"Certainly!" I replied politely. "Pray keep it." Lifting my cap a second time, I turned to go.

Her fingers touched my arm.

"Wait! Please wait!" she was urging. There was a half-imperious, half-appealing note in her hushed voice.

I stared.

"I'm afraid," I said blankly, "that I don't quite--"

"Some one may suspect. Some one may come," urged this most astonishing young woman. "Don't you see that--that I'm trusting you to help me?

Won't you stay?"

Wondering if I by any chance looked as stunned as I felt, I bowed formally, faced about, and waited, both arms on the rail. My ideas as to my companion had been revolutionized in sixty seconds. I had believed her a girl with whom I might have grown up, a girl whose brother and cousins I had probably known at college, a girl that I might have met at a friend's dinner or at the opera or on a country-club porch if I had had my luck with me. Now what was I to think her--an escaped lunatic or something more accountable and therefore worse? If I detest anything, it is the unconventional, the stagy, the mysterious. Setting my teeth, I resolved to wait until she concluded her researches; after that, politely but firmly, I would depart.

And then, beside me, the paper rustled. I heard a little gasp, a tiny low-drawn sigh. Stealing a glance down, I saw the girl's face shining whitely in the deck light. Her black lashes fringed her cheeks as her head bent backward; her eyes were as dark as the water we were slipping through. I had no idea of speaking, and yet I did speak.

"I am afraid," I heard myself saying, "that you have had bad news."

She was struggling for self-control, but her voice wavered.

"Yes," she agreed; "I am afraid I have."

"If there is anything I can do--" I was correct, but reluctant. How I would bless her if she would go away!

But obviously she did not intend to. Quite the contrary!

"There is something," she was murmuring, "that would help me very much."

There, I had done it! I was an a.s.s of the common or garden variety, who first resolved to keep out of a queer business and then, because a girl looked bothered, plunged into it up to my ears. I succeeded in hiding my feelings, in looking wooden.

"Please tell me," I responded, "what it is."

"But--I can't explain it." Her gloved hands tightened on the railing.

"And if I ask without explaining, it will seem so--so strange."

"Doubtless," I reflected grimly. But I had to see the thing through now.

"That doesn't matter at all," I a.s.sured her civilly through clenched teeth.

She came closer--so close that her fur coat brushed me, and her breath touched my cheek; her eyes, like gray stars now that they were less anxious, went to my head a little, I suppose. Oh, yes, she was lovely.

Of course that was a factor. If she had been past her first youth and skimpy as to hair, and dowdy, I don't pretend that I should ever have mixed myself up in the preposterous coil.

"This paper," she whispered, holding out the sheet, "has something in it. It is not about me; it is not even true. But if it stays aboard the ship,--if some one sees it, it may make trouble. Oh, you see how it sounds; I knew you would think me mad!"

"Not in the least." What an absurd rigmarole she was uttering! Yet such was the spell of her eyes, her voice, her nearness that I merely felt like saying, "Tell me some more."

"I can't destroy it myself," she went on anxiously. "He--they--mustn't see me do anything that might lead them to--to guess. But no one will think of you, n.o.body will be watching you; so by and by will you weight the paper with something heavy and drop it across the rail?"

My head was whirling, but a graven image might have envied me my impa.s.sivity. I bowed. "I shall be delighted," I announced ba.n.a.lly, "to do as you say."

Her face flushed to a warm wild-rose tint as she heard me promise it, and her red lips, parting, took on a tremulous smile.

"Thank you," she murmured in frank grat.i.tude. "I thought--I knew you would help me!" Then she was gone.

My trance broken I woke to hear myself softly swearing. I consigned myself to my proper home, an asylum; I wished the girl at Timbuktu, Kamchatka, Land's End--anywhere except on this ship. As I had told the agent of the Phillipson Rifles, I am no boy. One can scarcely knock about the world for thirty years without gaining some of its wisdom; and of all the appropriate truisms I spared myself not one.

Resentfully I reminded myself that mysteries were suspicious, that honest people seldom had need of secrecy, that idiots who, like me, consented to act blindfold would probably repent their blindness in sackcloth and ashes before long. But what use were these sage reflections? I had given my word to her. I was in for the consequences, however unpleasant they proved.

Without further mental parley I went down to my cabin, where I routed out from among my traps a bronze paper-weight as heavy as lead. Wrapping the mysterious sheet about it, I brought the package back on deck. There was not a soul in sight; it was a propitious hour.

To right and to left the coast lights were slipping past, making golden paths on the black water as our tug pulled us out to sea. The reservists down below were singing "_Va fuori, o stranier_!" I dropped my package overboard, watched it vanish, and turned to behold the sphinx-like Van Blarcom, sprung up as if by magic, regarding me placidly from the shelter of the smoking-room door.

