"'You don't think he's gone on the booze?' I said, incredulously.
"'I don't know what to think,' he retorted, irritably. 'I always thought he had plenty o' principle. You can't tell nowadays. But we don't want him to spoil himself at the beginning of his career. Understand what I mean?'
"As I sat in the stern of the cutter while the men pulled back into the shadow which was about to engulf the ship (for the moon was setting) I felt I liked Jack the better for that kindly whisper out of earshot of the estimable Mr. Bloom. It was like him. Now and again you could look into the depths of his character, where dwelt the old immemorial virtues of truth and charity and loyalty to his cloth. I even twisted round on the gunwale as I steered and looked back affectionately at his short, corpulent figure walking to and fro on the bridge deck, worrying himself about the 'young feller,' the embodiment of a rough yet exquisite altruism. It seemed to me a manifestation of love at least as worthy of admiration as was his domestic fidelity. Oh, yes! You fellows call me a cynic, but I believe in love, nevertheless. It is only your intense preoccupation with one particular sort of love which evokes the cynicism and which inspires the monstrous egotism of women like Mrs. Evans.
"'Hard over, Sir,' said the leading seaman. 'Way 'nuff, boys!' I flashed my torch upon the tiny jetty which Grünbaum had made near his house, for he often went on fishing expeditions round the island, I had heard. Steps had been cut down from a path in the face of the cliff which led away up to some workings facing the sea, but which are out of sight. When I had climbed up the jetty I said:
"'Now you wait here while I go along to the house, and make enquiries. I don't suppose he's very far off.'
"I made my own way up the rough stones to the path, midway between the soft whisper of the waves and the frightful edge above my head and I felt a momentary vertigo. I was suspended in the depths of an impenetrable darkness. All things—the jetty, the boat, the path, were swallowed up. Even the ship was indicated only by the faint hurricane-lamp at the gangway and the reflection of the galley-fire against a bulkhead. Stone for building and for buttressing the mine-galleries had been quarried out below, and the path was under-cut and littered about with the débris of an old ore-tip. I moved slowly toward Grünbaum's house, and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw another path, a more slanting stairway, on the face of the cliff. I paused. It was some hundred yards or so to where Grünbaum's house stood, as you see, at the foot of the slope. In the darkness Jack's words seemed to me to shed light. There was something wrong. But if something was wrong, if young Siddons had come to some harm, how had it happened? He must have had some motive in leaving a cutter with six men to wait for him. As for my idiotic suggestion that he might have gone on the booze, there wasn't a café within three miles that young Siddons would enter. He must have had some plan. Of course we are told, with wearisome insistence, to look for the woman; but we don't in real life. We look for all sorts of motives before we look for the woman. And even if I did in this instance suppose for a moment that Siddons had gone off on some mysterious adventure involving say, Captain Macedoine's daughter, I was no further advanced. He could hardly have told the sailors to wait. It was against all traditions of the service. And as I was deciding that he must have come to harm, and wondering how the deuce I was to discover him, a light shone out for a moment above me, I saw a figure silhouetted in a doorway and then vanish. Someone had gone in. I started up the steep by-path to make enquiries. I knew the pilot, a predatory person from Samos, had a hutch on the mountain somewhere, and it occurred to me that he had negotiated the sale of a flask or two of the sweetish wine of the island, and young Siddons had seized the opportunity to get it aboard without the old man knowing it. Quite a rational theory, I thought, as I toiled up the path getting short of breath. And suddenly I came upon the door which had opened and closed, a door in a house like a square white flat-topped box, with a window in one side shedding a faint glow upon a garden of shrubs.
"And now I was in a quandary. I sat down on a bowlder to take a breath. Supposing I knocked at the door and asked if any one had seen the Third Mate, and the inhabitants had not seen him and couldn't understand me, I should have done no good. And supposing they had seen him, or that he was inside, I should have some difficulty in explaining my interest in his private affairs. For I liked him, and we are always afraid of those whom we like. It is not only that we fear to tarnish our own reputation in their eyes, but we suffer a mingled terror and pleasure lest we discover them to be unworthy of their exalted position in our affections. So I got up and instead of knocking at the door I stepped among the shrubs and came to the window. And sitting close against the wall, with a small table in front of him and his head on his hand, sat Captain Macedoine.
"He was old. He showed, as we say, the ravages of time. And not of time only. Time alone could not furrow a human face into so many distorting folds and wrinkles. As I recalled the sleek, full-fed condition of his big smooth-shaven face when I had known him in the old days, I was revolted at the change. It was as though an evil spirit had been striving for years to leave him, and had failed. The cheeks were sunk into furrows of gray stubble and had sagged into sardonic ridges round the thin, wavering line of the mouth. The red eyelids blinked and twitched among the innumerable seams that ran back to the sparse, iron-gray hair. The nose, quite a noble and aquiline affair once, was red at the end, and querulous, like the long lean chin and reedy neck. Only the brow gave any hint that he might not be a casual loafer at a railroad station willing to carry your grip for a few pennies. High, narrow, and revealed remorselessly by the passing of the years, it was the brow of the supreme illusionist, the victim of an implacable and sinister spiritual destiny. I have said that when I saw him the previous evening he had the look of a man trying to win back into the world. Now that I saw him more clearly, he looked as though he had come back, at some frightful cost, and regretted it.
"He was listening to someone I could not see at the moment, and raising his eyes with a regularly recurring movement that was almost mechanical. I shifted a little to take in another view of the small, shabbily furnished room. Standing by the end of a sofa, on which I could see a girl's feet and skirt, was a dark young man brushing his frock coat and talking with what struck me as absurd eloquence. He had never shaved; his face was obscured in a sort of brown fungus and was blotchy about the forehead and chin. His black eyes rolled as he talked and flourished the brush. He seemed to be describing something highly creditable to himself. This, I may tell you, was Monsieur Nikitos, visible in business hours as a clerk at Grünbaum's elbow, or in a bare barn of an outer office. He came over to the table, and sitting down near Captain Macedoine, opened an account book. This was evidently a séance of the Anglo-Hellenic Development Company, I thought, and I moved back to the path. I had no desire to spy upon any of these people, you understand. I had to find Siddons, and even the intriguing amusement of watching a great illusionist had to recede before that urgent need. I regained the path below and thinking I would go down to the boat in case he had returned I started back. The torch showed me a steep descent of rubble where a cave-in had occurred, a gash in the edge of the path, I thought at first it was the way down to the jetty and I flashed the lamp steadily upon the bottom. There was someone lying down there. It was not long before I was kneeling over young Siddons.
"At first, you know, I really thought he was dead. He was lying face upward and his forehead had been gouged open above the left eye with some jagged edge and was bleeding in thick, slow runnels that disappeared into his curly hair. He lay perfectly motionless, but as I bent over him and searched the soft, delicate face in the first horror of grief, the eyes opened wide and blinked in a gaze of unconscious enquiry.