Читать книгу The White Blackbird - Robert Aitken - Страница 16

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"I could do with a sleep myself!" said Slyne, as he followed the old man toward the mid-ship saloon after Sallie had gone.

"There's no hurry," Captain Dove disagreed. "And—we've Hobson to get rid of first. What the everlasting blazes made you bring him aboard again!"

Slyne darted a grimace of disgust at him.

"An idea of my own," he answered slowly.

"But—you're surely not going to murder him in his bed now!" he added. Case-hardened and unscrupulous though he might be, he had not yet got so far as to contemplate without a seasick qualm the idea of killing any man in cold blood.

He threw himself down on the settee in the malodorous little saloon.

"I'm tired to death of you and your butcher's methods!" said he, regardless of consequences. "Have you no conscience at all?"

Captain Dove, blinking balefully at him from out of weak, red-rimmed eyes, showed all his tobacco-stained fangs: but in an unexpected smile instead of a snarl. The old man was evidently in a much better temper now that he had turned the tables so neatly on nearly all of those who had thought him utterly in their power. It seemed to amuse him to hear Jasper Slyne in the rôle of mentor.

"None at all," he answered amiably. "And—how about you?"

"You can leave me out of your reckoning after this," Slyne declared, the more morose since he knew very well what good grounds the other had for that taunt. "I'm going ashore just as soon as we get to Genoa, and you'll never set eyes on me again. I know when I've had enough—and I've had enough now."

"Not you," Captain Dove contradicted him blandly. "Say when." He had whisked a bottle of champagne out from a locker under the settee, knocked its wired head neatly off on the table-edge, and was pouring the creamy wine out into a glass, with hospitable but steady hand. When the glass was full he stopped, but not till then, since Slyne had said nothing.

He filled another for himself, and drank its contents off in a couple of gulps, produced a box of cigars, and lighted one clumsily. Slyne followed his example in both respects, but more deliberately, and the heady liquor was not without its prompt effect on him.

"What I mean, Dove," said he presently in that grandiose, patronising manner which always rubbed Captain Dove the wrong way, "what I mean is that I've had far more than enough of this rough-and-tumble work. It isn't the sort of sport at all that appeals to a gentleman. And, what's more, I haven't made a penny out of it all."

Captain Dove's eyes began to kindle. Slyne had succeeded, as usual, in touching him on the raw.

"No more have I," he asserted with a fierce oath. "I've barely enough left to pay the port-dues in Genoa and take my ship through the canal; you know very well, too, that I won't be safe till I see Suez astern. For a few tons of coal and some temporary repairs I'll have to trust to my wits. I'm worse off now than I was when I picked you up in New York, with your precious scheme for making our fortunes in Central America."

The flagrant injustice of that reproach was so obvious that Slyne kept his self-control. "Whose fault was it that you were so soft with Sallie as to let her spoil all our plans?" he asked equably, and did not wait for an answer. "And you're far better off at the finish than I am," said he. "Your foolishness has cost us both our chance of a big haul—but you've still got her."

"I've still got her," the old man admitted, if grudgingly. "That's true. I've still got her. And she'll have to pay pretty high, perhaps, for all she's cost me of late. You wouldn't believe, Slyne, how well I've always treated that girl. I couldn't have done better by her if she had been my own daughter. And I wouldn't have believed she'd ever go back on me as she's done of late."

"You don't know how to handle her at all," Slyne asserted bluntly. "You're getting into your dotage. She's outgrown you. And what'll happen in the end will be that you'll lose her too. You're far too grasping."

Captain Dove shook his hoary head with a cunning grin. "If I don't know how to handle her, there's nothing you can teach me," he commented. "And yet you'd give your very eye-teeth for her!"

"It would be the best bit of business you've done for long," Slyne affirmed. "She's cost you far more already than you'll ever make again, and me, too, for that matter. Look what a hoodoo she's been to us all this trip. We might both have been millionaires at this minute but for her interfering with—"

"Avast there, now!" the old man growled savagely. "Don't keep harping on that string, curse you! I know when I've had enough, too. So just keep your head shut about it. And bear in mind, Slyne, that what I say goes, on the Olive Branch, or—it'll maybe be 'Hobson's choice' for you too before we make Genoa."

