"Meaning that things—and people—are not always what they seem?"
"Meaning that people are so seldom what they seem that you can ignore the exceptions. Somebody has said that there are two distinct entities in the ego; the man as he sees himself, and the man as God sees him. That is only a fraction of a great truth. There are as many entities as the man has human contacts; he is not precisely the same man to any two of his acquaintances, and he is a hypocrite with most."
"Bosh!" said I, thinking I had the key to all this hard-bitted, and lately acquired, philosophy. "You have too much money, Bonteck; that is all that is the matter with you."
He put down his oyster fork and looked me squarely in the eye. He was the same handsome, upstanding young Hercules that he had always been, but there was something new and more or less provocative in the contemptuous set of the mouth and the half belligerent emphasis of the well-defined jaw.
"You've said it, Dick; I have too much money, and other people haven't enough," was his rather enigmatical retort. Then: "You may call it madman raving if you like, but I've lost my sense of perspective; I can't tell an honest man—or woman—when I see one."
"All of which leads up to?——"
"To the thing which has brought me to New Orleans, and to my reason for wiring you from Havana. My philosophy has led me to the jumping-off place, Dick. Before I am two months older I am going to know at least one small bunch of people for what they really are under their skins. And you are going to help me to acquire this invaluable information. How does that proposal strike you?"
"It strikes me a trifle remindfully, if you insist on knowing," I said. "I haven't been altogether out of touch with the home people, and quite a few of them have had something to say about this loss of perspective that you've just confessed to. I've been writing most of the gossip off to profit and loss, but——"
"You needn't," was his brusque interruption. "As I've said, this is a pretty rotten world, if anybody should ask."
"Is it, indeed? How many millions does it take to give a man that point of view?"
"That is the devil of it," he said, with a touch of bitterness. "Will you believe me when I say that, apart from yourself and two or three other honest money-despisers like you, I don't really know, as man to man, or man to woman, half a dozen people on the face of the planet?"
"I'll believe that you think so. Still, that is all piffle, as you very well know. So far as the women are concerned, it merely means that you haven't met the one and only."
Van Dyck was silent while the waiter was placing the meat course. During the plate-changing interval I became unpleasantly conscious of the presence—the curiously obtrusive presence—of a dark-faced, black-mustachioed little man sitting two tables away, and apparently engrossed in his dinner. Why this one foreign-looking individual, out of the many late diners comfortably filling the large room, should disturb me, I could not determine; but the vague disquietude came—and remained. Twice I thought I caught the small man watching my tablemate furtively from beneath his heavy eyebrows; and when Van Dyck began to speak again, I was almost certain I detected that half mechanical cocking of an ear which betrays the intentional and eager eavesdropper.
"The one and only woman," said Van Dyck musingly, taking up the thread of the table talk at the point where it had been broken by the shifting of plates. "That is another exploded fallacy, Preble. There are dozens of the 'one-and-onlys,' each with a scheming mamma, or a grafting father, or an impecunious guardian who has been thriftlessly making ducks and drakes of his ward's trust funds. And they are all so immitigably decent and well-behaved and conventional that butter wouldn't melt in the mouth of a single one of them. They never, by any chance, let you see one-sixty-fourth of an inch below the surface."
"I grant you surfaces are more or less deceptive," I admitted. "But your charge is too sweeping. You can't lump humanity any more than you can the stars in heaven."
"Can't I? Wait and you shall see. And it isn't altogether what you are thinking; that I have been 'touched' so often that it has soured me. Heaven knows I've been a perfect Pool of Bethesda to a whole worldful of financial cripples ever since I left the university; but I don't especially mind the graft. What I do mind is the fact that it makes smiling hypocrites out of the grafters, big and little. Not one of them dares show me his real self, and there are times when I am fairly sick at heart for one little refreshing glimpse of humanity in the raw."
"Which is more piffle," I commented. "You didn't cable me to come and eat a New Orleans dinner with you on the bare chance that I'd let you work off a batch of grouches on me, did you?"
His answer was delayed so long that I wondered if he were trying to determine beforehand how much or how little he might be obliged to tell me. But finally he broke ground, rather cautiously, I thought, in the field of the explanations.
"No; I didn't ask you for the purpose of unloading my peculiar and personal grievances upon you, tempting as that may have been. I have a deep-laid plot, and I want you to help me carry it out. It is just about the maddest thing you ever heard of, and I've got to have at least one sane man along—as a sort of sea-anchor to tie to when the hurricane begins ripping the masts out of us, and all that."
"In other words, you are out to pick up a bit of moral backing for the plot. Is that it?"
"You have hit it precisely. You are to go along and hold me up to the mark, Dick. If I show any signs of weakening, you are to jab a knife into me and twist it around a few times. You are on salary, you know—if you care to have it that way."
"If you say money to me again, I quit you cold, right here and now," was my answer to that. And then: "Pitch out and tell me: what is this piratical scheme that you are afraid you may not have the nerve to carry through?"
The plotter sat back in his chair, regarding me through half-closed eyelids; and again I thought I caught the dark-faced foreigner two tables distant stealthily watching him.
"On the face of it, it looks almost as thrilling as an old maids' tea party—and not any less conventional," Van Dyck began. "You have been around and about a good bit in the Caribbean, haven't you?"
"I suppose I might be able to pilot the Andromeda into most of the well-known harbors, if I had to," I boasted.
"Good. But you haven't been much out of the regular steamer lanes?—or have you?"
"Now and then; yes. Once, when I was trying to blow around from Carthagena to La Guaira in a coasting schooner, our old tub of a wind jammer was caught in a hurricane and piled up on a coral reef. We were Crusoes on the ghastly little island for nearly a month before a tramp steamer happened along and saw our signals."
Van Dyck nodded as one who is hearing what has been heard before.
"You wrote home about that adventure, as you may, or may not, remember, and the story got around to me. Afterward, I chanced to see in the shipping news the report of the captain of the tramp 'tanker' which had picked you up. Your island wasn't down on any of the charts, and Captain Svenson gave the latitude and longitude as a matter of information. Have you any idea what island it was—or is?"
"No. As you may imagine, I was only too glad to see the last of it when we were taken off."
"It is said to be the Lost Island of the old English plateship harriers—Sir Frankie Drake and the rest," Van Dyck went on. "There is a story that Drake once ran a Spanish treasure ship into the lagoon which encircles the island, shot it full of holes, and finally burned it after a siege lasting a couple of days. The tale adds that during the two-day fight the Spaniards had time to unload and bury some of the gold bars in the galleon's cargo. Drake tried to make his prisoners tell what they had done with the treasure—so the story goes—and when they proved obstinate he sailed away and left them to starve. At a somewhat later period the island appears in the legends