“My little boy,” she said next, ignoring the terms of endearment—“where
is he? Let me have him. How could you be so cruel—even as you—Nikolas
Rokoff—cannot be entirely devoid of mercy and compassion? Tell me where
he is. Is he aboard this ship? Oh, please, if such a thing as a heart
beats within your breast, take me to my baby!”
“If you do as you are bid no harm will befall him,” replied Rokoff.
“But remember that it is your own fault that you are here. You came
aboard voluntarily, and you may take the consequences. I little
thought,” he added to himself, “that any such good luck as this would
come to me.”
He went on deck then, locking the cabin-door upon his prisoner, and for
several days she did not see him. The truth of the matter being that
Nikolas Rokoff was so poor a sailor that the heavy seas the Kincaid
encountered from the very beginning of her voyage sent the Russian to
his berth with a bad attack of sea-sickness.
During this time her only visitor was an uncouth Swede, the Kincaid’s
unsavoury cook, who brought her meals to her. His name was Sven
Anderssen, his one pride being that his patronymic was spelt with a
double “s.”
The man was tall and raw-boned, with a long yellow moustache, an
unwholesome complexion, and filthy nails. The very sight of him with
one grimy thumb buried deep in the lukewarm stew, that seemed, from the
frequency of its repetition, to constitute the pride of his culinary
art, was sufficient to take away the girl’s appetite.
His small, blue, close-set eyes never met hers squarely. There was a
shiftiness of his whole appearance that even found expression in the
cat-like manner of his gait, and to it all a sinister suggestion was
added by the long slim knife that always rested at his waist, slipped
through the greasy cord that supported his soiled apron. Ostensibly it
was but an implement of his calling; but the girl could never free
herself of the conviction that it would require less provocation to
witness it put to other and less harmless uses.
His manner toward her was surly, yet she never failed to meet him with
a pleasant smile and a word of thanks when he brought her food to her,
though more often than not she hurled the bulk of it through the tiny
cabin port the moment that the door closed behind him.
During the days of anguish that followed Jane Clayton’s imprisonment,
but two questions were uppermost in her mind—the whereabouts of her
husband and her son. She fully believed that the baby was aboard the
Kincaid, provided that he still lived, but whether Tarzan had been
permitted to live after having been lured aboard the evil craft she
could not guess.
She knew, of course, the deep hatred that the Russian felt for the
Englishman, and she could think of but one reason for having him
brought aboard the ship—to dispatch him in comparative safety in
revenge for his having thwarted Rokoff’s pet schemes, and for having
been at last the means of landing him in a French prison.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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