The Sea Wolves

Front matter

"THE MOON FLOODING PICTURESQUELY UPON THE WILDNESS OF THE BAY" (p. 101)

CASSELL and COMPANY, Limited LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE MCMVI

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

I. THE WITCH-FINDER

"She's Spanish," said the American, Kenner; "you can bet your bottom dollar on it—and look at her daughter."

The other man, a clean-shaven, long-faced, dark-haired Englishman, sitting before a well-chosen déjeûner on the terrace of the great hotel at Monaco, did not betray any desire to contradict the assertion.

"I've been looking at her daughter for half-an-hour," said he, "and if she'll be pleased to go on breakfasting, I'll make it an hour."

The American laughed cheerily, with a great boyish laugh at the rejoinder, and took a cigar from a lizard-skin case.

"Wal," he remarked, "I've seen worse on canvas than the little girl with the straw hat and the streamers; but fix your eye on the maternal property, and I guess you'll shout glory! Why, man, she must be a hundred and four, and young at that!"

"They made her out fifty in the smoking-room last night," remarked the other, "so she's got the benefit of the doubt, any way. It's a case of Beauty and the Beast, and both of them of the feminine gender. The proprietor here will spin yarns about the pair until you wink with listening. He kept me up on cheroots and bad whiskey until three this morning, and if I hadn't got a head like a warming-pan, I'd pass the tale on."

"Does he know where the old girl hoists her flag when she's at home?"

"Broadly—that is, just enough to trouble the post-office. He says she's four walls and a precipice which she calls a castle somewhere in the north-west of Spain. Her profession, occupation, calling, or business, as they style it on the parish census, seems to be equally solitary—she's a wrecker, and she lives on the vitals of ships. What do you think of that?"

"I think he's a handsome liar!"

"But he believes it; and he gave me a list as long as your arm of the properties she has acquired by what the policies call peril of the sea. Look at her now: she's eating oysters with her fingers, you'll observe, and swearing at the waiter in two languages. Isn't there a prima facie case for the assumption?"

The American, who, like the other, was a man of some thirty years of age, fell to stroking his wavy yellow moustache thoughtfully. He did not seem able to look away from the table, luxuriously shadowed by many palms, whereat the Spanish woman and her daughter were sitting. Of these the mother demanded the more immediate notice. She was a woman gaunt and hag-like when your eyes fell upon her face, but of prodigious stature when she rose to walk, having the stride of a man and a gait which would have won applause upon a recreation ground. But age had worn furrows in the brown, hide-like skin of her ferocious countenance, until nothing but her features was discernible at the first; and these, which once had given ornament to a remarkable face, now stood out upon it to disfigurement.

As for her daughter—the little Inez, they called her in the hotel—then eating fruit with youthful recklessness, while the woman at her side was breakfasting off oysters and champagne, she was the contrast which gave to the picture its relief of welcome light. Her hair was dark with the rich sheen of Southern strength; her eyes were black and vivacious; and her face was piquant and beautiful, even after Northern traditions. Those who knew anything of her said that she was eighteen; and in this she had cheated the quick maturity of the land of Alcaldes and of garlic, for she did not look a day more, while her manner had all the childish unrest and the vivacity of an English boarding-school Miss. In truth a stranger family never sought the hospitality of Monaco, or brought yacht over the unsurpassably blue waters of the tideless sea; and the interest of the American, Kenner, and of the listless Englishman, Arnold Messenger—commonly known as "The Prince"—was entirely justified, even to the assumption that the crone-like woman had a past, and that her history was not to be told in the market-place.

Some of these thoughts were alive in Kenner's mind as he sat devouring his cigar and continuing to watch the woman and her daughter. The morning was glorious, for the sun danced with sparkling light upon the still Mediterranean, and shone from the white villas and the rocky promontory as it shines in the Riviera at the nod of spring, bearing full beams upon palm and aloe, and the glorious crannies of flowers which blossom with the salt spray upon them. Men in dazzling "blazers" moved in and out upon the terraces; the breeze, of exulting freshness, bore the strains of dreamy music upon its breath; a few yachts rode without motion under the shelter of the height of towers; tropic luxuriousness of nature seemed to have pushed winter from her hold, and to have come with a rich store from the very heart of Africa. It was not a morning to think of gloom; but the immovable touch of depression suddenly held the American, and he could not shake it off.

