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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Victory, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
+no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
+it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Victory
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #6378]
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VICTORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tracy Camp and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914. And that last
+word was the single word of the title.
+
+Those were the times of peace. Now that the moment of publication
+approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the
+title-page. The word “Victory” the shining and tragic goal of noble
+effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere
+novel. There was also the possibility of falling under the suspicion of
+commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book
+had something to do with war.
+
+Of that, however, I was not afraid very much. What influenced my
+decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of
+awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.
+“Victory” was the last word I had written in peace-time. It was the last
+literary thought which had occurred to me before the doors of the Temple
+of Janus flying open with a crash shook the minds, the hearts, the
+consciences of men all over the world. Such coincidence could not be
+treated lightly. And I made up my mind to let the word stand, in the
+same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen of Old Rome would have
+“accepted the Omen.”
+
+The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence (in
+the novel) of a person named Schomberg.
+
+That I believe him to be true goes without saying. I am not likely to
+offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an old
+member of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far
+back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story
+of mine published in 1902. Here he appears in a still larger part, true
+to life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only, in this instance, his
+deeper passions come into play, and thus his grotesque psychology is
+completed at last.
+
+I don't pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology; but
+it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton. My object in mentioning
+him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being the incarnation
+of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old deep-seated, and, as
+it were, impartial conviction.
+
+J. C.
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first
+thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness
+to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written, and to
+the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained
+when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the
+war. The writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the murder of an
+Austrian Archduke sounded the first note of warning for a world already
+full of doubts and fears.
+
+The contemporaneous very short Author's Note which is preserved in this
+edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I consented
+to the publication of the book. The fact of the book having been
+published in the United States early in the year made it difficult
+to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the
+thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful
+incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter
+of reality, tragic enough in all conscience, but even more cruel than
+tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to
+think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which
+in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing
+the truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp
+knife at its throat.
+
+The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power
+of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to
+be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too
+mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement
+to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on
+with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and the cobbler at his
+stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the
+leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be
+disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too
+awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly
+by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book
+pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of
+detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is
+yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.
+
+It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
+fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
+detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly
+Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the
+man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine
+attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of
+stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a
+remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this
+minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.
+Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting
+himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
+physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness
+of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead
+the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the
+matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.
+The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most
+pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
+
+But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst. I
+have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who stands
+behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a
+mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not so
+certain. He himself never laid claim to that distinction. His detachment
+was too great to make any claims, big or small, on one's credulity. I
+will not say where I met him because I fear to give my readers a
+wrong impression, since a marked incongruity between a man and his
+surroundings is often a very misleading circumstance. We became very
+friendly for a time, and I would not like to expose him to unpleasant
+suspicions though, personally, I am sure he would have been indifferent
+to suspicions as he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of
+life. He was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only the physical and
+moral foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance.
+That it was short was certainly not my fault for he had charmed me by
+the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, I cannot help
+thinking he had carried to excess. He went away from his rooms without
+leaving a trace. I wondered where he had gone to--but now I know.
+He vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure that,
+unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in looking
+upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight. Often in the
+course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense of a phrase
+heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I have fastened on
+to him many words heard on other men's lips and belonging to other men's
+less perfect, less pathetic moods.
+
+The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who is
+built on a much slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or whatever his name
+was) did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out
+of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in
+the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon
+extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to
+which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome
+significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off
+the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird
+impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the
+fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said:
+“A professional sharper?” and got for an answer: “He's a terror; but I
+must say that up to a certain point he will play fair. . . .” I wonder
+what the point was. I never saw him again because I believe he went
+straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other
+ports of call in the direction of Aspinall. Mr. Jones's characteristic
+insolence belongs to another man of a quite different type. I will say
+nothing as to the origins of his mentality because I don't intend to
+make any damaging admissions.
+
+It so happened that the very same year Ricardo--the physical
+Ricardo--was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and
+extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days' passage between two
+places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names don't matter. For the most part
+he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and raising himself from time
+to time on his elbow would talk about himself and go on talking, not
+exactly to me or even at me (he would not even look up but kept his
+eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if communing in a low voice with
+his familiar devil. Now and then he would give me a glance and make the
+hairs of his stiff little moustache stir quaintly. His eyes were green
+and every cat I see to this day reminds me of the exact contour of his
+face. What he was travelling for or what was his business in life he
+never confided to me. Truth to say, the only passenger on board that
+schooner who could have talked openly about his activities and purposes
+was a very snuffy and conversationally delightful friar, the superior
+of a convent, attended by a very young lay brother, of a particularly
+ferocious countenance. We had with us also, lying prostrate in the dark
+and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner, an old Spanish gentleman, owner
+of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured me, very ill indeed. Ricardo
+seemed to be either a servant or the confidant of that aged and
+distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the passage held a long
+murmured conversation with the friar, and after that did nothing but
+groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and then call for Martin in a
+voice full of pain. Then he who had become Ricardo in the book would go
+below into that beastly and noisome hole, remain there mysteriously,
+and coming up on deck again with a face on which nothing could be read,
+would as likely as not resume for my edification the exposition of his
+moral attitude towards life illustrated by striking particular instances
+of the most atrocious complexion. Did he mean to frighten me? Or seduce
+me? Or astonish me? Or arouse my admiration? All he did was to arouse my
+amused incredulity. As scoundrels go he was far from being a bore.
+For the rest my innocence was so great then that I could not take his
+philosophy seriously. All the time he kept one ear turned to the cuddy
+in the manner of a devoted servant, but I had the idea that in some way
+or other he had imposed the connection on the invalid for some end of
+his own. The reader, therefore, won't be surprised to hear that one
+morning I was told without any particular emotion by the padrone of the
+schooner that the “rich man” down there was dead: He had died in the
+night. I don't remember ever being so moved by the desolate end of a
+complete stranger. I looked down the skylight, and there was the devoted
+Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose white
+beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could make out in the dark
+depths of a horrible stuffy bunk.
+
+As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during
+all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late “rich man” had
+to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in
+sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination.
+The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense
+commiseration: “The poor man has left a young daughter.” Who was to look
+after her I don't know, but I saw the devoted Martin taking the trunks
+ashore with great care just before I landed myself. I would perhaps have
+tracked the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a little while,
+but I had some of my own very pressing business to attend to, which in
+the end got mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give
+to Ricardo. The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten him,
+though.
+
+My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my observation
+of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious. It ended in a
+sudden inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a hovel of sticks
+and mats by the side of a path. As I went in there only to ask for a
+bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the slightest idea what in
+my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible ire. It became
+manifest to me less than two minutes after I had set eyes on him for the
+first time, and though immensely surprised of course I didn't stop
+to think it out I took the nearest short cut--through the wall. This
+bestial apparition and a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in
+Haiti only a couple of months afterwards, have fixed my conception of
+blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal, to
+the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.
+Of Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too
+quickly.
+
+It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my
+memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world--so natural
+that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there, they had to
+come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who had
+taken to his trade without preparation, or premeditation, and without
+any moral intention but that which pervades the whole scheme of this
+world of senses.
+
+Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the
+origins of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena,
+because if I were to leave her out it would look like a slight; and
+nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a slight on Lena.
+If of all the personages involved in the “mystery of Samburan” I have
+lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at her, whom
+I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and with a most sustained
+attention. This attention originated in idleness for which I have a
+natural talent. One evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the
+tropics but of the South of France. It was filled with tobacco smoke,
+the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of strident
+music. The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed
+at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an
+enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable than
+the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less pretentious also, more
+homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the intervals when
+all the performers left the platform one of them went amongst the
+marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in a battered
+tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It was a girl.
+Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even
+surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which
+a man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and
+wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker
+and with no other sound but the slight rattle of the coins to attract
+attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed
+but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half
+a lifetime, and it was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that
+I dropped a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the
+sleep-walker turned her head to gaze at me and said “Merci, Monsieur”
+ in a tone in which there was no gratitude but only surprise. I must have
+been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence
+that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed
+their seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that
+particular performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard who
+conducted, and who might for all I know have been her father, but whose
+real mission in life was to be a model for the Zangiacomo of Victory.
+Having got a clear line of sight I naturally (being idle) continued to
+look at the girl through all the second part of the programme. The shape
+of her dark head inclined over the violin was fascinating, and, while
+resting between the pieces of that interminable programme she was, in
+her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in her lap, the very
+image of dreamy innocence. The mature, bad-tempered woman at the
+piano might have been her mother, though there was not the slightest
+resemblance between them. All I am certain of in their personal relation
+to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper part of the arm. That I
+am sure I have seen! There could be no mistake. I was in too idle a mood
+to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. It may have been playfulness,
+yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. It may have
+been playfulness. Yet I saw plainly poor “dreamy innocence” rub gently
+the affected place as she filed off with the other performers down the
+middle aisle between the marble tables in the uproar of voices, the
+rattling of dominoes through a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke. I
+believe that those people left the town next day.
+
+Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the other
+side of the Place de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did not go
+across to find out. It was my perfect idleness that had invested the
+girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want to destroy it by
+any superfluous exertion. The receptivity of my indolence made the
+impression so permanent that when the moment came for her meeting with
+Heyst I felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand of the
+risky and uncertain future. I was so convinced of it that I let her go
+with Heyst, I won't say without a pang but certainly without misgivings.
+And in view of her triumphant end what more could I have done for her
+rehabilitation and her happiness?
+
+1920. J. C.
+
+
+
+
+VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE PART ONE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very
+close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I
+believe, why some people allude to coal as “black diamonds.” Both these
+commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form
+of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of
+concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's
+waistcoat pocket--but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination
+in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like
+bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel. And I suppose
+those two considerations, the practical and the mystical, prevented
+Heyst--Axel Heyst--from going away.
+
+The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of
+finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may
+appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates,
+and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural
+physics, but they account for the persistent inertia of Heyst, at which
+we “out there” used to laugh among ourselves--but not inimically. An
+inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is scarcely
+worth derision. It may, indeed, be in the way sometimes; but this could
+not be said of Axel Heyst. He was out of everybody's way, as if he
+were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as
+conspicuous. Everyone in that part of the world knew of him, dwelling on
+his little island. An island is but the top of a mountain. Axel Heyst,
+perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of the imponderable
+stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid,
+shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which embrace
+the continents of this globe. His most frequent visitors were shadows,
+the shadows of clouds, relieving the monotony of the inanimate, brooding
+sunshine of the tropics. His nearest neighbour--I am speaking now of
+things showing some sort of animation--was an indolent volcano which
+smoked faintly all day with its head just above the northern horizon,
+and at night levelled at him, from amongst the clear stars, a dull red
+glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of a gigantic
+cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was also a
+smoker; and when he lounged out on his veranda with his cheroot, the
+last thing before going to bed, he made in the night the same sort of
+glow and of the same size as that other one so many miles away.
+
+In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the
+night--which were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath of
+air through. There was seldom enough wind to blow a feather along. On
+most evenings of the year Heyst could have sat outside with a naked
+candle to read one of the books left him by his late father. It was not
+a mean store. But he never did that. Afraid of mosquitoes, very likely.
+Neither was he ever tempted by the silence to address any casual remarks
+to the companion glow of the volcano. He was not mad. Queer chap--yes,
+that may have been said, and in fact was said; but there is a tremendous
+difference between the two, you will allow.
+
+On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan--the “Round
+Island” of the charts--was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light
+Heyst could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of
+an abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle: vague roofs above low
+vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long grass,
+something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged thickets
+towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with a black
+jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted side. But
+the most conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard raised on two
+posts and presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over that side, the
+white letters “T. B. C. Co.” in a row at least two feet high. These were
+the initials of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, his employers--his late
+employers, to be precise.
+
+According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T. B.
+C. Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two years, the
+company went into liquidation--forced, I believe, not voluntary. There
+was nothing forcible in the process, however. It was slow; and while the
+liquidation--in London and Amsterdam--pursued its languid course, Axel
+Heyst, styled in the prospectus “manager in the tropics,” remained at
+his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-station of the company.
+
+And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine there,
+with an outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards from the
+rickety wharf and the imposing blackboard. The company's object had been
+to get hold of all the outcrops on tropical islands and exploit them
+locally. And, Lord knows, there were any amount of outcrops. It was
+Heyst who had located most of them in this part of the tropical belt
+during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a ready letter-writer
+had written pages and pages about them to his friends in Europe. At
+least, so it was said.
+
+We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth--for himself, at any
+rate. What he seemed mostly concerned for was the “stride forward,”
+ as he expressed it, in the general organization of the universe,
+apparently. He was heard by more than a hundred persons in the islands
+talking of a “great stride forward for these regions.” The convinced
+wave of the hand which accompanied the phrase suggested tropical
+distances being impelled onward. In connection with the finished
+courtesy of his manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate silencing--for
+a time, at least. Nobody cared to argue with him when he talked in this
+strain. His earnestness could do no harm to anybody. There was no danger
+of anyone taking seriously his dream of tropical coal, so what was the
+use of hurting his feelings?
+
+Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his entree
+as a person who came out East with letters of introduction--and modest
+letters of credit, too--some years before these coal-outcrops began to
+crop up in his playfully courteous talk. From the first there was
+some difficulty in making him out. He was not a traveller. A traveller
+arrives and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not depart. I met a
+man once--the manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking Corporation
+in Malacca--to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with anything in
+particular (it was in the billiard-room of the club):
+
+“I am enchanted with these islands!”
+
+He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and
+while chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment.
+There are more spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of.
+
+Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn
+round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic circle. It
+just touched Manila, and he had been seen there. It just touched Saigon,
+and he was likewise seen there once. Perhaps these were his attempts to
+break out. If so, they were failures. The enchantment must have been
+an unbreakable one. The manager--the man who heard the exclamation--had
+been so impressed by the tone, fervour, rapture, what you will, or
+perhaps by the incongruity of it that he had related the experience to
+more than one person.
+
+“Queer chap, that Swede,” was his only comment; but this is the origin
+of the name “Enchanted Heyst” which some fellows fastened on our man.
+
+He also had other names. In his early years, long before he got so
+becomingly bald on the top, he went to present a letter of introduction
+to Mr. Tesman of Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm--tip-top house. Well,
+Mr. Tesman was a kindly, benevolent old gentleman. He did not know what
+to make of that caller. After telling him that they wished to render his
+stay among the islands as pleasant as possible, and that they were
+ready to assist him in his plans, and so on, and after receiving Heyst's
+thanks--you know the usual kind of conversation--he proceeded to query
+in a slow, paternal tone:
+
+“And you are interested in--?”
+
+“Facts,” broke in Heyst in his courtly voice. “There's nothing worth
+knowing but facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman.”
+
+I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have
+spoken about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of “Hard
+Facts.” He had the singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to him
+and became part of his name. Thereafter he mooned about the Java Sea in
+some of the Tesmans' trading schooners, and then vanished, on board an
+Arab ship, in the direction of New Guinea. He remained so long in that
+outlying part of his enchanted circle that he was nearly forgotten
+before he swam into view again in a native proa full of Goram vagabonds,
+burnt black by the sun, very lean, his hair much thinned, and a
+portfolio of sketches under his arm. He showed these willingly, but
+was very reserved as to anything else. He had had an “amusing time,” he
+said. A man who will go to New Guinea for fun--well!
+
+Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone off
+his face and all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-gold
+pair of horizontal moustaches had grown to really noble proportions,
+a certain disreputable white man fastened upon him an epithet. Putting
+down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of its contents--paid
+for by Heyst--he said, with that deliberate sagacity which no mere
+water-drinker ever attained:
+
+“Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman. Puffect! But he's a ut-uto-utopist.”
+
+Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where this
+pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh? Upon my word, the only thing
+I heard him say which might have had a bearing on the point was his
+invitation to old McNab himself. Turning with that finished courtesy of
+attitude, movement voice, which was his obvious characteristic, he had
+said with delicate playfulness:
+
+“Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!”
+
+Perhaps that was it. A man who could propose, even playfully, to quench
+old McNab's thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer of chimeras; for
+of downright irony Heyst was not prodigal. And, may be, this was the
+reason why he was generally liked. At that epoch in his life, in the
+fulness of his physical development, of a broad, martial presence, with
+his bald head and long moustaches, he resembled the portraits of Charles
+XII., of adventurous memory. However, there was no reason to think that
+Heyst was in any way a fighting man.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+It was about this time that Heyst became associated with Morrison on
+terms about which people were in doubt. Some said he was a partner,
+others said he was a sort of paying guest, but the real truth of the
+matter was more complex. One day Heyst turned up in Timor. Why in Timor,
+of all places in the world, no one knows. Well, he was mooning about
+Delli, that highly pestilential place, possibly in search of some
+undiscovered facts, when he came in the street upon Morrison, who, in
+his way, was also an “enchanted” man. When you spoke to Morrison of
+going home--he was from Dorsetshire--he shuddered. He said it was dark
+and wet there; that it was like living with your head and shoulders in
+a moist gunny-bag. That was only his exaggerated style of talking.
+Morrison was “one of us.” He was owner and master of the Capricorn,
+trading brig, and was understood to be doing well with her, except for
+the drawback of too much altruism. He was the dearly beloved friend of a
+quantity of God-forsaken villages up dark creeks and obscure bays, where
+he traded for produce. He would often sail, through awfully dangerous
+channels up to some miserable settlement, only to find a very hungry
+population clamorous for rice, and without so much “produce” between
+them as would have filled Morrison's suitcase. Amid general rejoicings,
+he would land the rice all the same, explain to the people that it was
+an advance, that they were in debt to him now; would preach to them
+energy and industry, and make an elaborate note in a pocket-diary which
+he always carried; and this would be the end of that transaction.
+I don't know if Morrison thought so, but the villagers had no doubt
+whatever about it. Whenever a coast village sighted the brig it would
+begin to beat all its gongs and hoist all its streamers, and all its
+girls would put flowers in their hair and the crowd would line the river
+bank, and Morrison would beam and glitter at all this excitement through
+his single eyeglass with an air of intense gratification. He was tall
+and lantern-jawed, and clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister who had
+thrown his wig to the dogs.
+
+We used to remonstrate with him:
+
+“You will never see any of your advances if you go on like this,
+Morrison.”
+
+He would put on a knowing air.
+
+“I shall squeeze them yet some day--never you fear. And that reminds
+me”--pulling out his inseparable pocketbook--“there's that So-and-So
+village. They are pretty well off again; I may just as well squeeze them
+to begin with.”
+
+He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.
+
+Memo: Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.
+
+Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with
+inflexible finality; but he never began the squeezing. Some men grumbled
+at him. He was spoiling the trade. Well, perhaps to a certain extent;
+not much. Most of the places he traded with were unknown not only to
+geography but also to the traders' special lore which is transmitted by
+word of mouth, without ostentation, and forms the stock of mysterious
+local knowledge. It was hinted also that Morrison had a wife in each and
+every one of them, but the majority of us repulsed these innuendoes
+with indignation. He was a true humanitarian and rather ascetic than
+otherwise.
+
+When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street,
+his eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the hopeless
+aspect of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads trudging from
+workhouse to workhouse. Being hailed on the street he looked up with a
+wild worried expression. He was really in trouble. He had come the week
+before into Delli and the Portuguese authorities, on some pretence
+of irregularity in his papers, had inflicted a fine upon him and had
+arrested his brig.
+
+Morrison never had any spare cash in hand. With his system of trading
+it would have been strange if he had; and all these debts entered in
+the pocketbook weren't good enough to raise a millrei on--let alone a
+shilling. The Portuguese officials begged him not to distress himself.
+They gave him a week's grace, and then proposed to sell the brig at
+auction. This meant ruin for Morrison; and when Heyst hailed him across
+the street in his usual courtly tone, the week was nearly out.
+
+Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner of a
+prince addressing another prince on a private occasion:
+
+“What an unexpected pleasure. Would you have any objection to drink
+something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there? The sun is
+really too strong to talk in the street.”
+
+The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel which
+he would have distained to enter at any other time. He was distracted.
+He did not know what he was doing. You could have led him over the edge
+of a precipice just as easily as into that wine-shop. He sat down like
+an automaton. He was speechless, but he saw a glass full of rough red
+wine before him, and emptied it. Heyst meantime, politely watchful, had
+taken a seat opposite.
+
+“You are in for a bout of fever, I fear,” he said sympathetically.
+
+Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.
+
+“Fever!” he cried. “Give me fever. Give me plague. They are diseases.
+One gets over them. But I am being murdered. I am being murdered by the
+Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among them. I am to have my
+throat cut the day after tomorrow.”
+
+In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a
+slight motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a
+drawing-room. Morrison's despairing reserve had broken down. He had been
+wandering with a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud hovels,
+silent, with no soul to turn to in his distress, and positively
+maddened by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled on a white man,
+figuratively and actually white--for Morrison refused to accept the
+racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials. He let himself go for the
+mere relief of violent speech, his elbows planted on the table, his
+eyes blood-shot, his voice nearly gone, the brim of his round pith hat
+shading an unshaven, livid face. His white clothes, which he had not
+taken off for three days, were dingy. He had already gone to the bad,
+past redemption. The sight was shocking to Heyst; but he let nothing
+of it appear in his bearing, concealing his impression under that
+consummate good-society manner of his. Polite attention, what's due from
+one gentleman listening to another, was what he showed; and, as usual,
+it was catching; so that Morrison pulled himself together and finished
+his narrative in a conversational tone, with a man-of-the-world air.
+
+“It's a villainous plot. Unluckily, one is helpless. That scoundrel
+Cousinho--Andreas, you know--has been coveting the brig for years.
+Naturally, I would never sell. She is not only my livelihood; she's my
+life. So he has hatched this pretty little plot with the chief of the
+customs. The sale, of course, will be a farce. There's no one here to
+bid. He will get the brig for a song--no, not even that--a line of a
+song. You have been some years now in the islands, Heyst. You know us
+all; you have seen how we live. Now you shall have the opportunity
+to see how some of us end; for it is the end, for me. I can't deceive
+myself any longer. You see it--don't you?”
+
+Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping strain
+on his recovered self-possession. Heyst was beginning to say that
+he “could very well see all the bearings of this unfortunate--” when
+Morrison interrupted him jerkily.
+
+“Upon my word, I don't know why I have been telling you all this. I
+suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my
+trouble to myself. Words can't do it justice; but since I've told you so
+much I may as well tell you more. Listen. This morning on board, in my
+cabin I went down on my knees and prayed for help. I went down on my
+knees!”
+
+“You are a believer, Morrison?” asked Heyst with a distinct note of
+respect.
+
+“Surely I am not an infidel.”
+
+Morrison was swiftly reproachful in his answer, and there came a pause,
+Morrison perhaps interrogating his conscience, and Heyst preserving a
+mien of unperturbed, polite interest.
+
+“I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying--well,
+women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant.
+I don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his
+silly troubles. It seems such cheek. Anyhow, this morning I--I have
+never done any harm to any God's creature knowingly--I prayed. A sudden
+impulse--I went flop on my knees; so you may judge--”
+
+They were gazing earnestly into each other's eyes. Poor Morrison added,
+as a discouraging afterthought:
+
+“Only this is such a God-forsaken spot.”
+
+Heyst inquired with a delicate intonation whether he might know the
+amount for which the brig was seized.
+
+Morrison suppressed an oath, and named curtly a sum which was in itself
+so insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have exclaimed
+at it. And even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity out of his politely
+modulated voice as he asked if it was a fact that Morrison had not that
+amount in hand.
+
+Morrison hadn't. He had only a little English gold, a few sovereigns, on
+board. He had left all his spare cash with the Tesmans, in Samarang, to
+meet certain bills which would fall due while he was away on his cruise.
+Anyhow, that money would not have been any more good to him than if it
+had been in the innermost depths of the infernal regions. He said all
+this brusquely. He looked with sudden disfavour at that noble forehead,
+at those great martial moustaches, at the tired eyes of the man sitting
+opposite him. Who the devil was he? What was he, Morrison, doing there,
+talking like this? Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us
+trading in the Archipelago did. Had the Swede suddenly risen and hit
+him on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than when this
+stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a little bow across the
+table:
+
+“Oh! If that's the case I would be very happy if you'd allow me to be of
+use!”
+
+Morrison didn't understand. This was one of those things that don't
+happen--unheard of things. He had no real inkling of what it meant, till
+Heyst said definitely:
+
+“I can lend you the amount.”
+
+“You have the money?” whispered Morrison. “Do you mean here, in your
+pocket?”
+
+“Yes, on me. Glad to be of use.”
+
+Morrison, staring open-mouthed, groped over his shoulder for the cord of
+the eyeglass hanging down his back. When he found it, he stuck it in his
+eye hastily. It was as if he expected Heyst's usual white suit of the
+tropics to change into a shining garment, flowing down to his toes,
+and a pair of great dazzling wings to sprout out on the Swede's
+shoulders--and didn't want to miss a single detail of the
+transformation. But if Heyst was an angel from on high, sent in answer
+to prayer, he did not betray his heavenly origin by outward signs.
+So, instead of going on his knees, as he felt inclined to do, Morrison
+stretched out his hand, which Heyst grasped with formal alacrity and a
+polite murmur in which “Trifle--delighted--of service,” could just be
+distinguished.
+
+“Miracles do happen,” thought the awestruck Morrison. To him, as to
+all of us in the Islands, this wandering Heyst, who didn't toil or spin
+visibly, seemed the very last person to be the agent of Providence in
+an affair concerned with money. The fact of his turning up in Timor or
+anywhere else was no more wonderful than the settling of a sparrow on
+one's window-sill at any given moment. But that he should carry a sum of
+money in his pocket seemed somehow inconceivable.
+
+So inconceivable that as they were trudging together through the sand
+of the roadway to the custom-house--another mud hovel--to pay the
+fine, Morrison broke into a cold sweat, stopped short, and exclaimed in
+faltering accents:
+
+“I say! You aren't joking, Heyst?”
+
+“Joking!” Heyst's blue eyes went hard as he turned them on the
+discomposed Morrison. “In what way, may I ask?” he continued with
+austere politeness.
+
+Morrison was abashed.
+
+“Forgive me, Heyst. You must have been sent by God in answer to my
+prayer. But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with worry;
+and it suddenly struck me: 'What if it's the Devil who has sent him?'”
+
+“I have no connection with the supernatural,” said Heyst graciously,
+moving on. “Nobody has sent me. I just happened along.”
+
+“I know better,” contradicted Morrison. “I may be unworthy, but I have
+been heard. I know it. I feel it. For why should you offer--”
+
+Heyst inclined his head, as from respect for a conviction in which he
+could not share. But he stuck to his point by muttering that in the
+presence of an odious fact like this, it was natural--
+
+Later in the day, the fine paid, and the two of them on board the brig,
+from which the guard had been removed, Morrison who, besides, being a
+gentleman was also an honest fellow began to talk about repayment. He
+knew very well his inability to lay by any sum of money. It was partly
+the fault of circumstances and partly of his temperament; and it would
+have been very difficult to apportion the responsibility between the
+two. Even Morrison himself could not say, while confessing to the fact.
+With a worried air he ascribed it to fatality:
+
+“I don't know how it is that I've never been able to save. It's some
+sort of curse. There's always a bill or two to meet.”
+
+He plunged his hand into his pocket for the famous notebook so well
+known in the islands, the fetish of his hopes, and fluttered the pages
+feverishly.
+
+“And yet--look,” he went on. “There it is--more than five thousand
+dollars owing. Surely that's something.”
+
+He ceased suddenly. Heyst, who had been all the time trying to look
+as unconcerned as he could, made reassuring noises in his throat.
+But Morrison was not only honest. He was honourable, too; and on this
+stressful day, before this amazing emissary of Providence and in the
+revulsion of his feelings, he made his great renunciation. He cast off
+the abiding illusion of his existence.
+
+“No. No. They are not good. I'll never be able to squeeze them. Never.
+I've been saying for years I would, but I give it up. I never really
+believed I could. Don't reckon on that, Heyst. I have robbed you.”
+
+Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and remained
+in that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him soothingly with the
+utmost courtesy. The Swede was as much distressed as Morrison; for he
+understood the other's feelings perfectly. No decent feeling was ever
+scorned by Heyst. But he was incapable of outward cordiality of manner,
+and he felt acutely his defect. Consummate politeness is not the right
+tonic for an emotional collapse. They must have had, both of them, a
+fairly painful time of it in the cabin of the brig. In the end Morrison,
+casting desperately for an idea in the blackness of his despondency,
+hit upon the notion of inviting Heyst to travel with him in his brig and
+have a share in his trading ventures up to the amount of his loan.
+
+It is characteristic of Heyst's unattached, floating existence that he
+was in a position to accept this proposal. There is no reason to think
+that he wanted particularly just then to go poking aboard the brig into
+all the holes and corners of the Archipelago where Morrison picked up
+most of his trade. Far from it; but he would have consented to almost
+any arrangement in order to put an end to the harrowing scene in the
+cabin. There was at once a great transformation act: Morrison raising
+his diminished head, and sticking the glass in his eye to look
+affectionately at Heyst, a bottle being uncorked, and so on. It was
+agreed that nothing should be said to anyone of this transaction.
+Morrison, you understand, was not proud of the episode, and he was
+afraid of being unmercifully chaffed.
+
+“An old bird like me! To let myself be trapped by those damned
+Portuguese rascals! I should never hear the last of it. We must keep it
+dark.”
+
+From quite other motives, among which his native delicacy was the
+principal, Heyst was even more anxious to bind himself to silence. A
+gentleman would naturally shrink from the part of heavenly messenger
+that Morrison would force upon him. It made Heyst uncomfortable, as it
+was. And perhaps he did not care that it should be known that he had
+some means, whatever they might have been--sufficient, at any rate, to
+enable him to lend money to people. These two had a duet down there,
+like conspirators in a comic opera, of “Sh--ssh, shssh! Secrecy!
