“They have ruined the mizzen-mast,” the man muttered. “Here’s wishing you good health, sir,” he added, helping himself very sparsely to the soda water. “I hope if ever I find myself again in a scrap like this that I shall be next a gentleman who holds his gun as steady as you, Monsieur Hamer. You had ‘em scared for a minute or so, sir, the whole lot of them.”
Berard also helped himself to a long drink, for now that the excitement was passed he was obviously depressed.
“It’s the one thing, this, in the navy.” he explained to Hamer, “that we dread. Everything in the shape of mutiny reflects back on the officers. I wouldn’t have believed it with some of the men. There was one I shot with my own hand. He was only married last week and going on leave to-morrow. There’s plenty of this sort of stuff at Toulon, of course, but I never dreamt there was any of it here or I would have curtailed leave.”
“Don’t you worry, old chap,” Hamer said, patting him on the shoulder. “You don’t suppose I shall forget that you turned up here in the nick of time. I think they meant business—that little deputy fellow especially. They wouldn’t believe that we had not got the papers or whatever it was they were searching for.”
“Well, I’m glad you made straight for the Bird of Paradise,” Berard declared. “There was something suspicious about the way she was lying so quietly. They put my searchlights out of order, but I knew that was a strange boat alongside. What the devil were they after?”
Hamer Wildburn shook his head. “I think I know,” he said.
They mounted the companionway at the sound of oars. A junior officer saluted and reported to Berard.
“The fighting is all over, sir. Ten of the chasseurs were killed and two gendarmes wounded, and one of our men got a bullet in his leg. Twenty of that Communist rag-tag and bobtail are stretched out there, half a dozen or so escaped, and the rest are for Antibes and Grasse prisons. It is all quiet now, and the place locked up.”
“What about Mademoiselle Tanya,” Wildburn asked.
“Madame Crestner drove her off directly the shooting began. They will arrest her when they want her.”
“If there’s nothing more I can do,” Berard observed, holding out his hand to Hamer, “I had better be looking after my own little troubles. We have brought you back your second matelot—Jean. They simply locked him up and refused to let him come back. Shall I leave you an escort?”
“Not in the least necessary,” Hamer declared. “I think they’re all satisfied that what they want is not on the Bird of Paradise. Besides, they’re pretty well cleaned up for the night.”
He strolled on deck and waved his hand to Berard as he stepped into the pinnace. The sea had gone down, and the moon was beginning to shine dimly through the misty bank of clouds. There were several stationary vehicles still at La Garoupe, but the place itself was in darkness. Neither did the château show any sign of life. The lights along the coast road had been extinguished. Only the lighthouse still flung its long beam across the bay over the dark woods and out seawards. Hamer descended the companionway and entered the saloon. Auguste was standing there with a somewhat puzzled look upon his face.
“I ask myself, monsieur,” he said, taking from under his arm a pair of disreputable and ragged blue trousers. “It could not have been by any chance this rubbish that all them people have been smelling around after?”
He lifted the trousers up by the legs and shook them. Odd rolls of paper, what seemed to be the stubs of many empty cheque books, a package of letters, and a larger packet of more formal-looking documents stamped with the seal of the French Republic, were shaken out on to the table. Then, last of all, with a black seal upon the envelope, was a letter addressed to three names:
“A Monsieur Edouard Mermillon, Monsieur le Baron Albert de Brett, ou Monsieur Eugene Chauvanne.”
Hamer stared at them in amazement. He had remained cool throughout a somewhat disturbing night, but he suddenly felt the walls of the little saloon spinning round him. Auguste scratched his head.
“I emptied this rubbish out of those places in the mast months ago, and laid them away in this old pair of trousers,” he explained. “Me not being able to read, they seemed just like rubbish.”
“Just rubbish.” Hamer repeated.
Like a man in a dream he rose to his feet. He held the bottom of one of the legs of the soiled, disreputable trousers in one hand and he passed the other to Auguste, then one by one he picked up the alarming-looking pile of documents and papers which lay upon the table, and dropped them down into their crude hiding-place. In addition to the papers which had first caught his eye, there were many others full of equally potent significance. There was a batch of perfumed and coroneted letters. There were at least a dozen independent cheque books—some not half-used. There was one loose cheque, the figures of which seemed to reach from one end of the blue oblong strip to the other. There were hastily scrawled letters. There was a parchment-bound cipher with a marvellous key. And there were deeds with great seals upon them—black and red and green. In they all went, and still scarcely realising what he was doing, Wildburn rolled up the trousers and secured them with a soiled white canvas belt. He held the bundle under his arm and turned towards Auguste. His knees were none too steady. Auguste looked at him anxiously.
“I have done wrong, monsieur?” he asked, in a tone of deep concern.
Hamer shook his head, but found speech difficult.
