a warming-pan, I'd pass the tale on."
"Does he know where the old girl hoists her flag when she's at home?"
"Broadly—that is, just enough to trouble the post-office. He says she's four walls and a precipice which she calls a castle somewhere in the north-west of Spain. Her profession, occupation, calling, or business, as they style it on the parish census, seems to be equally solitary—she's a wrecker, and she lives on the vitals of ships. What do you think of that?"
"I think he's a handsome liar!"
"But he believes it; and he gave me a list as long as your arm of the properties she has acquired by what the policies call peril of the sea. Look at her now: she's eating oysters with her fingers, you'll observe, and swearing at the waiter in two languages. Isn't there a prima facie case for the assumption?"
The American, who, like the other, was a man of some thirty years of age, fell to stroking his wavy yellow moustache thoughtfully. He did not seem able to look away from the table, luxuriously shadowed by many palms, whereat the Spanish woman and her daughter were sitting. Of these the mother demanded the more immediate notice. She was a woman gaunt and hag-like when your eyes fell upon her face, but of prodigious stature when she rose to walk, having the stride of a man and a gait which would have won applause upon a recreation ground. But age had worn furrows in the brown, hide-like skin of her ferocious countenance, until nothing but her features was discernible at the first; and these, which once had given ornament to a remarkable face, now stood out upon it to disfigurement.
As for her daughter—the little Inez, they called her in the hotel—then eating fruit with youthful recklessness, while the woman at her side was breakfasting off oysters and champagne, she was the contrast which gave to the picture its relief of welcome light. Her hair was dark with the rich sheen of Southern strength; her eyes were black and vivacious; and her face was piquant and beautiful, even after Northern traditions. Those who knew anything of her said that she was eighteen; and in this she had cheated the quick maturity of the land of Alcaldes and of garlic, for she did not look a day more, while her manner had all the childish unrest and the vivacity of an English boarding-school Miss. In truth a stranger family never sought the hospitality of Monaco, or brought yacht over the unsurpassably blue waters of the tideless sea; and the interest of the American, Kenner, and of the listless Englishman, Arnold Messenger—commonly known as "The Prince"—was entirely justified, even to the assumption that the crone-like woman had a past, and that her history was not to be told in the market-place.
Some of these thoughts were alive in Kenner's mind as he sat devouring his cigar and continuing to watch the woman and her daughter. The morning was glorious, for the sun danced with sparkling light upon the still Mediterranean, and shone from the white villas and the rocky promontory as it shines in the Riviera at the nod of spring, bearing full beams upon palm and aloe, and the glorious crannies of flowers which blossom with the salt spray upon them. Men in dazzling "blazers" moved in and out upon the terraces; the breeze, of exulting freshness, bore the strains of dreamy music upon its breath; a few yachts rode without motion under the shelter of the height of towers; tropic luxuriousness of nature seemed to have pushed winter from her hold, and to have come with a rich store from the very heart of Africa. It was not a morning to think of gloom; but the immovable touch of depression suddenly held the American, and he could not shake it off.
"I tell you what. Prince," said he, breaking his chain of silence after many minutes, "if I sit here watching that hag eat oysters—she's had three dozen already—I shall go to sleep and dream she's sticking pins into my figger. She makes me think I've been out on Bad-Lands."
The Prince looked up in astonishment.
"You'd better turn witch-finder!" he exclaimed: "the new Mat Hopkins and the crone of Monaco! I can see a deputation to put her through the water-cure."
"You've the laugh of me right along, but that's not it. Did you ever know that I'd worked the second-sight trade and made a hundred dollars a week in a barn-storming tour through the States?"
"You're clever enough," replied the other, "but I didn't know you'd ever done any thing so honest."
"Wal, a man must have his recreation, and I took mine with mediums; you try it when you're down to a dime."
"That's about my point now, though I don't see what it's got to do with the woman and the oysters."
"Every thing, Prince; and look here: I'm cleaned out if ever I had a clearer reading——"
"Of what?"
"Of the hag and of ourselves."
The Prince lighted a cigar, the smoke hiding the jeer upon his lips.
"Go on," said he.
Kenner gave his answer with great deliberation, but he wore the air of the most serious man alive.
"That's exactly what I'm going to do," he remarked; "and in five years' time you can remind me of what's been said. In the first place, I've met that woman before; in the second, I've got to meet her again; and at the next meeting she will best me or I shall best her; but there'll be smart work, and lives lost."
The man was woefully earnest, and his eyes, shining with some excitement, were still fixed upon the crone at the table. But Messenger listened, and laughed aloud.
"Kenner," said he, "you'd have made a better comedian than ever you were table-turner. Don't you think you've fooled around enough?"
