CHAPTER XVII.—AT OLD PLUGGER’S.

London boarding-houses being regulated by no statute law, and as little liable to the supervision of the police and the interference of the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for the Home Department as are other free commercial concerns, are very much harder to classify than are London hotels, inns, and public-houses. Their very exterior, which is decorated by no gaudy signs or gold-lettered inscriptions relative to viands, neat wines or cordials, might cause them to be mistaken for schools, workshops, or private dwellings. Even when a brass plate on the door bears the name of Bloss or Grewer or Pawkins—people who keep boarding-houses do appear, for some inscrutable reason, to parade the oddest patronymics—nobody not enlightened enough to know who Pawkins, Bloss, or Grewer may be, would gather much information from the laconic announcement. In all London there was not, taking one place with another, a much queerer boarding-house than one which stood on the Southwark or Surrey side of the Thames, and so nearly opposite to the Tower that the gaunt turrets of the grim old fortress were always (save in a fog of peculiar density) visible from its upper windows. This boarding-house, at the corner of what was called Dampier’s Row, was very solidly built, chiefly as it would seem, of the massive timbers of ships dissected in the breakers’ yards close by; and with its bow-windows and bulging outline, seemed to stand hard by the water’s edge, like some sturdy collier craft that had accidentally got stranded and was trying to accustom itself to life ashore. This particular boarding-house, the green door of which bore no distinguishing mark, was known in the neighbourhood and far along the river below bridge, as ‘Old Plugger’s.’

Whether there was a Plugger still in existence or not, it may be surmised that the original and veteran possessor of that name had enjoyed a widespread connection among mariners, for most of the present inmates of the house were seafaring persons. Most, but not all. And of the nautical boarders at Plugger’s none were common seamen. The title of ‘Captain’ was in as constant requisition within its weather-bleached porch, overgrown with scarlet-runners, as it could possibly be at a military club farther west. Two-thirds of the swarthy, restless-eyed customers claimed to have a right to that honorary prefix, or at the least to have been ‘officers’ of one branch or another of the mercantile marine. The remainder, apparently attracted to the spot by the smell of the tar and paint from the neighbouring wharfs, or by the sight of the forest of masts that rose up between them and the Middlesex shore, or by congenial company, had much to say as to gulches and placers and auriferous river-bars, and gold-dust which, after months of toil and hunger, had been fooled away in a week’s mad revel; and colossal fortunes that could infallibly be realised by any one who had a pitiful thousand pounds at command, and would be guided by sound advice as to its investment.

It was not a cheap boarding-house, according to the tariff of such establishments, this one of Old Plugger’s. Rivals and humbler imitators held it in respect, for it was a thriving concern. Its rooms seldom stood empty for long, and its frequenters somehow found the wherewithal to pay their score. It was not a noisy place; by no means comparable to the riotous dens about Tiger Bay and elsewhere, or to the sailors’ publics at Wapping or Rotherhithe; but now and then there was a din from within it, a shouting of hoarse voices, a trampling of heavy feet, a crashing of woodwork or of glass, and then silence. And if just then a patrol of the police happened to be passing down the main street, and some one said that the disturbance was at Old Plugger’s, the sergeant would shake his head as meaningly as Lord Burleigh in the Critic. But nobody seemed to care to inquire too curiously into the nature of the altercation in what was euphemistically known, among the trades-folk of the vicinity, as the captains’ boarding-house.

It was, as has been said with reference to contemporary events at Carbery, sultry August weather, and if it was hot even on the spurs of breezy Dartmoor, assuredly it was hotter in the east of London. The strong sun brought out with great effect the combined perfumes of pitch and paint, of gas refuse and train-oil, of tide-mud and fried flat-fish, of old tarpaulins, rotten timber, and animal and vegetable refuse, never so pungent as beside the Thames. Society, gasping for air of purer quality than that town-made article which during the season and the parliamentary session it had respired perforce, had left London. But the captains who patronised Plugger’s bore the loss of Society with philosophical equanimity, and were content to incur, by stopping where they were, a reputation for being wholly unfashionable.

