"C Q", or, In the Wireless House/Chapter 15
XV
Micky plays father confessor for the second time.
“LUCKY shot!" was the parting salutation of the wireless man on the Saxonia to Micky as she slid into the darkness. “Never come as near as that again!”
“Thanks!” answered our friend. “I can do without. So long!”
But it must be admitted that he was quite wabbly as he made his way to the ladder and descended to the deck, in response to an instinctive feeling that the passengers who sat at his table were somehow entitled to his encouragement. He found the second-cabin saloon crowded with a gesticulating and chattering mob of heterogeneous persons, each telling why it had happened and how near they had come to being sunk. A Baptist missionary from Ceylon was vainly endeavoring to organize a prayer meeting, while a commercial traveler from At-lanta had ordered up a case of beer at the other end of the saloon as a counter demonstration. The bunch held no interest for Micky. The simple fact was that they had had a narrow squeak, and he wanted neither a Hallelujah Chorus nor a Drinking Song as a supplement. He saw his Algerian friend calmly smoking a cigarette, and the brown-faced chauffeur devouring a sandwich. They were all right. Cloud was not to be seen,—he was in his room, probably, unless he ’d tried to swim off to the Saxonia,—a reckless and entirely improbable supposition. And Bennett could n’t get away. Micky left the saloon intending to go back to his office, smoke a pipe and then turn in.
As he made the corner of the deck-house, however, a small figure emerged from one of the passageways and caught his arm. It was the Bennett girl.
“Oh, Mr. Fitzpatrick!” she cried. “I ’m so frightened! Is there any danger?”
“No, of course not!” he answered cheerily. “We had a close shave, but it ’s all over now! She ’s two miles behind us by this time.”
“O—” she began. Then suddenly she gave way and began to sob pitifully.
“Poor little girl!“ exclaimed Micky, touched to the quick. “Poor little girl!“
Before he knew it he had taken her in his arms and she was crying hysterically with her head on his shoulder.
“By George! This won’t do!“ he thought, “suppose somebody should walk in on the party unexpectedly?“
“Look here, Miss Bennett,“ he said soothingly. “I ’m afraid we ’ll have to go somewhere else. You ’ve had a hard time. You ’re all unstrung. But try and brace up!“
The girl attempted to restrain her sobs, but without success.
“I ’m all alone!“ she cried brokenly. “They won’t even let me see my brother! And I thought we were going down with him locked in his state-room!“
“Oh I say!“ cried Micky, “you don’t mean old Ponsonby refuses to let you talk to him?“
“Yes,“ she answered. “Not a word can pass between us. I have n’t a soul to speak to. I don’t know anybody! And I don’t know what to do!“
“Poor child!“ exclaimed Micky. “Well, you just do as I tell you. We ’ve got to talk, that ’s sure. Of course I can’t go to your state-room, but you come on up to the wireless house and take a nip of brandy and tell me all about it.”
“Ought I?” she stammered. “You ’re the only person who ’s been kind to me on the whole boat. Since this morning I have n’t left my state-room, but when I thought we were going to be sunk I ran out.”
Micky preceded his guest up the ladder and placed a chair for her by the steam pipes. Then he poured out a tiny sip of brandy and handed it to her.
“Do you good,” he said, smiling.
She drank the brandy obediently, and wiped her eyes.
“Oh,” she said, “you don’t know what it is to have one person kind to you when you ’re in trouble. And we are in trouble! Of course—why, you ’re the person that knows most about it,—for it must have come by wireless.”
Micky nodded grimly.
“Yes,” he said, “it came that way. But it would n’t have made any difference. They ’d have caught him in New York.”
The girl began to cry again softly.
“He would do it!” she sobbed. “I told him no judge would sentence father if he knew why he ’d done it,—but Jim would do it!”
“Who—would do it?” inquired Micky. “Come, you might as well put some confidence in me and let me have the whole story.”
“There ’s no particular story,” she answered. “Father took the money to pay the doctors for mother and send her on the trip to Egypt. You see he ’d been employed there all his life,—but he could n’t ask the bank for money. And Sir Penniston Crisp, the great specialist, you know, said mother must have all kinds of care, trained nurses, and so on, and travel. He said she ’d die without them. Well, mother was sixty-one and father was sixty-seven and we only had his salary—two hundred and fifty pounds a year—to live on. But one day he came home and said he ’d had a bit of luck on the exchange and mother could go abroad.
“I see!” said Micky.