The answer was never given, for the Spanish woman had paid her bill and was leaving the terrace. In another hour she had quitted Monaco in her steam yacht, and nothing but the memory of a grotesque and singular personality remained behind her.
When Arnold Messenger gave me the bundle of papers from which in the more part this narrative of an episode has been put together, he forgot, at the same time, to present me with any facts in his past which would help the biographer of a very singular man to do him complete justice. I knew him in Montevideo as one who had played for a very great stake at no distant date, but had lost nigh all he had in the throw, even to the unquestioning friendship of the young man, by name Hal Fisher, who then accompanied him. Under such circumstances the making of crooked paths straight and the removal of stumbling-blocks was a task which I could accomplish but partially, and with no measure of complete satisfaction. Of the man's youth or boyhood I could learn little, save that he had been sent down from Magdalen College at Cambridge, and had left the university without taking a degree. The after years of his coming to manhood seem to have been spent in indolent luxury; and even in exploits which, but for the financial advocacy of his uncle, a rich rubber factor in Grantham, would have led to his acquaintance with the criminal law. Such a fate passed him by, and that it failed to overwhelm him may be set down both to his remarkable, if misdirected, intelligence, and to this succour of which I have spoken.
During his wanderings in London two years after he left Cambridge he had met the lad who, when I first encountered him, passed as his brother. The boy had befriended him in a street brawl, and, mutual confidences being exchanged, a very strange and inexplicable intimacy had come about. Hal Fisher was the son of a coffee merchant in Liverpool. He had suffered much—his mother dying at his birth—from a brutal interpretation of paternal duty which his father expounded to him; and at the age of fourteen he had quitted the private school in Edgbaston, Birmingham, where the aforesaid apocalypse was developed fruitfully, and had come to the city, as many have come, hoping, fearing, with no friends, no knowledge, no plan, no prospect. On the very evening of his arrival a chance curiosity led him to press into the heart of a crowd which had gathered—as British crowds will —to see one man set upon by five; and, being led instinctively to the defence of the minority, he joined heartily in the fray, and found himself shortly after in the rooms of Arnold Messenger, where he told the grave, thoughtful, sympathetic stranger the whole history of his life.
The result was a friendship which endured unbroken for nearly forty months. Fisher had much learning for his years; he wrote a capital letter, he had read many books. And here you will note a strange freak of fortune, which placed so fine a lad in the company of one of the most plausible and most accomplished chevaliers d'industrie in London. Arnold Messenger at that time—and after, as I fear—got meat and drink only by unfailing trickery. He found it mighty convenient to use the powers of one who never questioned him, who gave him faithful service, who had no plaguing curiosity—above all, one who deemed him in some part a hero, and betrayed for him an ardent boyish affection. The man, who had never evinced a regard unto that time even for a dog, was led to reciprocate the attachment in a generous way. He found himself acting the part of an elder brother. He shielded the boy from any participation in his dangerous ventures; he had pride in the thought that Fisher believed him to be honest; and he spent his money for the lad's good with a generosity which proved that he had two sides to his character.
This, then, is the somewhat reserved and priestly-looking man whom we find a loiterer at Monaco in the company of Kenner. His friend, the American, wore the reputation of riches, and had brought his yacht to the Mediterranean solely in search of pigeons to pluck, and schemes—honest or otherwise—to pursue. But fortune had not smiled either upon him or upon Messenger. They lost heavily at the tables, they were banned by the elect, they could not run down a single fool who would give heed to their multifarious schemes. For the Englishman the immediate future was so dark that he contemplated a thousand and one schemes by which he might delude trusting hotel-keepers, and quit Italy for a new campaign. Yet the spring of his knavish inspiration remained dry; the waters of roguery refused to flow.
This diminuendo of hope had just been struck when the pair encountered the Spanish woman and her daughter Inez. They watched her leave the town in her yacht, her ostensible destination being Genoa; after which they loitered for an hour about the quaint little harbour, and then returned, at Messenger's request, to hunt up the boys. Of these I have spoken sufficiently of Fisher, now a lad of seventeen; but of the other, Sydney Capel, a young fellow of twenty-four, I learned but little. Fisher had met him at Monaco; in his account of himself he said that he was a clerk in the firm of Capel, Martingale & Co., the financiers, of Bishopsgate Street, his uncle being head of the house, and reckoned a man of much substance. He was quite a boy still in habit and achievement, and the lads rowed and sailed together every day to their mutual satisfaction. When Messenger and the American found them on the morning I am writing of, they were in spurs and breeches, hot from a gallop, and already reducing the abundance of fish, flesh, and fowl which served them for déjeûner. And while they talked, which they did unceasingly, they never for a moment relaxed the grip of knife and fork, or gave the waiters a "stand-easy."
