The Beautiful White Devil Part 23

"To-morrow," she answered. "To-morrow night, all being well, we shall pick up a trading schooner off a certain island. Her owner is under an obligation to me, and will take you on board and convey you to Thursday Island. Thence you can travel home via Australia and the Ca.n.a.l or Honolulu and America, as you please."

I had expected that the parting was not far distant, but I did not think it would prove as close as this. I told Alie as much.

"It is the only opportunity that may serve," she answered. "And I must not keep you with me too long for your own sake."

Under cover of the darkness I managed to find and take her hand.

"It is only for a year, Alie. You understand that, don't you? At the end of a year you are to be my wife?"

"If you still wish it, yes," she answered, but so softly that I had to strain my ears to catch it. Then with a whispered good-night she slipped from me and went below.

At sundown next evening, surely enough, a small topsail schooner hove in sight from behind an island, and, seeing us, ran up a signal. It was returned from our gaff, and as soon as I read it I knew that my fate was sealed. Leaving Walworth to see my luggage brought up on deck I went down Alie's companion ladder to bid her farewell. She was seated on the couch at the further end, reading.

"The schooner has just put in an appearance and answered our signals,"

I began, hardly able to trust my voice to speak. "I have come to say good-bye. For both our sakes we must not let this interview be a long one. Alie, will you tell me for the last time exactly when I am to see you again, and where?"

"On the first day of May next year, all being well, I will be at an address in London, of which I will take care to acquaint you beforehand."

"But since you last spoke of that I have been thinking it over. Alie, you must not come to England, the risk would be too great."

"There will be no risk at all, and I shall take every precaution to ensure my own safety. You may rest a.s.sured of that," she answered.

"But before you go I have a little keepsake for you, something that may serve to remind you of the Beautiful White Devil and the days you have spent with her, when you are far away."

As she spoke she took from the table, beside which she was now standing, a large gold locket. Opening it she let me see that it contained an excellent portrait of herself.

"Oh, Alie," I cried, "how can I thank you? You have given me the one thing of all others that I desired. Now, in my turn, I have a present for you. This ring" (here I drew a ring from my finger) "was my poor dead mother's last gift to me, and I want you to wear it."

I placed it on her finger, and having done so, took her in my arms and kissed her on the lips. This time she offered no resistance.

Then we said good-bye, and I went up on deck. An hour later the _Lone Star_ had faded away into the night, and I was aboard the _Pearl Queen_ bound for Thursday Island and the Port of London.

When I came to think of it I could hardly believe that it was nearly four months since Walworth had found me out in the Occidental Hotel, Hong Kong, and induced me to become the servant and at the same time the lover of the Beautiful White Devil.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FIRST OF MAY.

Arriving in Thursday Island, one of the hottest and quaintest little spots on earth, I was fortunate enough to catch a British India mail boat in the act of starting for Brisbane. I accordingly had my luggage conveyed to her and was soon comfortably installed aboard her. The voyage from Torres Straits, along the Queensland coast, inside the Great Barrier Reef, though it boasts on one hand a rugged and almost continuous line of cliffs marked with such names as Cape Despair and Tribulation, and upon the other twelve hundred miles of treacherous reef, is quite worth undertaking. I explored the different ports of call, and, on reaching Brisbane, caught the train for Adelaide, embarked on board a P. and O. mail boat there, and in less than six weeks from the time of booking my pa.s.sage was standing in the porch of my own house in Cavendish Square, had rung the bell, and was waiting for the front door to be opened to me.

It was a cold winter's afternoon; an icy blast tore through the Square and howled round the various corners, so that all the folk whose inclement destinies compelled them to be abroad were hurrying along as if their one desire were to be indoors and by their fires again without loss of time.