A controversy might have been waged with reference to Old Plugger’s as to which was the back and which the front of that hospitable mansion. The main-door certainly opened on the street, or rather row, named in honour of Dampier, and by the position of a main-door that of a house-front is commonly to be determined. But then Plugger’s turned all its smiles, all its attractions towards the river. The best rooms were on that side, with their bow-windows and lumbering balconies; and there was even a narrow strip of garden, where snails ran riot among the neglected cabbages and tall sunflowers, and where the half of an old boat, set on end and festooned with sweet-pea and the inevitable scarlet-runner, did duty for an arbour, perilously near to the wash and ripple of the flood-tide.

In the broad wooden balcony that projected from the low first-floor of Plugger’s and in part overhung this delectable garden, were some six or seven men in their shirt sleeves mostly, for coolness’ sake, but otherwise not ill clad. Through the open bow-windows of the long room of which the balcony was an appendage, glimpses might be caught of some ten or twelve other customers, very similar in garb and bearing to those outside. It was early as yet, and breakfast—as betokened by the empty cups, empty bottles, and confusion of knives and forks and dirty plates—was already over. Some of the company were smoking a solemn morning pipe of the yard-long ‘churchwarden’ variety, affected by sea-going persons when on shore; two seated at a round-table were engaged in a game at cards; and one copper-visaged and gray-haired captain, with a glass of steaming rum-and-water at his elbow, sat on the flat top of the wooden balustrade itself, and alternately swept the waters with the aid of a gleaming brass-bound telescope, or glanced critically at the cards and the players. In all this there was nothing to distinguish Plugger’s from many another long-shore boarding-house, wherein mates and skippers take their spell of rest, as it were, between the hardships of the last voyage and those of the next; and those who have seen much of men of this class are aware how much of sterling worth is apt to underlie the harmless peculiarities traditional to the calling. But a physiognomist who should have, himself unseen, accompanied some Asmodeus bent on taking a bird’s-eye view of the company, could scarcely have failed to draw his own deductions from the countenances thus beheld. There were faces there in plenty which would have seemed in keeping with their surroundings had they been seen above the bulwarks of a long, black-hulled schooner, rakish as to her masts, and clean and sharp as to her run and cut-water, beating to windward off the Isle of Pines, or within sight of the mountain mass of Cuba. There were others, newly shaven, that would have harmonised well with a shaggy beard and tattered cabbage-palm hat, surmounting the red shirt and pistol-studded belt of the Australian bushranger. And again, others which might be conceived to have been tanned to their mahogany hue by the reflection of the sun from the tawny surface of some African river, where, behind the mangrove swamp, might be seen the cane-thatched top of the barracoon, where the cargo of ‘live ebony’ lay shackled. A very dangerous set of scamps, unless their looks belied them, were the bulk of Plugger’s patrons, and the more dangerous perhaps because they were not reckless—because they knew how to abstain from the overdose of liquor that sets the brain afloat and loosens the tongue.

‘Let me tell yew, mister, yew’d be riddled, yew would, like any catamount treed, ef yew played thet sorter game in Georgia, whar I war raised, yew would,’ suddenly exclaimed one of the card-players, whose nasal drawl would of itself have revealed his nationality. ‘Thet’s three times I’ve seen yew try to pass the king.’

‘Don’t cry afore you ’re hurt,’ retorted his adversary, whose air and tone were those of a sailor, and whose muscular wrists, emerging from shirt-cuffs linked by heavy sleeve-buttons of silver, were ornamented by mermaids and anchors and true-lovers’ knots in blue tattooing of the true salt-water pattern. ‘Guess this child wasn’t born last week, shipmate! Haven’t I sported the pasteboard at New York with Dead Rabbits; at New Orleans with Plug-uglies; and in California with fellows that stuck the points of their bowies in the table afore they set to a hand at poker! You’re a nice hand to tax a man with cheating, you, with two court cards up your sleeve now!’

