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CHAPTER XXIII
SURPRISES
Fifteen minutes later a small boat, rowed smartly by six sailors in white canvas, came alongside the ’midships ladder of the Nettie B. At a word from the officer the six oars rose as one vertically into the air, and the bowman staved off the cutter so that she brought up without a scratch.
A young man in dark blue sprang out of the stern-sheets upon the deck.
“Nettie B. of Freekirk Head?” he asked. “Captain Burns commanding?”
“Yes,” said Nat, stepping forward, “I am Captain Burns. What do you want?”
“I come from the gunboat Albatross,” said the officer, “and represent Captain Foraker. You have on board, have you not, a man named Code Schofield, also of Freekirk Head, under arrest for the murder of a man or men on the occasion of the sinking of his schooner?”
Nat scowled.
“Yes,” he said. “I arrested him myself in St. Pierre, Miquelon. I am a constable in Freekirk Head.”
“Just as we understood,” remarked the officer blandly. “Captain Foraker desires me to thank you for your prompt and efficient work in this matter, though I can tell you on the side, Captain Burns, that the old man is rather put out that he didn’t get the fellow himself. We chased up and down the Banks looking for him, but never got within sight of as much as his main truck sticking over the horizon.
“And the Petrel– that’s our steamer, you know–well, sir, maybe he didn’t make a fool of her. Payson, on the Petrel, is the ugliest man in the service, and when this fellow Schofield led him a chase of a hundred and fifty miles, and then got away among the islands of Placentia Bay, they say Payson nearly had apoplexy. So your getting him ought to be quite a feather in your cap.”
“I consider that I did my duty. But would you mind telling me what you have signaled me for?” Burns resented the gossip of this young whipper-snapper of the service who seemed, despite his frankness, to have something of a patronizing air.
“Certainly. Captain Foraker desires me to tell you that he wished the prisoner transferred to the Albatross. We know that you are not provided with an absolutely secure place to keep the prisoner, and, as we are on our way to St. Andrews on another matter, the skipper thinks he might just as well take the fellow in and hand him over to the authorities.”
“Well, I don’t agree with your skipper,” snapped Burns. “I got Schofield, and I’m going to deliver him. He’s safe enough, don’t you worry. When you go back you can tell Captain Foraker that Schofield is in perfectly good hands.”
The pleasant, amiable manner of the subaltern underwent a quick change. He at once became the stern, businesslike representative of the government.
“I am sorry, Captain Burns, but I shall deliver no such message, and when I go back I shall have the criminal with me. Those are my orders, and I intend to carry them out.” He turned to the six sailors sitting quietly in the boat, their oars still in the air.
“Unship oars!” he commanded. The sweeps fell away, three on each side. “Squad on deck!” The men scrambled up the short ladder and lined up in two rows of three. At his belt each man carried a revolver and cutlasses swung at their sides.
“Now,” requested the officer amiably, “will you please lead me to the prisoner?”
Nat’s face darkened into a scowl of black rage, and he cursed under his breath. It was just his luck, he told himself, that when he was about to triumph, some of these government loafers should come along and take the credit out of his hands.
For a moment he thought of resistance. All his crew were on deck, drawn by curiosity. But he saw they were vastly impressed by the discipline of the visitors and by their decidedly warlike appearance. If he resisted there would be blood spilt, and he did not like the thought of that. He finally admitted to himself that the young officer was only carrying out orders, and orders that were absolutely just.
“Well, come along!” he snarled ungraciously, and started forward. The officer spoke a word of command, and the squad marched after him as he, in turn, followed Nat.
Of all this Code had been ignorant, for the conversation had taken place too far aft for him to hear. His first warning was when the sailors marched past the window and Nat reluctantly opened the door of the old storeroom.
“Officers are here to get you, Schofield,” said the skipper of the Nettie B. “Come out.”
Wonderingly, Code stepped into the sunlight and open air and saw the officer with his escort. With the resignation that he had summoned during his five days of imprisonment he accepted his fate.
“I am ready,” he said. “Let’s go as soon as possible.”
“Captain Schofield,” said the subaltern, “you are to be transferred, and I trust you will deem it advisable to go peaceably.”
Catching sight of the six armed sailors, Code could not help grinning.
“There’s no question about it,” he said; “I will.”
“Form cordon!” ordered the officer, and the sailors surrounded him–two before, two beside, and two behind. In this order they marched to the cutter.
