“Never mind that. Tell them what they want to know and they’ll release you at once. They are even willing to pay your passage home. What do you say?”
“I say, ‘No!’”
“But—listen—”
“I am grateful to you, Mr. Coburn. But—” She hesitated. She thought of the murdered Manchu woman, of Pailloux’s and De Smett’s flagrant duplicity, of Winchester’s pompous brutality. She was indignant at these people’s lack of fair play, and she made up her mind that she would hurt them, even if it were dangerous for herself. They were after the vase for some grave and vital reason. She would not tell them where she had hidden it, or would they dream of searching Pailloux’s private safe for it, “Mr. Coburn,” she continued, “all this is something to me.”
“What?”
“A matter of principle.”
“Principle?”
“You are a Virginian, aren’t you?”
“I plead guilty, m’lady,”
“And, as a Virginian, aren’t there certain principles you respect—deep down in your heart—even though the rest of the world may deem them foolish and quixotic and self-hurting?”
“I reckon that’s right.”
“Very well. I am the same way. And one of my principles is that I will not quit under fire.”
“Bravo!” he cried. “I adore your delicious folly. If I weren’t a married man—”
“I am sorry you are,” she smiled, “but so glad for the sake of your wife.” She was serious again. “Listen—”
“Yes?”
Should she tell him about the murdered Manchu woman? The next moment she decided that she would not. The consul, too, would say that it must have been a case of too much champagne. But she told Mr. Coburn she had cabled her father.
“Oh!” he said, “You cabled?”
“Yes.” And, as he looked at her, shaking his head, “What is the matter?”
“I told you martial law has been proclaimed. All cables pass through the censor’s hands.”
“Oh! You think that my cable—”
“Was most likely never ticked off at all.”
“Mr. Coburn,” she said, “won’t you—”
“Please!” he interrupted. “I know what you want me to do, but I can’t. If I send a cable to your father in my private capacity, the censor will stop it, just as he stopped yours. As to my official capacity, I explained to you—”
“Yes. Your oath of office—and the very ticklish political situation, and—” bitterly “—it seems that I am not an American citizen—legally. Oh, it isn’t fair!”
“I am so sorry. I do wish there was something I could do to help you—”
“You can. I want to know something about Mr. Moses d’Acosta and Mandarin Sun Yu-Wen. Do you know them?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Are they influential in Canton?”
“Yes—and no. The local officials do not like them, in fact, hate them, would like to see them dead and buried—”
“Then,” asked Marie, “seeing how unscrupulous these Southern Chinese officials are, why don’t they cause them to disappear?”
“That’s where the rub comes in. D’Acosta and Sun Yu-Wen are too rich, too influential. If anything happened to them—why—heaven alone knows what might come of it. You see, where two are concerned, the Southern republic is really between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
“Good enough! What do you know about Prince Pavel Kokoshkine?”
“What all the world knows—that he is a Russian—an aristocrat—a gentleman—and a former officer in the czar’s army. He puzzles me. He is an imperialist—an aristocrat—and yet here he is in the service of these Southern radicals. It’s beyond me.”
“Where does he live?”
“On the other side of the river, not far from Nan-Hai prison, on the corner of the street of the Leaning Plum Tree.”
“Thank you.”
The consul rose to go, but Marie put her hand on his arm.
“One second,” she begged. “There is a British sailor across the landing. He is in trouble, too.”
“Oh?—Tommy Higginson?”
“You know him?”
The consul laughed.
“We all do in Canton. In trouble—and serves him right. It seems that he has been doing a little private gun-running, and so he has put himself outside the consular jurisdiction and protection. It looks black for him.”
“You can’t help him out, can you?”
“Neither I nor my British col-league.”
“But,” said Marie, “is there a reason in the world why you can’t give him—let’s say—a few cigarettes, just for the sake of humanity?”
“I reckon I can.”
“And—is there any reason why you can’t give him some of my cigarettes? Finally, is there any reason why, being a Virginia gentleman, you can’t turn your back on a lady for a few minutes when she asks you nicely—and although you are the consul, and under consular oath?”