The American, who was spare and lightly built, compared with the opposite player, scowled as he thrust his bony right hand into an inner pocket of the loose coat which he alone of all the occupants of the balcony wore. It may have been for the concealment of the cards alluded to; it may have been to get a grasp of some hidden weapon. The latter was the supposition that the most commended itself to the other gamester.

‘Shew your hand, Sam Barks!’ he said roughly, grasping a Dutch bottle, probably containing Schiedam, which stood in company with two glasses on the table, ‘or I’——

‘Belay there, you brace of babies!’ interrupted the copper-visaged captain, thrusting his flashing telescope and his metallic face betwixt the disputants. ‘Dog don’t eat dog, my mates! I always was agin play between friends.—Sam, my lad, you won’t make much out of Captain Hold.—Dick, my Trojan, you’ll not find the American quite as green as spinach. Draw your stakes, my heroes, and let’s shake hands and have a drink all round, for the renewal of friendship!’ And this singular specimen of a peacemaker flourished his glass, swallowed its contents, and rattled the teaspoon against its sides until this substitute for a bell attracted the notice of a watchful attendant, wearing a striped cotton jacket, such as cabin-boys in hot latitudes affect.

‘Three grogs, steward, and a goodish squeeze of lemon in mine, d’ye hear?’ called out he of the copper countenance; and the dark-skinned mulatto lad who was called ‘steward,’ as factotums in The Traveller’s Rest were called Deputy, nodded his woolly head, and was not long in bringing the desired refreshment. The kettle must have been kept always boiling, even on hot August mornings, at Plugger’s, so ready was the supply of steaming spirits and water.

‘Ah! my boys,’ said the venerable founder of the feast, as he took a second sip at the potent liquor, ‘here’s a blue blazing day for ye—puts me in mind, and you too mayhap, of a morning in the doldrums, where sun is sun, and the very sea seems to simmer like a can of hot broth. I’d like to smell blue water again, I would. I’d an offer, Monday, to command a decentish brig, West Ingies and Demerary way; regular molasses wagon; but old as I am, I’d rather have another bout in the South Seas. Black-birding for the Fiji and Queensland labour market is about the best sport a man can have, since they spoiled the fun we used to have off the West Coast.’

‘Ay, but that game’s pretty near played out too,’ answered Hold meditatively. ‘Why, you yourself, Captain Grincher, lost your schooner that the man-o’-war captured off the Solomons, and were tried at Sydney for what the government fellows called kidnapping. No; give me Chinese waters, and a handy crew aboard a bit of a fast-sailing lorcha to’——

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen!’ broke in the American, now in a good temper; ‘allow me to say it air a pity to see men of your talents a-huddling of ’em into corners wheer they’ll fail of their just reward. Now, listen, ef I could but get together a few spirited citizens and, mind ye, the handful of coin necessary for preliminary expenses, this child could point the place where lies, in fourteen fathom water, the treasure-ship Happy Land that left San Francisco, bound for New York, in the fall of ’49, and never was heard of more. She had the value, in dust and bars, of’——

But the precise amount of the golden freight which, on board the Happy Land, awaited the bold explorers who should reach that sunken vessel, is not destined to be set down in these pages, for the coloured steward at this juncture appeared holding a letter between his dusky finger and thumb. ‘For Cap’en Hold,’ said the mulatto; and Hold, recognising the handwriting, jumped to his feet in a trice, and snatched rather than received the envelope which the dark Ganymede of Plugger’s held out to him; and tearing it open, read as follows: ‘Come, and come at once. There is no time to lose. Something has occurred—something which makes your presence necessary. Come by noonday train. I will be at the park gate to the north soon after ten o’clock. Meet me there.’ The letter was signed ‘Ruth Willis.’

Hold’s mind was instantly made up. ‘I must heave anchor in a hurry,’ he said, as he thrust back the letter into his pocket. ‘So good-bye, Grincher; and good-bye, Barks!’ and without further delay, he withdrew to prepare for the journey to Carbery. To pay his reckoning, to push some needful articles into a bag, and to consign his sea-chest to the custody of the authorities of Plugger’s, well used to similar trusts, took but half an hour; and when the mid-day train started for the west of England it carried with it a second-class passenger, whose only luggage was a black bag, and who could easily have been mistaken for a man-o’-war’s man bound for Plymouth, there to rejoin one of those Hornets or Monkeys which have superseded the Arethusas and Hermiones of the past.