Code was told to get in first and take a seat looking aft. He did so, and the officer dropped into the stern-sheets so as to face his prisoner. The sailors took their position, shipped their oars smartly, and the cutter was soon under way to the gunboat.
Arrived at the accommodation ladder, and on deck, Code found a vessel with white decks, glistening brass work, and discipline that shamed naval authority. The subaltern, saluting, reported to the deck-officer that his mission had been completed, and the latter, after questioning Code, ordered that he be taken to confinement quarters.
These quarters, unlike the pen on the Nettie B., were below the deck, but were lighted by a porthole. The room was larger, had a comfortable bunk, a small table loaded with magazines, a chair, and a sanitary porcelain washstand. The luxury of the appointments was a revelation.
There was no question of his escaping from this room he very soon discovered.
The door was of heavy oak and locked on the outside. The walls were of solid, smooth timber, and the porthole was too small to admit the possibility of his escaping through it. The roof was formed of the deck planks.
He had hardly examined his surroundings when he heard a voice in sharp command on deck, and the running of feet, creaking of blocks, and straining of sheets as sail was got on the vessel. His room presently took an acute angle to starboard, and he realized that, with the fair gale on the quarter, they must be crowding her with canvas.
He could tell by the look of the water as it flew past his port that the remainder of the trip to St. Andrews would not take long. He knew the course there from his present position must be north, a little west, across the Bay of Fundy.
The Nettie B., when compelled to surrender her prisoner, had rounded Nova Scotia and was on the home-stretch toward Quoddy Roads. She was, in fact, less than thirty miles away from Grande Mignon Island, and Code had thought with a great and bitter homesickness of the joy just a sight of her would be.
He longed for the white Swallowtail lighthouse with its tin swallow above; for the tumbled green-clothed granite of the harbor approaches; for the black, sharp-toothed reefs that showed on the half-water near the can-buoy, and for the procession of stately headlands to north and south, fading from sight in a mantle of purple and gray.
But most of all for the crescent of stony beach, the nestle of white cottages along the King’s Road, and the green background of the mountain beyond, with Mallaby House in the very heart of it.
This had been his train of thought when Burns had opened the door to deliver him up to the gunboat, and now it returned to him as the stanch vessel under him winged her way across the blue afternoon sea.
He wondered if the Albatross would pass close enough inshore for him to get a glimpse of Mignon’s tall and forbidding fog-wreathed headlands. Just a moment of this familiar sight would be balm to his bruised spirit. He felt that he could gather strength from the sight of home. He had been among aliens so long!
But no nearer than just a glimpse. He made a firm resolution never to push the prow of the Lass into Flagg Cove until he stood clear of the charges against him. He admitted that it might take years, but his resolution was none the less strong.
His place of confinement was on the starboard side of the Albatross, and he was gratified after a few minutes to see the sun pouring through his porthole.
Despair had left him now, and he was quietly cheerful. With something akin to pleasure that the struggle was over, and that events were out of his hands for the time being, he settled down in his chair and picked up a magazine.
He had hardly opened it when a thought occurred to him. If the course was north a little west, how did it happen that the sun streamed into his room, which was on the east side of the ship on that course?
He sprang to the port and looked out.
The sun smote him full in the face. He strained his eyes against the horizon that was unusually clear for this foggy sea, and would have sworn that along its edge was a dark line of land. The conclusion was inevitable.
The Albatross was flying directly south as fast as her whole spread of canvas could take her.
Schofield could not explain this phenomenon to himself, nor did he try. The orders that a man-of-war sailed under were none of his affair, and if the captain chose to institute a hunt for the north pole before delivering a prisoner in port, naturally he had a perfect right to do so. It was possible, Code told himself, that another miserable wretch was to be picked up before they were both landed together.
Whatever course Captain Foraker intended to lay in the future his present one was taking him as far as possible away from Grande Mignon, St. Andrew’s, and St. John’s. And for this meager comfort Code Schofield was thankful.
The sun remained above the horizon until six o’clock, and then suddenly plumped into the sea. The early September darkness rushed down and, as it did so, a big Tungsten light in the ceiling of Code’s room sprang into a brilliant glow, the iron cover to the porthole being shut at the same instant.
A few moments later the door of his cell was unceremoniously opened and a man entered bearing an armful of fresh clothing.
