Chapter XIV: Part II: Return of the Seven Heroes

It was a tall man with black hair, dark eyes and a pinched face. His black, clerical clothes were rather rusty in the bright morning sunlight, though they were his best.

"The young beggars!" he said, "the young beggars!" and there was a catch in his voice. "A commission for both of them and a special allowance, did you say, Lord William?"

"The Admiralty could do no less, Mr. Dickson. We want a thousand lads like yours, if we could only get them. Not that any officer of their age in the Navy wouldn't have done the same, but their names will be for ever glorious in the history of the service. It is a feat that England will never willingly forget. You know that they, as well as the rest, are to have the Victoria Cross?"

Mr. Dickson stared, as if he saw something at a great distance.

"No," he said, "I didn't know that--er--excuse me for a moment."

The clergyman turned away to the window of the Admiral's office, which overlooked Harwich Harbour, and his shoulders were shaking. "_Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word: for mine eyes have seen----_"

"Shure, and they can't be long now, the Admiral says," came from Mrs. Murphy, sitting in the Admiral's chair, at the Admiral's table, with all sorts of confidential documents spread in front of her.

"Pathrick is to have the rank of Captain for the part he's tuk in it, though that was pure luck and him being on the spot. And, bedad, we'll have that motor cyar--and I never did see why a mere Docthor's wife like Mrs. Pestle, and him little better than a vetherinary surgeon, should keep a cyar when an officer in His Majesty's Navy couldn't!"

The Admiral in command at Harwich, a grizzled sailor who had been called up from his peaceful Devon home to leave his pheasants and fat cattle, came into the room, rubbing his hands.

"Well, they'll have the reception of their lives, young ladies," he said beaming; and, with a clank of his sword as he sat down, "Mrs. Murphy, if you attempt to read any of the papers on that table, I shall regretfully be compelled to have you shot, which will mar the festivity of the occasion! My dears, a special train full of journalists has just come down from town. There are thousands of people flocking to the quays in the spaces provided, and what the papers are saying about our friends will astonish you."

He produced a copy of the _Daily Wire_ and opened it, while they all crowded round to look. Modern journalism had secured a triumph. Short as the time had been, there were columns and columns of description of the events at Morstone of which hardly anybody had been allowed to know anything--and the Battle in the North Sea, about which nobody knew but the Admiralty.

There were portraits of the two Dickson boys, each apparently about twelve years of age and in broad Eton collars. There was a truculent, prize-fighting individual, with distinct side-whiskers, labelled, "Mr. John Carey, M.A., the heroic schoolmaster who slew the Master-spy, 'Doctor Upjelly,' with his own hands." A smudge on the top of a uniform represented Lieutenant-Commander Bernard Carey--also "heroic," with sundry other adjectives; and if those excellent Plymouth ladies, Mrs. Bosustow, Mrs. Scarlett and Mrs. Adams, had seen the people represented in the newspaper as their lords and masters walk into Paradise Row, Devonport, they certainly would not have known them.

Doris gasped. "To call that _John_!" she said; "what a wicked libel! Couldn't the editor be arrested?"

"An editor is one of the people whom nothing can arrest," said the Admiral. "'_In rebus desperatis remedia desperata_,' which means 'What the public wants, the public must have, however short the time in which to fake it up.'"

There was a knock at the door, and a young officer entered, saluting.

"Destroyers sighted, Sir," he said, not without an appreciative glance at the two pretty girls close by. He handed a piece of paper to the Admiral, adding: "Just come in by wireless from the _Arethusa_, Sir."

The old gentleman with the pointed beard and clanking sword read it. He chuckled.

"Well," he said, "the public is going to have some fun for its money, for Commander Carey is coming into harbour on board _his own_ boat. Now, then, suppose we all go out to the signalling station at the end of the Mole and get the first sight of them?"

* * * * *

Half a dozen clouds of black smoke upon the horizon, growing larger and larger every minute; a great murmur of the crowd; officers in dress uniform with binoculars at their eyes; a group of journalists in hard felt hats, making notes!...

Now the destroyers can be seen in a half-circle, with three great ships in the background.

"The Transports!" the Admiral said--"from seven to eight thousand Germans in them--what a haul! Look, Mrs. Murphy, that is the Cruiser _Arethusa_ by the side of them. I expect they had a handful in disarming all those chaps, and they must be pretty short-handed on board the whole flotilla, for they'll have had to send a lot of men aboard those two liners. Fine boats, the new light cruisers, _Captain_ Murphy?"

The old lieutenant of Coastguards flushed with pleasure.

"Never had a chance to go to sea in one of them, Sir," he said--"long after my time, I am sorry to say."

"Look!" Marjorie whispered to Doris, "they're opening out. Isn't it wonderful? How near they're getting! It's just like a figure in the Lancers."

Doris did not answer for a moment. Then she said:--"What's that, right in the middle?"

The Admiral overheard her.

"You've quick eyes, young lady," he answered; "that, unless I am very much mistaken, is a certain Submarine, lately in possession of the Kaiser, and which people are talking about a good deal just now!"

It was so. The destroyers slowed down, and made a great lane upon the sea. In the centre of this lane was something infinitely small, a black speck, like a cork floating on the water.

It grew and grew.

Then, from somewhere not far away, there was the heavy boom of a gun. Immediately, the air was rent with a noise like hundreds of bellowing bulls as all the ships at anchor opened their steam-sirens until the very stone quays trembled.

The cheers of thousands of voices, the wild tossing of hats into the air, the fluttering of hand-kerchiefs like sudden snow; and then, the Submarine, its whale-back ploughing through the Harbour waters, a white wake of foam behind it, came into full view. From the periscope fluttered two little flags, black and white. In half a minute the cheering, delirious crowd saw what they were.

"The skull and cross-bones, by Jove--two of 'em!" said a young lieutenant on the Admiral's Staff to his friend, a newly promoted Commander.

"So it is! How on earth did they get those on board a German submarine?"

"Someone of resource on board has spent a happy hour or two on the cruise home."

The young gentleman was right, but he did not know that Dickson max.'s shirt and the back of Dickson major's coat were the materials used by Mr. Scarlett, who was very handy with his needle.

"Here they come!"

"Here they come!" "Here they come" "Hurrah!" "Hurrah!"

Bang! went a whole salvo of guns. Upon the deck of the Submarine was a little group of four figures, and, if the truth must be told, four dirtier and more shame-faced human beings have rarely made a public appearance.

"Those must be the boys," the lieutenant shouted in his friend's ear.

The other nodded. He was staring at the Submarine.

"By Jove!" he cried, "there's the 'Whelk,' the good old Whelk! Look at him! We were at Osborne together, and he always swore he liked the beastly things--so the name stuck to him. That other chap must be his brother, I suppose--the schoolmaster Johnny."

"Good old Whe-e-lk!" he shouted, his hands to his mouth.

The lieutenant had never been shipmates with Bernard Carey. Also, his eyes were elsewhere. He twitched his friend's arm.

"I say," he said, in an awed voice, "look at the faces of those two girls!"

The Commander did so.

"Lucky old Whelk!"

THE END

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