"I tell you what. Prince," said he, breaking his chain of silence after many minutes, "if I sit here watching that hag eat oysters—she's had three dozen already—I shall go to sleep and dream she's sticking pins into my figger. She makes me think I've been out on Bad-Lands."

The Prince looked up in astonishment.

"You'd better turn witch-finder!" he exclaimed: "the new Mat Hopkins and the crone of Monaco! I can see a deputation to put her through the water-cure."

"You've the laugh of me right along, but that's not it. Did you ever know that I'd worked the second-sight trade and made a hundred dollars a week in a barn-storming tour through the States?"

"You're clever enough," replied the other, "but I didn't know you'd ever done any thing so honest."

"Wal, a man must have his recreation, and I took mine with mediums; you try it when you're down to a dime."

"That's about my point now, though I don't see what it's got to do with the woman and the oysters."

"Every thing, Prince; and look here: I'm cleaned out if ever I had a clearer reading2"

"Of what?"

"Of the hag and of ourselves."

The Prince lighted a cigar, the smoke hiding the jeer upon his lips.

"Go on," said he.

Kenner gave his answer with great deliberation, but he wore the air of the most serious man alive.

"That's exactly what I'm going to do," he remarked; "and in five years' time you can remind me of what's been said. In the first place, I've met that woman before; in the second, I've got to meet her again; and at the next meeting she will best me or I shall best her; but there'll be smart work, and lives lost."

The man was woefully earnest, and his eyes, shining with some excitement, were still fixed upon the crone at the table. But Messenger listened, and laughed aloud.

"Kenner," said he, "you'd have made a better comedian than ever you were table-turner. Don't you think you've fooled around enough?"

The answer was never given, for the Spanish woman had paid her bill and was leaving the terrace. In another hour she had quitted Monaco in her steam yacht, and nothing but the memory of a grotesque and singular personality remained behind her.

II. THE RECORDER INTRUDES

When Arnold Messenger gave me the bundle of papers from which in the more part this narrative of an episode has been put together, he forgot, at the same time, to present me with any facts in his past which would help the biographer of a very singular man to do him complete justice. I knew him in Montevideo as one who had played for a very great stake at no distant date, but had lost nigh all he had in the throw, even to the unquestioning friendship of the young man, by name Hal Fisher, who then accompanied him. Under such circumstances the making of crooked paths straight and the removal of stumbling-blocks was a task which I could accomplish but partially, and with no measure of complete satisfaction. Of the man's youth or boyhood I could learn little, save that he had been sent down from Magdalen College at Cambridge, and had left the university without taking a degree. The after years of his coming to manhood seem to have been spent in indolent luxury; and even in exploits which, but for the financial advocacy of his uncle, a rich rubber factor in Grantham, would have led to his acquaintance with the criminal law. Such a fate passed him by, and that it failed to overwhelm him may be set down both to his remarkable, if misdirected, intelligence, and to this succour of which I have spoken.

During his wanderings in London two years after he left Cambridge he had met the lad who, when I first encountered him, passed as his brother. The boy had befriended him in a street brawl, and, mutual confidences being exchanged, a very strange and inexplicable intimacy had come about. Hal Fisher was the son of a coffee merchant in Liverpool. He had suffered much—his mother dying at his birth—from a brutal interpretation of paternal duty which his father expounded to him; and at the age of fourteen he had quitted the private school in Edgbaston, Birmingham, where the aforesaid apocalypse was developed fruitfully, and had come to the city, as many have come, hoping, fearing, with no friends, no knowledge, no plan, no prospect. On the very evening of his arrival a chance curiosity led him to press into the heart of a crowd which had gathered—as British crowds will —to see one man set upon by five; and, being led instinctively to the defence of the minority, he joined heartily in the fray, and found himself shortly after in the rooms of Arnold Messenger, where he told the grave, thoughtful, sympathetic stranger the whole history of his life.

