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Updated: June 7, 2025
If anything happens to young Cleigh, back to Manila you go with the yacht! Clear out! At the last moment!" It was like a sob. Jane, still entranced, saw Cleigh stoop and put his arms under the body of his son, heave, and stand up under the dead weight. He staggered past her toward the main salon. She heard him mutter. "God help me if I'm too late if I've waited too long! Denny?"
She dressed hurriedly and warmly, bundling her hair under a velours hat and ramming a pin through both. "Denny?" she called. There was no answer. He was on deck, probably. An odd scene awaited her in the main salon. Cleigh, senior, stood before the phonograph listening to Caruso. The roll of the yacht in nowise disturbed the mechanism of the instrument.
But Cunningham had persuaded them up to this hour that they would not even be pursued; that it would not be humanly possible for Cleigh to surrender the hope of eventually recovering his unlawful possessions. And now they began to wonder, to fret secretly, to reconsider the ancient saying that the way of the transgressor is hard. On land they could have separated and hidden successfully.
If they talked at all it was in a whispering undertone. The mutinous revellers formed a group of their own. They appeared to have been roughly handled by the Cleighs. The attitude was humble, the expression worriedly sorrowful. Why hadn't they beat a retreat? The psychology of their madness escaped them utterly. There was one grain of luck they hadn't killed young Cleigh.
At eleven o'clock the following morning there occurred an episode which considerably dampened Jane's romantical point of view regarding this remarkable voyage. Cleigh had gone below for some illuminated manuscripts and Dennison was out of sight for the moment. She leaned over the rail and watched the flying fish. Suddenly out of nowhere came the odour of whisky.
The mockery on the face and the irony on the tongue of the man disturbed Cleigh. Supposing the rogue had his eye on that rug? To what lengths might he not go to possess it? And he had the infernal ingenuity of his master, Beelzebub. Or was he just trying Anthony Cleigh's nerves to see whether they were sound or raw? "But the beads!" he said. "I'm sorry. Simply Morrissy ran amuck."
The two understood, and followed him downstairs precipitately, with the startled Benson the tail to the kite. "No, no!" shouted Cleigh. "The big one first!" as Dennison laid one of the smaller cases on the floor. "Benson, where the devil is the claw hammer?" The butler foraged in the coat closet and presently emerged with a prier.
But Cleigh did not answer. His eyes were closed, his head rested against the back of the chair so Jane did not press the question. It was enough that she had seen behind a corner of this peculiar veil. And, oddly, she felt quite as much pity for the father as for the son. A wall of pride, Alpine high, and neither would force a passage!
"He said he never broke his word. No man can be a very great villain who can say that. Did he ever break his word to you?" "Except in this instance." "The beads?" "I am quite confident he knows where they are." "Are they so precious? What makes them precious?" "I have told you they are love beads." "That's rank nonsense! I'm no child!" "Isn't love rank nonsense?" Cleigh countered.
The speck soon lost its blackness and became violet, and then magically the streaked horizon rose up behind the speck and obliterated it. "The poor benighted thing!" said Jane. "God didn't mean that he should be this kind of a man." "Does any of us know what God wants of us?" asked Cleigh, bitterly. "He wants men like you who pretend to the world that they're granite-hearted when they're not.
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