Chapter 8 The Gates of Doom by Rafael Sabatini
AT "THE WORLD'S END"
Standing on the outskirts of the pleasant village of Chelsea, as one of London's western outposts, "The Worlds End" was a house of great comings and goings, of much bustle and consequence. Hence had it been preferred by Captain Gaynor to any quieter hostelry for the business which he desired to transact. In the constant ebb and flow of travellers to and from the Metropolis there was but little chance that any particular man or group of men would attract more than passing notice. Moreover, Maclean, its Scottish landlord, was a circumspect but ardent Jacobite, and the house had yet the additional advantage of being—both on the score of its remoteness and of its traffic—a most unlikely place for such a meeting.
It stood a little way back from the King's Road—which runs from St James's to Hampton Court—fronted by a patch of turf on which were planted a couple of trestle-tables flanked by plain wooden forms, and it looked out over a stretch of meadowland that sloped gently to the river.
Before its doors on this June evening the wonted bustle was toward. A great black and yellow stagecoach on its way to London was drawn up on the very edge of the patch of turf, and the hoarse-voiced driver passed the time of the day with the ostler in terms which knew little of decorum and less of dainty ears. A nobleman's travelling chaise, a sombre mass of wood and leather drawn by six horses and with bold escutcheons on its panels, stood cheek by jowl with the stage, but facing westward.
About these was a huddle of lesser craft, a post-chaise, a couple of hackney coaches, a carrier's cart, and lastly, stretching adown the road in line like the tail of a kite, some half-dozen waggons on their way to market for the following day. To increase the general bustle and to swell the throng there were men on horseback and men on foot, watermen from the moored barges and wherries, grooms, ostlers, drivers and waggoners, whilst a motley company derived from all of these sat about the trestle-tables over their ale, a noisy, babbling, quarrelling, laughing assembly.
Into this scene of activity rode Captain Gaynor at a little after eight o'clock of that summer evening—the hour appointed for the meeting of those six confederates who were to receive from him and in their turn disseminate those messages of which he was the bearer and of which he carried upon him a note in cipher. The substance of those messages has not survived, and there are no means today of ascertaining the details of the precise plot that was the object of this particular mission of Captain Gaynor. Whilst regrettable from the point of view of historical research, from our own it is a matter of little moment, since we are here concerned with the personal history of Captain Gaynor and not with that of any of the perennially budding Jacobite conspiracies.
We gather from stray records that have come down to us—and more particularly from the bulky memoirs which were penned by Mr Second Secretary Templeton to while the tedium of his subsequent retirement from office—that this was one of the earlier of those conspiracies which ultimately were to prove the undoing of that ambitious, plotting cleric, Atterbury; for we are able very plainly to trace that this mission of the notorious Jacobite agent, "Captain Jenkyn"—who was hanged at Tyburn under the extraordinary circumstances with which we are directly concerned—was undertaken at the Bishops urgent instances.
To receive Captain Gaynor, as he drew rein on the outskirts of that throng, came a shock-headed, sweating, surpliced ostler, who was thrust aside almost immediately by a younger man. That the ostler submitted without demur showed that the youth who usurped his functions on this occasion was a person of some authority, as did indeed the latter's garments which, though of plain homespun, indicated a station superior to a groom's. He was, in fact, Maclean's son, set by the vintner to watch for the Captain's coming.
Harry Gaynor tossed his reins to the youngster, and swung himself lightly from the saddle.
"I stay but a little while," he said, "so keep my nag saddled for me."
With that he pushed forward through the throng about the door, a throng which before his brisk, authoritative manner opened a way for him readily enough. He strode into a narrow, flagged passage upon which the taproom door stood open. From this issued sounds of voices and a reek of tobacco. Under the lintel leaned a tall, loose-limbed man in his shirt-sleeves with an apron girt about him. He turned at the sound of the Captain's steps, and disclosed the mellow, jovial face of Maclean.
His eyes welcomed the guest, and the Captain's returned that welcome. It was as if they had clasped hands. With the other Jacobites who were assembled above stairs there had been question and answer on the score of wants to veil the giving of password and countersign. But Captain Gaynor was known to the vintner.
"Ha, landlord!" quoth the soldier, after that real greeting of the eyes. "A pint of claret laced with Nantes!"
"At once, your Honour," replied Maclean, in formal landlord's tones.
The Captain stood halting upon the threshold of the taproom.
"Ye're somewhat crowded here," he said, and coughed as if the smoke had jarred his windpipe.