Arrived at the station most convenient for his purpose, Hold trudged sturdily on until he reached his old quarters at The Traveller’s Rest, where he installed his bag in one of those single-bedded rooms which were always at the service of so solvent a customer as Mr Hold, who, while inland and among shore-going folks, dropped his titular distinction of captain. After supper, the fresh arrival at The Rest sallied forth, and making his way to Carbery, waited, pacing softly to and fro, under the shelter of the park wall.

CHAPTER XVIII.—UNDER THE PARK WALL.

All through that August day which witnessed the hurried journey of Mr Richard Hold, master mariner, from the river-side bowers of Plugger’s to the silvan shades of The Traveller’s Rest, Sir Sykes Denzil’s ward was in a state of feverish agitation, which it was hard for even her to conceal from those about her. We may fairly own that women surpass us in the social diplomacy which they study from the cradle almost, and that their powers of suppressing what they feel—not seldom from a noble motive—are greater than ours. All of us must have wondered, as we read the marvellous narratives of such prisoners as Trenck and Latude, at the patient ingenuity that could contrive rope-ladders out of the flax thread of shirts, files out of scraps of rusty iron, tools from any fragment of metal that came to hand. None the less should we be astonished at the power of dissembling evinced by the captives on the watch for the propitious moment to break prison.

What Ruth dreaded above all other things was what a woman always does dread, the scrutiny of her own sex. That men are credulous, careless, prone to give credit to the shallowest excuse, readily hoodwinked, and easy to pacify, has been an article of faith with Eve’s daughters since prehistoric times. The real spy to be feared, the real censor before whom to tremble, is decidedly feminine, in the estimation of women who have anything to hide. Ruth therefore devoted her whole attention to keeping up a brave outside before the eyes of her guardian’s daughters, Blanche and Lucy, two as honestly unsuspicious girls as could be met with in all Devonshire.

But as all a priori reasoning is tainted with the fatal flaw of bad logic, Ruth forgot Jasper Denzil, still shut up in the house on account of his recent accident, and whose crooked mind had not much to do save to employ itself in fathoming the crooked ways of others. Now a man, if circumstances coerce him to limit his powers of observation to the narrow sphere of domesticity, is capable of becoming a spy more formidable than women would readily admit. If he sees less, he reasons more cogently as to what he does see, and he has the further advantage of being an unsuspected scout from whom no danger is anticipated.

Jasper Denzil had excellent reasons for the profound mistrust with which he regarded the Indian orphan. The very presence beneath his father’s roof of such a one as Ruth was in itself a standing puzzle and challenge to his curiosity. That she was Hold’s sister, the sister of a coarse-mannered adventurer of humble birth, was what the captain could not bring himself to believe. For Ruth seemed innately a lady. Either she must have had the advantages of gentle nurture and education, or as an actress in the never-ending social drama she displayed consummate skill. But whatever might have been her birth (and there were times when he was tempted to fancy that in her he saw that young sister of his own, long dead, the date of whose decease was supposed to coincide with that of the sad mood which had become habitual to Sir Sykes), Jasper with just cause regarded her as a most artful person.

The ex-cavalry officer remembered well enough that interview between Sir Sykes and Hold, at which he had played the part of an unsuspected audience. The demand to which his father had acceded was that Sir Sykes should receive in a false character Hold’s sister as an inmate of Carbery. True the seafaring fellow—smuggler, pirate, or whatever he might be—had laughed mockingly, and had spoken in strangely ironical accents when dictating to the baronet on this subject. But be she who she might, Ruth must be either an accomplished schemer or the willing instrument of others, or she would not have been where she was.