“I do not know, Auguste,” he answered truthfully enough.
As the dawn was breaking Auguste, with a cup of tea on a tray, made his way into his master’s cabin. Still fully dressed, still with his hand upon the butt of his revolver, Hamer was lying in a semi-recumbent position upon the bed.
“Monsieur has not slept?” Auguste asked disconsolately.
Hamer waved the question away. It seemed unimportant.
“You have not spoke to Jean?” he asked. “Not I, monsieur,” Auguste declared.
Hamer swung himself into a sitting position. He looked at Auguste as no other man had ever looked at him in his life.
“You have seen no one else this morning?”
“Not a soul, monsieur.”
“Swear on the head of your mother and the souls of your children that you will open your lips to no one.”
“I swear,” Auguste, who was a religious man, said solemnly.
Hamer Wildburn drank his tea and went back to bed.
“Sit on the steps outside, Auguste,” he directed. “Call me in an hour. If anyone approaches the boat wake me. You understand?”
“I understand, monsieur,” Auguste promised.
CHAPTER XXIX
Table of Contents
Monsieur Leon Crotieres, member of the Académie Francais, and perhaps the most distinguished of modern European historians, paused in his labours and looked downwards from the grounds of his villa into the Bay of Garoupe. He pointed to a very graceful thirty-ton yacht below which was flying the flags of France and the United States.
“My task,” he said to his wife, who was also his secretary, “would be an easier one if that boat, like the singing barge of Ulysses, could talk.”
His wife laid down her pencil. The summer heat was making her indolent, and she, too, was glad to pause.
“Explain, mon cher,” she begged. “What is there that boat could tell you that you do not know already?”
“Perhaps nothing,” he admitted, “and perhaps a great deal. You knew that she once belonged to a famous, or rather an infamous, financier who was supposed to be responsible for that terrible period of speculation and corruption on a gigantic scale which very nearly brought France to her knees a year or so ago?”
“Yes I remember hearing that.”
“There was a rumour that this financier had built on board a marvellous hiding place where he kept letters and bank books, and all sorts of evidence which would have destroyed the reputations of half the famous men in France if they had been found.”
“I remember that,
too,” she acknowledged. “It made the drama of his murder so intensely interesting. The police broke in and shot him on the morning of the investigation.”
Her husband nodded absently.
“Supposing they had not,” he meditated. “Think how differently the history of France during those few years might have been written. If ever there was a case of evil having been done that good might come of it I should think that it was there.”
“You have theories?” she asked He smiled and lit a cigarette.
“I have theories,” he admitted. “My dear, to be a true historian you must have imagination. You are permitted theories but you may not write about them. I figure to myself that that marvellous secret hiding place existed, inaccessible unless the Bird of Paradise had been almost disembowelled. I picture to myself that on the night of the Communist riot down below, the time when Tanya was singing and stirring the blood of all Frenchmen—her Communist songs in secret, her exquisite lyrics before the world—well, I picture to myself that at that time, when there is no doubt that the Bird of Paradise was seized by Communists and was almost broken to pieces there in the harbour, these secret documents really were discovered.”
“Are you going to write this,” his wife asked eagerly, “because it sounds as though it might become immensely interesting?”
He smiled again.
“My dear, I could not write it because it is only a theory, and if I knew it for a fact, still I should have to follow the path that those far greater men than I have trodden.”
“You mean forget?”
“I mean destroy. Sometimes I see it almost in a mirage, and I have hard work to convince myself that it was not the truth.”
“Tell me at least, Leon, what you mean.”
“I believe honestly,” he declared, “that either one of the Communists themselves, or someone amongst the defending party, who drove them away, really did discover those secret records.”
“Then what has become of them now?”
“How can one tell? I can sometimes imagine myself going through that agony of thought and doubt—what to do with them?…There have been whispers about so many great men. Supposing they had all been implicated!”
“Supposing they had. Would it not have been well for the whole truth to come out?”
“I will tell you what would have happened. Tanya knew—she who had planned that Communist meeting here, planted Communists on the gunboat, gave that great party down on the beach—she knew well what would have happened. She knew well that there would not have been a man in France who could have taken up the government, or even have served in a Government. The people had suffered enough already. Their nerves were stretched to breaking-point. They would have been up in arms in every city in France. France would have gone Communist, and Communism, you know, my dear, which is all very well in theory when poets talk of it, and dreamers play the men of action, would really ruin body and soul of any country which was governed according to its axioms.”
“But she recovered even after the Revolution,” his wife reminded him.
“This would have been worse. To begin with, she would have been overrun at once by Germany. She would have become a vassal State. She would have become the scorn of the world. I picture to myself that some man was great enough to scatter that evidence to the four winds of heaven and place their fates—the fates of the guilty—back in their own hands with a pledge to work out their redemption.”
