The Pagan Madonna Part 23

"Fate? Why, she's our chief engineer!"

Cleve turned away, chuckling; a dozen feet off this chuckle became boisterous laughter.

"What can they be after? Sunken treasure?" cried Jane, excitedly.

"Hangman's hemp--if I live long enough," was the grim declaration, and Cleigh drew the rug over his knees.

"But it can't be anything dreadful if they can laugh over it!"

"Did you ever hear Mephisto laugh in Faust? Cunningham is a queer duck. I don't suppose there's a corner on the globe he hasn't had a peek at. He has a vast knowledge of the arts. His real name n.o.body seems to know. He can make himself very likable to men and attractive to women. The sort of women he seeks do not mind his physical deformity. His face and his intellect draw them, and he is as cruel as a wolf. It never occurred to me until last night that men like me create his kind. But I don't understand him in this instance. A play like this, with all the future risks! After I get the wires moving he won't be able to stir a hundred miles in any direction."

"But so long as he doesn't intend to harm us--and I'm convinced he doesn't--perhaps we'd better play the game as he asks us to."

"Miss Norman," said Cleigh in a tired voice, "will you do me the favour to ask Captain Dennison why he has never touched the twenty thousand I deposited to his account?"

Astonished, Jane turned to Dennison to repeat the question, but was forestalled.

"Tell Mr. Cleigh that to touch a dollar of that money would be a tacit admission that Mr. Cleigh had the right to strike Captain Dennison across the mouth."

Dennison swung out of the chair and strode off toward the bridge, his shoulders flat and his neck stiff.

"You struck him?" demanded Jane, impulsively.

But Cleigh did not answer. His eyes were closed, his head rested against the back of the chair so Jane did not press the question. It was enough that she had seen behind a corner of this peculiar veil. And, oddly, she felt quite as much pity for the father as for the son. A wall of pride, Alpine high, and neither would force a pa.s.sage!

They did not see the arch rogue during the day, but he came in to dinner.

He was gay--in a story-telling mood. There was little or no banter, for he spoke only to Jane, and gave her flashes of some of his amazing activities in search of art treasures. He had once been chased up and down j.a.pan by the Mikado's agents for having in his possession some royal-silk tapestry which it is forbidden to take out of the country. Another time he had gone into Tibet for a lama's ghost mask studded with raw emeralds and turquoise, and had suffered untold miseries in getting down into India.

Again he had entered a Rajput haremlik as a woman, and eventually escaped with the fabulous rug which hung in the salon. Adventure, adventure, and death always at his elbow! There was nothing of the braggart in the man; he recounted his tales after the manner of a boy relating some college escapades, deprecatingly.

Often Jane stole a glance at one or the other of the Cleighs. She was constantly swung between--but never touched--the desire to laugh and the desire to weep over this tragedy, which seemed so futile.

"Why don't you write a book about these adventures?" she asked.

"A book? No time," said Cunningham. "Besides, the moment one of these trips is over it ends; I can recount it only sketchily."

"But even sketchily it would be tremendously interesting. It is as if you were playing a game with death for the mere sport of it."

"Maybe that hits it, though I've never stopped to a.n.a.lyze. I never think of death; it is a waste of gray matter. I should be no nearer death in Tibet than I should be asleep in a cradle. Why bother about the absolute, the inevitable? Humanity wears itself out building bridges for imaginary torrents. I am an exception; that is why I shall be young and handsome up to the moment the grim stalker puts his claw on my shoulder."

He smiled whimsically.

"But you, have you never caught some of the pa.s.sion for possessing rare paintings, rugs, ma.n.u.scripts?"

"You miss the point. What does the sense of possession amount to beside the sense of seeking and finding? Cleigh here thinks he is having a thrill when he signs a check. It is to laugh!"

"Have you ever killed a man?" It was one of those questions that leap forth irresistibly. Jane was a bit frightened at her temerity.

Cunningham drank his coffee deliberately.

"Yes."

"Oh!"

Jane shrank back a little.

"But never willfully," Cunningham added--"always in self-defence, and never a white man."

There was a peculiar phase about the man's singular beauty. Animated, it was youthful; in grim repose, it was sad and old.

"Death!" said Jane in a kind of awed whisper. "I have watched many die, and I cannot get over the terror of it. Here is a man with all the faculties, physical and mental; a human being, loving, hating, working, sleeping; and in an instant he is nothing!"

"A Chinaman once said that the thought of death is as futile as water in the hand. By the way, Cleigh--and you too, captain--give the wireless a wide berth. There's death there."

Jane saw the fire opals leap into the dark eyes.

CHAPTER XIII

The third day out they were well below Formosa, which had been turned on a wide arc. The sea was blue now, quiescent, waveless; there was only the eternal roll. Still Jane could not help comparing the sea with the situation--the devil was slumbering. What if he waked?

Time after time she tried to force her thoughts into the reality of this remarkable cruise, but it was impossible. Romance was always smothering her, edging her off, when she approached the sinister. Perhaps if she had heard ribald songs, seen evidence of drunkenness; if the crew had loitered about and been lacking in respect, she would have been able to grasp the actuality; but so far the idea persisted that this could not be anything more than a pleasure cruise. Piracy? Where was it?

So she measured her actions accordingly, read, played the phonograph, went here and there over the yacht, often taking her stand in the bow and peering down the cut.w.a.ter to watch the antics of some humorous porpoise or to follow the smother of spray where the flying fish broke. In fact, she conducted herself exactly as she would have done on board a pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p. There were moments when she was honestly bored.

Piracy! This was an established fact. Cunningham and his men had stepped outside the pale of law in running off with the _Wanderer_. But piracy without drunken disorder, piracy that wiped its feet on the doormat and hung its hat on the rack! There was a touch of the true farce in it.

Hadn't Cunningham himself confessed that the whole affair was a joke?

Round two o'clock on the afternoon of the third day Jane, for the moment alone in her chair, heard the phonograph--the s.e.xtet from Lucia. She left her chair, looked down through the open transom and discovered Dennison cranking the machine. He must have seen her shadow, for he glanced up quickly.

He crooked a finger which said, "Come on down!" She made a negative sign and withdrew her head.

Here she was again on the verge of wild laughter. Donizetti! Pirates!

Gla.s.s beads for which Cleigh had voyaged sixteen thousand miles! A father and son who ignored each other! She choked down this desire to laugh, because she was afraid it might end suddenly in hysteria and tears. She returned to her chair, and there was the father arranging himself comfortably. He had a book.

"Would you like me to read a while to you?" she offered.

"Will you? You see," he confessed, "I'm troubled with insomnia. If I read by myself I only become interested in the book, but if someone reads aloud it makes me drowsy."

"As a nurse I've done that hundreds of times. But frankly, I can't read poetry; I begin to sing-song it at once; it becomes rime without reason.

What is the book?"

Cleigh extended it to her. The moment her hands touched the volume she saw that she was holding something immeasurably precious. The form was unlike the familiar shapes of modern books. The covers consisted of exquisitely hand-tooled calf bound by thongs; there was a subtle perfume as she opened them. Illuminated vellum. She uttered a pleasurable little gasp.

"The Song of Songs, which is Solomon's," she read.