The Prisoner in the Mask Read online

  The Count followed his guide down into the bowels of the yacht; and there the real stokers, not having been told that he was supposed to be a Prince, indulged in some friendly horseplay, making him as grimy as themselves; then they gave him a shovel and set him to work.

  Meanwhile the whaler had made fast to the gangway and up it came the cruiser’s Captain, a bull-necked man with a black spade beard, followed by Colonel Roux, the redheaded warder and four marines.

  Van Ryn met them on the quarter deck, and made a good tactical move by telling his story without delay. His chunky, normally cheerful face expressing suitable solemnity, he greeted them with the words:

  ‘Gentlemen, I’m sure the treatment you’ve been ordered to mete out to your prisoner must be repugnant to you; so I think you may be relieved to hear that he has freed you of such unpleasant duties. You’ve come for him just too late. Five minutes ago he threw himself over the rail on the far side of the yacht; and before you could say “Jack Robinson” the sharks that were hovering round the waste chute from the main galley got him.’

  He had spoken in heavily accented but fluent French, so the whole of the boarding party understood him. The Captain and the Colonel exchanged a swift glance. Roux gave a slight shake of the head and the sailor replied for both of them:

  ‘We cannot accept your statement, Monsieur. My Sub-Lieutenant reports to me that you behaved most truculently towards him and showed an evident desire to shield the prisoner.’

  ‘What! D’you call me a liar?’ exclaimed Van Ryn, simulating swift indignation.

  ‘No, Monsieur,’ replied the French Captain tactfully. ‘But perhaps you have allowed your imagination to run away with you.’

  ‘Imagination be damned! I was beside him when he went over.’ Van Ryn jerked a thumb at young Plimsoll and the yacht’s Captain, who were standing beside him. ‘So did these two. Ask my secretary here, and Captain Oakie.’

  The Captain spoke no French, but he nodded vigorously, and Harry Plimsoll said that he too had witnessed the sudden tragedy.

  The French officers stared at them, still obviously unconvinced, and Colonel Roux said, ‘If he had intended to commit suicide, after plunging off the stern of the cruiser he would not have swum towards your boat. Since he did so, and you picked him up, his throwing himself into the sea again twenty minutes later does not make sense.’

  ‘Oh yes it does,’ countered the American swiftly. ‘When he made his break from you he was hoping to find sanctuary on this yacht. He implored me to hide him in one of the coal bunkers. But I wouldn’t. He told me he was a Prince who was being persecuted, and I was mighty interested; but, all the same, I had to tell him that when you came for him I’d have to hand him over. It was then that despair clouded the poor fellow’s mind, and before we could stop him he took a header. Would that be true about his being a Prince? He said Vendôme, or something like it, was his name and that he was the rightful King of France.’

  There was a sudden stir among the group of Frenchmen, and the Captain threw a swift glance of interrogation at the Colonel. After hesitating a moment, Roux said awkwardly:

  ‘The Prince is dead, Monsieur. He was shot while resisting arrest some weeks ago, and it was all in the newspapers. But the prisoner has a strange resemblance to his late Highness, and was causing great trouble by impersonating him. That is why my superiors took measures to conceal his features.’

  ‘Well, they’re both dead now,’ remarked Van Ryn with an air of finality. But the Colonel and the Captain were consulting together in undertones, and when they had done, the Captain announced:

  ‘I regret, Monsieur, but I regard it as my duty to search your yacht. As a first move, be good enough to have the whole of your ship’s company paraded up here.’

  With a shrug of resignation, Van Ryn told Captain Oakie to have the boatswain pipe ‘all hands on deck’. Most of the sailors were already standing about watching the proceedings, but soon after the whistle had ceased to shrill others, including the engine room staff with de Quesnoy amongst them, came tumbling up through the hatchways.

  Altogether, including the Japanese valet and a Chinese cook, the ship’s company numbered twenty. The men made no attempt to fall in, but, grouping themselves in a ragged line, stood eyeing the French intruders with either slightly hostile or faintly amused expressions.

