“You have my name, it appears. I am not so fortunate.”
He hung down his head, and I saw with no little satisfaction that he blushed like a girl.
“I was Harry Avenhill once,” he said.
“The son of Dr. Avenhill, of Cambridge?”
“It’s as true as night.”
“Thank God that your father is dead. We will speak of him again—when the seed has begun to grow a little warm. I want now to go back a step. This ship in which my diamonds were to go——”
He started, and looked at me with wild eyes.
“I never said anything about any ship!”
“No? Then I was dreaming it. You yourself were to return to Paris viâ Havre and Southampton, I think; while this fellow Rouge la Gloire, he went from Newhaven.”
“How did you know that?”
“Oh, I know many things. The ship, then, is waiting for him—shall we say in Shoreham harbour?”
It was a pure guess upon my part, but I have never seen a man so struck by astonishment and wonder. For some minutes he could not say a single word. When he replied, it was in the tone of one who could contest with me no longer.
“If you know, you know,” he said. “But look here, Dr. Fabos; you have spoken well to me, and I’ll speak well to you. Leave Val Imroth alone. You haven’t a month to live if you don’t.”
I put my hand upon his shoulder, and turned him round to look me full in the face.
“Harry Avenhill,” said I, “did they tell you, then, that Dr. Fabos was a woman? Listen to me, now. I start to-morrow to hunt these people down. You shall go with me; I will find a place for you upon my yacht. We will seek this Polish Jew together—him and others, and by the help of God above me, we will never rest until we have found them.”
He could not reply to me. I summoned Okyada, and bade him find a bedroom for Mr. Harry Avenhill.
“We leave by the early train for Newcastle,” I said. “See that Mr. Avenhill is called in time. And please to tell my sister that I am coming to have a long talk with her.”
* * * * *
My poor sister! However will she live if there are no slippers to be aired or man’s untidiness to be corrected! Her love for me is very sweet and true. I could wish almost that my duty would leave me here in England to enjoy it.
CHAPTER VI.
A CHALLENGE FROM A WOMAN.
Dr. Fabos joins his Yacht “White Wings.”
I had given the name of White Wings to my new turbine yacht, and this, I confess, provokes the merriment of mariners both ancient and youthful. We are painted a dirty grey, and have the true torpedo bows—to say nothing of our low-lying stern rounded like a shark’s back and just as formidable to look upon when we begin to make our twenty-five knots. The ship is entirely one after my own heart. I will not deny that an ambition of mastery has affected me from my earliest days. My castles must be impregnable, be they upon the sea or ashore. And the yacht which Yarrow built for me has no superior upon any ocean.
The boat, I say, was built upon the Thames and engined upon the Tyne. I remember that I ordered it three days after I wrote the word “ship” in my diary; upon a morning when the notion first came to me that the sea and not the land harboured the world’s great criminals, and that upon the sea alone would they be taken. To none other than the pages of my diary may I reveal this premonition yet awhile. The police would mock it; the public remain incredulous. And so I keep my secret, and I carry it with me. God knows to what haven.
We left Newcastle, bravely enough, upon the second day of September in the year 1904. A member of the Royal Yacht Squadron by favour and friendship of the late Prince Valikoff, of Moscow, whose daughter’s life he declared that I saved, we flew the White Ensign, and were named, I do not doubt, for a Government ship. Few would have guessed that this was the private yacht of an eccentric Englishman; that he had embarked upon one of the wildest quests ever undertaken by an amateur, and that none watched him go with greater interest than his friend Murray, of Scotland Yard. But such was the naked truth. And even Murray had but a tithe of the secret.
A long, wicked-looking yacht! I liked to hear my friends say that. When I took them aboard and showed them the monster turbines, the spacious quarters for my men beneath the cupola of the bows, and aft, my own cabins, furnished with some luxury and no little taste, I hope—then it was of the Hotel Ritz they talked, and not of any wickedness at all. My own private room was just such a cabin as I have always desired to find upon a yacht. Deep sloping windows of heavy glass permitted me to see the white foaming wake astern and the blue horizon above it. I had to my hand the books that I love; there were pictures of my own choosing cunningly let into the panels of rich Spanish mahogany. Ornaments of silver added dignity but no display. Not a spacious room, I found that its situation abaft gave me that privacy I sought, and made of it as it were a house apart. Here none entered who had not satisfied my little Jap that his business was urgent. I could write for hours with no more harassing interruption than that of a gull upon the wing or the echo of the ship’s bells heard afar. The world of men and cities lay down yonder below the ether. The great sea shut its voices out, and who would regret them or turn back to hear their message?
Let pride in my ship, then, be the first emotion I shall record in this account of her voyages. Certainly the summer smiled upon us when we started down the turbid, evil-smelling river Tyne, and began to dip our whale-nosed bows to the North Sea. The men I had shipped for the service, attracted by the terms of my offer, and drawn from the cream of the yachting ports of England, were as fine a lot as ever trod a spotless deck. Benson, my chief engineer, used to be one of Yarrow’s most trusted experts. Captain Larry had been almost everything nautical, both afloat and ashore. A clean-shaven, blue-eyed, hard-faced man, I have staked my fortune upon his courage. And how shall I forget Cain and Abel, the breezy twin quartermasters from County Cork—to say nothing of Balaam, the Scotch boatswain, or Merry, the little cockney cook! These fellows had been taken aside and told one by one frankly that the voyage spelled danger, and after danger, reward. They accepted my conditions with a frankness which declared their relish for them. I had but three refusals, and one of these, Harry Avenhill, had no title to be a chooser.
Such was the crew which steamed with me, away from gloomy Newcastle, southward, I knew not to what seas or harbourage. To be just, certain ideas and conjectures of my own dictated a vague course, and were never absent from my reckoning. I believed that the ocean had living men’s secrets in her possession, and that she would yield them up to me. Let Fate, I said, stand at the tiller, and Prudence be her handmaiden. But one man in all Europe knew that I intended to call at the port of Havre, and afterwards to steam for Cape Town. To others I told a simpler tale. The yacht was my hobby, the voyage a welcome term of idleness. They rarely pursued the subject further.
Now, I had determined to call at the port of Havre, not because I had any business to do there, but because intelligence had come to me that Joan Fordibras was spending some weeks at Dieppe, and that I should find her at the Hôtel de Palais. We made a good passage down the North Sea, and on the morning following our arrival I stood among a group of lazy onlookers, who watched the bathers go down to the sea at Dieppe and found their homely entertainment therein. Joan Fordibras was one of the last to bathe, but many eyes followed her with interest, and I perceived that she was an expert swimmer, possessed of a graceful figure, and of a daring in the water which had few imitators among her sex. Greatly admired and evidently