“Captain Schofield,” he said, with the deference of a servant, “the captain wishes your presence at dinner. The ship’s barber will be here presently. Etiquette provides that you wear these clothes. I will fix them and lay them out for you. If you care for a bath, sir, I will draw it–”
“Say, look here,” exclaimed our hero with a sudden and unexpected touch of asperity, “if you’re trying to kid me, old side-whiskers, you’re due for the licking of your life.”
He got deliberately upon his feet and removed the fishing-coat which he had worn uninterruptedly since the night at St. Pierre.
“I thought I’d read about you in that magazine or something, and had fallen asleep, but here you are still in the room. I’m going to see whether you’re alive or not. No one can mention a bath to me with impunity.”
He made a sudden grab for the servant, who stood with mouth open, uncertain as to whether or not he was dealing with a lunatic.
Before he could move, Code’s hard, strong hands closed upon his arms in a grip that brought a bellow of pain. In deadly fear of his life, he babbled protests, apologies, and pleadings in an incoherent medley that would have satisfied the most toughened skeptic. Code released him, laughing.
“Well, I guess you’re real, all right,” he said. “Now if you’re in earnest about all this, draw that bath quick. Then I’ll believe you.”
Half an hour later Code, bathed, shaved, and feeling like a different man, was luxuriating in fresh linen and a comfortable suit.
“Look here, Martin,” he said to the valet, “of course I know that this is no more the gunboat Albatross than I am. The Canadian government isn’t in the habit of treating prisoners in exactly this manner. What boat is this?”
Martin coughed a little before answering. In all his experience he had never before been asked to dress the skipper of a fishing vessel.
“I was told to say, sir, in case you asked, that you are aboard the mystery schooner, sir.”
“What! The mystery schooner that led the steamer that chase?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, by the great trawl hook! And I didn’t know it!”
“No, sir. Remember we came up behind the Nettie B., and when you were transferred you were made to sit facing away from this ship so you would not recognize her.”
“Then all the guns were fakes, and the whole business of a man-of-war as well?” cried Code, astonished almost out of his wits by this latest development in his fortunes.
“Yes, sir. The appearances were false, but as for seamanship, sir, this vessel could not do what she does were it not for the strict training aboard her, sir. I’ll wager our lads can out-maneuver and outsail any schooner of her tonnage on the seas, Gloucestermen included. The navy is easy compared to our discipline.”
“But what holds the men to it if it’s so hard?”
“Double wages and loyalty to the captain.”
“Captain Foraker?”
“Yes, sir. There, sir, that tie is beautiful. Now the waistcoat and coat. If you will permit me, sir, you look, as I might say, ’andsome, begging your pardon.”
Code flushed and looked into the glass that hung against the wall of his cabin. He barely recognized the clean-shaven, clear-eyed, broad shouldered youth he saw there as the rough, salty skipper of the schooner Charming Lass. He wondered with a chuckle what Pete Ellinwood would say if he could see him.
“And now, sir, if you’re ready, just come with me, sir. Dinner is at seven, and it is now a quarter to the hour.”
Stunned by the wonders already experienced, and vaguely hoping that the dream would last forever, Code followed the bewhiskered valet down a narrow passage carpeted with a stuff so thick that it permitted no sound.
Martin passed several doors–the passage was lighted by small electrics–and finally paused before one on the right-hand side. Here he knocked, and apparently receiving an answer, peered into the room for a moment. Withdrawing his head, he swung the door open and turned to Schofield.
“Go right in, sir,” he said, and Code, eager for new wonders, stepped past him.
The room was a small sitting-room, lighted softly by inverted bowl-shaped globes of glass so colored as to bring out the full value of the pink velours and satin brocades with which the room was hung and the furniture covered.
For a moment he stared without seeing anything, and then a slight rustling in a far corner diverted his attention. He looked sharply and saw a woman rise from a lounge and come toward him with outstretched hands.
She was Elsa Mallaby!
CHAPTER XXIV
THE SIREN
He saw the glad smile on her lips, the light in her great, lustrous, dark eyes, and the beauty of her faultless body, and yet they all faded to nothing beside the astounding and inexplicable fact that she was in the mystery schooner.
“You here!” he gasped, taking her hands in his big rough ones and gripping them tight. The impulse to draw her to him in an embrace was almost irresistible, for not only was she lovely in the extreme, but she was from Freekirk Head and home, and his soul had been starved with loneliness and the ceaseless repetition of his own thoughts.
