She rose from her chair, picked up the black bag she had brought with her, walked around deliberately in front of the seated man and opening it showed him the contents—jewels. Roped pearls and lovely sapphires, Oriental rubies, diamonds, unnamable stones—all the blazing wealth of gems that Keturah Hand had kept stuffed in a pillow for many years and had lost one summer on the beach.
“See,” said Mermaid, quietly. “Here is a ransom. Take it. Let Guy go free. Let him live the life of a man. Let him stumble and sin and suffer, pick himself up, breathe the fresh air, and feel the warmth of the sunshine. You, who choose to live here in the darkness, can be happy in the artificial light of—these.”
The man’s face became red in a ghastly setting of white whiskers. He struggled to sit up. He put out one thick hand and clutched a rope of pearls. Then, with a great effort, he unclenched his hand and drew it slowly back to his side as if he were dragging a heavy weight back with it. He managed to articulate one word:
“Where?”
“They were once Keturah Hawkins’s,” she told him. At the name his shoulders twitched. “They were coveted by the mate of the China Castle. He insulted their owner, and for it he was flogged. I do not know what crimes they may have been responsible for before they came into John Hawkins’s hands. But they have been responsible, since that time, for a flogging, the wreck of one life, the destruction of one soul, and now I offer them to you to save a boy’s happiness. Will you take them and be satisfied?”
“They spell ruin,” he muttered, thickly. He made no gesture. Mermaid quietly closed the black bag.
“Since you will not take them as a ransom I will return them,” she said, “and offer another ransom in their stead.” Her low utterance was without the note of determination and equally without assurance of success.
He heard the door close after her. Then the man called Captain Vanton did an unpremeditated thing. He went to a drawer in the desk at the end of the mahogany and teakwood cabin-parlour, drew out a bundle of manuscript, wrote carefully a signature upon it, and the date, then thrust it back. Again he drew out something, this time a pistol, and shot himself dead.