He looked at her significantly; then he laughed.
“Very well,” he said, and turned his face to the wall
She opened her handbag and took out a package of Bostanioglo cigarettes she had bought that morning. Rapidly she scribbled a few words on the inside of the box, closed it again and handed it to the consul.
“Here you are,” she said. “Give it to Mr. Higginson. Tell him the cigarettes are from me. Tell him they are good cigarettes, that they were made in dear old London. Tell him, furthermore, that the advertisement on the inside cover of the box may make him think of home. You understand?”
The consul smiled. “I think I heard the scratch of a pencil.”
“Forget it, please!”
“I will Good-night, Miss Campbell!”
“Good-night, Mr. Coburn! And thanks!”
The consul left and, a few seconds later, the baboo returned.
“Booker T.,” Marie said, “I am going to take a little nap—on that chair there. So would you mind remaining outside?”
“Memsahib, I regret very much, but it is against—”
“I get you, old dear! On the other hand, consider my feminine prejudices and inhibitions. Consider your own sense of delicacy—”
“But—”
“Don’t be a little chocolate-éclair-colored jackass! See—I’ll curl up on that rocking-chair—and,”—suiting the action to her words—“I’ll put it right near the door. You can stay just beyond the threshold, where you can look at me any time you want to. I am tired, very tired, but I know I couldn’t sleep if you stay here in the room. Aren’t you armed with that big revolver of yours?”
“But—”
“Please!”
She gave him a brilliant smile, and—thought Marie—at last he showed certain signs of strictly male humanity. He bowed.
“Yes-s-s, memsahib,” he replied, and he took his place beyond the threshold while she sat on the chair near the door, imitating a moment later the deep breathing of an exhausted sleeper, but watching carefully from beneath lowered eyelids and listening to whatever might happen on the landing.
There was a silence—swathing, leaden, and unbroken, except occasionally by the creaking noise of a sentinel outside grounding his rifle or the click-clank-click of a metal scabbard-tip being dragged against the stone pavement as the officers of the night watch went on their rounds.
* * * *
Marie glanced across her shoulder at the iron-grilled windows. It was still night, heavy, deep violet, with a froth of stars tossed over the crest of the heavens.
She looked at her wrist-watch. Two o’clock in the morning, she could tell, by the rays of the single electric bulb on the landing. She felt despair creeping over her soul, and, pluckily, she decided to fight it back. So she began to marshal her thoughts as logically and constructively as she could. By this time she had completely dismissed any idea of coming to terms with Judge Winchester and Pailloux a
nd whatever political party and influence they represented. These men were intriguing, unscrupulous, thoroughly evil. But what about Moses d’Acosta, the masterful, idealistic Turkish Jew, and about Mandarin Sun Yu-Wen? How did they come into the focus of this dark-coiling adventure? It seemed that they were both dangerous enemies of the Southern radicals—thus, logically, both working for the same end. Too, they seemed to have genuine liking and sympathy for each other. Yet, she remembered, there had been that undercurrent between them as if, somehow, they were opposed one against the other; and both had been anxious about that little Chinese vase which had been the real root of her troubles—which had begun with an overdue hotel bill and had wound up with her here in a political prison. Then there was Prince Pavel Kokoshkine’s enigmatic figure, and the Chuen to yan of the Temple of Horrors, whom the murdered Manchu woman had mentioned with her dying breath. What did “Chuen to yan” mean? Why hadn’t she thought of asking the American consul? She was quite angry with herself.
Try as she might, she was not able to fit the pieces of the puzzle into a reasonable whole. There was a missing link, and it consisted in her own relation to this mystery—her own and her mother’s. So once more her thoughts returned to the latter. She must have been a Chinese subject, Tatar or Central Asian, but whatever her race and blood, she must have been important during life, even from beyond death.
