"Sir, you forget the ladies," I said boldly.
"Dr. Phillimore, I forget nothing," he replied formally. "But will you be good enough to tell me what the advantage of postponing the discovery will be?"
Well, when it came to the point, I really did not know. It was wholly a desire to delay, an instinct in favour of procrastination, that influenced me. I shrank from the risks of an assault in our weakened state. I struggled with my answer.
"It is only to gain time."
"And what then?" he inquired coldly.
I shrugged my shoulders as Sir John had shrugged his. This was common sense carried to the verge of insanity. There must fall a time when there is no further room for reasoning, and surely it had come now.
"You will be good enough to inform the mutineers, Sir John Barraclough," pursued the Prince, having thus silenced me, "that we have not the treasure they are in search of, and that undoubtedly it is already in their hands, or in the hands of some of them, possibly by the assistance of confederates," with which his eyes slowed round to Lane.
The words, foolish beyond conception, as I deemed them, suddenly struck home to me. "Some of them!" If the Prince had not shifted his treasure, certainly Lane had not. I knew enough of the purser to go bail for him in such a case. And he had lost his key. I think it was perhaps the mere mention of confederates that set my wits to work, and what directed them to Pye I know not.
"Wait one moment," said I, putting my hand on Barraclough. "I'd like to ask a question before you precipitate war," and raising my voice I cried, "Is Holgate there?"
"Yes, doctor, and waiting for an answer, but I've got some tigers behind me."
"Then what's become of Pye?" I asked loudly.
There was a perceptible pause ere the reply came. "Can't you find him?"
"No," said I. "He was last seen in his cabin about midnight, when he locked himself in."
"Well, no doubt he is there now," said Holgate, with a fat laugh. "And a wise man, too. I always betted on the little cockney's astuteness. But, doctor, if you don't hurry up, I fear we shall want sky-pilots along."
"What is this? Why are you preventing my orders being carried out?" asked the Prince bluffly.
I fell back. "Do as you will," said I. "Our lives are in your hands."
Barraclough shouted the answer dictated to him, and there came a sound of angry voices from the other side of the door. An axe descended on it, and it shivered.
"Stand by there," said Barraclough sharply, and Lane closed up.
Outside, the noise continued, but no further blow was struck, and at last Holgate's voice was raised again:
"We will give you till eight o'clock this evening, captain, and good-day to you. If you part with the goods then, I'll keep my promise and put you ashore in the morning. If not–" He went off without finishing his sentence.
"He will not keep his promise, oh, he won't!" said a tense voice in my ear; and, turning, I beheld the Princess.
"That is not the trouble," said I, as low as she. "It is that we have not the treasure, and we are supposed to be in possession of it."
"Who has it?" she asked quickly.
"Your brother denies that he has shifted it, but the mutineers undoubtedly found it gone. It is an unfathomed secret so far."
"But," she said, looking at me eagerly, "you have a suspicion."
"It is none of us," I said, with an embracing glance.
"That need not be said," she replied quickly. "I know honest men."
She continued to hold me with her interrogating eyes, and an answer was indirectly wrung from me.
"I should like to know where Pye is," I said.
She took this not unnaturally as an evasion. "But he's of no use," she said. "You have told me so. We have seen so together."
It was pleasant to be coupled with her in that way, even in that moment of wonder and fear. I stared across at the door which gave access to the stairs of the saloon.
"It is possible they have left no one down below," I said musingly.
She followed my meaning this time. "Oh, you mustn't venture it!" she said. "It would be foolhardy. You have run risks enough, and you are wounded."
"Miss Morland," I answered. "This is a time when we can hardly stop to consider. Everything hinges on the next few hours. I say it to you frankly, and I will remember my promise this time."
"You remembered it before. You would have come," she said, with a sudden burst of emotion; and somehow I was glad. I liked her faith in me.
"What the deuce do you make of it?" said Barraclough to me.
I shook my head. "I'll tell you later when I've thought it over," I answered. "At present I'm bewildered—also shocked. I've had a startler, Barraclough." He stared at me. "I'll walk round and see. But I don't know if it will get us any further."
"There's only one thing that will do that," said he significantly.
"You mean–"
"We must make this sanguinary brute compromise. If he will land us somewhere–"
"Oh, he won't!" I said. "I've no faith in him."
"Well, if they haven't the treasure, they may make terms to get it," he said in perplexity.
"If they have not," I said. He looked at me. "The question is, who has the treasure?" I continued.
"Good heavens, man, if you know—speak out," he said impatiently.
"When I know I'll speak," I said; "but I will say this much, that whoever is ignorant of its whereabouts, Holgate isn't."
"I give it up," said Barraclough.
"Unhappily, it won't give us up," I rejoined. "We are to be attacked this evening if we don't part with what we haven't got."
He walked away, apparently in despair of arriving at any conclusion by continuing the conversation. I went toward the door, for I still had my idea. I wondered if there was anything in it. Princess Alix had moved away on the approach of Sir John, but now she interrupted me.
"You're not going?" she asked anxiously.
"My surgery is below," said I. "I must get some things from it."
She hesitated. "Won't—wouldn't that man Holgate let you have them? You are running too great a risk."
"That is my safety," I said, smiling. "I go down. If no one is there so much the better; if some one crops up I have my excuse. The risk is not great. Will you be good enough to bar the door after me?"
This was not quite true, but it served my purpose. She let me pass, looking after me with wondering eyes. I unlocked the door and went out into the lobby that gave on the staircase. There was no sound audible above the noises of the ship. I descended firmly, my hand on the butt of a revolver I had picked up. No one was visible at the entrance to the saloon. I turned up one of the passages toward my own cabin. I entered the surgery and shut the door. As I was looking for what I wanted, or might want, I formulated my chain of reflections. Here they are.
The key had been stolen from Lane. It could only have been stolen by some one in our own part of the ship, since the purser had not ventured among the enemy.
Who had stolen it?
Here was a break, but my links began a little further on, in this way.
If the person who had stolen the key, the traitor that is in our camp, had acted in his own interests alone, both parties were at a loss. But that was not the hypothesis to which I leaned. If, on the other hand, the traitor had acted in Holgate's interests, who was he?
Before I could continue my chain to the end, I had something to do, a search to make. I left the surgery noiselessly and passed along the alley to Pye's cabin. The handle turned and the door gave. I opened it. No one was there.
That settled my links for me. The man whom I had encountered in the fog at the foot of the bridge was the man who was in communication with Holgate. That pitiful little coward, whose stomach had turned at the sight of blood and on the assault of the desperadoes, was their creature. As these thoughts flashed through my mind it went back further in a leaf of memory. I recalled the room in the "Three Tuns" on that dirty November evening; I saw Holgate and the little clerk facing each other across the table and myself drinking wine with them. There was the place in which I had made the third officer's acquaintance, and that had been brought about by Pye. There, too, I had first heard of Prince Frederic of Hochburg; and back into my memory flashed the stranger's talk, the little clerk's stare, and Holgate's frown. The conspiracy had been hatched then. Its roots had gone deep then; from that moment the Sea Queen and her owner had been doomed.