Enough that on the Saturday following Jack and I returned to Hull and took ship on board the Thomas Wilcox, whose captain had special permission from his owners to land us on the island of Hogland. I confess that I left the shores of England feeling depressed and miserable, and disinclined to go and dig for treasure or anything else, and that I looked long and sadly back at the dull shores of the Humber and wondered whereabouts exactly lay Gloucestershire, and what the good folks at Henderson Court were doing just at this moment, and especially Gladys—there I go again!
The North Sea is a cruel, ruthless body of water, and a stumbling-block to passengers. I had travelled to the Cape and back, and scarcely felt inconvenience; but here, one day out from England, I was treated to such a pitching and a rolling and a tumbling that my very soul refused comfort, and I lay and wished I was dead like any novice upon shipboard; and so did Jack, which was a great consolation to me, and did me more good than all the ministrations of the benevolent chief steward and the encouragement of kind Captain Edwards.
But all was forgotten and forgiven when Copenhagen was reached and the historical castle of Elsinore, one of the ugliest fastnesses, I should say, that ever mason put together for the joint accommodation of long-dead, disreputable kings, exemplary living monarchs, and respectable ghosts.
We passed Elsinore at midnight, and I did think that—as we had paid a good sum of money for our passages, and had stayed up and yawned for an hour beyond our usual sea-time for retiring—there might have been some little spiritual manifestation for our benefit. But Hamlet's father is, I suppose, laid by this time; or the rebuilt castle, upon whose battlements he used to walk, is not to his taste (in which case he is the ghost of a wise and discriminating spirit!), for he never appeared to us; and we were obliged to retire to bed baffled and disappointed, resolved to pen a complaint to the Psychical Research authorities, who ought to see that passengers viâ Elsinore are not disappointed in this way.
And so on into the Baltic, and past many islands belonging to Denmark and Sweden, and with distant glimpses of a most uninteresting-looking mainland; and presently the Gulf of Finland was reached, and our pulses began to beat once more with the old ardour of treasure hunting—a sensation we had almost forgotten since the agitating days of the Ngami search, and the many exciting adventures and crises through which we had passed in the last three months.
As we drew hourly nearer to our island, my excitement grew positively painful. I was oppressed with a kind of horror that we should find Strong waiting to be taken off, with a smile of triumph upon his face and a cheque for one hundred thousand pounds securely buttoned up in his breast pocket!
Captain Edwards, who proved a good and kind friend to us throughout, strongly recommended us to take with us to Hogland a sailor—one whom he could easily spare us, since he was now within a twelve hours' run of his destination—of Russian nationality, who could speak English. He had more than one such "hand" on board, and we arranged with a certain Michail Andreyef to land with us and act as our interpreter—a post which that gentleman, having ascertained that no work of any kind would be involved in the situation, accepted with alacrity at a moderate wage; and remarkably useful he proved to us in our sojourn in that lonely island.
I do not think that Michail, good man, would have landed with us if he had known that there was no drinking shop on the island; but he found out our flasks after a day or two, and these no doubt afforded him some little consolation, though, of course, the contents did not last him long, and he was only drunk three days on the entire proceeds. And now here, at last, was Hogland itself—our Eldorado, as we hoped, if only James Strong had not already landed and ruined our prospects!
How I stared at it, and wondered and wondered whether the fateful tin box that contained old Clutterbuck's cheque lay somewhere within its soil, peacefully slumbering until the right man came along to unearth the treasure! And oh! how I wished it might prove that Strong had neither arrived nor forestalled me!
CHAPTER XXVII