"There is another room above," Maclean replied, approving the Captain's easy acting. "Will you be pleased to go up, sir?"
The soldier turned and made for the stairs. "The first door to the right, your Honour," Maclean called after him. "I'll bring the claret." He coughed significantly, and Captain Gaynor, turning as he went up, caught from the host's quick, expressive gestures that the door he was to take was on the left instead. He nodded his understanding, and went on. He knew the chamber from another visit some two years ago. It was peculiarly well fitted for a secret meeting in such a place, access being gained to it across another room, through a door that looked for all the world like that of a cupboard in the wall.
But as he went he was puzzled by the almost excessive caution which the landlord had shown, by the loud announcement that the door was on the right followed by a correcting gesture. Maclean, the Captain reflected, must have some good reason for this, some notion that there was a spy at hand.
Such a notion Maclean had, indeed, and his suspicions on that score were almost immediately changed to certainty. For as he turned he found himself confronted in the doorway of the taproom by the very object of his suspicions—a burly fellow in snuff-coloured clothes, in whom he had sniffed a Bow Street messenger. This man had sat apart, unobtrusive, in a corner of the taproom whence he could command the passage, and for all his unobtrusiveness—or, perhaps, because of it—Maclean had furtively watched him with increasing mistrust. He had taken care when Captain Gaynor entered so to place himself before the soldier as to screen him from the prying eyes of that suspected spy. And it was with the intention of misleading that same watcher that he had uttered aloud his misdirection.
Confronted now by the man, and his every suspicion thus confirmed, Maclean, affecting to await the fellow's commands, effectively barred his way until it should be too late for him to perceive the real direction taken by the Captain.
"What d'ye lack, sir?" was his formal question, smiling his anxiety to supply the needs of this guest—and in that smile dissembling the greater anxiety which this guest occasioned him.
The fellow coughed affectedly. "This reek of tobacco smoke," said he, "is more than I can suffer. I'll go upstairs to this other room of yours."
Maclean made way with a bow and a readiness that were entirely disarming.
"Pray do so," said he, and waved a hand towards the stairs. "The room is on the right. You'll find some company there. I'll send a drawer to wait on you."
The burly spy—for a spy he was, and moreover had a warrant in his pocket and six men at his orders outside at the trestle-tables—felt himself checked by the landlord's ease and the readiness with which the way was opened for him. Maclean was a born conspirator, a man who knew how a plot should be laid if it were to baffle discovery. To mask that meeting above stairs against precisely such a contingency as the present one, he had placed a room above at the disposal of such of his guests as appeared to be persons of quality, and it was into this room that the spy now thrust himself, notwithstanding the loss of confidence occasioned him by the landlord's imperturbability.
He found himself in the company of some dozen gentlemen who eyed him somewhat askance, a circumstance which reawakened fading suspicions. The assembly was, it is true, rather more numerous than he had been led to look for, and he observed that it was broken into detached groups of twos and threes. These, surely, could not be his quarry. Yet, being a man so suspicious of ruses that he saw ruses where none existed, considered innocence itself the most damning mark of guilt, the messenger sat down in a corner, and, when presently approached by a drawer, ordered himself a nipperkin of ale. But the scrutiny to which he furtively submitted each separate group and each member of it gradually convinced him that either he had been deliberately led or else was fallen into error. This conviction was complete when anon the door opened to admit a couple of fresh arrivals, the first of whom was a portly, pompous man in a full-bottomed wig, in whom the messenger recognised Sir Henry Thresh, one of the Middlesex justices.
Meanwhile Captain Gaynor had crossed the empty room on the left of the passage, and through that deceptive narrow double-door had entered the farther apartment, where his friends awaited him.
This was a small chamber facing westward and flooded now with the roseate glow of sunset. It was very plainly furnished, and about a polished, oblong walnut table in mid-apartment sat four gentlemen over their wine. A crystal bowl of water—inevitable appendage to every Jacobite gathering—occupied the middle of the board and shed upon it a wedge of prismatic light. Near this pipes had been placed, a tinder-box and a leaden jar of cut tobacco; but only one member of the company—an extremely tall and slender young man, very fine in a green riding-suit with white satin linings—was smoking. This gentleman had dark, vivacious eyes and a pleasant face under an extremely modish and ample periwig; his name was Partridge, and he was said to be a person of considerable importance in Wiltshire.