"I tell you what, Prince," said Fisher, attacking a dish of wild strawberries and cream with particular relish, "that road to Mentone is about the grandest bit I've yet done in explorations. I never saw any thing like those carouba-trees in my life; and as for cypress and euphorbia, why, you can revel in them! We saw the Corsican snow caps again this morning—grand they were in the sun, just like the mountains in a 'Percy', and as clear as a photograph—eh, Capel?"
Sydney Capel, who admitted with reluctance that beauty could be found four miles from Charing Cross, answered unpoetically, and with full mouth—
"Good old Corsica!"
"That's just where he's such a brute," continued Fisher, quite disregarding the animalism of the observation. "I show him a hill all alive with grey olives and lemon-trees, and he says that it reminds him of Regent's Park! I believe the only thing Capel cares for in the universe is a hansom cab or a theatre ticket."
"He's only chaffing you, Hal," said the Prince, who smoked with a pleasant smile as he listened to the babble; "if you treat him properly, he'll let you give him a whole essay on heliotrope, and a bookful of facts about the prickly pear."
"Will he?" replied Fisher, looking round for yet a further measure of sweet sustenance. "You don't know what an unartistic beggar it is—all facts and figures, like a calculating machine. What do you think, now? He's going back to London to-night to lug Heaven knows how many kegs of gold to St. Petersburg!"
The American had been reading during this talk, but he looked up sharply at the words. The Prince, too, put down the paper he held in his hand.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Just what I want to know," continued Fisher; "I call it rot—why, it only seems yesterday that he came here!"
"Must you really go, Capel?" enquired the Prince with sudden interest.
"I'm afraid so; you see, twice every year our house sends some hundreds of thousands to St. Petersburg in the matter of the loan we got for Russia. My uncle likes me to be one of the two that look after the business, and so I'm going back."
"That's a queer job," remarked Kennel, with a delightfully assumed indifference. "How many of you round up the dollars, did you say?"
"Only two of us," said Capel, lighting a cigarette and lolling back to look away down the coast-line to Bordighera; "you see, there's no danger."
"Of course not," interrupted Messenger suddenly; "I suppose nobody ever knows when the money is going."
"Exactly—we have a special train from Fenchurch Street to Tilbury, a special cabin or tug from Tilbury to Flushing, and then we go right through to the Russian frontier."
"Do they give you a great time out yonder?" asked Kenner.
"By Jove! I should think they do! I was trotted all over St. Petersburg like a grand duke when I went there last winter; I never ate so much in a week that I can remember."
"So I should fancy," said Kenner, sinking suddenly back into his chair and taking up his book.
"By-the-way," said he, as if in after-thought, "I may skirmish a while in your old city after this flower-show here—what's the number of your street, if I'm passing?"
"I've got Capel's address," interposed Fisher suddenly; "we're going to dine together when I get back."
"That's right," said the Prince, looking hard at Kenner as he spoke.
They did not question the lads further, nor even look at them, but had great occupation in the causeries of current French newspapers which lay about on chairs and tables in pictorial profusion. The contaminating example of silence seized upon the others—a musical silence, during which the leaves of the date-bearing palms swayed musically in the sea-breeze, and the melodies which Glück made floated up from terrace to terrace, to be lost in a crescendo of chatter and movement, or to merge with the whispers of the wind to which the multicolored buds were opening. So full of seductive rest was all the environment of lake-like water and olive-capped hills that to survey it in idleness, to draw deep breaths of intoxicating freshness, was sufficient pastime for the restless or the wanderer. Even the boys, given to mad desires to make this bill or that cape, to ensnare the unnameably poor fish of the Mediterranean, to do any thing but vegetate, suffered it for a whole hour before the mood took them to round the Cap d'Ail and inspect the point of Villefranche. The idea was no sooner suggested by Fisher than Sydney Capel gave it an immediate imprimatur; and in the wealth of his self-satisfaction cried with one of the five Italian words he knew: "Andiamo! there's just time for an hour's spin, out and back. I say, Kenner, can we have your boat?"
"Why, certainly," said the American. "I guess the Prince and me don't hanker after sprat-fishing this watch—eh, Prince?"
"Don't consider me," replied the Prince quietly; "I'm going into the hotel to write letters."
"Then you'll want me?" cried Fisher dolefully.
"Not a bit of it. I've only got to tot down one or two things, and you're better out than in. We shall see you at dinner."
"Yes; Capel will have time to bolt something before he sets out on that money-grubbing business of his. We should be back by five."
They went off arm in arm toward the harbor, where the American's steam yacht Semiramis lay, and Fisher took the opportunity on the way to make a somewhat significant remark upon his friend and patron's scholarship.
"Poor old Messenger!" said he; "I fancy him blundering through a dictionary without me. I never knew a man write such a fist or spell so badly in all my life!"