“Yes,” she replied in her gentle voice, “I am here. You are surprised?”
“That hardly expresses it,” he returned. “So many things have happened to-day that I expect anything now.”
“Come, let us go in,” she said, and led him through a doorway that connected with an adjoining room. In the center of it was a small table laid with linen and furnished with glittering silver and glass. “Are you hungry?” she asked.
“You know fishermen well enough not to ask that,” he laughed, and they sat down. Elsa did not make any tax upon his conversational powers. It was Code himself who first put a pertinent question.
“I take for granted your being here and your living like this,” he said; “but I am bursting with curiosity. How do you happen to be in this schooner?”
“It is my schooner; why shouldn’t I be in it?” she smiled.
“Yours?” He was mystified. “But why should you have a vessel like this? You never used one before that I know of.”
“True, Code; but I have always loved the sea, and–it amuses me. You remember that sometimes I have been away from Freekirk Head for a month at a time. I have been cruising in this schooner. Once I went nearly as far as Iceland; but that took longer. A woman in my position must do something. I can’t sit up in that great big house alone all the time.”
The intensity with which she said this put a decidedly new face on the matter. It was just like her to be lonely without Jim, he thought. Naturally a woman with all her money must do something.
“But, Elsa,” he protested, “your having the schooner for your own use is all right enough; but why has it always turned up to help me when I needed help most? Really, if I had all the money in the world I could never repay the obligations that you have put me under this summer.”
“I don’t want you to repay me,” she said quietly. “Just the fact that I have helped you and that you appreciate it is enough to make me happy.”
He looked steadily into her brown eyes for a few moments. Then her gaze dropped and a dull flush mounted from her neck until it suffused her face.
He had never seen her look so beautiful. The wealth of her black hair was coiled about the top of her head like a crown, and held in its depths a silver butterfly.
Her gown was Quaker gray in color, and of some soft clinging material that enhanced the lines of her figure. It was an evening gown, and cut just low enough to be at the same time modest and beautiful. Code, without knowing why, admired her taste and told himself that she erred in no particular. Her mode of life was, at the same time, elegant and feminine–exactly suited her.
“You are easily made happy,” he remarked, referring to her last sentence.
“No, I’m not,” she contradicted him seriously. “I am the hardest woman in the world to make happy.”
“And helping me does it?”
“Yes.”
“You are a good woman,” he said gratefully, “and always seem to be doing for others. No one will ever forget how you offered to stand by the women of Grande Mignon while the men went fishing.”
Again Elsa blushed, but this time the color came from a different source. Little did he know that her philanthropy was all a part of the same plan–to win his favor.
“And the things I know you must have done for my mother,” he went on. “Those are the things that I appreciate more than any. It is not every woman who would even think of them, let alone do them.”
Why would he force her into this attitude of perpetual lying? she thought. It was becoming worse and worse. Why was he so straightforward and so blind? Could he not see that she loved him? Was he one of those cold and passionless men upon whom no woman ever exerts an intense influence?
Though she did not know it, she expressed the whole fault in her system. A man reared in a more complex community than a fishing village would have divined her scheme, and the result would have been a prolonged but most delightful duel of wits and hearts.
But Code, by the very directness of his honesty, and simplicity of his nature, cut through the gauzy wrappings of this delectable package and went straight to its heart. And there he found nothing, because what little of the deeply genuine there lay in this woman’s restless nature was disguised and shifted at the will of her caprice.
When Code had experienced the pleasure of lighting a genuine clear Havana cigar after many months of abstinence, she leaned across the table to him, her hands clasped before her.
“Code, what does loneliness represent to you?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he temporized, taken aback. “I don’t go in for loneliness much; but when I do, why all I want is–well, let me see, a good game of quoits with the boys in front of the church, or a talk with my mother about how rich we are going to be some day when I get that partnership in the fishstand. I’m too busy to be lonely.”
“And I’m too lonely to be busy!” He looked at her unbelievingly.
“You!” he cried. “Why, you have everything in the world; you can go anywhere, do anything, have the people about you that you want. You, lonely? I don’t understand you.”
“Well, I’ll put it another way. Did you ever want something so hard that it hurt, and couldn’t get it?”
“Yes, I wanted my father back after he died,” said Code simply.
