THE SKIES BETRAY.
A Message Comes from the Diamond Ship.
I shall carry you next to a scene in the Southern Atlantic, to a day in the month following my escape from the Azores. The morning is a brilliant morning of torrid heat and splendid sunshine. The sea about us is a sea gleaming as a sheeted mirror of the purest silver; a vast, still, silent sea, with a cloudless horizon and a breath as of Southern springtime. The yacht White Wings is changed but little since last you saw her at Villa do Porto.
A close observer would mark the mast which carries her apparatus for Marconigrams; she steams very slowly, with a gentle purr of her engines that seems to soothe to sleep. There is a trim sailor on the look-out in her bows, and the second officer paces the bridge with the air of one who has long since ceased to enjoy an active occupation. Down amidships shouts of laughter claim my attention and turn my steps to the spot. The laughter is the laughter of honest seamen. The victim is my friend, McShanus.
He picked himself from the deck, brushed his clothes methodically, and told me that the game had been Ju-Jitsu.
“’Tis the little yellow devil again, and me on my back like a turtle. Says he, ‘The honourable Irishman no puttee Okyada on the floor.’ Says I, ‘Ye wisp of hay, I could knock ye down with my thumb.’ ‘The honourable Irishman try,’ says he. So I just put my hands upon his shoulders and gave him a bit of a push. Sons of Ireland! he dropped to the floor directly I touched him, and where is the relic of Timothy McShanus? Sure, he caught me on the soles of his feet as I fell over him, and shot me twenty yards—me that has the blood of kings in me veins. He grassed me like a rabbit, sir, and there are those who laughed. Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est. Let them hear Martial and be hanged to them!”
I comforted Timothy with what words I could, and told him that they were bringing breakfast up to the deck.
“I want a few words with Larry and yourself,” said I, “and hungry men are poor listeners. You have amused the crew, Timothy, and that is something in these days. Be thankful to have played such a noble part and come and eat immediately. There is a capital fish curry—and the loaves are hot from the oven.”
“Faith,” he replied, “if you make me as warm inside as I am out, ’twill be my clothes I am selling to the natives.”
And then he asked almost pitifully.
“’Tis not to say that ye are going back to Europe, Ean, me bhoy?”
“The very thing in my mind, Timothy. I’ll tell you when we have had our ‘parritch.’ We were not born to spend useful careers in the Doldrums. Let us remember it after breakfast.”
They had stretched a friendly awning over the aft deck, and hereunder we took our coffee and such food as a man cared to eat in such a temperature. When breakfast was done and we had lighted the morning cigarette, delicious beyond words under such circumstances, I began to speak very frankly to Timothy and the Captain of our present situation and the impossibility of continuing it further.
“The obstinate man is about to surrender to his friends,” I said. “We have now been running to and fro between Porto Grande and this Styx of an ocean for nearly a month. We have sailed half-way to the Brazils and back, and discovered no more traces of the Diamond Ship than of the barque which Jason steered. When I consented to quit Villa do Porto, I believed that the Jew, Valentine Imroth, would be taken afloat in the vessel we saw when first we returned from South Africa. I still believe it—but what is the good of belief when the ocean guards his secret and no eyes of ours can pry it out? He has escaped us, vanished in a cloud, and left us to gird at ourselves for the precious weeks we have lost. It may be that my deductions were wrong from the first, that he has fled to Paris or to America, and that the Diamond Ship is safely in some harbour where no civilised Government will find her. In that case our patrol is doubly futile. We are giving him time to perfect his plans, while we keep from the authorities that personal account of our investigations to which they are entitled. These conclusions compel me most reluctantly to assent to your wishes and to return. We have failed upon the high seas. Let us now discover what the shore has to tell us.”
They heard me with evident pleasure. Loyal as the men had been all along, these weary weeks of fruitless pursuit could not but tell their tale upon them. When we sailed away from Villa do Porto and raced to the Southern Atlantic, it was in the minds of all of us that we should track down the Jew successfully in as many days as we had now devoted weeks to a futile quest. All the arguments were upon my side. If the unknown vessel harboured Imroth’s rogues, and not them alone, but the fruits of their robberies, then it was plain that she must abide at least for a time in the situation where we had first discovered her. How could her communication with the shore be established otherwise? Relief ships from Europe would be visiting her constantly. She must be provisioned, coaled, and kept aware of what was going on ashore. It seemed impossible to me that she could shift her present cruising ground or make any wide detour until open pursuit compelled her to do so. These reasons had kept me doggedly to my quest of her. But they had failed to satisfy my comrades, and there were other impulses bidding me return.
“It is hard to give it up, doctor,” said Captain Larry when I had done; “but really, I think you are right. If the Government had sent out a ship to help us, the course would have been plain enough. As it is, we can do nothing even if we track them down, and we might lose valuable lives in the endeavour. Get back to Portsmouth and leave it to the Government. That’s my word, and that, I think, is what Mr. McShanus thinks. We have done all we can, and a precious sight more than most would have done.”
