"You're not going to fail me now, are you? You need not answer. I can feel it in the beat of your heart against mine."
"No," said the girl. "I'm yours, I suppose."
"Don't you know?"
"Yes, I know. No one else would want me, discarded."
"I want you. I'd want you if the whole world rejected you."
"And you won't tell me where Derrick is?"
"No, it's a heavy secret to carry in one's breast. I feared that they would worm it out of me. You can't know what I've gone through," he went on. "I've been suspected and questioned and cross-questioned, but I never gave it away. It was you who kept me up. The thought of you always, you, you, you! Meanwhile I'm slaving my life out, almost wrecking my brain, to carry out these big deals, and when it is over and I have you they can do their worst. Your father, Beekman when he comes back-"
"Oh, then he will come back?"
"Of course he will. And I'll face them all. I don't know whether I have damned myself for you or not, but if I have, I don't care," he went on recklessly.
"It was my fault, anyway," said the girl. "I should have been stronger. I should not have agreed to such a marriage, and I should not have kept the agreement when I loved you."
"You need not say that," said Harnash-there was good stuff in him-"It is all my own plan and scheme. You were bound, and there was only one way to break the bond. Now I give myself six months. By that time the talk will have died out and we will be married."
"I'll marry you," said the girl, "or I'll marry no one else on earth, but before I marry you you must bring Derrick Beekman into my presence and he must release me."
"That is a harder thing than what I have done, but I'll do it. Provided you will help me."
"I will, but how?"
"When you see him you must tell him that you don't love him and that you wish to marry me."
"Very well. I'll do that part."
"And I'll do the other."
"Promise me, on your word of honor."
"Honor!" exclaimed Harnash bitterly. "Do you think, after what I have done, that I've got any honor, that you could trust to?"
"I'll be trusting myself to you," said the girl, "and you know what that implies."
"Say that you are glad that it has happened as it has, despite the scandal."
Stephanie looked at him a long time.
"You poor boy," she said, drawing his head down and kissing his forehead in that motherly way which all women have toward the men they love until the maternal affection has a chance to vent itself in the right direction. "How you must have suffered for me."
"It was nothing."
"Yes, I am glad," she said at last.
CHAPTER VII
UP AGAINST IT HARD
When he went to bed, what time it was when he awakened, or where he was at that moment were facts about which Derrick Beekman had no ideas whatsoever. At first he was conscious of but one thing-that he was; and that consciousness was painful, not to say harrowing, to the last degree. For one thing, he was horribly sick. The place where he lay appeared to be as unsteady as his mental condition was uncertain. He was heaved up and down, tossed back and forth, and rolled from side to side in an utterly inexplicable way to his bewildered mind. And every mad motion threw him against some bruised and painful portion of his anatomy.
As he struggled to open his eyes it seemed to him that he was lying in pitch darkness. His ears were assailed by a concatenation of discordant noises, creaks, groans, thunderous blows of which he could make nothing. No one has ever pictured hell as a place of reeking odors and hideous sounds. Why that opportunity has been neglected is not known. Certainly the popular brimstone idea of it is highly suggestive. At any rate, the bad air and other indescribable odors, to say nothing of the noises that came to him, added to his physical perturbation and wretchedness. Under the circumstances, the wonder was not so much that he did not think clearly, but that he could think at all. It was only after some moments of sickening return to consciousness that he became convinced that he was alive and somewhere.
He lay for a little while desperately trying to solve the problems presented to him by his environment, with but little immediate success. Finally, as a help toward clearing up the mystery, he decided upon exploration. Though the undertaking was painful to him, he made an effort to sit up. His head came in violent contact with something which he had not noticed in the obscurity above him and nearly knocked him senseless again. After another violent fit of sickness, he decided upon a more circumspect investigation.
He felt about with his hands and discovered that he was in some box-like enclosure one side of which seemed to be open save for a containing strip against which he had been violently hurled several times and which had prevented him from being thrown out. This enclosure was in violently agitated motion. At first, in his confusion, he decided vaguely upon a railroad train, a sleeping-car berth, but he realized that not even the roughest freight car would produce such an effect as that unless the train were running on the cross ties, in which case its stoppage would be immediate. This pitching and tossing kept on. If he had been in his clear senses, he would have known in an instant where he was, but it was only after violent effort at concentration that his aching head told him that he must be aboard a ship!
He was familiar with steamers of the more magnificent class, and with his own yacht, and the pleasure craft of his friends, and he knew enough from reading to decide that this was the forecastle of a ship. He decided that it was a wooden ship. The outer planking against which he lay was of wood. He listened next for the beat or throb of a screw, and heard none. Thinking more and more clearly, it came to him that it was a sailing ship. As his eyes became used to the obscurity, he saw abaft his feet and to his left hand, for he lay head to the bows, well forward on the port side, a square of light which betokened an open hatchway. He strained his eyes up through the hatchway. He could make out nothing. It was still daylight on deck, and that was all he could decide.
As he lay staring stupidly, above the roar of the wind, and the creaking and groaning of the straining ship and the thunder of great waves against the bow as she plunged into the head seas, he heard harsh voices. The tramping of many feet, hurried, irregular, came to him; then a sudden silence; a command followed, and again the massed and steady trampling of the same feet. A shrill, harsh-creaking sound followed, as of taut rope straining through the dry sheaves of a heavy block. Rude rhythmical sounds, sailors' chanties, penetrated the wooden cave in one of the recesses of which he lay. It was a sailing ship, obviously. They were mast-heading yards; apparently setting or taking in sail.
What ship, and how came he aboard? By this time he was sufficiently himself to come to a decision. He would get out of that berth. He would mount the ladder, the top of which he could see dimly nearest the hatch-combing, and get out on deck.
He thrust one leg over the side of the berth, and as the dim light fell upon it, he discovered that he was barefoot. It had not yet occurred to him to examine his clothes. Being asleep, he would naturally be wearing the luxurious night gear he affected. Not so in this instance. Where the white of his leg stopped he discerned a fringe of ragged trousers. He felt them. They were tattered and torn, and indescribably foul and dirty. Mystery on mystery! Cautiously, so as not to hit his head a second time, he sat up and lowered himself to the deck. Continuing his inspection, he was horrified at the shirt which covered the upper half of his body, and which fully matched the trousers. Where were the clothes he had worn the night before?
It came upon him like the proverbial flash of lightning from a clear sky-that bachelor supper, the gay revelry, the wine he had drunk, his sallying forth with George Harnash. He vaguely remembered their first stop; after that-nothing. Where were his watch, his studs, his money? He looked around carefully, with a faint hope that he might see them. A dress suit was, of course, an absurdity at that hour and in that place, but anything was better than those