Of the other three, two were men of forty or thereabouts. One was Viscount Harewood, a gentleman with whom allegiance to the Stuarts was a family matter, since he claimed the patriarchal second Charles for his grandsire. Indeed, some resemblance to that too-merry monarch was to be discerned in his lordship's swarthy tint and saturnine cast of countenance; the other was Mr Stephen Dyke, a pale, hawk-faced man in a brown bag-wig. The last member of that quartette was the staunch and almost brazen Jacobite, Sir Thomas Leigh. He was much older than his companions, very tall and straight nevertheless, with something military in his air and carriage, and something military, too, in the vigorous oaths with which his speech was peppered, for he had seen service in the late queen's days. In countenance he was fresh-complexioned, frank and jovial.
They rose to welcome Captain Gaynor, who came a full quarter of an hour behind the time appointed for the meeting; yet, as he perceived, he was not the last to arrive. Lord Pauncefort and an Irish man named O'Neill were still awaited. He made his excuses and sat down to await with them their missing confederates, giving them meanwhile such news as they sought, until they were interrupted by the entrance of Maclean with the Captain's claret.
Having set down the jug and glass, the vintner leaned a hand upon the table, and addressing himself more particularly to Captain Gaynor, he gravely announced the presence in the house of one whom he suspected of being a spy.
They listened in consternation and in silence, with the exception of old Sir Thomas, who let fly a volley of sulphuric oaths which no one heeded.
"What do you counsel us to do, Maclean?" was Captain Gaynor's quiet question.
"Why, do the business upon which you are come, gentlemen. The rogue is safe bestowed for the present, watching the guests in another room across the passage. I had disposed against any such surprise as this. And, after all," he ended, "it is not impossible that he is after other quarry than yourselves. Still, I thought it well to set you on your guard."
He withdrew upon that, leaving relief behind him; for all but one accepted as certain the supposition that the Bow Street messenger might be on the spoor of other game.
"It must be so, egad!" cried Harewood. "Else were we betrayed, and that is not possible."
"Not possible, indeed," agreed Sir Thomas. "The fellow will be some thief-taker on the trail of a tobyman belike. Maclean starts at shadows."
But Captain Gaynor did not share their confidence. Pauncefort's absence fretted him. The mistrust implanted in his breast by Sir John Kynaston and what he had learnt from him was stirring uneasily now.
"I wonder where the plague these others tarry," he muttered, and then almost immediately to answer him the door opened and O'Neill reeled into the room.
There is no other way in which to describe his entrance. He was a red-headed youngster, whose face was usually florid and mischievously good-humoured. It was of a deathly pallor now, and clammy; his blue eyes were a thought wild. His boots were white with dust, and all about him there was an air of haste, disorder and alarm.
His advent brought the others to their feet. Questions rained upon him on the score of his condition.
He sank to a chair, snatched up a glass of Nantes that belonged to Sir Thomas, and unceremoniously drained it. Then he explained himself quite tersely.
"The game is up, gentlemen." He rolled his eyes about the company that stood above him. "'Tis betrayed we are; undone entirely."
There fell a pause, all eyes upon this bearer of ill tidings. Then Lord Harewood fired a question.
"By whom?" quoth he, so fiercely that had the betrayer heard him he must have looked to his skin.
"I don't know," was the answer, "and faith 'tis the only thing I don't know. We've been sold—devil a doubt of that, and 'tis a miracle I am here to tell you of it. Clinton, Brownrigg, Holmdale, Spencer Gamlin and Sir Vernon Bewick have been arrested today upon warrants. Other arrests are to follow—yours, Harewood, and yours, Sir Thomas."
"Let them arrest me and be damned to them," said the stalwart veteran. "What else?"
"There's a warrant for myself too, bedad, and you may be thankful for't, as otherwise I should never have had any warning at all."
Came a fresh volley of questions, quelled at last by Captain Gaynor. He spoke for the first time since O'Neill's arrival.
"Shall we discuss this matter calmly, gentlemen," said he. "Thus shall we make the better speed, and time may be of more consequence than we deem. Will you be seated?"
He spoke in a crisp voice of authority. Outwardly he was the calmest—indeed, the only calm—man in that room. He was instantly obeyed. They realised that in this extremity a leader was needed, and the natural leader, as much by the position which his mission gave him as by his natural endowments, was Captain Gaynor. They sat down at once, and the Captain sat down with them.
He was familiar with desperate situations, and he had been too long an actor to permit himself now to be surprised into a betrayal of his true feelings. And so he remained outwardly as unmoved as if the thing before them were but of trifling import. Inwardly his soul sickened. Years of planning were overthrown thus at a blow. All was to do again, it seemed; and heaven alone knew whether he would live to be in at the ultimate victory which he was assured God must accord the right. Yet nothing of this showed in his countenance. If it was stern and singularly hard, it had all the calm that goes with hardness.