+Secrecy!” It must have been funny, because they were very serious about
+it.
+
+And for a time the conspiracy was successful in so far that we all
+concluded that Heyst was boarding with the good-natured--some said:
+sponging on the imbecile--Morrison, in his brig. But you know how it
+is with all such mysteries. There is always a leak somewhere. Morrison
+himself, not a perfect vessel by any means, was bursting with gratitude,
+and under the stress he must have let out something vague--enough to
+give the island gossip a chance. And you know how kindly the world is
+in its comments on what it does not understand. A rumour sprang out that
+Heyst, having obtained some mysterious hold on Morrison, had fastened
+himself on him and was sucking him dry. Those who had traced these
+mutters back to their origin were very careful not to believe them. The
+originator, it seems, was a certain Schomberg, a big, manly, bearded
+creature of the Teutonic persuasion, with an ungovernable tongue which
+surely must have worked on a pivot. Whether he was a Lieutenant of the
+Reserve, as he declared, I don't know. Out there he was by profession a
+hotel-keeper, first in Bangkok, then somewhere else, and ultimately in
+Sourabaya. He dragged after him up and down that section of the tropical
+belt a silent, frightened, little woman with long ringlets, who smiled
+at one stupidly, showing a blue tooth. I don't know why so many of us
+patronized his various establishments. He was a noxious ass, and he
+satisfied his lust for silly gossip at the cost of his customers. It
+was he who, one evening, as Morrison and Heyst went past the hotel--they
+were not his regular patrons--whispered mysteriously to the mixed
+company assembled on the veranda:
+
+“The spider and the fly just gone by, gentlemen.” Then, very important
+and confidential, his thick paw at the side of his mouth: “We are among
+ourselves; well, gentlemen, all I can say is, don't you ever get mixed
+up with that Swede. Don't you ever get caught in his web.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+Human nature being what it is, having a silly side to it as well as
+a mean side, there were not a few who pretended to be indignant on no
+better authority than a general propensity to believe every evil report;
+and a good many others who found it simply funny to call Heyst the
+Spider--behind his back, of course. He was as serenely unconscious of
+this as of his several other nicknames. But soon people found other
+things to say of Heyst; not long afterwards he came very much to the
+fore in larger affairs. He blossomed out into something definite. He
+filled the public eye as the manager on the spot of the Tropical Belt
+Coal Company with offices in London and Amsterdam, and other things
+about it that sounded and looked grandiose. The offices in the two
+capitals may have consisted--and probably did--of one room in each;
+but at that distance, out East there, all this had an air. We were more
+puzzled than dazzled, it is true; but even the most sober-minded among
+us began to think that there was something in it. The Tesmans appointed
+agents, a contract for government mail-boats secured, the era of steam
+beginning for the islands--a great stride forward--Heyst's stride!
+
+And all this sprang from the meeting of the cornered Morrison and of the
+wandering Heyst, which may or may not have been the direct outcome of a
+prayer. Morrison was not an imbecile, but he seemed to have got himself
+into a state of remarkable haziness as to his exact position towards
+Heyst. For, if Heyst had been sent with money in his pocket by a direct
+decree of the Almighty in answer to Morrison's prayer then there was no
+reason for special gratitude, since obviously he could not help himself.
+But Morrison believed both, in the efficacy of prayer and in the
+infinite goodness of Heyst. He thanked God with awed sincerity for his
+mercy, and could not thank Heyst enough for the service rendered as
+between man and man. In this (highly creditable) tangle of strong
+feelings Morrison's gratitude insisted on Heyst's partnership in the
+great discovery. Ultimately we heard that Morrison had gone home through
+the Suez Canal in order to push the magnificent coal idea personally
+in London. He parted from his brig and disappeared from our ken; but
+we heard that he had written a letter or letters to Heyst, saying that
+London was cold and gloomy; that he did not like either the men or
+things, that he was “as lonely as a crow in a strange country.” In
+truth, he pined after the Capricorn--I don't mean only the tropic; I
+mean the ship too. Finally he went into Dorsetshire to see his people,
+caught a bad cold, and died with extraordinary precipitation in the
+bosom of his appalled family. Whether his exertions in the City of
+London had enfeebled his vitality I don't know; but I believe it was
+this visit which put life into the coal idea. Be it as it may, the
+Tropical Belt Coal Company was born very shortly after Morrison,
+the victim of gratitude and his native climate, had gone to join his
+forefathers in a Dorsetshire churchyard.
+
+Heyst was immensely shocked. He got the news in the Moluccas through the
+Tesmans, and then disappeared for a time. It appears that he stayed with
+a Dutch government doctor in Amboyna, a friend of his who looked after
+him for a bit in his bungalow. He became visible again rather suddenly,
+his eyes sunk in his head, and with a sort of guarded attitude, as if
+afraid someone would reproach him with the death of Morrison.
+
+Naive Heyst! As if anybody would . . . Nobody amongst us had any
+interest in men who went home. They were all right; they did not count
+any more. Going to Europe was nearly as final as going to Heaven. It
+removed a man from the world of hazard and adventure.
+
+As a matter of fact, many of us did not hear of this death till months
+afterwards--from Schomberg, who disliked Heyst gratuitously and made up
+a piece of sinister whispered gossip:
+
+“That's what comes of having anything to do with that fellow. He
+squeezes you dry like a lemon, then chucks you out--sends you home to
+die. Take warning by Morrison!”
+
+Of course, we laughed at the innkeeper's suggestions of black mystery.
+Several of us heard that Heyst was prepared to go to Europe himself,
+to push on his coal enterprise personally; but he never went. It wasn't
+necessary. The company was formed without him, and his nomination of
+manager in the tropics came out to him by post.
+
+From the first he had selected Samburan, or Round Island, for the
+central station. Some copies of the prospectus issued in Europe, having
+found their way out East, were passed from hand to hand. We greatly
+admired the map which accompanied them for the edification of the
+shareholders. On it Samburan was represented as the central spot of the
+Eastern Hemisphere with its name engraved in enormous capitals. Heavy
+lines radiated from it in all directions through the tropics, figuring a
+mysterious and effective star--lines of influence or lines of distance,
+or something of that sort. Company promoters have an imagination of
+their own. There's no more romantic temperament on earth than the
+temperament of a company promoter. Engineers came out, coolies were
+imported, bungalows were put up on Samburan, a gallery driven into the
+hillside, and actually some coal got out.
+
+These manifestations shook the soberest minds. For a time everybody in
+the islands was talking of the Tropical Belt Coal, and even those who
+smiled quietly to themselves were only hiding their uneasiness. Oh, yes;
+it had come, and anybody could see what would be the consequences--the
+end of the individual trader, smothered under a great invasion of
+steamers. We could not afford to buy steamers. Not we. And Heyst was the
+manager.
+
+“You know, Heyst, enchanted Heyst.”
+
+“Oh, come! He has been no better than a loafer around here as far back
+as any of us can remember.”
+
+“Yes, he said he was looking for facts. Well, he's got hold of one that
+will do for all of us,” commented a bitter voice.
+
+“That's what they call development--and be hanged to it!” muttered
+another.
+
+Never was Heyst talked about so much in the tropical belt before.
+
+“Isn't he a Swedish baron or something?”
+
+“He, a baron? Get along with you!”
+
+For my part I haven't the slightest doubt that he was. While he was
+still drifting amongst the islands, enigmatical and disregarded like an
+insignificant ghost, he told me so himself on a certain occasion. It
+was a long time before he materialized in this alarming way into the
+destroyer of our little industry--Heyst the Enemy.
+
+It became the fashion with a good many to speak of Heyst as the Enemy.
+He was very concrete, very visible now. He was rushing all over the
+Archipelago, jumping in and out of local mail-packets as if they had
+been tram-cars, here, there, and everywhere--organizing with all his
+might. This was no mooning about. This was business. And this sudden
+display of purposeful energy shook the incredulity of the most
+sceptical more than any scientific demonstration of the value of these
+coal-outcrops could have done. It was impressive. Schomberg was the
+only one who resisted the infection. Big, manly in a portly style,
+and profusely bearded, with a glass of beer in his thick paw, he would
+approach some table where the topic of the hour was being discussed,
+would listen for a moment, and then come out with his invariable
+declaration:
+
+“All this is very well, gentlemen; but he can't throw any of his
+coal-dust in my eyes. There's nothing in it. Why, there can't be
+anything in it. A fellow like that for manager? Phoo!”
+
+Was it the clairvoyance of imbecile hatred, or mere stupid tenacity of
+opinion, which ends sometimes by scoring against the world in a most
+astonishing manner? Most of us can remember instances of triumphant
+folly; and that ass Schomberg triumphed. The T.B.C. Company went into
+liquidation, as I began by telling you. The Tesmans washed their hands
+of it. The Government cancelled those famous contracts, the talk died
+out, and presently it was remarked here and there that Heyst had faded
+completely away. He had become invisible, as in those early days when
+he used to make a bolt clear out of sight in his attempts to break away
+from the enchantment of “these isles,” either in the direction of New
+Guinea or in the direction of Saigon--to cannibals or to cafes. The
+enchanted Heyst! Had he at last broken the spell? Had he died? We were
+too indifferent to wonder overmuch. You see we had on the whole liked
+him well enough. And liking is not sufficient to keep going the interest
+one takes in a human being. With hatred, apparently, it is otherwise.
+Schomberg couldn't forget Heyst. The keen, manly Teutonic creature was a
+good hater. A fool often is.
+
+“Good evening, gentlemen. Have you got everything you want? So! Good!
+You see? What was I always telling you? Aha! There was nothing in it. I
+knew it. But what I would like to know is what became of that--Swede.”
+
+He put a stress on the word Swede as if it meant scoundrel. He detested
+Scandinavians generally. Why? Goodness only knows. A fool like that is
+unfathomable. He continued:
+
+“It's five months or more since I have spoken to anybody who has seen
+him.”
+
+As I have said, we were not much interested; but Schomberg, of course,
+could not understand that. He was grotesquely dense. Whenever three
+people came together in his hotel, he took good care that Heyst should
+be with them.
+
+“I hope the fellow did not go and drown himself,” he would add with a
+comical earnestness that ought to have made us shudder; only our crowd
+was superficial, and did not apprehend the psychology of this pious
+hope.
+
+“Why? Heyst isn't in debt to you for drinks is he?” somebody asked him
+once with shallow scorn.
+
+“Drinks! Oh, dear no!”
+
+The innkeeper was not mercenary. Teutonic temperament seldom is. But he
+put on a sinister expression to tell us that Heyst had not paid perhaps
+three visits altogether to his “establishment.” This was Heyst's crime,
+for which Schomberg wished him nothing less than a long and tormented
+existence. Observe the Teutonic sense of proportion and nice forgiving
+temper.
+
+At last, one afternoon, Schomberg was seen approaching a group of his
+customers. He was obviously in high glee. He squared his manly chest
+with great importance.
+
+“Gentlemen, I have news of him. Who? why, that Swede. He is still
+on Samburan. He's never been away from it. The company is gone,
+the engineers are gone, the clerks are gone, the coolies are gone,
+everything's gone; but there he sticks. Captain Davidson, coming by from
+the westward, saw him with his own eyes. Something white on the wharf,
+so he steamed in and went ashore in a small boat. Heyst, right enough.
+Put a book into his pocket, always very polite. Been strolling on
+the wharf and reading. 'I remain in possession here,' he told Captain
+Davidson. What I want to know is what he gets to eat there. A piece of
+dried fish now and then--what? That's coming down pretty low for a man
+who turned up his nose at my table d'hote!”
+
+He winked with immense malice. A bell started ringing, and he led the
+way to the dining-room as if into a temple, very grave, with the air
+of a benefactor of mankind. His ambition was to feed it at a profitable
+price, and his delight was to talk of it behind its back. It was very
+characteristic of him to gloat over the idea of Heyst having nothing
+decent to eat.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+A few of us who were sufficiently interested went to Davidson for
+details. These were not many. He told us that he passed to the north of
+Samburan on purpose to see what was going on. At first, it looked as if
+that side of the island had been altogether abandoned. This was what he
+expected. Presently, above the dense mass of vegetation that Samburan
+presents to view, he saw the head of the flagstaff without a flag. Then,
+while steaming across the slight indentation which for a time was known
+officially as Black Diamond Bay, he made out with his glass the white
+figure on the coaling-wharf. It could be no one but Heyst.
+
+“I thought for certain he wanted to be taken off, so I steamed in. He
+made no signs. However, I lowered a boat. I could not see another living
+being anywhere. Yes. He had a book in his hand. He looked exactly as we
+have always seen him--very neat, white shoes, cork helmet. He explained
+to me that he had always had a taste for solitude. It was the first I
+ever heard of it, I told him. He only smiled. What could I say? He isn't
+the sort of man one can speak familiarly to. There's something in him.
+One doesn't care to.
+
+“'But what's the object? Are you thinking of keeping possession of the
+mine?' I asked him.
+
+“'Something of the sort,' he says. 'I am keeping hold.'
+
+“'But all this is as dead as Julius Caesar,' I cried. 'In fact, you have
+nothing worth holding on to, Heyst.'
+
+“'Oh, I am done with facts,' says he, putting his hand to his helmet
+sharply with one of his short bows.”
+
+Thus dismissed, Davidson went on board his ship, swung her out, and as
+he was steaming away he watched from the bridge Heyst walking shoreward
+along the wharf. He marched into the long grass and vanished--all but
+the top of his white cork helmet, which seemed to swim in a green sea.
+Then that too disappeared, as if it had sunk into the living depths of
+the tropical vegetation, which is more jealous of men's conquests than
+the ocean, and which was about to close over the last vestiges of the
+liquidated Tropical Belt Coal Company--A. Heyst, manager in the East.
+
+Davidson, a good, simple fellow in his way, was strangely affected. It
+is to be noted that he knew very little of Heyst. He was one of those
+whom Heyst's finished courtesy of attitude and intonation most strongly
+disconcerted. He himself was a fellow of fine feeling, I think, though
+of course he had no more polish than the rest of us. We were naturally
+a hail-fellow-well-met crowd, with standards of our own--no worse, I
+daresay, than other people's; but polish was not one of them. Davidson's
+fineness was real enough to alter the course of the steamer he
+commanded. Instead of passing to the south of Samburan, he made it his
+practice to take the passage along the north shore, within about a mile
+of the wharf.
+
+“He can see us if he likes to see us,” remarked Davidson. Then he had an
+afterthought: “I say! I hope he won't think I am intruding, eh?”
+
+We reassured him on the point of correct behaviour. The sea is open to
+all.
+
+This slight deviation added some ten miles to Davidson's round trip, but
+as that was sixteen hundred miles it did not matter much.
+
+“I have told my owner of it,” said the conscientious commander of the
+Sissie.
+
+His owner had a face like an ancient lemon. He was small and
+wizened--which was strange, because generally a Chinaman, as he grows in
+prosperity, puts on inches of girth and stature. To serve a Chinese firm
+is not so bad. Once they become convinced you deal straight by them,
+their confidence becomes unlimited. You can do no wrong. So Davidson's
+old Chinaman squeaked hurriedly:
+
+“All right, all right, all right. You do what you like, captain--”
+
+And there was an end of the matter; not altogether, though. From time to
+time the Chinaman used to ask Davidson about the white man. He was still
+there, eh?
+
+“I never see him,” Davidson had to confess to his owner, who would peer
+at him silently through round, horn-rimmed spectacles, several sizes too
+large for his little old face. “I never see him.”
+
+To me, on occasions he would say:
+
+“I haven't a doubt he's there. He hides. It's very unpleasant.” Davidson
+was a little vexed with Heyst. “Funny thing,” he went on. “Of all the
+people I speak to, nobody ever asks after him but that Chinaman of
+mine--and Schomberg,” he added after a while.
+
+Yes, Schomberg, of course. He was asking everybody about everything, and
+arranging the information into the most scandalous shape his imagination
+could invent. From time to time he would step up, his blinking,
+cushioned eyes, his thick lips, his very chestnut beard, looking full of
+malice.
+
+“Evening, gentlemen. Have you got all you want? So! Good! Well, I am
+told the jungle has choked the very sheds in Black Diamond Bay. Fact.
+He's a hermit in the wilderness now. But what can this manager get to
+eat there? It beats me.”
+
+Sometimes a stranger would inquire with natural curiosity:
+
+“Who? What manager?”
+
+“Oh, a certain Swede,”--with a sinister emphasis, as if he were saying
+“a certain brigand.” “Well known here. He's turned hermit from shame.
+That's what the devil does when he's found out.”
+
+Hermit. This was the latest of the more or less witty labels applied
+to Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of the tropical
+belt, where the inane clacking of Schomberg's tongue vexed our ears.
+
+But apparently Heyst was not a hermit by temperament. The sight of his
+land was not invincibly odious to him. We must believe this, since
+for some reason or other he did come out from his retreat for a while.
+Perhaps it was only to see whether there were any letters for him at the
+Tesmans. I don't know. No one knows. But this reappearance shows that
+his detachment from the world was not complete. And incompleteness of
+any sort leads to trouble. Axel Heyst ought not to have cared for his
+letters--or whatever it was that brought him out after something more
+than a year and a half in Samburan. But it was of no use. He had not the
+hermit's vocation! That was the trouble, it seems.
+
+Be this as it may, he suddenly reappeared in the world, broad chest,
+bald forehead, long moustaches, polite manner, and all--the complete
+Heyst, even to the kindly sunken eyes on which there still rested the
+shadow of Morrison's death. Naturally, it was Davidson who had given him
+a lift out of his forsaken island. There were no other opportunities,
+unless some native craft were passing by--a very remote and
+unsatisfactory chance to wait for. Yes, he came out with Davidson, to
+whom he volunteered the statement that it was only for a short time--a
+few days, no more. He meant to go back to Samburan.
+
+Davidson expressing his horror and incredulity of such foolishness,
+Heyst explained that when the company came into being he had his few
+belongings sent out from Europe.
+
+To Davidson, as to any of us, the idea of Heyst, the wandering drifting,
+unattached Heyst, having any belongings of the sort that can furnish a
+house was startlingly novel. It was grotesquely fantastic. It was like a
+bird owning real property.
+
+“Belongings? Do you mean chairs and tables?” Davidson asked with
+unconcealed astonishment.
+
+Heyst did mean that. “My poor father died in London. It has been all
+stored there ever since,” he explained.
+
+“For all these years?” exclaimed Davidson, thinking how long we all had
+known Heyst flitting from tree to tree in a wilderness.
+
+“Even longer,” said Heyst, who had understood very well.
+
+This seemed to imply that he had been wandering before he came under our
+observation. In what regions? And what early age? Mystery. Perhaps he
+was a bird that had never had a nest.
+
+“I left school early,” he remarked once to Davidson, on the passage. “It
+was in England. A very good school. I was not a shining success there.”
+
+The confessions of Heyst. Not one of us--with the probable exception of
+Morrison, who was dead--had ever heard so much of his history. It
+looks as if the experience of hermit life had the power to loosen one's
+tongue, doesn't it?
+
+During that memorable passage, in the Sissie, which took about two days,
+he volunteered other hints--for you could not call it information--about
+his history. And Davidson was interested. He was interested not because
+the hints were exciting but because of that innate curiosity about our
+fellows which is a trait of human nature. Davidson's existence, too,
+running the Sissie along the Java Sea and back again, was distinctly
+monotonous and, in a sense, lonely. He never had any sort of company on
+board. Native deck-passengers in plenty, of course, but never a white
+man, so the presence of Heyst for two days must have been a godsend.
+Davidson was telling us all about it afterwards. Heyst said that his
+father had written a lot of books. He was a philosopher.
+
+“Seems to me he must have been something of a crank, too,” was
+Davidson's comment. “Apparently he had quarrelled with his people in
+Sweden. Just the sort of father you would expect Heyst to have. Isn't
+he a bit of a crank himself? He told me that directly his father died he
+lit out into the wide world on his own, and had been on the move till he
+fetched up against this famous coal business. Fits the son of the father
+somehow, don't you think?”
+
+For the rest, Heyst was as polite as ever. He offered to pay for his
+passage; but when Davidson refused to hear of it he seized him heartily
+by the hand, gave one of his courtly bows, and declared that he was
+touched by his friendly proceedings.
+
+“I am not alluding to this trifling amount which you decline to take,”
+ he went on, giving a shake to Davidson's hand. “But I am touched by your
+humanity.” Another shake. “Believe me, I am profoundly aware of having
+been an object of it.” Final shake of the hand. All this meant that
+Heyst understood in a proper sense the little Sissie's periodic
+appearance in sight of his hermitage.
+
+“He's a genuine gentleman,” Davidson said to us. “I was really sorry
+when he went ashore.”
+
+We asked him where he had left Heyst.
+
+“Why, in Sourabaya--where else?”
+
+The Tesmans had their principal counting-house in Sourabaya. There had
+long existed a connection between Heyst and the Tesmans. The incongruity
+of a hermit having agents did not strike us, nor yet the absurdity of a
+forgotten cast-off, derelict manager of a wrecked, collapsed, vanished
+enterprise, having business to attend to. We said Sourabaya, of course,
+and took it for granted that he would stay with one of the Tesmans.
+One of us even wondered what sort of reception he would get; for it was
+known that Julius Tesman was unreasonably bitter about the Tropical
+Belt Coal fiasco. But Davidson set us right. It was nothing of the
+kind. Heyst went to stay in Schomberg's hotel, going ashore in the hotel
+launch. Not that Schomberg would think of sending his launch alongside
+a mere trader like the Sissie. But she had been meeting a coasting
+mail-packet, and had been signalled to. Schomberg himself was steering
+her.
+
+“You should have seen Schomberg's eyes bulge out when Heyst jumped in
+with an ancient brown leather bag!” said Davidson. “He pretended not
+to know who it was--at first, anyway. I didn't go ashore with them. We
+didn't stay more than a couple of hours altogether. Landed two thousand
+coconuts and cleared out. I have agreed to pick him up again on my next
+trip in twenty days' time.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+Davidson happened to be two days late on his return trip; no great
+matter, certainly, but he made a point of going ashore at once, during
+the hottest hour of the afternoon, to look for Heyst. Schomberg's hotel
+stood back in an extensive enclosure containing a garden, some large
+trees, and, under their spreading boughs, a detached “hall available
+for concerts and other performances,” as Schomberg worded it in his
+advertisements. Torn, and fluttering bills, intimating in heavy red
+capitals CONCERTS EVERY NIGHT, were stuck on the brick pillars on each
+side of the gateway.
+
+The walk had been long and confoundedly sunny. Davidson stood wiping his
+wet neck and face on what Schomberg called “the piazza.” Several doors
+opened on to it, but all the screens were down. Not a soul was in sight,
+not even a China boy--nothing but a lot of painted iron chairs and
+tables. Solitude, shade, and gloomy silence--and a faint, treacherous
+breeze which came from under the trees and quite unexpectedly caused the
+melting Davidson to shiver slightly--the little shiver of the tropics
+which in Sourabaya, especially, often means fever and the hospital to
+the incautious white man.
+
+The prudent Davidson sought shelter in the nearest darkened room. In the
+artificial dusk, beyond the levels of shrouded billiard-tables, a white
+form heaved up from two chairs on which it had been extended. The middle
+of the day, table d'hote tiffin once over, was Schomberg's easy time. He
+lounged out, portly, deliberate, on the defensive, the great fair beard
+like a cuirass over his manly chest. He did not like Davidson, never a
+very faithful client of his. He hit a bell on one of the tables as he
+went by, and asked in a distant, Officer-in-Reserve manner:
+
+“You desire?”
+
+The good Davidson, still sponging his wet neck, declared with simplicity
+that he had come to fetch away Heyst, as agreed.
+
+“Not here!”
+
+A Chinaman appeared in response to the bell. Schomberg turned to him
+very severely:
+
+“Take the gentleman's order.”
+
+Davidson had to be going. Couldn't wait--only begged that Heyst should
+be informed that the Sissie would leave at midnight.
+
+“Not--here, I am telling you!”
+
+Davidson slapped his thigh in concern.
+
+“Dear me! Hospital, I suppose.” A natural enough surmise in a very
+feverish locality.
+
+The Lieutenant of the Reserve only pursed up his mouth and raised his
+eyebrows without looking at him. It might have meant anything, but
+Davidson dismissed the hospital idea with confidence. However, he had to
+get hold of Heyst between this and midnight:
+
+“He has been staying here?” he asked.
+
+“Yes, he was staying here.”
+
+“Can you tell me where he is now?” Davidson went on placidly. Within
+himself he was beginning to grow anxious, having developed the affection
+of a self-appointed protector towards Heyst. The answer he got was:
+
+“Can't tell. It's none of my business,” accompanied by majestic
+oscillations of the hotel-keeper's head, hinting at some awful mystery.
+
+Davidson was placidity itself. It was his nature. He did not betray his
+sentiments, which were not favourable to Schomberg.
+
+“I am sure to find out at the Tesmans' office,” he thought. But it was
+a very hot hour, and if Heyst was down at the port he would have learned
+already that the Sissie was in. It was even possible that Heyst had
+already gone on board, where he could enjoy a coolness denied to the
+town. Davidson, being stout, was much preoccupied with coolness and
+inclined to immobility. He lingered awhile, as if irresolute. Schomberg,
+at the door, looking out, affected perfect indifference. He could not
+keep it up, though. Suddenly he turned inward and asked with brusque
+rage:
+
+“You wanted to see him?”
+
+“Why, yes,” said Davidson. “We agreed to meet--”
+
+“Don't you bother. He doesn't care about that now.”
+
+“Doesn't he?”
+
+“Well, you can judge for yourself. He isn't here, is he? You take my
+word for it. Don't you bother about him. I am advising you as a friend.”
+
+“Thank you,” said, Davidson, inwardly startled at the savage tone. “I
+think I will sit down for a moment and have a drink, after all.”
+
+This was not what Schomberg had expected to hear. He called brutally:
+
+“Boy!”
+
+The Chinaman approached, and after referring him to the white man by a
+nod the hotel-keeper departed, muttering to himself. Davidson heard him
+gnash his teeth as he went.
+
+Davidson sat alone with the billiard-tables as if there had been not a
+soul staying in the hotel. His placidity was so genuine that he was not
+unduly, fretting himself over the absence of Heyst, or the mysterious
+manners Schomberg had treated him to. He was considering these things in
+his own fairly shrewd way. Something had happened; and he was loath to
+go away to investigate, being restrained by a presentiment that somehow
+enlightenment would come to him there. A poster of CONCERTS EVERY
+EVENING, like those on the gate, but in a good state of preservation,
+hung on the wall fronting him. He looked at it idly and was struck by
+the fact--then not so very common--that it was a ladies' orchestra;
+“Zangiacomo's eastern tour--eighteen performers.” The poster stated
+that they had had the honour of playing their select repertoire before
+various colonial excellencies, also before pashas, sheiks, chiefs, H. H.
+the Sultan of Mascate, etc., etc.
+
+Davidson felt sorry for the eighteen lady-performers. He knew what that
+sort of life was like, the sordid conditions and brutal incidents of
+such tours led by such Zangiacomos who often were anything but musicians
+by profession. While he was staring at the poster, a door somewhere at
+his back opened, and a woman came in who was looked upon as Schomberg's
+wife, no doubt with truth. As somebody remarked cynically once, she was
+too unattractive to be anything else. The opinion that he treated her
+abominably was based on her frightened expression. Davidson lifted his
+hat to her. Mrs. Schomberg gave him an inclination of her sallow head
+and incontinently sat down behind a sort of raised counter, facing the
+door, with a mirror and rows of bottles at her back. Her hair was very
+elaborately done with two ringlets on the left side of her scraggy neck;
+her dress was of silk, and she had come on duty for the afternoon. For
+some reason or other Schomberg exacted this from her, though she added
+nothing to the fascinations of the place. She sat there in the smoke and
+noise, like an enthroned idol, smiling stupidly over the billiards from
+time to time, speaking to no one, and no one speaking to her. Schomberg
+himself took no more interest in her than may be implied in a sudden
+and totally unmotived scowl. Otherwise the very Chinamen ignored her
+existence.
+
+She had interrupted Davidson in his reflections. Being alone with her,
+her silence and open-eyed immobility made him uncomfortable. He was
+easily sorry for people. It seemed rude not to take any notice of her.
+He said, in allusion to the poster:
+
+“Are you having these people in the house?”
+
+She was so unused to being addressed by customers that at the sound of
+his voice she jumped in her seat. Davidson was telling us afterwards
+that she jumped exactly like a figure made of wood, without losing her
+rigid immobility. She did not even move her eyes; but she answered him
+freely, though her very lips seemed made of wood.
+
+“They stayed here over a month. They are gone now. They played every
+evening.”
+
+“Pretty good, were they?”
+
+To this she said nothing; and as she kept on staring fixedly in front
+of her, her silence disconcerted Davidson. It looked as if she had not
+heard him--which was impossible. Perhaps she drew the line of speech
+at the expression of opinions. Schomberg might have trained her, for
+domestic reasons, to keep them to herself. But Davidson felt in honour
+obliged to converse; so he said, putting his own interpretation on this
+surprising silence:
+
+“I see--not much account. Such bands hardly ever are. An Italian lot,
+Mrs. Schomberg, to judge by the name of the boss?”
+
+She shook her head negatively.
+
+“No. He is a German really; only he dyes his hair and beard black for
+business. Zangiacomo is his business name.”
+
+“That's a curious fact,” said Davidson. His head being full of Heyst, it
+occurred to him that she might be aware of other facts. This was a very
+amazing discovery to anyone who looked at Mrs. Schomberg. Nobody had
+ever suspected her of having a mind. I mean even a little of it, I mean
+any at all. One was inclined to think of her as an It--an automaton, a
+very plain dummy, with an arrangement for bowing the head at times
+and smiling stupidly now and then. Davidson viewed her profile with a
+flattened nose, a hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye.
