He was dressed in a grey cotton shirt, a jacket and a pair of trousers of canvas, and he wore sandshoes on his naked feet.
“Brandy,” said Mordaunt, and the steward dived down the companion. He came back with a full glass and, lifting the man’s shoulders against his knee, put the glass to his lips. The young man’s face was long, his body where it showed at the neck and breast just bones in an envelope of skin. He took a drink of the brandy, threw back his head on the steward’s knee and coughed.
“A martyr by El Greco, without a martyr’s saintliness,” said Mordaunt, thinking the stranger beyond hearing.
“A dago,” said Hamlin the skipper.
The stranger turned his eyes on Hamlin and said: “Damn your eyes!” in English unmistakable, and fainted away.
Mordaunt gave his orders. “You had better get him below, rub him down with a hot towel, give, him a spare suit of pyjamas, and put him to bed in Mr. Ricardo’s berth with a hot-water bottle. You don’t mind?”
Mr. Ricardo didn’t mind. He was, indeed, fluttering around, trying to help and getting in everybody’s way. Meanwhile a question was troubling his mind as much as he, in his efforts to help, was troubling Craston, the mate, and the steward. Why did the name of the ship, El Rey— “The King” — awaken some vague familiar resonance in his brain? El Rey... El Rey... No, there was no answer.
When he climbed the companion again on to the deck, the light on Start Point had been extinguished, the day had come, and the ketch had borne away upon its course.
“Mind the Skerries’ buoy, sir,” said Hamlin. “The tide’s setting us to the east.”
“I know,” Mordaunt answered; and after a moment or two, Hamlin continued: “A queer thing. That young-fellow-my-lad must have tumbled off the stern of that ship just as she began to cross our bows. The tide brought him straight down on us. A bit of good luck, I should say.”
Mordaunt grinned and shook his head.
“A bit of good timing, I should.”
And with that Mr. Ricardo’s memory began to work. El Rey! He had read about it. Certain States of South America had chartered El Rey — Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia — to carry back to their respective countries some undesirable aliens. She was to call at Spanish and French ports and in England. Then she was to go on with the rest of her passengers to the Baltic and Germany. There lay the explanation of something which had puzzled them, all, but of which no one had spoken. The stranger had a broad black band about his right leg above the ankle, as though a heavy iron fetter had for years bitten into his flesh.
CHAPTER 3
MORDAUNT WRITES A LETTER
MORDAUNT DROPPED HIS anchor in the Dart river above the ferry which crosses from Dartmouth town and the railway station at Kingswear. The morning was clear, but neither town was yet alert to it. Mordaunt felt in one of the pigeon-holes at the back of the deckhouse and drew out of it a plain yellow flag.
“Here you are!” he said and Hamlin took it from his hand. It was the flag flown by every vessel hailing straight from a foreign port, and no one, whether passenger or crew, must leave her until the harbour authorities had given her clearance. Hamlin, the skipper, balanced the folded flag on the palm of his hand. He was thinking that Captain Mordaunt and his Agamemnon had sailed in and out of Dartmouth so often that no one on shore would trouble about his port of departure unless the yellow flag invited him.
“I am to hoist this?” he asked, thrusting out his under-lip.
Mordaunt nodded his head and added slowly, “Yes.”
“You’ve a good deal to do, Captain Mordaunt, haven’t you? You have to lay up the boat, travel to London, settle your affairs for a long absence...”
“Still,” Mordaunt interrupted, “there are rules.”
They were both thinking of the stranger with the black band above his ankle who in the misty dawn had come aboard.
“He’ll have to report, of course, when the Customs men come on board,” said Mordaunt. “I don’t see why I should be delayed.”
Hamlin was still patting doubtfully the piece of bunting in his hand. It was clearly important that Mordaunt should not be held up in the Dart river by regulations at this time. Mordaunt spoke quickly.
“I’ll wake him up, whilst you hoist that;” and Mordaunt had only reached the bottom of the companion when the yellow flag flickered up the mast like a flame.
The stranger, however, wanted no awakening. He was sitting, shaved and dressed, down to his shoes, in clothes which belonged to Mordaunt.