He took up one of the long-stemmed pipes, and began deliberately to fill it from the leaden jar.
"Firstly," he said, his voice very quiet and even, "will you tell us, Mr O'Neill, how you come by your knowledge?"
"I have it," answered O'Neill at once, leaning forward across the table, "from my cousin, Jocelyn Butler, who is my Lord Carteret's private secretary. 'Twas his own hand prepared the warrants by my lord's directions, and had not my own been among the names we should never have had this warning. As it was, Jocelyn came to me soon after six this evening, as I was on the point of setting out—in fact, 'tis what delayed me. At first he told me no more than there was a warrant out for my arrest on a charge of conspiring against the peace of the realm, and urged me to take horse and begone at once. But I swore I wouldn't stir a foot until he had told me all there was to't.
"He demurred awhile, but bethinking him that 'twill be the talk of the town by morning, and that as most of the arrests were made already 'twas little he'ld be betrayin', he spoke out, and told me all he knew, or leastways all that I asked him, and I asked him all that mattered. Thereupon I rode hither as fast as horse could bring me, for amongst other things my cousin told me that the messengers from Bow Street were on their way hither to surprise a meeting of plotters."
There was a stir about the table.
"Ah!" said Captain Gaynor. "That, too, was known, then, eh?" He reached for the tinder-box as he spoke.
"Faith, yes. But glory be to heaven, I've arrived ahead of them."
"'Sblud! But ye've not," roared Sir Thomas Leigh, and hubbub broke out afresh, through which O'Neill listened in increasing alarm to the announcement that one of the messengers was here already.
"And what's to be done, then?" he cried.
"That we will now consider," said the Captain, and by the very tone of his voice restored order about the table. He struck steel against flint, and having kindled a flame applied it to his pipe. Then "You did not learn," he inquired, "whether Lord Pauncefort had been arrested?"
"I learnt that he had not."
"But a warrant will have been issued for him, of course?"
"Not so. I asked that, too, and I was relieved to learn that he, at least, has been overlooked."
"Overlooked? How very fortunate," said Captain Gaynor, with the faintest note of irony. Sir John Kynaston's warning was humming now in his mind. "This being so, can any here suggest why my Lord Pauncefort is not with us?"
A hush followed that significant question, broken at last by Harewood, who was Pauncefort's friend.
"Now, sink me, Captain Gaynor, what is't you mean by that?" And his swarthy face was flushed by sudden anger.
"Before I answer you, my lord," said the soldier, maintaining his outward calm, "let me ask you all a question. Has anyone of you mentioned to a living soul that we were to assemble here tonight? If any has, I entreat him to speak frankly now in the interests of us all."
Followed a little spell of silence; then from one and another broke firm and sturdy denials.
"I will remind you, then," said the Captain, "that no living man knew of this meeting save those who were to assemble—ourselves present, and one other who is absent."
"There is yet one other—Maclean," Mr Partridge reminded the Captain.
"Ay!" roared Harewood. "What of Maclean?"
Gaynor's smile and a little gesture with the fingers that held his pipe brushed aside the question as frivolous.
"Maclean did not know the names of those who were to assemble, and you will bear in mind that Mr O'Neill has told us that the warrants are out with those names set forth. Maclean could not have possessed such knowledge. Nor yet, had he possessed it, could he have betrayed it without running his own neck into a noose, and there is still the further trifling matter in his favour that 'twas he, himself, brought us word of the presence of the messenger.
"You must see, sirs, that there is but one person could have betrayed us to this extent; his absence more than confirms the suspicion—a suspicion which amounts to certainty with me. And I am not a man to form hasty judgments. I will further remind you that my Lord Pauncefort is a gamester, broken and desperate, and I do not suggest, I state, and I will maintain my statement wherever and whenever opportunity is afforded me—he has taken this dastardly course to mend his shattered fortunes. In a word, gentlemen, he has sold us; and I make no doubt that he has obtained a handsome price from the Secretary of State for his Judas services."
Harewood got angrily to his feet. "By God!" he swore. "I'll not hear a man thus abused in his absence!"
"You shall not find me slow to accuse him to his face," said the Captain. "The opportunity of that, I think, is all that I can now ask of Fortune."