"And yet they sent him down from the 'varsity without a degree," interposed Capel with malice.
"That's true; but he's the best chap alive for all that. He's been more than a brother to me; and there's something else in the world besides spelling."
He always consoled himself with this reflection, which was the growth of an honest friendship; but upon this afternoon the Prince had scant need of his sympathy. He progressed without his amanuensis to his satisfaction; for the truth was that he had no business of letter-writing at all. The moment the boys were out of hearing he had put his paper down, as Kenner had done; and the men, each desiring the other to begin, waited with a slight, but unusual, restraint upon them. This was but the restraint of an instant, neither boasting of any substantial mock modesty; and when once he spoke, the Prince had meaning in his voice.
"Kenner," said he, "I've a fancy to smoke a cigar out past the lower town. Are you that way?"
"I was going to suggest it," replied Kenner, with the frankest air possible; "let's get."
They moved from the terrace, and skirted round the harbour to the Mentone road, walking sedately, and without uttering a single observation, until they had left the effervescence and the voices of those who served tables behind them, and were upon that perfect highway which is one of the continuing glories of the Riviera. There, but for a handful of loiterers coming from the olive-clad promontory of Cap Martin, they had no company; and the sun being almost in the zenith, they made yet a slower measure of progress. Again, as at the hotel, Messenger was the first to speak.
"Kenner," said he of a sudden, as he stopped and began to use his stick upon the hard road as a man uses a burin upon a block—"Kenner, that money could be acquired."
The American blew a great circle of smoke from his lips, and looked at the other full in the face.
"You've made an observation," said he, "for which I've been looking for the last ten minutes."
Messenger ceased to engrave unnecessary hieroglyphics upon the wayside when he had got the answer, and walked on briskly for a while, as a man whose active mind compels activity in his limbs. When he stopped again, it was at a fall of the road where the hedge was all ablaze with a burden of flower and fruit, and a little cascade of crystal water shot out a thousand lights, as of unnumbered jewels. There was a jutting out of the grass bank here which made a natural seat under a canopy of wisteria and laburnum, and the men went to it by a common impulse, and began to talk more freely.
"What I want to ask myself," said the Prince, resuming the broken conversation at the point he had left it—"what I want to ask myself is this: How comes it if these clerks—you can't call them any thing else—are sent twice or three times a year to St. Petersburg with some tons of money, that no one of our friends has ever had the mind to try his luck with them?"
"That's nat'ral," interrupted the American; "but who's going to say that they have heard of it? I've got a head pretty full of items, but this is a cablegram to me. You don't suppose the dude's people are going round to all the newspaper men with the tale: 'Here's five hundred thousand off to St. Petersburg again; come and have a straight talk about it.' They keep it under lock and key; that's their chart of safety, as any mule could see."
"I quite follow you," said Messenger, whose hair was streaming back from his forehead in the fresh breeze, and whose eyes shone queerly, as if reflecting the ardent thought of the keen mind behind them; "yet, when I really think of the matter, I can remember that I have heard the tale before. All these financial houses send bullion in big sums to the Continent at one time or other, and it's rare that they've any other guard than a couple of trusted clerks."
"And why should they?" asked Kenner, to whom reflection brought some disappointment; "why should they? Who could interfere with them? You've got to leave sticking up trains to our boys; it's played out in your country, I reckon. Even Red Rube himself wouldn't have taken it on, passage paid!"
"All that's very true," said Messenger, "but it's premature. At the present moment I am putting a very simple question to myself. Let's suppose that a man of some intelligence came to hear that Capel, Martingale & Co. were sending half-a-million to Russia say in three months' time. We'll presume he's got money behind him, and is a man of big ventures. Naturally it would strike him that there's a weak spot in the arrangement somewhere, and that a clever hand, with time before him, should be able to lay it bare. I'd like to bet a hundred that I'd find it with five minutes' thought."
"Maybe," said Kenner, shaking his head as one who has no belief, "maybe; but I'd like to wager on the other thing. Not that you ain't smart, Prince—I don't know your fellow in the States—but it's just this: I don't believe there is any weak spot. Why, figure it out! They mail the money by a special car, by a special steam-boat, and another special car. Where are you to scoop the jack-pot if—you've got a whole bank behind you?"
"The weak spot," said Messenger with great deliberation, "is the tug. If the man that I have spoken of had the work in hand, he would make it his first business to square the skipper of the tug. After that his course would be easy."
"How do you make that out? What could they do with a tug full of money between Harwich and the Scheldt? By gosh! you've the quickest head for bad conclusions that I've tapped yet! Don't you see that the packet would be cabled as missing to every port in the Channel, and stopped away this side of Ushant light? It's as plain to me as the hilltop yonder."
