III
The Gorgon did interrupt revelations, but, as Clement had planned, the trick he had scored was a most useful one. More useful from the fact that the pair of rogues did not know how effectively the inconsequent-looking young Briton had taken measures against them. That is, they still continued the tactics of trying to shut Clement off from intimacy with Heloise.... The very method Clement had delicately drawn the girl’s attention to.
And of course the girl began to notice that the Gorgon was always at her side with a sort of leechlike doggedness. She began to notice that the massive Mr. Neuburg inevitably took up the siege, as it were, whenever her companion was away. Mr. Neuburg talked cleverly and also incessantly, but he wasn’t young and he wasn’t that rather attractive Mr. Seadon. Without realizing anything of its meaning, she felt that Mr. Seadon was, as he had laughingly suggested, being barred out by a crowd.
She began to show irritation—and independence. Mr. Neuburg found she was leaving him in the middle of conversations. Méduse Smythe could produce nothing important enough to hold her mistress at her side. The twain were not fools. They recognized they were beaten. They ceased their attentions with a brilliant naturalness, but Clement knew that the eyes of Mr. Neuburg watched him always as he walked with Heloise.
Clement knew that the intelligence that was busy considering him was not one to be despised. He did not know the extent of the gang working to ensnare Heloise, but he felt that Neuburg was probably the brains of it, the master mind, and that he would act in a masterly manner, leaving very little to chance. To checkmate such a fellow would call for all his ability—and perhaps all his strength and courage.
All the same, though he was constantly on the alert, Clement made the most of his opportunities with Heloise. It was for the good of Heloise—and it was extraordinarily attractive for himself. He wasn’t going to marry her. That was absurd.... How could he? Only—only she was decisively and radiantly pretty. The singular glowing curd-whiteness of her skin, the vividness of her beautiful and delicate lips against the coolness of that skin, the clearness and steadiness of her eyes—all these things gave him an eversharpening sense of delight whenever he set eyes on her.
And her step suited his so perfectly. On board ship, one is immensely appreciative of any one whose step suits one perfectly. Her tall figure swung so gracefully, so untiringly, beside him as they walked, no matter if the sea was as smooth as polished glass—which the Atlantic rarely is—or whether there was a “lop” on. She was as physically fit and as hard as he was, and she took the same zest in out-of-door things. He felt a sort of comradeship, a rightness in the fact that they should stride up and down the promenade deck together in such a perfect unison as almost to suggest they were one....
As though they were one!... but, of course, that was idiotic. They weren’t one. There was no suggestion of their being one. One—that meant marriage. And that question didn’t come up. Although, of course, the little lawyer had said ... “Oh, hang the little lawyer!” he muttered.
“Who are you hanging?” asked Heloise, who was near and who had heard the most lethal part of his muttering.
“I was hanging this top-heavy sea,” said Clement genially. “I wanted to show you the captain’s bridge—I’ve got permission—but with this lop....”
“Show me the captain’s bridge—now,” she laughed back. “The lop doesn’t matter—not a hang.”
That was part of her attraction. She really didn’t care a hang about things that made other people uncomfortable. She enjoyed risks. She was daring enough to go anywhere, see everything. They adventured into all the strange and usually unseen parts of that splendid ship, even as far as the boiler room. She was eager, she was interested in everything, she had a zest for life. She was an ideal chum. More and more he began to perceive that she was the ideal chum—anyhow for one particular man. And presently he was saying not “Hang the little lawyer,” but “Hang Henry Gunning.”
Because both had a healthy disregard for exposure, and a healthy regard for fresh air, they became almost the sole occupants of the breezy boat deck. There they sat daily and talked; there in the evenings they sat, and sometimes did not talk.
In their talks they found splendid affinities. They found that they liked so many similar things: not merely sports, books, theaters, the open country and the other solaces of life, but other more significant things. They found that both cared most in life for character: for honesty, straightness, generosity, high-mindedness. They liked intelligent people rather than merely jolly ones. They liked people who did things rather than people who played at doing things. They found that they had a mutual austerity of ideal in their way of looking at problems ... would rather be the losers in anything than win underhand; they would take the difficult path if it was the right one, rather than the easy if it were wrong.
This brought them dangerously near to the core of the matter they were both engaged on, dangerously near Henry Gunning ... yet both instinctively veered away from that.
But he had come in when she spoke of her journey to Canada—though even in this he came in only as “a friend, an old friend in whom I am interested.”
This happened when they talked about Sicamous one night.
“I am going as far as Sicamous, at any rate,” she had said. “And that reminds me, there are things I wanted to ask you about Sicamous.... Perhaps you remember—we were interrupted?”
“Something about mines, wasn’t it?” said Clement with a careful casualness.
“Yes.... I want you to tell me all about mines in that area.... Now—please tell me.”
Clement laughed with a touch of dismay.
“But all about them. That’s a terrifically large order. In the first place, there’s nothing to say about them—and then there’s everything.”
“That sounds enigmatic. You’ll have to explain.”
“I mean by that there are not so very many mines—those at Nelson, on Kootenay Lake—silver-mines, they are—are perhaps the most important. But, on the other hand, it’s always supposed that there are great possibilities among those rocky valleys.”
