AYLMER CLIMBS--AND FALLS
The door of the lazaret was pulled quietly back. The opening showed
Miller, silhouetted as in a frame, a splash of sunshine which flowed
down into the outer cabin hanging in a golden halo, as it were, behind
his remarkably solid looking head. Coming from the full light into the
darkness--for the lamp was already flickering to final extinction--he
blinked. And there was something unhuman in his aspect as he stood
there, searching the gloom with his impassive eyes, something not
altogether stealthy, but yet something with a tinge of menace in it. So,
no doubt, the hovering night-bird comes to a pause above its victim.
His glance first recognized Miss Van Arlen. He demonstrated the fact by
a little deferential movement--a bow which seemed to deprecate, or even
criticize, the circumstance of her surroundings. He smiled, but with
slightly raised eyebrows, and as his glance travelled on to meet
Aylmer's there was a hint of suggestion in it. It was a glance, at any
rate, which was responsible for the faint flush which rose to the girl's
cheek and for the hardening of Aylmer's lips. For some reason unknown
even to himself, the latter's bound arms instinctively moved towards the
child, who had nestled against his shoulder and had there fallen asleep.
"A scene which would catch a painter's--or a poet's eye--" said the
gray man, meditatively. "We could call it Innocence, could we not?"
Again he looked from one to the other with that questioning, suggestive
glance which somehow seemed to deprecate, and yet, at the same time,
imply equivocation. Neither answered him, and he made an energetic
gesture--one which relegated trivialities to forgetfulness.
"I must be a source of wonder to you; I am to myself!" he cried. "To
allow myself to be trapped into such trifling at such a moment! It is
the artistic temperament; you must address your amazement to it and your
forgiveness to me. I bring good news, relatively."
Claire rose from her seat on the floor.
"Yes?" she said eagerly. "There is a chance of escape, or, perhaps,
rescue?"
His eyes became sombre.
"No, my dear young lady," he said. "My optimism has not reached so far,
as yet. But I have persuaded our captors that Captain Aylmer's detention
here is not necessary. They do not exact a parole from him, but they
permit me to loose his lower limbs and to give him the freedom of the
deck. It is because his release implies your own that this concession
gives me--and him--undoubted pleasure."
He stooped as he finished speaking, and quickly and deftly unlashed the
cords at Aylmer's ankles and, with a jerk, pulled him to his feet. He
shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the still tethered hands.
"I fear I am helpless there, my dear fellow," he said. "Complete rights
of enfranchisement were not allowed me."
Claire parted her lips as if to speak, hesitated, and pressed them
firmly together again. The shackling of those wrists was a mere blind
but--Aylmer forbore to communicate the fact to Miller. Why?
Miller looked at her keenly, inquiringly.
"Yes?" he said. "You want further information? Is that it?"
"I have a hundred questions to ask," she smiled. "How did you get this
concession? Where are we? What are they doing with us? What is our
destination?"
He shrugged his shoulders again.
"As to the first--a little tact was all that was necessary, though tact,
indeed, is too self-laudatory a word. Logic, let us say. I showed him
how unnecessary it was to antagonize a man with whom he would eventually
have to chaffer. That was mere common-sense, was it not?"
"Chaffer?" repeated Aylmer. He considered Miller; for an appreciable
moment he surveyed him silently. "That implies a bargain, and to bargain
there must be goods to sell. Landon has none which will tempt me."
"Liberty," suggested Miller. "Comfort, and not for yourself alone?"
"With Landon I do not bargain," said Landon's cousin, doggedly. "I have
set myself to clean our name of the stigmas with which he had bedaubed
it. There are no terms to be made."
"You sacrifice yourself?" said Miller. He paused. "Have you the right to
sacrifice others?"
"No," said Aylmer, quietly. "You and Miss Van Arlen must do exactly what
seems best for yourselves. That is a deal apart."
Miller shook his head.
"No, my dear Captain Aylmer," he answered. "That is exactly what it is
not. Landon's terms concern us all."
Claire looked at him anxiously.
"He has told you them?" she cried. "You are his messenger?"
Miller gave a little bow of acquiescence.
"They are bluntly these," he said. "For you he demands from your father
the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds. For your nephew, double that
amount. For myself, I must apologize for placing myself next, but the
financial sequence necessitates it, ten thousand. For our friend
here--nothing, or, to be precise, nothing in cash."
She did not flinch as he mentioned the sums. She merely looked
contemptuous.
"Is that all?" she asked. "He is a common blackmailer?"
Miller shook his head.
"No," he said. "Unfortunately that is not all."
He looked directly at Aylmer.
"It rests with you," he said suddenly. "He wants from you--silence. What
has happened is as if it had never been. You are to allow him to take
his place unquestioned in the society which befits his rank. He wishes
to turn a new leaf."