It may have been a petty malice, suited to his feline nature, that caused Jasper on that particular night to remain down-stairs later than usual, causing his sisters also to defer their retiring to rest for an extra half-hour. They kept early hours at Carbery as a rule, as rich people, in the profound dullness of the dignified ease which is not enlivened by guests, are sometimes apt to do. Sir Sykes, who always stayed long enough in the drawing-room to sip his coffee, was the first to disappear; but no one save himself and his valet knew when he left the library for his bedroom. When the captain was in health it was his custom to spend an hour or two in trying rare combinations of skill and luck among the ivory balls in the billiard-room; but since the steeplechase he had been glad to retire unfashionably early.

It was because he fancied that Miss Willis was impatiently awaiting the moment for separating for the night, that Jasper chose to delay it; but at length the time came when the good-nights had been exchanged, and the drawing-room was abandoned. Captain Denzil’s room, which adjoined the picture-gallery on the first-floor, was immediately beneath that occupied by the Indian orphan. Repeatedly, after he reached it, did Jasper fancy that he heard a light swift step overhead, as if Sir Sykes’s ward were hurrying to and fro; and then his sharpened ear caught the sound of a stealthy tread upon the oaken staircase.

Extinguishing the lights for the time being, Captain Denzil threw open his window, which overlooked the park; and by the time his eyes grew somewhat accustomed to the darkness, he saw, or thought he saw, a female form glide from under the black shadow of the giant sycamores and flit bat-like away through the solitary gloom.

‘If it were not for this provoking arm,’ said the captain, who was still, despite the skilful care of worthy little Dr Aulfus from Pebworth, suffering less from his hurts than from the Nemesis that dogs the steps of the hard-liver, ‘I’d win the odd trick to-night. But if I can’t follow to see who it is that she meets, at anyrate I shall get a second peep at yonder ingenuous creature when she comes back. A rare moonless night it is for such an errand!’

Jasper’s eyes had not deceived him. It was Ruth whose slight figure had passed away into the deepening shadows of the night, crossing the park towards its northern boundary, which abutted upon the broken country leading to the royal forest, treeless, but none the less in sound law the forest of Dartmoor. It was so dark that even one better accustomed to the locality might have failed to keep to the right course among narrow and grass-grown paths, many of them trodden by no human foot, but by the cloven hoofs of the deer trooping down to pool or pasture.

Yet Ruth threaded her devious way past holt and thicket, past pond and hollow, almost as well as the oldest keeper on the estate would have done, and presently gained the gate which, as has been already remarked, stood always open on the northern side of the park, corresponding to that on the southern or seaward side, for, as has been said, the public had an ancient right or user to traverse Carbery Chase. But as a right of ingress for men might imply a right of egress for deer, some zigzag arrangement of iron bars had been set up, screen-like, at either extremity of the footpath, and this effectually restrained the roving propensities of the antlered herd within.

‘So—you are late, Ruth! I have kicked about here, till I began to think you’d thrown me over. No wonder, living among fine folks, that you’re getting to care little how long a rough fellow like yours to command is kept on the look-out.’

Such was the surly greeting of the stout sailor-like man whom Ruth found irritably pacing to and fro under the lee of the wall.

‘I could not come, brother, one moment earlier without arousing suspicion that might be the ruin of us both,’ answered the girl steadily, but in a conciliatory tone. ‘And what, after all, signify a few minutes more or less of expectation, compared with a life of constant effort, constant watchfulness, and the sense of depending on one’s self alone in the midst of enemies who sleep beneath the same roof and feed at the same table? I tell you that the tension on my nerves is far greater than I ever dreamed that it could be, and that there are times when I even fancy that I shall be driven mad by the strain imposed upon me of playing a part, ever and always, without rest or respite!’

Ruth’s voice as she proceeded had grown shrill and tremulous with the effect of the emotions, long pent up, that found expression at last, and she pressed her slender hand upon her heated brow with a gesture which Hold was not slow to mark.