“Your steward lent me these,” he said.
“And he was quite right,” Mordaunt returned with a smile.
A box full of cigarettes and an ash-tray were lying on the table and Mordaunt pushed the box over to the stranger. “Don’t you smoke?”
“Indeed, I do.”
“Then try one, please!”
There was something vulpine in the speed of the stranger’s thin long fingers as they darted towards the box; but it was not so startling as the control which stopped them at the rim of the box and set them tapping out a bar of a tune before they dropped languidly on one of the paper tubes. Yet he was starving for a cigarette! So, at all events, Mr. Ricardo decided, as he sat unnoticeable reading, or pretending to read, an official report taken from the bookcase above his head; and so, too, had decided. He said pleasantly:
“You should have helped yourself.”
The man from the sea shook his head and laughed.
“That would have put me at too heavy a disadvantage.”
He struck a match and lit his cigarette and, as he drew the smoke into his lungs, he uttered a little moan of delight. “Oh...oh!”
He looked at the brand on the tube. “Turkish.”
“Yes.”
The stranger inhaled with his eyes closed. How many years had passed since this enjoyment had been allowed to him? Mr. Ricardo wondered. But, indeed, it was more than an enjoyment, however sensuous. It seemed to take from him the suspicion, the fear, the expectation of an enemy in everyone, which Mr. Ricardo had observed. He sat there smoking, a man repaired. Mordaunt, with a glance of amusement at him, opened a drawer in the table.
“I have got something to say to you — by the way, my name’s Mordaunt, Philip Mordaunt—”
He paused for a moment, and for more than a moment afterwards there followed a disconcerting silence. Then the stranger replied: “And mine is Devisher — Bryan Devisher.”
“Right!”
Mordaunt took from the drawer which he had opened a letter-case and counted out fifteen pounds in notes.
“Before we talk,” he said, “I should be happier if we were on still more equal terms. Will you borrow these from me?”
Upon the white face a flush slowly spread. “Philip Mordaunt, you said?”
“Yes — Captain,” and seeing that Devisher’s eyes were wandering about the cabin, Mordaunt lifted a blotting pad with some paper upon it, placed them in front of him, and added a pencil from the table drawer. He gave the name of a club.
Devisher wrote down the address, tucked the paper away in a pocket, and did the same with the money.
“Thank you!” he said; and as there had been no patronage in the offer, so there was no servility in the acceptance.
“Now!” said Mordaunt. He was sitting on the couch against the saloon wall with its lockers and its high ledge, whilst Devisher was on a chair at the head of the table at his right hand. “Now, the position is this. No one must leave this ship until the Customs officers come on board. They won’t be here probably for another hour. It’s hardly eight yet. But when they do come, you ought to make a full statement to them.”
“I see, yes,” Devisher observed, staring down at the mahogany table. He could not keep the bitterness out of his voice, which already had a natural rasp, but he could, according to Mr. Ricardo, hide thus the savage fury of his eyes. “That I fell overboard, for instance.”
“Yes.”
“Without a passport.”
“Yes.
”
“From the ship, El Rey.”
“Yes.”
It was as evident to Devisher as to Ricardo on the opposite side of the saloon, that “the ship El Rey” meant no more to Mordaunt than information of a merely formal kind.
“With the black mark of a fetter so wide and deep around my ankle, that I am likely to wear it to the day of my death.”
Mr. Ricardo sat up. No, no, he said to himself. Every word up till now had been inspired by the right spirit and used in the right place. But this reference to the chain by the man who had worn it — no, no! A lack of susceptibility to the higher tastes, an indelicacy. Fie, fie, Mr. Devisher!
Apparently, however, Captain Mordaunt was unconscious of any want of tact in his guest. He laughed as frankly as Devisher had spoken.
“That’s your affair. I don’t see how the Customs could make any charge, whether you declared it or not.”
The words were lightly said but not lightly taken. Devisher had so far kept to the same unemotional key, but now he clapped his hands to his face and he shivered like a man stricken with a mortal chill. Mordaunt drew back in discomfort.