Aylmer met the look with blank incredulity, at first. Then his lips
tightened with determination.
"And you?" he cried. "You are taking him seriously? You are going to
give him this money?"
Miller's out-turned palms expressed a vague pessimism.
"Is there an alternative?" he asked.
Aylmer laughed harshly.
"Blank refusal: what is his answer to that?"
The dark eyes searched the two expectant faces meditatively. The thin
prehensile fingers picked at a loose splinter in the bulkhead.
"I think he would find a way," he said slowly. "I think--in fact he has
threatened it--he would--_hurt_ you!"
Aylmer stared at the gray figure, puzzled, frowning. Miller had used a
new voice for the two last syllables, a voice that shook ever so
slightly with some concealed emotion. "Hurt you," he reiterated sharply,
and then darted a quick, bird-like glance at Aylmer--a look full of
interrogation.
Claire Van Arlen moved forward with a sudden startled movement.
"Hurt!" she cried. "You mean that he would use torture?"
"I think," said Miller, very slowly, "that he would use anything."
And then Aylmer began to laugh--loudly, gaily, and quite
whole-heartedly. Miller's eyebrows proclaimed their owner's
astonishment.
"Melodrama!" explained Aylmer, still chuckling. "I remember Landon as a
small boy, even before his Eton days. He bred these leanings then. He
wasted his pocket money on 'bloods,' I think they are called--penny
exhilarators for youths of tender years, crammed with impossible
villainies. And now he is going to tie flaming splinters between my
fingers and squeeze my thumbs in the crack of the door! This is the
price I am to pay for refusing him social rehabilitation. We cannot
congratulate him on his sense of humor, we really cannot."
Miller paused over his reply, looked down, looked up, and then bridged a
moment of hesitation with his usual expedient--a shrug.
"For the moment I fear he hasn't got one," he said.
"Possibly not," agreed Aylmer. He nodded towards the door. "I'll take
advantage of his concessions to come and see." He gave another little
confident nod to usher the other two before him. As the child ran
forward he caught him up with his bound hands and raised him shoulder
high. Then, stooping, he passed out at Miller's heels on to the deck. He
was laughing still, laughing up at the boy as the childish fingers
steadied themselves in his hair.
"You won't be able to do that when they shave it to put the pitch
plaster on," he cried. "And when they've stretched me on the rack, I
shall be too tall to carry you out of a cabin. And as for being a pig
man again, and carrying a spear after the thumbscrews have been applied,
why, it simply won't bear thinking about!"
As he emerged on deck he looked about him keenly. Muhammed's was the
first figure which caught his eye. The Moor was sitting on the gunwale
opposite the companion, looking shoreward. And the shore, to Aylmer's
surprise, was very near on the starboard bow.
Suddenly he realized that it was not the mainland which he saw, but an
archipelago of islands girdled with reefs. Rockbound channels were
frames to pictures of the dun red African strand half a dozen miles
away.
He looked aft. The sun was not far from its setting, hanging in a red
disc above the distant hills of Algeria. The captain was at the tiller.
Beside him lounged Landon, watching a gray-painted torpedo boat which
had emerged from the shelter of the islands and was about to pass close
under their stern. The gold and crimson of the Spanish naval ensign
floated at her flagstaff.
Landon looked round as he heard the footsteps of the newcomers on the
deck. He nodded them a greeting without changing his seat, and did it
with a studied air of contempt.
"Well?" he said laconically.
Aylmer was silent. His glance traveled over Landon's head to examine the
war vessel as it passed.
The captain grunted something in an undertone. Landon laughed, and held
up the first and fourth fingers of his right hand horn-wise.
"The good Luigi advises me to avert the evil eye," he explained. "Does
that glance of yours threaten us, my affectionate cousin, does it?"
Aylmer sat back upon the boom and looked at the other squarely. The
child scrambled from his shoulder and went back along the deck to stand
at Muhammed's knee. But the Moor, after a quick, welcoming smile, showed
no further recognition of his presence. His glance, the glances, indeed,
of all on board, centered in the meeting of the two who eyed each other
across the slant of Signor Luigi's tiller.
Aylmer made a motion of his head towards Miller.
"You sent this man to bargain with me?" he said.
"No," said Landon. "I sent him to tell you my terms."
He laughed; he looked Aylmer insolently in the face and laughed again.
"The thick-headedness of you is what amuses me," he said. "The crass
incapability of understanding your own case. Order, respectability, good
feeling, as you call it--these have been propping you all your life. You
don't understand--how should you?--what it is to be in the hands of a
man who gives not a jot for any one of them." He snapped his fingers.
