Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “But what did you think of doing out there?”

  “God knows!”

  Neilson was miserable. There was a ring in the hoarse voice that went straight to his heart. He longed to tell this man what was in store for him — what he himself knew — but he conquered the longing as he had conquered it before. Time enough when the detectives came on board; dirty work and all responsibility would very well keep for them.

  So the good captain thought to himself, as the pair took turns in silence; so the dominant brain at his side willed and intended that he should think.

  “Whatever you hear of me,” resumed Skrimshire, at last, “and however great a beast I may some day turn out, remember that I wasn’t one aboard your ship. Will you, captain? Remember the best of me and I’ll be grateful, wherever I am, and whatever happens.”

  “I will,” said Neilson, hoarse in his turn; and he grasped the guilty hand. Skrimshire had some ado to keep from smiling, but there was another point upon which he required an assurance, and he sought it after a decent pause.

  “So you expect to pass the Otway some time to-morrow?”

  “By dinner time, if we’re lucky.”

  “And there you signal?”

  “Yes, they should hear of us in Melbourne early to-morrow afternoon.”

  “And what about the pilot?”

  “Oh, he’ll come aboard later — certainly not before evening. It’s easy as mid-ocean till you come to the Heads, and we can’t be there before nightfall, even if the wind holds fair.”

  “Well, let’s hope it may. So long, captain, and a thousand thanks for all your kindness. Dark night, by the way?”

  “Yes; let’s hope to-morrow won’t be like it.”

  But the next night was darker still; there was neither moon nor star, and Skrimshire was thankful to have had speech with the captain while he could, for now he would speak to nobody, and to-morrow —

  There was no to-morrow in Skrimshire’s mind, there was only to-night. There was the hour he had been living for these six long weeks. There was the plan that had come to him with the south-east trades, and rolled in his mind through the Southern Ocean, only to reach perfection within the last few hours. But it was perfect now. And all beyond lay dark.

  “Isn’t that their boat, sir?”

  It was the chief steward who wanted to know; he was dallying on the poop in the excitement of the occasion. The captain stood farther aft: an anxious face, a red cigar-end, and a blue Tam-o’-Shanter were all of him that showed in the intense darkness. The main-yard had just been backed, and the chief officer was now on the quarter-deck, seeing the rope-ladder over the side. It was through his glasses that Skrimshire was watching the pilot’s cutter, or rather her lights, and as well as he could, by their meagre rays, the little boat that now bobbed against the cutter’s side.

  “It is the boat, ain’t it, sir?” persisted the steward.

  “Yes, I think so,” said Skrimshire. “How many men come with the pilot, as a rule?”

  “Only himself and a chap to row him.”

  “Ah! You might give these to the chief officer, steward. I’m going to my cabin for a minute. Don’t forget to thank the mate for lending me his glasses: they’ve been exceedingly useful to me.”

  And Skrimshire disappeared down the ladder; his tone had been strange, but the steward only remembered this afterwards: at the time he was too excited himself, and too glad of a glass to level at the boat, to note any such nicety as a mere tone.

  “Four of them, by Jingo,” mused the steward. “I wonder what that’s for?”

  But he did not wonder long: in a very few minutes the four were on board, and ascending the same ladder by which Skrimshire had gone below, the pilot at their head. Neilson received them at the break of the poop.

  “I congratulate you, captain,” was the pilot’s greeting; “we didn’t expect you before next week. Now, first allow me,” and he lowered his voice, “to introduce Inspector Robins, of the Melbourne police; this gentleman is an officer he has brought with him; and my man has come aboard for a message for the shore. Mr. Robins would like a word with you before we let him go. There is no hurry, for I’m very much afraid I can’t take you in till daylight.”

  Neilson took the inspector to the weather-rail.

  “I know what’s coming,” he said. “The Garth Castle signalled-”

  “I know, I know. Have you got him? Have you got him?” rapped out Robins.

  “Safe and sound,” whispered the captain; “and thinks himself as right as the bank, poor devil!”

  “Then you didn’t put him in irons?”