Slyne gave him back glance for virulent glance, but kept silence, and showed his wisdom thereby. For Captain Dove, in that frame of mind, might very easily have been moved to some insane act of violence. The old man had never before gone so far as actually to threaten his casual accomplice. And even Slyne, who did not fear death itself, did not desire to die in a more unpleasant manner than need be. He sat quiet, searching his nimble brain for some more soothing speech.

"What makes me so hot," he explained, relaxing his scowl as he held out his empty glass, "is that I haven't the money you want for her. You've no idea, Dove, how well I could do with a wife like that. And now—"

"Sallie wouldn't whistle to your teachings now any more than she will to mine—not so well, in fact," Captain Dove declared, accepting the friendly hint, and reached for the bottle. "I wish to blazes that this lame flipper of mine was fit for duty again. See if you can find a fresh bottle below you, Slyne. And, for heaven's sake! talk sense. You haven't the money—and that's the end of the matter."

Slyne, searching under the settee, scowled to himself. He was not for a moment prepared to admit that the matter was at an end, but neither was he inclined to contradict his companion again. It irked him to have to hold his tongue. He approached the subject afresh, from another direction.

"You may not find it so easy now as you think to dispose of her," he adventured. "The world's not so wide as it was, for one thing, and—she's developed a very strong will of her own these past few months."

"Tell me something I don't know," begged Captain Dove. "The world's become far too small to suit me—or you either, Slyne—but I know one or two quiet corners yet where the black flag's better known than the British, if that's what you're hinting at.

"Did you ever hear of the Pirate Isles, for instance? They're not what they used to be, of course, but there's still trade to be done in those waters, in spite of the French. I once met a Chinese mandarin there who offered me a hundred thousand taels for the girl—close on eighty-five thousand dollars. I'm going East again now, and I know where to lay my hands on him when I want to.

"A year ago I could have got rid of her to a son-of-a-gun from Shiraz who tried to do me down over a deal in rifles for Afghanistan, but I wouldn't let her go, to a scoundrel like that.

"The Rajah of—But, pshaw! I've had a round dozen of such offers for her, first and last, all good as government bonds—and a lot more than that like yours, Slyne."

Slyne almost choked over his champagne, but Captain Dove did not seem to notice that.

"And now I'll take the next—of the right sort—that comes along," the old man went on, growing gloomy again. "I've been too particular, I'll admit. I've picked and chosen for her, at my own expense, and always meaning to see her as happily settled as might be. I couldn't have considered her more if she had been my own daughter."

Slyne pricked up his ears. "That's just where the trouble will come in for you," said he. "She's somebody's daughter, and some day she'll find out whose; she isn't by any means so simple as you suppose. Then there will be the devil to pay—out of empty pockets."

He hesitated over an impulse to argue the moral aspect of Captain Dove's expressed intention regarding the helpless girl, but concluded to let that go, since the pecuniary side of it was so much more to the point. "I wonder you don't see," he went on patiently, "how much better it would pay you in the long run to marry her to me, and so be done with all your worries. I'm bound to make money. With her to help me I'd soon be breaking the bank.

"I'm not close-fisted, either; I'm willing to share the profits with you as long as you've any use for them." He held up a protesting hand as Captain Dove would have cut in, no doubt with some caustic sarcasm. "What I'm offering you isn't eighty-five thousand dollars, remember," he finished, "but a free income for life, that'll run into six figures a year—or I'll be vastly surprised at your simple tastes!"

"You'd be more surprised if I said 'done' to any such idiot's bargain," opined Captain Dove, and laughed like an old hyena. "And the sooner you set all such nonsensical projects aside, the better we'll get on together. My pretty white blackbird will never have to fret her heart out in any imitation-gilt cage. And more than that, I heard her tell you not so long ago—I suppose you forgot that the open port below you was just at my ear—that she'd far rather beg in the gutter than marry you!"

Slyne flushed darkly under his tan and darted an ugly glance at his grinning tormentor. He had always plumed himself on his way with women, and Captain Dove's chance shaft had sorely wounded his very sensitive self-esteem. But he still controlled his own barbed tongue and said nothing of the new card he had up his sleeve.

"So be it, then," he agreed, with a somewhat difficult smile. "I can't force you" ("you old fool!" he added mentally) "to take the chance of a lifetime when it's offered you. And, of course, what you've told me now makes all the difference. You've often given me to understand that Sallie's a somebody by rights. Now you say she's only a slave!"

