"Your Jack was prompt enough in running away from him, such as he is," retorted her cousin bitterly. He could not have struck, for his purpose, upon a weaker joint in her poor woman's armour of pride and trust.
She caught her breath sharply, as if indeed she had received a blow. "Well, say your say," she exclaimed, coming to a standstill and facing him; "I will hear all that you and your—your friend have to say, lest," with a magnificent toss of her head, "you fancy I am afraid, or that I believe one word of it all. I know that Jack—that Captain Smith, as he is called—is engaged upon a secret and important mission; but it is one, Rupert, which all English gentlemen should wish to help, not impede."
"Do you know what the mission is—do you know to whom? And if, my fair cousin, it is such that all English gentlemen would help, why then this secrecy?"
She bit her lip; but it trembled. "What is it you accuse him of?" she asked, with a stamp of her foot.
"Listen to me," said Rupert gently, "it is the kinder thing that you should know the truth, and believe me, every word I say I can substantiate. This Captain Jack Smith, whatever his real name may be, was picked up when a mere boy by an old Liverpool merchant, starving in the streets of that town. This merchant, by name Cochrane, an absurd person who gave himself out to be a relative of Cochrane of Shaws, adopted the boy and started him upon a slaver, that is a ship which does trade in negro slaves, my dear—a pretty trade. He next entered a privateer's ship as lieutenant. You know what these are—ocean freebooters, tolerated by government for the sake of the harm they wreck upon the ships of whatever nation we may happen to be at war with—a sort of pirate ship—hardly a much more reputable business than the slaver's; but Captain Smith made himself a name in it. Now that the war is over, he has taken to a lower traffic still—that of smuggling."
"But what is smuggling?" cried the girl, tears brimming up at last into her pretty eyes, and all her heat of valiance suddenly gone. "What does it mean?"
"What is smuggling? Bless your innocence! I beg your pardon, my dear—miss I should say—but if you'll allow me I think I'm the man to explain that 'ere to you." The husky mellifluous tones of the preventive-service man, who had crept up unnoticed to listen to the conversation, here murmured insinuatingly in her ear.
Rupert hesitated; then reading shrinking aversion upon Madeleine's face, shrewdly conjectured that the exposition of her lover's doings might come with more force from Mr. Hobson's lips than from his own, and allowed the latter to proceed unmolested.
"Smuggling, my pretty," wheezed the genial representative of the custom laws, "again asking pardon, but it slipped out, smuggling is, so to say, a kind of stealing, a kind of cheating and that of a most rank and heinous kind. For, mind you, it ain't stealing from a common man, nor from the likes of you and me, nor from a nobleman either: it's cheating and stealing from his most gracious Majesty himself. For see you, how 'tis, his Majesty he says, 'Every keg of brandy,' says he, 'and every yard of lace and every pipe o' tobacco as is brought into this here country shall be paid for, so much on, to me, and that's called a tax, miss, and for that there are the custom houses and custom officers—which is me—to see his Majesty paid right and proper his lawful dues. But what does your smuggler do, miss—your rollicking, dare-devil chap of a smuggler? Why he lands his lace and his brandy and his 'baccy unbeknownst and sells 'em on the sly—and pockets the profit! D'ye see?—and so he cheats his Majesty, which is a very grievous breaking of the law; so much so that he might as well murder at once—Kind o' treason, you may say—and that's what makes 'em such desperate chaps. They knows if they're caught at it, with arms about them, and two or three together—it's—clank."
Mr. Hobson grasped his own bull neck with an unpleasantly significant gesture and winked knowingly at the girl, who turned white as death and remained gazing at him with a sort of horrified fascination which he presently noted with an indulgent smile.