The Pursuit Part 51

"By way of Celsa, where an infant awaits baptism--and my friends, I dare to hope, will excuse the short delay--to Messina. Where else, my good Luigi? That surely is the place where your guests can most conveniently adjust their misunderstandings."

The smuggler shrugged his shoulders.

"I am at your service, father," he said, and looked vacantly at the opposite wall. But the tail of his eye, Aylmer noted, was on Landon. Was there a message, or inquiry, in it?

"All of us," said Landon, smoothly, "must find your proposition a very practical one. May I hasten to add my approval of it?"

He looked smilingly at Aylmer, at Claire, lastly at Muhammed. The Moor--was it Aylmer's fancy?--answered with a tiny nod. There was sarcasm in this glance of Landon's; there was menace; there was--so Aylmer told himself--malignant triumph.

Padre Sigismondi nodded absently. He presented his coffee-cup to the Moor to be refilled, and as the brown liquid ran from the spout, watched it with a slow, stolid abstraction. His mental alertness seemed to be relaxing with physical refreshment. He offered no further remarks; he plied his spoon upon the polenta slowly, and yet more slowly.

Suddenly Emmanuele, the sailor, dropped his cup in the act of taking a more than usually copious draught. He looked stupidly at the coa.r.s.e crockery as it broke upon the floor.

Sigismondi shook a finger at him, a finger which, somehow, he seemed to have under no proper command. "Careless one!" he mumbled. "Careless one!

Where are your manners?" And then, suddenly, as if he heaved back a weight, he rose unsteadily to his feet. He threatened Luigi with his clenched fist.

"Traitorous dog!" he cried, and fell senseless to the floor.

His companion stared at him stupidly, plunged forward as if to bring him aid, and then fell, too, at his feet. The pair lay where they had fallen, unmoving.

At the back of the room Landon broke out into pleasant laughter.

Aylmer darted forward and bent to shake Sigismondi fiercely by the shoulder. Claire cried to him warningly.

Too late!

Landon and Luigi had flung themselves upon him from behind. Muhammed had dropped a looped cord across his shoulders. There was a moment's confusion--the corner of the table smashed under a chance blow--and then stillness. Lashed with cords into rigidity, Aylmer lay upon the planks, and Landon, gazing down, spat upon his upturned face.

"You clever fool!" he derided. "To think to have cornered me--me!"

He looked rapidly at his watch and turned to Luigi.

"It is five hours to dawn," he said. "Where is it we are to take them?

There is no possibility for delay?"

The smuggler threw out his hands with an air of fatalism.

"The headquarters of the Society--there is no other place!" he said.

"With this wind, four hours or less will see us there. They will charge a commission; you will have to bear with that. But we shall have perfect privacy and, if you will, perfected means of dealing with this man's obstinacy. And there will be adepts, who will give you their a.s.sistance for the pleasure of the thing."

Landon nodded.

"Do you hear, my friend, do you hear?" he cried, thrusting his foot against Aylmer's cheek. "You have wriggled well in my coils--I grant you that. You have twisted and, for the moment, escape seemed open--wide open--before you. But against me? No one prevails there, no one!"

"One may--yet."

The voice was Claire's. Landon wheeled towards her.

"That shows a very determined optimism, sister-in-law," he said. "And who, if the knowledge is not privileged?"

"G.o.d," she said quietly, and met his eyes unflinchingly.

CHAPTER XXV

FATE'S FINAL WORD

Storm, darkness, despair--these had been the sole comrades for the two who lay bound in their old quarters in the _Santa Margarita's_ lazaret.

Within a few minutes of the moment in which Padre Sigismondi had succ.u.mbed to the islander's treacherous hospitality, those who had sought his protection had been prisoners once more, and the felucca's mast had been stepped anew. For three hours it had bent before the strength of the northern wind--the hot, oppressive breath which seemed to blow no longer from Nature's lips but in her very face. For it was an unnatural wind--in temperature, in the quarter from which it came, in dampness. The rigging slackened in the humid gusts, but the great sail bellied out magnificently. They had torn across the broad waste of waters at racing speed. Captain Luigi announced with legitimate pride that they had come a matter of five and fifty kilometres. The land loomed up before them mountainously a short five miles away.

Landon peered into the darkness. Lights shone far to the left of their position--lights in rows, lights white, lights dusky orange, and far beyond the main ma.s.s of the illumination one red star which winked in solemn intervals.

"Messina," explained Luigi, tersely. "The red beam? That is the Faro."

"And we land where?" asked Landon.

"Here, if the Holy Mother gives us her protection," said the skipper, and pointed straight ahead. "In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred there is no difficulty about it. The port police--there are three of them--are cousins of my own and, it is needless to say, controlled by the Society.

In fifteen minutes you will see."

"The hundredth chance?" said Landon. "That is--?"

"The Carbineers, Signor. Or rather one Carbineer--Sergeant Pinale, who has been at the bottom of many an honest contrabandist's misfortune.

_Brutta bestia!_ He will not keep to any ordered sequence in his goings and comings. But the men of the Society will know. If they answer our signals, all is well."

Landon looked at him debatingly.

"Who is to answer signals at this hour of the night, my good Luigi? Your colleagues will be in their more or less virtuous beds."

The smuggler smiled a superior smile.

"The Society never sleeps, Signor, and it has trained the men in its ranks to remember as much. High on the blank wall of hill above the port is a watch-tower, though only a private dwelling-house to all seeming.

There is a need for the sons of the Mafia to have an open door into Sicily at any moment of the day or night."

He called one of the hands to the tiller as he finished speaking and went forward. He came back, holding a ship's lantern. There were wings of gla.s.s on hinges on either side of it--one red, one green.

He knelt and busied himself in lighting it in the shelter of the companion. The breeze had driven them right in under the shadow of the land by now. The steep above the sh.o.r.e seemed almost to overhang them.

Here and there a faint oil lamp flickered along the Marina; a larger, nearer, and brighter gleam was evidence of a tiny jetty which was washed by waves which were dwindling under the protection of the land.

Luigi lifted his lamp and held it clear of the companion. Rapidly he shut the green shield over the untinted gla.s.s, as rapidly opened it again, shut the red wing twice in quick succession, and finally left the green signal closed.

Landon's eyes probed the darkness. His companion stood silent, his face raised towards the hill. There was no apprehension in his att.i.tude, only expectancy.

Quite suddenly it seemed that the wind had dropped. The shelter of the sh.o.r.e might account for this in part, Landon mused, but surely not altogether. It was weird, in a sense, this abrupt alternation to perfect stillness after the uproars of the outer seas, but it was not unpleasant. It gave one a sense of relaxation; but the heat, untempered by the faintest breath of air, was incredibly oppressive. December was aping the temperatures of August.

Luigi sighed contentedly and spoke.