  “No; I thought it better not to. He’d have committed suicide. I spotted that; sounded him without his knowing,” said the crafty captain. “I happened to read the signals myself, and I never let on to a soul in the ship.”

  The good fellow looked delighted with himself behind his red cigar, but the acute face of the detective scarcely reflected his satisfaction.

  “Well, that’s all right if he’s all right” said Robins. “If you don’t mind, captain, I’d like to be introduced to him. One or both of us will spend the night with him, by your leave.”

  “As you like,” said Neilson; “but I can’t help feeling sorry for him. He’s no more idea of this than the man in the moon. That you, steward? Where’s Mr. Bennett? He was here a minute ago.”

  “Yes, sir; only just gone below, sir.”

  “Well, go and ask him to come up and drink with the pilot. I’ll introduce him to the pilot, and you can do what you like,” continued the captain, only wishing he could shirk a detestable duty altogether. “But I give you fair warning, this is a desperate man, or I’m much mistaken in him.”

  “Desperate!” chuckled the inspector; “don’t we know it? It seems to have been as bad a murder as you’ve had in the old country for a long time. In a train. All planned. Victim in one carriage, our friend in the next; got along footboard in tunnel, shot him dead through window, and got back. Case of revenge, and other fellow no beauty, but this one’s got to swing. On his way to join your ship, too; passage booked beforehand. The most cold - blooded plant-”

  It was the chief steward, breathless and panic-stricken.

  “His door’s locked—”

  “He always does lock it,” exclaimed the captain, as Robins darted to the ladder with an oath.

  “But now he won’t answer!” cried the steward.

  And even with his words the answer came, in the terrific report of a revolver fired in a confined space. Next instant the inspector had hurled himself into the little saloon, the others at his heels, and half the ship’s company at theirs. There was no need to point out the culprit’s cabin. White smoke was streaming through the ventilated panels; all stood watching it, but for a time none spoke. Then Robins turned upon the captain.

  “We have you to thank for this, Captain Neilson,” said he. “It is you who will have to answer for it.”

  Neilson turned white, but it was white heat with him.

  “And so I will,” he thundered, “but not to you! I don’t answer to any confounded Colonial policemen, and I don’t take cheek from one, either. By Heaven, sir, I’m master of this ship, and for two pins I’ll have you over the side again, detective or no detective. Do your business and break in that door, and you leave me to mind mine at the proper time and in the proper place.”

  He was furious with the fury of a masterful mariner, whose word is law aboard his own vessel, and yet beneath this virile passion there lurked a certain secret satisfaction in the thought that the companion of so many weeks was at all events not to hang. But the tragedy which had occurred was the greater unpleasantness for himself; indeed it might well lead to something more, and Neilson stood in the grip of grim considerations; in his own doorway, while Robins sent for the carpenter without addressing another syllable to the captain.

  The saloon had been invaded by steerage passengers, and even by members of the crew, but discipline was for once a second
ary matter in the eyes of Captain Neilson, and their fire was all for the insolent intruder who had dared to blame him aboard his own ship. The carpenter had to fight his way through a small, but exceedingly dense, crowd, beginning on the quarter-deck outside, and at its thickest in the narrow passage terminating in the saloon. On his arrival, however, the lock was soon forced, and the door swung inwards in a sudden silence, broken as suddenly by the detective’s voice.

  “Empty, by Heaven!” he shrieked. “Hunt him — he’s given us the slip!”

  And the saloon emptied only less rapidly than it had filled, till Neilson had it to himself; he stepped over to the passenger’s cabin, half expecting to find him hiding in some corner after all. There he was wrong; nor did he at once grasp the full significance of what he did find.

  A revolver was dangling from a peg on one side of the cabin — dangling by a yard of twine secured to the trigger. A few more inches of the twine, tied to the butt, had been severed by burning, as had another yard dangling from another peg at the opposite side of the cabin. An inch of candle lay upon the floor.