Harewood looked round with glaring eyes, in appeal to the others to repudiate this hideous charge against his friend; but on every face he saw conviction written. The thing was all too plain. The viscount felt that conviction being borne in upon his very self, yet loyally he sought to hold it off.
"I'll not believe it! Sink me, I'll not believe it!" he exclaimed, although his voice almost broke on the words.
"The decision," said the Captain, "does your heart more credit than your judgment. Yet, my lord, lest you or any here should think that I judge rashly, let me add something that is known to me—something that I confess has spurred me on to this conclusion." And briefly he informed the company of the threat which Pauncefort had uttered to Sir John Kynaston. "Now," he concluded, "I hold that in such a matter there is no ground for thinking that the man who is so lost to honour as to threaten will hesitate to perform."
Convinced, Harewood sat down and took his head in his hands. "He was my friend," he said in a dull voice.
Smoking quietly, Captain Gaynor turned again to O'Neill. "You have not said that there is a warrant out for me."
"I was coming to't," was the answer, and the Irishman's face quickened with excitement. "There is and there is not."
"How?" Gaynor looked at him with knitting brows.
"There is a warrant issued for Captain Jenkyn," was the explanation, "and it is expected that he will be taken here with the rest of us."
The soldier stiffened visibly. Here was the last ounce of proof against Pauncefort. For but two men in England knew of his identity with the bearer of that sobriquet—his lordship and Sir John Kynaston. Not even these gentlemen gathered here together had hitherto suspected it. At the announcement now there was an outcry, dominated by Leigh's outflung hand and thundered monosyllable—
"You!"
The Captain smiled at them, and slowly, deprecatingly, shook his head.
"Sirs," he said, "you cannot really think that Captain Jenkyn is any particular individual. Rather, I think, is it a title conferred by the Government to fit any Jacobite agent who visits England. On this occasion, from what O'Neill tells us, it would seem they thrust the honour upon me. But," and he turned again to the Irishman, "I am not specified by name in the warrant?"
"By no other name—no."
"That is very odd."
"Ay," returned O'Neill, "until we have the explanation, which is still more odd, bedad. You were specifically accused to the Secretary of State. But when he desired Mr Templeton to issue a warrant in due form, Mr Templeton urged that there was some mistake—that his lordship's informer was perforce in error; that Captain Harry Gaynor was no Jacobite but a soldier of fortune whose entire record and whose credentials were in his hands, a man who had no sympathy with the Stuart Cause and who had been recommended to him by his own cousin, Tollemache Templeton, an old friend of your own.
"Lord Carteret, it seems, sought to combat Mr Templeton's confidence; but the Second Secretary is an obstinate man who claims that he is never at fault. He laid Captain Gaynor's credentials before Lord Carteret, and when his lordship suggested that such documents could be forged, Mr Templeton took coach and visited the embassies of two of the governments from which certain of those credentials proceeded."
"What embassies?" quoth the Captain, his eyes preternaturally bright.
"The Austrian and the Turkish."
The Captain sighed his instant relief from that sudden tension. He even smiled as the Irishman continued: "Mr Templeton was assured at both that the documents presented were entirely genuine. The Turkish ambassador, indeed, claimed a personal acquaintance with Captain Gaynor made in Constantinople four years ago, and spoke, I am informed, in terms of high praise of you to the Second Secretary. With this information Mr Templeton returned to Lord Carteret, and boldly informed his lordship that he would resign his office ere he made himself the laughing-stock of the town by issuing a warrant against a gentleman so unimpeachable and accredited. This, sir, in my cousin's own presence. My Lord Carteret was swayed by that assurance; he bowed before it to the extent of consenting that the warrant should be made out for 'Captain Jenkyn'—whose identity, he was informed, was one with your own. To this Mr Templeton made no objection, confident that the result must prove the correctness of his own and the error of his lordship's information."
"It is a confidence," said the Captain, smiling, "in which we must see to't that Mr Templeton is encouraged." It gratified him to observe the good fruit borne by the thoroughness of his dispositions, and he was thankful for it in this extremity.
"And how is that to be accomplished now?" quoth Mr Dyke from the other end of the table.
The Captain smoked in silence an instant. Then he removed the pipe from his lips, and spoke.
"Let us for a moment consider our position. I do not think that it is one that need cause us any undue alarm."
"Do you not, by God!" growled old Sir Thomas. "Then, you're monstrous slow at taking alarm, sir."