Marie speculated and wondered. What and who were her mother’s people? There was that uncle of hers, dead, murdered—Who, what had he been? How had he been connected with it all? Quite clearly she recalled d’Acosta’s words:
“Shall we call him your uncle? Or shall we call him Mr. Mavropoulos? Or shall we go straight back into ancient history and call him—ah—what is the old Tatar title he loved so? The Ssu Yueh?”
Mavropoulos! It sounded to her like a Greek name. How could she be connected with it?
“My word!” she thought. “What a mess!”
She stretched her cramped limbs a little and yawned. But the next moment she imitated again a sleeper’s deep breathing as she heard Judge Winchester’s pinchbeck Lancashire accents in the corridor:
“All right, Pailloux. We shall see what the man wants.”
The door being open at a convenient angle and the baboo’s back not obstructing her vision, she saw the two men coming along the corridor, saw them, through a minutely raised eyelid, stop at the door of her room and peer in.
“By Jove!” whispered Winchester. “Fast asleep! Has nerve that girl!”
Then they crossed and entered the room where Higginson was imprisoned.
She heard the judge’s first words:
“You asked for me?”
“Yes, yer ’Onor,” replied the sailor.
“I suppose you have decided to make a clean breast of it, my man.”
“Well, yer ’Onor, I got some valuable information for yer. For a price—”
“Name it!”
“I want yer to release me.”
“I’ll see what can be done. First, the information. About the gun-running, eh?”
“To ’ell with them blanked guns!” came the reply in the picaresque diction of the London docks. “It’s something different—and a bleedin’ sight more important, cully!”
“Oh!” countered the judge. “For instance—”
Marie sucked in her breath. It was now evident to her that the sailor had read and understood the message which she had scribbled on the inside of the cigarette-box.
“Yes, yer ’Onor!” said the man. “It’s about a vase wit’ a funny nyme—’eathenish and chinky—”
“Sssh!” interrupted Winchester.
“Sssh!” echoed Pailloux.
They stepped into the sailor’s room and closed the door from the inside, and again there was silence, while Marie waited, excited, expectant. The message she had written on the inside cover of the box had of necessity been short. But she relied on the sailor’s shrewd cockney sense to supply the missing links, all the more that she had learned from the consul that the man was in real danger and would grasp at the proverbial straw to save his neck. She glanced in the direction of the window. She did not want morning to come before she had her chance. It was still dark enough outside, with just the faintest sign of morning blazing its purple message. Ten minutes she waited, fifteen, twenty, and the purple morning light increased in vividness; it took on a slight tinge of gold and deep red.
“Dear God, help me!” prayers of her childhood, long forgotten, rose to her lips.
* * * *
She waited another five minutes, and then the door of the sailor’s room opened and, from beneath lowered eyelids, she saw Winchester and Pailloux on the threshold, and between them Higginson, who was gesticulating for dear life.
“Stroike me pink,” he exclaimed, “if I ain’t tellin’ yer Gawd’s truth!”
“I do not believe you,” said Pailloux.
“Listen!” continued Higginson. “Call me a sanguinary organ-grinder’s ring-tailed monkey if I’m lyin’ to yer two gents! I tell yer I seen that ’ere vase—”
“Nom d’un nom d’un nom!” interrupted the hotel manager. “Do not name it! Call it ‘the thing!’ We told you before that it is dangerous to mention it by name, that nobody, except the judge and me and perhaps three or four important Chinese officials, know of the thing’s existence.”
“Wot ho! Wot bloody ho!” cried the sailor triumphantly, while Marie blessed his ready mother-wit. “If nobody except yerselves and mebbe ’arf a dozen toffs knows about this ’ere bloomin’—now—thing, then ’ow, in the nyme of me sainted grandaunt Priscilla, can I know about this ’ere syme—now—thing, eh? Don’t yer see that I’m givin’ it to yer straight?”
“Logical!” suddenly exclaimed the Frenchman. “Absolutely logical!”
“Now ye’re talkin’, Mister Whiskerando!” said the sailor. “It’s the truth, don’t yer see?”