Captain Dove cogitated deeply, and then drank again. The Olive Branch was moving smoothly along her course, leaving a heavy load of trouble always a little further astern. A pleasant sense of security and comfort had replaced the agonizing mental strain of the past few days. The wine he had been imbibing was buoying him up, and he was inclined to be garrulous.

"I've often told you she ought to be at least a lady of title in her own right," he remarked at length, "she's so damned high and mighty with me at times. But—who she really is—I've never told you that, have I, Slyne?"

Slyne shook his head, with assumed unconcern.

"I've never told you that—because I don't know," the old man chuckled explosively.

"I don't suppose it's ever struck you that it might pay you to find out?" Slyne inquired with sardonic gravity, and Captain Dove began to show signs of becoming restless again.

"How the Seven Stars can I find out!" he demanded indignantly. "The trader I bought her from, along with a shipload of niggers for the Sultan of El Merayeh, when she was very little more than knee-high to me—and a pretty stiff price I paid for her, too, let me tell you!—had brought her from the other side of the Back o' Beyond that lies three months away behind the mountains of God-knows-Where. So much I found out from him one way and another, although he could speak no language that I'd ever heard before. And no one will ever be able to find out more. She's my property, by right of purchase. It wouldn't pay even her own father, whoever he is, to try to take her away from me."

"But where was it you ran across her?" asked Slyne, with somewhat too much eagerness. "Oh, all right. You needn't tell me any more than you want to. I'm not in the least inquisitive."

He lighted another cigar, and lay back in his seat as if he took no further interest in that strange story. But in his fertile brain he was seeking some way to turn it to his own advantage. And the obstacles before him merely made him the more determined. For the needy adventurer's restless mind was inflamed by dreams of the future he might achieve with a wife such as Sallie to help him, by the delusion that, once she was legally his, he would succeed in bending or breaking her will to his every wish.

In the smoke that hung about the skylight of the squalid, grubby little saloon, with its two evil-smelling, untended kerosene lamps overwhelming even the odour of two rank cigars, he saw golden, diamond-set visions of such a career as could only end at the very crest of that dazzling society amid which crowns nod in friendly fashion to coronets, which will, on occasion, open its doors as if hospitably to a man with money and brains and a tempting wife. Slyne had more than once in his palmier days strayed boldly over all boundaries into the outskirts of quite august circles, and felt assured that he was fitted to shine among even the most select.

While as for Sallie—he could imagine her at his side, tall and slender, in the very latest mode, but scarcely more than young girl yet, as lissom and shapely as any sculptor's divinest dream of Aphrodite, with her pure, proud, sensitive features faintly flushed under the scrutiny of the multitude to the complexion of a wild-rose at its prime; with her curved, crimson lips, drooped a little as though in appeal against the envious stare of the other women, questioning eyebrows, eyes with the wild wine of youth abrim behind their long, shadowy lashes, alive with strange, lambent lights, like twin rainbows born between sunshine and shower; and, over all, a glory of red-gold hair luridly aglow in the gleam of innumerable electroliers.

His own eyes hardened and narrowed again. A cock-roach crawling along a beam had brought him back to crude matters of fact.

"Does she know—what you've told me?" he tried afresh, with unconquerable persistence.

Captain Dove shook his head abstractedly, and then sat up with a scowl, realising too late that he had admitted more than was maybe wise.

"It doesn't make any difference, of course," said Slyne, to appease him, "since there's so little to know: and she doesn't seem much interested, does she? The upshot is that she's your property; there isn't a court in the world that could say otherwise. And no other claimant could prove his case.

"If you'll take a tip from me, though, you'll see that she and Yoxall don't give you the slip together some fine—" He halted, tongue-tied under the old man's murderous glance.

"You can count him out," Captain Dove asserted, with a cold assurance which very much discomposed his more imaginative companion. "Is that bottle empty too? Then I'll just see to him now, before I turn in. I'm much obliged to you for reminding me."

He rose, still scowling, and set his lips to one of several speaking-tubes let into the bulkhead behind him. "Is that Mr. Brasse?" he demanded. "I want one of those boxes of cigars you have in the engine-room." He set one ear to the tube, nodded, and sat down again.

"You're not going to—do anything rash?" Slyne asked, uncomfortably.

