"Not a drop, thank G--I'm sorry!--I ask your pardon, Mr. Neeland!"

added the captain, very red in the face.

But Neeland laughed so hard that, after a moment, the red died out in the captain's face and a faint grin came into it.

So they shook hands and said good night; and Neeland went away, leaving his box on the floor of the captain's cabin as certain of its inviolability as he was of the Bank of England.

CHAPTER XX

THE DROP OF IRISH

The usual signs of land greeted Neeland when he rose early next morning and went out on deck for the first time without his olive-wood box--first a few gulls, then puffins, terns, and other sea fowl in increasing numbers, weed floating, fishing smacks, trawlers tossing on the rougher coast waters.

After breakfast he noticed two British torpedo boat destroyers, one to starboard, the other on the port bow, apparently keeping pace with the _Volhynia_. They were still there at noon, subjects of speculation among the pa.s.sengers; and at tea-time their number was increased to five, the three new destroyers appearing suddenly out of nowhere, dead ahead, dashing forward through a lively sea under a swirling vortex of gulls.

The curiosity of the pa.s.sengers, always easily aroused, became more thoroughly stirred up by the bulletins posted late that afternoon, indicating that the tension between the several European chancelleries was becoming acute, and that emperors and kings were exchanging personal telegrams.

There was all sorts of talk on deck and at the dinner table, wild talk, speculative talk, imaginative discussions, logical and illogical. But, boiled down to its basic ingredients, the wildest imagination on board the _Volhynia_ admitted war to be an impossibility of modern times, and that, ultimately, diplomacy would settle what certainly appeared to be the ugliest international situation in a hundred years.

At the bottom of his heart Neeland believed this, too; wished for it when his higher and more educated spiritual self was flatly interrogated; and yet, in the everyday, impulsive ego of James Neeland, the drop of Irish had begun to sing and seethe with the atavistic instinct for a row.

War? He didn't know what it meant, of course. It made good poetry and interesting fiction; it rendered history amusing; made dry facts succulent.

Preparations for war in Europe, which had been going on for fifty years, were most valuable, too, in contributing the brilliant hues of uniforms to an otherwise sombre civilian world, and investing commonplace and sober cities with the omnipresent looming mystery of fortifications.

To a painter, war seemed to be a dramatic and gorgeous affair; to a young man it appealed as all excitement appeals. The sportsman in him desired to witness a sc.r.a.p; his artist's imagination was aroused; the gambler in him speculated as to the outcome of such a war. And the seething, surging drop of Irish fizzed and purred and coaxed for a chance to edge sideways into any fight which G.o.d in His mercy might provide for a decent gossoon who had never yet had the pleasure of a broken head.

"Not," thought Neeland to himself, "that I'll go trailing my coat tails. I'll go about my own business, of course--but somebody may hit me a crack at that!"

He thought of Ilse Dumont and of the man with the golden beard, realising that he had had a wonderful time, after all; sorry in his heart that it was all over and that the _Volhynia_ was due to let go her mudhooks in the Mersey about three o'clock the next morning.

As he leaned on the deck rail in the soft July darkness, he could see the lights of the destroyers to port and starboard, see strings of jewel-like signals flash, twinkle, fade, and flash again.

All around him along the deck pa.s.sengers were promenading, girls in evening gowns or in summer white; men in evening dress or reefed in blue as nautically as possible; old ladies toddling, swathed in veils, old gentlemen in dinner coats and sporting headgear--every weird or conventional combination infested the decks of the _Volhynia_.

Now, for the first time during the voyage, Neeland felt free to lounge about where he listed, saunter wherever the whim of the moment directed his casual steps. The safety of the olive-wood box was no longer on his mind, the handle no longer in his physical clutch. He was at liberty to stroll as carelessly as any boulevard _flaneur_; and he did so, scanning the pa.s.sing throng for a glimpse of Ilse Dumont or of the golden-bearded one, but not seeing either of them.

In fact, he had not laid eyes on them since he had supped not wisely but too well on the soup that Scheherazade had flavoured for him.

The stateroom door of the golden-bearded man had remained closed. His own little c.o.c.kney steward, who also looked out for Golden Beard, reported that gentleman as requiring five meals a day, with beer in proportion, and the porcelain pipe steaming like aetna all day long.