The result was a friendship which endured unbroken for nearly forty months. Fisher had much learning for his years; he wrote a capital letter, he had read many books. And here you will note a strange freak of fortune, which placed so fine a lad in the company of one of the most plausible and most accomplished in London. Arnold Messenger at that time—and after, as I fear—got meat and drink only by unfailing trickery. He found it mighty convenient to use the powers of one who never questioned him, who gave him faithful service, who had no plaguing curiosity—above all, one who deemed him in some part a hero, and betrayed for him an ardent boyish affection. The man, who had never evinced a regard unto that time even for a dog, was led to reciprocate the attachment in a generous way. He found himself acting the part of an elder brother. He shielded the boy from any participation in his dangerous ventures; he had pride in the thought that Fisher believed him to be honest; and he spent his money for the lad's good with a generosity which proved that he had two sides to his character.

This, then, is the somewhat reserved and priestly-looking man whom we find a loiterer at Monaco in the company of Kenner. His friend, the American, wore the reputation of riches, and had brought his yacht to the Mediterranean solely in search of pigeons to pluck, and schemes—honest or otherwise—to pursue. But fortune had not smiled either upon him or upon Messenger. They lost heavily at the tables, they were banned by the elect, they could not run down a single fool who would give heed to their multifarious schemes. For the Englishman the immediate future was so dark that he contemplated a thousand and one schemes by which he might delude trusting hotel-keepers, and quit Italy for a new campaign. Yet the spring of his knavish inspiration remained dry; the waters of roguery refused to flow.

This diminuendo of hope had just been struck when the pair encountered the Spanish woman and her daughter Inez. They watched her leave the town in her yacht, her ostensible destination being Genoa; after which they loitered for an hour about the quaint little harbour, and then returned, at Messenger's request, to hunt up the boys. Of these I have spoken sufficiently of Fisher, now a lad of seventeen; but of the other, Sydney Capel, a young fellow of twenty-four, I learned but little. Fisher had met him at Monaco; in his account of himself he said that he was a clerk in the firm of Capel, Martingale & Co., the financiers, of Bishopsgate Street, his uncle being head of the house, and reckoned a man of much substance. He was quite a boy still in habit and achievement, and the lads rowed and sailed together every day to their mutual satisfaction. When Messenger and the American found them on the morning I am writing of, they were in spurs and breeches, hot from a gallop, and already reducing the abundance of fish, flesh, and fowl which served them for déjeûner. And while they talked, which they did unceasingly, they never for a moment relaxed the grip of knife and fork, or gave the waiters a "stand-easy."

"I tell you what, Prince," said Fisher, attacking a dish of wild strawberries and cream with particular relish, "that road to Mentone is about the grandest bit I've yet done in explorations. I never saw any thing like those carouba-trees in my life; and as for cypress and euphorbia, why, you can revel in them! We saw the Corsican snow caps again this morning—grand they were in the sun, just like the mountains in a 'Percy', and as clear as a photograph—eh, Capel?"

Sydney Capel, who admitted with reluctance that beauty could be found four miles from Charing Cross, answered unpoetically, and with full mouth—

"Good old Corsica!"

"That's just where he's such a brute," continued Fisher, quite disregarding the animalism of the observation. "I show him a hill all alive with grey olives and lemon-trees, and he says that it reminds him of Regent's Park! I believe the only thing Capel cares for in the universe is a hansom cab or a theatre ticket."

"He's only chaffing you, Hal," said the Prince, who smoked with a pleasant smile as he listened to the babble; "if you treat him properly, he'll let you give him a whole essay on heliotrope, and a bookful of facts about the prickly pear."

"Will he?" replied Fisher, looking round for yet a further measure of sweet sustenance. "You don't know what an unartistic beggar it is—all facts and figures, like a calculating machine. What do you think, now? He's going back to London to-night to lug Heaven knows how many kegs of gold to St. Petersburg!"

