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"I will!" he vowed. "I'll go myself to the nearest chemist, and
he shall give me the very strongest stuff he's got. Good-by, and
don't you stir till I come back - for your own sake. I'll go this
minute, and I'll ride like hell!" And if ever two men were glad
to be rid of each other, they were this young villain and myself.
But what was his villany? It was little enough that I had
overheard at the window, and still less that poor Eva had told me
in her hurried lines. All I saw clearly was that the Lady Jermyn
and some hundred souls had perished by the foulest of foul play;
that, besides Eva and myself, only the incendiaries had escaped;
that somehow these wretches had made a second escape from the gig,
leaving dead men and word of their own death behind them in the
boat. And here the motive was as much a mystery to me as the
means; but, in my present state, both were also matters of supreme
indifference. My one desire was to rescue my love from her
loathsome captors; of little else did I pause to think. Yet
Rattray's visit left its own mark on my mind; and long after he
was gone I lay puzzling over the connection between a young
Lancastrian, of good name, of ancient property, of great personal
charm, and a crime of unparalleled atrocity committed in cold blood
on the high seas. That his complicity was flagrant I had no
room to doubt, after Eva's own indictment of him, uttered to his
face and in my hearing. Was it then the usual fraud on the
underwriters, and was Rattray the inevitable accomplice on dry
land? I could think of none but the conventional motive for
destroying a vessel. Yet I knew there must be another and a
subtler one, to account not only for the magnitude of the crime,
but for the pains which the actual perpetrators had taken to
conceal the fact of their survival, and for the union of so
diverse a trinity as Senhor Santos, Captain Harris, and the young
squire.
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