+He asked himself: Did that speak just now? Will it speak again? It was
+as exciting, for the mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with a
+mechanism. A smile played about the fat features of Davidson; the smile
+of a man making an amusing experiment. He spoke again to her:
+
+“But the other members of that orchestra were real Italians, were they
+not?”
+
+Of course, he didn't care. He wanted to see whether the mechanism would
+work again. It did. It said they were not. They were of all sorts,
+apparently. It paused, with the one goggle eye immovably gazing down
+the whole length of the room and through the door opening on to the
+“piazza.” It paused, then went on in the same low pitch:
+
+“There was even one English girl.”
+
+“Poor devil!”--said Davidson, “I suppose these women are not much better
+than slaves really. Was that fellow with the dyed beard decent in his
+way?”
+
+The mechanism remained silent. The sympathetic soul of Davidson drew its
+own conclusions.
+
+“Beastly life for these women!” he said. “When you say an English girl,
+Mrs. Schomberg, do you really mean a young girl? Some of these orchestra
+girls are no chicks.”
+
+“Young enough,” came the low voice out of Mrs. Schomberg's unmoved
+physiognomy.
+
+Davidson, encouraged, remarked that he was sorry for her. He was easily
+sorry for people.
+
+“Where did they go to from here?” he asked.
+
+“She did not go with them. She ran away.”
+
+This was the pronouncement Davidson obtained next. It introduced a new
+sort of interest.
+
+“Well! Well!” he exclaimed placidly; and then, with the air of a man who
+knows life: “Who with?” he inquired with assurance.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg's immobility gave her an appearance of listening
+intently. Perhaps she was really listening; but Schomberg must have been
+finishing his sleep in some distant part of the house. The silence was
+profound, and lasted long enough to become startling. Then, enthroned
+above Davidson, she whispered at last:
+
+“That friend of yours.”
+
+“Oh, you know I am here looking for a friend,” said Davidson hopefully.
+“Won't you tell me--”
+
+“I've told you”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+A mist seemed to roll away from before Davidson's eyes, disclosing
+something he could not believe.
+
+“You can't mean it!” he cried. “He's not the man for it.” But the last
+words came out in a faint voice. Mrs. Schomberg never moved her head the
+least bit. Davidson, after the shock which made him sit up, went slack
+all over.
+
+“Heyst! Such a perfect gentleman!” he exclaimed weakly.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg did not seem to have heard him. This startling fact did
+not tally somehow with the idea Davidson had of Heyst. He never talked
+of women, he never seemed to think of them, or to remember that they
+existed; and then all at once--like this! Running off with a casual
+orchestra girl!
+
+“You might have knocked me down with a feather,” Davidson told us some
+time afterwards.
+
+By then he was taking an indulgent view of both the parties to that
+amazing transaction. First of all, on reflection, he was by no means
+certain that it prevented Heyst from being a perfect gentleman, as
+before. He confronted our open grins or quiet smiles with a serious
+round face. Heyst had taken the girl away to Samburan; and that was
+no joking matter. The loneliness, the ruins of the spot, had impressed
+Davidson's simple soul. They were incompatible with the frivolous
+comments of people who had not seen it. That black jetty, sticking out
+of the jungle into the empty sea; these roof-ridges of deserted houses
+peeping dismally above the long grass! Ough! The gigantic and funereal
+blackboard sign of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, still emerging from a
+wild growth of bushes like an inscription stuck above a grave figured by
+the tall heap of unsold coal at the shore end of the wharf, added to the
+general desolation.
+
+Thus was the sensitive Davidson. The girl must have been miserable
+indeed to follow such a strange man to such a spot. Heyst had, no doubt,
+told her the truth. He was a gentleman. But no words could do justice to
+the conditions of life on Samburan. A desert island was nothing to it.
+Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert island--why, you could not
+help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-playing girl out of an ambulant
+ladies' orchestra to remain content there for a day, for one single day,
+was inconceivable. She would be frightened at the first sight of it. She
+would scream.
+
+The capacity for sympathy in these stout, placid men! Davidson was
+stirred to the depths; and it was easy to see that it was about Heyst
+that he was concerned. We asked him if he had passed that way lately.
+
+“Oh, yes. I always do--about half a mile off.”
+
+“Seen anybody about?”
+
+“No, not a soul. Not a shadow.”
+
+“Did you blow your whistle?”
+
+“Blow the whistle? You think I would do such a thing?”
+
+He rejected the mere possibility of such an unwarrantable intrusion.
+Wonderfully delicate fellow, Davidson!
+
+“Well, but how do you know that they are there?” he was naturally asked.
+
+Heyst had entrusted Mrs. Schomberg with a message for Davidson--a few
+lines in pencil on a scrap of crumpled paper. It was to the effect: that
+an unforeseen necessity was driving him away before the appointed time.
+He begged Davidson's indulgence for the apparent discourtesy. The woman
+of the house--meaning Mrs. Schomberg--would give him the facts, though
+unable to explain them, of course.
+
+“What was there to explain?” wondered Davidson dubiously.
+
+“He took a fancy to that fiddle-playing girl, and--”
+
+“And she to him, apparently,” I suggested.
+
+“Wonderfully quick work,” reflected Davidson. “What do you think will
+come of it?”
+
+“Repentance, I should say. But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg has been
+selected for a confidante?”
+
+For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that
+woman whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the two
+billiard-tables--without expression, without movement, without voice,
+without sight.
+
+“Why, she helped the girl to bolt,” said Davidson turning at me his
+innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which
+this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow which
+sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling. It looked
+as though he would never get over it.
+
+“Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst's note, twisted like a pipe-light, into my
+lap while I sat there unsuspecting,” Davidson went on. “Directly I had
+recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth she had to do with it
+that Heyst should leave it with her. And then, behaving like a painted
+image rather than a live woman, she whispered, just loud enough for me
+to hear:
+
+“I helped them. I got her things together, tied them up in my own shawl,
+and threw them into the compound out of a back window. I did it.”
+
+“That woman that you would say hadn't the pluck to lift her little
+finger!” marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice. “What
+do you think of that?”
+
+I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve. She was
+too lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion. It was impossible
+to think that Heyst had bribed her. Whatever means he had, he had
+not the means to do that. Or could it be that she was moved by
+that disinterested passion for delivering a woman to a man which in
+respectable spheres is called matchmaking?--a highly irregular example
+of it!
+
+“It must have been a very small bundle,” remarked Davidson further.
+
+“I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive,” I said.
+
+“I don't know. She was miserable. I don't suppose it was more than
+a little linen and a couple of those white frocks they wear on the
+platform.”
+
+Davidson pursued his own train of thought. He supposed that such a thing
+had never been heard of in the history of the tropics. For where could
+you find anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra? No doubt fellows
+here and there took a fancy to some pretty one--but it was not for
+running away with her. Oh dear no! It needed a lunatic like Heyst.
+
+“Only think what it means,” wheezed Davidson, imaginative under his
+invincible placidity. “Just only try to think! Brooding alone on
+Samburan has upset his brain. He never stopped to consider, or he
+couldn't have done it. No sane man . . . How is a thing like that to go
+on? What's he going to do with her in the end? It's madness.”
+
+“You say that he's mad. Schomberg tells us that he must be starving on
+his island; so he may end yet by eating her,” I suggested.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told us.
+Indeed, the wonder was that they had been left alone so long. The
+drowsy afternoon was slipping by. Footsteps and voices resounded on the
+veranda--I beg pardon, the piazza; the scraping of chairs, the ping of
+a smitten bell. Customers were turning up. Mrs. Schomberg was begging
+Davidson hurriedly, but without looking at him, to say nothing to
+anyone, when on a half-uttered word her nervous whisper was cut short.
+Through a small inner door Schomberg came in, his hair brushed, his
+beard combed neatly, but his eyelids still heavy from his nap. He looked
+with suspicion at Davidson, and even glanced at his wife; but he was
+baffled by the natural placidity of the one and the acquired habit of
+immobility in the other.
+
+“Have you sent out the drinks?” he asked surlily.
+
+She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared with
+a loaded tray, on his way out. Schomberg went to the door and greeted
+the customers outside, but did not join them. He remained blocking
+half the doorway, with his back to the room, and was still there when
+Davidson, after sitting still for a while, rose to go. At the noise
+he made Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his hat to Mrs.
+Schomberg and receive her wooden bow accompanied by a stupid grin, and
+then looked away. He was loftily dignified. Davidson stopped at the
+door, deep in his simplicity.
+
+“I am sorry you won't tell me anything about my friend's absence,” he
+said. “My friend Heyst, you know. I suppose the only course for me now
+is to make inquiries down at the port. I shall hear something there, I
+don't doubt.”
+
+“Make inquiries of the devil!” replied Schomberg in a hoarse mutter.
+
+Davidson's purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been mainly to
+make Mrs. Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain have heard
+something more of Heyst's exploit from another point of view. It was
+a shrewd try. It was successful in a rather startling way, because the
+hotel-keeper's point of view was horribly abusive. All of a sudden, in
+the same hoarse sinister tone, he proceeded to call Heyst many names, of
+which “pig-dog” was not the worst, with such vehemence that he actually
+choked himself. Profiting from the pause, Davidson, whose temperament
+could withstand worse shocks, remonstrated in an undertone:
+
+“It's unreasonable to get so angry as that. Even if he had run off with
+your cash-box--”
+
+The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close to
+Davidson's.
+
+“My cash-box! My--he--look here, Captain Davidson! He ran off with a
+girl. What do I care for the girl? The girl is nothing to me.”
+
+He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start. That's what the
+girl was; and he reiterated the assertion that she was nothing to him.
+What he was concerned for was the good name of his house. Wherever he
+had been established, he had always had “artist parties” staying in his
+house. One recommended him to the others; but what would happen now,
+when it got about that leaders ran the risk in his house--his house--of
+losing members of their troupe? And just now, when he had spent seven
+hundred and thirty-four guilders in building a concert-hall in his
+compound. Was that a thing to do in a respectable hotel? The cheek, the
+indecency, the impudence, the atrocity! Vagabond, impostor, swindler,
+ruffian, schwein-hund!
+
+He had seized Davidson by a button of his coat, detaining him in
+the doorway, and exactly in the line of Mrs. Schomberg's stony gaze.
+Davidson stole a glance in that direction and thought of making some
+sort of reassuring sign to her, but she looked so bereft of senses, and
+almost of life, perched up there, that it seemed not worth while.
+He disengaged his button with firm placidity. Thereupon, with a last
+stifled curse, Schomberg vanished somewhere within, to try and compose
+his spirits in solitude. Davidson stepped out on the veranda. The party
+of customers there had become aware of the explosive interlude in the
+doorway. Davidson knew one of these men, and nodded to him in passing;
+but his acquaintance called out:
+
+“Isn't he in a filthy temper? He's been like that ever since.”
+
+The speaker laughed aloud, while all the others sat smiling. Davidson
+stopped.
+
+“Yes, rather.” His feelings were, he told us, those of bewildered
+resignation; but of course that was no more visible to the others than
+the emotions of a turtle when it withdraws into its shell.
+
+“It seems unreasonable,” he murmured thoughtfully.
+
+“Oh, but they had a scrap!” the other said.
+
+“What do you mean? Was there a fight!--a fight with Heyst?” asked
+Davidson, much perturbed, if somewhat incredulous.
+
+“Heyst? No, these two--the bandmaster, the fellow who's taking these
+women about and our Schomberg. Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in the
+morning, and went for our worthy friend. I tell you, they were rolling
+on the floor together on this very veranda, after chasing each other all
+over the house, doors slamming, women screaming, seventeen of them, in
+the dining-room; Chinamen up the trees. Hey, John? You climb tree to see
+the fight, eh?”
+
+The boy, almond-eyed and impassive, emitted a scornful grunt, finished
+wiping the table, and withdrew.
+
+“That's what it was--a real, go-as-you-please scrap. And Zangiacomo
+began it. Oh, here's Schomberg. Say, Schomberg, didn't he fly at you,
+when the girl was missed, because it was you who insisted that the
+artists should go about the audience during the interval?”
+
+Schomberg had reappeared in the doorway. He advanced. His bearing
+was stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded, and he
+controlled his voice with apparent effort.
+
+“Certainly. That was only business. I quoted him special terms and
+all for your sake, gentlemen. I was thinking of my regular customers.
+There's nothing to do in the evenings in this town. I think, gentlemen,
+you were all pleased at the opportunity of hearing a little good music;
+and where's the harm of offering a grenadine, or what not, to a lady
+artist? But that fellow--that Swede--he got round the girl. He got round
+all the people out here. I've been watching him for years. You remember
+how he got round Morrison.”
+
+He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off. The
+customers at the table exchanged glances silently. Davidson's attitude
+was that of a spectator. Schomberg's moody pacing of the billiard-room
+could be heard on the veranda.
+
+“And the funniest part is,” resumed the man who had been speaking
+before--an English clerk in a Dutch house--“the funniest part is that
+before nine o'clock that same morning those two were driving together
+in a gharry down to the port, to look for Heyst and the girl. I saw them
+rushing around making inquiries. I don't know what they would have
+done to the girl, but they seemed quite ready to fall upon your Heyst,
+Davidson, and kill him on the quay.”
+
+He had never, he said, seen anything so queer. Those two investigators
+working feverishly to the same end were glaring at each other with
+surprising ferocity. In hatred and mistrust they entered a steam-launch,
+and went flying from ship to ship all over the harbour, causing no end
+of sensation. The captains of vessels, coming on shore later in the day,
+brought tales of a strange invasion, and wanted to know who were the two
+offensive lunatics in a steam-launch, apparently after a man and a girl,
+and telling a story of which one could make neither head nor tail. Their
+reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the
+point of the mate of an American ship bundling them out over the rail
+with unseemly precipitation.
+
+Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone in
+the night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the eastward.
+This was known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom Heyst hired
+for the purpose at three o'clock in the morning. The Tesman schooner had
+sailed at daylight with the usual land breeze, and was probably still in
+sight in the offing at the time. However, the two pursuers after their
+experience with the American mate, made for the shore. On landing, they
+had another violent row in the German language. But there was no second
+fight; and finally, with looks of fierce animosity, they got together
+into a gharry--obviously with the frugal view of sharing expenses--and
+drove away, leaving an astonished little crowd of Europeans and natives
+on the quay.
+
+After hearing this wondrous tale, Davidson went away from the hotel
+veranda, which was filling with Schomberg's regular customers. Heyst's
+escapade was the general topic of conversation. Never before had that
+unaccountable individual been the cause of so much gossip, he judged.
+No! Not even in the beginnings of the Tropical Belt Coal Company when
+becoming for a moment a public character was he the object of a silly
+criticism and unintelligent envy for every vagabond and adventurer in
+the islands. Davidson concluded that people liked to discuss that sort
+of scandal better than any other.
+
+I asked him if he believed that this was such a great scandal after all.
+
+“Heavens, no!” said that excellent man who, himself, was incapable of
+any impropriety of conduct. “But it isn't a thing I would have done
+myself; I mean even if I had not been married.”
+
+There was no implied condemnation in the statement; rather something
+like regret. Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its essence
+the rescue of a distressed human being. Not that we were two romantics,
+tingeing the world to the hue of our temperament, but that both of us
+had been acute enough to discover a long time ago that Heyst was.
+
+“I shouldn't have had the pluck,” he continued. “I see a thing all
+round, as it were; but Heyst doesn't, or else he would have been scared.
+You don't take a woman into a desert jungle without being made sorry for
+it sooner or later, in one way or another; and Heyst being a gentleman
+only makes it worse.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened that
+I did not meet Davidson again for some three months. When we did come
+together, almost the first thing he said to me was:
+
+“I've seen him.”
+
+Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty,
+that he had not intruded. He was called in. Otherwise he would not have
+dreamed of breaking in upon Heyst's privacy.
+
+“I am certain you wouldn't,” I assured him, concealing my amusement at
+his wonderful delicacy. He was the most delicate man that ever took a
+small steamer to and fro among the islands. But his humanity, which was
+not less strong and praiseworthy, had induced him to take his
+steamer past Samburan wharf (at an average distance of a mile) every
+twenty-three days--exactly. Davidson was delicate, humane, and regular.
+
+“Heyst called you in?” I asked, interested.
+
+Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date.
+Davidson was examining the shore through his glasses with his unwearied
+and punctual humanity as he steamed past Samburan.
+
+I saw a man in white. It could only have been Heyst. He had fastened
+some sort of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was waving it at the
+end of the old wharf.
+
+Davidson didn't like to take his steamer alongside--for fear of being
+indiscreet, I suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped his
+engines, and lowered a boat. He went himself in that boat, which was
+manned, of course, by his Malay seamen.
+
+Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his
+signalling-pole; and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down engaged
+busily in unfastening the flag from it.
+
+“Was there anything wrong?” I inquired, Davidson having paused in his
+narrative and my curiosity being naturally aroused. You must remember
+that Heyst as the Archipelago knew him was not--what shall I say--was
+not a signalling sort of man.
+
+“The very words that came out of my mouth,” said Davidson, “before I
+laid the boat against the piles. I could not help it!”
+
+Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag
+thing, which struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.
+
+“No, nothing wrong,” he cried. His white teeth flashed agreeably below
+the coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.
+
+I don't know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which prevented
+Davidson from clambering upon the wharf. He stood up in the boat,
+and, above him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles, thanking him and
+apologizing for the liberty, exactly in his usual manner. Davidson had
+expected some change in the man, but there was none. Nothing in him
+betrayed the momentous fact that within that jungle there was a girl, a
+performer in a ladies' orchestra, whom he had carried straight off the
+concert platform into the wilderness. He was not ashamed or defiant
+or abashed about it. He might have been a shade confidential when
+addressing Davidson. And his words were enigmatical.
+
+“I took this course of signalling to you,” he said to Davidson, “because
+to preserve appearances might be of the utmost importance. Not to me, of
+course. I don't care what people may say, and of course no one can hurt
+me. I suppose I have done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed
+myself to be tempted into action. It seemed innocent enough, but all
+action is bound to be harmful. It is devilish. That is why this world
+is evil upon the whole. But I have done with it! I shall never lift a
+little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation
+of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us
+whether we want it or not; but now I, have done with observation, too.”
+
+Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms alongside
+an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush. He had
+never heard anybody speak like this before; certainly not Heyst, whose
+conversation was concise, polite, with a faint ring of playfulness in
+the cultivated tones of his voice.
+
+“He's gone mad,” Davidson thought to himself.
+
+But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged
+to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly most unusual
+talk. Then he remembered--in his surprise he had lost sight of it--that
+Heyst now had a girl there. This bizarre discourse was probably the
+effect of the girl. Davidson shook off the absurd feeling, and asked,
+wishing to make clear his friendliness, and not knowing what else to
+say:
+
+“You haven't run short of stores or anything like that?”
+
+Heyst smiled and shook his head:
+
+“No, no. Nothing of the kind. We are fairly well off here. Thanks, all
+the same. If I have taken the liberty to detain you, it is not from any
+uneasiness for myself and my--companion. The person I was thinking of
+when I made up my mind to invoke your assistance is Mrs. Schomberg.”
+
+“I have talked with her,” interjected Davidson.
+
+“Oh! You? Yes, I hoped she would find means to--”
+
+“But she didn't tell me much,” interrupted Davidson, who was not averse
+from hearing something--he hardly knew what.
+
+“H'm--Yes. But that note of mine? Yes? She found an opportunity to give
+it to you? That's good, very good. She's more resourceful than one would
+give her credit for.”
+
+“Women often are--” remarked Davidson. The strangeness from which he had
+suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried off a girl, wore
+off as the minutes went by. “There's a lot of unexpectedness about
+women,” he generalized with a didactic aim which seemed to miss its
+mark; for the next thing Heyst said was:
+
+“This is Mrs. Schomberg's shawl.” He touched the stuff hanging over
+his arm. “An Indian thing, I believe,” he added, glancing at his arm
+sideways.
+
+“It isn't of particular value,” said Davidson truthfully.
+
+“Very likely. The point is that it belongs to Schomberg's wife. That
+Schomberg seems to be an unconscionable ruffian--don't you think so?”
+
+Davidson smiled faintly.
+
+“We out here have got used to him,” he said, as if excusing a universal
+and guilty toleration of a manifest nuisance. “I'd hardly call him that.
+I only know him as a hotel-keeper.”
+
+“I never knew him even as that--not till this time, when you were so
+obliging as to take me to Sourabaya, I went to stay there from economy.
+The Netherlands House is very expensive, and they expect you to bring
+your own servant with you. It's a nuisance.”
+
+“Of course, of course,” protested Davidson hastily.
+
+After a short silence Heyst returned to the matter of the shawl. He
+wanted to send it back to Mrs. Schomberg. He said that it might be very
+awkward for her if she were unable, if asked, to produce it. This had
+given him, Heyst, much uneasiness. She was terrified of Schomberg.
+Apparently she had reason to be.
+
+Davidson had remarked that, too. Which did not prevent her, he pointed
+out, from making a fool of him, in a way, for the sake of a stranger.
+
+“Oh! You know!” said Heyst. “Yes, she helped me--us.”
+
+“She told me so. I had quite a talk with her,” Davidson informed him.
+“Fancy anyone having a talk with Mrs. Schomberg! If I were to tell the
+fellows they wouldn't believe me. How did you get round her, Heyst?
+How did you think of it? Why, she looks too stupid to understand human
+speech and too scared to shoo a chicken away. Oh, the women, the women!
+You don't know what there may be in the quietest of them.”
+
+“She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life,” said
+Heyst. “It's a very respectable task.”
+
+“Is that it? I had some idea it was that,” confessed Davidson.
+
+He then imparted to Heyst the story of the violent proceedings following
+on the discovery of his flight. Heyst's polite attention to the tale
+took on a sombre cast; but he manifested no surprise, and offered no
+comment. When Davidson had finished he handed down the shawl into
+the boat, and Davidson promised to do his best to return it to Mrs.
+Schomberg in some secret fashion. Heyst expressed his thanks in a few
+simple words, set off by his manner of finished courtesy. Davidson
+prepared to depart. They were not looking at each other. Suddenly Heyst
+spoke:
+
+“You understand that this was a case of odious persecution, don't you? I
+became aware of it and--”
+
+It was a view which the sympathetic Davidson was capable of
+appreciating.
+
+“I am not surprised to hear it,” he said placidly. “Odious enough, I
+dare say. And you, of course--not being a married man--were free to step
+in. Ah, well!”
+
+He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines in
+his hands when Heyst observed abruptly:
+
+“The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I
+think that here we can safely defy the fates.”
+
+When relating all this to me, Davidson's only comment was:
+
+“Funny notion of defying the fates--to take a woman in tow!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+Some considerable time afterwards--we did not meet very often--I asked
+Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he had
+tackled his mission in a direct way, and had found it easy enough. At
+the very first call he made in Samarang he rolled the shawl as tightly
+as he could into the smallest possible brown-paper parcel, which he
+carried ashore with him. His business in the town being transacted,
+he got into a gharry with the parcel and drove to the hotel. With his
+precious experience, he timed his arrival accurately for the hour of
+Schomberg's siesta. Finding the place empty as on the former occasion,
+he marched into the billiard-room, took a seat at the back, near the
+sort of dais which Mrs. Schomberg would in due course come to occupy,
+and broke the slumbering silence of the house by thumping a bell
+vigorously. Of course a Chinaman appeared promptly. Davidson ordered a
+drink and sat tight.
+
+“I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if necessary,”
+ he said--Davidson's a very abstemious man--“rather than take that parcel
+out of the house again. Couldn't leave it in a corner without letting
+the woman know it was there. It might have turned out worse for her than
+not bringing the thing back at all.”
+
+And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing two
+or three iced drinks which he did not want. Presently, as he hoped it
+would happen, Mrs. Schomberg came in, silk dress, long neck, ringlets,
+scared eyes, and silly grin--all complete. Probably that lazy beast had
+sent her out to see who was the thirsty customer waking up the echoes of
+the house at this quiet hour. Bow, nod--and she clambered up to her post
+behind the raised counter, looking so helpless, so inane, as she sat
+there, that if it hadn't been for the parcel, Davidson declared, he
+would have thought he had merely dreamed all that had passed between
+them. He ordered another drink, to get the Chinaman out of the room, and
+then seized the parcel, which was reposing on a chair near him, and
+with no more than a mutter--“this is something of yours”--he rammed it
+swiftly into a recess in the counter, at her feet. There! The rest
+was her affair. And just in time, too. Schomberg turned up, yawning
+affectedly, almost before Davidson had regained his seat. He cast about
+suspicious and irate glances. An invincible placidity of expression
+helped Davidson wonderfully at the moment, and the other, of course,
+could have no grounds for the slightest suspicion of any sort of
+understanding between his wife and this customer.
+
+As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss. Davidson was lost in
+admiration. He believed, now, that the woman had been putting it on
+for years. She never even winked. It was immense! The insight he had
+obtained almost frightened him; he couldn't get over his wonder at
+knowing more of the real Mrs. Schomberg than anybody in the Islands,
+including Schomberg himself. She was a miracle of dissimulation. No
+wonder Heyst got the girl away from under two men's noses, if he had her
+to help with the job!
+
+The greatest wonder, after all, was Heyst getting mixed up with
+petticoats. The fellow's life had been open to us for years and nothing
+could have been more detached from feminine associations. Except that he
+stood drinks to people on suitable occasions, like any other man, this
+observer of facts seemed to have no connection with earthly affairs and
+passions. The very courtesy of his manner, the flavour of playfulness in
+the voice set him apart. He was like a feather floating lightly in
+the workaday atmosphere which was the breath of our nostrils. For this
+reason whenever this looker-on took contact with things he attracted
+attention. First, it was the Morrison partnership of mystery, then
+came the great sensation of the Tropical Belt Coal where indeed varied
+interests were involved: a real business matter. And then came this
+elopement, this incongruous phenomenon of self-assertion, the greatest
+wonder of all, astonishing and amusing.
+
+Davidson admitted to me that, the hubbub was subsiding; and the affair
+would have been already forgotten, perhaps, if that ass Schomberg
+had not kept on gnashing his teeth publicly about it. It was really
+provoking that Davidson should not be able to give one some idea of the
+girl. Was she pretty? He didn't know. He had stayed the whole afternoon
+in Schomberg's hotel, mainly for the purpose of finding out something
+about her. But the story was growing stale. The parties at the tables on
+the veranda had other, fresher, events to talk about and Davidson shrank
+from making direct inquiries. He sat placidly there, content to be
+disregarded and hoping for some chance word to turn up. I shouldn't
+wonder if the good fellow hadn't been dozing. It's difficult to give you
+an adequate idea of Davidson's placidity.
+
+Presently Schomberg, wandering about, joined a party that had taken the
+table next to Davidson's.
+
+“A man like that Swede, gentlemen, is a public danger,” he began. “I
+remember him for years. I won't say anything of his spying--well, he
+used to say himself he was looking for out-of-the-way facts and what is
+that if not spying? He was spying into everybody's business. He got hold
+of Captain Morrison, squeezed him dry, like you would an orange, and
+scared him off to Europe to die there. Everybody knows that Captain
+Morrison had a weak chest. Robbed first and murdered afterwards! I don't
+mince words--not I. Next he gets up that swindle of the Belt Coal. You
+know all about it. And now, after lining his pockets with other people's
+money, he kidnaps a white girl belonging to an orchestra which is
+performing in my public room for the benefit of my patrons, and goes
+off to live like a prince on that island, where nobody can get at him. A
+damn silly girl . . . It's disgusting--tfui!”
+
+He spat. He choked with rage--for he saw visions, no doubt. He jumped up
+from his chair, and went away to flee from them--perhaps. He went into
+the room where Mrs. Schomberg sat. Her aspect could not have been very
+soothing to the sort of torment from which he was suffering.
+
+Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst. His proceeding was to
+enter into conversation with one and another, casually, and showing no
+particular knowledge of the affair, in order to discover something about
+the girl. Was she anything out of the way? Was she pretty? She couldn't
+have been markedly so. She had not attracted special notice. She was
+young--on that everybody agreed. The English clerk of Tesmans remembered
+that she had a sallow face. He was respectable and highly proper. He
+was not the sort to associate with such people. Most of these women were
+fairly battered specimens. Schomberg had them housed in what he called
+the Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending and
+washing their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out to dry
+between the trees, like a lot of washerwomen. They looked very much
+like middle-aged washerwomen on the platform, too. But the girl had
+been living in the main building along with the boss, the director, the
+fellow with the black beard, and a hard-bitten, oldish woman who took
+the piano and was understood to be the fellow's wife.
+
+This was not a very satisfactory result. Davidson stayed on, and even
+joined the table d'hote dinner, without gleaning any more information.
+He was resigned.
+
+“I suppose,” he wheezed placidly, “I am bound to see her some day.”
+
+He meant to take the Samburan channel every trip, as before of course.
+
+“Yes,” I said. “No doubt you will. Some day Heyst will be signalling to
+you again; and I wonder what it will be for.”
+
+Davidson made no reply. He had his own ideas about that, and his silence
+concealed a good deal of thought. We spoke no more of Heyst's girl.
+Before we separated, he gave me a piece of unrelated observation.
+
+“It's funny,” he said, “but I fancy there's some gambling going on
+in the evening at Schomberg's place, on the quiet. I've noticed men
+strolling away in twos and threes towards that hall where the orchestra
+used to play. The windows must be specially well shuttered, because I
+could not spy the smallest gleam of light from that direction; but I
+can't believe that those beggars would go in there only to sit and think
+of their sins in the dark.”
+
+“That's strange. It's incredible that Schomberg should risk that sort of
+thing,” I said.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+As we know, Heyst had gone to stay in Schomberg's hotel in complete
+ignorance that his person was odious to that worthy. When he arrived,
+Zangiacomo's Ladies' Orchestra had been established there for some time.