Madame Crotieres moistened the tip of her pencil between her lips. She was an extraordinarily pretty woman, and in her eyes at that moment there was a light of longing.
“If only you could have written this,” she murmured. “If only you could have been the discoverer.”
He shook his head.
“By chance, my dear,” he said, “I know who was on the yacht with that young American the day after the fighting, and he, I think, was the one man great enough to have been the saviour of France. You yourself, my dear, when our work is completed, should be able to divine the truth. You will never know it any other way…This morning, you see, the sun is hot and the wind is sweet, and one has fancies. Presently we must go back to our work and write of the day when General Perissol became President of France.”
“Darling,” Mrs. Hamer Wildburn pouted, “why were you in such a hurry to get away from the château this morning? I had heaps of things to do, and I am not at all sure that I have not forgotten half the lunch.” Hamer looked up to the skies. One hand rested upon the wheel of the Bird of Paradise, and one arm was around his wife’s waist as she sat in the pit by his side.
“My dear,” he confided, “your father awoke this morning in a most determined frame of mind. All this summer he has been praying me to accept the Hermoine. This morning I fled to escape argument.”
She nodded understandingly.
“It would give him so much pleasure, Hamer, if you would accept it. You know what he thinks of you. There is nothing in the whole world good enough.”
He drew her a little closer. Auguste had just looked round. The anchor was up. Jean was busy with the sail. The wind was fair for their cruise. Watching the sails closely Hamer swung the Bird of Paradise a few points to leeward.
“Your father has already given me the most precious thing in the world, Lucienne,” he declared. “I don’t want anything else. We have quite as much money as is good for us, and since you won dad’s heart so completely we have to face the certainty of becoming multimillionaires some day. I have heaps of work when I can find time for it, and we have that marvellous youngster for a plaything. How could I be happier with a two hundred ton yacht? If you want it—”
“I want the Bird of Paradise and you,” she whispered with her lips perilously near to his ear. “I think I wanted them from the day I thought I was going to drown and you pulled me on board.”
More dignified in presence than ever, as upright as a year or so before, the handsomest president Europe had ever known—Perissol—stood arm-in-arm with his wife in the gardens of his lighthouse hill villa. His face was more deeply lined because all the cares of a prosperous nation at times rested upon his shoulders, but his mouth had softened and the light in his eyes was the light of a lover’s happiness.
“Louise,” he exclaimed, “look!”
They saw the Bird of Paradise heeling over a little on her way out to sea. They saw Hamer Wildburn standing up at the wheel and Lucienne by his side.
“The first day of our holiday, my dear. Isn’t that a wonderful sight Look at them. The happiest couple in the world, I should think, and perhaps I am the one man in the world who knows how he deserves it.”
His face became more thoughtful. Louise’s arm tightened upon his.
“What lie did that day—the decision he came to—has made not only France, but Europe, what it is,” he said almost reverently. “His father would have given him twenty millions, the wealth of empires, for the contents of those old trousers. He could have become the most famous figure in history. He could have had the crazy populace of France at his feet, and all the time he could have satisfied what the Anglo-Saxons are too ready to call their sense of honour. My dear, it was a miracle. He saw the truth.”
“Please go on, Armand,” she begged. “It is almost the first time you have ever talked like this.”
“I have felt too much,” he admitted. “I have felt that what came of his action was too wonderful, that I might wake one morning and find it a house of cards and the earth quaking again beneath our feet. What he did will live as a great deed, as France will live. Look at everyone. There is Montelimar. Nothing would drag him on the Bourse. Nothing would tempt him back into politics. He remains, though, one of the greatest philanthropists in France, always ready to do his duty to his country—a true patriot. Look at Edouard Mermillon. He has brought France back again into the front rank of the nations. He has made us famous throughout Europe as a country whose policy is dignified and stable and whose honour is unsullied. There is not an enemy who does not
recognise Mermillon as one of the greatest of modern statesmen, and he himself—you do not know it, but I do—he is a poor man. Every penny that ever came dragged up from that foul pit of corruption has gone back again—and more. He lives on the pension of a Civil Servant, Half his salary even goes towards the past. There is no yacht for Mermillon, none of the great luxuries of life, but if there could be a man whose thoughts, whose day by day life I might envy—which there could not be—it would be his. Chauvanne—well, he went where he was headed for…Lavandou. Ah, he was a hero, but nothing will bring him back again, and he was the first who made the sacrifice. Look at the men of whom France can boast to-day.”
Her lips stole up to his.
“And their President,” she murmured. “The real inspiration of all that happened. If only that beautiful head of his would come down a little oftener from the clouds.”
He stooped and kissed her. The Bird of Paradise rounded the point, the west wind in her sails, the line of foam behind. The President and his wife continued their morning walk along the path thick with pine needles.
THE END
THE ZEPPELIN'S PASSENGER
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
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