His second impregnable conclusion was that those whom he sought had boarded the _Alethea_, but had left her before she tripped her anchor. That they were not stowed away aboard her seemed unquestionable. The brigantine was hardly large enough for the presence of three persons aboard her to be long kept a secret from an inquisitive fourth,--unless, indeed, they lay in hiding in the hold; for which, once the ship got under way, there could be scant excuse. And Kirkwood did not believe himself a person of sufficient importance in Calendar's eyes, to make that worthy endure the discomforts of a'tween-decks imprisonment throughout the voyage, even to escape recognition.
With every second, then, he was traveling farther from her to whose aid he had rushed, impelled by motives so hot-headed, so innately, chivalric, so unthinkingly gallant, so exceptionally idiotic!
Idiot! Kirkwood groaned with despair of his inability to fathom the abyss of his self-contempt. There seemed to be positively no excuse for _him_. Stryker had befriended him indeed, had he permitted him to drown. Yet he had acted for the best, as he saw it. The fault lay in himself: an admirable fault, that of harboring and nurturing generous and compassionate instincts. But, of course, Kirkwood couldn't see it that way.
"What else could I do?" he defended himself against the indictment of common sense. "I couldn't leave her to the mercies of that set of rogues!... And Heaven knows I was given every reason to believe she would be aboard this ship! Why, she herself told me that she was sailing ...!"
Heaven knew, too, that this folly of his had cost him a pretty penny, first and last. His watch was gone beyond recovery, his homeward passage forfeited; he no longer harbored illusions as to the steamship company presenting him with another berth in lieu of that called for by that water-soaked slip of paper then in his pocket--courtesy of Stryker. He had sold for a pittance, a tithe of its value, his personal jewelry, and had spent every penny he could call his own. With the money Stryker was to give him he would be able to get back to London and his third-rate hostelry, but not with enough over to pay that one week's room-rent, or ...