CHAPTER V

MR. VAN BLARCOM. U. S. A.

For a trip that had begun with such rich promise of the unusual, my voyage on the _Re d'Italia_ proved a gratifying anticlimax during its first few days. The weather was bad. We plowed forward monotonously, flagless, running between dark-gray water and a lowering, leaden sky.

Screws throbbed, timbers creaked, and dishes crashed as the Gulf Stream took us, and great waves reared themselves round us like myriads of threatening Alps.

After that first night the girl kept discreetly to her stateroom. I was relieved; but I thought of her a good deal. I had little else to do.

Pacing a drunken deck and smoking, I wove unsatisfactory theories, asking myself what was her need of secrecy, what the item she wanted hidden, what the errand that had made her sail on the vessel a week after the spectacular torpedoing of a sister-ship? Did she know this Van Blarcom or did she merely dread any notice? And above all, who was the man and had he been watching when I tossed that wretched extra across the rail?

I saw something of him, of course, as time went on. Naturally we four bold spirits, the ubiquitous McGuntrie, Van Blarcom, the young reservist Pietro Ricci,--a very good sort of fellow,--and I were herded together beyond escape. Also, a foursome at bridge seemed divinely indicated by our number, and to avert a sheer paralysis of ennui we formed the habit of winning each other's money at that game.

As we played I studied Van Blarcom, but without results. It was ruffling; I should have absorbed in so much intercourse a fairly definite impression of his personality, profession, and social grade.

But he was baffling; reticent, but self-a.s.sured, authoritative even, and, in a quiet way, watchful. He smoked a good cigar, mixed a good drink, seemed used to travel, but produced a coa.r.s.e-grained effect, made grammatical errors, and on the whole was a person from whom, once ash.o.r.e, I should flee.

At six o'clock on the seventh night out our voyage entered its second lap; all the electric lights were simultaneously extinguished as we entered the danger zone. We made a sketchy toilet by means of tapers, groped like wandering ghosts down a dim corridor, and dined by the faint rays of candles thrust into bottles and placed at intervals along the festive board. I went on deck afterward to find the ship plunging through blackness on forced draft, with port-holes shrouded and with not even a riding-light. If not in Davy Jones's locker by that time, we should reach Gibraltar the next evening; afterward we should head for Naples, a two days' trip.

The following morning found our stormy weather over. The sea through which we were speeding had a magic color, the dark, rich, Mediterranean blue. Ascending late, I saw gulls flying round us and seaweed drifting by, and Mr. McGuntrie in a state of nerves, with a life belt about him, walking wildly to and fro.

"Well, Mr. Bayne," he greeted me, "never again for mine! If I ever see the end of this trip,--if you call it a trip; I call it merry hades,--believe me, I'll sell something hereafter that I can sell on land. I'm a crackerjack of a salesman, if I do say it myself. Once I got started talking I could get a man down below to buy a hot toddy and a set of flannels--and I wish I'd gone down there and done it before I ever saw this boat."

Unmoved, I leaned on the railing and watched the blue swells break.

McGuntrie took a turn or two. In the ship's library he had discovered a manual ent.i.tled "How to Swim," and he was now attempting between laments to memorize its salient points.

"The first essay is best made in water of not less than fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and not more than four feet in depth," he gabbled, and then broke off to gaze at the sea about us, chilly in temperature, and countless fathoms deep. "Oh, what's the use? What the blue blazes does it matter?" he cried hysterically. "I tell you that U-boat that sank the _San Pietro_ is laying for us. In about an hour you'll see a periscope bob up out there. Then we'll send out an S.O.S., and the next thing you know we'll sink with all on board."

We had as yet escaped this doom when toward six o'clock we approached Gibraltar, running beneath a crimson sunset and between misty purple sh.o.r.es. On one hand lay Africa, on the other the Moorish country, both shrouded in a soft haze and edged with snowy foam. Down below the soldiers of Italy were singing. A merchantman of belligerent nationality, our ship proudly flew its flag again. Indeed, had it failed to do so, the British patrol-boats would long since have known the reason why.

It was growing dark when I turned to find Van Blarcom at my elbow.

"I didn't see you," I commented rather shortly. I don't like people to creep up beside me like cats.

"No," he responded. "I've been waiting quite a while. I didn't want to disturb you, but the fact is I'd like a word with you, Mr. Bayne."

I eyed him with curiosity. He was inscrutable, this quiet, alert, efficient-looking man. Take, for instance, his present manner, half self-a.s.sured, half respectfully apologetic--what grade in life did it fit?