The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
THE PYRRHIC VICTOR
A wave of something that was vaguely disheartening, that was almost nauseating, swept through McKinnon. It left him momentarily dazed, as men are dazed with that forlornest sickness which follows a seismic upheaval. He felt as though the deck under his feet had opened and let him down into the depths of a chilling sea. Insidiously and almost unwittingly he had grown to believe that this unbefriended and lonely woman was in some way very close to him. Little by little he had come to accept the hope that they might draw even closer together, that the exigencies of warfare might make their paths identical.
But as he stood listening to Ganley's thundered declaration there swept through him the impression of being engulfed and suffocated in fogs of duplicity, of being entangled in endless webs of lies and intrigues and counter-intrigues. He felt suddenly oppressed and disturbed by a sense of unlooked-for and undefined conspiracies beyond conspiracies, of bewildering and inscrutable forces at play all about him.
"Is this true?" he demanded of the woman before him.
His question was almost a prayer for its own denial. He could see that the scene through which she had passed had sorely taxed her strength. She was no longer a girl, but a woman who had known and confronted life.
"Is this true?" he repeated, and even as he asked it he felt that whatever part she might be playing in that crowded drama he would in the end be compelled to stand by her.
"No," whispered the woman, white to her lips. "It is not true."
"Have you a husband?"
"No," she still answered in her low voice. The monosyllable was emotionless, yet he could see by her face that she was suffering.
Ganley laughed outright. It was not a pleasant laugh.
"And you never married a mangy, half-caste diamond-wearing Santo Domingan named De Perralta?" demanded the man on the berth edge.
"I married a man named Perralta," answered the woman slowly, her unwavering eyes on McKinnon as she spoke.
"Then it is true?" A note of involuntary bitterness rang through McKinnon's sharp query.
"Yes," she answered.
"But you have just said you had no husband!"
"He was dragged from the carriage half an hour after the ceremony."
"What ceremony?"
"After our marriage. I have not seen him since that day. Seven weeks later he died of yellow fever."
"And tell why he was dragged from that carriage," prompted Ganley, with his guttural and mirthless laugh, as he saw the woman's wide eyes watching him closely, almost challengingly.
"He had shot the wife of a government official named Gurmanito, in Bogota," she answered in her listless monotone. "That was only one of other things."
"Other things which made him almost worthy of the family he'd married into," interpolated the scoffing Ganley, in luxurious appreciation of her misery.
McKinnon could see that she was shaking, that her whole body was quivering. When she spoke again, hurriedly, her voice was higher, in pitch, as though the strain upon her was becoming a tension she could no longer control or endure.
"I have never spoken of these things," she said in her tremulous soprano, facing McKinnon, "but I want you to understand. It was three years ago, when I was little more than a schoolgirl. I was under a great debt of gratitude to this man who—to this man Perralta. I had been left in care of the American Consul at La Guayra; I had taken an English steamship to Venezuela, after two years in a French school. I was to re-embark from La Guayra for Puerto Locombia, but quarantine was established on account of bubonic plague, before I could get away. I had to live at the consulate on short rations—the American consul had refused the demand of the Venezuelan Government for a certificate that La Guayra was free of the plague. He and his family were taken off by a United States gunboat, the Paducah, and I would have been sent to the detention camps, had it not been for this man Perralta."
"Go on!" prompted the other, as she paused.
"He seemed a gentleman then, and had money and influence. He played his part well. He leased a seagoing tug and had me and my companion, a young German woman, carried out of the infected district. After we had passed the necessary period of quarantine, for observation, in the English hospital at George town, he was there, waiting for us. I was weak and ill—I think it was of coast-fever. He bribed or bought over the German woman, I don't know how. I was tricked into a ceremony I did not understand. I scarcely knew what to do when I found out. But it was decided for me—he was dragged from the carriage as he sat beside me...... I tell you all this because—because I want you to understand."
"I do understand," answered McKinnon.
"And is that all?" asked Ganley, with his careless sneer.
"Yes; that is all," she answered. The insolence of the gross-limbed gun-runner was like a whip-lash to McKinnon.
"And is that all on your side?" he asked, with a sudden movement of disgust.
"Not by a long shot!" retorted the man in the raincoat, with unlooked-for energy. "I want later history than all this. I want to know just what this woman's got of mine."