"Not that!" he added. "For honor, standing, the esteem of my fellows I
give nothing--nothing!"
"And yet chaffer to obtain them," said Aylmer, drily.
"I don't chaffer; I take," said Landon. "I am requiring them as mere
stage properties necessary to the carrying out of my other purposes.
Intrinsically they have no value for me."
"Unfortunately for you, you have neither the weapons to win them nor the
means to buy them," said Aylmer.
"Haven't I?" said Landon, slowly. "Haven't I?" He rose from his seat and
came a pace or two nearer. "Listen to me, you--you blazing fool!" he
snarled. "I have you here to break, as I will. See that you don't goad
me into doing it, for the mere pleasure of seeing you squirm. You give
me your promise to accept me, push me forward, vouch for me, in the
rotten mob you call society, or, by God, you'll be sorry before I've
done with you!"
Aylmer still stared relentlessly into the other's eyes.
"You haven't a thing that'll touch me--not a single thing!" he said. "My
life? Do you think that has a value for me above the hope of clearing
you from a decent family's path--into the gutter!"
Landon went white with passion. His fingers worked.
"By the Lord!" he said, and his eyes shot menacing lightnings towards
Miller, not towards his cousin; "by the Lord, am I to keep my hands off
him--after that?"
There was a sort of appeal in the question. There was malignance, there
was red anger, but there was entreaty, the cry of a slave to a master.
Claire recognized it; so did Aylmer, with amazement.
They both looked at the gray man.
Miller's gesture was all humility, all dejection.
"Don't exasperate him, Captain Aylmer," he pleaded. "He has weapons; he
has, indeed!"
Landon laughed malevolently.
"By God, I have!" he cried. "Your thick body and your ox's nerves? You
can pit them against me, if you like! What about your finer feelings, as
I suppose you'd call them? What about your honor? And--what
about--_hers_?"
He shot the question out fiercely, insistently, pointing at Claire.
A sudden dryness coated Aylmer's lips.
"What do you mean?" he demanded. He rose, too, towering over Landon from
the full height of his stature and that, indeed, seemed to have added
inches to itself since the other spoke.
But Landon, drunk with venom, did not flinch.
"Look at her!" he cried, still pointing. "Look at her! And if you defy
me, you shall have something more to look at before long! I'll deal with
her; I'll let these men have their will of her; I'll drag her through
filth enough--I'll--"
His voice broke hideously into a shriek of pain. Aylmer had flung off
the lashings on his wrists and continued the movement, as it were, into
one direct, smashing blow on Landon's mouth!
And Landon fell as a log falls, stark, inert, his head meeting the
tiller end in his fall with frightful emphasis. He rolled into the
scuppers at the captain's feet, bloody, disfigured, unconscious as the
deck itself.
There was a rush from the two deck hands. Muhammed came flying aft.
Aylmer dodged, landed his fist on the Moor's temple, evaded the hands
stretched out for him, and sprang for the rigging. Within the space of
seconds he was standing upon the great cross spar of the lateen, leaning
against the mast, and waving his arms in semaphore-wise towards the gray
stern of the torpedo boat as she slid away against the disc of the
setting sun.
The captain yelled aloud with fury.
"He is signalling to them!" he screamed. "God's Mother! If they see him
we're undone!"
A sudden light gleamed in Claire's eyes, a light of hope, of relief
and--bright above them all--admiration. This was a man. Her woman's
blood quickened to the knowledge that his man's strength had been used
brutally, splendidly, for her. She cried aloud her encouragement. She
waved her hand.
"Make them see you, make them!" she called. She beat her open hand upon
the taffrail in her passion.
The gunboat slowed. Half a dozen signal flags rushed up to her peak. The
white foam of her wake disappeared slowly with the stopping of her
engines. Captain Luigi cried out again; he addressed invectives to
things terrestrial and to celestial things apostrophes at a set value in
candles, using both forms of eloquence impartially to goad his
hesitating deck hands to pull Aylmer from his eyrie at the risk of their
lives. The mariners shook their heads.
And then, at the captain's ear, harshly, snippingly, between his teeth,
Miller spoke.
"Let go the halliards!" he hissed. "Let go the halliards!"
And Claire Van Arlen heard.
She cried out to Aylmer warningly, shrill in her despair. He did not
hear or, perhaps, in the intentness of his task, did not heed. She cried
out again.
Too late!
The two men flung themselves upon the ropes which held the great lateen
yard in place, slacked them, payed them out suddenly a couple of yards.
Aylmer tottered, rocked forward, and then maintained his hand hold upon
the mast. But this time the men reversed the operation. With a
tremendous effort they jerked the ropes. The spar leaped upwards!
And Aylmer shot into the air and landed stunningly upon the planking at
Claire Van Arlen's feet.