Pirates' Hope

VI

A SEA CHANGE

With the Nicaraguan coast fairly astern, and the Andromeda picking her way gingerly among the cays and reefs which extend from fifty to one hundred miles off the eastern hump of the Central American camel, we soon made the open Caribbean, and our course was once more laid indefinitely to the south and east. If we were to hold this general direction we should bring up in due time somewhere upon the Colombian or Venezuelan coast of South America.

Watching my opportunity, I cornered Van Dyck on the bridge at a moment when he had relieved the man at the wheel; this on our second evening out from Gracias á Dios. As I came up, he was changing the course more to the southward, and I asked him if we were slated to do the Isthmus and the Canal.

"I hadn't thought very much about it," he answered half-absently. "Do you think the others would like it?"

"The Isthmus is pretty badly hackneyed, nowadays," I suggested; "and for your particular purpose – "

"Forget it!" he broke in abruptly. And then: "It's a hideous failure, Dick, as you have doubtless found out for yourself."

"Which part of it is a failure – your experiment, or the other thing?"

"I don't know what you mean by 'the other thing'," he bit out.

"Then I'll tell you: You thought it wouldn't be such a bad idea to show Madeleine Barclay what a vast difference there is between yourself and Ingerson as a three-meal-a-day proposition; as a steady diet, so to speak, in an environment which couldn't very well be changed or broken. Wasn't that it?"

"Something of the sort, maybe," he admitted, rather sheepishly, I thought.

"And it isn't working out?"

"You can see for yourself."

"What I see is that you are giving Ingerson a good bit more than a guest's chance."

"You don't understand," he returned gloomily.

"Naturally. I'm no mind reader."

While the Andromeda was shearing her way through three of the long Caribbean swells he was silent. Then he said: "I'm going to tell you, Dick; I shall have a fit if I don't tell somebody. Madeleine has turned me down – not once, you know, but a dozen times. It's the cursed money!"

"But Ingerson has money, too," I put in.

"I know; but that is different. Can't you conceive of such a thing as a young woman's turning down the man she really cares for, and then letting herself be dragooned into marrying somebody else?"

"You are asking too much," I retorted. "You want me to believe that a sane, well-balanced young woman like Madeleine Barclay will refuse a good fellow because he happens to be rich, and marry the other kind of a fellow who has precisely the same handicap. It may be only my dull wit, but I can't see it."

"I could make you see it if you were a little less thick-headed," he cut in impatiently. And then he added: "Or if you knew Mr. Holly Barclay a little better."

It was just here that I began to see a great light, with Madeleine Barclay threatening to figure as a modern martyr to a mistaken sense of duty. Did she know that her father would make his daughter's husband his banker? And was she generously refusing to involve the man she loved?

"It ought to make you all the more determined, Bonteck," I said, after I had reasoned it out. "It is little less than frightful to think of – the other thing, I mean. Ingerson will buy her for so much cash down; that is about what it will amount to."

"Don't you suppose I know it?" he exclaimed wrathfully. "Good Lord, Dick, I've racked my brain until it is sore trying to think up some way of breaking the combination. You don't know the worst of it. Holly Barclay is in deep water. Strange as it may seem, his sister, Emily Vancourt, named him, of all the incompetents in a silly world, as her executor and the guardian of her son. The boy is in college in California, and next year he will come of age."

"And Barclay can't pay out?"

"You've said it. He has squandered the boy's fortune as he has Madeleine's. I don't know how he did it, but I fancy the bucket-shops have had the most of it. Anyway, it's gone, and when the fatal day of accounting rolls around he will stand a mighty good chance of going to jail."

"Does Madeleine know?" I asked.

"Not the criminal part, you may be sure. She merely knows that her father is in urgent need of money – a good, big chunk of it. And she also knows, without being told, that the man who marries her will be invited to step into the breach. Isn't it horrible?"

"You have discovered the right word for it," I agreed. And then: "You are not letting it stand at that, are you?"

He did not reply at once. From the after-deck came sounds of cheerful laughter, with Alicia Van Tromp's rich contralto dominating; came also the indistinguishable words of a popular song which Billy Grisdale was chanting to his own mandolin accompaniment. Presently Jack Grey's mellow tenor joined in, and in the refrain I could hear Conetta's silver-toned treble. It jarred upon me a little; and yet I tried to make myself believe that I was glad she was happy enough to sing. True to her word, she had consistently maintained the barrier quarrelsome between us; and Jerry Dupuyster was playing his part like an obedient little soldier.

"You'd say it was a chance for a man to do something pretty desperate, wouldn't you, Dick?" Van Dyck said, breaking the long pause in his own good time.

"I think you would be justified in considering the end, rather than the particular means," I conceded.

"I have had a crazy project up my sleeve – a sort of forlorn hope, you know. But after working out all of the details time and again, I've always weakened on it."

"Perhaps some of the details are weak," I suggested, willing to be helpful if I could.

"One of them is, and I can't seem to build it up so that it will seem reasonably plausible. Of course you know that I'd pay the father out of the prison risk in the hollow half of a minute if I could make it appear as anything less than sheer charity. But I can't do anything like that openly; and if I should do it in any other ordinary way, Madeleine would be sure to find out about it and argue that I was merely lowering myself to Ingerson's plane – paving the way with the money that she despises. And she'd turn me down again – with some show of reason. I am still sane enough to foresee that."

"If Miss Barclay only had some money of her own with which to buy her release from that unspeakable father of hers," I began.

"That would break the combination easily," he said. "And she did have money once; half of her mother's fortune was left to her – with her father as trustee. It went the same way as Barclay's own half, and the Vancourt trust fund."

With Conetta's voice in my ears I couldn't think straight enough to help him much. What I said was more an echo of my own growing determination regarding Conetta than anything else.

"I'd fight for my own, Bonteck; and I'd do it with whatever weapon came handiest," I declared; and then the return of the steersman whom Van Dyck had relieved put an end to the confidences for the time being.

With the sea routine resumed, and the Andromeda once more steaming free and footloose, a night and a day elapsed before I again had private speech with Van Dyck. As before, it was after dinner in the evening, and Van Dyck had sent one of the cabin stewards to ask me to join him in his stateroom. It was a matchless night, and I was lounging with the younger members of the ship's company on the after-deck when the steward came and whispered to me. We were all singing college songs with Billy Grisdale's mandolin for an accompaniment, and I was able to slip away unnoticed.

I found Van Dyck sitting at his table, stepping off distances on a spread-out chart with a pair of compasses, and somehow I fancied that the air of the luxuriously fitted little den was surcharged with the electricity of portent.

"You sent for me?" I queried.

"Yes; sit down and light your pipe," and he motioned me to a chair. "What are the others doing?"

"The young people, with the Greys, are on the after-deck, caterwauling with Billy, as you can hear. There is a bridge table in full blast in the saloon, with Mrs. Van Tromp, Aunt Mehitable, Holly Barclay and Ingerson sitting in. The Sanfords have disappeared – gone to bed, I imagine; and the major is in the smoking-room, guzzling hot toddies."

"Good!" was the brief rejoinder. "Everything quiet up forward?"

"Why, yes – for all I know to the contrary," I answered in some little surprise. "Why shouldn't it be quiet?"

For a moment Van Dyck seemed embarrassed. And his explanation, when he made it, was half halting.

"There has been some little trouble with – er – the crew, you know. Quite likely you haven't seen any signs of it. I – I've been trying to keep it under cover as well as I could."

"Trouble? – of what sort?" I demanded.

"Why – er – the only kind one ever has with a crew; something like a threatened mutiny, I believe."