His little West Indian stewardess also reported the gossip from her friend on another corridor, which was, in effect, that Miss White, the trained nurse, took all meals in her room and had not been observed to leave that somewhat monotonous sanctuary.

How many more of the band there might be Neeland did not know. He remembered vaguely, while lying rigid under the grip of the drug, that he had heard Ilse Dumont's voice mention somebody called Karl. And he had an idea that this Karl might easily be the big, ham-fisted German who had tried so earnestly to stifle him and throw him from the vestibule of the midnight express.

However, it did not matter now. The box was safe in the captain's care; the _Volhynia_ would be lying at anchor off Liverpool before daylight; the whole exciting and romantic business was ended.

With an unconscious sigh, not entirely of relief, Neeland opened his cigarette case, found it empty, turned and went slowly below with the idea of refilling it.

They were dancing somewhere on deck; the music of the ship's orchestra came to his ears. He paused a moment on the next deck to lean on the rail in the darkness and listen.

Far beneath him, through a sea as black as onyx, swept the reflections of the lighted ports; and he could hear the faint hiss of foam from the curling flow below.

As he turned to resume his quest for cigarettes, he was startled to see directly in front of him the heavy figure of a man--so close to him, in fact, that Neeland instinctively threw up his arm, elbow out, to avoid contact.

But the man, halting, merely lifted his hat, saying that in the dim light he had mistaken Neeland for a friend; and they pa.s.sed each other on the almost deserted deck, saluting formally in the European fashion, with lifted hats.

His spirits a trifle subdued, but still tingling with the shock of discovering a stranger so close behind him where he had stood leaning over the ship's rail, Neeland continued on his way below.

Probably the big man had made a mistake in good faith; but the man certainly had approached very silently; was almost at his very elbow when discovered. And Neeland remembered the light-shot depths over which, at that moment, he had been leaning; and he realised that it would have been very easy for a man as big as that to have flung him overboard before he had wit to realise what had been done to him.

Neither could he forget the curious gleam in the stranger's eyes when a ray from a deck light fell across his shadowy face--unusually small eyes set a little too close together to inspire confidence. Nor had the man's slight accent escaped him--not a Teutonic accent, he thought, but something fuller and softer--something that originated east of Scutari, suggesting the Eurasian, perhaps.

But Neeland's soberness was of volatile quality; before he arrived at his stateroom he had recovered his gaiety of spirit. He glanced ironically at the closed door of Golden Beard as he fitted his key into his own door.

"A lively lot," he thought to himself, "what with Scheherazade, Golden Beard, and now Ali Baba--by jinx!--he certainly did have an Oriental voice!--and he looked the part, too, with a beak for a nose and a black moustache a la Enver Pasha!"

Much diverted by his own waxing imagination, he turned on the light in his stateroom, filled the cigarette case, turned to go out, and saw on the carpet just inside his door a bit of white paper folded c.o.c.ked-hat fashion and addressed to him.

Picking it up and unfolding it, he read:

May I see you this evening at eleven? My stateroom is 623. If there is anybody in the corridor, knock; if not, come in without knocking.

I mean no harm to you. I give my word of honour. Please accept it for as much as your personal courage makes it worth to you--its face value, or nothing.

Knowing you, I may say without flattery that I expect you. If I am disappointed, I still must bear witness to your courage and to a generosity not characteristic of your s.e.x.

You have had both power and provocation to make my voyage on this ship embarra.s.sing. You have not done so. And self-restraint in a man is a very deadly weapon to use on a woman.

I hope you will come. I desire to be generous on my part. Ask yourself whether you are able to believe this. You don't know women, Mr.

Neeland. Your conclusion probably will be a wrong one.

But I think you'll come, all the same. And you will be right in coming, whatever you believe.

Ilse Dumont.

It was a foregone conclusion that he would go. He knew it before he had read half the note. And when he finished it he was certain.

Amused, his curiosity excited, grateful that the adventure had not yet entirely ended, he lighted a cigarette and looked impatiently at his watch.

It lacked half an hour of the appointed time and his exhilaration was steadily increasing.