+
+The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost
+corner of the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had something
+to do with money. He transacted it quickly, and then found himself with
+nothing to do while he awaited Davidson, who was to take him back to his
+solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst meant to go. He whom we used
+to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was suffering from thorough
+disenchantment. Not with the islands, however. The Archipelago has a
+lasting fascination. It is not easy to shake off the spell of island
+life. Heyst was disenchanted with life as a whole. His scornful
+temperament, beguiled into action, suffered from failure in a subtle way
+unknown to men accustomed to grapple with the realities of common human
+enterprise. It was like the gnawing pain of useless apostasy, a sort of
+shame before his own betrayed nature; and in addition, he also suffered
+from plain, downright remorse. He deemed himself guilty of Morrison's
+death. A rather absurd feeling, since no one could possibly have
+foreseen the horrors of the cold, wet summer lying in wait for poor
+Morrison at home.
+
+It was not in Heyst's character to turn morose; but his mental state was
+not compatible with a sociable mood. He spent his evenings sitting
+apart on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. The lamentations of string
+instruments issued from the building in the hotel compound, the
+approaches to which were decorated with Japanese paper lanterns strung
+up between the trunks of several big trees. Scraps of tunes more or
+less plaintive reached his ears. They pursued him even into his bedroom,
+which opened into an upstairs veranda. The fragmentary and rasping
+character of these sounds made their intrusion inexpressibly tedious in
+the long run. Like most dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear
+the music of the spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had
+a taste for silence which he had been able to gratify for years. The
+islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark
+garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea
+without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of
+smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are
+soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell.
+
+Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early
+days. For him, however, that was broken. He was no longer enchanted,
+though he was still a captive of the islands. He had no intention to
+leave them ever. Where could he have gone to, after all these years?
+Not a single soul belonging to him lived anywhere on earth. Of this
+fact--not such a remote one, after all--he had only lately become aware;
+for it is failure that makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his
+resources. And though he had made up his mind to retire from the world
+in hermit fashion, yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of
+loneliness which had come to him in the hour of renunciation. It hurt
+him. Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that
+lacerate our intelligence and our feelings.
+
+Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye.
+Towards the unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
+lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour. Nudging certain of his customers
+with his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs “that Swede” was
+giving himself.
+
+“I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house. This place
+isn't good enough for him. I wish to goodness he had gone somewhere else
+to show off his superiority. Here I have got up this series of concerts
+for you gentlemen, just to make things a little brighter generally; and
+do you think he'll condescend to step in and listen to a piece or two of
+an evening? Not he. I know him of old. There he sits at the dark end of
+the piazza, all the evening long--planning some new swindle, no doubt.
+For two-pence I would ask him to go and look for quarters somewhere
+else; only one doesn't like to treat a white man like that out in the
+tropics. I don't know how long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet
+a trifle that he'll never work himself up to the point of spending the
+fifty cents of entrance money for the sake of a little good music.”
+
+Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening
+Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped
+snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress
+as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among
+the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out parts of
+their great rugged trunks, here and there, in the great mass of darkness
+under the lofty foliage. More lanterns, of the shape of cylindrical
+concertinas, hanging in a row from a slack string, decorated the doorway
+of what Schomberg called grandiloquently “my concert-hall.” In his
+desperate mood Heyst ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain, and
+went in.
+
+The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported
+pine boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning. An
+instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing, scraping,
+squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano, operated upon
+by a bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered nostrils, rained hard notes
+like hail through the tempest of fiddles. The small platform was filled
+with white muslin dresses and crimson sashes slanting from shoulders
+provided with bare arms, which sawed away without respite. Zangiacomo
+conducted. He wore a white mess-jacket, a black dress waistcoat, and
+white trousers. His longish, tousled hair and his great beard were
+purple-black. He was horrible. The heat was terrific. There were perhaps
+thirty people having drinks at several little tables. Heyst, quite
+overcome by the volume of noise, dropped into a chair. In the quick time
+of that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the
+movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces,
+the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of
+brutality--something cruel, sensual and repulsive.
+
+“This is awful!” Heyst murmured to himself.
+
+But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not
+flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He
+remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have
+been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and,
+so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition
+of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply
+murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if
+witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it
+seemed marvellous to see the people sitting so quietly on their
+chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs
+of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural
+spectacle of their indifference.
+
+When the piece of music came to an end the relief was so great that he
+felt slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his feet.
+When he raised his eyes, the audience, most perversely, was exhibiting
+signs of animation and interest in their faces, and the women in white
+muslin dresses were coming down in pairs from the platform into the body
+of Schomberg's “concert-hall.” They dispersed themselves all over the
+place. The male creature with the hooked nose and purple-black beard
+disappeared somewhere. This was the interval during which, as the astute
+Schomberg had stipulated, the members of the orchestra were encouraged
+to favour the members of the audience with their company--that is, such
+members as seemed inclined to fraternize with the arts in a familiar and
+generous manner; the symbol of familiarity and generosity consisting in
+offers of refreshment.
+
+The procedure struck Heyst as highly incorrect. However, the impropriety
+of Schomberg's ingenious scheme was defeated by the circumstance that
+most of the women were no longer young, and that none of them had ever
+been beautiful. Their more or less worn cheeks were slightly rouged, but
+apart from that fact, which might have been simply a matter of routine,
+they did not seem to take the success of the scheme unduly to heart.
+The impulse to fraternize with the arts being obviously weak in the
+audience, some of the musicians sat down listlessly at unoccupied
+tables, while others went on perambulating the central passage: arm in
+arm, glad enough, no doubt, to stretch their legs while resting their
+arms. Their crimson sashes gave a factitious touch of gaiety to the
+smoky atmosphere of the concert-hall; and Heyst felt a sudden pity for
+these beings, exploited, hopeless, devoid of charm and grace, whose fate
+of cheerless dependence invested their coarse and joyless features with
+a touch of pathos.
+
+Heyst was temperamentally sympathetic. To have them passing and
+repassing close to his little table was painful to him. He was preparing
+to rise and go out when he noticed that two white muslin dresses and
+crimson sashes had not yet left the platform. One of these dresses
+concealed the raw-boned frame of the woman with the bad-tempered curve
+to her nostrils. She was no less a personage than Mrs. Zangiacomo. She
+had left the piano, and, with her back to the hall, was preparing the
+parts for the second half of the concert, with a brusque, impatient
+action of her ugly elbow. This task done, she turned, and, perceiving
+the other white muslin dress motionless on a chair in the second row,
+she strode towards it between the music-stands with an aggressive and
+masterful gait. On the lap of that dress there lay, unclasped and idle,
+a pair of small hands, not very white, attached to well-formed arms.
+The next detail Heyst was led to observe was the arrangement of the
+hair--two thick, brown tresses rolled round an attractively shaped head.
+
+“A girl, by Jove!” he exclaimed mentally.
+
+It was evident that she was a girl. It was evident in the outline of the
+shoulders, in the slender white bust springing up, barred slantwise by
+the crimson sash, from the bell-shaped spread of muslin skirt hiding the
+chair on which she sat averted a little from the body of the hall. Her
+feet, in low white shoes, were crossed prettily.
+
+She had captured Heyst's awakened faculty of observation; he had
+the sensation of a new experience. That was because his faculty of
+observation had never before been captured by any feminine creature in
+that marked and exclusive fashion. He looked at her anxiously, as no man
+ever looks at another man; and he positively forgot where he was. He had
+lost touch with his surroundings. The big woman, advancing, concealed
+the girl from his sight for a moment. She bent over the seated youthful
+figure, in passing it very close, as if to drop a word into its ear.
+Her lips did certainly move. But what sort of word could it have been
+to make the girl jump up so swiftly? Heyst, at his table, was surprised
+into a sympathetic start. He glanced quickly round. Nobody was looking
+towards the platform; and when his eyes swept back there again, the
+girl, with the big woman treading at her heels, was coming down the
+three steps from the platform to the floor of the hall. There she
+paused, stumbled one pace forward, and stood still again, while
+the other--the escort, the dragoon, the coarse big woman of the
+piano--passed her roughly, and, marching truculently down the centre
+aisle between the chairs and tables, went out to rejoin the hook-nosed
+Zangiacomo somewhere outside. During her extraordinary transit, as if
+everything in the hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes met
+the upward glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl.
+She had not moved. Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.
+
+Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips. Then he
+got up. It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made him
+cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the island of
+Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him then, a man in
+trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.
+
+It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it. He was not
+thinking of Morrison then. It may be said that, for the first time
+since the final abandonment of the Samburan coal mine, he had completely
+forgotten the late Morrison. It is true that to a certain extent he
+had forgotten also where he was. Thus, unchecked by any sort of self
+consciousness, Heyst walked up the central passage.
+
+Several of the women, by this time, had found anchorage here and there
+among the occupied tables. They talked to the men, leaning on their
+elbows, and suggesting funnily--if it hadn't been for the crimson
+sashes--in their white dresses an assembly of middle-aged brides
+with free and easy manners and hoarse voices. The murmuring noise
+of conversations carried on with some spirit filled Schomberg's
+concert-room. Nobody remarked Heyst's movements; for indeed he was not
+the only man on his legs there. He had been confronting the girl for
+some time before she became aware of his presence. She was looking down,
+very still, without colour, without glances, without voice, without
+movement. It was only when Heyst addressed her in his courteous tone
+that she raised her eyes.
+
+“Excuse me,” he said in English, “but that horrible female has done
+something to you. She has pinched you, hasn't she? I am sure she pinched
+you just now, when she stood by your chair.”
+
+The girl received this overture with the wide, motionless stare of
+profound astonishment. Heyst, vexed with himself, suspected that she did
+not understand what he said. One could not tell what nationality these
+women were, except that they were of all sorts. But she was astonished
+almost more by the near presence of the man himself, by his largely
+bald head, by the white brow, the sunburnt cheeks, the long, horizontal
+moustaches of crinkly bronze hair, by the kindly expression of the man's
+blue eyes looking into her own. He saw the stony amazement in hers
+give way to a momentary alarm, which was succeeded by an expression of
+resignation.
+
+“I am sure she pinched your arm most cruelly,” he murmured, rather
+disconcerted now at what he had done.
+
+It was a great comfort to hear her say:
+
+“It wouldn't have been the first time. And suppose she did--what are you
+going to do about it?”
+
+“I don't know,” he said with a faint, remote playfulness in his tone
+which had not been heard in it lately, and which seemed to catch her
+ear pleasantly. “I am grieved to say that I don't know. But can I do
+anything? What would you wish me to do? Pray command me.”
+
+Again, the greatest astonishment became visible in her face; for she now
+perceived how different he was from the other men in the room. He was as
+different from them as she was different from the other members of the
+ladies' orchestra.
+
+“Command you?” she breathed, after a time, in a bewildered tone. “Who
+are you?” she asked a little louder.
+
+“I am staying in this hotel for a few days. I just dropped in casually
+here. This outrage--”
+
+“Don't you try to interfere,” she said so earnestly that Heyst asked, in
+his faintly playful tone:
+
+“Is it your wish that I should leave you?”
+
+“I haven't said that,” the girl answered. “She pinched me because I
+didn't get down here quick enough--”
+
+“I can't tell you how indignant I am--” said Heyst. “But since you are
+down here now,” he went on, with the ease of a man of the world speaking
+to a young lady in a drawing-room, “hadn't we better sit down?”
+
+She obeyed his inviting gesture, and they sat down on the nearest
+chairs. They looked at each other across a little round table with a
+surprised, open gaze, self-consciousness growing on them so slowly that
+it was a long time before they averted their eyes; and very soon they
+met again, temporarily, only to rebound, as it were. At last they
+steadied in contact, but by that time, say some fifteen minutes from the
+moment when they sat down, the “interval” came to an end.
+
+So much for their eyes. As to the conversation, it had been perfectly
+insignificant because naturally they had nothing to say to each other.
+Heyst had been interested by the girl's physiognomy. Its expression was
+neither simple nor yet very clear. It was not distinguished--that could
+not be expected--but the features had more fineness than those of any
+other feminine countenance he had ever had the opportunity to observe so
+closely. There was in it something indefinably audacious and infinitely
+miserable--because the temperament and the existence of that girl were
+reflected in it. But her voice! It seduced Heyst by its amazing quality.
+It was a voice fit to utter the most exquisite things, a voice which
+would have made silly chatter supportable and the roughest talk
+fascinating. Heyst drank in its charm as one listens to the tone of some
+instrument without heeding the tune.
+
+“Do you sing as well as play?” he asked her abruptly.
+
+“Never sang a note in my life,” she said, obviously surprised by the
+irrelevant question; for they had not been discoursing of sweet sounds.
+She was clearly unaware of her voice. “I don't remember that I ever had
+much reason to sing since I was little,” she added.
+
+That inelegant phrase, by the mere vibrating, warm nobility of the
+sound, found its way into Heyst's heart. His mind, cool, alert, watched
+it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of
+the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our
+unexpressed longings lie.
+
+“You are English, of course?” he said.
+
+“What do you think?” she answered in the most charming accents. Then, as
+if thinking that it was her turn to place a question: “Why do you always
+smile when you speak?”
+
+It was enough to make anyone look grave, but her good faith was so
+evident that Heyst recovered himself at once.
+
+“It's my unfortunate manner--” he said with his delicate, polished
+playfulness. “Is is very objectionable to you?”
+
+She was very serious.
+
+“No. I only noticed it. I haven't come across so many pleasant people as
+all that, in my life.”
+
+“It's certain that this woman who plays the piano is infinitely more
+disagreeable than any cannibal I have ever had to do with.”
+
+“I believe you!” She shuddered. “How did you come to have anything to do
+with cannibals?”
+
+“It would be too long a tale,” said Heyst with a faint smile. Heyst's
+smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his great
+moustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as comfortable as a
+shy bird in its native thicket. “Much too long. How did you get amongst
+this lot here?”
+
+“Bad luck,” she answered briefly.
+
+“No doubt, no doubt,” Heyst assented with slight nods. Then, still
+indignant at the pinch which he had divined rather than actually seen
+inflicted: “I say, couldn't you defend yourself somehow?”
+
+She had risen already. The ladies of the orchestra were slowly regaining
+their places. Some were already seated, idle stony-eyed, before the
+music-stands. Heyst was standing up, too.
+
+“They are too many for me,” she said.
+
+These few words came out of the common experience of mankind; yet by
+virtue of her voice, they thrilled Heyst like a revelation. His feelings
+were in a state of confusion, but his mind was clear.
+
+“That's bad. But it isn't actual ill-usage that this girl is complaining
+of,” he thought lucidly after she left him.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+That was how it began. How it was that it ended, as we know it did end,
+is not so easy to state precisely. It is very clear that Heyst was not
+indifferent, I won't say to the girl, but to the girl's fate. He was
+the same man who had plunged after the submerged Morrison whom he
+hardly knew otherwise than by sight and through the usual gossip of the
+islands. But this was another sort of plunge altogether, and likely to
+lead to a very different kind of partnership.
+
+Did he reflect at all? Probably. He was sufficiently reflective. But
+if he did, it was with insufficient knowledge. For there is no evidence
+that he paused at any time between the date of that evening and the
+morning of the flight. Truth to say, Heyst was not one of those men
+who pause much. Those dreamy spectators of the world's agitation are
+terrible once the desire to act gets hold of them. They lower their
+heads and charge a wall with an amazing serenity which nothing but an
+indisciplined imagination can give.
+
+He was not a fool. I suppose he knew--or at least he felt--where this
+was leading him. But his complete inexperience gave him the necessary
+audacity. The girl's voice was charming when she spoke to him of her
+miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of unconscious cynicism
+inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of poverty. And whether
+because he was humane or because her voice included all the modulations
+of pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in its compass, it was not disgust
+that the tale awakened in him, but the sense of an immense sadness.
+
+On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of the
+concert, the girl told Heyst about herself. She was almost a child
+of the streets. Her father was a musician in the orchestras of small
+theatres. Her mother ran away from him while she was little, and the
+landladies of various poor lodging-houses had attended casually to her
+abandoned childhood. It was never positive starvation and absolute rags,
+but it was the hopeless grip of poverty all the time. It was her father
+who taught her to play the violin. It seemed that he used to get drunk
+sometimes, but without pleasure, and only because he was unable to
+forget his fugitive wife. After he had a paralytic stroke, falling
+over with a crash in the well of a music-hall orchestra during the
+performance, she had joined the Zangiacomo company. He was now in a home
+for incurables.
+
+“And I am here,” she finished, “with no one to care if I make a hole in
+the water the next chance I get or not.”
+
+Heyst told her that he thought she could do a little better than that,
+if it was only a question of getting out of the world. She looked at him
+with special attention, and with a puzzled expression which gave to her
+face an air of innocence.
+
+This was during one of the “intervals” between the two parts of the
+concert. She had come down that time without being incited thereto by a
+pinch from the awful Zangiacomo woman. It is difficult to suppose that
+she was seduced by the uncovered intellectual forehead and the long
+reddish moustaches of her new friend. New is not the right word. She had
+never had a friend before; and the sensation of this friendliness going
+out to her was exciting by its novelty alone. Besides, any man who did
+not resemble Schomberg appeared for that very reason attractive. She was
+afraid of the hotel-keeper, who, in the daytime, taking advantage of the
+fact that she lived in the hotel itself, and not in the Pavilion with
+the other “artists” prowled round her, mute, hungry, portentous behind
+his great beard, or else assailed her in quiet corners and empty
+passages with deep, mysterious murmurs from behind, which, not
+withstanding their clear import, sounded horribly insane somehow.
+
+The contrast of Heyst's quiet, polished manner gave her special delight
+and filled her with admiration. She had never seen anything like that
+before. If she had, perhaps, known kindness in her life, she had never
+met the forms of simple courtesy. She was interested by it as a very
+novel experience, not very intelligible, but distinctly pleasurable.
+
+“I tell you they are too many for me,” she repeated, sometimes
+recklessly, but more often shaking her head with ominous dejection.
+
+She had, of course, no money at all. The quantities of “black men” all
+about frightened her. She really had no definite idea where she was on
+the surface of the globe. The orchestra was generally taken from the
+steamer to some hotel, and kept shut up there till it was time to go on
+board another steamer. She could not remember the names she heard.
+
+“How do you call this place again?” she used to ask Heyst.
+
+“Sourabaya,” he would say distinctly, and would watch the discouragement
+at the outlandish sound coming into her eyes, which were fastened on his
+face.
+
+He could not defend himself from compassion. He suggested that she might
+go to the consul, but it was his conscience that dictated this advice,
+not his conviction. She had never heard of the animal or of its uses. A
+consul! What was it? Who was he? What could he do? And when she learned
+that perhaps he could be induced to send her home, her head dropped on
+her breast.
+
+“What am I to do when I get there?” she murmured with an intonation so
+just, with an accent so penetrating--the charm of her voice did not fail
+her even in whispering--that Heyst seemed to see the illusion of human
+fellowship on earth vanish before the naked truth of her existence, and
+leave them both face to face in a moral desert as arid as the sands of
+Sahara, without restful shade, without refreshing water.
+
+She leaned slightly over the little table, the same little table at
+which they had sat when they first met each other; and with no other
+memories but of the stones in the streets her childhood had known, in
+the distress of the incoherent, confused, rudimentary impressions of her
+travels inspiring her with a vague terror of the world she said rapidly,
+as one speaks in desperation:
+
+“You do something! You are a gentleman. It wasn't I who spoke to you
+first, was it? I didn't begin, did I? It was you who came along and
+spoke to me when I was standing over there. What did you want to speak
+to me for? I don't care what it is, but you must do something.”
+
+Her attitude was fierce and entreating at the same time--clamorous, in
+fact though her voice had hardly risen above a breath. It was clamorous
+enough to be noticed. Heyst, on purpose, laughed aloud. She nearly
+choked with indignation at this brutal heartlessness.
+
+“What did you mean, then, by saying 'command me!'?” she almost hissed.
+
+Something hard in his mirthless stare, and a quiet final “All right,”
+ steadied her.
+
+“I am not rich enough to buy you out,” he went on, speaking with an
+extraordinary detached grin, “even if it were to be done; but I can
+always steal you.”
+
+She looked at him profoundly, as though these words had a hidden and
+very complicated meaning.
+
+“Get away now,” he said rapidly, “and try to smile as you go.”
+
+She obeyed with unexpected readiness; and as she had a set of very good
+white teeth, the effect of the mechanical, ordered smile was joyous,
+radiant. It astonished Heyst. No wonder, it flashed through his mind,
+women can deceive men so completely. The faculty was inherent in them;
+they seemed to be created with a special aptitude. Here was a smile
+the origin of which was well known to him; and yet it had conveyed a
+sensation of warmth, had given him a sort of ardour to live which was
+very new to his experience.
+
+By this time she was gone from the table, and had joined the other
+“ladies of the orchestra.” They trooped towards the platform, driven in
+truculently by the haughty mate of Zangiacomo, who looked as though
+she were restraining herself with difficulty from punching their backs.
+Zangiacomo followed, with his great, pendulous dyed beard and short
+mess-jacket, with an aspect of hang-dog concentration imparted by his
+drooping head and the uneasiness of his eyes, which were set very close
+together. He climbed the steps last of all, turned about, displaying
+his purple beard to the hall, and tapped with his bow. Heyst winced in
+anticipation of the horrible racket. It burst out immediately unabashed
+and awful. At the end of the platform the woman at the piano, presenting
+her cruel profile, her head tilted back, banged the keys without looking
+at the music.
+
+Heyst could not stand the uproar for more than a minute. He went out,
+his brain racked by the rhythm of some more or less Hungarian dance
+music. The forests inhabited by the New Guinea cannibals where he had
+encountered the most exciting of his earlier futile adventures were
+silent. And this adventure, not in its execution, perhaps, but in its
+nature, required even more nerve than anything he had faced before.
+Walking among the paper lanterns suspended to trees he remembered with
+regret the gloom and the dead stillness of the forests at the back of
+Geelvink Bay, perhaps the wildest, the unsafest, the most deadly spot
+on earth from which the sea can be seen. Oppressed by his thoughts,
+he sought the obscurity and peace of his bedroom; but they were not
+complete. The distant sounds of the concert reached his ear, faint
+indeed, but still disturbing. Neither did he feel very safe in there;
+for that sentiment depends not on extraneous circumstances but on our
+inward conviction. He did not attempt to go to sleep; he did not even
+unbutton the top button of his tunic. He sat in a chair and mused.
+Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly
+and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering
+optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions,
+of an ever-expected happiness. But now he was troubled; a light veil
+seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening of a tenderness,
+indistinct and confused as yet, towards an unknown woman.
+
+Gradually silence, a real silence, had established itself round him. The
+concert was over; the audience had gone; the concert-hall was dark; and
+even the Pavilion, where the ladies' orchestra slept after its noisy
+labours, showed not a gleam of light. Heyst suddenly felt restless in
+all his limbs, as this reaction from the long immobility would not be
+denied, he humoured it by passing quietly along the back veranda and out
+into the grounds at the side of the house, into the black shadows under
+the trees, where the extinguished paper lanterns were gently swinging
+their globes like withered fruit.
+
+He paced there to and fro for a long time, a calm, meditative ghost in
+his white drill-suit, revolving in his head thoughts absolutely novel,
+disquieting, and seductive; accustoming his mind to the contemplation
+of his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily it should appear
+praiseworthy and wise. For the use of reason is to justify the obscure
+desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices, and
+follies, and also our fears.
+
+He felt that he had engaged himself by a rash promise to an action big
+with incalculable consequences. And then he asked himself if the girl
+had understood what he meant. Who could tell? He was assailed by all
+sorts of doubts. Raising his head, he perceived something white flitting
+between the trees. It vanished almost at once; but there could be no
+mistake. He was vexed at being detected roaming like this in the middle
+of the night. Who could that be? It never occurred to him that perhaps
+the girl, too, would not be able to sleep. He advanced prudently. Then
+he saw the white, phantom-like apparition again; and the next moment
+all his doubts as to the state of her mind were laid at rest, because he
+felt her clinging to him after the manner of supplicants all the world
+over. Her whispers were so incoherent that he could not understand
+anything; but this did not prevent him from being profoundly moved. He
+had no illusions about her; but his sceptical mind was dominated by the
+fulness of his heart.
+
+“Calm yourself, calm yourself,” he murmured in her ear, returning her
+clasp at first mechanically, and afterwards with a growing appreciation
+of her distressed humanity. The heaving of her breast and the trembling
+of all her limbs, in the closeness of his embrace, seemed to enter his
+body, to infect his very heart. While she was growing quieter in his
+arms, he was becoming more agitated, as if there were only a fixed
+quantity of violent emotion on this earth. The very night seemed
+more dumb, more still, and the immobility of the vague, black shapes,
+surrounding him more perfect.
+
+“It will be all right,” he tried to reassure her, with a tone of
+conviction, speaking into her ear, and of necessity clasping her more
+closely than before.
+
+Either the words or the action had a very good effect. He heard a light
+sigh of relief. She spoke with a calmed ardour.
+
+“Oh, I knew it would be all right from the first time you spoke to me!
+Yes, indeed, I knew directly you came up to me that evening. I knew it
+would be all right, if you only cared to make it so; but of course I
+could not tell if you meant it. 'Command me,' you said. Funny thing for
+a man like you to say. Did you really mean it? You weren't making fun of
+me?”
+
+He protested that he had been a serious person all his life.
+
+“I believe you,” she said ardently. He was touched by this declaration.
+“It's the way you have of speaking as if you were amused with people,”
+ she went on. “But I wasn't deceived. I could see you were angry with
+that beast of a woman. And you are clever. You spotted something at
+once. You saw it in my face, eh? It isn't a bad face--say? You'll never
+be sorry. Listen--I'm not twenty yet. It's the truth, and I can't be so
+bad looking, or else--I will tell you straight that I have been worried
+and pestered by fellows like this before. I don't know what comes to
+them--”
+
+She was speaking hurriedly. She choked, and then exclaimed, with an
+accent of despair:
+
+“What is it? What's the matter?”
+
+Heyst had removed his arms from her suddenly, and had recoiled a little.
+“Is it my fault? I didn't even look at them, I tell you straight. Never!
+Have I looked at you? Tell me. It was you that began it.”
+
+In truth, Heyst had shrunk from the idea of competition with fellows
+unknown, with Schomberg the hotel-keeper. The vaporous white figure
+before him swayed pitifully in the darkness. He felt ashamed of his
+fastidiousness.
+
+“I am afraid we have been detected,” he murmured. “I think I saw
+somebody on the path between the house and the bushes behind you.”
+
+He had seen no one. It was a compassionate lie, if there ever was one.
+His compassion was as genuine as his shrinking had been, and in his
+judgement more honourable.
+
+She didn't turn her head. She was obviously relieved.
+
+“Would it be that brute?” she breathed out, meaning Schomberg, of
+course. “He's getting too forward with me now. What can you expect? Only
+this evening, after supper, he--but I slipped away. You don't mind him,
+do you? Why, I could face him myself now that I know you care for me.
+A girl can always put up a fight. You believe me? Only it isn't easy to
+stand up for yourself when you feel there's nothing and nobody at your
+back. There's nothing so lonely in the world as a girl who has got to
+look after herself. When I left poor dad in that home--it was in the
+country, near a village--I came out of the gates with seven shillings
+and threepence in my old purse, and my railway ticket. I tramped a mile,
+and got into a train--”
+
+She broke off, and was silent for a moment.
+
+“Don't you throw me over now,” she went on. “If you did, what should
+I do? I should have to live, to be sure, because I'd be afraid to kill
+myself, but you would have done a thousand times worse than killing a
+body. You told me you had been always alone, you had never had a dog
+even. Well, then, I won't be in anybody's way if I live with you--not
+even a dog's. And what else did you mean when you came up and looked at
+me so close?”
+
+“Close? Did I?” he murmured unstirring before her in the profound
+darkness. “So close as that?”
+
+She had an outbreak of anger and despair in subdued tones.
+
+“Have you forgotten, then? What did you expect to find? I know what sort
+of girl I am; but all the same I am not the sort that men turn their
+backs on--and you ought to know it, unless you aren't made like the
+others. Oh, forgive me! You aren't like the others; you are like no one
+in the world I ever spoke to. Don't you care for me? Don't you see--?”
+
+What he saw was that, white and spectral, she was putting out her arms
+to him out of the black shadows like an appealing ghost. He took her
+hands, and was affected, almost surprised, to find them so warm, so
+real, so firm, so living in his grasp. He drew her to him, and she
+dropped her head on his shoulder with a deep-sigh.
+
+“I am dead tired,” she whispered plaintively.
+
+He put his arms around her, and only by the convulsive movements of her
+body became aware that she was sobbing without a sound. Sustaining her,
+he lost himself in the profound silence of the night. After a while she
+became still, and cried quietly. Then, suddenly, as if waking up, she
+asked:
+
+“You haven't seen any more of that somebody you thought was spying
+about?”
+
+He started at her quick, sharp whisper, and answered that very likely he
+had been mistaken.
+
+“If it was anybody at all,” she reflected aloud, “it wouldn't have been
+anyone but that hotel woman--the landlord's wife.”
+
+“Mrs. Schomberg,” Heyst said, surprised.
+
+“Yes. Another one that can't sleep o' nights. Why? Don't you see why?
+Because, of course, she sees what's going on. That beast doesn't even
+try to keep it from her. If she had only the least bit of spirit! She
+knows how I feel, too, only she's too frightened even to look him in the
+face, let alone open her mouth. He would tell her to go hang herself.”
+
+For some time Heyst said nothing. A public, active contest with the
+hotel-keeper was not to be thought of. The idea was horrible. Whispering
+gently to the girl, he tried to explain to her that as things stood, an
+open withdrawal from the company would be probably opposed. She listened
+to his explanation anxiously, from time to time pressing the hand she
+had sought and got hold of in the dark.