  De Quesnoy, now sweating and begrimed, was standing among the stokers. He needed no telling that for him, during the next five minutes, life or death would hang in the balance. It was only with a great effort of will that he managed to stand slackly, as though at ease, and to keep his eyes from riveting themselves on Roux.

  The Captain of the cruiser gave the assembly a sweeping glance from end to end; then he said to the Colonel, ‘I knew de Vendôme slightly. My sister sold him a hunter and I was with her when he came to inspect the horse. There is no one remotely like him here.’

  ‘I fear you are right,’ Roux agreed. ‘All the same, I am going to have a closer look.’ Then, followed by the warder, he walked slowly along the ragged line, giving each man in turn a searching glance.

  He peered with his melancholy blue eyes for longest at the stokers, striving to discern their features more clearly under the coatings of sweat and dirt. The Count dared not meet those probing eyes. His heart hammering in his breast, he feared that even now a memory of one of the many photographs of himself, which had appeared in the Press only three weeks before, might cause Roux to question him; and if that happened it might yet lead to his recapture and death.

  Roux passed on. De Quesnoy’s feeling of relief was beyond description. But it was premature. The warder was following close on the Colonel’s heels. He now stared at the Count. His eyes widened. Suddenly he gave a shout.

  ‘Mon Colonel! Here is our man!’ He shot out an accusing finger. ‘Look! Look! The sores upon his neck. Our prisoner had them. They were made by the rubbing of the helmet.’

  Next moment, burning to get his own back for the blows that had knocked him out earlier that morning, he fell upon de Quesnoy, kicking and striking at him furiously.

  Taken by surprise though he was, the Count’s brain was quick enough to tell him that his only hope now lay in bluffing to the limit. In broken French and using the most atrocious accent, he cried:

  ‘You make mistake! I no French convict! I Russian seaman.’ Then, parrying the blows of the redheaded warder and lashing out in his turn, he gave vent to a non-stop flow of curses, protests and abuse in fluent Russian.

  Before either of them sustained any serious injury they were pulled apart by the other stokers. Roux’s eyes were once more riveted on de Quesnoy. Both Captains, Van Ryn and young Plimsol had all come hurrying up. To put his friends wise to the line he was taking, the Count shouted again, this time in broken English:

  ‘I am Russian! Ivan Orloff is my name. I am Russian. I show you!’ Upon which, breaking free of the men who held him, he folded his arms, bent both his knees and, kicking out his feet alternately, began to dance a Trepak.

  His skilful antics, and mercurial change from anger to buffoonery, had the desired effect of easing the tension. Most of the men about him laughed and Van Ryn cried gamely:

  ‘Sure thing he’s a Russian. It’s only folk who are born subjects of the Czar can dance those crazy dances as easy as we could a polka.’ Then, having heard the Count’s fluent swearing, he added: ‘He can sing a good song, too, when he chooses. Come on Ivan; give us a song.’

  Ceasing his kicking, the Count stood up and obliged with the first few stanzas of a Russian folk song; but to his dismay he saw that the warder was still regarding him with malevolent suspicion, and Roux with a curious intentness. After a moment the Colonel waved de Quesnoy into silence and asked Van Ryn:

  ‘For how long has this man been signed on by you?’

  ‘He’s a new hand,’ replied the American. ‘He came into Caracas in a grain-ship, got drunk, missed his sailing and was taken on by us because we were short-staffed in the engine room.’


  De Quesnoy’s heart was in his mouth again. Van Ryn’s statement had been a wild gamble. There was no Ivan Orloff on the manifest, so if Roux asked to see it the game would be up. On the other hand the bluff must have collapsed right away had the Colonel received no reply.

  The Captain of the cruiser had been thoughtfully stroking his square beard. Now, he gave a shrug and said to Roux, ‘Why waste time on this fellow? He is a Russian all right; and anyhow he has not the faintest resemblance to the Duke de Vendôme.’

  ‘No,’ replied the Colonel slowly, ‘but his face is strangely familiar. I cannot get it out of my mind that I have seen him somewhere before.’

  ‘Cross-question him again later then. If we do not get on with searching the ship we shall still be at it into the hot hours of the day.’