"When you have heard me perhaps you will abate your own," the soldier answered him, and with that proceeded: "If, gentlemen, you have been properly cautious, you should not now stand in any grave peril." He was thinking swiftly, speaking almost as he thought. "These arrests are premature. In a month's time they might have occasioned concern. As it is, what can be proved against any man of you?
"Return then quietly to your homes, and pursue your avocations. Should you be arrested, suffer it in patience, and in the conviction that your liberty must very speedily be restored to you. It would not surprise me," he continued, "if this prematureness were deliberate. It is Lord Carteret's policy to stifle our work at its very source, and to strike terror into our leaders by a display of the Government's omniscience rather than allow any treason to spread to punishable lengths. It is devilish shrewd of him, for he knows that martyrs to a cause beget sympathy for that cause, and ten emulators for every one that falls. Therefore, he does not desire martyrs. Should you be arrested the matter will probably end in a private admonition from Lord Carteret to each of you ere you are restored to liberty. That, sirs, I think, is the position."
His calm, so admirably dissembling his own inward despair—fell like a balm upon those five disordered minds.
But Sir Thomas Leigh found an objection to his reasoning.
"You do not overlook, I trust, that our betrayal proceeds from within?"
"I do not, Sir Thomas. But it would be unreasonable to suppose that our ranks have yielded more than one traitor, and the word of one man alone—actuated, no doubt, from motives of self-interest—whilst serving the ends of Lord Carteret to damp us with terror of his omniscience, as I have said, is very far from sufficing to produce the conviction of any who does not betray himself.
"You are further to remember that it is in the last degree unlikely that our betrayer will come forward to accuse us. That, indeed, would be a foolish procedure on every count. Pauncefort must have made it a condition of his bargain with the Government that he shall remain in the background, and the Government itself must have desired this, for once the informer were proclaimed his value would be at an end—and a man in Pauncefort's position is of very great value, so great that the Government may well desire to retain his services for the future—that is, assuming that Pauncefort is to live. But I think we owe it to ourselves in this case to make assurance doubly sure."
His voice rang with so sinister a note that all eyes were turned to search his countenance. It was hard now to the point of cruelty.
"It should, I think, be a point of expediency and honour with any who is so fortunate as to escape the trap laid for us here tonight to seek out my Lord Pauncefort, and—" A swift, trenchant gesture with the pipe-stem completed his meaning.
There was a gasp from Mr Partridge; dismay was written, too, upon the face of Harewood.
"We are not children, sirs," said the Captain in a rasping voice, "and our game is not a child's game. When a man betrays us we have a duty to discharge to ourselves, to one another and to the Cause we serve. For a traitor there is but one punishment all the world over. That punishment Lord Pauncefort has incurred, and I, for one, pray heaven that I may be spared long enough from the clutches of the law to administer it myself. So would I have each of you think."
The white hawk-face of Mr Dyke looked singularly vicious as he swore what he would do, given the opportunity, and he was followed instantly by O'Neill and old Sir Thomas.
"One risk, however, we do run, sirs, in spite of what I have said," the Captain resumed, "and it is somewhat serious—the risk of my being taken in your company. If I am so taken the identity of Captain Jenkyn is established and attached to Harry Gaynor, and Mr Templeton is proven wrong in his assurance. Whatever happen to the rest, for Captain Jenkyn there will be no mercy; he will receive the very shortest shrift.
"If, then, I am taken in your company, I am destroyed by being found with you, as was promised by our betrayer; and similarly you may suffer grievously for being found with me. Our chief danger, then, lies there. If you are taken without me, your danger is reduced to insignificant proportions, as I have said. If I am taken anywhere but here, my own risk also is lessened to vanishing-point."
Their agreement with this reasoning was immediate and unanimous.
"And therefore," added Mr Dyke, "it is of the first importance that we should be rid of you and you of us."
"Precisely," the Captain agreed. "All that remains to be determined is how we shall achieve that most desirable consummation; and the means, I confess, do not seem quite ready to our hands. Can any of you propose a course?"
"Where the devil is that rascal Maclean?" roared Sir Thomas.
"'Tis what I've been wonderin' myself," said O'Neill, "for savin' the brandy I've filched from you, Sir Thomas, 'tis devil a thought has been bestowed upon my thirst."
"Is there no safe way of calling him?" quoth Partridge.
"No way that is not fraught with danger in a house that is watched," said the thoughtful Mr Dyke. "If he has left us alone 'tis a sign he is convinced we are besieged and fears to come to us lest he should show the way to others."
And then, at last, the door opened, and Maclean himself came in. He was rather breathless, and his broad face had lost much of its habitual florid tint.