+
+“As I told you, I am not rich enough to buy you out so I shall steal you
+as soon as I can arrange some means of getting away from here. Meantime
+it would be fatal to be seen together at night. We mustn't give
+ourselves away. We had better part at once. I think I was mistaken just
+now; but if, as you say, that poor Mrs. Schomberg can't sleep of nights,
+we must be more careful. She would tell the fellow.”
+
+The girl had disengaged herself from his loose hold while he talked, and
+now stood free of him, but still clasping his hand firmly.
+
+“Oh, no,” she said with perfect assurance. “I tell you she daren't open
+her mouth to him. And she isn't as silly as she looks. She wouldn't give
+us away. She knows a trick worth two of that. She'll help--that's what
+she'll do, if she dares do anything at all.”
+
+“You seem to have a very clear view of the situation,” said Heyst, and
+received a warm, lingering kiss for this commendation.
+
+He discovered that to part from her was not such an easy matter as he
+had supposed it would be.
+
+“Upon my word,” he said before they separated, “I don't even know your
+name.”
+
+“Don't you? They call me Alma. I don't know why. Silly name! Magdalen
+too. It doesn't matter; you can call me by whatever name you choose.
+Yes, you give me a name. Think of one you would like the sound
+of--something quite new. How I should like to forget everything that has
+gone before, as one forgets a dream that's done with, fright and all! I
+would try.”
+
+“Would you really?” he asked in a murmur. “But that's not forbidden. I
+understand that women easily forget whatever in their past diminishes
+them in their eyes.”
+
+“It's your eyes that I was thinking of, for I'm sure I've never wished
+to forget anything till you came up to me that night and looked me
+through and through. I know I'm not much account; but I know how to
+stand by a man. I stood by father ever since I could understand. He
+wasn't a bad chap. Now that I can't be of any use to him, I would just
+as soon forget all that and make a fresh start. But these aren't things
+that I could talk to you about. What could I ever talk to you about?”
+
+“Don't let it trouble you,” Heyst said. “Your voice is enough. I am in
+love with it, whatever it says.”
+
+She remained silent for a while, as if rendered breathless by this quiet
+statement.
+
+“Oh! I wanted to ask you--”
+
+He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected the
+question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation she went
+on:
+
+“Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-room
+there--you remember?”
+
+“I thought we were being observed. A smile is the best of masks.
+Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some Dutch
+clerks from the town. No doubt he was watching us--watching you, at
+least. That's why I asked you to smile.”
+
+“Ah, that's why. It never came into my head!”
+
+“And you did it very well, too--very readily, as if you had understood
+my intention.”
+
+“Readily!” she repeated. “Oh, I was ready enough to smile then. That's
+the truth. It was the first time for years I may say that I felt
+disposed to smile. I've not had many chances to smile in my life, I can
+tell you; especially of late.”
+
+“But you do it most charmingly--in a perfectly fascinating way.”
+
+He paused. She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of
+extreme delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.
+
+“It astonished me,” he added. “It went as straight to my heart as though
+you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling me. I felt as if I had never
+seen a smile before in my life. I thought of it after I left you. It
+made me restless.”
+
+“It did all that?” came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and incredulous.
+
+“If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come out
+here tonight,” he said, with his playful earnestness of tone. “It was
+your triumph.”
+
+He felt her lips touch his lightly, and the next moment she was gone.
+Her white dress gleamed in the distance, and then the opaque darkness of
+the house seemed to swallow it. Heyst waited a little before he went the
+same way, round the corner, up the steps of the veranda, and into his
+room, where he lay down at last--not to sleep, but to go over in his
+mind all that had been said at their meeting.
+
+“It's exactly true about that smile,” he thought. There he had spoken
+the truth to her; and about her voice, too. For the rest--what must be
+must be.
+
+A great wave of heat passed over him. He turned on his back, flung his
+arms crosswise on the broad, hard bed, and lay still, open-eyed under
+the mosquito net, till daylight entered his room, brightened swiftly,
+and turned to unfailing sunlight. He got up then, went to a small
+looking-glass hanging on the wall, and stared at himself steadily. It
+was not a new-born vanity which induced this long survey. He felt
+so strange that he could not resist the suspicion of his personal
+appearance having changed during the night. What he saw in the glass,
+however, was the man he knew before. It was almost a disappointment--a
+belittling of his recent experience. And then he smiled at his
+naiveness; for, being over five and thirty years of age, he ought to
+have known that in most cases the body is the unalterable mask of the
+soul, which even death itself changes but little, till it is put out of
+sight where no changes matter any more, either to our friends or to our
+enemies.
+
+Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies. It was the very
+essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by
+hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by a system
+of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller
+amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of
+passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care
+in the world--invulnerable because elusive.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and
+unapproachable, and in return was generally considered a “queer chap.”
+ He had started off on these travels of his after the death of his
+father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his
+country and angry with all the world, which had instinctively rejected
+his wisdom.
+
+Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst
+had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the
+humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty
+years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the
+most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of
+disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness,
+for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst
+had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face
+in affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue
+dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three
+years, after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with
+the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at
+the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral
+and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.
+
+Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age
+were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young
+man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning
+of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great
+achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the
+pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis had blown away from the
+son.
+
+“I'll drift,” Heyst had said to himself deliberately.
+
+He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He meant
+to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf
+drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable trees of a forest
+glade; to drift without ever catching on to anything.
+
+“This shall be my defence against life,” he had said to himself with a
+sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his father there was no
+other worthy alternative.
+
+He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others
+do through drink, from vice, from some weakness of character--with
+deliberation, as others do in despair. This, stripped of its facts, had
+been Heyst's life up to that disturbing night. Next day, when he saw the
+girl called Alma, she managed to give him a glance of frank tenderness,
+quick as lightning and leaving a profound impression, a secret touch on
+the heart. It was in the grounds of the hotel, about tiffin time, while
+the Ladies of the orchestra were strolling back to their pavilion after
+rehearsal, or practice, or whatever they called their morning musical
+exercises in the hall. Heyst, returning from the town, where he had
+discovered that there would be difficulties in the way of getting away
+at once, was crossing the compound, disappointed and worried. He had
+walked almost unwittingly into the straggling group of Zangiacomo's
+performers. It was a shock to him, on coming out of his brown study, to
+find the girl so near to him, as if one waking suddenly should see the
+figure of his dream turned into flesh and blood. She did not raise her
+shapely head, but her glance was no dream thing. It was real, the most
+real impression of his detached existence--so far.
+
+Heyst had not acknowledged it in any way, though it seemed to him
+impossible that its effect on him should not be visible to anyone who
+happened to be looking on. And there were several men on the
+veranda, steady customers of Schomberg's table d'hote, gazing in his
+direction--at the ladies of the orchestra, in fact. Heyst's dread arose,
+not out of shame or timidity, but from his fastidiousness. On getting
+amongst them, however, he noticed no signs of interest or astonishment
+in their faces, any more than if they had been blind men. Even Schomberg
+himself, who had to make way for him at the top of the stairs, was
+completely unperturbed, and continued the conversation he was carrying
+on with a client.
+
+Schomberg, indeed, had observed “that Swede” talking with the girl in
+the intervals. A crony of his had nudged him; and he had thought that it
+was so much the better; the silly fellow would keep everybody else off.
+He was rather pleased than otherwise and watched them out of the corner
+of his eye with a malicious enjoyment of the situation--a sort of
+Satanic glee. For he had little doubt of his personal fascination, and
+still less of his power to get hold of the girl, who seemed too ignorant
+to know how to help herself, and who was worse than friendless, since
+she had for some reason incurred the animosity of Mrs. Zangiacomo, a
+woman with no conscience. The aversion she showed him as far as she
+dared (for it is not always safe for the helpless to display the
+delicacy of their sentiments), Schomberg pardoned on the score of
+feminine conventional silliness. He had told Alma, as an argument, that
+she was a clever enough girl to see that she could do no better than to
+put her trust in a man of substance, in the prime of life, who knew
+his way about. But for the excited trembling of his voice, and the
+extraordinary way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of his
+crimson, hirsute countenance, such speeches had every character of calm,
+unselfish advice--which, after the manner of lovers, passed easily into
+sanguine plans for the future.
+
+“We'll soon get rid of the old woman,” he whispered to her hurriedly,
+with panting ferocity. “Hang her! I've never cared for her. The climate
+don't suit her; I shall tell her to go to her people in Europe. She will
+have to go, too! I will see to it. Eins, zwei, march! And then we shall
+sell this hotel and start another somewhere else.”
+
+He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it
+was true. Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in
+defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister
+valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. Her shrinking form, her
+downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at the end of an
+empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to the overpowering
+force of his will, the recognition of his personal fascinations. For
+every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and
+the human race come to an end.
+
+It's easy to imagine Schomberg's humiliation, his shocked fury, when
+he discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks, his
+prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched from under
+his nose by “that Swede,” apparently without any trouble worth speaking
+of. He refused to believe the fact. He would have it, at first, that
+the Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable reason, had played him a scurvy
+trick, but when no further doubt was possible, he changed his view of
+Heyst. The despised Swede became for Schomberg the deepest, the most
+dangerous, the most hateful of scoundrels. He could not believe that the
+creature he had coveted with so much force and with so little effect,
+was in reality tender, docile to her impulse, and had almost offered
+herself to Heyst without a sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and
+from a profound need of placing her trust where her woman's instinct
+guided her ignorance. Nothing would serve Schomberg but that she must
+have been circumvented by some occult exercise of force or craft, by the
+laying of some subtle trap. His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly at
+the means “that Swede” had employed to seduce her away from a man
+like him--Schomberg--as though those means were bound to have been
+extraordinary, unheard of, inconceivable. He slapped his forehead openly
+before his customers; he would sit brooding in silence or else would
+burst out unexpectedly declaiming against Heyst without measure,
+discretion, or prudence, with swollen features and an affectation of
+outraged virtue which could not have deceived the most childlike of
+moralists for a moment--and greatly amused his audience.
+
+It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of Heyst,
+while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel. It was, in a
+manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo concerts had ever
+been--intervals and all. There was never any difficulty in starting the
+performer off. Anybody could do it, by almost any distant allusion.
+As likely as not he would start his endless denunciations in the very
+billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg sat enthroned as usual, swallowing
+her sobs, concealing her tortures of abject humiliation and terror under
+her stupid, set, everlasting grin, which, having been provided for her
+by nature, was an excellent mask, in as much as nothing--not even death
+itself, perhaps--could tear it away.
+
+But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its
+physiognomy. So, after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward calm,
+as if his indignation had dried up within him. And it was time. He was
+becoming a bore with his inability to talk of anything else but Heyst's
+unfitness to be at large, Heyst's wickedness, his wiles, his astuteness,
+and his criminality. Schomberg no longer pretended to despise him. He
+could not have done it. After what had happened he could not pretend,
+even to himself. But his bottled-up indignation was fermenting
+venomously. At the time of his immoderate loquacity one of his
+customers, an elderly man, had remarked one evening:
+
+“If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy.”
+
+And this belief was less than half wrong. Schomberg had Heyst on the
+brain. Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which had
+never been so unpromising since he came out East directly after the
+Franco-Prussian War, he referred to some subtly noxious influence of
+Heyst. It seemed to him that he could never be himself again till he had
+got even with that artful Swede. He was ready to swear that Heyst had
+ruined his life. The girl so unfairly, craftily, basely decoyed away
+would have inspired him to success in a new start. Obviously Mrs.
+Schomberg, whom he terrified by savagely silent moods combined with
+underhand, poisoned glances, could give him no inspiration. He had grown
+generally neglectful, but with a partiality for reckless expedients, as
+if he did not care when and how his career as a hotel-keeper was to be
+brought to an end. This demoralized state accounted for what Davidson
+had observed on his last visit to the Schomberg establishment, some two
+months after Heyst's secret departure with the girl to the solitude of
+Samburan.
+
+The Schomberg of a few years ago--the Schomberg of the Bangkok days,
+for instance, when he started the first of his famed table d'hote
+dinners--would never have risked anything of the sort. His genius ran to
+catering, “white man for white men” and to the inventing, elaborating,
+and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction and impudent
+delight. But now his mind was perverted by the pangs of wounded vanity
+and of thwarted passion. In this state of moral weakness Schomberg
+allowed himself to be corrupted.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+The business was done by a guest who arrived one fine morning by
+mail-boat--immediately from Celebes, having boarded her in Macassar,
+but generally, Schomberg understood, from up China Sea way; a wanderer
+clearly, even as Heyst was, but not alone and of quite another kind.
+
+Schomberg, looking up from the stern-sheets of his steam-launch, which
+he used for boarding passenger ships on arrival, discovered a dark
+sunken stare plunging down on him over the rail of the first-class part
+of the deck. He was no great judge of physiognomy. Human beings, for
+him, were either the objects of scandalous gossip or else recipients of
+narrow strips of paper, with proper bill-heads stating the name of his
+hotel--“W. Schomberg, proprietor, accounts settled weekly.”
+
+So in the clean-shaven, extremely thin face hanging over the mail-boat's
+rail Schomberg saw only the face of a possible “account.” The
+steam-launches of other hotels were also alongside, but he obtained the
+preference.
+
+“You are Mr. Schomberg, aren't you?” the face asked quite unexpectedly.
+
+“I am at your service,” he answered from below; for business is
+business, and its forms and formulas must be observed, even if one's
+manly bosom is tortured by that dull rage which succeeds the fury of
+baffled passion, like the glow of embers after a fierce blaze.
+
+Presently the possessor of the handsome but emaciated face was seated
+beside Schomberg in the stern-sheets of the launch. His body was long
+and loose-jointed, his slender fingers, intertwined, clasped the leg
+resting on the knee, as he lolled back in a careless yet tense attitude.
+On the other side of Schomberg sat another passenger, who was introduced
+by the clean-shaven man as--
+
+“My secretary. He must have the room next to mine.”
+
+“We can manage that easily for you.”
+
+Schomberg steered with dignity, staring straight ahead, but very much
+interested by these two promising “accounts.” Their belongings, a couple
+of large leather trunks browned by age and a few smaller packages,
+were piled up in the bows. A third individual--a nondescript, hairy
+creature--had modestly made his way forward and had perched himself on
+the luggage. The lower part of his physiognomy was over-developed;
+his narrow and low forehead, unintelligently furrowed by horizontal
+wrinkles, surmounted wildly hirsute cheeks and a flat nose with wide,
+baboon-like nostrils. There was something equivocal in the appearance of
+his shaggy, hair-smothered humanity. He, too, seemed to be a follower of
+the clean-shaven man, and apparently had travelled on deck with native
+passengers, sleeping under the awnings. His broad, squat frame denoted
+great strength. Grasping the gunwales of the launch, he displayed a
+pair of remarkably long arms, terminating in thick, brown hairy paws of
+simian aspect.
+
+“What shall we do with the fellow of mine?” the chief of the party asked
+Schomberg. “There must be a boarding-house somewhere near the port--some
+grog-shop where they could let him have a mat to sleep on?”
+
+Schomberg said there was a place kept by a Portuguese half-caste.
+
+“A servant of yours?” he asked.
+
+“Well, he hangs on to me. He is an alligator-hunter. I picked him up in
+Colombia, you know. Ever been in Colombia?”
+
+“No,” said Schomberg, very much surprised. “An alligator-hunter? Funny
+trade! Are you coming from Colombia, then?”
+
+“Yes, but I have been coming for a long time. I come from a good many
+places. I am travelling west, you see.”
+
+“For sport, perhaps?” suggested Schomberg.
+
+“Yes. Sort of sport. What do you say to chasing the sun?”
+
+“I see--a gentleman at large,” said Schomberg, watching a sailing canoe
+about to cross his bow, and ready to clear it by a touch of the helm.
+
+The other passenger made himself heard suddenly.
+
+“Hang these native craft! They always get in the way.”
+
+He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a harsh
+voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a thin,
+dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of a rigid
+nose. Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing secretarial
+about him. Both he and his long, lank principal wore the usual white
+suit of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white shoes--all correct.
+The hairy nondescript creature perched on their luggage in the bow had a
+check shirt and blue dungaree trousers. He gazed in their direction from
+forward in an expectant, trained-animal manner.
+
+“You spoke to me first,” said Schomberg in his manly tones. “You were
+acquainted with my name. Where did you hear of me, gentlemen, may I
+ask?”
+
+“In Manila,” answered the gentleman at large, readily. “From a man with
+whom I had a game of cards one evening in the Hotel Castille.”
+
+“What man? I've no friends in Manila that I know of,” wondered Schomberg
+with a severe frown.
+
+“I can't tell you his name. I've clean forgotten it; but don't you
+worry. He was anything but a friend of yours. He called you all the
+names he could think of. He said you set a lot of scandal going about
+him once, somewhere--in Bangkok, I think. Yes, that's it. You were
+running a table d'hote in Bangkok at one time, weren't you?”
+
+Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only throw
+out his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve
+manner. A table d'hote? Yes, certainly. He always--for the sake of white
+men. And here in this place, too? Yes, in this place, too.
+
+“That's all right, then.” The stranger turned his black, cavernous,
+mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg, who sat gripping
+the brass tiller in a sweating palm. “Many people in the evening at your
+place?”
+
+Schomberg had recovered somewhat.
+
+“Twenty covers or so, take one day with another,” he answered feelingly,
+as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive. “Ought to be more,
+if only people would see that it's for their own good. Precious little
+profit I get out of it. You are partial to tables d'hote, gentlemen?”
+
+The new guest made answer that he liked a hotel where one could find
+some local people in the evening. It was infernally dull otherwise. The
+secretary, in sign of approval, emitted a grunt of astonishing ferocity,
+as if proposing to himself to eat the local people. All this sounded
+like a longish stay, thought Schomberg, satisfied under his grave air;
+till, remembering the girl snatched away from him by the last guest who
+had made a prolonged stay in his hotel, he ground his teeth so audibly
+that the other two looked at him in wonder. The momentary convulsion
+of his florid physiognomy seemed to strike them dumb. They exchanged a
+quick glance. Presently the clean-shaven man fired out another question
+in his curt, unceremonious manner:
+
+“You have no women in your hotel, eh?”
+
+“Women!” Schomberg exclaimed indignantly, but also as if a little
+frightened. “What on earth do you mean by women? What women? There's
+Mrs. Schomberg, of course,” he added, suddenly appeased, with lofty
+indifference.
+
+“If she knows how to keep her place, then it will do. I can't stand
+women near me. They give me the horrors,” declared the other. “They are
+a perfect curse!”
+
+During this outburst the secretary wore a savage grin. The chief guest
+closed his sunken eyes, as if exhausted, and leaned the back of his head
+against the stanchion of the awning. In this pose, his long, feminine
+eyelashes were very noticeable, and his regular features, sharp line of
+the jaw, and well-cut chin were brought into prominence, giving him a
+used-up, weary, depraved distinction. He did not open his eyes till
+the steam-launch touched the quay. Then he and the other man got ashore
+quickly, entered a carriage, and drove away to the hotel, leaving
+Schomberg to look after their luggage and take care of their strange
+companion. The latter, looking more like a performing bear abandoned by
+his show men than a human being, followed all Schomberg's movements step
+by step, close behind his back, muttering to himself in a language
+that sounded like some sort of uncouth Spanish. The hotel-keeper felt
+uncomfortable till at last he got rid of him at an obscure den where
+a very clean, portly Portuguese half-caste, standing serenely in the
+doorway, seemed to understand exactly how to deal with clients of every
+kind. He took from the creature the strapped bundle it had been hugging
+closely through all its peregrinations in that strange town, and cut
+short Schomberg's attempts at explanation by a most confident--
+
+“I comprehend very well, sir.”
+
+“It's more than I do,” thought Schomberg, going away thankful at being
+relieved of the alligator-hunter's company. He wondered what these
+fellows were, without being able to form a guess of sufficient
+probability. Their names he learned that very day by direct inquiry “to
+enter in my books,” he explained in his formal military manner, chest
+thrown out, beard very much in evidence.
+
+The shaven man, sprawling in a long chair, with his air of withered
+youth, raised his eyes languidly.
+
+“My name? Oh, plain Mr. Jones--put that down--a gentleman at large. And
+this is Ricardo.” The pock-marked man, lying prostrate in another long
+chair, made a grimace, as if something had tickled the end of his nose,
+but did not come out of his supineness. “Martin Ricardo, secretary. You
+don't want any more of our history, do you? Eh, what? Occupation? Put
+down, well--tourists. We've been called harder names before now; it
+won't hurt our feelings. And that fellow of mine--where did you tuck him
+away? Oh, he will be all right. When he wants anything he'll take it.
+He's Peter. Citizen of Colombia. Peter, Pedro--I don't know that he ever
+had any other name. Pedro, alligator hunter. Oh, yes--I'll pay his board
+with the half-caste. Can't help myself. He's so confoundedly devoted to
+me that if I were to give him the sack he would fly at my throat. Shall
+I tell you how I killed his brother in the wilds of Colombia? Well,
+perhaps some other time--it's a rather long story. What I shall always
+regret is that I didn't kill him, too. I could have done it without any
+extra trouble then; now it's too late. Great nuisance; but he's useful
+sometimes. I hope you are not going to put all this in your book?”
+
+The offhand, hard manner and the contemptuous tone of “plain Mr. Jones”
+ disconcerted Schomberg utterly. He had never been spoken to like this
+in his life. He shook his head in silence and withdrew, not exactly
+scared--though he was in reality of a timid disposition under his manly
+exterior--but distinctly mystified and impressed.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which
+filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned
+towards his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:
+
+“I must get rid of these two. It won't do!”
+
+Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first; but she
+had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself. Sitting
+in her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was careful not
+to make a sound, knowing from experience that her very assent would be
+resented. With her eyes she followed the figure of Schomberg, clad in
+his sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about the room.
+
+He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in
+her night attire, looked the most unattractive object in
+existence--miserable, insignificant, faded, crushed, old. And the
+contrast with the feminine form he had ever in his mind's eye made his
+wife's appearance painful to his aesthetic sense.
+
+Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of screwing
+his courage up to the sticking point.
+
+“Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into his
+bedroom, and tell him to be off--him and that secretary of his--early in
+the morning. I don't mind a round game of cards, but to make a decoy of
+my table d'hote--my blood boils! He came here because some lying rascal
+in Manila told him I kept a table d'hote.”
+
+He said these things, not for Mrs. Schomberg's information, but simply
+thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point where it would
+give him courage enough to face “plain Mr. Jones.”
+
+“Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper,” he went on. “I have a good
+mind to--”
+
+He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so unlike
+the picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though his eyes
+strayed about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features awakened in
+the miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing for years a fear
+for his precious carcass, since the poor creature had nothing else but
+that to hold on to in the world. She knew him well; but she did not know
+him altogether. The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man
+whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage. And,
+timid in her corner, she ventured to say pressingly:
+
+“Be careful, Wilhelm! Remember the knives and revolvers in their
+trunks.”
+
+In guise of thanks for that anxious reminder, he swore horribly in
+the direction of her shrinking person. In her scanty nightdress, and
+barefooted, she recalled a mediaeval penitent being reproved for her
+sins in blasphemous terms. Those lethal weapons were always present to
+Schomberg's mind. Personally, he had never seen them. His part, ten
+days after his guests' arrival, had been to lounge in manly, careless
+attitudes on the veranda--keeping watch--while Mrs. Schomberg, provided
+with a bunch of assorted keys, her discoloured teeth chattering and her
+globular eyes absolutely idiotic with fright, was “going through” the
+luggage of these strange clients. Her terrible Wilhelm had insisted on
+it.
+
+“I'll be on the look-out, I tell you,” he said. “I shall give you a
+whistle when I see them coming back. You couldn't whistle. And if he
+were to catch you at it, and chuck you out by the scruff of the neck, it
+wouldn't hurt you much; but he won't touch a woman. Not he! He has told
+me so. Affected beast. I must find out something about their little
+game, and so there's an end of it. Go in! Go now! Quick march!”
+
+It had been an awful job; but she did go in, because she was much more
+afraid of Schomberg than of any possible consequences of the act. Her
+greatest concern was lest no key of the bunch he had provided her with
+should fit the locks. It would have been such a disappointment for
+Wilhelm. However, the trunks, she found, had been left open; but her
+investigation did not last long. She was frightened of firearms, and
+generally of all weapons, not from personal cowardice, but as some women
+are, almost superstitiously, from an abstract horror of violence and
+murder. She was out again on the veranda long before Wilhelm had any
+occasion for a warning whistle. The instinctive, motiveless fear being
+the most difficult to overcome, nothing could induce her to return to
+her investigations, neither threatening growls nor ferocious hisses, nor
+yet a poke or two in the ribs.
+
+“Stupid female!” muttered the hotel-keeper, perturbed by the notion
+of that armoury in one of his bedrooms. This was from no abstract
+sentiment, with him it was constitutional. “Get out of my sight,” he
+snarled. “Go and dress yourself for the table d'hote.”
+
+Left to himself, Schomberg had meditated. What the devil did this mean?
+His thinking processes were sluggish and spasmodic; but suddenly the
+truth came to him.
+
+“By heavens, they are desperadoes!” he thought.
+
+Just then he beheld “plain Mr. Jones” and his secretary with the
+ambiguous name of Ricardo entering the grounds of the hotel. They had
+been down to the port on some business, and now were returning; Mr.
+Jones lank, spare, opening his long legs with angular regularity like
+a pair of compasses, the other stepping out briskly by his side.
+Conviction entered Schomberg's heart. They were two desperadoes--no
+doubt about it. But as the funk which he experienced was merely
+a general sensation, he managed to put on his most severe
+Officer-of-the-Reserve manner, long before they had closed with him.
+
+“Good morning, gentlemen.”
+
+Being answered with derisive civility, he became confirmed in his sudden
+conviction of their desperate character. The way Mr. Jones turned his
+hollow eyes on one, like an incurious spectre, and the way the other,
+when addressed, suddenly retracted his lips and exhibited his teeth
+without looking round--here was evidence enough to settle that point.
+Desperadoes! They passed through the billiard-room, inscrutably
+mysterious, to the back of the house, to join their violated trunks.
+
+“Tiffin bell will ring in five minutes, gentlemen.” Schomberg called
+after them, exaggerating the deep manliness of his tone.
+
+He had managed to upset himself very much. He expected to see them come
+back infuriated and begin to bully him with an odious lack of restraint.
+Desperadoes! However they didn't; they had not noticed anything unusual
+about their trunks and Schomberg recovered his composure and said
+to himself that he must get rid of this deadly incubus as soon as
+practicable. They couldn't possibly want to stay very long; this was not
+the town--the colony--for desperate characters. He shrank from action.
+He dreaded any kind of disturbance--“fracas” he called it--in his hotel.
+Such things were not good for business. Of course, sometimes one had to
+have a “fracas;” but it had been a comparatively trifling task to seize
+the frail Zangiacomo--whose bones were no larger than a chicken's--round
+the ribs, lift him up bodily, dash him to the ground, and fall on
+him. It had been easy. The wretched, hook-nosed creature lay without
+movement, buried under its purple beard.
+
+Suddenly, remembering the occasion of that “fracas,” Schomberg groaned
+with the pain as of a hot coal under his breastbone, and gave himself up
+to desolation. Ah, if he only had that girl with him he would have been
+masterful and resolute and fearless--fight twenty desperadoes--care
+for nobody on earth! Whereas the possession of Mrs. Schomberg was no
+incitement to a display of manly virtues. Instead of caring for no one,
+he felt that he cared for nothing. Life was a hollow sham; he wasn't
+going to risk a shot through his lungs or his liver in order to preserve
+its integrity. It had no savour--damn it!
+
+In his state of moral decomposition, Schomberg, master as he was of the
+art of hotel-keeping, and careful of giving no occasion for criticism
+to the powers regulating that branch of human activity, let things take
+their course; though he saw very well where that course was tending.
+It began first with a game or two after dinner--for the drinks,
+apparently--with some lingering customer, at one of the little tables
+ranged against the walls of the billiard-room. Schomberg detected the
+meaning of it at once. “That's what it was! This was what they were!”
+ And, moving about restlessly (at that time his morose silent period had
+set in), he cast sidelong looks at the game; but he said nothing. It was
+not worth while having a row with men who were so overbearing. Even when
+money appeared in connection with these postprandial games, into which
+more and more people were being drawn, he still refrained from raising
+the question; he was reluctant to draw unduly the attention of “plain
+Mr. Jones” and of the equivocal Ricardo, to his person. One evening,
+however, after the public rooms of the hotel had become empty, Schomberg
+made an attempt to grapple with the problem in an indirect way.
+
+In a distant corner the tired China boy dozed on his heels, his back
+against the wall. Mrs. Schomberg had disappeared, as usual, between ten
+and eleven. Schomberg walked about slowly in and out of the room and
+the veranda, thoughtful, waiting for his two guests to go to bed. Then
+suddenly he approached them, militarily, his chest thrown out, his voice
+curt and soldierly.
+
+“Hot night, gentlemen.”
+
+Mr Jones, lolling back idly in a chair, looked up. Ricardo, as idle, but
+more upright, made no sign.
+
+“Won't you have a drink with me before retiring?” went on Schomberg,
+sitting down by the little table.
+
+“By all means,” said Mr. Jones lazily.
+
+Ricardo showed his teeth in a strange, quick grin. Schomberg felt
+painfully how difficult it was to get in touch with these men, both
+so quiet, so deliberate, so menacingly unceremonious. He ordered the
+Chinaman to bring in the drinks. His purpose was to discover how long
+these guests intended to stay. Ricardo displayed no conversational vein,
+but Mr. Jones appeared communicative enough. His voice somehow matched
+his sunken eyes. It was hollow without being in the least mournful;
+it sounded distant, uninterested, as though he were speaking from the
+bottom of a well. Schomberg learned that he would have the privilege of
+lodging and boarding these gentlemen for at least a month more. He could
+not conceal his discomfiture at this piece of news.
