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Updated: June 15, 2025
It was a face that men turned to look at twice and shook their heads in doubt afterwards a handsome, worn, secretive face, in as perfect control as the strings of an instrument under the bow of a great artist. It was the face of a man without purpose in life beyond the moment watchful, careful, remorselessly determined, an adventurer's asset, the dial-plate of a hidden machinery.
Whether we attribute his conduct to accident or to design, from an adventurer's point of view the instinct which made him spread his sails to the breezes of Jacobin favor was quite as sound as that which later, when Jacobinism came to be abhorred, made him anxious that the fact should be forgotten.
The young widow still leaned on the adventurer's arm. After a few minutes of reflection she said, "You are right; I was wrong. I judged you wrongly. The compensation I offered you was almost an insult; but do not for a moment think that I wished to humiliate you. Recall what I said to you this morning of your courage and the generosity of your heart. Well, all this I still think.
Abruptly the fat adventurer's smoldering resentment leaped in flame. "That'll be about all, Mr. Mulready! 'Bout face, you hound, and get into that boat! D'you think I'll temporize with you till Doomsday? Then forget it. You're wrong, dead wrong. Your bluff's called, and" with an evil chuckle "I hold a full house, Mulready, every chamber taken." He lifted meaningly the hand in the coat pocket.
He had thought of O'Hara before merely as a rather shady adventurer of a not very rare type, but he looked at the adventurer's face now and he saw that it was the face of a man of unspeakable sorrows. When O'Hara looked at one, one saw only a pair of singularly keen and hard blue eyes set under a bony brow.
This spot finally monopolized the adventurer's attention; had he been in Germany, he would have looked for gray castle-towers rising behind the foliage. The place looked inaccessible and romantic, and was undeniably picturesque. New York was far enough away to be mistaken for say Alexandria; while the broad river certainly took its rise in as prehistoric an age as the Nile itself.
Perplexed with these cogitations, Mr. Clarke appealed to our adventurer's own reflection.
On went the wondrous tale, with no further interruption from Sir Mortimer, who sat at the head of the table, playing the part of host to Captain Robert Baldry, listening with cold patience to the adventurer's rhodomontade.
Such another there would have been if Strafford had lived to encounter Cromwell. The market for the great adventurer's services having risen so high, the price which he asked was large a principality in hand, a province to be conquered, supreme command of the army which he had raised.
But the third, he of the grey lounge suit, remained motionless; only his eyes clashed coldly with the adventurer's. He seemed a man little if at all Lanyard's senior, and built upon much the same lines. A close-clipped black moustache ornamented his upper lip. His chin was square and strong with character. The cut of his clothing was conspicuously neither English nor Continental.
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