By this time they had come close to the bell buoy; and Maida remembered how, with me, she had leaned on the deck-rail idly watching the silhouettes of a man and a boy in a motor-boat.
"It was you we saw last night!" she exclaimed. "You put on a diver's helmet. You had a thing like an empty cage in your hand. You went down under the water——"
"Ah, you saw that from the yacht, did you?" broke in Essain. "I was afraid, when I caught sight of the passing yacht, that it might have been so! But it doesn't matter. Lord John fancies himself a detective—but it's luck, more than skill, which has favoured him so far: and his luck won't bring him to the bell buoy until I want him to come—which I shall do, later. The cage you saw isn't empty to-day, if any of Lord John's luck is on my friends' side, and I'm sure it is. I placed the receptacle ready last night. Now, I think it will be filled with jewelled fish, which I have come to catch. In their place I shall give it a feed of stones, heavy enough to hold it down. And deep under the still water you shall be its guardian, till I'm out of England and can let Lord John have a hint where to look for his lost wife."
Maida remembered what I had told her last night: how, when I was a boy I had loved the old bell buoy and "imagined a thousand stories about it." Surely I could never have invented one so strange as this—this end of our love story for which the bell tolled!
"When he finds me gone, he will never think of the bell buoy," Maida told herself.
But I had thought of it even without knowing that she was gone. I had put myself into Rameses' skin, and let my mind follow the workings of his since the sending of the anonymous letter to Lady Annesley, just up to the moment when those two dark silhouettes had passed near the moonlit bell buoy. I had cursed myself for not seeing how it might have suited Rameses' book to have Maida isolated on board the Lily Maid—certain to be offered to her if she left Annesley's house to be married in a hurry. I had called myself every kind of madman and fool for leaving her alone at the mercy of the enemy, and—having done all this I went straight to Southampton in my brother's highest-powered car, to hire a motorboat of my own.
That is how I got to the bell buoy just as Essain and his companion had emptied the iron cage of its treasures and were filling it with stones while Maida lay bound hand and foot in the bottom of the boat.
Rameses had ready a tiny bottle of Prussic acid which he crushed between his teeth at sight of me and the two policemen from Southampton. But the disguised girl lived, and through her we found the false Combes, Blackburn and Drivenny, members all of the old New York gang who had played me so many tricks. Nobody outside has ever yet heard the story of the imposture and the theft; nor will they know till they see this story in print. By then the jewel auction will have been forgotten by the world. Only we shall not forget. But we are too happy, Maida and I, to remember with bitterness.
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