Part 30 (1/2)
”Heaven knows, I have!”
”Why?”
”Do you really wish to know?” in a voice new to her ear. ”Do you wish to know why I want money, lots and lots of it?”
She dropped her arms and turned. The tone agitated and alarmed her strangely. ”Why, yes. With plenty of money you could devote all your time to writing; and I am sure you could write splendid stories.”
”That was not my exact thought,” he replied, resolutely pulling himself together. ”But it will serve.” By George! he thought, that was close enough.
She did not ask him what his exact thought was, but she suspected it.
There was a little shock of pleasure and disappointment; the one rising from the fact that he had stopped where he did and the other that he had not gone on. And she grew angry over this second expression. She liked him; she had never met a young man whom she liked more. But liking is never loving, and her heart was as free and unburdened as the wind. As once remarked, many of the men with whom she had come into contact had been bred in idleness, and her interest in them had never gone above friendly tolerance. Her admiration was for men, young or old, who cut their way roughly through the world's great obstacles, who achieved things in pioneering, in history, in science; and she admired them because they were rather difficult to draw out, being more familiar with startling journeys, wildernesses, strange peoples, than with the gilded metaphors of the drawing-room.
And here were three of them to meet daily, to study and to ponder over.
And types as far apart as the three points of a triangle; the man at her side, young, witty, agreeable; Cathewe, grave, kindly, and sometimes rather saturnine; Breitmann, proud and reserved; and each of them having rung true in some great crisis. If ever she loved a man . . . The thought remained unfinished and she glanced up and met Fitzgerald's eyes. They were sad, with the line of a frown above them.
How was she to keep him under hand, and still erect an impa.s.sable barrier! It was the first time she had given the matter serious thought. The joy of the sea underfoot, the tang of the rus.h.i.+ng air, the journey's end, these had occupied her volatile young mind. But now!
”I am dull,” said he gloomily.
”Thank you!”
”I mean that I am stupid, doubly stupid,” he corrected.
”Cricket will be a cure for that.”
”I doubt it,” approaching dangerous ground once more.
”Let's go and talk to Captain Flanagan, then.”
”There!” with sudden spirit, ”the very thing I've been wanting!”'
It was of no importance that they both knew this to be a prevarication about which St. Peter would not trouble his h.o.a.ry head nor take the pains to indite in his great book of demerits.
But all through that bright day the girl thought, and there were times when the others had to speak to her twice; not at all a rea.s.suring sign.
CHAPTER XVIII
CATHEWE ADVISES AND THE ADMIRAL DISCLOSES
One day they dropped anchor in the sapphire bay of Funchal, in the summer calm, hot and glaring; Funchal, with its dense tropical growth, its cloud-wreathed mountains, its amethystine sisters in the faded southeast. And for two days, while Captain Flanagan recoaled, they played like children, jolting round in the low bullock-carts, climbing the mountains or b.u.mping down the corduroy road. It was the strangest treasure hunt that ever left a home port. It was more like a page out of a boy's frolic than a sober quest by grown-ups. That danger, menace and death hid in covert would have appealed to them (those who knew) as ridiculous, impossible, obsolete. The story of cutla.s.s and pistol and highboots had been molding in archives these eighty-odd years.
Dangers? From whom, from what direction? No one suggested the possibility, even in jest; and the only man who could have advanced, with reasonable a.s.surance, that danger, real and serious, existed, was too busy apparently with his b.u.t.terfly-net. Still, he had not yet been consulted; he was not supposed to know that this cruise was weighted with something more than pleasure.
Fitzgerald waited with an impatience which often choked him. A secret agent had not so adroitly joined this expedition for the pleasure of seeing a treasure dug up from some reluctant grave. What was he after?
If indeed Breitmann was directly concerned, if he knew of the treasure's existence, of what benefit now would be his knowledge? A share in the finding at most. And was Breitmann one who was conditioned of such easy stuff that he would rather be sure and share than to strike out for all the treasure and all the risks? The more he gave his thought to Breitmann the more that gentleman retracted into the fog, as it were. On several occasions he had noticed signs of a preoccupation, of suppressed excitement, of silence and moroseness.
Fitzgerald could join certain squares of the puzzle, but this led forward scarce a step. Breitmann had entered the employ of the admiral for the very purpose for which M. Ferraud had journeyed sundrily into the cellar and beaten futilely on the chimney. It resolved to one thing, and that was the secretary had arrived too late. He was sure that Breitmann had no suspicion regarding M. Ferraud. But for a casual glance at the little man's hands, neither would he have had any. He determined to prod M. Ferraud. He was well trained in repression; so, while he often lost patience, there was never any external sign of it.
Besides, there was another affair which over-shadowed it and at times engulfed it.