“And I wanted Jim after he died,” added Elsa. “Those things are bad enough; but one gets used to them. What I mean especially is something we see about us all the time and have no chance of getting. Did you ever want something like that, so that it nearly killed you, and couldn’t get it?”
Code was silent. The one rankling hurt of his whole life, after seemingly being healed, broke out afresh–the engagement of Nat Burns and Nellie Tanner.
He suddenly realized that, since seeing Elsa, he had not as much as remembered Nellie’s existence, when usually her mental presence was not far from him. Elsa, with all her luxury and alluring feminine charms, seemed to cast a spell that bound him helpless like the music in the fairy stories. He liked the spell, and, after all she had done, he confessed to an extraordinary feeling for the enchantress.
Now had come the memory of Nellie–dear, frank-eyed, open-hearted Nellie Tanner–and the thought that her fresh wholesomeness was pledged to make glad the life of Nat Burns seared his heart. A cloud settled down on his brow. But in a moment he recalled himself. His hostess had asked him a question; he must answer it.
“Yes, I have wanted something–and couldn’t get it.”
“Yes,” said Elsa slowly, “a thing is bad enough; but it seems to me that the most hopeless thing in the world is to want a person in that way.” Her voice was dreamy and retrospective. Its peculiar, vibrant timbre thrilled him with the thought that perhaps there was some hidden tragedy in her life that he had never suspected. Any unpleasant sense that she was curious was overcome by the manner in which she spoke.
“Yes, it is,” he answered solemnly.
She looked up in astonishment at the sincerity of his tone, her heart tingling with a new emotion of delicious uncertainty. What if, after all, he had wanted some one in the way she wanted him? What if the some one were herself and he had been afraid to aspire to a woman of her wealth and position? She asked this without any feeling of conceit, for one who loves always dreams he sees signs of favor in the one beloved.
“Then you have wanted some one?” All her manner, her voice, her eyes expressed sympathy. She was the soul of tact and no mean actress at the same time.
Code, still in the depth of reminiscence and averted happiness, scarcely heard her, but he answered
“Yes, I have.” Then, coming to full realization of the confession, he colored and laughed uneasily. “But let’s not talk of such personal things any more,” he added. “You must think me very foolish to be mooning about like this.”
“Can I help you?” she asked, half suffocated by the question. “Perhaps there might be something I could do that would bring the one you want to you.”
It was the crucial point in the conversation. She held her breath as she awaited his answer. She knew he was no adept at the half-meanings and near-confessions of flirtation, and that she could depend upon his words and actions to be genuine.
He looked at her calmly without the additional beat of a pulse. His color had died down and left him pale. He was considering.
“You have done much for me,” he said at last, “and I shall never forget it, but in this matter even you could not help me. Only the Almighty could do it by direct intervention, and I don’t believe He works that way in this century,” Code smiled faintly.
As for Elsa, she felt the grip as of an icy hand upon her heart. It was some one else that he meant. Was it possible that all her carefully planned campaign had come to this miserable failure? Had she come this far only to lose all?
The expression of her features did not change, and she sought desperately to control her emotion, but she could not prevent two great tears from welling up in her eyes and slowly rolling down her cheeks.
Code sat startled and nonplused. Only once before in his life had he seen a woman cry, and that was when Nellie broke down in his mother’s house after the fire. But the cause for that was evident, and the very fact of her tears had been a relief to him. Now, apparently without rime or reason, Elsa Mallaby was weeping.
The sight went to his heart as might the scream of a child in pain. He wondered with a panicky feeling whether he had hurt her in any way.
“I say, Elsa,” he cried, “what’s the matter? Don’t do that. If I’ve done anything–” He was on his feet and around the little table in an instant. He took her left hand in his left and put his right on her shoulder, speaking to her in broken, incoherent sentences.
But his words, gentle and almost endearing, emphasized the feeling of miserable self-pity that had taken hold of her and she suddenly sobbed aloud.
“Elsa, dear,” he cried, beside himself with uncertainty, “what is it? Tell me. You’ve done so much for me, please let me do something for you if I can.”
“You can’t, Code,” she said, “unless it’s in your heart,” and then she bowed her beautiful head forward upon her bare arms and wept. After awhile the storm passed and she leaned back.
He kissed her suddenly. Then he abruptly turned to the door and went out.
Schofield had suddenly come to his senses and disengaged himself from Elsa’s embrace.
