He disappeared with a smile, and Elliott went back to the rail to smoke another cigar, filled with a painful mingling of affection and pity for this unrestful spirit. He foresaw what he himself might be like in ten years. Thus far, his memory held nothing worse than misfortune, nothing of dishonour; but dishonour is apt to be the second stage of misfortune. “Go back to work, and let this chasing easy money alone,” Henninger had said, and he was right. It was the advice that Margaret had given him, and that he had vowed to take. But there was still the gold-ship, and Elliott thrilled anew with the irrepressible sense of adventure and romance.
Next morning Henninger had regained his customary equipoise, and Elliott could hardly believe his recollection of last night’s conversation. Henninger gave an account of the accusation and of his defence very briefly to his friends. The captain, acting as arbiter, had ordered that Henninger should refrain from playing cards for stakes while on board, under penalty of being posted as a sharper. On the other hand, the accuser was warned not to make his story public, as there was no corroborative evidence of its truth.
In spite of this caution, some word of the affair spread through the ship, and the rest of the voyage was not pleasant. Henninger found himself an object of suspicion; passengers were shy of speaking to him; no one was openly rude, but the atmosphere was hostile. His three friends stood by him, incurring thereby a share of the popular animosity, and Henninger came and went in saloon and smoking-room, to all appearances as undisturbed and indifferent as possible. Perhaps no one but Elliott knew how much wrath and contempt was hidden under that iron exterior, but every one of the four was glad when the hawsers were looped on the Southampton docks.
It would be two days before the first Castle liner would sail for Cape Town, and they went over to London, where the last arrangements were completed. Elliott was to make for Bombay with all speed, and he drew two hundred pounds above the price of his ticket for expenses. He was to report by cable to Henninger at Zanzibar whether he discovered anything or not. Elliott would also be notified in case of developments at the other end, though it was very possible that it might be necessary for the rest to take sudden action without waiting him to rejoin them, and in such event the plunder was to be shared alike.
Twenty-four hours later Elliott saw his friends aboard the big steamer at Southampton, amid a crowd of army officers, correspondents, weeping female relatives, Jews, and speculators, who were bound for the seat of the still smouldering war. Elliott himself returned to London, crossed to Paris, took the Orient Express, and was hurried across Europe and the length of Italy to Brindisi, where he caught the mail-steamer touching there on her way to Bombay.
CHAPTER VIII. THE MAN FROM ALABAMA
Elliott found the atmosphere on the big Peninsular and Oriental liner different from anything he had ever encountered before. The ship was full of Anglo-Indian people, army officers, civil servants, and merchants returning to the East, and whose conversation was composed of English slang and exotic phrases of a foreign tongue. The crew were mostly Lascars of intolerable filthiness, and there were innumerable Indian maids—ayahs, Elliott supposed them to be—whom he met continually about the ship on mysterious errands of comfort to their mistresses. There were queer dishes at dinner, where Elliott made himself disagreeably conspicuous on the first evening by wearing a sack coat; and the talk ran upon subjects which he had previously encountered only in the works of Mr. Kipling.
Most of these passengers had come on board at Southampton and had settled so comfortably together that Elliott felt himself an intruder. He was distinctly an “outsider;” and he found it hard to scrape acquaintance with these healthy, well-set-up and apparently simple-minded young Englishmen, who seemed too candid to be natural. It was even more impossible to know how to approach the peppery veterans, who nevertheless were seen to converse jovially enough with folk of their own sort. He was distinctly lonely; he was almost homesick. His mind was perplexed with the object of his voyage, of which he felt the responsibility to a painful degree, so there were few things in his life which he ever enjoyed less than the passage from Brindisi to Alexandria.
At Port Said another half-dozen passengers came on board. Elliott took them all to be English, apparently of the tourist class, travelling around the world on circular tickets. One of them was sent to share Elliott’s stateroom, much to his annoyance, but the man proved to be entirely inoffensive, a dull, respectable green-grocer with the strict principles of his London suburb, who was taking his daughter on a long southern sea voyage by medical advice. His sole desire was to return to his early radishes, and he spent almost all his waking hours in sitting dumbly beside his daughter on the after deck, a slight, pale girl of twenty, whose incessant cough sounded as if sea air had been prescribed too late.
It was very hot as the steamer pushed at a snail’s pace through the canal. The illimitable reaches of honey-coloured sand seemed to gather up the fierce sun-rays and focus them on the ship. The awnings from stem to stern afforded little relief, and the frilled punkahs sweeping the saloon tables only stirred the heated air. At night the ship threw a portentous glare ahead from the gigantic search-light furnished by the Canal Company, and in the close staterooms it was impossible to sleep. Many of the men walked the deck or dozed in long chairs, and at daybreak there was an undress parade when the imperturbable Lascars turned the hose on a couple of dozen passengers lined against the rail. Then there was a little coolness and it was possible to think of breakfast, before the African sun became again a flaming menace.