He was not satisfied; but he let the subject drop, and went out to make the enquiries he had promised at the offices of the shipping company.
“I can discover nothing,” he said when he returned, “to justify any disbelief in the young woman’s statement. The manager, who treated me with extreme courtesy, acknowledges her name and claim, and is perfectly willing that an attempt should be made to recover the red morocco handbag, stipulating only that an inventory of its contents shall be placed in the hands of their representative, who will accompany us, that all expenses shall be borne by me, and that I will hold myself personally responsible for the good faith of the transaction. He has telephoned to Sheerness, to put a diver employed by the company especially at my service; and, in short, the attempt is to be made as early as practicable to-morrow morning.”
She smiled.
“How prompt and resourceful you are. I do hope, most sincerely, that success in every way will reward you.”
Miss Daisy Limner came punctually to her appointment. The office doors were scarcely open before she applied at them. When she heard the gratifying news, her joy and relief almost overcame her.
“You are a good sort!” she said, blinking away a genuine tear or two, with a heartiness which a little staggered Gilead.
They caught the earliest train available from Victoria, where they took up the agent of the company, who, in his turn, took down, en route, the list, supplied very readily by Miss Limner, of jewels contained in the red morocco handbag. It made quite a goodly show, and impressed Gilead with a proper sense of the disaster implied in their loss. Mr Limner, he thought, must have exhibited an extraordinary fondness and delicacy of feeling in forbearing to realize on them until the last moment, since they appeared to represent, on their face value, a quite handsome investment. It bettered his opinion of the hard-pressed gentleman, and made him feel more kindly disposed towards him; especially as a number of the stones being unset, no very personal sentiment could be assumed to attach to them.
All the journey down the young lady, having relieved her mind, seemed given over to the highest spirits. Now and again, even, a topical allusion, a spice of slang would come to garnish her discourse, and give Gilead a painful idea of the nature of the company which her young destiny had ruled her. She chaffed the shipping clerk demurely, and plied him with her eyes in a way which dreadfully embarrassed that susceptible youth, who was obviously torn between his admiration for so much beauty and liveliness and an almost irresistible desire to respond in kind, and his respectful awe of the young plutocrat whose steps he attended. Gilead, in short, was glad when the journey had come to an end, and they stepped out upon the platform at Sheerness.
The barge which was to convey them to the sunken vessel was already in waiting by the hard, with a couple of men in her in addition to the diver, who, fully apparelled but for his helmet, sat beside the apparatus which was to supply him with air. They put off at once, for the flow was running strong, and a pull of a mile was needed to carry them to the spot where a lighter, flying a danger signal, was moored above the invisible Prinz Karl. It was a lovely glowing day. Mist and water blended in that luminous haze which seems to obliterate the boundaries between death and existence, and to drug the soul in Lethe. Swimming within that neutral commingling of elements, air melting into liquid and liquid into air, the boat drifted like a bubble; all sense of gravity appeared lost. The world was a remote thing; the town they had left a mirage; all sounds coming from it were subdued to a soft humming and tinkling like noises in a dream. They only jarring note, to Gilead at least, was supplied by Miss Limner. The young lady did not somehow seem to fit into the picture.
He could hardly believe that this was the identical artless Daisy that had blinked her dewy lashes at him in his office a few hours earlier. She sparkled, but it was more now with the sweet sting of champagne. In the exhilaration of the trip, and its assumed happy termination, her speech threw off more and more its trammels of formality. She was sportive with the stolid mariners. She coquetted her way to their deeply-embedded hearts, and smiling on the shipping-clerk, who had turned green with jealousy, asked him not to feel bound to her if he would rather look another way. Even the majestic diver himself did not escape her; but was questioned as to the aggravation he must feel when he came across mermaids and was unable to kiss them. She made a toy of every detail of his harness; and when at last they had anchored, and the ladder was hung over the barge-side, and the helmet was screwed into place and the air-pump got into position, she actually did, with a chirrup of laughter, drop a butterfly kiss on the glass plate through which his face looked, and bid the grotesque figure, as it valued her favour, return with the bag or not return at all. And, after that, the silence of nervous suspense which came to reign was a relief to one person.