CHAPTER III THE "HUMMING TOP"
"Why Humming Top?" asked Madame Gilbert.
It was early in March, and the devastation wrought by the Admiralty in the yacht's graceful interior had been obliterated by the skilled hands of White of Cowes. Her upper and main decks had been entirely refashioned, and nothing remained of her armament except a brass signal gun forward. At the main mast head waved in the breeze the burgee of the Royal Thames Yacht Club, and from the inclined jackstaff at her stern hung the Blue Ensign which it is the privilege of that Club to wear. The Humming Top lay in the Test above Southampton just where the magazines of Marchwood front the river. Madame Gilbert leaned upon the bridge rail, and beside her, as close beside her as Madame would permit, stood the Baronet of Wigan.
Sir John Toppys had been presented to Madame some weeks earlier, and between them a friendship had ripened. In due course, when the Humming Top, completed and ready for sea, had been towed to her moorings off Marchwood, Sir John had pressed Madame to honour the vessel with her presence. She, not unwilling to inspect the yacht in which she was to traverse the seas of the wide world, and not unwilling to double-lock her chains upon the Baronet's proffered neck, had consented to travel in his company to Southampton on the visit of introduction. Together they had examined the sleeping quarters on the main deck allotted to Madame and her maid, and the lady had gratified her host by suggesting some small alterations. Notebook in hand he hung upon her lips.
"My room is splendid," said she, "and I am so glad that you have given me a proper spring bed instead of a snuffy bunk. If you will have a light fitted at the head of my bed, and a bell push so that I can switch off the light or summon my maid without moving more than my hand, the room will be just perfect."
"I will give orders at once," declared Sir John Toppys. "You are sure that there is no further way in which I may meet your wishes?"
"None at present," said Madame. "If I think of anything else, I will let you know. She is a lovely boat, but why do you call her the Humming Top?"
Sir John Toppys had not succumbed so far to the spells of Madame as to have wholly lost his earlier suspicion that the Toppys Family and fortunes were in her eyes objects of derision. She was so frank in her laughter at their ancestral pretensions, she proclaimed so openly that she embarked on her voyage to the South Seas as a glorious rag, that in time he had become disarmed. If she felt as she professed to feel, surely she would be less open in profession. Still now and then Madame would shoot out a question which did awaken in the baronet's mind a feeling that his leg was about to be pulled. Before, therefore, answering her inquiry he reflected for a moment upon her possible motive.