  The twine had been passed through it: there was its mark in the wax. The whole had been strung across the cabin and the candle lighted before Skrimshire left; the revolver, hung by the trigger as a man is hanged by the neck, had been given a three - foot drop, and gone off duly as the flame burnt down to the string.

  Such was the plan which an ingenious (if perverted) mind had taken several weeks to perfect.

  Neilson rushed on deck, to find all hands at the rail, and a fresh sensation in the air.

  The pilot met him on the poop.

  “My boat’s gone!” he cried. “And the night like pitch!”

  Neilson stood thunderstruck.

  “Did you leave a man aboard?”

  “No; he came up for a telegram for the police in town.”

  “Then you can’t blame me there.”

  And the captain leapt upon the rail at the break of the poop.

  “Silence!” he roared. “Silence — every man of you! If we can’t see we must listen... that’s it... not a whisper... now...” At first there was nothing to be heard but the quick-drawn breath from half-a-hundred throats; then, out of the impenetrable darkness, came the thud, thud, thud of an oar in a rowlock, already some distance away; but in which direction it was impossible to tell on such a night.

  THE LADY OF THE LIFT

  IT was the Man from Winchester who gave her that name: the Man who was Swiss godfather and godmother to half the hotel. Whiskers and the Suffragite, the Meenister and the Limit, were a few more of his baptismal efforts; but it is only fair to state that he called us these things behind our respective backs, whereas we called him Man to his impudent little laughing face. The one exception to a redeeming rule was the Lady of the Lift, who delighted in her nom d’hotel and made much of its inventor. The Man was in fact a sufficiently healthy and hearty specimen of the young barbarian; but though doubtless a very small molecule at Winchester, where he had but finished his first term, it must be confessed that there was a good deal of him at the Alpine haunt to which his people had brought him for the Christmas holidays.

  It was one of those spots to which half-one’s friends flock nowadays in the latter part of December, to return with the complexions of Choctaws all too early in the New Year. A group of gay hotels, with as many balconies as a pagoda, and an unpopular annex in the background, had broken out upon a plateau among the dazzling peaks. Snow of an almost incandescent purity and brilliance rose in huge uncouth chunks against a tropically blue sky; the softened shapes of mountains lay buried underneath; and snow clung in great gouts to the fir-trees, that bristled upon the lower slopes like darts from the blue. You had to freeze for hours on a sledge, skimming dizzy ledges, climbing all the time, to reach this fairy fastness from the nearest railway. But it was worth the freezing, even before the journey’s end, if you made it by moonlight, as just before Christmas one did. And the hotels when you reached them (if only they really had reserved those rooms) were quite wonderfully managed and equipped: surely there are volumes in the fact that there was a lift in even one of them, a lift with a crimson velvet seat, where a poor lady could sit and watch the fun at nights, of it but not in it, and so not in the way at all, though accessible to chivalry not otherwise engaged.

  The poor lady! That was her life in the hotel; and everybody was sorry for her except herself. It seemed such a sad-case. The exact trouble was unknown — she never spoke of herself — but its outward sign was a crutch. And her face was so young, and her hair so gray! But younger than her face was the whole spirit of the Lady of the Lift: her humor, her courage, her breezy outlook on life, her keen interest in everybody and everything. And the cruel part of it was that nature had cast her in athletic mould, that in fact she had excelled at those very sports which she was now constrained to watch at a distance from the bedroom balcony where she took her modicum of open air.

  Madame Faivre she was called to her face; and her English was just a little broken. But who she had been formerly, who or what her husband, or any other detail of her sad life, nobody knew or even pretended to know, with the possible exception of old Whiskers, and he was both vague in his ideas and chary of expressing them.

  Old Whiskers, so dubbed by young Winchester on account of a somewhat feline or Teutonic moustache, was an Alpine veteran who climbed in summer and curled in winter. He was understood to improve the equinoxes in some scholastic capacity at Oxford. The personality of Madame Faivre quite worried Whiskers for a day or two after his arrival; he could have sworn that he had met her somewhere, and so he told her with the easy modest sociability which made him another favorite himself.