“That was four years ago!” went on the girl, gaining confidence as she proceeded. “Mother went to Egypt with a trained nurse and spent the winter, and did the same thing the winters following. In the summer we took a cottage at Brighton and had the best specialists. It must have cost a pile of money. And all that time neither mother nor I ever suspected a thing.”
“No,—why should you?" interjected the listener.
“Then Jim—Jim Chilvers—I was engaged to be married to him—”
She stopped suddenly and looked enquiringly at Micky.
“Sure,—I understand,” said Micky encouragingly.
“Jim came to me one day and said he ’d found that father had taken the money from the bank—nearly £5000—by shifting the securities around some way. I don’t understand those things. We were to have been married in a month, but Jim explained that they were going to have some kind of an investigation and that the bank would surely find it out.”
She turned a white face to him. Outside the rain beat a ghostly tattoo on the rattling panes.
“Now Sir Penniston had said that any shock might kill mother, and Jim said that the disgrace would kill father, too. He ’s an old man, you know! There was nothing to do he said, except for him—Jim— to shoulder the blame to save father. He said the only person who made any difference to him was me. As long as I knew he was n’t the ordinary sort of criminal he did n’t mind. Father would n’t hear of it at first, but finally on mother’s account he agreed to let me go with Jim. Poor Jim! He s got some trouble himself! I ’m awfully afraid he ’s tubercular. So two weeks ago we ran away to Paris—Mother thinks I ’m on a visit in Scotland—and got married and then took the train to Madrid and Gibraltar. There s a man on board who has followed us all the way from Paris. He sits at our table. Cloud is his name. And we were terribly afraid he was a detective. Perhaps he is. Maybe that is how Jim came to be arrested.”
“No!” said Micky. “I know that man. He ’s not—a detective.”
“Well,” she continued, “that’s the whole thing. Then one morning Jim and I met Mrs. Trevelyan and the Captain, and she recognized him. So there we were! And inside an hour Jim was locked up in his state-room under arrest with orders from the Captain to let him talk to nobody. So everything ’s over!”
She looked at him helplessly.
“It is tough!” answered Micky with sympathy.
“The hardest part of it all is being kept away from Jim!—I don’t know why Captain Ponsonby won’t let me go to him—I ’m all alone,—no one to speak to—!”
“Look here!” said Micky. “You ’d better go down now. I ’ll see what I can do. You can’t tell. Perhaps everything will come out all right even yet. No one would want to punish him—unless it were the bank.”
“Except the bank!” sighed the girl.
Micky opened the door. The rain had almost ceased, but the night was as thick as ever. He assisted her down the ladder and to her state-room. On the opposite side of the narrow passage one of the older stewards stood on guard at Bennett’s door. He grinned sheepishly at Micky.
“Jim!” called the girl. “Jim.”
”Beg pardon, Miss!” interrupted the steward. ”It ’s against orders!”
”It ’s a damned outrage!” retorted Micky. ”Tell the Captain to go to hell! Hello, there, Mr. Chilvers!”
”Jim! Jim!” repeated the girl hysterically. ”Mr. Fitzpatrick is looking after me. Don’t worry. I ’m all right. Good night.”
”I ’ll do the best I can for both of you!” added Micky. ”Keep up your nerve!”
Then he turned to the steward.
”Now go and tell Ponsonby!” he cried wrathfully.
Micky, after bidding good night to Mr. Chilvers, climbed up the ladder to the wireless house with many conflicting emotions and lit a pipe. Poor Bennett! ”Not the ordinary sort of criminal,” the girl had said. The very words used by Graeme. ”Not the ordinary sort.” Was there any ”ordinary sort” of criminal, he wondered? If you only knew the truth would n’t you always find some reason for their having done what they did,—some extenuating circumstance,—some excuse? No one really wanted to do wrong, he felt sure.
”I wish I could help these people!” he sighed, gazing out into the night through the water-stained windows.
“I wish I could help ’em!” he repeated. “And I wish I could do something for Graeme!—Queer fix all around!”
He looked at the alarm clock. It was almost time to take the news from Wellfleet. But first he threw over his mains and called up Morrissy on the Berlin.
“What’s doing?” he asked, when he had aroused the whole seaboard with his shower of “C Q’s” and cut out all the others except the Lloyd.”
“What ’s doing? We have just missed cutting the Saxonia in halves.”
“Don’t say,” returned Morrissy. “We ’re at anchor at quarantine. Fog thick as pea soup. Say, that Roakby story is a corker, is n’t it? The papers are full of it.—By the way, the first game of the World’s Championship series was played to-day and the Athletics batted Matty all over the lot.”