Presently my old housekeeper opened the door, and, though I had telegraphed to her from Naples to expect me, pretended to be so overwhelmed with surprise at seeing me as to be incapable of speech for nearly a minute. I managed to get past her at last, however, and went into what, in the days of my practice, had been my consulting room. The fire was burning brightly, my slippers were toasting before it, my writing table was loaded with books and papers as usual, and a comfortable easy chair was drawn up beside it. Everything was exactly as I had left it fourteen months before, even to the paper knife still resting in a half cut book, and a hastily scrawled memo upon the blotting pad. There was something almost ironical about this state of stagnation when I thought of the changes that had occurred in my own life since last I had used that knife and written that memorandum. I told the old housekeeper to let me have my dinner at the usual hour, and having done so, asked her the news of the Square. Her reply was not important.

"James [her husband] an' me, sir," she said, "'ad the rheumatiz at the beginning of the winter, the young postman with the red whiskers 'ave got married to the parlour maid as burnt herself so bad three years back, at number 99, and the little gal with the golden curls across the way fell down the airey and broke her leg two months ago come next Friday."

Such was the chronicle of the most important occurrences in that quiet London Square during my absence.

After dinner I returned to my study, wrote two or three letters, and then drawing my chair up to the fire, sat down to think. Outside the wind howled and the rain dashed against my windows, but my thoughts were very far away from Cavendish Square; they were flying across the seas to an island, where lived a woman whom I had come to love better than all the world. Closing my eyes, I seemed to see the yacht lying in the little harbour under the palm clad hills; I went ash.o.r.e, threaded my way through the tangled ma.s.s of jungle, and pa.s.sed up the path to the bungalow on the hillside. There I found Alie moving about her rooms with all her old queenly grace; then like a flash the scene changed, and we were back on the yacht's deck in the typhoon. I saw the roaring seas racing down upon us, heard the wind whistling and shrieking through the straining cordage, noticed the broken bulwarks, and by my side, Alie in her oilskins, with her sou-wester drawn tight about her head, clinging to the rail with every atom of her strength.

But all that was past and over, and now for twelve months--nay, to be exact, eleven,--I was to be the staid, respectable London householder I had been before I visited the East. After that--but there, what was to happen after that, who could tell?

After a while the termination of my pipe brought my reverie to an end, so I took up a file of papers from the table and fell to scanning the last few numbers. Suddenly a headline caught my eye and rivetted my attention. It was a clipping from a Hong Kong paper, and read as follows:

"THE BEAUTIFUL WHITE DEVIL AGAIN."

"After a silence of something like four months the Beautiful White Devil has again done us the honour of appearing in Eastern waters. On this occasion, however, her polite attentions have been bestowed upon Singapore, from which place she has abducted, with singular cleverness, a young English doctor, whose acquaintance she had made in Batavia, and with him a certain well-known resident by name Ebbington. These two affairs were managed with that dexterity which the Beautiful White Devil has taught us to expect from her, the sequel, however, we have yet to learn.

Surely, and we say it for the fiftieth occasion, it is time some definite steps were taken by Government to bring about the capture of a woman who, while being a picturesque and daring enough subject for a novel, has been a continual menace and danger to the commerce of the East for a greater number of years than the editorial chair cares to reckon."

I cut the paragraph out and, having placed it in my pocket-book, turned to the next issue published a week later. Here I found another quarter column devoted to her exploits. This one was also from the Hong Kong paper and ran as follows:

"THE BEAUTIFUL WHITE DEVIL'S LATEST AND GREATEST EXPLOIT."

"Last week we described what may be considered two of the cleverest and most daring exploits in the whole of the Beautiful White Devil's extraordinary career. We refer to the abduction of an English doctor, travelling in the East in order to study Asiatic diseases, and a well-known figure in Singapore society, Mr. Arthur James Ebbington, whose bay pony, Cupid, it will be remembered, won the Straits Settlement's Cup last year. The whereabouts of these two gentlemen have not yet, so we learn, been discovered, but to compensate for that we have to chronicle another, and perhaps more serious, act of violence on the part of this notorious character. The facts of the case are as follows:

"On Sat.u.r.day morning last the mail steamer _Bramah_ left Singapore for Hong Kong, having on board a number of distinguished pa.s.sengers, including the new admiral of the China Station, Sir Dominic Denby, his flag lieutenant, Mr.