  “It was before I gave up skating,” said Whiskers. “I can’t help feeling that we’ve skated together, somewhere or other.”

  “It must have been many years ago,” said madame. “I also have given it up quite young. I have had a weak ankle. I have to thank that ankle also for this crutch.”

  Whiskers felt embarrassed. He was in fact the first to be informed that the lady’s infirmity was originally due to an accident; but he kept the information to himself, and discussed Madame Faivre no more with his hotel acquaintances. He felt he had already committed a minor breach of tact and taste; he made amends with many little deferential attentions; but still the vague memory, the elusive association, would cause him a certain amount of mental exasperation whenever they met, as a riddle of no consequence that yet refused to be given up.

  Then an old skating friend turned up, and was turned away, without so much as seeing the rooms he had engaged seven weeks before; but he did insist on having his lunch, and parenthetically he solved the mystery for Whiskers at a glance.

  “Remember her! Why, of course I remember her; don’t you?” And he whispered the maiden name for which Whiskers had racked his brain in vain.

  But Whiskers was getting to the age at which memory begins to fail; he was not immediately the wiser.

  “I seem to remember the name at Davos one year,” he said. “Or was it St. Moritz?”

  “Davos. I should think you did remember it!”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one reason you used to skate with her every day; you were about the best pair there.”

  “So I told her!” cried Whiskers.

  “You don’t mean to say she denied it?”

  “Certainly; no recollection whatever, so she said.”

  The old skating friend came up to Whiskers’s good ear. They were waiting in the hall for lunch, and the lady as usual was waiting in the lift, had indeed gone up and down in it more than once rather than relinquish her favorite seat. But now she hung at anchor a few inches above the level of the hall, exchanging the sprightliest and kindest glances with all the hungry, bright red faces, just in from sun and snow.

  “Of course you know why she denies it?” whispered the old skating friend.

  “I suppose she’s forgotten me too.”

  “Not s
he!”

  “How long is it ago?”

  “Seven or eight years, I suppose.”

  “That’s it, then; we’ve both aged.”

  “She has, if you like!” said the skating friend. “She looks twenty years older — might be another woman altogether — but she isn’t, by Jove! Don’t look, but she’s got her eye on us now.”

  She had, though she was rallying her young Man at the same time, and he her with perfectly unintelligible Winchester repartee. Whiskers begged his friend to refresh a treacherous memory.

  “Well,” began the other, “it was such a terrific scandal at the time...”

  Whiskers did remember the whole thing. It made him grave. His friend, about to be turned back through the snow, vowing an Englishman’s vengeance in the Times, and really only distracted from his grievance by seeing and hearing about the Lady of the Lift, now took a mordant satisfaction in pouring vitriolic comments on the forgotten scandal into the good ear that Whiskers was lending him perforce. That ripe gray scholar listened grudgingly; more than once he begged for a lower whisper; and it was through him that the pair stayed behind in the hall when all the rest had trooped off to luncheon.

  “It’s a good many years ago,” the old boy said. “She must have married and settled down since then, and had a hard time of it at that, I’m afraid; it’s most awfully bad luck our crossing her path like this. She shall never know I spotted her. Women should always have another chance. And this one has been smashed up into the bargain: an accident, I gather: probably one of those infernal motors. I must look after her a bit more. Remember her? Do you remember her rocking turns and three-change-threes?”

  Old Whiskers was as good as his word; at least he was as good to the poor lady as she would allow him to be. Now he remembered her better every time he saw her, and marvelled more and more at the change which a few short years had wrought in her. At sixty he himself looked to all intents and purposes as good a man as he had been at fifty-three; the salt had gained upon the pepper in his hair and moustache; his mirror advised him of no graver change. Yet here was a fine athletic girl transformed into a decrepit elderly lady in little more than a lustrum. Nemesis had handled her very roughly; her present case was sufficient punishment for any past, even for that which seemed incredible when one looked upon the bright young smile under the beautiful silver hair. Old Whiskers was not sure but that it was an improvement, that hair!