"There's a light coming aft. Quick. We can't wait."
I was fairly distracted, and knew not what to do. It was plain that, if we lingered there, we should be detected, and it seemed equally plain that there was no chance of discovering Mademoiselle. Some one who had passed that way had lighted upon her unconscious body.
"Quick, man," said Legrand. "All will be lost."
I ordered Juliette down the rope, and as she protested, talking of her mistress, I told her all would be well if she would only descend. Thus reassured—for she had understood but imperfectly what had happened through her ignorance of English—she jumped on the rail alertly and disappeared. Lane followed, and Ellison, despite his wound, was lithe as a cat. Then I mounted.
Heaven was a vault of darkness, and the sea poured multitudinous small noises in my ears as it rippled against the side of the Sea Queen. There was visible but the loom of the funnel and the stack of the state-rooms turning night into deeper night. Noises now arose from the saloon and streamed up to me. I put my hands on the rope, and then a voice wheezed almost in my ear.
"I'll lay it's the doctor."
It was Holgate, as civil and indifferent as if he were greeting a friend on the quarterdeck. I started and gripped my revolver tightly.
"It couldn't be any one else," pursued Holgate; and now his bulk was a blacker shadow than the empty blackness around. "Got a little party down there, I dare say? Well, now, I never thought of that, doctor. For one thing, I hadn't an idea that you would have left a lady all alone in a faint. It wasn't like your gallantry, doctor. So I didn't tumble to it. But it's no odds. You're welcome. I make you a present of your party. Good-night, doctor."
I slipped down the rope and reached the boat ere this astounding speech was ended. He was a fiend. Why did he torture us thus?
"Let her go, man," said I fiercely to Legrand. "He's the Devil in the flesh."