SIR PAUL WESTERHAM BUYS THE CRIME SYNDICATE
Captain Melun was a man used to being hard hit. He was steeled against
cunningly and swiftly-dealt blows, such as he himself administered, but
this declaration of Sir Paul Westerham, that he intended to marry the
Lady Kathleen, took him quite aback.
“Oh!” he exclaimed softly, and his voice had a certain note of
puzzlement and anxiety in it. “Oh!” he repeated, and again he said “Oh!”
The baronet smiled a little grimly in his red beard, but his duck's-egg
green eyes were as serene and as cold as ever.
The three gently ejaculated “Ohs” of the captain had told him much.
His quick brain realised that he had dealt the captain an exceedingly
well-landed blow. Then the baronet's smile died, for, following the
train of his suspicious thoughts, he instinctively grasped and held on
to the idea that just as Melun had been searching his kit-bag for the
purpose of blackmail, so that individual purposed marriage with the
Prime Minister's daughter to the same end.
This notion disquieted him greatly.
It disturbed him so much that the hard eyes hardened. Only the
baronet's friends knew that they sometimes hardened because of the
softness behind their gaze.
Westerham's heart, indeed, rose in revolt against the suggestion that
this man, spurned of the Army, suspected of the clubs, distrusted by
every honourable man, should for a moment presume to reach out and
touch the hand of Kathleen Carfax. Not for such a man as Melun was
the girl with the calm yet, at the same time, troubled face, that had
looked out from the tattered picture and drawn him back to England.
Westerham's brain worked as swiftly as the brain of a woman, as do the
brains of men who, cut off from the electric-lift side of civilisation,
day by day face Nature in its true, maternal, and therefore its
feminine aspect. It was a long guess, but a shrewd guess, and a true
guess, that if Melun had his hopes set on Lady Kathleen, the girl with
the dark hair and steadfast eyes stood in some peril.
The mere thought of it quickened Westerham's blood, and the quickening
of his blood livened his brain still more, so that he watched, almost
cat-like, the glance of Melun's eyes as they followed the placing of
the Lady Kathleen's picture in his pocket.
For a couple of minutes nothing was said. Each man knew instinctively
that he must move to the attack, but realised that a mistake at the
opening of the game might possibly spell disaster.
It was the baronet who broke the silence—it is always the man who has
least to fear that recovers first.
Westerham had pursued a train of thought as bold as it was unerring. It
had come home to him that Melun was not merely a blackmailer, but a
prince among blackmailers. With infinite speed of thought he followed
out his idea, and came to a conclusion which at once suggested and
vindicated his next remark.
“I have never realised before, Captain Melun,” he said, “what a
pleasure it was to meet a perfectly-unqualified villain.”
Captain Melun raised his black eyebrows a shade more obliquely, and his
eyelids flickered. He was, however, equal to the situation.
“Indeed?” he said coolly, though he passed his tongue along his upper
lip beneath his carefully-trimmed moustache. “Indeed? I shall be glad
if you will explain.”
Westerham took a deep breath and laughed almost gaily. “I shall be
charmed,” he said.
He paused a little and then continued: “No man, except one with such a
reputation as yours,” he said, “would dream of regarding Lady Kathleen
Carfax as a possible wife unless he were so equipped with all the arts
of blackmail that he had some reason to hope for his success.”
By this time Captain Melun had got back his composure.
“You seem,” he said casually, “to endow Lord Penshurst with an
exceedingly poor character.”
“Not exactly,” said Westerham. “I endow you with an exceedingly
dangerous one.”
There was another pause, and the two pairs of eyes sought each other,
and the heavy-lidded, slumberous eyes of Melun flickered and faltered
beneath those of the man who had so correctly jumped to a menacing
conclusion.
“I am about to present to you an argument,” continued the baronet,
“which unswervingly follows my present conception of yourself. Long
experience of this wicked world—by which I mean that particular
kind of vulture-like humanity which preys upon better men than
itself—enables me to assume that you are without question a
blackmailer, a bad blackmailer, and a blackmailer of no common type.