"I'm not going to do anything that would upset an infant in arms—for more than a minute," returned Captain Dove in his mildest tone, and Slyne sprang to his feet with a startled oath as a hatch in the floor beyond the table at which they were sitting suddenly lifted, and in the opening appeared the bald head and stoop shoulders of the sullen chief engineer.

"It's all right. You needn't be nervous," said Captain Dove with a nasty grin. "There are lots of other funny little contrivances you know nothing about on this ship." And Slyne, looking angrily sheepish, returned to its pocket in his white coat something he had pulled out in a hurry, while his tormentor stooped and took gingerly from the engineer the innocent looking cigar box which that individual was holding out to him.

The hatch descended again, noiselessly, and they were once more alone.

"I don't like that infernal fellow," Slyne declared in a sulky voice, "and he doesn't like me—or you either, for that matter. If I were you I wouldn't turn my back on him when there's a hammer within his reach."

"Don't you worry about me," Captain Dove advised in return, and, holding the box to his ear, shook it slightly. "My head's quite as thick as your own—if it comes to hammer-work," he added, in a provoking tone. But that shot missed its mark. Slyne was very much more interested in the cigar box.

The old man set that down on the table, and, stooping, pulled off his shoes. "I don't want Da Costa to notice us," he explained, and Slyne, inspired by a fearful curiosity, followed his example.

Box in hand, but at arm's length, Captain Dove left the saloon, tiptoed laboriously up the steep stair which led, by way of the quarter-deck, to the chart-house behind the bridge, and, stepping out on to the deck with extreme precaution, passed aft into the darkness.

The night was no less obscure now that dawn was near, but he could have found his way about the ship blind, and Slyne crept closely after him, not knowing what to expect, since Reuben Yoxall lay safely locked in one of the rooms below.

Captain Dove stopped behind the canvas shaft of one of the wind-sails which had been spread to catch the scant breeze and relieve a little the atmosphere of the mid-ship cabins. Its base was made fast about the hood of an ordinary deck ventilator.

"Cast it loose for a minute and listen," he whispered to his companion, and Slyne obeyed.

He listened there for a time, and then turned to whisper excitedly to Captain Dove.

"There's something wrong with him," he said. "He's raving. He's down with fever, as sure's I live."

"Let me hear," the old man commanded, and was very soon satisfied.

"Hell!" he ejaculated. "Now, isn't that the limit! There's surely some hoodoo on board this ship.

"Tie it up again, Slyne. We needn't waste powder and shot on him. He's booked out, express, on a free pass—and a damned good riddance, too!"

Slyne was not slow in re-fastening the canvas to the ventilator again. But even then Captain Dove was not done with him.

"Hobson's in the next cabin," the old man remarked, "and we may as well give him his ticket now as later on. We can't afford to let him bolt ashore whenever we make port—and blow the gaff on us both, Slyne!"

Slyne hung back, his gorge up again.

"What are you going to do?" he demanded.

"You do your part and I'll do mine," snapped Captain Dove. And Slyne cast loose the second wind-chute.

Into the wide, rusted mouth of the ventilator Captain Dove cautiously thrust one end of the flat cigar box and pushed that well down its open throat. A muffled click was no more than audible but, none the less, caused Slyne to start apprehensively. And then the old man withdrew the box, tossed it over the ship's side, and, with a hurried whisper to Slyne to make the canvas fast again, scuttled off back to the saloon.

Slyne was not slow in following him, but stubbed his toes hurtfully on his way to the stair and could scarcely repress the curse that rose to his lips. Just then, however, he caught sight of a shadow at the near end of the bridge above, which, he knew, was Da Costa, on watch, and he did not care to be detected in any such dangerous and undignified predicament. When he limped into the saloon below he found Captain Dove seated there, once more sucking at a cigar, head cocked on one side as if listening for something.

"Was it an explosive?" demanded Slyne, almost boiling over at the idea that he had unwittingly been risking his life as a cat's-paw.

"What the blazes are you talking about?" Captain Dove counter-questioned acidly. "And where have you been, eh? I thought you said you were going to bed."

He stared unwinkingly into the other's angry, suspicious eyes. "What's it like on deck?" he inquired. "Any sign of wind yet?"

"You ought to know, you've just been on deck," snapped Slyne.

"On deck!" exclaimed Captain Dove in surprise. "Not me. I've been sitting smoking here since you left the saloon."