The American had been reading during this talk, but he looked up sharply at the words. The Prince, too, put down the paper he held in his hand.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Just what I want to know," continued Fisher; "I call it rot—why, it only seems yesterday that he came here!"

"Must you really go, Capel?" enquired the Prince with sudden interest.

"I'm afraid so; you see, twice every year our house sends some hundreds of thousands to St. Petersburg in the matter of the loan we got for Russia. My uncle likes me to be one of the two that look after the business, and so I'm going back."

"That's a queer job," remarked Kennel, with a delightfully assumed indifference. "How many of you round up the dollars, did you say?"

"Only two of us," said Capel, lighting a cigarette and lolling back to look away down the coast-line to Bordighera; "you see, there's no danger."

"Of course not," interrupted Messenger suddenly; "I suppose nobody ever knows when the money is going."

"Exactly—we have a special train from Fenchurch Street to Tilbury, a special cabin or tug from Tilbury to Flushing, and then we go right through to the Russian frontier."

"Do they give you a great time out yonder?" asked Kenner.

"By Jove! I should think they do! I was trotted all over St. Petersburg like a grand duke when I went there last winter; I never ate so much in a week that I can remember."

"So I should fancy," said Kenner, sinking suddenly back into his chair and taking up his book.

"By-the-way," said he, as if in after-thought, "I may skirmish a while in your old city after this flower-show here—what's the number of your street, if I'm passing?"

"I've got Capel's address," interposed Fisher suddenly; "we're going to dine together when I get back."

"That's right," said the Prince, looking hard at Kenner as he spoke.

They did not question the lads further, nor even look at them, but had great occupation in the causeries of current French newspapers which lay about on chairs and tables in pictorial profusion. The contaminating example of silence seized upon the others—a musical silence, during which the leaves of the date-bearing palms swayed musically in the sea-breeze, and the melodies which Glück made floated up from terrace to terrace, to be lost in a crescendo of chatter and movement, or to merge with the whispers of the wind to which the multicolored buds were opening. So full of seductive rest was all the environment of lake-like water and olive-capped hills that to survey it in idleness, to draw deep breaths of intoxicating freshness, was sufficient pastime for the restless or the wanderer. Even the boys, given to mad desires to make this bill or that cape, to ensnare the unnameably poor fish of the Mediterranean, to do any thing but vegetate, suffered it for a whole hour before the mood took them to round the Cap d'Ail and inspect the point of Villefranche. The idea was no sooner suggested by Fisher than Sydney Capel gave it an immediate imprimatur; and in the wealth of his self-satisfaction cried with one of the five Italian words he knew: "Andiamo! there's just time for an hour's spin, out and back. I say, Kenner, can we have your boat?"

"Why, certainly," said the American. "I guess the Prince and me don't hanker after sprat-fishing this watch—eh, Prince?"

"Don't consider me," replied the Prince quietly; "I'm going into the hotel to write letters."

"Then you'll want me?" cried Fisher dolefully.

"Not a bit of it. I've only got to tot down one or two things, and you're better out than in. We shall see you at dinner."

"Yes; Capel will have time to bolt something before he sets out on that money-grubbing business of his. We should be back by five."

They went off arm in arm toward the harbor, where the American's steam yacht Semiramis lay, and Fisher took the opportunity on the way to make a somewhat significant remark upon his friend and patron's scholarship.

"Poor old Messenger!" said he; "I fancy him blundering through a dictionary without me. I never knew a man write such a fist or spell so badly in all my life!"

"And yet they sent him down from the 'varsity without a degree," interposed Capel with malice.

"That's true; but he's the best chap alive for all that. He's been more than a brother to me; and there's something else in the world besides spelling."

He always consoled himself with this reflection, which was the growth of an honest friendship; but upon this afternoon the Prince had scant need of his sympathy. He progressed without his amanuensis to his satisfaction; for the truth was that he had no business of letter-writing at all. The moment the boys were out of hearing he had put his paper down, as Kenner had done; and the men, each desiring the other to begin, waited with a slight, but unusual, restraint upon them. This was but the restraint of an instant, neither boasting of any substantial mock modesty; and when once he spoke, the Prince had meaning in his voice.