"She has explained that she took this paper," replied the other, pointing to the littered cabin floor.
"What do I care what she said, or says, or is going to say. You've got to show me—I'm from Missouri!"
McKinnon pondered the situation. It was plain that Ganley had regained his self-control, that he could no longer be counted on to act with the unthinking directness of the outraged savage he had seemed.
"There's a very simple way to settle this problem," McKinnon suggested. "We'll lock this cabin, so nothing in it can be interfered with. The three of us will step into your cabin. You'll then go through your belongings, these documents and papers of yours, and I'll check them off as you do so, one by one. It will be easy enough to tell then if anything is missing."
The proposal aroused no enthusiasm in Ganley.
"This is not the hour o' night I care to go into the general-auditing business," was his reply.
"Nor altogether the hour of night for keeping a young lady out of her bed!"
Ganley peered at the speaker for several seconds before replying.
"I like to see you being nice and considerate," he said at last, with his mild and studied laugh. "And I imagine you enjoy being judge and jury in a case like this. And I also imagine, just because this woman's flashed her lamps at you a couple o' times, that you've got an idea that she's all right and I'm all wrong. You've both concluded that this little talk-fest has settled the whole case. But it hasn't. And I guess it's not going to."
He rose to his feet heavily and slowly and thoughtfully, and then turned to McKinnon.
"Remember, I'm not trying to hold you in any way. You're free. You can do what you like. But if anything unexpected should happen, just bear in mind I gave you a chance to stand in with me, and you wouldn't take it!"
"Is that a threat?" asked McKinnon.
"Threats? Why should I make threats? Talking's cheap, and there's been a good deal of it handed round here to-night. And, as you say, we've rather tired the lady."
There was no longer any trace of mockery in his voice as he drew himself up and spoke more directly to the younger man.
"And now I'm going to turn in. But don't you forget that I'm still trying to be a friend o' yours!"
"I know it!" said the younger man, meeting his eyes without flinching.
"Then there's nothing we need to worry about," declared Ganley. And before the other quite realised it the man in the black raincoat, with a benevolent and all-forgiving arm-wave, crossed the room to the cabin door. No one spoke as he passed out through it and closed it after him.
It was the watching and motionless woman who finally emitted a little gasp in which anger seemed to override astonishment. Her companion was startled by the look of bewilderment, mounting almost to open distrust, that crept slowly over her face. There seemed to be something akin to pitying contempt in her eyes as she slowly turned about and gazed at him.
"What does this mean?" she demanded.
"Does what mean?" he parried, disturbed by the hostility of her gaze.
"The way you have played into Ganley's hand—the way you have sacrificed everything for your own safety!"
"But nothing has been sacrificed," persisted the unhappy McKinnon.
"I have been sacrificed—you have watched him humiliate me—you have helped him to humiliate me!"
"It was hard to bear, I know. But it could not be helped. It's a part of the price we have to pay for our victory. It's a part I would have borne myself, a thousand times over, if I'd only been able."
"The price for what victory?" she demanded.
"The victory we wanted; the thing we've been working for, all along. It's settled—and he doesn't even understand it's settled!"
"Yes; it's settled," she echoed, unhappily.
"But this leaves us free!"
"You do not know this man as I do," was her answer.
"But it's over—we're through with him!"
"He is not through with us!"
"But what can he do, when once I've got in touch with the Princeton?"
She looked about the small cabin, from side to side, fornlornly. It was the first time McKinnon had seen actual fear in her eyes. He even felt that she had been vaguely weighing the place's possibilities against assault.
"Are you afraid?" he asked, not comprehending the source of her distrust. She shook her head in negation.
"This is an American ship," was her answer.
"Then what is it?" he asked, oppressed by some new-born isolation of spirit that barred and walled him away from her.
Again that look of almost contemptuous pity crept into her eyes.
"I'm afraid of you," she replied; "I'm afraid of the future, and how you will surely fail."
There was no sign of tears in her eyes, though he had felt, from her voice, that an outburst was imminent. Yet he found it hard, cruelly hard, to meet her open and unwavering glance.
"Why have you treated me like this?" she asked him, almost without emotion. "Have you nothing to say, nothing to explain?"
McKinnon did not answer for a moment or two.
"I can't explain," he said, at last, his face distorted, under the strong side-light, with some unuttered misery of spirit.