“H’m, you have lost no time in making yourself look like a Christian again, I notice,” my uncle began.
“I lost no time in beginning, sir, but I assure you it was a devilish stiff conversion.”
“And what was your hurry, Roger?”
“Anxiety to do you credit, Uncle Francis.”
“You are becoming a dutiful nephew damned suddenly,” observed Sir Francis.
“It has come on during this lonely life,” I explained.
“In that case what shall we do with ourselves this morning? Revisit the scene of last night’s affair, eh?”
“I thought a walk in the other direction might give you a better idea of this interesting island,” I suggested.
“Is there anything to see in the other direction?” he enquired, still with the same gravity, but with an eye that inadvertently twinkled every now and then.
“I thought of presenting you to the proprietor of the island, sir.”
My uncle looked at me fixedly for a moment and then abruptly enquired:
“Do you mean to marry her, Roger?”
“That’s entirely for her to say, Uncle Francis.”
“Well, you’ll be deuced lucky if she says ‘yes’! By the way, what are you going to marry on?”
This was a somewhat delicate question but I thought it best to be candid.
“The advertised reward,” I replied.
“For what, may I ask?”
“For catching the spy.”
“Oh, you claim that!”
“No, she does.”
My uncle smiled beneficently.
“That’s all right, old fellow,” said he, “and I’ll intimate as much to her father. Come on! Now you’ve shaved, what are you waiting for?”
“Your blessing, sir; but I’m ready now.”
The very weather was encouraging, for the wind had fallen considerably, and it was just cold enough to make us step out over the frozen road in bursting spirits. My uncle literally whistled several times, and once he remarked apropos of nothing:
“I’ve always admired that type myself!”
On what decent pretext I managed to get Jean out of the library within two minutes of her entrance with her father, or whether it actually was decent, my memory is a blank. I knew she loved me because she came out with me so quickly, and she knew my heart because I asked her to. And as we both had really known the night before, there scarcely needed a question to be asked and answered. And that is the end of Jean’s and my part in the story.
As for that brave, brutal and extraordinary man who had masqueraded as an imbecile for two whole years to serve the ambitions of his country, playing the part of a kind of isolated living base for the German Navy, as a spy, as a destroyer, and as a murderer, I have never learned his name or his past history to this day. After his first outburst of blasphemy, I believe he kept doggedly silent up to his speedy end. He lived and died like a savage, cunning, carnivorous beast; or, in other words, like his masters who employed him.
Colophon
The Man from the Clouds
was published in by
J. Storer Clouston.
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Caught in the Act,
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