“Only gallantry? Have we such a wonderful cargo, then?”
“There are times,” was the cautious reply, “when not even the captain knows exactly what he is carrying.”
“You remind me,” Jocelyn Thew observed, “of a voyage I once made from Port Elizabeth to New York, with half-a-dozen I.D.B’s on board, and as many detectives, watching them day and night.”
The captain nodded.
“What happened?” he enquired.
“Oh, the detectives arrested the lot of them, I think, got hold of them on the last day.” The captain rose from his place.
“Queer thing,” he remarked, “but the law generally does come out on top.”
Jocelyn followed his example a few minutes later, and Katharine purposely joined him on the way out. She led her companion to the corner where her steamer chair had been placed, and motioned him to sit by her side. They were on the weather side of the ship, with a slight breeze in their faces and a canopy over their heads which deadened sound. She leaned a little forward.
“Smoke, please.” she begged. “I mean it — see.”
She lit a cigarette and he followed suit.
“Not a cigar?”
He shook his head.
“I keep them for my hard thinking times.”
“Then you were thinking very hard this morning?”
“I was,” he admitted.
“And gazing very earnestly out of those field-glasses of yours.”
“Quite true.”
“Mr. Thew,” she said abruptly, “it is my impression, although for some reason or other I am scarcely allowed to go near him, that Mr. Phillips is dying.”
“One knew, of course, that there was that risk,” Jocelyn Thew reminded her.
“I do not think that he can possibly live for twenty-four hours,” she continued. “I was allowed to sit with him for a short time early this morning. He is beginning to wander in his mind, to speak of his wife and a sum of money.” Jocelyn’s fine eyebrows came a little closer together.
“Well?”
“Nothing in his appearance or speech indicate the man of wealth or even of birth. I begin to wonder whether I know the whole truth about this frantic desire of his to reach England before he dies?”
“I think,” Jocelyn Thew said thoughtfully, “that you have been talking again to Mr. Crawshay.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “and he has been warning me against you.”
“I suppose,” Jocelyn ruminated, “the man has a certain amount of puppy-dog intelligence.”
“I do not understand Mr. Crawshay at all,” she confessed. “My acquaintance with him before we met on this steamer was of the slightest, but his manner of coming certainly led one to believe that he was a man of courage and determination. Since then he has crawled about in an overcoat and rubber shoes, and groaned about his ailments until one feels inclined to laugh at him. Last night he was different again. He was entirely serious, and he spoke to me about you.”
“Do you need to be warned against me?” he asked grimly. “Have I ever sailed under false colours?”
“Don’t,” she begged, looking at him with a little quiver of the lips and a wonderfully soft light in her eyes. “You have never deceived me in any way except, if at all, as regards this voyage. I made up my mind this evening that I would ask you, if you cared to tell me, to take me into your confidence about this man who is dying down below, and his strange journey. I need scarcely add that I should respect that confidence.”
“I am sorry,” he answered. “You ask an impossibility.”
“Then there is some sort of conspiracy going on?” she persisted. “Let me ask you a straightforward question. Is it not true that you have made me an unknowing participator in an illegal act?”
“It is,” he admitted. “I was very sorry to have to do so but it was necessary. Without your assistance, I should never have been allowed to bring Phillips across the Atlantic.”
“What difference do I make?” she asked.
“You lend an air of respectability and credibility to the whole thing,” he told her. “You are a person of repute, of distinguished social position, and the object of a good deal of admiration in your own country. The doctor who accompanies you comes from your own hospital. No one would believe it possible that either of you could be concerned in any sort of conspiracy. If that ass Crawshay had not got on board, I am convinced that there would never have been a breath of suspicion.”
She shivered a little.
“Is it quite kind to bring me into an affair of this sort?” she asked.
“It is a world,” he declared cruelly, “in which we fight always for our own hand or go under. I am fighting for mine, and if I have occasionally to sacrifice a friend as well as an enemy, I do not hesitate.”
“What has the world done to you,” she demanded, “that you should speak so bitterly?” “Better not ask me that.”
“How will the man Phillips’ death affect your plans?”
“It will make very little difference either way,” he assured her. “We rather expected him to die.”
“And you won’t take me any further into your confidence?”
“No further. Your task will be completed at Liverpool. So long as you leave this steamer in company with the doctor and the ambulance, if Phillips is still alive, you will be free to return home whenever you please.”
“Very well,” she said. “You see, I accept my position. I shall go through with what I have promised, whatever Mr. Crawshay may say. Won’t you in return treat me, if not as a confederate, as a friend?”
He turned and looked at her, met the appealing glance of her soft eyes for a moment and looked suddenly away.
“I do not belong to the ranks of those, Miss Beverley, from whom it is well for you to choose your friends.”
“But why should I not make my own choice?” she insisted. “I have always been my own mistress. I have lived with my own ideas, I have declined to be subject to any one’s authority. I am an independent person. Can’t you treat me as such?”
“There are facts,” he said, “which can never be ignored. You belong to the world of wealthy, gently born men and women who comprise what is called Society. I belong, and have belonged all my life, to a race of outcasts.” “Don’t!” she begged.
“It is true,” he repeated doggedly.
“But what do you mean by outcasts?”
“Criminals, if you like it better. I have broken the law more than once. There is an unexecuted warrant out against me at the present moment. You may even see me marched off this steamer at Liverpool between two policemen.”
“But why?” she asked passionately. “Why? What is the motive of it all? Is it money?”
“I am not in need of money,” he told her, “but I have a great and sacred use for all I can lay my fingers on. If I succeed in my present enterprise, I shall receive a hundred thousand pounds.”
“I value Jerry’s life and future at more than that,” she declared. “Will you make a fresh start, Mr. Jocelyn Thew, with twice that sum of money to your credit?”
He shook his head, but there was a curious change creeping into his face. For the first time she saw how soft a man’s dark-blue eyes may sometimes become. The slight trembling of his parted lips, too, seemed to unlock all the cruel, hard lines of his face. He had suddenly the appearance of a person of temperament — a poet, even a dreamer.
“I could not take money from you, Miss Beverley,” he said, “or from any other woman in the world.”
“Upon no conditions?” she whispered softly.
“Upon no conditions,” he repeated.
The breeze had dropped, and twilight had followed swiftly upon the misty sunset. There was something a little ghostly about the light in which they sat. “I am stifled,” she declared abruptly. “Come and walk.”