"But she had sailed, and the dock which had held her was empty.
"This discovery did not daunt me, for I had expected it. I should have been surprised if she had been at her berth; and the fact that she had weighed under cover of night fell in so well with my anticipation that I waited only to ascertain officially what ships had left Spezia during the past twenty-four hours. They told me at the Customs that the Brazilian war-vessel built by Signor Vezzia weighed at three a.m.; but more I could not learn, for these men had evidently been well bribed, and were as dumb as unfee'd lawyers. I knew that their information was not worth a groat, and hurried back to the Albergo to assure myself that my neighbour with the necklace had sailed also. To my surprise, he was at breakfast when I arrived at the hotel; and so one great link in my theoretic chain snapped at the first test. As he had not sailed with the others, he could have no direct connection with the nameless ship, no nautical part or lot with her. But what was he, then? That I meant to know as soon as opportunity should serve.
* * * * *
"I have led you up, Strong, step by step, through the details of this work to this point, that you may have the facts unalloyed as I have them; and may construct your history from this preamble as I have constructed mine. I am now about to move over the ground more quickly. I will quit Spezia, and ask you to come with me, after the interval of nigh a year—during which no man had known that which I now tell you—to London, where, in an hotel in Cecil Street, Strand, I was again the neighbour of the man with the jewels whom I had taken so daring an advantage of in Italy. Let me tell you briefly what had happened in the between-time. The day on which the nameless ship left the dock, this man—whom, I may say at once, I have always met under the name of Captain Black—quitted the town and reached Paris. Thither I followed him, staying one day in the French capital, but going onward with him on the following morning to Cherbourg. There he went aboard a small yacht, and I lost him in the Channel. I returned at once to Italy, and wired to friends in the police force at New York, at London, and San Francisco, and at three ports in South America for news (a) of a new war-ship lately completed at Spezia for the Brazilian republic; (b) of a man known as Captain Black, who left the port of Cherbourg in the cutter-yacht La France on the morning of October 30th. For nearly twelve months I waited for an answer to these questions; but none came to me. To the best of my knowledge, the nameless war-ship was never seen upon the high seas. I began to ask myself, if she existed, how came it that a vessel, burnished to the beauty of gold, had been spoken of none, seen of none, reported in no harbour, mentioned in no despatch? Yet she remained known but to her crew and to me: and my study of shipping lists, gazettes, and papers in all tongues, never gave me clue to her. Only this, I had such a record of navigation as I think man never kept yet before; and I marked it as curious, if nothing more, that in the month when the cruiser quitted Spezia three ocean-going steamers, each carrying specie to the value of more than one hundred thousand pounds, went down in fair weather, and were paid for at Lloyd's. What folly! you say again; what are you going to conclude? I answer only—God grant that I conclude falsely—that this terrible thing I suspect is the phantom of a too-keen imagination.
"Now, when no tidings came, either of the ship I sought or of the man Black, I did not lose all hope. Indeed, I was much occupied making—during a month's leisure in London—a list, as far as that were possible, of all the gems and baubles which the dead men and women on the sunken steamers had owned. This was a paltry record of bracelets, and rings, and tiaras, and clasps, such stuff as any fellow of a jeweller may sell; unconvincing stuff, worth no more than a near relation for purposes of evidence. There was but one piece of the whole mass that did not come in my category—a great box with a fine painting by Jean Petitot upon its lid, and a curious circle of jasper all about the miniatures. This was a historic piece of bijouterie mentioned as having once been the property of Necker, the French financier; then lost by a New York dealer, who was taking it from Paris to Boston in the steamship Catalania; the ship supposed to have foundered, with the loss of all hands, off the Banks of Newfoundland, sixteen days after the nameless ship left Spezia. I made a record of this trifle, and forgot it until, many months later, a private communication from the head of the New York Secret Service told me that the man I wanted was in London; that he was an American millionaire, who owned a house on the banks of the Hudson River; who had great influence in many cities, who came to Europe to buy precious stones and miniature paintings, a man who was considered eccentric by his friends. I kept the notes, and hurried to England—for I had been to Geneva some while—and took rooms in the hotel where Captain Black was staying. Three days after I was disguised as you have seen me, selling him miniatures. Within a week, by what steps I need not pause to say, I knew that the jasper box, lost, by report, in the steamer Catalania, was under lock and key in his bedroom.
"I cannot tell you how that discovery agitated me. Here, indeed, was my second direct link. The man had in his possession an historic and unmistakable casket, which all the world believed to be lost in a steamer from which no soul had escaped. How I treasured that knowledge! Three months the man remained in London; during three months he was not thirty hours out of my sight or knowledge. Day by day when with him, I consulted such shipping information as I could get; and scored another mark upon my record when I made sure that no inexplicable story from the sea was written while he remained ashore. This was perplexing for a surety. I could not in any way connect the man with the nameless ship, and yet he knew her crew; he was the one in whose possession the jewels were; above all, while he was ashore there were no disasters which could not be set down to ocean peril or the act of God, as the policies say. This further knowledge held me to him with the magnetic attraction of a mystery such as I have never known in my life. I resigned my work for the Government; and henceforth gave myself heart and soul to the pursuit of the man. I followed him to Paris, to St. Petersburg; I tracked him through France to Marseilles; I watched him embark, with three of the ruffians I had seen at Spezia, in his yacht again; and within a month the yacht was in harbour at Cowes without him; while a steamer, bound from the Cape to Cadiz, and known to have specie aboard her, went out of knowledge as the others had done. Then was I sure, sure of that awful dream I had dreamed, conscious that I alone shared with that man and his crew one of the most ghastly secrets that the deep has kept within her.
"The end of my story I judge now that you anticipate. Though absolutely convinced myself, I had still lack of the one direct link to make a legal chain. I had positively to connect the man Black with the nameless ship, for this I had only done so far by pure circumstance. For many months I have made no gain in this attempt. Last year in Liverpool I sketched in yet another point in my picture. I received tidings of the man in that city, and there I did trade with him in my old disguise; but he was not alone—the crew of ruffians you have known by this time kept company with him in that bold and bestial Bohemianism you will have witnessed with me. I kept vigil there a week, but lost him at the end of that time. When he reappeared in the circles of civilisation it was in Paris, but two days ago, when I asked you to accompany me. You know that I attempted to sail with him on his cruise, and your instinct tells you why. If I could, by being two days afloat in his company, prove beyond doubt that he used his yacht as a pretence; if I could prove that when he left port in her he sailed out to sea, and was picked up by the nameless ship, my chain was forged, my book complete, and I had but to call the Government to the work!
"But I have failed, and the labour I have set myself shall be done by others, but chiefly, Mark Strong, by you. From the valley of the dead whence soon I must look back, if it is to be on a life that has no achievement before God in it, I, who have laid down such a life as mine was in this cause, urge you upon it. You have youth, and money sufficient for the enterprise; you will get money in its pursuit. You have no fear of the black After, which is the end of life; but, after all, it may come to you as it came to me, that there is the finger of the Almighty God pointing to your path of duty. I have lived the life of a common eavesdropper; but believe me that in this work I have felt the call of humanity, and hoped, if I might live to accomplish it, that the Book