"Because you haven't brought any grip on it. The further I go into it the easier it seems. Let me give you the whole business in a few words. The man I have mentioned would, to begin with, leave this place to-night, and follow this Sydney Capel to London. There he would associate with him closely (taking rooms in his house, if possible) for the next three months. He would use what mind he had to the making of a friendship; and the leisure from this occupation would be given to the promotion of a good understanding (bought at any price) with the skipper of the tug who generally crosses with the money. It is no great strain to imagine that this man might find important business in St. Petersburg at the very moment when Sydney Capel next left with the bullion. For him to get a permit to go through by the special and the tug would be no unreasonable thing. I can imagine, too, that if he had a friend with a fast steam yacht, and if this friend met the tug by agreement in the North Sea, the way would be clearer. Do you follow me thus far?"
"In a bee-line!" replied the American, who smoked with a fury begotten of excitement.
"Well, we can see all the rest without a long bill on thought. The skipper of the tug has men to depend on aboard with him; the clerks, if they are not bought, get a couple of raps from a revolver-butt; the tug is scuttled, the money is shipped upon the yacht, and she steams north to reach the Atlantic. After that it's a mere pleasure trip."
He ceased to speak, the quick glow of interest passing from the face it had lighted as the sun passes from a cloud. But Kenner rose quickly from the grass bank, and with blanched face and dancing eyes cried—
"Prince, you're a genius, by thunder!"
"Do you think so?" asked Messenger. "But I was only giving a suppositional case. You'd want a cast-iron man to take the business on, and money behind him."
Kenner answered the suggestion with his customary and simple exclamation: "Let's get!"
The afternoon was passing, the west being already touched with that arc of deeper crimson which is the herald of twilight, and there were few wayfarers upon the road to Monaco. For some part of the way the men walked, as they had come, in a meditative silence, but upon the threshold of the town the American stopped of a sudden, and asked his companion the abrupt question—
"Can you leave here to-night?"
Messenger displayed no shadow of surprise that it was put to him. He had been waiting for it since they had left the alcove of the orchids; and he answered it with another interrogation—
"If I could get five hundred and the promise of a couple of thousand in a month, I'd see my way."
"It's a big sum, Prince," urged Kenner laconically.
"And a big thing. I don't know that the figure isn't below the mark. Of course it would be share and share whatever's got as between man and man, and this money I want can go against the account when the time comes. You would bring the Semiramis to London directly I wire for you."
"That's fair-sounding," replied Kenner, "and I don't know that I've got any thing against it. I'll chew it in my mind for half-an-hour, any way."
"Take all the time you like," said the Prince; "to-morrow will do as well as to-day, though something might be got if a man followed this youngster to London to-night. By the way, if I go, you'll have Fisher with you for a couple of months' cruise—that's understood?"
"Why, certainly; but he'll be ashore later on?"
"Ashore—I fancy not! Would you be having him shout my history in the streets when my back's turned? If we go, he goes; that's as certain as the sun is sinking."
They entered the garden as they spoke, and went to Kenner's room. Two hours later Sydney Capel left for London; and Arnold Messenger, commonly known as "The Prince," went with him.
At one bell in the first dog—the day being Wednesday, and the month July—the steam yacht Semiramis rounded the South Foreland, and dropped anchor among a fleet of wind-bound vessels which lay off the white town of Deal. She had taken a pilot from the Solent, for her skipper, Roger Burke, a huge man from San Francisco, knew nothing of English waters, and the main part of the crew was made up of niggers and of lascars. She had for mate a slim, quiet man, named Parker; and her chief engineer was a Frenchman, whom she had picked up during a long cruise in the Pacific. Yet she had been built in the Thames for the American, Jake Kenner; and in the matter of speed, or, indeed, of design, she had few equals among pleasure boats. I have heard it said that she was one of the first yachts to be equipped with a tubular boiler and with twin screws; but her owner had gone to Thorneycroft's to buy one of the fastest vessels floating, and the firm had built for him a craft with all the rakish beauty of a cruiser combined with the speed and hull of a torpedo-catcher.
Not that she was by any means an enormous yacht, judging her by later-day standards. Her comparatively large engines allowed but restricted accommodation aft; and while her whole length was nearly two hundred feet, much of it was given to boilers and bunkers, and little to solid comfort. Yet she was a ship-shape-looking craft, with a crew of twenty men; and those on board had the satisfaction of knowing that she could hold her own with most things afloat if the need were that she should show her heels. Unhappily, I have nothing but a photograph of her to use in this account, for she was a wreck within a few weeks of the date when I first see her in my mind in the Downs; and of her idle, easygoing crew but few lived to carry the remembrance of her.