“I must tell you,” cried Devisher violently, plucking is hands away from his face; and Mordaunt’s discomfort increased. A scene — he had a horror of it, he had been at every shift he knew to avoid it.
“My name is Devisher, Bryan Devisher, yes. But it’s not the name on my passport in the purser’s cabin on El Rey.”
“Then you give your real name here,” Mordaunt interrupted, but the interruption went almost unheard and certainly not considered.
“I took part in a revolution over there in Venezuela,” the young man rushed on, the words almost tumbling in a froth like a breaker from his mouth. “And it was high time, I can tell you. A revolution was wanted, but it failed. Vicente Gomez, the dictator won, as he always did. I lay quiet up in Caracas, but I was betrayed — and I think I know, too, who betrayed me. I spent six years dragging an iron cannon-ball in the Castillo del Libertador, an island prison in the bay with its cells below the water-line. Six mortal years until Vicente Gomez died. Then we were released. I forget how many tons of iron fetters and handcuffs were thrown into the sea. But after a time, when this ship El Rey was chartered, I was deported.”
To both his auditors the story was true. The white mask of Devisher’s face, which had felt neither sun nor wind for years, bore out his words, apart from the black ring about his ankle. And the horrors which they suggested were stark before their eyes.
“But we have a Minister there, a Consul,” cried Mr. Ricardo.
“You could have appealed to them,” added Mordaunt.
Devisher shrugged his shoulders.
“Not a chance! I hadn’t made myself known to any of them whilst I could. Besides...” and his eyes fell sullenly and, after a moment or two, a displeasing sly smile twisted his face.
But Mordaunt had had enough. The sly smile had put a full stop at the end of all this palaver. Confessions were for the priest in the curtained darkness of his confessional box, not for the tiny saloon of a ketch in the river Dart on an August morning. He rose to his feet.
“No, no!” he exclaimed, and he rang a hand-bell vigorously.
The steward appeared from the pantry forward before Devisher could add another word.
“I want a hot bath, Perry, and then we’ll all want breakfast.”
Breakfast, that was what they wanted. They would be different men with some good hot bacon and eggs and coffee inside of them. He heard the water begin to run from the taps in the bathroom beyond his tiny cabin on his right. He stood for a moment, seized by a fresh idea. He sat down, took a block of notepaper, envelopes, and a fountain pen out of the drawer.
“Yes, whilst I am waiting, I’ll write a letter;” and, pulling the blotting pad towards him, he began to write, slowly, selecting his words, a very still figure, so that no one interrupted him; Devisher perhaps because his outburst had been silenced, Ricardo certainly because he was trying to reconcile this Captain Mordaunt with the Mordaunt against whom he had brushed at so many six o’clock sherry parties. Then he had been a flibbertigibbet of a man, querulous, caustic, defeated, the sort of man who sees others of his age leaving him behind, making their names, and complains, “If only I could find my vocation, they’d soon be surprised.” But now he had authority, he was solidly sure, and it was not because he was captain of his boat and knew how to sail it. Even at Lezardrieux, Mr. Ricardo had discovered serenity and consequently a good-humour in him which were new.
“Well, I shall get to the bottom of that,” he thought cheerfully. For Mr. Ricardo counted himself a very acute observer of character.
Mordaunt had finished his letter by the time when the steward told him his bath was ready. He folded it, put it into an envelope and addressed the envelope. Then he got to his feet.
“You’ll please begin breakfast as soon as it’s brought in. I’m not going to hurry;” and he suddenly turned to Devisher. “You may have many troubles and few friends in front of you, for all I know. I should like to help you because you came to me out of the sea.”
“Meerschaum,” Devisher interposed, “but not half as valuable.”
Mordaunt was not to be diverted.
“But I shan’t be in England. So I can’t. But this man can, if anyone can,” and he handed the letter he had written to Devisher. “He’s old, crotchety, very much eighteen-seventy, but he’s wise, and if you tell him everything, he may throw you another life buoy.”
He waited for no answer. Devisher heard the door of the cabin close whilst he was still reading the address upon the envelope. He repeated the name aloud on a note of perplexity.
