Conspiracy (England)/Chapter 12

dawn, still overcast, but with rain hardly more than a fine misty drizzle, the Voyageur plowed into Queensport harbor, swept past grim old Fort Jefferson, and slowed toward the long pier of the Ionic Yacht Club—the pier whence she had sailed on the strangest of her many cruises.

With her tender in tow, she came alongside the pier, eased to the stringpiece, and stopped, as engineer Hazeltine tossed a cable over a mooring pile.

“Go below now, and stay there!” commanded Wingate, from where he stood beside the seaman at the wheel.

“Yes, sir,” the engineer replied. “I will, as soon as I get another hawser over, aft. But it ain't right, sir. I tell you I had nothing at all to do with any trouble between you and the captain, sir!”

“No argument, now!” snapped Wingate. “Get that other hawser over, and look sharp! Then go below!” He gestured eloquently with the revolver in his hand. “It's no use for either of you to try to help Jaccard, or to untie him. I'll shoot the first man that sticks a nose out of that companionway! Get a move on, there! Jump!”

When the engineer, grumbling vain pleas of innocence, had vanished below, Wingate turned to the seaman.

“Go up to the clubhouse and tell the manager to phone for a couple of policemen in a hurry. If the manager's asleep, wake him up, and send him to me! Look alive!”

“Yes, sir,” replied the seaman, not in the least understanding what it was all about, but too hard-boiled to care much one way or the other. This sort of thing was all in the day's work for him.

He leaped to the wharf and departed at a rolling trot, while Wingate remained grimly on guard, his watchful eye covering the companionway.

An all but deserted city Queensport seemed, at that pallid hour. Few people were visible, except a handful of negroes shuffling along toward a near-by cotton press, a black man driving a mule cart over the cobbles of Harbor Street, and an aged huckster already wheeling his barrow with the sonorous cry:

“Raw craib! Raw shrimp! Get yo' shrimpy raw!”

Wingate gave no heed to anything but the companionway. With his gun ready for business, he stood guard.

If ever any morning dawned on a hard-looking character, it was now. His bare head was all a tousle of wet hair. His face was deeply lined with strain and exhaustion. A scraggle of nearly a fortnight's beard gave him the air of a extraordinarily disreputable vagabond. His flannels—soaked, wrinkled, and shrunk, stained with dirt and ink, rain-washed to motley hues—made him a kind of grotesque scarecrow.

But, withal, a healthy color showed in his cheek, so far as there was room for any color to show. His eye was keen, alert, normal. He had become a wholly different man from the cringing, snarling wreck that had sailed—it seemed ages ago—under the lash of morphine addiction—out of Queensport harbor.

The miracle of all miracles had happened. Wingate, not only cured of morphinism, but hating the accursed drug more bitterly than he hated the devil's self, stood there master of his yacht and of himself, once more a man!

In a matter of five minutes the sailor came rolling back and swung aboard.

“Police coming?” demanded Wingate.

“I dunno, sir; but the manager, he didn't want to phone for 'em. He give me this here letter for you.”

The man extended a sealed envelope.

Wingate took it with mounting anger.

“What the deuce does the man mean by refusing to obey me—me, a club member?” he growled. “What's the idea of writing me a note, when I want the police?”

He thrust the gun into his pocket, ripped open the envelope, and read:

Wingate stared at this, thunderstruck. A score of questions seethed in his brain. What could it mean? How could his wife know anything of what had happened? Where was she? In Queensport? And if in Queensport, why?

Hard on the heels of all this, a taxi swooped up to the club and a woman got out and ran down the driveway toward the wharf. She wore a little red toque and a raincoat; and if ever a woman looked agitated, it was this one.

“Good God!” cried Wingate, his heart giving a great leap. “Constance! You—here?”

$he laughed unsteadily as she reached the wharf. Forgetting all about the companionway, Wingate climbed over the rail, jumped to the stringpiece, and ran to meet her.

“Constance! What's the meaning of all this?”

“Are you all right, Marty? Tell me you're quite all right!”

“I should say I was! But, my Lord, what a time I've had—mutiny, and fighting, and everything! Jaccard, my captain, got me to an island—locked me up—” Wingate grew more or less incoherent. “I broke out—had to fight 'em. I've got the steward marooned—got Jaccard tied up and locked in his cabin. And if I can get the police—”

Constance laughed, a bit wildly.

“God love you, Marty, I knew you would! I knew it!”

“Knew what?” he stammered. “What are you talking about? Where did you come from, and—”

“From the Bella Vista Hotel, right up the street. I've been there a fortnight, waiting—getting a wireless every day—”

“Wireless? But—”

“But nothing came this morning. The last I heard—”

“Good Lord! Are you crazy, or am I?”

“I've been so frightened, Marty—oh, just terribly! I didn't—didn't know but you might have been killed, er something; but the lookout I'd hired, at the club, sighted the Voyageur twenty minutes ago. He phoned the hotel—they woke me up—and here I am!”

