A Secret of the Sea: A Novel. Vol. 3 (of 3)

by T. W. Speight

"Perhaps so, my friend, but still, I shall do it. During the last half-hour it seems as if the scales had fallen from my eyes. I seem now to see that woman as she really is--not as I have always believed her to be. I sent her to Stammars this morning with a message of the utmost importance. How will she deliver that message? Not as I asked her to deliver it, but----What a fool I must have been to send her on such an errand! I tell you, Whitaker, that I must go after her: that there is not a minute to lose."

"If you must go, you must, but in that case I shall go with you."

And in that way the matter was settled. Dr. Whitaker, finding that further opposition was useless, yielded the point, but was determined not to lose sight of Kelvin till he had seen him safely back in his own room. A quarter of an hour later the brougham came round. Kelvin managed to crawl downstairs, a step at a time, supported on each side by Whitaker and Pod. Mrs. Kelvin, being still busy with her pudding in the back part of the house, knew nothing of all this. Matthew sent her a message by Mr. Bray, his chief clerk; but it was not to be given to her till after the brougham had started.

Then Pod climbed on to the box beside the driver, and away they went.

[CHAPTER VI.]

VAN DUREN IN WALES.

In the dusk of a sweet May evening a man slipped quietly out of the back door of the "Ring of Bells" tavern--a low public-house, frequented chiefly by fishermen and labourers, in the village of Marhyddoc, and shunning the more frequented neighbourhoods, found himself presently in a pretty winding lane that seemed to lead to nowhere in particular, and was quite given over to solitude. Here the man sat down for a while on the trunk of a fallen tree. The house had become intolerable to him: he could stay in it no longer; so he had strolled out to this quiet nook, there to wait till dusk had deepened into dark. Not without difficulty would even Jonas Pringle have recognized in this man Max Van Duren. Hands and face had been stained till they were the colour of a gipsy's, and his hair had been dyed jet black. He had only been twelve hours in Marhyddoc, but he had already found out a great deal that it behoved him to know. Fortunately for Van Duren, the landlord of the "Ring of Bells" spoke English fluently, and was very fond of airing his accomplishment, besides being naturally of a garrulous turn of mind. As a consequence, Van Duren had very soon extracted from him all that he had to tell--more than enough to confirm his worst fears.

In the portraits which the landlord drew of two of the strangers who were staying at the big hotel on the cliff, he had no difficulty in recognizing Byrne and Miriam. He could no longer doubt that he had been duped by these two; that they had only hired his rooms, and wormed themselves into his confidence, in order to extract from him a secret which, up to that time, he could have sworn would never be whispered by him in mortal ears. And they had succeeded but too well. What a weak fool he had been! How easily that girl had twined him round her finger! How well he could see the sneer that would curve her beautiful lips when she spoke of him to her father! He hated her now with as much intensity as he had loved her before. Had Miriam Byrne come walking down that lane in the May twilight--had she and Max Van Duren met face to face with no third person by, the chances that her father would ever have seen his daughter alive again would have been very problematical indeed.

But with Byrne and his daughter at the hotel was another individual, according to the landlord's account--an elderly gentleman, whom Van Duren altogether failed to recognize. Not that he was greatly troubled thereby: he had far more important matters to occupy his thoughts.

For the landlord had other news--news that he was in no wise loth to impart, that for Van Duren was full of intense significance. He knew all about the divers and their strange apparatus and dresses. He told his hearer how, in the first place, someone had come down to Marhyddoc, and, after some difficulty, had found out the exact spot where the schooner Albatross had foundered twenty years before. The place was then marked with a buoy, and soon after that the divers had come. Everybody in the village had asked themselves what there was in the cargo of the Albatross that could be worth the trouble and expense of recovery after having been for twenty years at the bottom of the sea: and for a long time the question asked by everybody had remained unanswered. But at last it had oozed out, nobody seemed to know exactly how, that the particular object for which the divers were instructed to search was a small oaken box, clamped with silver. The box was said by some to contain certain documents and title-deeds of immense value, for lack of which the rightful heir to a great property had been kept out of his own for years. Others knew for a fact that the box was full of sovereigns which were being sent out to America to buy slaves with. Others there were who averred that inside the silver-clamped box would be found the evidence of a terrible murder that had remained undetected all this long time.