“Merci! So far that’s satisfactory; and your slave feels he has not been toiling in vain. But there’s a good deal more to be done before we can take our ship safe into port. And it must be done quickly, too. I pine to cast off this priestly garb—in which I’ve been so long miserably masquerading—and enter into the real enjoyments of life. But there’s another, and more potent reason, for using despatch; breakers around us, on which we may be wrecked, ruined any day—any hour. Le Capitaine Ryecroft was not, or is not, the only one.”
“Richard—le braconnier—you’re thinking of?”
“No, no, no! Of him we needn’t have the slightest fear. I hold his lips sealed, by a rope around his neck; whose noose I can draw tight at the shortest notice. I am far more apprehensive of Monsieur, votre mari!”
“In what way?”
“More than one; but for one, his tongue. There’s no knowing what a drunken man may do or say in his cups; and Monsieur Murdock is hardly ever out of them. Suppose he gets to babbling, and lets drop something about—well, I needn’t say what. There’s still suspicion abroad—plenty of it,—and like a spark applied to tinder, a word would set it ablaze.”
“C’est vrai!”
“Fortunately, Mademoiselle had no very near relatives of the male sex, nor any one much interested in her fate, save the fiancé and the other lover—the rustic and rejected one—Shenstone fils. Of him we need take no account. Even if suspicious, he hasn’t the craft to unravel a clue so cunningly rolled as ours; and for the ancien hussard, let us hope he has yielded to despair, and gone back whence he came. Luck too, in his having no intimacies here, or I believe anywhere in the shire of Hereford. Had it been otherwise, we might not so easily have got disembarrassed of him.”
“And you do think he has gone for good?”
“I do; at least it would seem so. On his second return to the hotel—in haste as it was—he had little luggage; and that he has all taken away with him. So I learnt from one of the hotel people, who professes our faith. Further, at the railway station, that he took ticket for London. Of course that means nothing. He may be en route for anywhere beyond—round the globe, if he feel inclined to circumnavigation. And I shall be delighted if he do.”
He would not be much delighted had he heard at the railway station of what actually occurred—that in getting his ticket Captain Ryecroft had inquired whether he could not be booked through for Boulogne. Still less might Father Rogier have felt gratification to know, that there were two tickets taken for London; a first-class for the Captain himself, and a second for the waterman Wingate—travelling together, though in separate carriages, as befitted their different rank in life.