“Ah,” breathed the girl, “there are possibilities then.”
“Not thinking of going in for mining, are you?” Clement teased—and with a reason.
“N-o,” said the girl. “It’s rather—it’s rather because a friend of mine is interested. Deeply interested. I wanted to learn if there is any foundation for—for expecting big things, immense returns from mining in the Sicamous district.”
Clement was excited. Then it was mining. That was the venture Henry Gunning was supposed to need backing for. He answered without any show of his emotion. “What exactly are your friend’s interests—silver, copper, gold?”
“All of them,” she answered quickly, and Clement though he saw the character of Gunning at once in that report. Your unsuccessful prospector is rather like that. He hasn’t merely a Golconda of one metal up his sleeve—he has all the rare metals in the world, only asking to be picked out of the surface ... if only some one will oblige with the money to buy picks. “All of them,” repeated the girl. “I understand that—that the claims (that’s right, isn’t it?) pegged out show rich veins of gold, copper and silver, and there’s also nickel—even platinum. It—is that possible?”
“I will say,” said Clement candidly, “It’s held to be possible. Prospectors are always saying that the whole of the district is a likely place for—yes, all those minerals.”
“These particular claims have been assayed and show excellent results.”
“They have, however, to be worked, I take it,” said Clement. “With mines you can’t really tell until they have been worked.”
“Oh——” said the girl rather pitifully. “Then don’t you think there is a possibility of an—an immense fortune in claims showing such good sample results?”
“There might be. There is always that possibility.... On the other hand, I should advise your friend to go with extreme caution.”
“You’re not—you’re not very stimulating,” she said ruefully.
“I’m just being as honest as I can,” said Clement, with a meaning she could not appreciate, for actually he was. His whole instinct told him to pour the coldest of cold water upon that mining scheme—and yet he couldn’t altogether in fairness do that.
“I believe you are,” she said softly, and with a surprising intuition she added, “I believe you’d be honest even against your own interests.”
In the tiny and quite significant pause that followed that touch of curiously personal intimacy, Clement felt bound to say, “You see, Miss Heloise, mining is a risky venture. You can throw away more money and more easily in mining than you can in anything else—not even excepting theaters and newspapers. There are so many things that make it a gamble. The lode or stope may peter out. There may be immense difficulties in cutting shafts. There may be fatal drawbacks in the matter of transport, of working, of labor, and scores of things.... Mineral finds that look good at the first assay may not pay for their keep when they come to be worked. I know these valleys. We came across some seams that looked good. They looked enormously good to a tenderfoot like myself, for example. But the experts with the party wouldn’t look at them. Nothing in them. Not worth the blasting.... Your friend certainly should be advised to move with the greatest care in this matter.”
The girl was silent for a while.
“It hurts so to shatter people’s dreams,” she said in a low voice. And then she said on a lighter note, “But I remember—you talked of difficulties that turned on transport; most of the difficulties do, don’t they?”
“Yes; it’s lack of transport facilities that kills most mining ventures.”
“Well,” cried the girl, with glee, “that’s a difficulty that doesn’t hold good here.... The railway runs within a very short distance of the claims. Doesn’t that make it sound more hopeful?”
Clement said decisively, “It makes it sound hopeless.”
“Mr. Seadon!” she protested, aghast.
“It does,” said Clement, sure of himself. “Miss Heloise, if those claims are only a very short distance from the railway, then they are claims that could not have been overlooked. Don’t you see ... railwaymen, engineers, prospectors, scores of people must have had a chance of poking round. If there had been anything good there, it would have been found long ago. And as it hasn’t happened—well——”
“You think there is no chance at all,” said the girl in dismay.
“I think,” said Clement impressively—this, he felt, was his great opportunity. He must drive home truth into the soul of this girl, though it was painful—“I think that you—that your friend should go into this matter with the most scrupulous attention, that you—that your friend should commit himself” (in his stress he overlooked the gender he had employed) “in no way. All the dealings should be made through unbiased experts—unbiased, Miss Heloise; some big mining consultants with a reputation for straight-dealing.... Nobody locally. I urge you to impress upon your friend the need of the greatest care.”
The girl gave a gasp. It was a gasp of misery. Clement felt sore and sorry for her—but he must say what he had to say. Then she said with pain, “Then you think—you think there might be something—underhand about such a venture.”
“Yes,” said Clement slowly, “I think there is a great possibility of there being something underhand in it—from what you tell me.”
“O-oh,” sighed the girl, and she fell back in her chair. Clement knew why she was overcome. His confirmation of the suspicions that the little lawyer Hartley Hard had fired at her, had forced her soul to face an ugly conviction.
Clement, inexpressibly sorry for her, followed her action with his eyes. He would like to help her, he felt in his heart an almost agonized desire to do something to soothe her wounded soul. She was so gentle, so young to have suffered a shock. He half turned in his eagerness to help her.
Something—a shadow where there should have been the gray-blue light of the open sea—caused him to lift his eyes.
Behind her chair, close behind, crouching against the bow of the boat that shielded them from the wind, filling up the space through which Clement should have been able to gaze straight out to sea, he saw a figure.
A great, a bulky figure. The black, the stealthy figure of a mountain of a man—listening.
He poised there for a minute—then he vanished.