Now he was, to all official intents, a private person, yet, as the steamer cast anchor in the roadstead of Jaffa, he had realised that a more tremendous responsibility than ever before rested with him.
The last words spoken to Spence in England had been those of Sir Michael Manichoe. The great man was bidding him good-bye at Charing Cross.
"Remember," he had said, "that whatever proof or help we may get from this woman, Gertrude Hunt, will be but the basis for you to work on in the East. We shall cable every result of our investigations here. Remember that, as we think, you have immense ability and resource against you. Go very warily. As I have said before, no sum is too great to sacrifice, no sacrifice too great to make."
There had been a day's delay at Jaffa. It had been a day of strange, bewildering thoughts to the journalist.
The "Gate of the Holy Land" is not, as many people suppose, a fine harbour, a thronged port.
The navies of the ancient world which congregated there were smaller than even the coasting steamers of to-day. They found shelter in a narrow space of more or less untroubled water between the shelving rock of the long, flat shore and a low reef rising but of the sea parallel to the town. The vessels with timber for Solomon's Temple tossed almost unsheltered before the terraces of ochre-coloured Oriental houses.
For several hours it had been too rough for the passengers on the French boat to land. More than a mile of restless bottle-green sea separated them from the rude ladders fastened to the wave-washed quay.
There had been one of the heavy rain-storms which at that season of the year visit Palestine. Over the Moslem minarets of the town the purple tops of the central mountains of Judah and Ephraim showed clear and far away.