“But I have also learnt this, that no blackmailer can stand alone. His
offence is the most cowardly offence in the world. A blackmailer is
always a coward, and a coward is invariably afraid of isolated action.
I am therefore very certain that you do not stand alone in this attempt
to blackmail me.”
Captain Melun's eyes left those of Westerham and studied the
white-painted panel behind the baronet's head.
Sir Paul went steadily on with his pitiless and logical argument.
“I am persuaded,” he said, “that your only motive in leaving New York
was to sail on the same ship as myself, and, if possible, find an
opportunity of buying my silence on some point.
“Possibly you think that in the discovery which we have mutually made
in the past few minutes you have unearthed a fact which may be much to
your advantage. You are wrong.
“On the contrary,” Sir Paul continued, “it is I who have unearthed a
fact which may be much to my benefit, and with your permission I will
proceed to explain to you why.”
Captain Melun slowly shrugged his shoulders and slightly bowed his
head. He realised that it was the baronet's move, and did not propose
to hinder him in the making of it, inasmuch as until he could correctly
grasp Westerham's intention he could make no counter move himself.
“Following therefore,” continued Westerham, “my original line of
thought, I should say that you were the headpiece, the brain-piece, of
a well-planned scheme of crime.”
The faint colour in Melun's face became fainter still. Westerham knew
he was pursuing the right trail.
“Now with such men as yourself—mind, I am not speaking so much from
knowledge as from an intuition as to what I should do myself were
I placed in similar circumstances—it is probable that you have
sufficient intelligence, not only to rob your victims, but to rob your
friends.
“Another piece of life's philosophy that roughing it has taught me
is that the robber is always poor. I come, therefore, to the natural
deduction that you are hard up.”
Westerham's whole expression of face changed suddenly. The coldness
left it. The sea-green eyes smiled with a smile that invited confidence
from the man before him.
“Well?” said Melun. “And what of it?”
Westerham knew that the battle was won.
“Then,” Westerham continued coolly, “such a sum as a hundred thousand
pounds would not come amiss to you. Such a sum I am prepared to pay
you—under certain conditions.”
He paused suddenly in his speech with the intention of catching
the very slightest exclamation on the part of Melun; nor was he
disappointed. A quick indrawing of Melun's breath told Westerham that
he was hitting him hard.
All the pleasantness in Westerham's face vanished again, and he looked
at the captain with narrowed eyes.
“I realise that in offering you such a sum,” he said, “it will, of
course, cost you something to earn it. A man who speculates must spend
his own money to gain other people's. A criminal—you must forgive
the word, but it is necessary—who seeks to make a great coup at the
expense of others must put up a certain amount of money to bring it off.
“I think, however, that I am offering you quite enough to enable you to
buy either the silence or the inactivity of your fellow criminals. A
hundred thousand pounds is a good deal of money, and your gang cannot
be so large that you will not be able to afford a sufficient sum to
render them your servants.”
“Exactly,” said Captain Melun.
“Ah!” exclaimed Westerham. “Then you acknowledge what I say to be true?”
“Sir Paul,” answered Melun, “you may take my word at what you judge
it is worth, but none the less I, for my part, am prepared to take
the word of a gentleman. Do you give me your word of honour that the
offer—I take it such is meant—is in all sincerity?”
“It is meant in all sincerity,” said the baronet, “because I am
following out my own particular ideas, and I know that you have neither
the capacity nor yet the opportunity of saying me nay.”
No man was quicker than Melun to seize an advantage. He saw that
Westerham read him through and through, and that acknowledgment of his
own baseness would be the surest way of obtaining some small measure of
the baronet's confidence.
No man lies to his doctor, and at the moment Melun stood in the
presence of a pitiless diagnosis of his soul.
“Yes, Captain Melun,” the baronet proceeded, “I admit that you have had
bad luck, but your bad luck places you in my hands. In short, you can
be delivered up to the captain of this ship as a common thief, or you
can do as I tell you.”
For a moment Melun hesitated, then he laughed.
“I never realised before,” he said steadily, almost with insolence,
“that the blackmailer could be blackmailed.”
“Nevertheless,” said Westerham, “such is the case.”