“Ay, and ’tis sense the man speaks,” added McShanus. “The last man in the world would I be to cry off while the fox is running; but, Ean, me bhoy, he’s gone to ground as sure as blazes, and what for would ye flog a good horse to death? Here’s a fortune spent in coal, and a sea hot enough to fry haddocks, and divil of a sign as much as of a row-boat. The Captain’s not behind me in knowing of other people who have a claim upon your consideration. Go to Europe and learn of their welfare. There is one who may need ye sorely. And poor talk will it be that you’ll hear then if they tell you of ‘what might have been.’ Go back to Europe, say I, and learn what has become of Joan Fordibras. ’Tis better work than roasting like a heathen nigger on this blazer of an ocean.”
Well, we were agreed finely, as you will see. But the determination, none the less, had its counterpoise of depression which is not difficult to apologise for. It is in the British blood to persist even when failure seems assured and hope has long been abandoned. We had set out to find the Diamond Ship, and we had failed. That she was still afloat upon the Southern Atlantic remained my unalterable conviction. It was even possible that Joan Fordibras was aboard her, and not in Europe at all. A Council of Prudence said, “Return”; a Vanity of Conviction said, “Go on.” I had listened to the voice of the first-named and surrendered to it. My comrades professed their joy in tones becoming a graveyard. The men heard of our determination with hands thrust deep into their pockets and mouths which emitted surly clouds of smoke. Rarely has a homeward-bound ship carried heavier hearts or a crew as silent. We were going to see the white cliffs of England again; but we were leaving the Diamond Ship for others to take. Everyone, professing to be glad, remained conscious of a personal defeat, of a rebuff which should not have been, and would not have been, but for a caprice of Fortune, unlooked for and unmerited.
Upon my own part, there were conflicting hopes and desires which I could have confessed to none. It certainly had been a blow upon my vanity that the Admiralty had sent no ship to my assistance, and that Scotland Yard had been so long bestirring itself. What could their delay mean but incredulity? They doubted my story, or if they did not doubt it, then they were wasting the precious weeks in vain inquiries at the consulates or formal exchange with the Governments. In due season they would act, when the Diamond Ship had made her last voyage, perhaps, and the master criminal stood beyond their reach. Val Imroth, indeed, appeared to me to be the beginning and the end of this great conspiracy. The others were the puppets with which this king of rogues played a game daring beyond all imagination of meaner minds. Let him be caught, and the house of his crimes would be shattered to ruins. He was the Alpha and the Omega, the brain and the soul of it. I concerned myself with no other—even little Joan must stand in peril until he were taken. My sense of duty forbade another course; I dare not turn aside.
Many a night and oft when the glorious Southern sky looked down upon us, and the sea was still, and nothing but the purring voice of the steamer’s engines could be heard, had I, alone upon the aft deck, asked myself of Joan’s fate and of the future which awaited her. Had the rogues discovered her that night I fled from the Valley House, or had she been spirited away before Okyada came to me? Was it a man’s part to have left the island immediately, or should I have lingered on in the hope of seeing her? I know not to this day.
If a man’s love make claim upon sentiment alone and not upon common-sense, then must I be found blameworthy. But if he is to use his brains as much in an affair of the heart as in that of the common things of the day, then was I justified a thousand times. Again and again did reason tell me that the Jew would hold her as a hostage for his own safety; and that no harm would befall her until danger threatened him. Let me come face to face with him, and then I might fear for her. Alas! that reason cannot always be a comforter. There were blacker hours when I depicted her the prey of the ruffians of the island, the victim of her foster-father’s savage anger, alone and defenceless amongst them all, looking for my coming, and crying in her despair because I did not come. These were the blacker hours, I say. Let the long spell of waiting answer for them. They vanished like the mist when the good news came.
We set the yacht upon a northward course, and lived through a morning of angry silence. Disdaining any lunch but a biscuit and a proud cigar, Timothy McShanus fell to reminiscences. I remember he discussed the law of chances, reminding me of the American citizen, who, being asked if he were a lucky man, replied that he once held four aces at a game of poker in Mexico City, and only got one shot in the leg. In a lachrymose mood, Timothy went on to say that he cared little whether he lived or died, but that he would give much to know what they were doing at the Goldsmith Club in London town. I did not answer him, for at that moment Captain Larry came scurrying along the deck, and one look at his face told me that he had news of moment.
“Well, Larry—and now?”
“There is a message, sir.”
“A message?”
“I don’t know what to say, sir. The telegraph instruments are going like one o’clock. I thought you had better know immediately. There’s no one else aboard can read them.”
My rough exclamation astonished them both. Our Marconi instruments had always been a pleasant source of mystery to the crew, and even the Captain regarded them with some little awe. Hitherto we had hardly made use of them at all, exchanging, I think, but a couple of messages—one with a P. & O. steamer and another with a union boat. And now they spoke for the third time, not from any ocean-going ship, I felt sure, nor from any station ashore, but a voice from the unknown, pregnant of good or ill, it might be, beyond any power of the imagination to say. Be it said that I went below with an anxiety, an excitement of the news baffling words. Was it possible that this implement of steel and brass, of wire and filings, and the simplest electric batteries, would............