  It was a most welcome reprieve for de Quesnoy; but no more. With the warder, the marines and the sailors called up from the whaler to help, the two officers spent the next hour and three-quarters poking into every corner, cubby-hole and locker in the yacht. Meanwhile, still a prey to almost unbearable suspense, the Count had to continue to act his rôle of a stoker, now lounging about off duty, with as much conviction as he could put into it.

  Soon after ten o’clock the abortive search at last came to an end. Tired, hot and ill-tempered, the French boarding party straggled back on deck to be met with the now openly derisive grins of the yacht’s company. Van Ryn was among the few who kept a straight face. Going up to the two officers, he said tersely:

  ‘Well, gentlemen, I trust that you are now satisfied?’

  It was the Captain who answered. ‘We are satisfied, Monsieur, that the man we are seeking is not hidden in this yacht; therefore we must accept your explanation of his disappearance. But I am far from satisfied about your conduct in this matter. Had you not arbitrarily refused to hand the man over to my officer in the whaler, he would have had no opportunity to commit suicide, and we should not be saddled with the unenviable task of accounting to our Government for the loss of a most important Prisoner of State.’

  ‘Now isn’t that just too bad,’ remarked Van Ryn sarcastically. ‘It gives me a real pain to think that after all the kindness you two fellers showed your prisoner you’re likely to find yourselves in the doghouse on his account.’

  The Captain flushed above his black beard. ‘It is true that on account of your act we may get into hot water, and that seems to me all the better reason why I should take steps to ensure your getting into hot water too. Your yacht is now under arrest and you will sail her to the port of Cayenne, to answer a charge in front of a French magistrate of having obstructed a Naval officer carrying out his duty.’

  It was then that the hefty, thirty-four-year-old American showed to the full his true mettle. ‘Like hell I will!’ he positively roared. ‘You’d best think again, and mighty quick unless you want the pants scorched off you. I pulled a man out of the sea. He was muzzled like a mad dog and had been chained up like a wild beast; yet he was as sane as I am. And you’re going to charge me with wanting to know how come that the French nation, with all its vaunted civilisation, was treating a human being as though it had not yet crawled out of the Middle Ages.’

  For a second he paused for breath, then stormed on. ‘All right! Try it! Try it and just see where it gets you. My name’s Channock Van Ryn. Maybe you’ve never heard of it, but that name goes for something in the United States. My old man is President of the Chesapeake Banking and Trust Corporation. What’s more, he is a Senator. You pull this on me and he’ll have it taken up by our Ambassador in Paris. Can you guess what’ll happen then? Don’t bother; I’ll tell you. I’m a banker, so it’s my business to know about Governments and their reactions. Yours won’t face the music. No Government would dare to admit to a thing like this. It’s going to deny all knowledge of the mask and chain. It’s going to father those bright ideas on you; and to appease world indignation it will have those gold rings off your hats and tunics just so quickly you’ll think they’ve been ripped off by a hurricane.’

  Again Van Ryn paused for a second. Then he launched his final broadside. ‘As soon as my engineer has a head of steam, I’m sailing. But not to Cayenne. I am a citizen of the United States of America proceeding on my lawful occasions. On the stern staff of this yacht I’m flying, as is my right, the Stars and Stripes. Just you try firing at Old Glory as a means of stopping me. I guess Mr. Theodore Roosevelt would have something to say about that. As First Citizen the President would be liable to take that as sort of personal. So if you boys want to make dead certain of wrecking your careers that’s what you’d better do.’

  Under this terrible tirade the two Frenchmen had wilted visibly. Both were thinking how fortunate it was that all their men had already filed down the gangway, and so had not witnessed their being subjected to these appalling threats. They cast an anxious glance round, wondering how many of the yacht’s crew understood French, then exchanged an unhappy glance. Each of them read his own thoughts in the other’s eyes. This horrible American meant what he said; and he was right in believing that their Government would save its face by making scapegoats of them. They were faced with ruin or surrender.

