The Grand Babylon Hôtel
‘It is,’ said Nella, and the sound of her voice seemed to her to issue
from the lips of some third person.
‘It’s death,’ repeated Miss Spencer, and gradually her head and
shoulders sank back, and hung loosely over the chair. Nella was
conscious of a sudden revulsion. The woman had surely fainted. Dropping
the revolver she ran round the table. She was herself again--feminine,
sympathetic, the old Nella. She felt immensely relieved that this had
happened. But at the same instant Miss Spencer sprang up from the chair
like a cat, seized the revolver, and with a wild movement of the arm
flung it against the window. It crashed through the glass, exploding as
it went, and there was a tense silence.
‘I told you that you were a fool,’ remarked Miss Spencer slowly, ‘coming
here like a sort of female Jack Sheppard, and trying to get the best of
me.
We are on equal terms now. You frightened me, but I knew I was a
cleverer woman than you, and that in the end, if I kept on long enough,
I should win.
Now it will be my turn.’
Dumbfounded, and overcome with a miserable sense of the truth of Miss
Spencer’s words, Nella stood still. The idea of her colossal foolishness
swept through her like a flood. She felt almost ashamed. But even at
this juncture she had no fear. She faced the woman bravely, her mind
leaping about in search of some plan. She could think of nothing but a
bribe--an enormous bribe.
‘I admit you’ve won,’ she said, ‘but I’ve not finished yet. Just
listen.’
Miss Spencer folded her arms, and glanced at the door, smiling bitterly.
‘You know my father is a millionaire; perhaps you know that he is one of
the richest men in the world. If I give you my word of honour not to
reveal anything that you’ve told me, what will you take to let me go
free?’
‘What sum do you suggest?’ asked Miss Spencer carelessly.
‘Twenty thousand pounds,’ said Nella promptly. She had begun to regard
the affair as a business operation.
Miss Spencer’s lip curled.
‘A hundred thousand.’
Again Miss Spencer’s lip curled.
‘Well, say a million. I can rely on my father, and so may you.’
‘You think you are worth a million to him?’
‘I do,’ said Nella.
‘And you think we could trust you to see that it was paid?’
‘Of course you could.’
‘And we should not suffer afterwards in any way?’
‘I would give you my word, and my father’s word.’
‘Bah!’ exclaimed Miss Spencer: ‘how do you know I wouldn’t let you go
free for nothing? You are only a rash, silly girl.’
‘I know you wouldn’t. I can read your face too well.’
‘You are right,’ Miss Spencer replied slowly. ‘I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t
let you go for all the dollars in America.’
Nella felt cold down the spine, and sat down again in her chair. A
draught of air from the broken window blew on her cheek. Steps sounded
in the passage; the door opened, but Nella did not turn round. She could
not move her eyes from Miss Spencer’s. There was a noise of rushing
water in her ears. She lost consciousness, and slipped limply to the
ground.
Chapter Ten AT SEA
IT seemed to Nella that she was being rocked gently in a vast cradle,
which swayed to and fro with a motion at once slow and incredibly
gentle. This sensation continued for some time, and there was added to
it the sound of a quick, quiet, muffled beat. Soft, exhilarating breezes
wafted her forward in spite of herself, and yet she remained in a
delicious calm. She wondered if her mother was kneeling by her side,
whispering some lullaby in her childish ears. Then strange colours swam
before her eyes, her eyelids wavered, and at last she awoke. For a few
moments her gaze travelled to and fro in a vain search for some clue to
her surroundings, was aware of nothing except sense of repose and a
feeling of relief that some mighty and fatal struggle was over; she
cared not whether she had conquered or suffered defeat in the struggle
of her soul with some other soul; it was finished, done with, and the
consciousness of its conclusion satisfied and contented her. Gradually
her brain, recovering from its obsession, began to grasp the phenomena
of her surroundings, and she saw that she was on a yacht, and that the
yacht was moving. The motion of the cradle was the smooth rolling of the
vessel; the beat was the beat of its screw; the strange colours were the
cloud tints thrown by the sun as it rose over a distant and receding
shore in the wake of the yacht; her mother’s lullaby was the crooned
song of the man at the wheel. Nella all through her life had had many
experiences of yachting. From the waters of the River Hudson to those
bluer tides of the Mediterranean Sea, she had yachted in all seasons and
all weathers. She loved the water, and now it seemed deliciously right
and proper that she should be on the water again. She raised her head to
look round, and then let it sink back: she was fatigued, enervated; she
desired only solitude and calm; she had no care, no anxiety, no
responsibility: a hundred years might have passed since her meeting with
Miss Spencer, and the memory of that meeting appeared to have faded into
the remotest background of her mind.
It was a small yacht, and her practised eye at once told that it
belonged to the highest aristocracy of pleasure craft. As she reclined
in the deck-chair (it did not occur to her at that moment to speculate
as to the identity of the person who had led her therein) she examined
all visible details of the vessel. The deck was as white and smooth as
her own hand, and the seams ran along its length like blue veins. All
the brass-work, from the band round the slender funnel to the concave
surface of the binnacle, shone like gold.
The tapered masts stretched upwards at a rakish angle, and the rigging
seemed like spun silk. No sails were set; the yacht was under steam, and
doing about seven or eight knots. She judged that it was a boat of a
hundred tons or so, probably Clyde-built, and not more than two or three
years old.