The anchor being over, and the yacht riding easily upon a glassy sea, Roger Burke, the captain, came down from the spotlessly white bridge, and descended the companion to the gray-and-gold saloon. He found Hal Fisher there, lying his length upon the velvet sofa, and absorbed in a heroic, if antique, story which dealt with the corsairs of Barbary. The lad looked up eagerly at his coming, and asked unnecessarily: "Was that the anchor I heard them letting go?"
"Why, for sure; did you think it was the shooters or the coal?"
"Surly brute!" muttered the boy, as the colossal form of the skipper disappeared through the door which led to the private cabin; and he remembered that at last they must have come to the Downs. He had been following so closely the sufferings of five hundred Christians who had worked under the lashings of the Moors that the whole business of bringing-to had escaped him. Yet he had longed for a sight of the white cliffs of England with that intense nostalgie which young travellers suffer. For three months he had not seen a wooded lane nor a really green field; for three months—and this was the sorer trial—he had not looked upon the one man who was as brother, father, indeed, the whole world of mankind, to him. In the earlier days letters had been frequent; they had received them at Alexandria, at Cairo, and at Gibraltar, where for a few weeks prior to her voyage northward the yacht had been lying. But the Prince no longer wrote, as once he had written in that terrible hand of his, boyish letters, full of gossip and good wishes; stunted and withered messages, half promises, hints at business of exceeding importance—of such had been his communications at the end of it, until Hal began to ask himself with no little dread: Is he tiring of me? Can I be of no more use to him? Has not the time come for us to take different roads in life?
He was not the one to suffer any mere charity. The moment he was sure that Arnold Messenger had wearied of him he would make his own way, he declared. There were intervals when he was almost angry with the Prince for leaving him on Kenner's yacht. How came it that he could not be in London with him? Of what sort were those affairs which could be manipulated by one who spelled "believe" without an "i," and put three "p's" in "proper"? The mystery was more than the lad's seventeen years of worldly knowledge could solve. He could only conclude with a heavy heart that the grip of evil fortune had clutched him once more, and that the road of life ahead of him lay through dark paths.
All this contributed to an inveterate longing to set foot in England. Had he but known what infinite perils awaited him on the shores of his own country his doubts and fears would have been of another mood. But suspicion was as far away from him as the poles, both at that time and until the more part of the evil was written. Indeed, when he came on deck to observe the white buildings and the conventional pier of Deal, with the hills and dales of lovely Kent, all fair and green in the ripe fulness of a generous summer, what gloominess he had passed from him, and gave place to an overwhelming gladness, because he knew that soon he would hear his one friend's voice again, and feel the grip of a hand which had done so much for him.
In this mood he stood upon the poop of the Semiramis when Roger Burke, the skipper, went to the private cabin where Kenner sat. The two men were soon occupied in earnest conversation, the American having a long letter in cipher before him, as well as a telegram, with which he was more immediately concerned.
"Burke," said he, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, "this cablegram says: 'Stop in the Downs until I come.' Now what does he mean by that? Here's the cipher—you can read it as well as I can—putting it plain that we were to be ready for the job by the eleventh of the month, and this is the tenth. What's the delay, and why?—unless he wants to fly the danger signal, and this is his flag."
The great skipper shook his head, and leaned back on the sofa mystified.
"It's a job ez big ez oceans," said he, "and it's one chance in five hundred that he gets the leg of them. Don't you see that they may be on top of him long afore he's weathered London? By thunder! there ain't a man of us in it what hasn't got a rope round his gullet bought and paid for now, at the beginning of it—not a man of us!"
Kenner was not convinced.
"You don't know the Prince," said he; "it's got to be a fire-and-blazes police to go one better than him, any way."
"I ain't contradictin' that," remarked Burke; "he may be as thick in grit as an out-West man, but he's a poor notion of showing it. What's he want this kid aboard for? Let me ask. Is this a game of base-ball, or is it a job for men?"
"That's his business," replied Kenner, "and I guess it'll come out square when there's settling times. The question I've got to ask now is: Where's he laying for?—and when's the money going over?"
"That's it," said Burke, with a shrug; "and how many's got to share when the candy's split?"
Kenner had an answer upon his lips, but it stayed there, as a great sound of hailing was heard above and footsteps thudded upon the deck. In another moment the cabin-door opened, and Arnold Messenger entered. Though three months had passed since the American had seen him, his face was mobile and impassive as of yore, his manner as confident and easy, his self-possession as remarkable. He had a suit of blue serge upon him that had come from a fine tailor, his brown boots shone like reflectors, his linen had an exquisite whiteness. And as he entered the cabin the others greeted him with a word of intense satisfaction, and waited for him to speak, since the whole fortune of the enterprise hung upon his words.
"Kenner," said he, shutting the door behind him, and bolting it, "what I've got to tell must be told by the clock. I'll be wanting to reach London by the 6.55 out of the town."