  In an endeavour to retrieve something of his dignity, the Captain said, ‘Monsieur; this affair of the prisoner is our misfortune, not our fault. You are right in your contention that it is of much more importance that good relations between our two countries should be maintained. Be pleased to proceed whenever you wish.’

  As he turned towards the gangway Roux said, ‘You are right. But before leaving I would like to question further that man who says he is a Russian. In another five minutes’ talk with him I should probably remember why it is that his face is so familiar to me.’

  ‘To hell with the Russian!’ exclaimed the black-bearded Captain, letting go against his military colleague the suppressed rage he was feeling. ‘We know that he is not your prisoner, so what the devil does it matter who he is? For God’s sake, let us get away from this accursed yacht.’

  When the whaler was well on her way back to the cruiser, and de Quesnoy had for the past five minutes been pouring out his heartfelt thanks to the man who had saved him, Van Ryn suddenly gave him a quizzical glance, and said:

  ‘Before that bunch came aboard you assured me that none of them would be able to tell that you weren’t a member of the crew. Yet it was clear that the Colonel and the Captain were looking for the Prince Vendôme, and knew him well by sight. How come that you escaped identification?’

  De Quesnoy smiled. ‘Because I am not the man they were looking for. I changed places with the Duke de Vendôme after they had put the mask on him. All the same, I had a very narrow escape, because I am wanted for participation in this conspiracy and Colonel Roux very nearly recognised me.’

  ‘And who may you be?’ inquired Van Ryn with a lift of his eyebrows.

  ‘I am Lieutenant-Colonel the Count de Quesnoy, and your most grateful servant.’

  As the Count declared himself he made a graceful bow, but on drawing himself upright again he staggered slightly, put a hand to his head and murmured, ‘Forgive me, but for the past three hours I have been under a great strain, and … and it is now nearly three weeks since I have been able to do more than doze in considerable discomfort. Would you therefore permit me …?’

  ‘Not another word, Count,’ Van Ryn cut him short. ‘I’m a poor host not to have thought of that. Come right along with me, and I’ll put you in my best guest cabin. You shall sleep the clock round if you wish.’

  Almost at once de Quesnoy fell into eight hours of oblivion. On waking he felt wonderfully refreshed, and found that a suit of white drill had been laid out for him. After luxuriating for a while in a hot bath, he dressed and joined his host, whom he found with Plimsol and Captain Oakie just about to go into dinner.

  While once more savouring the joys of pleasant companionship, well-cooked food and excellent champagne, he told them the full story of the Vendôme conspiracy and its tragi
c outcome. When at length he had done and they were lighting up their cigars, Van Ryn asked:

  ‘And what now, Count? It is clear that you are finished as far as the French Army is concerned. What do you mean to do with yourself?’

  De Quesnoy’s grey, yellow-flecked eyes suddenly became hard and his mouth determined. ‘I intend to return to France with the least possible delay,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘I have taken a vow to ruin General André and bring about the fall of the Combes government. Either I shall succeed in that or die in the attempt.’

  20

  THE LONG ROAD BACK

  The fates decreed that de Quesnoy should not, after all, return to France in the immediate future. In the first place, an hour or so after dinner on the night of his escape his new friends noticed that he was looking very flushed. At first they thought that it was the excitement of having regained his freedom coupled with the quantity of champagne he had drunk; but later he complained of pains in his head and it transpired that he was running a high temperature. Next day it was clear that he had used his last reserves of strength during his escape and, having already been seriously weakened by his eighteen days of extraordinarily harsh captivity, had now gone down with fever.

  There was no doctor on board, but the tall, pink-cheeked Harry Plimsol was a young man of most diverse accomplishments. His father being a small town doctor, he had started life by studying medicine, but after a year thrown it up in favour of law, then in turn abandoned that for accountancy; but his money having given out before he could qualify, he had had to take a job in the Chesapeake Corporation. It might therefore have been said that he was a ‘Jack of all trades and a master of none’, but the fact remained that his unusually wide general knowledge, together with an excellent memory and a pleasant manner, made him a most efficient confidential secretary; and in the present case he was quite capable of taking charge of the invalid.