No one was to be seen on deck except the man at the wheel: this man wore
a blue jersey; but there was neither name nor initial on the jersey, nor
was there a name on the white life-buoys lashed to the main rigging, nor
on the polished dinghy which hung on the starboard davits. She called to
the man, and called again, in a feeble voice, but the steerer took no
notice of her, and continued his quiet song as though nothing else
existed in the universe save the yacht, the sea, the sun, and himself.
Then her eyes swept the outline of the land from which they were
hastening, and she could just distinguish a lighthouse and a great white
irregular dome, which she recognized as the Kursaal at Ostend, that
gorgeous rival of the gaming palace at Monte Carlo. So she was leaving
Ostend. The rays of the sun fell on her caressingly, like a restorative.
All around the water was changing from wonderful greys and dark blues to
still more wonderful pinks and translucent unearthly greens; the magic
kaleidoscope of dawn was going forward in its accustomed way, regardless
of the vicissitudes of mortals.
Here and there in the distance she descried a sail--the brown sail of
some Ostend fishing-boat returning home after a night’s trawling. Then
the beat of paddles caught her ear, and a steamer blundered past,
wallowing clumsily among the waves like a tortoise. It was the Swallow
from London. She could see some of its passengers leaning curiously over
the aft-rail. A girl in a mackintosh signalled to her, and mechanically
she answered the salute with her arm. The officer of the bridge of the
Swallow hailed the yacht, but the man at the wheel offered no reply. In
another minute the Swallow was nothing but a blot in the distance.
Nella tried to sit straight in the deck-chair, but she found herself
unable to do so. Throwing off the rug which covered her, she discovered
that she had been tied to the chair by means of a piece of broad
webbing. Instantly she was alert, awake, angry; she knew that her perils
were not over; she felt that possibly they had scarcely yet begun. Her
lazy contentment, her dreamy sense of peace and repose, vanished
utterly, and she steeled herself to meet the dangers of a grave and
difficult situation.
Just at that moment a man came up from below. He was a man of forty or
so, clad in irreproachable blue, with a peaked yachting cap. He raised
the cap politely.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Beautiful sunrise, isn’t it?’ The clever and
calculated insolence of his tone cut her like a lash as she lay bound in
the chair. Like all people who have lived easy and joyous lives in those
fair regions where gold smoothes every crease and law keeps a tight hand
on disorder, she found it hard to realize that there were other regions
where gold was useless and law without power. Twenty-four hours ago she
would have declared it impossible that such an experience as she had
suffered could happen to anyone; she would have talked airily about
civilization and the nineteenth century, and progress and the police.
But her experience was teaching her that human nature remains always the
same, and that beneath the thin crust of security on which we good
citizens exist the dark and secret forces of crime continue to move,
just as they did in the days when you couldn’t go from Cheapside to
Chelsea without being set upon by thieves. Her experience was in a fair
way to teach her this lesson better than she could have learnt it even
in the bureaux of the detective police of Paris, London, and St
Petersburg.
‘Good morning,’ the man repeated, and she glanced at him with a sullen,
angry gaze.
‘You!’ she exclaimed, ‘You, Mr Thomas Jackson, if that is your name!
Loose me from this chair, and I will talk to you.’ Her eyes flashed as
she spoke, and the contempt in them added mightily to her beauty. Mr
Thomas Jackson, otherwise Jules, erstwhile head waiter at the Grand
Babylon, considered himself a connoisseur in feminine loveliness, and
the vision of Nella Racksole smote him like an exquisite blow.
‘With pleasure,’ he replied. ‘I had forgotten that to prevent you from
falling I had secured you to the chair’; and with a quick movement he
unfastened the band. Nella stood up, quivering with fiery annoyance and
scorn.
‘Now,’ she said, fronting him, ‘what is the meaning of this?’
‘You fainted,’ he replied imperturbably. ‘Perhaps you don’t remember.’
The man offered her a deck-chair with a characteristic gesture. Nella
was obliged to acknowledge, in spite of herself, that the fellow had
distinction, an air of breeding. No one would have guessed that for
twenty years he had been an hotel waiter. His long, lithe figure, and
easy, careless carriage seemed to be the figure and carriage of an
aristocrat, and his voice was quiet, restrained, and authoritative.
‘That has nothing to do with my being carried off in this yacht of
yours.’
‘It is not my yacht,’ he said, ‘but that is a minor detail. As to the
more important matter, forgive me that I remind you that only a few
hours ago you were threatening a lady in my house with a revolver.’
‘Then it was your house?’
‘Why not? May I not possess a house?’ He smiled.
‘I must request you to put the yacht about at once, instantly, and take
me back.’ She tried to speak firmly.
‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I am afraid that’s impossible. I didn’t put out to sea
with the intention of returning at once, instantly.’ In the last words
he gave a faint imitation of her tone.
‘When I do get back,’ she said, ‘when my father gets to know of this
affair, it will be an exceedingly bad day for you, Mr Jackson.’
‘But supposing your father doesn’t hear of it--’
‘What?’
‘Supposing you never get back?’
‘Do you mean, then, to have my murder on your conscience?’
‘Talking of murder,’ he said, ‘you came very near to murdering my