‘Come, come, Missy,’ he said in accents far more gentle than those which he had first employed; ‘you’ve taken this thing, whatever it is, too much to heart. See, now; I’d never have suggested the plan if I had not believed that in the house of Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet, you’d have been like a fish in water. Didn’t we always call you in joke “My Lady,” and that because your ways weren’t as our plain ways? Haven’t you got your head stuffed as full of book-learning as an egg is full of meat? Aren’t you dainty and proud and what not? Till folks declared, to be sister o’ mine, you must have been changed at nurse. And now do you find it a hardship to have to consort with yon Denzil people?—not your equals, I’ll be bound, if all had their due.’

‘You can’t understand me, Brother Dick,’ said the girl softly, and turning away her face. ‘Give me, I say, a real stand-point; let not my life be a lie, and I should fear no comparison with those who are daily my dupes. But I hold my tenure of the bed I sleep on, the bread I eat, by mere sufferance, and I see no way as yet to’——

‘That fop—the dandy Lancer fellow—Captain Jasper don’t seem to take to you then?’ asked Hold; and Ruth winced perceptibly at the blunt question.

‘Captain Denzil will never, I imagine, care very much for any one but his dear self,’ she answered gently. ‘Now that he is an invalid—though he will soon be out and about again—he thinks that he pays me no small compliment in preferring my conversation to the insipid society of his excellent sisters. But I no more expect a proposal of marriage from Jasper Denzil than I expect the sky to fall.’

‘That’s a pity,’ said Hold dryly; and then a pause ensued. ‘You didn’t send for me, Missy, to tell me that?’ he added, after some moments spent in thought.

‘No!’ returned Ruth in her low clear voice. ‘I sent for you that you might read a letter—how obtained I leave you to guess—which concerns us both. Have you the means of doing so?’

‘Catch me without light, Missy!’ complacently replied the seaman, drawing from one of his deep coat-pockets a small dark-lantern, which he lighted. ‘Now for this letter,’ he said; and receiving it from Ruth’s hand, read it attentively twice over. As he did so, some rays from the shaded lantern that he held illumined his resolute face.

‘Wilkins, eh? Enoch Wilkins. That’s the name the craft hails by; and he’s a land-shark, it seems,’ muttered Hold, as he refolded the document.

‘He is a London lawyer, as you see,’ explained Ruth; ‘and all I know of him, gleaned from various sources, is that he was the captain’s creditor for a large sum, which Sir Sykes has very recently paid. He is, I gather, a sort of turf solicitor of no very good repute, and has somehow a grip on poor weak Sir Sykes. Now the baronet, I feel sure, has but one secret’——

‘That, you may be certain of!’ interjected Hold.

‘And this man knows it and trades on it,’ said the baronet’s ward eagerly; ‘and in doing so his path crosses ours. See! The word “others,” which is underlined, must surely have reference to you and me. Rely on it, he has an inkling of our plans, and may counteract them.’

‘Take the wind out of my sails, will he, eh?’ said Hold grimly, and with a threatening gesture.

‘Brother Dick, Brother Dick, when will you learn wisdom!’ said his sister, smiling. ‘Your buccaneer tricks of clenched fist and angry frown are as out of place in peaceable England as it would be to strut about with pistols and cutlass. You are not on the West Coast now, or off the Isle of Pines, or in the Straits of Malacca, to carry things with a high hand. Our plain course is to make an ally, not an enemy of this lawyer. He knows much, but perhaps not all, and may be induced to accept as true the story that has been told to Sir Sykes. In any case, he cannot be very scrupulous; and will not be desirous, by bringing about a dispute and a scandal, to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The baronet’s purse is deep enough for all of us.’

‘You’re right!’ rejoined the sailor, with a whistle that was meant to express unbounded admiration for his sister’s shrewdness. ‘I’ll make tracks to London, and see what terms can be made with Commodore Wilkins, before he shews his face here.’

‘Tell him nothing that he does not know,’ said Ruth, as the pair separated.

‘Trust me for that!’ was Hold’s confident reply.

Jasper, still at his window, caught but a glimpse of the girl’s slight form as it glided by and re-entered the house.

To be continued.