“By Jupiter!” admitted Winchester. “I am beginning to believe it myself!”
“Truthful ’Arry—that’s wot me mytes calls me aboard ship!” cut in Mr. Higginson in a splendid outburst of seafaring imagination.
Winchester took Pailloux to one side and whispered to him earnestly. Then he approached the sailor once more.
“My man,” he said, “we have decided that you are speaking the truth. You could not possibly know about the existence of the—ah—thing unless—well—unless you knew. And you described the thing correctly. You know its name. Very well. We shall give you the chance you ask for.”
“All I wants is ten minutes alone with the lydy,” said the sailor. “I’ll myke ’er ’fess up, or me nyme ain’t Truthful ’Arry ’Igginson, gents’ I knows wot to say to ’er! I—” again his imagination surged up riotously and magnificently—“I knows a few things about ’er that’d myke yer ’air turn gray. Let me tell you, gents—”
“Some other time. We are in a hurry to put our hands on the thing.”
“Right-o! Ten minutes with ’er, mebbe fifteen. Alone. That’s all I aisk.”
“Alone?” objected Monsieur Pailloux. “But—”
“I got to talk to her gentle-like first. She won’t spill unless I gets ’er confidence first—and we got to be alone for that.”
“Still, I don’t see—” said the Frenchman.
“We’ll leave the baboo in the room. Oh, yes,”—as Higginson was about to expostulate—“got to be done!” He called to the baboo. “Hey, there, Hurree Chuckerjee!”
The latter approached and salaamed.
“Yes, sahib?”
“Armed, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sahib.”
“Mr. Higginson is going to talk to Miss Campbell for a few minutes, and you’ll stay in the room with them.”
“But—yer ’Onor—” interjected the sailor.
“You can talk to her in a whisper, Higginson. And it’s up to you to watch, Hurree Chuckerjee—understand?”
“Listen is obey, sahib!”
“It’s all right,” Winchester said to Pailloux. “The windows of the room are barred with iron, and there are sentinels in the street.”
“Very well,” said Higginson. “I’ll talk to ’er. And then, if I’m right and I myke the lydy ’fess up, all ye’ve got to do is look for the—now—thing after she owns up—and, gents, she’ll own up soon enough! And then, after ye’ve found it, yell squash that there gun-runnin’ indictment against me and let me go back to me ship—and wot ho for the briny and Liverpool and the barmaids of the Old Crocodile!”
“Agreed!” said Mr. Winchester.
* * * *
A minute later, Marie Campbell simulated surprise and indignation when the baboo took her by the arm, calling, “Ho, memsahib!” and when immediately afterward Winchester, flanked by Higginson and the Frenchman, walked up to her and told her, with a thin laugh, that he wanted “this person, Mr. Higginson, able-bodied seaman,” to have a few minutes’ private conversation with her.
“I don’t know Mr.—oh—” she cried, “whatever his name!”
“Aw—lydy,” cut in the sailor, with every appearance of hurt feelings, “don’t yer remember Truthful ’Arry?” He appealed to the judge. “That’s gratitude, yer ’Onor! After it was me who ’elped ’er to—”
Marie cut in rapidly, afraid the sailor’s imagination might defeat its own ends.
“I don’t know you,” she repeated.
“Don’t you?” smiled the judge.
“But, Miss Campbell,” exclaimed Higginson, winking a watery blue eye at her, “don’t yer recall as ’ow yer told me only larst week—”
“I don’t remember a thing!”
“You will remember—presently,” said Judge Winchester. He turned to the sailor.
“Higginson,” he said, “come straight to my private office when you are through with Miss Campbell. Know where it is, don’t you?” He smiled disagreeably.
“Yes, yer ’Onor. It’s the third door beyond the turning of the corridor, ain’t it?”
“Mon Dieu, no!” exclaimed the Frenchman.
“Indeed, no!” echoed Mr. Winchester. “It’s the fourth door. Be careful! I shall instruct the guards to let you pass.”
Adventure Tales, Volume 5 Page 15