"Kenner," said he, "I've a fancy to smoke a cigar out past the lower town. Are you that way?"

"I was going to suggest it," replied Kenner, with the frankest air possible; "let's get."

They moved from the terrace, and skirted round the harbour to the Mentone road, walking sedately, and without uttering a single observation, until they had left the effervescence and the voices of those who served tables behind them, and were upon that perfect highway which is one of the continuing glories of the Riviera. There, but for a handful of loiterers coming from the olive-clad promontory of Cap Martin, they had no company; and the sun being almost in the zenith, they made yet a slower measure of progress. Again, as at the hotel, Messenger was the first to speak.

"Kenner," said he of a sudden, as he stopped and began to use his stick upon the hard road as a man uses a burin upon a block—"Kenner, that money could be acquired."

The American blew a great circle of smoke from his lips, and looked at the other full in the face.

"You've made an observation," said he, "for which I've been looking for the last ten minutes."

Messenger ceased to engrave unnecessary hieroglyphics upon the wayside when he had got the answer, and walked on briskly for a while, as a man whose active mind compels activity in his limbs. When he stopped again, it was at a fall of the road where the hedge was all ablaze with a burden of flower and fruit, and a little cascade of crystal water shot out a thousand lights, as of unnumbered jewels. There was a jutting out of the grass bank here which made a natural seat under a canopy of wisteria and laburnum, and the men went to it by a common impulse, and began to talk more freely.

"What I want to ask myself," said the Prince, resuming the broken conversation at the point he had left it—"what I want to ask myself is this: How comes it if these clerks—you can't call them any thing else—are sent twice or three times a year to St. Petersburg with some tons of money, that no one of our friends has ever had the mind to try his luck with them?"

"That's nat'ral," interrupted the American; "but who's going to say that they have heard of it? I've got a head pretty full of items, but this is a cablegram to me. You don't suppose the dude's people are going round to all the newspaper men with the tale: 'Here's five hundred thousand off to St. Petersburg again; come and have a straight talk about it.' They keep it under lock and key; that's their chart of safety, as any mule could see."

"I quite follow you," said Messenger, whose hair was streaming back from his forehead in the fresh breeze, and whose eyes shone queerly, as if reflecting the ardent thought of the keen mind behind them; "yet, when I really think of the matter, I can remember that I have heard the tale before. All these financial houses send bullion in big sums to the Continent at one time or other, and it's rare that they've any other guard than a couple of trusted clerks."

"And why should they?" asked Kenner, to whom reflection brought some disappointment; "why should they? Who could interfere with them? You've got to leave sticking up trains to our boys; it's played out in your country, I reckon. Even Red Rube himself wouldn't have taken it on, passage paid!"

"All that's very true," said Messenger, "but it's premature. At the present moment I am putting a very simple question to myself. Let's suppose that a man of some intelligence came to hear that Capel, Martingale & Co. were sending half-a-million to Russia say in three months' time. We'll presume he's got money behind him, and is a man of big ventures. Naturally it would strike him that there's a weak spot in the arrangement somewhere, and that a clever hand, with time before him, should be able to lay it bare. I'd like to bet a hundred that I'd find it with five minutes' thought."

"Maybe," said Kenner, shaking his head as one who has no belief, "maybe; but I'd like to wager on the other thing. Not that you ain't smart, Prince—I don't know your fellow in the States—but it's just this: I don't believe there is any weak spot. Why, figure it out! They mail the money by a special car, by a special steam-boat, and another special car. Where are you to scoop the jack-pot if—you've got a whole bank behind you?"

"The weak spot," said Messenger with great deliberation, "is the tug. If the man that I have spoken of had the work in hand, he would make it his first business to square the skipper of the tug. After that his course would be easy."

"How do you make that out? What could they do with a tug full of money between Harwich and the Scheldt? By gosh! you've the quickest head for bad conclusions that I've tapped yet! Don't you see that the packet would be cabled as missing to every port in the Channel, and stopped away this side of Ushant light? It's as plain to me as the hilltop yonder."