Wingate fumbled for words.

“You—you were waiting? But what—”

“Listen, Marty!” She grew suddenly calmer, with a supreme effort. “You may never forgive me, but I don't care. What does that matter? What does anything matter, but that you're cured? Oh, I can see that, well enough—you cured! And the cost? It's nothing! If I'd spent every dollar I had in the world—”

“Constance! Tell me—”

“I made that all up about Judge Furchgott. I told you a deliberate lie—a wicked lie, to worry and scare you. The will hasn't even come up yet; but I had to scare you, some way! And the letter about that Florida property—I made all that up, too!”

“Scare me?”

“About money—so that you'd realize that you couldn't spend thousands a day, and wreck everything.”

“Scare me? My God, what riddles! As if that pirate Jaccard, and that crook Zanelli, hadn't scared me enough! They made me more mad than scared, at that; but oh, the knock-out I gave them! It was a pippin! And what I'll do to them yet!”

Constance had to laugh, though she was pale and her mouth was trembling.

“Poor fellows!” she commiserated. “They must have had an awful time, going up against you. I'm truly sorry for them!”

“Sorry for them—for a couple of arch crooks? Are you crazy?”

“But I've paid them well. It's cost me heaps and heaps of money; but oh, Lord, how well spent!”

“Will you stop raving and talk sense? I've got to get the police, and—”

“There, there, Marty! It's all right. No police at all, dear. Don't you see? You dear old stupid! That terrible morphine. You never, never would have stopped, so long as anybody was trying to make you—so long as your heart and soul weren't in the battle to stop!”

“But, what the—”

“You had to be made mad by scorn and insults—fighting mad, killing mad. You had to hate! Only a whip of scorpions could chase that morphine devil away; but the devil's gone now. I can see that! It's gone forever! Oh, thank God!”

“You mean—you mean to say,” stammered Wingate, passing a fight-stained hand over his eyes, as if awaking from a dream, “you mean it—was all a—”

“You haven't really hurt good old Jaccard, have you? A prince, he is. Oh, what a scheming and toiling I had to get him into the plan, and to get you to hire him! And Zanelli—you haven't injured him? I hope not! They were taking awful chances, Marty, against such a fighter as you are when you're mad enough! Do you know who Zanelli really is? He's Dr. Enrico Spezia, from Rome and London—one of the biggest narcotic specialists in the world. He masqueraded as a steward, to take charge of this case, and—”

Wingate's bearded jaw fell. He stood staring at Constance with blank eyes.

“My Gawd!” muttered the sailor on the yacht's deck. “All these here swell guys is a bunch of nuts. I never seen one yet that wasn't crazy as a bug!”

Wherewith, shaking his head with disapproval, he gnawed a man-size chew from his plug and turned away, disgusted.

Wingate seized his wife's wrist and held it in a grip that hurt; but that hurt, proving his strength, was a joy to her.

“What?” he cried. “A put-up job? A conspiracy?”

She laughed assent; and now with perceptions that for years had been strangers to him, he saw how graceful, how feminine, how infinitely to be desired she was. Old memories and half forgotten intimacies leaped in his heart. He trembled subtly.

“You don't have to forgive me, Marty,” she said, her eyes very brave. “You can hate me and cast me off, if you want to. It doesn't matter about me. What matters is you—just you! You're well again, all cured and your old self—I thank my God for that!”

There were tears in the steady gray eyes that tried to smile up at him. His own grew wet.

“Yes, I've come back,” he said huskily. “It might have killed me, but—”

“I knew that, too. I'd rather it had killed you, Marty, than to have had you live as you were. I'd rather have had you go down fighting than stay a slave! It was the one big chance, the only chance, and I took it.”

He laughed grimly.

“I took some chances myself, to get back to you. I tore up a floor, waded a mangrove swamp, smashed a boat, seized a yacht, knocked out a couple of men, and did some shooting; but I got back to you! And they didn't do all the curing, either. There was something else—”

“There was yourself!”

“Yes, and more than that, Constance. There was this!”

He thrust a hand into his breast pocket and brought out a photograph. Crumpled, rain-soaked, sodden, and discolored with ink, it was a mere wreck and mockery of a photograph. He held it out to her.

“This!” he repeated. “And look at the poor thing now!”

She laughed—her happiest laugh in years.

“Just as it is, Marty,” she told him, “that bit of paper is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen!”

“Not the most beautiful thing I've ever seen! How about the original? But”—his voice held a warning—“you know what you've been guilty of?”

“Loving you, Martin—loving you enough to risk everything on one throw of the dice!”

“More than that—conspiracy! Conspiracy on the high seas! And do you know what the penalty's going to be?”

“Banishment?”

“No—imprisonment for life!”

“Where, Marty?”

His arm went around her.

“Here, girl!” he answered, as he drew her close.