“It is with every confidence,” the baronet continued, “that I make you
my present offer. You have divined my secret just as I have divined
yours; it would, however, be just as well for both if I explained every
motive of my action.”
He paused and looked for a moment almost shyly out of the port-hole,
which swung up and down between sea and sky.
“Where I have been,” he said, “women are few and far between. I never
cared for any of them—until—until—I saw this picture.”
He tapped his breast lightly.
“Do you think,” he continued, his voice rising louder again, “that I
should ever have set out for England if I had not been drawn back by
this?”
He tapped his breast again. Then his eyes grew wider and his nostrils
distended.
“I suppose,” he cried, with a certain tone of irony in his voice,
“that I am a poet. But I am a poet of the open air. Do you think that
I care a glass of barbed-wire whisky for all the scented drawing-rooms
in the world? I began life, as they call it, in England, when I was
young. What do you think I care for polo, for Hurlingham, for a stuffy
reception in some great house in town? Nothing—nothing! Give me the
open prairie land, the tall, blue grass, the open sky, the joy of the
weary body that has ridden hard after cattle all the day!”
He laughed shortly.
“Do you think,” he continued, extending an almost melodramatically
gesticulating hand towards the astonished captain, “that there is any
soft, silk-bound pillow in Mayfair that could appeal to me when I could
sleep under the stars?”
“Heavens!” He reached out his arms and brought them to his sides again
with a strenuous motion, all his muscles contracted. “I have learnt,”
he cried, “the lesson that life is not only real and earnest, but that
life is hard, that life is a battle—a battle to be won!”
His eyes fell upon his strong, sinewy, brown hands, and he clenched his
fists.
“I am not going back to England to make pleasure, but to fight—to win
the girl of the picture—from you!”
But now, to Westerham's surprise, Melun had turned to sneering. The
baronet was a breed of man the captain did not understand; no man
that he had as yet been acquainted with loosed his heart in this wild
manner. It seemed to him that Westerham was but a romantic child.
But there was no childhood, no romance, in the bitter gaze he lifted
his eyes to meet.
“Listen,” said Westerham, quietly, “for a hundred thousand pounds I
expect you to place yourself at my disposal. For a hundred thousand
pounds I expect not only your services, but the services of all those
whom you employ. And the greatest of these services will be silence.
“I am going back to England as Sir Paul Westerham, Baronet, the richest
man in the world. Thanks to the prying of the New York reporters I have
had to sail on this ship in my own name. I did not wish it, and I have
no intention of ever being discovered in London in the same character
as I left New York.”
Westerham laughed a little to himself.
“No reporters at the dock-side for me,” he said. “No triumphal entry
into London. No account of what I eat and do, and how many hours a
night I sleep. I am going back to London to do precisely as I choose.”
Melun was very quiet. He knew he had met a stronger spirit than his
own. For all the bleak chilliness of the eyes of the man who talked to
him, he knew that he had to deal with the fierceness of a wild animal
which feels the cage opening before him, that Westerham was seeking to
evade the bars of a social prison.
“In three days' time,” Westerham went on, “we shall be in Liverpool.
I shall leave the ship in such a dress that no man will recognise me.
I shall go straight to London and put up at Walter's Hotel in the
Strand. It is a little place, where not even journalists will look for
a millionaire.”
“You forget,” said Melun, “that if you disappear in that manner there
will be an awful outcry over your disappearance.”
“That matters nothing,” said Westerham. “Disappear I shall, to pursue
my own ends as I choose to follow them. For once I am going to prove
that money has the power to hide a man. Do you agree to my bargain?”
Melun nodded his head.
“I agree,” he said, “because I must. The day after you land in
Liverpool I will meet you at Walter's.”
“You tell me,” said Westerham, “that you agree. Yet I doubt your
word. There is something which I have not yet fathomed. You are still
thinking of Lady Kathleen?
“Lie to me if you dare!” he added with brutal emphasis.
“I am not such a fool as to lie to you,” answered Captain Melun. “I am
still thinking of the Lady Kathleen.”
“Then you make a vast mistake,” said the baronet.
He rose and opened the door for Melun to pass out.