"Because you haven't brought any grip on it. The further I go into it the easier it seems. Let me give you the whole business in a few words. The man I have mentioned would, to begin with, leave this place to-night, and follow this Sydney Capel to London. There he would associate with him closely (taking rooms in his house, if possible) for the next three months. He would use what mind he had to the making of a friendship; and the leisure from this occupation would be given to the promotion of a good understanding (bought at any price) with the skipper of the tug who generally crosses with the money. It is no great strain to imagine that this man might find important business in St. Petersburg at the very moment when Sydney Capel next left with the bullion. For him to get a permit to go through by the special and the tug would be no unreasonable thing. I can imagine, too, that if he had a friend with a fast steam yacht, and if this friend met the tug by agreement in the North Sea, the way would be clearer. Do you follow me thus far?"

"In a bee-line!" replied the American, who smoked with a fury begotten of excitement.

"Well, we can see all the rest without a long bill on thought. The skipper of the tug has men to depend on aboard with him; the clerks, if they are not bought, get a couple of raps from a revolver-butt; the tug is scuttled, the money is shipped upon the yacht, and she steams north to reach the Atlantic. After that it's a mere pleasure trip."

He ceased to speak, the quick glow of interest passing from the face it had lighted as the sun passes from a cloud. But Kenner rose quickly from the grass bank, and with blanched face and dancing eyes cried—

"Prince, you're a genius, by thunder!"

"Do you think so?" asked Messenger. "But I was only giving a suppositional case. You'd want a cast-iron man to take the business on, and money behind him."

Kenner answered the suggestion with his customary and simple exclamation: "Let's get!"

The afternoon was passing, the west being already touched with that arc of deeper crimson which is the herald of twilight, and there were few wayfarers upon the road to Monaco. For some part of the way the men walked, as they had come, in a meditative silence, but upon the threshold of the town the American stopped of a sudden, and asked his companion the abrupt question—

"Can you leave here to-night?"

Messenger displayed no shadow of surprise that it was put to him. He had been waiting for it since they had left the alcove of the orchids; and he answered it with another interrogation—

"If I could get five hundred and the promise of a couple of thousand in a month, I'd see my way."

"It's a big sum, Prince," urged Kenner laconically.

"And a big thing. I don't know that the figure isn't below the mark. Of course it would be share and share whatever's got as between man and man, and this money I want can go against the account when the time comes. You would bring the Semiramis to London directly I wire for you."

"That's fair-sounding," replied Kenner, "and I don't know that I've got any thing against it. I'll chew it in my mind for half-an-hour, any way."

"Take all the time you like," said the Prince; "to-morrow will do as well as to-day, though something might be got if a man followed this youngster to London to-night. By the way, if I go, you'll have Fisher with you for a couple of months' cruise—that's understood?"

"Why, certainly; but he'll be ashore later on?"

"Ashore—I fancy not! Would you be having him shout my history in the streets when my back's turned? If we go, he goes; that's as certain as the sun is sinking."

They entered the garden as they spoke, and went to Kenner's room. Two hours later Sydney Capel left for London; and Arnold Messenger, commonly known as "The Prince," went with him.

III. ON BOARD THE "SEMIRAMIS"

At one bell in the first dog—the day being Wednesday, and the month July—the steam yacht Semiramis rounded the South Foreland, and dropped anchor among a fleet of wind-bound vessels which lay off the white town of Deal. She had taken a pilot from the Solent, for her skipper, Roger Burke, a huge man from San Francisco, knew nothing of English waters, and the main part of the crew was made up of niggers and of lascars. She had for mate a slim, quiet man, named Parker; and her chief engineer was a Frenchman, whom she had picked up during a long cruise in the Pacific. Yet she had been built in the Thames for the American, Jake Kenner; and in the matter of speed, or, indeed, of design, she had few equals among pleasure boats. I have heard it said that she was one of the first yachts to be equipped with a tubular boiler and with twin screws; but her owner had gone to Thorneycroft's to buy one of the fastest vessels floating, and the firm had built for him a craft with all the rakish beauty of a cruiser combined with the speed and hull of a torpedo-catcher.