Madame looked away, and tried not to smile. "Certainly, if you wish. I quite understand. We will stop for a few hours, Captain."
The Skipper grunted, and reluctantly gave in. He could not say that he had elected to give Port Kennedy a miss in order that the dryness of the Humming Top might not be tempered by fiery island liquors. He knew very well what would happen if Lord Topsham and his seducer, John Clifford, were let loose upon that outpost of white civilisation.
Down below, when later Willie descended, he again caught a glimpse of his Marie. But again she fled from him, skipped into an empty cabin, and fastened the door against him. Again he waited, and did not retire to his own room until he heard Madame's steps approach. Madame Gilbert had deliberately chosen that he should be housed where his doings could be kept under her close personal observation. Willie, in his cabin, heard the mistress and maid go to their own quarters, and devoured his nails in helpless rage. His boyish love for Madame had already gone; in its place was growing up a passion not far removed from hate. Was he, a great English Lord, to be cabined and spied on by a mere widow? She had cut him off from the wine which he was learning to love, and she had so terrified Marie that the girl was afraid even to look upon him. The goddess whom he had spurned he now cursed.
Marie, eager above all things to earn that reprieve of which Madame had hinted, told how she had escaped from Willie, and locked herself up at his approach. Her degenerate passions had been stirred by Willie's colour, and she had sought to advance herself by a marriage with an English Lord before the boy could recover from her novel fascinations. But of love for him, in the nobler sense, she had not a scrap. She would sacrifice half-a-dozen Lord Topshams, now that she had no prospect of marrying one of them, to be saved from a return to that awful revengeful France. Eagerly, in rapid emphatic French, she spread before Madame the proofs of her abandonment of Lord Topsham, and again and again protested her resolution never, never to sport with him again. She would not speak with him if she could possibly help. If he touched her she would shriek for protection.
"But, Madame," she went on, "I am as frightened of him as I am of you. I have seen in his bright blue eyes that cold look for murder which sometimes glares out from yours. I feel sure that he will kill me. But I would sooner that he killed me—if he did it quickly—than that I should be tried and shot in France. The shooting I might face bravely—death many times came near me in Amiens and I smiled upon it—but the trial, the awful remorseless faces, the shame and the horror of my treachery, the cold, deliberate preparations for my death—I could not face them, Madame. I would far sooner kill myself now at your feet."
"Keep that shame and terror before you," said Madame harshly. "They shall be yours if you disobey me, even for one instant. For you then there shall be no escape by the easy way of suicide. I will have you locked up and watched day and night by my sailors."
From Tops Island to Port Kennedy is about one hundred miles, and the Humming Top, at the cautious speed set by Ching, did not arrive until the early afternoon of the second day out. She had come through all the channels without touching once, and the First Officer, who with Ching had prepared the home-made chart, shook hands with him in mutual congratulation.
"This," said the First, "is a great occasion wasted. What it really needs is a long drink."
"It does," lamented Ching. "I have always been strictly temperate in my habits, and will have no officer or man with me who cannot be trusted to keep down his elbow. But this terrible drought which has fallen upon the Humming Top makes me dream of bottles by night and think of them by day. The most beautiful music which I could hear would be the flop of a pulled-out cork."