Hoskin, and a prominent new government official for Hong Kong, Mr. Barkmansworth. There were also among the pa.s.sengers six gentlemen of una.s.suming appearance, who, as far as could be judged, seemed to be total strangers to each other. The names they booked under were, as we find by a perusal of the shipping company's books, Matherson, Calderman, Burns, Alderney, Braham, and Balder.

"The first described himself as a missionary, the second was presumably a tourist, the third a tea merchant, the fourth an English newspaper correspondent, the fifth an American mill owner, and the sixth an Indian civilian on furlough. On Sunday morning early, the officer of the watch sighted a sail some few points off the starboard bow. From all appearances it was a large schooner yacht, flying a distress signal. On nearer approach it was seen that she had suffered considerable damage, her topmasts appearing to have been carried completely away.

"On inquiring her name it was elicited that she was the schooner yacht _Sagittarius_, belonging to the Royal Cowes Yacht Squadron, and owned by Lord Melkard, the well-known Home Rule Peer, who was supposed, at the time, to be cruising in these waters. Suspicion being thus entirely diverted, Captain Barryman brought his steamer as close as was prudent and signalled to the yacht to send a boat, which request was immediately complied with. Meanwhile, however, the attention of the officers on the bridge being rivetted on the yacht, two of the men before enumerated, Matherson the missionary, and Balder the Indian civilian, contrary to rules, made their way on to the bridge and implored the captain and chief officer to stand by the smaller vessel, which they declared to be sinking. Then without warning, on receiving a signal from below, these two, to all appearances eminently peaceable gentlemen, drew revolvers from their pockets and covered the astonished officers. The remaining members of the gang by this time had posted themselves at the entrances to the first and second saloons, the engine-room, and the fo'c's'le, and refused to allow anyone to come on to or to leave the deck.

"When the boat came alongside Mr. Barkmansworth, the official before described, who had just had his bath and was completing his toilet in his cabin, was called up from below and ordered to descend into her. After some argument, and a considerable amount of threatening, he complied with the request and was pulled over to the yacht. Once there, he was seized, stripped to the skin, dragged up to a triangle, and remorselessly flogged. He was then sent bleeding and almost unconscious back to the steamer, where he was immediately placed under the doctor's care. On the return of the boat alongside, the six desperadoes, who had all the time been mounting guard, as before described, entered it and were conveyed to the yacht, which immediately steamed off in a southwesterly direction.

"That this last insult to the Powers-that-Be will have the result of inducing them to take more effective action against this notorious woman is too much to expect. But with a reckless confidence somewhat unusual to us, we are now pinning our faith on the newly arrived naval authority, the more so as he was himself a witness of the whole disgraceful affair. We can only point out one fact, and that is, that unless this woman be soon brought to justice, travelling by mail boat in Eastern waters will be a thing of the past.

When steamers are stopped, and well known and respected government officials publicly flogged in mid-ocean, it is evident that affairs are coming to too atrocious a pa.s.s altogether."

Putting this criticism into my pocket-book with the other, I took a glimpse at my locket and went to bed.

Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I donned the orthodox top hat and frock coat and set off to walk to South Kensington to call upon my sister Janet--who, by the way, was a widow, her husband having died of malarial fever when with his regiment on the west coast of Africa.

I found her in the morning-room in the act of writing a note of welcome to me. She greeted me with all her old sisterly affection, and when she had done so, made me sit down before the fire and tell her all my adventures.

"We have heard the most wonderful tales about you," she said, with a smile. "How you were captured by a sort of female Captain Kidd of fabulous beauty, who carried you off to an island in the Pacific, where you were made to dig sufficient gold to pay your ransom."

"Indeed?"

"It has been recopied into all sorts of papers," she continued. "But I've no doubt it was a ma.s.s of mere fabrication. Own the truth now, wasn't it?"

"Every bit," I answered candidly. "I have been very much annoyed by those stupid newspaper paragraphs. It is just like the rabid craving of the age for sensationalism. But before I go any further, Janet, I want to tell you something. I am going to be married."

"You! George! Why, you always used to say you had made up your mind never to do anything so foolish."

"So I did; but you see I have changed my mind."

"So it would appear. And now, who is she? Tell me where you met her and all about her."