+
+“What's the matter? Don't you like to have people in your house?” asked
+plain Mr. Jones languidly. “I should have thought the owner of a hotel
+would be pleased.”
+
+He lifted his delicate and beautifully pencilled eyebrows. Schomberg
+muttered something about the locality being dull and uninteresting to
+travellers--nothing going on--too quiet altogether, but he only provoked
+the declaration that quiet had its charm sometimes, and even dullness
+was welcome as a change.
+
+“We haven't had time to be dull for the last three years,” added plain
+Mr. Jones, his eyes fixed darkly on Schomberg whom he further more
+invited to have another drink, this time with him, and not to worry
+himself about things he did not understand; and especially not to be
+inhospitable--which in a hotel-keeper is highly unprofessional.
+
+“I don't understand,” grumbled Schomberg. “Oh, yes, I understand
+perfectly well. I--”
+
+“You are frightened,” interrupted Mr. Jones. “What is the matter?”
+
+“I don't want any scandal in my place. That's what's the matter.”
+
+Schomberg tried to face the situation bravely, but that steady, black
+stare affected him. And when he glanced aside uncomfortably, he met
+Ricardo's grin uncovering a lot of teeth, though the man seemed absorbed
+in his thoughts all the time.
+
+“And, moreover,” went on Mr. Jones in that distant tone of his, “you
+can't help yourself. Here we are and here we stay. Would you try to
+put us out? I dare say you could do it; but you couldn't do it without
+getting hurt--very badly hurt. We can promise him that, can't we,
+Martin?”
+
+The secretary retracted his lips and looked up sharply at Schomberg, as
+if only too anxious to leap upon him with teeth and claws.
+
+Schomberg managed to produce a deep laugh.
+
+“Ha! Ha! Ha!”
+
+Mr Jones closed his eyes wearily, as if the light hurt them, and looked
+remarkably like a corpse for a moment. This was bad enough; but when he
+opened them again, it was almost a worse trial for Schomberg's nerves.
+The spectral intensity of that glance, fixed on the hotel-keeper (and
+this was most frightful) without any definite expression, seemed to
+dissolve the last grain of resolution in his character.
+
+“You don't think, by any chance, that you have to do with ordinary
+people, do you?” inquired Mr. Jones, in his lifeless manner, which
+seemed to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave.
+
+“He's a gentleman,” testified Martin Ricardo with a sudden snap of the
+lips, after which his moustaches stirred by themselves in an odd, feline
+manner.
+
+“Oh, I wasn't thinking of that,” said plain Mr. Jones, while Schomberg,
+dumb and planted heavily in his chair looked from one to the other,
+leaning forward a little. “Of course I am that; but Ricardo attaches
+too much importance to a social advantage. What I mean, for instance, is
+that he, quiet and inoffensive as you see him sitting here, would think
+nothing of setting fire to this house of entertainment of yours. It
+would blaze like a box of matches. Think of that! It wouldn't advance
+your affairs much, would it?--whatever happened to us.”
+
+“Come, come gentlemen,” remonstrated Schomberg, in a murmur. “This is
+very wild talk!”
+
+“And you have been used to deal with tame people, haven't you? But we
+aren't tame. We once kept a whole angry town at bay for two days, and
+then we got away with our plunder. It was in Venezuela. Ask Martin
+here--he can tell you.”
+
+Instinctively Schomberg looked at Ricardo, who only passed the tip of
+his tongue over his lips with an uncanny sort of gusto, but did not
+offer to begin.
+
+“Well, perhaps it would be a rather long story,” Mr. Jones conceded
+after a short silence.
+
+“I have no desire to hear it, I am sure,” said Schomberg. “This isn't
+Venezuela. You wouldn't get away from here like that. But all this is
+silly talk of the worst sort. Do you mean to say you would make deadly
+trouble for the sake of a few guilders that you and that other”--eyeing
+Ricardo suspiciously, as one would look at a strange animal--“gentleman
+can win of an evening? Isn't as if my customers were a lot of rich men
+with pockets full of cash. I wonder you take so much trouble and risk
+for so little money.”
+
+Schomberg's argument was met by Mr. Jones's statement that one must do
+something to kill time. Killing time was not forbidden. For the rest,
+being in a communicative mood, Mr. Jones said languidly and in a voice
+indifferent, as if issuing from a tomb, that he depended on himself, as
+if the world were still one great, wild jungle without law. Martin was
+something like that, too--for reasons of his own.
+
+All these statements Ricardo confirmed by short, inhuman grins.
+Schomberg lowered his eyes, for the sight of these two men intimidated
+him; but he was losing patience.
+
+“Of course, I could see at once that you were two desperate
+characters--something like what you say. But what would you think if
+I told you that I am pretty near as desperate as you two gentlemen?
+'Here's that Schomberg has an easy time running his hotel,' people
+think; and yet it seems to me I would just as soon let you rip me open
+and burn the whole show as not. There!”
+
+A low whistle was heard. It came from Ricardo, and was derisive.
+Schomberg, breathing heavily, looked on the floor. He was really
+desperate. Mr. Jones remained languidly sceptical.
+
+“Tut, tut! You have a tolerable business. You are perfectly tame; you--”
+ He paused, then added in a tone of disgust: “You have a wife.”
+
+Schomberg tapped the floor angrily with his foot and uttered an
+indistinct, laughing curse.
+
+“What do you mean by flinging that damned trouble at my head?” he cried.
+“I wish you would carry her off with you some where to the devil! I
+wouldn't run after you.”
+
+The unexpected outburst affected Mr. Jones strangely. He had a horrified
+recoil, chair and all, as if Schomberg had thrust a wriggling viper in
+his face.
+
+“What's this infernal nonsense?” he muttered thickly. “What do you mean?
+How dare you?”
+
+Ricardo chuckled audibly.
+
+“I tell you I am desperate,” Schomberg repeated. “I am as desperate as
+any man ever was. I don't care a hang what happens to me!”
+
+“Well, then”--Mr. Jones began to speak with a quietly threatening
+effect, as if the common words of daily use had some other deadly
+meaning to his mind--“well, then, why should you make yourself
+ridiculously disagreeable to us? If you don't care, as you say, you
+might just as well let us have the key of that music-shed of yours for
+a quiet game; a modest bank--a dozen candles or so. It would be greatly
+appreciated by your clients, as far as I can judge from the way they
+betted on a game of ecarte I had with that fair, baby-faced man--what's
+his name? They just yearn for a modest bank. And I am afraid Martin here
+would take it badly if you objected; but of course you won't. Think of
+the calls for drinks!”
+
+Schomberg, raising his eyes, at last met the gleams in two dark caverns
+under Mr. Jones's devilish eyebrows, directed upon him impenetrably. He
+shuddered as if horrors worse than murder had been lurking there, and
+said, nodding towards Ricardo:
+
+“I dare say he wouldn't think twice about sticking me, if he had you at
+his back! I wish I had sunk my launch, and gone to the bottom myself
+in her, before I boarded the steamer you came by. Ah, well, I've been
+already living in hell for weeks, so you don't make much difference.
+I'll let you have the concert-room--and hang the consequences. But
+what about the boy on late duty? If he sees the cards and actual money
+passing, he will be sure to blab, and it will be all over the town in no
+time.”
+
+A ghastly smile stirred the lips of Mr. Jones.
+
+“Ah, I see you want to make a success of it. Very good. That's the way
+to get on. Don't let it disturb you. You chase all the Chinamen to bed
+early, and we'll get Pedro here every evening. He isn't the conventional
+waiter's cut, but he will do to run to and fro with the tray, while
+you sit here from nine to eleven serving out drinks and gathering the
+money.”
+
+“There will be three of them now,” thought the unlucky Schomberg.
+
+But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if
+a murderous one. There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny, no
+suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man, or of an
+insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and
+a subtle power of terror. Pedro with his fangs, his tangled beard, and
+queer stare of his little bear's eyes was, by comparison, delightfully
+natural. Besides, Schomberg could no longer help himself.
+
+“That will do very well,” he asserted mournfully. “But if you gentlemen,
+if you had turned up here only three months ago--ay, less than three
+months ago--you would have found somebody very different from what I am
+now to talk to you. It's true. What do you think of that?”
+
+“I scarcely know what to think. I should think it was a lie. You were
+probably as tame three months ago as you are now. You were born tame,
+like most people in the world.”
+
+Mr Jones got up spectrally, and Ricardo imitated him with a snarl and a
+stretch. Schomberg, in a brown study, went on, as if to himself:
+
+“There has been an orchestra here--eighteen women.”
+
+Mr Jones let out an exclamation of dismay, and looked about as if the
+walls around him and the whole house had been infected with plague. Then
+he became very angry, and swore violently at Schomberg for daring to
+bring up such subjects. The hotel-keeper was too much surprised to get
+up. He gazed from his chair at Mr. Jones's anger, which had nothing
+spectral in it but was not the more comprehensible for that.
+
+“What's the matter?” he stammered out. “What subject? Didn't you hear me
+say it was an orchestra? There's nothing wrong in that. Well, there was
+a girl amongst them--” Schomberg's eyes went stony; he clasped his hands
+in front of his breast with such force that his knuckles came out white.
+“Such a girl! Tame, am I? I would have kicked everything to pieces about
+me for her. And she, of course . . . I am in the prime of life . . .
+then a fellow bewitched her--a vagabond, a false, lying, swindling,
+underhand, stick-at-nothing brute. Ah!”
+
+His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out his
+arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury. The other
+two looked at his shaking back--the attenuated Mr. Jones with mingled
+scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of a cat which
+sees a piece of fish in the pantry out of reach. Schomberg flung himself
+backwards. He was dry-eyed, but he gulped as if swallowing sobs.
+
+“No wonder you can do with me what you like. You have no idea--just let
+me tell you of my trouble--”
+
+“I don't want to know anything of your beastly trouble,” said Mr. Jones,
+in his most lifelessly positive voice.
+
+He stretched forth an arresting hand, and, as Schomberg remained
+open-mouthed, he walked out of the billiard-room in all the uncanniness
+of his thin shanks. Ricardo followed at his leader's heels; but he
+showed his teeth to Schomberg over his shoulder.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+From that evening dated those mysterious but significant phenomena in
+Schomberg's establishment which attracted Captain Davidson's casual
+notice when he dropped in, placid yet astute, in order to return
+Mrs. Schomberg's Indian shawl. And strangely enough, they lasted
+some considerable time. It argued either honesty and bad luck or
+extraordinary restraint on the part of “plain Mr. Jones and Co.” in
+their discreet operations with cards.
+
+It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg's
+concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled up
+on and about the musicians' platform, and lighted at the other by two
+dozen candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with green
+cloth. In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned into a banker,
+faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned into a croupier.
+By contrast, the other faces round that table, anything between twenty
+and thirty, must have looked like collected samples of intensely
+artless, helpless humanity--pathetic in their innocent watch for the
+small turns of luck which indeed might have been serious enough for
+them. They had no notice to spare for the hairy Pedro, carrying a tray
+with the clumsiness of a creature caught in the woods and taught to walk
+on its hind legs.
+
+As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way. He remained in the
+billiard-room, serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an air
+of not seeing the growling monster, of not knowing where the drinks
+went, of ignoring that there was such a thing as a music-room over there
+under the trees within fifty yards of the hotel. He submitted himself
+to the situation with a low-spirited stoicism compounded of fear and
+resignation. Directly the party had broken up, (he could see dark
+shapes of the men drifting singly and in knots through the gate of
+the compound), he would withdraw out of sight behind a door not quite
+closed, in order to avoid meeting his two extraordinary guests; but he
+would watch through the crack their contrasted forms pass through the
+billiard-room and disappear on their way to bed. Then he would hear
+doors being slammed upstairs; and a profound silence would fall upon the
+whole house, upon his hotel appropriated, haunted by those insolently
+outspoken men provided with a whole armoury of weapons in their trunks.
+A profound silence. Schomberg sometimes could not resist the notion that
+he must be dreaming. Shuddering, he would pull himself together,
+and creep out, with movements strangely inappropriate to the
+Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve bearing by which he tried to keep up his
+self-respect before the world.
+
+A great loneliness oppressed him. One after another he would extinguish
+the lamps, and move softly towards his bedroom, where Mrs. Schomberg
+waited for him--no fit companion for a man of his ability and “in the
+prime of life.” But that life, alas, was blighted. He felt it; and never
+with such force as when on opening the door he perceived that woman
+sitting patiently in a chair, her toes peeping out under the edge of her
+night-dress, an amazingly small amount of hair on her head drooping
+on the long stalk of scraggy neck, with that everlasting scared grin
+showing a blue tooth and meaning nothing--not even real fear. For she
+was used to him.
+
+Sometimes he was tempted to screw the head off the stalk. He imagined
+himself doing it--with one hand, a twisting movement. Not seriously, of
+course. Just a simple indulgence for his exasperated feelings. He wasn't
+capable of murder. He was certain of that. And, remembering suddenly the
+plain speeches of Mr. Jones, he would think: “I suppose I am too tame
+for that”--quite unaware that he had murdered the poor woman morally
+years ago. He was too unintelligent to have the notion of such a crime.
+Her bodily presence was bitterly offensive, because of its contrast with
+a very different feminine image. And it was no use getting rid of her.
+She was a habit of years, and there would be nothing to put in her
+place. At any rate, he could talk to that idiot half the night if he
+chose.
+
+That night he had been vapouring before her as to his intention to face
+his two guests and, instead of that inspiration he needed, had merely
+received the usual warning: “Be careful, Wilhelm.” He did not want to be
+told to be careful by an imbecile female. What he needed was a pair of
+woman's arms which, flung round his neck, would brace him up for the
+encounter. Inspire him, he called it to himself.
+
+He lay awake a long time; and his slumbers, when they came, were
+unsatisfactory and short. The morning light had no joy for his eyes.
+He listened dismally to the movements in the house. The Chinamen were
+unlocking and flinging wide the doors of the public rooms which opened
+on the veranda. Horrors! Another poisoned day to get through somehow!
+The recollection of his resolve made him feel actually sick for a
+moment. First of all the lordly, abandoned attitudes of Mr. Jones
+disconcerted him. Then there was his contemptuous silence. Mr. Jones
+never addressed himself to Schomberg with any general remarks, never
+opened his lips to him unless to say “Good morning”--two simple words
+which, uttered by that man, seemed a mockery of a threatening character.
+And, lastly, it was not a frank physical fear he inspired--for as to
+that, even a cornered rat will fight--but a superstitious shrinking awe,
+something like an invincible repugnance to seek speech with a wicked
+ghost. That it was a daylight ghost surprisingly angular in his
+attitudes, and for the most part spread out on three chairs, did
+not make it any easier. Daylight only made him a more weird, a more
+disturbing and unlawful apparition. Strangely enough in the evening when
+he came out of his mute supineness, this unearthly side of him was less
+obtrusive. At the gaming-table, when actually handling the cards, it was
+probably sunk quite out of sight; but Schomberg, having made up his mind
+in ostrich-like fashion to ignore what was going on, never entered the
+desecrated music-room. He had never seen Mr. Jones in the exercise of
+his vocation--or perhaps it was only his trade.
+
+“I will speak to him tonight,” Schomberg said to himself, while he drank
+his morning tea, in pyjamas, on the veranda, before the rising sun had
+topped the trees of the compound, and while the undried dew still
+lay silvery on the grass, sparkled on the blossoms of the central
+flower-bed, and darkened the yellow gravel of the drive. “That's what
+I'll do. I won't keep out of sight tonight. I shall come out and catch
+him as he goes to bed carrying the cash-box.”
+
+After all, what was the fellow but a common desperado? Murderous? Oh,
+yes; murderous enough, perhaps--and the muscles of Schomberg's stomach
+had a quivering contraction under his airy attire. But even a common
+desperado would think twice or, more likely, a hundred times, before
+openly murdering an inoffensive citizen in a civilized, European-ruled
+town. He jerked his shoulders. Of course! He shuddered again, and
+paddled back to his room to dress himself. His mind was made up, and he
+would think no more about it; but still he had his doubts. They grew and
+unfolded themselves with the progress of the day, as some plants do. At
+times they made him perspire more than usual, and they did away with
+the possibility of his afternoon siesta. After turning over on his couch
+more than a dozen times, he gave up this mockery of repose, got up, and
+went downstairs.
+
+It was between three and four o'clock, the hour of profound peace. The
+very flowers seemed to doze on their stalks set with sleepy leaves. Not
+even the air stirred, for the sea-breeze was not due till later. The
+servants were out of sight, catching naps in the shade somewhere behind
+the house. Mrs. Schomberg in a dim up-stair room with closed jalousies,
+was elaborating those two long pendant ringlets which were such a
+feature of her hairdressing for her afternoon duties. At that time no
+customers ever troubled the repose of the establishment. Wandering about
+his premises in profound solitude, Schomberg recoiled at the door of the
+billiard-room, as if he had seen a snake in his path. All alone with the
+billiards, the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs, Mr.
+Secretary Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning rapidity
+something that looked like tricks with his own personal pack of cards,
+which he always carried about in his pocket. Schomberg would have backed
+out quietly if Ricardo had not turned his head. Having been seen, the
+hotel-keeper elected to walk in as the lesser risk of the two. The
+consciousness of his inwardly abject attitude towards these men caused
+him always to throw his chest out and assume a severe expression.
+Ricardo watched his approach, clasping the pack of cards in both hands.
+
+“You want something, perhaps?” suggested Schomberg in his
+lieutenant-of-the-Reserve voice.
+
+Ricardo shook his head in silence and looked expectant. With him
+Schomberg exchanged at least twenty words every day. He was infinitely
+more communicative than his patron. At times he looked very much like
+an ordinary human being of his class; and he seemed to be in an amiable
+mood at that moment. Suddenly spreading some ten cards face downward in
+the form of a fan, he thrust them towards Schomberg.
+
+“Come, man, take one quick!”
+
+Schomberg was so surprised that he took one hurriedly, after a very
+perceptible start. The eyes of Martin Ricardo gleamed phosphorescent
+in the half-light of the room screened from the heat and glare of the
+tropics.
+
+“That's the king of hearts you've got,” he chuckled, showing his teeth
+in a quick flash.
+
+Schomberg, after looking at the card, admitted that it was, and laid it
+down on the table.
+
+“I can make you take any card I like nine times out of ten,” exulted the
+secretary, with a strange curl of his lips and a green flicker in his
+raised eyes.
+
+Schomberg looked down at him dumbly. For a few seconds neither of them
+stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his fingers,
+let the whole pack fall on the table. Schomberg sat down. He sat down
+because of the faintness in his legs, and for no other reason. His mouth
+was dry. Having sat down, he felt that he must speak. He squared his
+shoulders in parade style.
+
+“You are pretty good at that sort of thing,” he said.
+
+“Practice makes perfect,” replied the secretary.
+
+His precarious amiability made it impossible for Schomberg to get away.
+Thus, from his very timidity, the hotel-keeper found himself engaged
+in a conversation the thought of which filled him with apprehension. It
+must be said, in justice to Schomberg, that he concealed his funk very
+creditably. The habit of throwing out his chest and speaking in a severe
+voice stood him in good stead. With him, too, practice made perfect; and
+he would probably have kept it up to the end, to the very last moment,
+to the ultimate instant of breaking strain which would leave him
+grovelling on the floor. To add to his secret trouble, he was at a loss
+what to say. He found nothing else but the remark:
+
+“I suppose you are fond of cards.”
+
+“What would you expect?” asked Ricardo in a simple, philosophical tone.
+“It is likely I should not be?” Then, with sudden fire: “Fond of cards?
+Ay, passionately!”
+
+The effect of this outburst was augmented by the quiet lowering of the
+eyelids, by a reserved pause as though this had been a confession of
+another kind of love. Schomberg cudgelled his brains for a new topic,
+but he could not find one. His usual scandalous gossip would not serve
+this turn. That desperado did not know anyone anywhere within a thousand
+miles. Schomberg was almost compelled to keep to the subject.
+
+“I suppose you've always been so--from your early youth.”
+
+Ricardo's eyes remained cast down. His fingers toyed absently with the
+pack on the table.
+
+“I don't know that it was so early. I first got in the way of it playing
+for tobacco--in forecastles of ships, you know--common sailor games. We
+used to spend whole watches below at it, round a chest, under a
+slush lamp. We would hardly spare the time to get a bite of salt
+horse--neither eat nor sleep. We could hardly stand when the watches
+were mustered on deck. Talk of gambling!” He dropped the reminiscent
+tone to add the information, “I was bred to the sea from a boy, you
+know.”
+
+Schomberg had fallen into a reverie, but without losing the sense of
+impending calamity. The next words he heard were:
+
+“I got on all right at sea, too. Worked up to be mate. I was mate of a
+schooner--a yacht, you might call her--a special good berth too, in the
+Gulf of Mexico, a soft job that you don't run across more than once in a
+lifetime. Yes, I was mate of her when I left the sea to follow him.”
+
+Ricardo tossed up his chin to indicate the room above; from which
+Schomberg, his wits painfully aroused by this reminder of Mr. Jones's
+existence, concluded that the latter had withdrawn into his bedroom.
+Ricardo, observing him from under lowered eyelids, went on:
+
+“It so happened that we were shipmates.”
+
+“Mr Jones, you mean? Is he a sailor too?”
+
+Ricardo raised his eyelids at that.
+
+“He's no more Mr. Jones than you are,” he said with obvious pride. “He a
+sailor! That just shows your ignorance. But there! A foreigner can't be
+expected to know any better. I am an Englishman, and I know a gentleman
+at sight. I should know one drunk, in the gutter, in jail, under the
+gallows. There's a something--it isn't exactly the appearance, it's
+a--no use me trying to tell you. You ain't an Englishman, and if you
+were, you wouldn't need to be told.”
+
+An unsuspected stream of loquacity had broken its dam somewhere deep
+within the man, had diluted his fiery blood and softened his pitiless
+fibre. Schomberg experienced mingled relief and apprehension, as if
+suddenly an enormous savage cat had begun to wind itself about his legs
+in inexplicable friendliness. No prudent man under such circumstances
+would dare to stir. Schomberg didn't stir. Ricardo assumed an easy
+attitude, with an elbow on the table. Schomberg squared his shoulders
+afresh.
+
+“I was employed, in that there yacht--schooner, whatever you call it--by
+ten gentlemen at once. That surprises you, eh? Yes, yes, ten. Leastwise
+there were nine of them gents good enough in their way, and one
+downright gentleman, and that was . . .”
+
+Ricardo gave another upward jerk of his chin as much as to say: He! The
+only one.
+
+“And no mistake,” he went on. “I spotted him from the first day. How?
+Why? Ay, you may ask. Hadn't seen that many gentlemen in my life. Well,
+somehow I did. If you were an Englishman, you would--”
+
+“What was your yacht?” Schomberg interrupted as impatiently as he dared;
+for this harping on nationality jarred on his already tried nerves.
+“What was the game?”
+
+“You have a headpiece on you! Game! 'Xactly. That's what it was--the
+sort of silliness gentlemen will get up among themselves to play at
+adventure. A treasure-hunting expedition. Each of them put down so much
+money, you understand, to buy the schooner. Their agent in the city
+engaged me and the skipper. The greatest secrecy and all that. I reckon
+he had a twinkle in his eye all the time--and no mistake. But that
+wasn't our business. Let them bust their money as they like. The pity of
+it was that so little of it came our way. Just fair pay and no more. And
+damn any pay, much or little, anyhow--that's what I say!”
+
+He blinked his eyes greenishly in the dim light. The heat seemed to
+have stilled everything in the world but his voice. He swore at large,
+abundantly, in snarling undertones, it was impossible to say why, then
+calmed down as inexplicably, and went on, as a sailor yarns.
+
+“At first there were only nine of them adventurous sparks, then, just a
+day or two before the sailing date, he turned up. Heard of it somehow,
+somewhere--I would say from some woman, if I didn't know him as I do. He
+would give any woman a ten-mile berth. He can't stand them. Or maybe in
+a flash bar. Or maybe in one of them grand clubs in Pall Mall. Anyway,
+the agent netted him in all right--cash down, and only about four and
+twenty hours for him to get ready; but he didn't miss his ship. Not he!
+You might have called it a pier-head jump--for a gentleman. I saw him
+come along. Know the West India Docks, eh?”
+
+Schomberg did not know the West India Docks. Ricardo looked at him
+pensively for a while, and then continued, as if such ignorance had to
+be disregarded.
+
+“Our tug was already alongside. Two loafers were carrying his dunnage
+behind him. I told the dockman at our moorings to keep all fast for a
+minute. The gangway was down already; but he made nothing of it. Up he
+jumps, one leap, swings his long legs over the rail, and there he is
+on board. They pass up his swell dunnage, and he puts his hand in his
+trousers pocket and throws all his small change on the wharf for them
+chaps to pick up. They were still promenading that wharf on all fours
+when we cast off. It was only then that he looked at me--quietly, you
+know; in a slow way. He wasn't so thin then as he is now; but I noticed
+he wasn't so young as he looked--not by a long chalk. He seemed to touch
+me inside somewhere. I went away pretty quick from there; I was wanted
+forward anyhow. I wasn't frightened. What should I be frightened for? I
+only felt touched--on the very spot. But Jee-miny, if anybody had told
+me we should be partners before the year was out--well, I would have--”
+
+He swore a variety of strange oaths, some common, others quaintly
+horrible to Schomberg's ears, and all mere innocent exclamations of
+wonder at the shifts and changes of human fortune. Schomberg moved
+slightly in his chair. But the admirer and partner of “plain Mr. Jones”
+ seemed to have forgotten Schomberg's existence for the moment. The
+stream of ingenuous blasphemy--some of it in bad Spanish--had run dry,
+and Martin Ricardo, connoisseur in gentlemen, sat dumb with a stony gaze
+as if still marvelling inwardly at the amazing elections, conjunctions,
+and associations of events which influence man's pilgrimage on this
+earth.
+
+At last Schomberg spoke tentatively:
+
+“And so the--the gentleman, up there, talked you over into leaving a
+good berth?”
+
+Ricardo started.
+
+“Talked me over! Didn't need to talk me over. Just beckoned to me, and
+that was enough. By that time we were in the Gulf of Mexico. One night
+we were lying at anchor, close to a dry sandbank--to this day I am not
+sure where it was--off the Colombian coast or thereabouts. We were
+to start digging the next morning, and all hands had turned in early,
+expecting a hard day with the shovels. Up he comes, and in his quiet,
+tired way of speaking--you can tell a gentleman by that as much as by
+anything else almost--up he comes behind me and says, just like that
+into my ear, in a manner: 'Well, what do you think of our treasure hunt
+now?'
+
+“I didn't even turn my head; 'xactly as I stood, I remained, and I spoke
+no louder than himself:
+
+“'If you want to know, sir, it's nothing but just damned tom-foolery.'
+
+“We had, of course, been having short talks together at one time or
+another during the passage. I dare say he had read me like a book. There
+ain't much to me, except that I have never been tame, even when walking
+the pavement and cracking jokes and standing drinks to chums--ay, and to
+strangers, too. I would watch them lifting their elbows at my expense,
+or splitting their side at my fun--I can be funny when I like, you bet!”
+
+A pause for self-complacent contemplation of his own fun and generosity
+checked the flow of Ricardo's speech. Schomberg was concerned to keep
+within bounds the enlargement of his eyes, which he seemed to feel
+growing bigger in his head.
+
+“Yes, yes,” he whispered hastily.
+
+“I would watch them and think: 'You boys don't know who I am. If you
+did--!' With girls, too. Once I was courting a girl. I used to kiss her
+behind the ear and say to myself: 'If you only knew who's kissing you,
+my dear, you would scream and bolt!' Ha! ha! Not that I wanted to
+do them any harm; but I felt the power in myself. Now, here we sit,
+friendly like, and that's all right. You aren't in my way. But I am not
+friendly to you. I just don't care. Some men do say that; but I really
+don't. You are no more to me one way or another than that fly there.
+Just so. I'd squash you or leave you alone. I don't care what I do.”
+
+If real force of character consists in overcoming our sudden weaknesses,
+Schomberg displayed plenty of that quality. At the mention of the fly,
+he re-enforced the severe dignity of his attitude as one inflates a
+collapsing toy balloon with a great effort of breath. The easy-going,
+relaxed attitude of Ricardo was really appalling.
+
+“That's so,” he went on. “I am that sort of fellow. You wouldn't think
+it, would you? No. You have to be told. So I am telling you, and I dare
+say you only half believe it. But you can't say to yourself that I am
+drunk, stare at me as you may. I haven't had anything stronger than a
+glass of iced water all day. Takes a real gentleman to see through a
+fellow. Oh, yes--he spotted me. I told you we had a few talks at sea
+about one thing or another. And I used to watch him down the skylight,
+playing cards in the cuddy with the others. They had to pass the time
+away somehow. By the same token he caught me at it once, and it was then
+that I told him I was fond of cards--and generally lucky in gambling,
+too. Yes, he had sized me up. Why not? A gentleman's just like any other
+man--and something more.”
+
+It flashed through Schomberg's mind: that these two were indeed well
+matched in their enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in different
+disguises.
+
+“Says he to me”--Ricardo started again in a gossiping manner--'I'm
+packed up. It's about time to go, Martin.'
+
+“It was the first time he called me Martin. Says I:
+
+“'Is that it, sir?'
+
+“'You didn't think I was after that sort of treasure, did you? I wanted
+to clear out from home quietly. It's a pretty expensive way of getting a
+passage across, but it has served my turn.'
+
+“I let him know very soon that I was game for anything, from pitch and
+toss to wilful murder, in his company.
+
+“'Wilful murder?' says he in his quiet way. 'What the deuce is that?
