“Ah!” he said, looking very much relieved and with a wonderfully pleasant smile, “that explains everything. To tell the honest truth, my good man, I knew I had seen you before, the moment I set eyes on you, and the fact is I thought you were a detective who has been hunting me down for a long time, and who has played me one or two tricks too dirty and too cowardly even for a detective to play, and for which one day I mean to be even with him.”
He was smiling still, but the smile seemed to have shifted from his eyes to his teeth, and the effect had ceased to be pleasant. He swung himself round and away from me, and, with hands clasped behind him and bent head, commenced pacing backward and forward—evidently deep in thought—in the scanty space the cabin afforded.
Five minutes went by in silence, and then he began to mutter to himself in a low voice, turning his head from side to side every now and then in a quick, nervous, birdlike way, his eyes never still a moment, but pouncing restlessly first on one object and then on another.
“What’s come to me,” he said to himself, and there was a look on his face which I have never seen except on the face of a madman—as, indeed, I am now fully persuaded he was. “What’s come to me that I of all men in the world should so forget myself as to behave—and before two louts—like a drunken, screeching, hysterical Jezebel?”
He stopped his restless pacing for a moment, and it seemed to me that the man was writhing under his self-contempt, as if every word had been a lash cutting ribbons of flesh from his bare back. Once more he fell to walking to and fro and holding converse with himself.
“Is the end coming, that I can break down like this?” he asked. “No, no, it’s this being hunted down day and night, until I get to start at my own shadow, that has made me nervous and overwrought.
“Nervous! Overwrought! My God! who wouldn’t be so who has led the life I’ve led these last six months—hearing in the daytime the step of the officer who has come to arrest me in every sound, and lying wide-eyed and awake the whole night through rather than trust myself to the sleep which brings always the same hideous dream, from which I awake screaming and with the cold sweat running off me like water!”
It was a magnificent piece of acting, if acting it were, and there was a pathetic break in his voice at the last which, had he not been what he was, would have made me pity him.
But James Mullen, alias Captain Shannon, was scarcely an object for pity, as I was soon reminded, for as he looked up my eye met his, and he read there, I suppose, something of what was passing through my mind. To such a man’s vanity the mere thought of being considered a possible object for pity is unendurable. It implies a consciousness of superiority on the part of the pitier which is resented more fiercely than an insult or a wrong. For one moment I thought that he was about to attack me again—not this time with tooth and nail, after the manner of a wild cat or a hysterical woman, but with a heavy three-legged stool which was lying upon the bunk, tossed there, I suppose, by Hughes to be out of the way while he was clearing up.
Mullen turned the edge of a glance toward it without taking his eyes from mine, and I saw his hand flutter up hesitatingly for a moment like a startled bird, and then drop dead to his side, and I knew that he was thinking how dearly, if he dared, he would love to beat the stool again and again against my face until he had bashed every feature out of recognition. But on this occasion he managed to keep his self-control, and contented himself by asking me, with savage irritability, what I was waiting for, and what I saw strange in him that I stood staring in that way.