“Septimus Crottle, Esq.”
Mr. Ricardo, who had been rent between curiosity and the obligation of gentlemanly reticence, gave a little jump. Devisher seemed to become aware of Mr. Ricardo.
“Do you know him?”
“Septimus Crottle?
“Who else?”
“No, I do not.”
“Yet you jumped when I read the name.”
“Did I?” Mr. Ricardo beamed. He liked people to find significance in his reactions.
“You did, but it doesn’t matter.”
Mr. Ricardo was nettled.
“It might matter,” said he stiffly.
“Indeed?” Devisher smiled as he spoke, but with a polite indifference.
“Septimus Crottle is the owner of the Dagger Line of Steamships,” said Mr. Ricardo.
The indifference passed from Devisher’s face.
CHAPTER 4
“AGAMEMNON’S” BATH
MORDAUNT STRIPPED HIMSELF of his suede jerkin, his high sea-boots, and the rest of his defences against a gale, and slipped into the bath. After the buffeting of sea and wind, the velvet caress of hot fresh water was a delight for a Roman emperor. He shaved in it, soaped his limbs, and emptied his sponge again and again over his head, wondering whether there could be anything as good as living hard and bathing soft. But it was Agamemnon’s bath. It is true that no lady with a meat axe was secretly opening the bathroom door, no lads of the village listening timidly in the road were wailing “Ai, ai! That was a nasty one!” as the axe was heftily administered. But it was still, in its way, fateful. Mordaunt lay and relaxed his sinews and steeped his limbs and closed his eyes — and opened them and closed them again. From far away there was a splash of sculls, the grating of a rowing boat against a ship’s side, and then a voice, thin and small, as though it spoke through a hundred folds of grey silk, but cheerful:
“So here you are, back again, Aggy boy.”
Mordaunt assured himself solemnly that Aggy Boy was not a name.
“I propose to see about that,” and he was apparently still proposing to see about it, when a hammering upon the door aroused him. The steward’s voice spoke urgently.
“Your breakfast’s getting cold, Captain Mordaunt.”
And Mordaunt realised that what was happening to his breakfast
had happened to his bath. He climbed out of it with a shiver, and in a quarter of an hour, and in a shore-going blue suit, he was sitting down in the saloon to a breakfast fresh from the stove.
Mr. Ricardo at the other side of the cabin was smoking a cigarette.
“Do you mind this whilst you’re eating?” he asked, waving it.
“Not a bit,” answered Mordaunt. Suddenly he cried out: “Where is Devisher?
“He has gone, I think.”
Mordaunt rose and called up the companion for Hamlin, and Hamlin came down, contentedly smiling.
“Mr. Devisher?” Mordaunt asked abruptly.
“It’s just like this, sir. The Customs didn’t come on board, knowing of us well, but just passed the time of day. The two gentlemen were down in the saloon, but soon afterwards the — I can’t fit my tongue to his name — the passenger from the foreign ship comes up. I was hauling down the yellow flag, and he asks what he should do now. I showed him the harbour-master’s office by the slipway, and he said he would go and report if he could be put ashore. There was a boatman ‘sculling about for a job So I called him up to the gangway and off the gentleman went.”
Mordaunt looked not too pleased.
“Just like that?” he said. “Without a word?
“Oh, yes, sir. He said you were in your bath and not to be disturbed. He said he’d write to you.”
Mordaunt laughed.
“All right,” he said, and went on with his breakfast. “After all, he has saved us some trouble.”
“And some delay,” Hamlin added quickly. “We should have been kept here all day, telling the same story over and over.”
It was clear both to Mordaunt and Ricardo that the skipper had edged Devisher over the yacht’s side as soon as he got the chance, guessing that the last place Devisher would visit would be the harbour-master’s office, or the office of any other functionary of the port. Mordaunt, however, was really troubled — and once more to Mr. Ricardo’s surprise; Mr. Ricardo could see him at a cocktail party a year ago, overshouting some other gossip to tell his story with a sardonic amusement — lest he had let loose an equivocal person, if not a bandit, on the world.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 151