+What are you talking about? People do get killed sometimes when they get
+in one's way, but that's self-defence--you understand?'
+
+“I told him I did. And then I said I would run below for a minute, to
+ram a few of my things into a sailor's bag I had. I've never cared for
+a lot of dunnage; I believed in going about flying light when I was at
+sea. I came back and found him strolling up and down the deck, as if
+he were taking a breath of fresh air before turning in, like any other
+evening.
+
+“'Ready?'
+
+“'Yes, sir.'
+
+“He didn't even look at me. We had had a boat in the water astern ever
+since we came to anchor in the afternoon. He throws the stump of his
+cigar overboard.
+
+“'Can you get the captain out on deck?' he asks.
+
+“That was the last thing in the world I should have thought of doing. I
+lost my tongue for a moment.
+
+“'I can try,' says I.
+
+“'Well, then, I am going below. You get him up and keep him with you
+till I come back on deck. Mind! Don't let him go below till I return.'
+
+“I could not help asking why he told me to rouse a sleeping man, when
+we wanted everybody on board to sleep sweetly till we got clear of the
+schooner. He laughs a little and says that I didn't see all the bearings
+of this business.
+
+“'Mind,' he says, 'don't let him leave you till you see me come up
+again.' He puts his eyes close to mine. 'Keep him with you at all
+costs.'
+
+“'And that means?' says I.
+
+“'All costs to him--by every possible or impossible means. I don't want
+to be interrupted in my business down below. He would give me lots
+of trouble. I take you with me to save myself trouble in various
+circumstances; and you've got to enter on your work right away.'
+
+“'Just so, sir,' says I; and he slips down the companion.
+
+“With a gentleman you know at once where you are; but it was a ticklish
+job. The skipper was nothing to me one way or another, any more than you
+are at this moment, Mr. Schomberg. You may light your cigar or blow your
+brains out this minute, and I don't care a hang which you do, both or
+neither. To bring the skipper up was easy enough. I had only to stamp on
+the deck a few times over his head. I stamped hard. But how to keep him
+up when he got there?
+
+“'Anything the matter; Mr. Ricardo?' I heard his voice behind me.
+
+“There he was, and I hadn't thought of anything to say to him; so I
+didn't turn round. The moonlight was brighter than many a day I could
+remember in the North Sea.
+
+“'Why did you call me? What are you staring at out there, Mr. Ricardo?'
+
+“He was deceived by my keeping my back to him. I wasn't staring at
+anything, but his mistake gave me a notion.
+
+“'I am staring at something that looks like a canoe over there,' I said
+very slowly.
+
+“The skipper got concerned at once. It wasn't any danger from the
+inhabitants, whoever they were.
+
+“'Oh, hang it!' says he. 'That's very unfortunate.' He had hoped that
+the schooner being on the coast would not get known so very soon.
+'Dashed awkward, with the business we've got in hand, to have a lot of
+niggers watching operations. But are you certain this is a canoe?'
+
+“'It may be a drift-log,' I said; 'but I thought you had better have a
+look with your own eyes. You may make it out better than I can.'
+
+“His eyes weren't anything as good as mine. But he says:
+
+“'Certainly. Certainly. You did quite right.'
+
+“And it's a fact I had seen some drift-logs at sunset. I saw what they
+were then and didn't trouble my head about them, forgot all about it
+till that very moment. Nothing strange in seeing drift-logs off a coast
+like that; and I'm hanged if the skipper didn't make one out in the
+wake of the moon. Strange what a little thing a man's life hangs on
+sometimes--a single word! Here you are, sitting unsuspicious before me,
+and you may let out something unbeknown to you that would settle your
+hash. Not that I have any ill-feeling. I have no feelings. If the
+skipper had said, 'O, bosh!' and had turned his back on me, he would not
+have gone three steps towards his bed; but he stood there and stared.
+And now the job was to get him off the deck when he was no longer wanted
+there.
+
+“'We are just trying to make out if that object there is a canoe or a
+log,' says he to Mr. Jones.
+
+“Mr Jones had come up, lounging as carelessly as when he went below.
+While the skipper was jawing about boats and drifting logs. I asked by
+signs, from behind, if I hadn't better knock him on the head and drop
+him quietly overboard. The night was slipping by, and we had to go. It
+couldn't be put off till next night no more. No. No more. And do you
+know why?”
+
+Schomberg made a slight negative sign with his head. This direct appeal
+annoyed him, jarred on the induced quietude of a great talker forced
+into the part of a listener and sunk in it as a man sinks into slumber.
+Mr. Ricardo struck a note of scorn.
+
+“Don't know why? Can't you guess? No? Because the boss had got hold of
+the skipper's cash-box by then. See?”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+ “A common thief!”
+
+Schomberg bit his tongue just too late, and woke up completely as he saw
+Ricardo retract his lips in a cat-like grin; but the companion of “plain
+Mr. Jones” didn't alter his comfortable, gossiping attitude.
+
+“Garn! What if he did want to see his money back, like any tame
+shopkeeper, hash-seller, gin-slinger, or ink-spewer does? Fancy a mud
+turtle like you trying to pass an opinion on a gentleman! A gentleman
+isn't to be sized up so easily. Even I ain't up to it sometimes. For
+instance, that night, all he did was to waggle his finger at me. The
+skipper stops his silly chatter, surprised.
+
+“'Eh? What's the matter?' asks he.
+
+“The matter! It was his reprieve--that's what was the matter.
+
+“'O, nothing, nothing,' says my gentleman. 'You are perfectly right. A
+log--nothing but a log.'
+
+“Ha, ha! Reprieve, I call it, because if the skipper had gone on with
+his silly argument much longer he would have had to be knocked out
+of the way. I could hardly hold myself in on account of the precious
+minutes. However, his guardian angel put it into his head to shut up and
+go back to his bed. I was ramping mad about the lost time.”
+
+“'Why didn't you let me give him one on his silly coconut sir?' I asks.
+
+“'No ferocity, no ferocity,' he says, raising his finger at me as calm
+as you please.
+
+“You can't tell how a gentleman takes that sort of thing. They don't
+lose their temper. It's bad form. You'll never see him lose his
+temper--not for anybody to see anyhow. Ferocity ain't good form,
+either--that much I've learned by this time, and more, too. I've had
+that schooling that you couldn't tell by my face if I meant to rip you
+up the next minute--as of course I could do in less than a jiffy. I have
+a knife up the leg of my trousers.”
+
+“You haven't!” exclaimed Schomberg incredulously.
+
+Mr Ricardo was as quick as lightning in changing his lounging, idle
+attitude for a stooping position, and exhibiting the weapon with one
+jerk at the left leg of his trousers. Schomberg had just a view of it,
+strapped to a very hairy limb, when Mr. Ricardo, jumping up, stamped his
+foot to get the trouser-leg down, and resumed his careless pose with one
+elbow on the table.
+
+“It's a more handy way to carry a tool than you would think,” he went
+on, gazing abstractedly into Schomberg's wide-open eyes. “Suppose some
+little difference comes up during a game. Well, you stoop to pick up a
+dropped card, and when you come up--there you are ready to strike, or
+with the thing up you sleeve ready to throw. Or you just dodge under the
+table when there's some shooting coming. You wouldn't believe the damage
+a fellow with a knife under the table can do to ill-conditioned skunks
+that want to raise trouble, before they begin to understand what the
+screaming's about, and make a bolt--those that can, that is.”
+
+The roses of Schomberg's cheek at the root of his chestnut beard faded
+perceptibly. Ricardo chuckled faintly.
+
+“But no ferocity--no ferocity! A gentleman knows. What's the good of
+getting yourself into a state? And no shirking necessity, either. No
+gentleman ever shirks. What I learn I don't forget. Why! We gambled
+on the plains, with a damn lot of cattlemen in ranches; played fair,
+mind--and then had to fight for our winnings afterwards as often as not.
+We've gambled on the hills and in the valleys and on the sea-shore, and
+out of sight of land--mostly fair. Generally it's good enough. We began
+in Nicaragua first, after we left that schooner and her fool errand.
+There were one hundred and twenty-seven sovereigns and some Mexican
+dollars in that skipper's cash-box. Hardly enough to knock a man on the
+head for from behind, I must confess; but that the skipper had a narrow
+escape the governor himself could not deny afterwards.
+
+“'Do you want me to understand, sir, that you mind there being one life
+more or less on this earth?' I asked him, a few hours after we got away.
+
+“'Certainly not,' says he.
+
+“'Well, then, why did you stop me?'
+
+“'There's a proper way of doing things. You'll have to learn to be
+correct. There's also unnecessary exertion. That must be avoided,
+too--if only for the look of the thing.' A gentleman's way of putting
+things to you--and no mistake!
+
+“At sunrise we got into a creek, to lie hidden in case the treasure hunt
+party had a mind to take a spell hunting for us. And dash me if they
+didn't! We saw the schooner away out, running to leeward, with ten pairs
+of binoculars sweeping the sea, no doubt on all sides. I advised the
+governor to give her time to beat back again before we made a start. So
+we stayed up that creek something like ten days, as snug as can be. On
+the seventh day we had to kill a man, though--the brother of this Pedro
+here. They were alligator-hunters, right enough. We got our lodgings in
+their hut. Neither the boss nor I could habla Espanol--speak Spanish,
+you know--much then. Dry bank, nice shade, jolly hammocks, fresh fish,
+good game, everything lovely. The governor chucked them a few dollars to
+begin with; but it was like boarding with a pair of savage apes, anyhow.
+By and by we noticed them talking a lot together. They had twigged
+the cash-box, and the leather portmanteaus, and my bag--a jolly lot of
+plunder to look at. They must have been saying to each other:
+
+“'No one's ever likely to come looking for these two fellows, who seem
+to have fallen from the moon. Let's cut their throats.'
+
+“Why, of course! Clear as daylight. I didn't need to spy one of them
+sharpening a devilish long knife behind some bushes, while glancing
+right and left with his wild eyes, to know what was in the wind. Pedro
+was standing by, trying the edge of another long knife. They thought we
+were away on our lookout at the mouth of the river, as was usual with us
+during the day. Not that we expected to see much of the schooner, but
+it was just as well to make certain, if possible; and then it was cooler
+out of the woods, in the breeze. Well, the governor was there right
+enough, lying comfortable on a rug, where he could watch the offing, but
+I had gone back to the hut to get a chew of tobacco out of my bag. I had
+not broken myself of the habit then, and I couldn't be happy unless I
+had a lump as big as a baby's fist in my cheek.”
+
+At the cannibalistic comparison, Schomberg muttered a faint, sickly
+“don't.” Ricardo hitched himself up in his seat and glanced down his
+outstretched legs complacently.
+
+“I am tolerably light on my feet, as a general thing,” he went on. “Dash
+me if I don't think I could drop a pinch of salt on a sparrow's tail,
+if I tried. Anyhow, they didn't hear me. I watched them two brown, hairy
+brutes not ten yards off. All they had on was white linen drawers rolled
+up on their thighs. Not a word they said to each other. Antonio was
+down on his thick hams, busy rubbing a knife on a flat stone; Pedro was
+leaning against a small tree and passing his thumb along the edge of his
+blade. I got away quieter than a mouse, you bet.”
+
+“I didn't say anything to the boss then. He was leaning on his elbow
+on his rug, and didn't seem to want to be spoken to. He's like
+that--sometimes that familiar you might think he would eat out of your
+hand, and at others he would snub you sharper than a devil--but always
+quiet. Perfect gentleman, I tell you. I didn't bother him, then; but
+I wasn't likely to forget them two fellows, so businesslike with their
+knives. At that time we had only one revolver between us two--the
+governor's six-shooter, but loaded only in five chambers; and we had no
+more cartridges. He had left the box behind in a drawer in his cabin.
+Awkward! I had nothing but an old clasp-knife--no good at all for
+anything serious.
+
+“In the evening we four sat round a bit of fire outside the
+sleeping-shed, eating broiled fish off plantain leaves, with roast yams
+for bread--the usual thing. The governor and I were on one side, and
+these two beauties cross-legged on the other, grunting a word or two
+to each other, now and then, hardly human speech at all, and their eyes
+down, fast on the ground. For the last three days we couldn't get them
+to look us in the face. Presently I began to talk to the boss quietly,
+just as I am talking to you now, careless like, and I told him all I had
+observed. He goes on picking up pieces of fish and putting them into his
+mouth as calm as anything. It's a pleasure to have anything to do with a
+gentleman. Never looked across at them once.
+
+“'And now,' says I, yawning on purpose, 'we've got to stand watch at
+night, turn about, and keep our eyes skinned all day, too, and mind we
+don't get jumped upon suddenly.'
+
+“'It's perfectly intolerable,' says the governor. 'And you with no
+weapon of any sort!'
+
+“'I mean to stick pretty close to you, sir, from this on, if you don't
+mind,' says I.
+
+“He just nods the least bit, wipes his fingers on the plantain leaf,
+puts his hand behind his back, as if to help himself to rise from the
+ground, snatches his revolver from under his jacket and plugs a bullet
+plumb centre into Mr. Antonio's chest. See what it is to have to do with
+a gentleman. No confounded fuss, and things done out of hand. But he
+might have tipped me a wink or something. I nearly jumped out of my
+skin. Scared ain't in it! I didn't even know who had fired. Everything
+had been so still just before that the bang of the shot seemed
+the loudest noise I had ever heard. The honourable Antonio pitches
+forward--they always do, towards the shot; you must have noticed that
+yourself--yes, he pitches forward on to the embers, and all that lot of
+hair on his face and head flashes up like a pinch of gunpowder. Greasy,
+I expect; always scraping the fat off them alligators' hides--”
+
+“Look here,” exclaimed Schomberg violently, as if trying to burst some
+invisible bonds, “do you mean to say that all this happened?”
+
+“No,” said Ricardo coolly. “I am making it all up as I go along, just to
+help you through the hottest part of the afternoon. So down he pitches
+his nose on the red embers, and up jumps our handsome Pedro and I at the
+same time, like two Jacks-in-the-box. He starts to bolt away, with his
+head over his shoulder, and I, hardly knowing what I was doing, spring
+on his back. I had the sense to get my hands round his neck at once, and
+it's about all I could do to lock my fingers tight under his jaw. You
+saw the beauty's neck, didn't you? Hard as iron, too. Down we both went.
+Seeing this the governor puts his revolver in his pocket.
+
+“'Tie his legs together, sir,' I yell. 'I'm trying to strangle him.'
+
+“There was a lot of their fibre-lines lying about. I gave him a last
+squeeze and then got up.
+
+“'I might have shot you,' says the governor, quite concerned.
+
+“'But you are glad to have saved a cartridge, sir,' I tell him.
+
+“My jump did save it. It wouldn't have done to let him get away in
+the dark like that, and have the beauty dodging around in the bushes,
+perhaps, with the rusty flint-lock gun they had. The governor owned up
+that the jump was the correct thing.
+
+“'But he isn't dead,' says he, bending over him.
+
+“Might as well hope to strangle an ox. We made haste to tie his elbows
+back, and then, before he came to himself, we dragged him to a small
+tree, sat him up, and bound him to it, not by the waist but by the
+neck--some twenty turns of small line round his throat and the trunk,
+finished off with a reef-knot under his ear. Next thing we did was to
+attend to the honourable Antonio, who was making a great smell frizzling
+his face on the red coals. We pushed and rolled him into the creek, and
+left the rest to the alligators.
+
+“I was tired. That little scrap took it out of me something awful. The
+governor hadn't turned a hair. That's where a gentleman has the pull
+of you. He don't get excited. No gentleman does--or hardly ever. I fell
+asleep all of a sudden and left him smoking by the fire I had made
+up, his railway rug round his legs, as calm as if he were sitting in a
+first-class carriage. We hardly spoke ten words to each other after
+it was over, and from that day to this we have never talked of the
+business. I wouldn't have known he remembered it if he hadn't alluded to
+it when talking with you the other day--you know, with regard to Pedro.”
+
+“It surprised you, didn't it? That's why I am giving you this yarn of
+how he came to be with us, like a sort of dog--dashed sight more useful,
+though. You know how he can trot around with trays? Well, he could bring
+down an ox with his fist, at a word from the boss, just as cleverly. And
+fond of the governor! Oh, my word! More than any dog is of any man.”
+
+Schomberg squared his chest.
+
+“Oh, and that's one of the things I wanted to mention to Mr. Jones,” he
+said. “It's unpleasant to have that fellow round the house so early. He
+sits on the stairs at the back for hours before he is needed here, and
+frightens people so that the service suffers. The Chinamen--”
+
+Ricardo nodded and raised his hand.
+
+“When I first saw him he was fit to frighten a grizzly bear, let alone
+a Chinaman. He's become civilized now to what he once was. Well, that
+morning, first thing on opening my eyes, I saw him sitting there, tied
+up by the neck to the tree. He was blinking. We spent the day watching
+the sea, and we actually made out the schooner working to windward,
+which showed that she had given us up. Good! When the sun rose again, I
+took a squint at our Pedro. He wasn't blinking. He was rolling his eyes,
+all white one minute and black the next, and his tongue was hanging out
+a yard. Being tied up short by the neck like this would daunt the arch
+devil himself--in time--in time, mind! I don't know but that even a
+real gentleman would find it difficult to keep a stiff lip to the end.
+Presently we went to work getting our boat ready. I was busying myself
+setting up the mast, when the governor passes the remark:
+
+“'I think he wants to say something.'
+
+“I had heard a sort of croaking going on for some time, only I wouldn't
+take any notice; but then I got out of the boat and went up to him, with
+some water. His eyes were red--red and black and half out of his
+head. He drank all the water I gave him, but he hadn't much to say for
+himself. I walked back to the governor.
+
+“'He asks for a bullet in his head before we go,' I said. I wasn't at
+all pleased.
+
+“'Oh, that's out of the question altogether,' says the governor.
+
+“He was right there. Only four shots left, and ninety miles of wild
+coast to put behind us before coming to the first place where you could
+expect to buy revolver cartridges.
+
+“'Anyhow,' I tells him, 'he wants to be killed some way or other, as a
+favour.'
+
+“And then I go on setting up the boat's mast. I didn't care much for the
+notion of butchering a man bound hand and foot and fastened by the neck
+besides. I had a knife then--the honourable Antonio's knife; and that
+knife is this knife.
+
+“Ricardo gave his leg a resounding slap.
+
+“First spoil in my new life,” he went on with harsh joviality. “The
+dodge of carrying it down there I learned later. I carried it stuck in
+my belt that day. No, I hadn't much stomach for the job; but when you
+work with a gentleman of the real right sort you may depend on your
+feelings being seen through your skin. Says the governor suddenly:
+
+“'It may even be looked upon as his right'--you hear a gentleman
+speaking there?--'but what do you think of taking him with us in the
+boat?'
+
+“And the governor starts arguing that the beggar would be useful in
+working our way along the coast. We could get rid of him before coming
+to the first place that was a little civilized. I didn't want much
+talking over. Out I scrambled from the boat.
+
+“'Ay, but will he be manageable, sir?'
+
+“'Oh, yes. He's daunted. Go on, cut him loose--I take the
+responsibility.'
+
+“'Right you are, sir.'
+
+“He sees me come along smartly with his brother's knife in my hand--I
+wasn't thinking how it looked from his side of the fence, you know--and
+jiminy, it nearly killed him! He stared like a crazed bullock and began
+to sweat and twitch all over, something amazing. I was so surprised,
+that I stopped to look at him. The drops were pouring over his eyebrows,
+down his beard, off his nose--and he gurgled. Then it struck me that he
+couldn't see what was in my mind. By favour or by right he didn't like
+to die when it came to it; not in that way, anyhow. When I stepped round
+to get at the lashing, he let out a sort of soft bellow. Thought I was
+going to stick him from behind, I guess. I cut all the turns with one
+slash, and he went over on his side, flop, and started kicking with his
+tied legs. Laugh! I don't know what there was so funny about it, but I
+fairly shouted. What between my laughing and his wriggling, I had a job
+in cutting him free. As soon as he could feel his limbs he makes for the
+bank, where the governor was standing, crawls up to him on his hands and
+knees, and embraces his legs. Gratitude, eh? You could see that being
+allowed to live suited that chap down to the ground. The governor gets
+his legs away from him gently and just mutters to me:
+
+“'Let's be off. Get him into the boat.'
+
+“It was not difficult,” continued Ricardo, after eyeing Schomberg
+fixedly for a moment. “He was ready enough to get into the boat,
+and--here he is. He would let himself be chopped into small pieces--with
+a smile, mind; with a smile!--for the governor. I don't know about him
+doing that much for me; but pretty near, pretty near. I did the tying up
+and the untying, but he could see who was the boss. And then he knows a
+gentleman. A dog knows a gentleman--any dog. It's only some foreigners
+that don't know; and nothing can teach them, either.”
+
+“And you mean to say,” asked Schomberg, disregarding what might have
+been annoying for himself in the emphasis of the final remark, “you mean
+to say that you left steady employment at good wages for a life like
+this?”
+
+“There!” began Ricardo quietly. “That's just what a man like you would
+say. You are that tame! I follow a gentleman. That ain't the same thing
+as to serve an employer. They give you wages as they'd fling a bone to
+a dog, and they expect you to be grateful. It's worse than slavery. You
+don't expect a slave that's bought for money to be grateful. And if you
+sell your work--what is it but selling your own self? You've got so many
+days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me
+enough for my life? Ay! But they throw at you your week's money and
+expect you to say 'thank you' before you pick it up.”
+
+He mumbled some curses, directed at employers generally, as it seemed,
+then blazed out:
+
+“Work be damned! I ain't a dog walking on its hind legs for a bone; I am
+a man who's following a gentleman. There's a difference which you will
+never understand, Mr. Tame Schomberg.”
+
+He yawned slightly. Schomberg, preserving a military stiffness
+reinforced by a slight frown, had allowed his thoughts to stray away.
+They were busy detailing the image of a young girl--absent--gone--stolen
+from him. He became enraged. There was that rascal looking at him
+insolently. If the girl had not been shamefully decoyed away from him,
+he would not have allowed anyone to look at him insolently. He would
+have made nothing of hitting that rogue between the eyes. Afterwards he
+would have kicked the other without hesitation. He saw himself doing it;
+and in sympathy with this glorious vision Schomberg's right foot, and
+arm moved convulsively.
+
+At this moment he came out of his sudden reverie to note with alarm the
+wide-awake curiosity of Mr. Ricardo's stare.
+
+“And so you go like this about the world, gambling,” he remarked
+inanely, to cover his confusion. But Ricardo's stare did not change its
+character, and he continued vaguely:
+
+“Here and there and everywhere.” He pulled himself together, squared his
+shoulders. “Isn't it very precarious?” he said firmly.
+
+The word precarious--seemed to be effective, because Ricardo's eyes lost
+their dangerously interested expression.
+
+“No, not so bad,” Ricardo said, with indifference. “It's my opinion that
+men will gamble as long as they have anything to put on a card. Gamble?
+That's nature. What's life itself? You never know what may turn up. The
+worst of it is that you never can tell exactly what sort of cards you
+are holding yourself. What's trumps?--that is the question. See? Any man
+will gamble if only he's given a chance, for anything or everything. You
+too--”
+
+“I haven't touched a card now for twenty years,” said Schomberg in an
+austere tone.
+
+“Well, if you got your living that way you would be no worse than you
+are now, selling drinks to people--beastly beer and spirits, rotten
+stuff fit to make an old he-goat yell if you poured it down its throat.
+Pooh! I can't stand the confounded liquor. Never could. A whiff of neat
+brandy in a glass makes me feel sick. Always did. If everybody was like
+me, liquor would be going a-begging. You think it's funny in a man,
+don't you?”
+
+Schomberg made a vague gesture of toleration. Ricardo hitched up his
+chair and settled his elbow afresh on the table.
+
+“French siros I must say I do like. Saigon's the place for them. I see
+you have siros in the bar. Hang me if I ain't getting dry, conversing
+like this with you. Come, Mr. Schomberg, be hospitable, as the governor
+says.”
+
+Schomberg rose and walked with dignity to the counter. His footsteps
+echoed loudly on the floor of polished boards. He took down a bottle,
+labelled “Sirop de Groseille.” The little sounds he made, the clink of
+glass, the gurgling of the liquid, the pop of the soda-water cork had
+a preternatural sharpness. He came back carrying a pink and glistening
+tumbler. Mr. Ricardo had followed his movements with oblique, coyly
+expectant yellow eyes, like a cat watching the preparation of a saucer
+of milk, and the satisfied sound after he had drunk might have been a
+slightly modified form of purring, very soft and deep in his throat. It
+affected Schomberg unpleasantly as another example of something inhuman
+in those men wherein lay the difficulty of dealing with them. A
+spectre, a cat, an ape--there was a pretty association for a mere man to
+remonstrate with, he reflected with an inward shudder; for Schomberg had
+been overpowered, as it were, by his imagination, and his reason could
+not react against that fanciful view of his guests. And it was not only
+their appearance. The morals of Mr. Ricardo seemed to him to be pretty
+much the morals of a cat. Too much. What sort of argument could a mere
+man offer to a . . . or to a spectre, either! What the morals of a
+spectre could be, Schomberg had no idea. Something dreadful, no
+doubt. Compassion certainly had no place in them. As to the ape--well,
+everybody knew what an ape was. It had no morals. Nothing could be more
+hopeless.
+
+Outwardly, however, having picked up the cigar which he had laid aside
+to get the drink, with his thick fingers, one of them ornamented by a
+gold ring, Schomberg smoked with moody composure. Facing him, Ricardo
+blinked slowly for a time, then closed his eyes altogether, with the
+placidity of the domestic cat dozing on the hearth-rug. In another
+moment he opened them very wide, and seemed surprised to see Schomberg
+there.
+
+“You're having a very slack time today, aren't you?” he observed. “But
+then this whole town is confoundedly slack, anyhow; and I've never faced
+such a slack party at a table before. Come eleven o'clock, they begin to
+talk of breaking up. What's the matter with them? Want to go to bed so
+early, or what?”
+
+“I reckon you don't lose a fortune by their wanting to go to bed,” said
+Schomberg, with sombre sarcasm.
+
+“No,” admitted Ricardo, with a grin that stretched his thin mouth from
+ear to ear, giving a sudden glimpse of his white teeth. “Only, you see,
+when I once start, I would play for nuts, for parched peas, for any
+rubbish. I would play them for their souls. But these Dutchmen aren't
+any good. They never seem to get warmed up properly, win or lose. I've
+tried them both ways, too. Hang them for a beggarly, bloodless lot of
+animated cucumbers!”
+
+“And if anything out of the way was to happen, they would be just
+as cool in locking you and your gentleman up,” Schomberg snarled
+unpleasantly.
+
+“Indeed!” said Ricardo slowly, taking Schomberg's measure with his eyes.
+“And what about you?”
+
+“You talk mighty big,” burst out the hotel-keeper. “You talk of ranging
+all over the world, and doing great things, and taking fortune by the
+scruff of the neck, but here you stick at this miserable business!”
+
+“It isn't much of a lay--that's a fact,” admitted Ricardo unexpectedly.
+
+Schomberg was red in the face with audacity.
+
+“I call it paltry,” he spluttered.
+
+“That's how it looks. Can't call it anything else.” Ricardo seemed to
+be in an accommodating mood. “I should be ashamed of it myself, only you
+see the governor is subject to fits--”
+
+“Fits!” Schomberg cried out, but in a low tone. “You don't say so!” He
+exulted inwardly, as if this disclosure had in some way diminished the
+difficulty of the situation. “Fits! That's a serious thing, isn't it?
+You ought to take him to the civil hospital--a lovely place.”
+
+Ricardo nodded slightly, with a faint grin.
+
+“Serious enough. Regular fits of laziness, I call them. Now and then
+he lays down on me like this, and there's no moving him. If you think I
+like it, you're a long way out. Generally speaking, I can talk him over.
+I know how to deal with a gentleman. I am no daily-bread slave. But when
+he has said, 'Martin, I am bored,' then look out! There's nothing to do
+but to shut up, confound it!”
+
+Schomberg, very much cast down, had listened open-mouthed.
+
+“What's the cause of it?” he asked. “Why is he like this? I don't
+understand.”
+
+“I think I do,” said Ricardo. “A gentleman, you know, is not such a
+simple person as you or I; and not so easy to manage, either. If only I
+had something to lever him out with!”
+
+“What do you mean, to lever him out with?” muttered Schomberg
+hopelessly.
+
+Ricardo was impatient with this denseness.
+
+“Don't you understand English? Look here! I couldn't make this
+billiard table move an inch if I talked to it from now till the end of
+days--could I? Well, the governor is like that, too, when the fits are
+on him. He's bored. Nothing's worthwhile, nothing's good enough, that's
+mere sense. But if I saw a capstan bar lying about here, I would soon
+manage to shift that billiard table of yours a good many inches. And
+that's all there is to it.”
+
+He rose noiselessly, stretched himself, supple and stealthy, with
+curious sideways movements of his head and unexpected elongations of his
+thick body, glanced out of the corners of his eyes in the direction of
+the door, and finally leaned back against the table, folding his arms on
+his breast comfortably, in a completely human attitude.
+
+“That's another thing you can tell a gentleman by--his freakishness.
+A gentleman ain't accountable to nobody, any more than a tramp on the
+roads. He ain't got to keep time. The governor got like this once in a
+one-horse Mexican pueblo on the uplands, away from everywhere. He lay
+all day long in a dark room--”
+
+“Drunk?” This word escaped Schomberg by inadvertence at which he became
+frightened. But the devoted secretary seemed to find it natural.
+
+“No, that never comes on together with this kind of fit. He just lay
+there full length on a mat, while a ragged, bare-legged boy that he had
+picked up in the street sat in the patio, between two oleanders near the
+open door of his room, strumming on a guitar and singing tristes to him
+from morning to night. You know tristes--twang, twang, twang, aouh, hoo!