Slyne, busy replacing his shoes, thought that over, and sat up again with a sneering laugh.

"Don't forget, Dove," said he, "that, if you ever go back on me at a pinch, that will be the worst day's work you've ever done for yourself. I'm the one who's been sitting here while you've been on deck—and I don't know yet what you went for."

"You'll hear presently," the other informed him, quite unmoved by his threat. "And don't you forget, Slyne, that, if you ever go back on me at a pinch, I've another—box of cigars that I'm keeping for your benefit; I don't think Brasse will fail to look very carefully after it, either."

Slyne blanched a little, in spite of himself, and at that moment a stifled shout came from behind some closed door at the end of the alleyway outside the airless saloon. He moved, as if to rise, but sat still, rigid, his eyes dilated, as a blood-curdling, long-drawn cry reached his ears dully from the distance, and finally died to silence in a quavering agony.

Even Captain Dove was uncomfortably affected by it.

A shrill whistle made them both jump as the sight of a policeman just then might have done. It was the old man who first recovered his nerve.

"That's Da Costa, curse him!" he muttered, and darted a glance of contempt at Slyne as he crossed to the bridge speaking-tube.

"How the devil do I know!" he roared into that, after listening to what his new second mate had to say. "Yes, I heard it. You'd better send down and find out what it was."

He set the whistle into the tube again and turned to Slyne.

"Pull yourself together, you fool!" he said savagely. "This isn't the time to show the white feather. I wouldn't trust—" He stopped abruptly, hearing the sound of heavy feet in the passage as some of the watch on deck came tramping in, and Slyne, who had also heard that, pulled out his handkerchief to hide his tell-tale face.

The footsteps did not stop at the saloon door, however, but went on to the end of the alleyway. And, when Captain Dove at length looked out, one of the men there was still knocking violently at the door of Hobson's room. But he could obtain no answer.

"Better get a hatchet and handspikes, Cassidy," said Captain Dove, "and break the door in. Something must have gone wrong inside."

The panelling soon began to splinter under these drastic measures. A crash told that it had succumbed, and then the two listeners heard the key being turned in the lock.

They strained their ears to catch what the men were muttering to each other. One jumped clumsily back into the passage with a hoarse bark of alarm, and, over the shuffling of feet which ensued, could be heard the soft thud of quick, desperate blows on some substance which muffled them, until one fell on woodwork again and a murmur of eager congratulations succeeded it.

The man Cassidy came along to the saloon door, out of breath but exultant. "Mr. Hobson's stone-dead, sir," said he, extending his hatchet, on whose flat blade lay, black and limp, a long thin snake that looked like a slimy shoe-string. "Mr. Hobson's stone-dead—and that's what killed him. It all but got me too, while I was turning over the blankets."

"Bring it nearer the light," Captain Dove directed, and then bent over it, frowning, while Slyne, at his shoulder, stared at it as if fascinated.

"Huh!" Captain Dove at length commented. "Your luck was certainly in, Cassidy, when you managed to dodge that. It must have got on board while we were alongside the wharf at the Rio. But my luck's out, since I've lost another man—and the ship so short-handed too!

"You might see if you can find a bottle of grog for those lads, Mr. Slyne. And—Cassidy. Just rouse the carpenter out and tell him to tie a fire-bar or two to the body and slip it over the side. We can't keep a dead man on board till morning in weather like this."

Cassidy touched his forelock and went off, apparently quite content with the luck which had left him alive to enjoy his share of the bottle Slyne had handed him. Captain Dove shut the door behind him, and looked contemplatively round at Slyne. His own face was grey. The artificial animation derived from the alcohol he had imbibed was dying away. He looked very old and tired.

He slouched across to the speaking-tube and whistled up the engine-room, while Slyne sat watching him with sombre eyes.

"We've got black-water fever on board now, Brasse," he said in a weary voice. "Hobson's dead already, and the mate's down with it, too. I want you to send one of your men up to see after him. I can't spare a single deck-hand. And I must have some one—or Sallie will be wanting to nurse him herself."

He set his ear to the mouthpiece and, after he had waited a while, spoke into it again.

"That's good," he remarked. "Send him up to the mate's room right away. He'll have to stay there, in quarantine. And whatever he does know about doctoring will maybe help him to save his own life!"