"You've half-an-hour," said Kenner laconically. "Burke'll keep the gig out."
"That will suit me perfectly," replied the Prince, settling himself with provoking slowness at the table, upon which he laid some paper; "and if you'll get me ink, we shall save talk.
Burke went to a cupboard at the request; but Kenner could not longer tolerate the mystery.
"Prince," said he, "out with it; is the money going, or do you throw the cards?"
"The money is going to-morrow night," answered Messenger, without moving a muscle of his face, "and the tug Admiral takes it from Tilbury to Flushing."
"Did you happen to know—that is, do you learn the amount?" asked the American, with a husky voice.
"One million sterling!" answered the Prince, his face as placid as marble, and his nerves as steady as steel wires.
"By gosh!" said the American.
Messenger permitted to them a moment's silence in which to digest his words, and then continued with somewhat more satisfying detail—
"Kenner, there's been work to do since we parted, more than three months ago, which I never booked in my calculations the day this thing came to us at Monaco—you remember when. But that you've learned of in my letters, and this is not the time to go into it. The first thing I've to ask you now is this: Have you got a man aboard here that you can't trust in the job, and if so, when are you going to send him ashore?"
Kenner did not answer the question himself, but turned to the skipper, Burke, who sat upon the edge of the bunk nursing his chin in his hand.
"Burke," said he, "that's your affair, I guess. What you don't know about them ain't worth the knowing."
The skipper raised his head at the appeal, and answered quietly :
"If I thought ez any of 'em was that way, I'd put bullets in 'em now, if you was to swing me afore two bells."
"That's all I wanted to hear," replied Messenger, "and in that matter I've no sort of doubt. The next thing to ask you is: How much are we going to tell them safely, and when are they to be told?"
"You've got to tell 'em a good deal, I reckon," said the skipper instantly—"a good deal, barrin' what your cargo's worth; the knowledge of that's between us three——"
"And the skipper of the tug," interposed Messenger; "a man among a thousand, he is—Kess Robinson by name, and as obstinate as a mule. I had to promise him twenty thousand pounds and a couple of thousand per man for his crew——"
"Are they all swore to it?" asked Burke sharply.
"Why should they be—now?" answered Messenger. "Do we want them ladling it all over the town? But they're well chosen; and if there's to be trouble among them, it will come from the mate, Mike Brennan, a big honest fool, that I've talked to for a month, and made no more impression on than if he'd been cast-iron ballast."
"How many of 'em is to come aboard here?" asked Kenner somewhat anxiously. "You see, whatever they have, our lot's got to have the same, if they're going right along smooth with it."
"I've thought of that," replied Messenger; "put down fifty thousand for the men together, and there needn't be a whisper; but you'll get all the arms you have aft, and if they've any pride forward, we'll have to begin the shooting!"
"That's as plain as dough-nuts!" cried Burke, snapping his fingers; "and it rests for us to know what our instructions is—you're mighty quiet about them."
"I am going to write them," said Messenger, taking up the pen and a big sheet of foolscap, and speaking with an easy air of command, as one inheriting it; "I am going to make it so plain that a child of seven could follow it. In the first place, you will weigh the moment I am gone, and get into Sheerness for as much coal as you can carry, stacking decks as well as bunkers. You will lie at the river's mouth until to-morrow night—it may be until ten, it may be until eleven. The money will leave Bishopsgate Street somewhere about seven o'clock, and will be carried in a special train from Fen church Street to Tilbury, where it will be put, in charge of Sydney Capel and Arthur Conyers, the head clerk of the house, upon the tag Admiral, I shall be already upon the tug, which will weigh at once and proceed up river. At Sheerness we shall show a flare, when you, being ready to put out, will follow us as closely as common sense dictates until we stand well in the North Sea, and clear of ships. We shall shape a course full N.E. to be out of the track of steamers, and when we are ready for you, which will not be until we have passed Hull—we shall send up a couple of rockets, and you will answer and make fast alongside, while we come over and bring the money. After that, as I said to you three months ago, it's a question of sea-legs."
The American listened to the clear enunciation of ideas with a close attention and admiration for the man whose brain could generate such a plausible hypothesis. There were yet, however, links missing from the chain as he saw it, and his first question was in a degree proof of his own shrewdness:
"These clerks, or whatever you call 'em," said he—"who's going to lay them out?"
"That depends on themselves, or on one of them, at any rate," answered Messenger, continuing to write. "You've read from my letters that Capel is in with us to his armpits. I bought him for a quarter share—as between you and me, Kenner—a month ago. He owes a matter of fifty thousand in London, and can't draw back—I've seen to that. He flew at the job almost before I'd opened my lips, and I'd trust him to the end of it. The other's a mere dummy, a numskull, who'll either cave in at the first show of fight or go under for his pains. It's the mate, as I said before, that's like to trouble us; the rest's a mere pleasure cruise."
And the destination?" asked the American.
"Montevideo first, and the blessed shades of the Argentine or Urugaay after."
He wrote out fully the directions he had given, marking the hours most plainly in uncouth if legible capitals, the others waiting for him patiently, though their excitement was palpitating and visible. When he had concluded the whole with a fine flourish, he looked at his watch, and said that he had ten minutes, a reflection which drew from the American the desire to "crack a bottle for luck."
"Which you'll need badly," muttered Burke. "I've no fancy for work begun on Fridays."
Messenger listened to him, a mocking sneer upon his lips.
"Burke," said he, "I've had fine accounts of you; and you're in for the biggest venture of your life. Are you going to play the old woman now?"
"By thunder! that's sense to the kernel," added Kenner. "We're afloat, and Heaven knows when we'll see the shore again——"
"That depends on us all," said Messenger, rising; "but if any man shows false, let him look to himself."
With this he went on deck, to find the gig waiting, and Fisher leaning moodily upon the taffrail. For a moment he made as though to step into the boat without any notice of the lad; but a sudden impulse arrested him, and he took the boy's hand quickly, and spoke to him in a low voice.
"Hal," said he, "I've much to say to you, but this isn't the time. I shall be aboard here again in three days, and then I'll count upon you."
He was gone almost with his words; and while Fisher was yet thinking of them, the Semiramis had weighed anchor, and was standing in toward the river's mouth.
The rain fell in torrents—pitiless summer rain, which the quivering ground swallowed greedily, and the hurned and seared leaves drank up with unquenchable greed. For a month or more the consuming drought had settled heavily upon the city and the south, leaving to the intolerable sun the green of the earth and the fuller ripeness of the fields; but on that July afternoon the westerly gale had come to lave all things with its refreshing gifts, and to pour upon London that torrent-like draught which alone made life in her streets possible at such a season.
Toward evening the downpour, which had been gathering strength for some hours, burst with a new intensity, sweeping in rivers of water from the higher roofs, and swirling into dust-brown eddies at the choked grating of the sewers. The sky, which had presented a face of leaden cloud since midday, darkened almost as at the touch of night; the air seemed to exude an enervating heaviness; the wind swept from corner to corner, and from nook to nook, bending the younger plants like whips, and scattering the full blossoms from the gardens in showers of perfuming leaves. It was a night, verily, to shame summer—a night breeding thoughts of books and of the blessings of the lemon-tree and the cheapness of ice.
Sydney Capel, standing moodily at his window in the court of Danes Inn, arrived at these reflections, and at more, as the clock struck five, and an aged charwoman condescended to set his tea upon the table, and to make a delightfully vague remark, which served her for all weathers.
"Here's an everning agen," said she; and with that she withdrew as quietly as she had come, and left her special charge to the last meal he would get before setting oat on his long journey—ostensibly to the Russian frontier, in reality to some distant shore of whose situation he was but vaguely conscious.
It has been said by those who saw Capel at this time that he was vastly changed from the man who had taken life so flippantly on the shores of the Mediterranean three months before. His face had lost its colour; his eyes were ringed about with purple hollows; he had a hacking cough, which rarely left him; he had lost much of his old spruceness in dress; he had become blasé and effeminate. Such a change was easy to account for by those who knew the inner pages of his life during those months when Messenger had wound the coils of his rope about him stealthily, until he held him on that day as a vaquero holds quarry in a lasso. It had been a quick fall; but the seeds which breed the tares of life bad been in Capel from his birth, and he proved plastic as clay in the hands of a man who moulded him with all the ready skill of an adventurer and a rogue. On that night the end had come, the parting of the ways—from a career, from friends, from his old world to the paths of danger, of darkness, and of doubt. Had it been possible he would have turned back even then; but the web was too closely woven, the meshes of the net had ensnared him beyond hope.
A clock in the Strand struck the first quarter after five when he turned away from the sight of the relentless rain, and gathered his baggage together with a mechanical effort. He had prepared himself just that outfit which used to serve him on these trips when he took ingots across the Continent, and was fêted in St. Petersburg; but it seemed rather a mockery now to look upon a portmanteau with a dress suit in it, or those other fripperies which were so purely ornamental. Nevertheless they lay there in bulky confusion; and he went to work mechanically, waiting every moment to hear the sound of Messenger's steps upon the stairs and the knock upon bis oak which was the very last he might expect to hear.
As the thing went it was half-past five before Messenger appeared, a smile upon his face and an unusual colour in his cheeks. He was dressed in a short black jacket, with a white vest beneath, and carried no visible equipment, save a light mackintosh, for the long journey before him. But he spoke with an unusual rapidity of utterance, and could not check his uneasiness.