+Chroo, yah!”
+
+Schomberg uplifted his hands in distress. This tribute seemed to flatter
+Ricardo. His mouth twitched grimly.
+
+“Like that--enough to give colic to an ostrich, eh? Awful. Well, there
+was a cook there who loved me--an old fat, Negro woman with spectacles.
+I used to hide in the kitchen and turn her to, to make me dulces--sweet
+things, you know, mostly eggs and sugar--to pass the time away. I am
+like a kid for sweet things. And, by the way, why don't you ever have
+a pudding at your tablydott, Mr. Schomberg? Nothing but fruit, morning,
+noon, and night. Sickening! What do you think a fellow is--a wasp?”
+
+Schomberg disregarded the injured tone.
+
+“And how long did that fit, as you call it, last?” he asked anxiously.
+
+“Weeks, months, years, centuries, it seemed to me,” returned Mr. Ricardo
+with feeling. “Of an evening the governor would stroll out into the sala
+and fritter his life away playing cards with the juez of the place--a
+little Dago with a pair of black whiskers--ekarty, you know, a
+quick French game, for small change. And the comandante, a one-eyed,
+half-Indian, flat-nosed ruffian, and I, we had to stand around and bet
+on their hands. It was awful!”
+
+“Awful,” echoed Schomberg, in a Teutonic throaty tone of despair. “Look
+here, I need your rooms.”
+
+“To be sure. I have been thinking that for some time past,” said Ricardo
+indifferently.
+
+“I was mad when I listened to you. This must end!”
+
+“I think you are mad yet,” said Ricardo, not even unfolding his arms or
+shifting his attitude an inch. He lowered his voice to add: “And if
+I thought you had been to the police, I would tell Pedro to catch
+you round the waist and break your fat neck by jerking your head
+backward--snap! I saw him do it to a big buck nigger who was flourishing
+a razor in front of the governor. It can be done. You hear a low crack,
+that's all--and the man drops down like a limp rag.”
+
+Not even Ricardo's head, slightly inclined on the left shoulder, had
+moved; but when he ceased the greenish irises which had been staring out
+of doors glided into the corners of his eyes nearest to Schomberg and
+stayed there with a coyly voluptuous expression.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+Schomberg felt desperation, that lamentable substitute for courage,
+ooze out of him. It was not so much the threat of death as the weirdly
+circumstantial manner of its declaration which affected him. A mere
+“I'll murder you,” however ferocious in tone, and earnest, in purpose,
+he could have faced; but before this novel mode of speech and procedure,
+his imagination being very sensitive to the unusual, he collapsed as if
+indeed his moral neck had been broken--snap!
+
+“Go to the police? Of course not. Never dreamed of it. Too late now.
+I've let myself be mixed up in this. You got my consent while I wasn't
+myself. I explained it to you at the time.”
+
+Ricardo's eye glided gently off Schomberg to stare far away.
+
+“Ay! Some trouble with a girl. But that's nothing to us.”
+
+“Naturally. What I say is, what's the good of all that savage talk to
+me?” A bright argument occurred to him. “It's out of proportion; for
+even if I were fool enough to go to the police now, there's nothing
+serious to complain about. It would only mean deportation for you. They
+would put you on board the first west-bound steamer to Singapore.” He
+had become animated. “Out of this to the devil,” he added between his
+teeth for his own private satisfaction.
+
+Ricardo made no comment, and gave no sign of having heard a single word.
+This discouraged Schomberg, who had looked up hopefully.
+
+“Why do you want to stick here?” he cried. “It can't pay you people
+to fool around like this. Didn't you worry just now about moving your
+governor? Well, the police would move him for you; and from Singapore
+you can go on to the east coast of Africa.”
+
+“I'll be hanged if the fellow isn't up to that silly trick!” was
+Ricardo's comment, spoken in an ominous tone which recalled Schomberg to
+the realities of his position.
+
+“No! No!” he protested. “It's a manner of speaking. Of course I
+wouldn't.”
+
+“I think that trouble about the girl has really muddled your brains,
+Mr. Schomberg. Believe me, you had better part friends with us; for,
+deportation or no deportation, you'll be seeing one of us turning up
+before long to pay you off for any nasty dodge you may be hatching in
+that fat head of yours.”
+
+“Gott im Himmel!” groaned Schomberg. “Will nothing move him out? Will
+he stop here immer--I mean always? Suppose I were to make it worth your
+while, couldn't you--”
+
+“No,” Ricardo interrupted. “I couldn't, unless I had something to lever
+him out with. I've told you that before.”
+
+“An inducement?” muttered Schomberg.
+
+“Ay. The east coast of Africa isn't good enough. He told me the other
+day that it will have to wait till he is ready for it; and he may not be
+ready for a long time, because the east coast can't run away, and no one
+is likely to run off with it.”
+
+These remarks, whether considered as truisms or as depicting Mr.
+Jones's mental state, were distinctly discouraging to the long-suffering
+Schomberg; but there is truth in the well-known saying that places
+the darkest hour before the dawn. The sound of words, apart from the
+context, has its power; and these two words, 'run off,' had a special
+affinity to the hotel-keeper's, haunting idea. It was always present
+in his brain, and now it came forward evoked by a purely fortuitous
+expression. No, nobody could run off with a continent; but Heyst had run
+off with the girl!
+
+Ricardo could have had no conception of the cause of Schomberg's changed
+expression. Yet it was noticeable enough to interest him so much that
+he stopped the careless swinging of his leg and said, looking at the
+hotel-keeper:
+
+“There's not much use arguing against that sort of talk--is there?”
+
+Schomberg was not listening.
+
+“I could put you on another track,” he said slowly, and stopped, as if
+suddenly choked by an unholy emotion of intense eagerness combined with
+fear of failure. Ricardo waited, attentive, yet not without a certain
+contempt.
+
+“On the track of a man!” Schomberg uttered convulsively, and paused
+again, consulting his rage and his conscience.
+
+“The man in the moon, eh?” suggested Ricardo, in a jeering murmur.
+
+Schomberg shook his head.
+
+“It would be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the
+moon. You go and try. It isn't so very far.”
+
+He reflected. These men were thieves and murderers as well as gamblers.
+Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly complete. But he
+preferred not to think of it in detail. He put it to himself summarily
+that he would be paying Heyst out and would, at the same time, relieve
+himself of these men's oppression. He had only to let loose his natural
+gift for talking scandalously about his fellow creatures. And in this
+case his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love,
+has an eloquence of its own. With the utmost ease he portrayed for
+Ricardo, now seriously attentive, a Heyst fattened by years of private
+and public rapines, the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many
+shareholders, a wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep
+purposes and simple wiles, of mystery and futility. In this exercise of
+his natural function Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his
+face, loquacious, florid, eager, his manliness set off by the military
+bearing.
+
+“That's the exact story. He was seen hanging about this part of the
+world for years, spying into everybody's business: but I am the only
+one who has seen through him from the first--contemptible, double-faced,
+stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow.”
+
+“Dangerous, is he?”
+
+Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo's voice.
+
+“Well, you know what I mean,” he said uneasily. “A lying, circumventing,
+soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal. Nothing open about him.”
+
+Mr Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the room in
+an oblique, noiseless manner. He flashed a grin at Schomberg in passing,
+and a snarling:
+
+“Ah! H'm!”
+
+“Well, what more dangerous do you want?” argued Schomberg. “He's in no
+way a fighting man, I believe,” he added negligently.
+
+“And you say he has been living alone there?”
+
+“Like the man in the moon,” answered Schomberg readily. “There's no
+one that cares a rap what becomes of him. He has been lying low, you
+understand, after bagging all that plunder.”
+
+“Plunder, eh? Why didn't he go home with it?” inquired Ricardo.
+
+The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this was
+something worth looking into. And he was pursuing truth in the manner
+of men of sounder morality and purer intentions than his own; that is he
+pursued it in the light of his own experience and prejudices. For facts,
+whatever their origin (and God only knows where they come from), can be
+only tested by our own particular suspicions. Ricardo was suspicious all
+round. Schomberg, such is the tonic of recovered self-esteem, Schomberg
+retorted fearlessly:
+
+“Go home? Why don't you go home? To hear your talk, you must have made
+a pretty considerable pile going round winning people's money. You ought
+to be ready by this time.”
+
+Ricardo stopped to look at Schomberg with surprise.
+
+“You think yourself very clever, don't you?” he said.
+
+Schomberg just then was so conscious of being clever that the snarling
+irony left him unmoved. There was positively a smile in his noble
+Teutonic beard, the first smile for weeks. He was in a felicitous vein.
+
+“How do you know that he wasn't thinking of going home? As a matter of
+fact, he was on his way home.”
+
+“And how do I know that you are not amusing yourself by spinning out
+a blamed fairy tale?” interrupted Ricardo roughly. “I wonder at myself
+listening to the silly rot!”
+
+Schomberg received this turn of temper unmoved. He did not require to be
+very subtly observant to notice that he had managed to arouse some sort
+of feeling, perhaps of greed, in Ricardo's breast.
+
+“You won't believe me? Well! You can ask anybody that comes here if
+that--that Swede hadn't got as far as this house on his way home. Why
+should he turn up here if not for that? You ask anybody.”
+
+“Ask, indeed!” returned the other. “Catch me asking at large about a man
+I mean to drop on! Such jobs must be done on the quiet--or not at all.”
+
+The peculiar intonation of the last phrase touched the nape of
+Schomberg's neck with a chill. He cleared his throat slightly and looked
+away as though he had heard something indelicate. Then, with a jump as
+it were:
+
+“Of course he didn't tell me. Is it likely? But haven't I got eyes?
+Haven't I got my common sense to tell me? I can see through people. By
+the same token, he called on the Tesmans. Why did he call on the Tesmans
+two days running, eh? You don't know? You can't tell?”
+
+He waited complacently till Ricardo had finished swearing quite openly
+at him for a confounded chatterer, and then went on:
+
+“A fellow doesn't go to a counting-house in business hours for a chat
+about the weather, two days running. Then why? To close his account with
+them one day, and to get his money out the next! Clear, what?”
+
+Ricardo, with his trick of looking one way and moving another approached
+Schomberg slowly.
+
+“To get his money?” he purred.
+
+“Gewiss,” snapped Schomberg with impatient superiority. “What else? That
+is, only the money he had with the Tesmans. What he has buried or put
+away on the island, devil only knows. When you think of the lot of hard
+cash that passed through that man's hands, for wages and stores and all
+that--and he's just a cunning thief, I tell you.” Ricardo's hard stare
+discomposed the hotel-keeper, and he added in an embarrassed tone: “I
+mean a common, sneaking thief--no account at all. And he calls himself a
+Swedish baron, too! Tfui!”
+
+“He's a baron, is he? That foreign nobility ain't much,” commented Mr.
+Ricardo seriously. “And then what? He hung about here!”
+
+“Yes, he hung about,” said Schomberg, making a wry mouth. “He--hung
+about. That's it. Hung--”
+
+His voice died out. Curiosity was depicted in Ricardo's countenance.
+
+“Just like that; for nothing? And then turned about and went back to
+that island again?”
+
+“And went back to that island again,” Schomberg echoed lifelessly,
+fixing his gaze on the floor.
+
+“What's the matter with you?” asked Ricardo with genuine surprise. “What
+is it?”
+
+Schomberg, without looking up, made an impatient gesture. His face was
+crimson, and he kept it lowered. Ricardo went back to the point.
+
+“Well, but how do you account for it? What was his reason? What did he
+go back to the island for?”
+
+“Honeymoon!” spat out Schomberg viciously.
+
+Perfectly still, his eyes downcast, he suddenly, with no preliminary
+stir, hit the table with his fist a blow which caused the utterly
+unprepared Ricardo to leap aside. And only then did Schomberg look up
+with a dull, resentful expression.
+
+Ricardo stared hard for a moment, spun on his heel, walked to the end
+of the room, came back smartly, and muttered a profound “Ay! Ay!” above
+Schomberg's rigid head. That the hotel-keeper was capable of a
+great moral effort was proved by a gradual return of his severe,
+Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner.
+
+“Ay, ay!” repeated Ricardo more deliberately than before, and as if
+after a further survey of the circumstances, “I wish I hadn't asked you,
+or that you had told me a lie. It don't suit me to know that there's a
+woman mixed up in this affair. What's she like? It's the girl you--”
+
+“Leave off!” muttered Schomberg, utterly pitiful behind his stiff
+military front.
+
+“Ay, ay!” Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more and more
+enlightened and perplexed. “Can't bear to talk about it--so bad as that?
+And yet I would bet she isn't a miracle to look at.”
+
+Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn't know, as if he didn't care.
+Then he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.
+
+“Swedish baron--h'm!” Ricardo continued meditatively. “I believe the
+governor would think that business worth looking up, quite, if I put it
+to him properly. The governor likes a duel, if you will call it so; but
+I don't know a man that can stand up to him on the square. Have you ever
+seen a cat play with a mouse? It's a pretty sight!”
+
+Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression,
+looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the alarm
+of a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession of his
+breast.
+
+“There are no lies between you and me,” he said, more steadily than he
+thought he could speak.
+
+“What's the good now? He funks women. In that Mexican pueblo where we
+lay grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak, I used to go to dances of
+an evening. The girls there would ask me if the English caballero in
+the posada was a monk in disguise, or if he had taken a vow to the
+sancissima madre not to speak to a woman, or whether--You can imagine
+what fairly free-spoken girls will ask when they come to the point of
+not caring what they say; and it used to vex me. Yes, the governor funks
+facing women.”
+
+“One woman?” interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.
+
+“One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred, for that
+matter. In a place that's full of women you needn't look at them unless
+you like; but if you go into a room where there is only one woman, young
+or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her. And, unless you are
+after her, then--the governor is right enough--she's in the way.”
+
+“Why notice them?” muttered Schomberg. “What can they do?”
+
+“Make a noise, if nothing else,” opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the
+distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed, nothing
+is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty and
+absorbing card game. “Noise, noise, my friend,” he went on forcibly;
+“confounded screeching about something or other, and I like it no more
+than the governor does. But with the governor there's something else
+besides. He can't stand them at all.”
+
+He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no
+philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment
+without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little
+fetishism, he emitted his own conclusion, which surely could not go to
+the root of the matter.
+
+“I'm hanged if I don't think they are to him what liquor is to me.
+Brandy--pah!”
+
+He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder. Schomberg
+listened to him in wonder. It looked as if the very scoundrelism, of
+that--that Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity standing
+between the thief and the retribution.
+
+“That's so, old buck.” Ricardo broke the silence after contemplating
+Schomberg's mute dejection with a sort of sympathy. “I don't think this
+trick will work.”
+
+“But that's silly,” whispered the man deprived of the vengeance which he
+had seemed already to hold in his hand, by a mysterious and exasperating
+idiosyncrasy.
+
+“Don't you set yourself to judge a gentleman.” Ricardo without anger
+administered a moody rebuke. “Even I can't understand the governor
+thoroughly. And I am an Englishman and his follower. No, I don't think I
+care to put it before him, sick as I am of staying here.”
+
+Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of seeing
+him stay. Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of Heyst as
+created by his own power of false inferences, of his hate, of his love
+of scandal, that he could not contain a stifled cry of conviction
+as sincere as most of our convictions, the disguised servants of our
+passions, can appear at a supreme moment.
+
+“It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand pounds,
+or two or three times as much, for all I know. No trouble, no--”
+
+“The petticoat's the trouble,” Ricardo struck in.
+
+He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which an
+observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such as a
+wild animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might betray.
+Schomberg saw nothing. It would probably have cheered his drooping
+spirits; but in a general way he preferred not to look at Ricardo.
+Ricardo, however, with one of his slanting, gliding, restless glances,
+observed the bitter smile on Schomberg's bearded lips--the unmistakable
+smile of ruined hopes.
+
+“You are a pretty unforgiving sort of chap,” he said, stopping for a
+moment with an air of interest. “Hang me if I ever saw anybody look so
+disappointed! I bet you would send black plague to that island if you
+only knew how--eh, what? Plague too good for them? Ha, ha, ha!”
+
+He bent down to stare at Schomberg who sat unstirring with stony eyes
+and set features, and apparently deaf to the rasping derision of that
+laughter so close to his red fleshy ear.
+
+“Black plague too good for them, ha, ha!” Ricardo pressed the point on
+the tormented hotel-keeper. Schomberg kept his eyes down obstinately.
+
+“I don't wish any harm to the girl--” he muttered.
+
+“But did she bolt from you? A fair bilk? Come!”
+
+“Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her--what he
+promised her, how he frightened her. She couldn't have cared for him,
+I know.” Schomberg's vanity clung to the belief in some atrocious,
+extraordinary means of seduction employed by Heyst. “Look how he
+bewitched that poor Morrison,” he murmured.
+
+“Ah, Morrison--got all his money, what?”
+
+“Yes--and his life.”
+
+“Terrible fellow, that Swedish baron! How is one to get at him?”
+
+Schomberg exploded.
+
+“Three against one! Are you shy? Do you want me to give you a letter of
+introduction?”
+
+“You ought to look at yourself in a glass,” Ricardo said quietly. “Dash
+me if you don't get a stroke of some kind presently. And this is the
+fellow who says women can do nothing! That one will do for you, unless
+you manage to forget her.”
+
+“I wish I could,” Schomberg admitted earnestly. “And it's all the doing
+of that Swede. I don't get enough sleep, Mr. Ricardo. And then, to
+finish me off, you gentlemen turn up . . . as if I hadn't enough worry.”
+
+“That's done you good,” suggested the secretary with ironic seriousness.
+“Takes your mind off that silly trouble. At your age too.”
+
+He checked himself, as if in pity, and changing his tone:
+
+“I would really like to oblige you while doing a stroke of business at
+the same time.”
+
+“A good stroke,” insisted Schomberg, as if it were mechanically. In his
+simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered his
+head. An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with Schomberg
+ideas were rare and therefore tenacious. “Minted gold,” he murmured with
+a sort of anguish.
+
+Such an expressive combination of words was not without effect upon
+Ricardo. Both these men were amenable to the influence of verbal
+suggestions. The secretary of “plain Mr. Jones” sighed and murmured.
+
+“Yes. But how is one to get at it?”
+
+“Being three to one,” said Schomberg, “I suppose you could get it for
+the asking.”
+
+“One would think the fellow lived next door,” Ricardo growled
+impatiently. “Hang it all, can't you understand a plain question? I have
+asked you the way.”
+
+Schomberg seemed to revive.
+
+“The way?”
+
+The torpor of deceived hopes underlying his superficial changes of mood
+had been pricked by these words which seemed pointed with purpose.
+
+“The way is over the water, of course,” said the hotel-keeper. “For
+people like you, three days in a good, big boat is nothing. It's no more
+than a little outing, a bit of a change. At this season the Java Sea
+is a pond. I have an excellent, safe boat--a ship's life-boat--carry
+thirty, let alone three, and a child could handle her. You wouldn't get
+a wet face at this time of the year. You might call it a pleasure-trip.”
+
+“And yet, having this boat, you didn't go after her yourself--or after
+him? Well, you are a fine fellow for a disappointed lover.”
+
+Schomberg gave a start at the suggestion.
+
+“I am not three men,” he said sulkily, as the shortest answer of the
+several he could have given.
+
+“Oh, I know your sort,” Ricardo let fall negligently. “You are like most
+people--or perhaps just a little more peaceable than the rest of the
+buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten show. Well, well,
+you respectable citizen,” he went on, “let us go thoroughly into the
+matter.”
+
+When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones's henchman was
+ready to discuss, in his own words, “this boat of yours, with courses
+and distances,” and such concrete matters of no good augury to that
+villainous Swede, he recovered his soldierly bearing, squared his
+shoulders, and asked in his military manner:
+
+“You wish, then, to proceed with the business?”
+
+Ricardo nodded. He had a great mind to, he said. A gentleman had to be
+humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too, on occasions,
+for his own good. And it was the business of the right sort of
+“follower” to know the proper time and the proper methods of that
+delicate part of his duty. Having exposed this theory Ricardo proceeded
+to the application.
+
+“I've never actually lied to him,” he said, “and I ain't going to now.
+I shall just say nothing about the girl. He will have to get over the
+shock the best he can. Hang it all! Too much humouring won't do here.”
+
+“Funny thing,” Schomberg observed crisply.
+
+“Is it? Ay, you wouldn't mind taking a woman by the throat in some dark
+corner and nobody by, I bet!”
+
+Ricardo's dreadful, vicious, cat-like readiness to get his claws out at
+any moment startled Schomberg as usual. But it was provoking too.
+
+“And you?” he defended himself. “Don't you want me to believe you are up
+to anything?”
+
+“I, my boy? Oh, yes. I am not that gentleman; neither are you. Take 'em
+by the throat or chuck 'em under the chin is all one to me--almost,”
+ affirmed Ricardo, with something obscurely ironical in his complacency.
+“Now, as to this business. A three days' jaunt in a good boat isn't a
+thing to frighten people like us. You are right, so far; but there are
+other details.”
+
+Schomberg was ready enough to enter into details. He explained that he
+had a small plantation, with a fairly habitable hut on it, on Madura. He
+proposed that his guest should start from town in his boat, as if going
+for an excursion to that rural spot. The custom-house people on the quay
+were used to see his boat go off on such trips.
+
+From Madura, after some repose and on a convenient day, Mr. Jones
+and party would make the real start. It would all be plain sailing.
+Schomberg undertook to provision the boat. The greatest hardship the
+voyagers need apprehend would be a mild shower of rain. At that season
+of the year there were no serious thunderstorms.
+
+Schomberg's heart began to thump as he saw himself nearing his
+vengeance. His speech was thick but persuasive.
+
+“No risk at all--none whatever.”
+
+Ricardo dismissed these assurances of safety with an impatient gesture.
+He was thinking of other risks.
+
+“The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted at sea,
+and that may bring awkwardness later on. A ship's boat with three white
+men in her, knocking about out of sight of land, is bound to make talk.
+Are we likely to be seen on our way?”
+
+“No, unless by native craft,” said Schomberg.
+
+Ricardo nodded, satisfied. Both these white men looked on native life as
+a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could
+walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its
+incomprehensible aims and needs. No. Native craft did not count, of
+course. It was an empty, solitary part of the sea, Schomberg expounded
+further. Only the Ternate mail-boat crossed that region about the eighth
+of every month, regularly--nowhere near the island though. Rigid, his
+voice hoarse, his heart thumping, his mind concentrated on the success
+of his plan, the hotel-keeper multiplied words, as if to keep as many
+of them as possible between himself and the murderous aspect of his
+purpose.
+
+“So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on the
+eighth--always best to make a start at night, with a land breeze--it's a
+hundred to one--What am I saying?--it's a thousand to one that no
+human eye will see you on the passage. All you've got to do is keep her
+heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps not quite so long.
+There will always be draft enough to keep a boat moving; you may reckon
+on that; and then--”
+
+The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with eagerness,
+with impatience, and with something like apprehension, the true nature
+of which was not clear to him. And he did not want to investigate it.
+Ricardo regarded him steadily, with those dry eyes of his shining more
+like polished stones than living tissue.
+
+“And then what?” he asked.
+
+“And then--why, you will astonish der herr baron--ha, ha!”
+
+Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in a
+hoarse bass.
+
+“And you believe he has all that plunder by him?” asked Ricardo, rather
+perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely probable when
+looked at all round by his acute mind.
+
+Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.
+
+“How can it be otherwise? He was going home, he was on his way, in this
+hotel. Ask people. Was it likely he would leave it behind him?”
+
+Ricardo was thoughtful. Then, suddenly raising his head, he remarked:
+
+“Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh? That's not much of a sailing
+direction. I've heard of a port being missed before on better
+information. Can't you say what sort of landfall a fellow may expect?
+But I suppose you have never seen that island yourself?”
+
+Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a
+man congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an
+unsavoury experience. No, certainly not. He had never had any business
+to call there. But what of that? He could give Mr. Ricardo as good a
+sea-mark as anybody need wish for. He laughed nervously. Miss it! He
+defied anyone that came within forty miles of it to miss the retreat of
+that villainous Swede.
+
+“What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at
+night? There's a volcano in full blast near that island--enough to guide
+almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano to steer
+by?”
+
+These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared.
+The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs. Schomberg,
+dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room.
+She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her
+place, where she sat down to stare straight before her, as usual.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial
+enterprise. The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal
+Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where
+prying eyes--if any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or
+in sorrow--could have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine
+enterprise.
+
+Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass of
+two wet seasons' growth. The silence of his surroundings, broken only by
+such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain through the
+foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing the leaves of
+the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the shore, favoured
+rather than hindered his solitary meditation.
+
+A meditation is always--in a white man, at least--more or less an
+interrogative exercise. Heyst meditated in simple terms on the mystery
+of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest reflection:
+
+“There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all.”
+
+He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that this
+primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed. The oldest voice in the
+world is just the one that never ceases to speak. If anybody could have
+silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst's father, with
+his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but apparently he
+could not. There was in the son a lot of that first ancestor who,
+as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from the celestial mould,
+started inspecting and naming the animals of that paradise which he was
+so soon to lose.
+
+Action--the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth! The
+barbed hook, baited with the illusions of progress, to bring out of the
+lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!
+
+“And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the silliest
+fish of them all.” Heyst said to himself.
+
+He suffered. He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought to
+have been a masterpiece of aloofness. He remembered always his last
+evening with his father. He remembered the thin features, the great mass
+of white hair, and the ivory complexion. A five-branched candlestick
+stood on a little table by the side of the easy chair. They had been
+talking a long time. The noises of the street had died out one by one,
+till at last, in the moonlight, the London houses began to look like the
+tombs of an unvisited, unhonoured, cemetery of hopes.
+
+He had listened. Then, after a silence, he had asked--for he was really
+young then:
+
+“Is there no guidance?”
+
+His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the moon
+swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town.
+
+“You still believe in something, then?” he said in a clear voice,
+which had been growing feeble of late. “You believe in flesh and blood,
+perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too.
+But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate
+that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least
+difficult--always remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as
+pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself.”
+
+“What is one to do, then?” sighed the young man, regarding his father,
+rigid in the high-backed chair.
+
+“Look on--make no sound,” were the last words of the man who had spent
+his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which filled heaven
+and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding.
+
+That very night he died in his bed, so quietly that they found him
+in his usual attitude of sleep, lying on his side, one hand under his
+cheek, and his knees slightly bent. He had not even straightened his
+legs.
+
+His son buried the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of beliefs.
+He observed that the death of that bitter contemner of life did not
+trouble the flow of life's stream, where men and women go by thick as
+dust, revolving and jostling one another like figures cut out of cork
+and weighted with lead just sufficiently to keep them in their proudly
+upright posture.
+
+After the funeral, Heyst sat alone, in the dusk, and his meditation took
+the form of a definite vision of the stream, of the fatuously jostling,
+nodding, spinning figures hurried irresistibly along, and giving no sign
+of being aware that the voice on the bank had been suddenly silenced .
+. . Yes. A few obituary notices generally insignificant and some grossly
+abusive. The son had read them all with mournful detachment.
+
+“This is the hate and rage of their fear,” he thought to himself, “and
+also of wounded vanity. They shriek their little shriek as they fly
+past. I suppose I ought to hate him too . . .”
+
+He became aware of his eyes being wet. It was not that the man was his
+father. For him it was purely a matter of hearsay which could not in
+itself cause this emotion. No! It was because he had looked at him so
+long that he missed him so much. The dead man had kept him on the bank
+by his side. And now Heyst felt acutely that he was alone on the bank of
+the stream. In his pride he determined not to enter it.
+
+A few slow tears rolled down his face. The rooms, filling with shadows,
+seemed haunted by a melancholy, uneasy presence which could not express
+itself. The young man got up with a strange sense of making way for
+something impalpable that claimed possession, went out of the house, and
+locked the door. A fortnight later he started on his travels--to “look
+on and never make a sound.”
+
+The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain
+quantity of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and
+pictures, which might have complained of heartless desertion after many
+years of faithful service; for there is a soul in things. Heyst, our
+Heyst, had often thought of them, reproachful and mute, shrouded and
+locked up in those rooms, far away in London with the sounds of the
+street reaching them faintly, and sometimes a little sunshine, when
+the blinds were pulled up and the windows opened from time to time in
+pursuance of his original instructions and later reminders. It seemed
+as if in his conception of a world not worth touching, and perhaps not
+substantial enough to grasp, these objects familiar to his childhood and
+his youth, and associated with the memory of an old man, were the only
+realities, something having an absolute existence. He would never have
+them sold, or even moved from the places they occupied when he looked
+upon them last. When he was advised from London that his lease had
+expired, and that the house, with some others as like it as two peas,
+was to be demolished, he was surprisingly distressed.
+
+He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. Already
+the Tropical Belt Coal Company was in existence. He sent instructions
+to have some of the things sent out to him at Samburan, just as any
+ordinary, credulous person would have done. They came, torn out from
+their long repose--a lot of books, some chairs and tables, his father's
+portrait in oils, which surprised Heyst by its air of youth, because he
+remembered his father as a much older man; a lot of small objects, such
+as candlesticks, inkstands, and statuettes from his father's study,
+which surprised him because they looked so old and so much worn.
+
+The manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, unpacking them on the
+veranda in the shade besieged by a fierce sunshine, must have felt like
+a remorseful apostate before these relics. He handled them tenderly;
+and it was perhaps their presence there which attached him to the island
+when he woke up to the failure of his apostasy. Whatever the decisive
+reason, Heyst had remained where another would have been glad to be off.
+The excellent Davidson had discovered the fact without discovering the
+reason, and took a humane interest in Heyst's strange existence, while
+at the same time his native delicacy kept him from intruding on the
+other's whim of solitude. He could not possibly guess that Heyst, alone
+on the island, felt neither more nor less lonely than in any other
+place, desert or populous. Davidson's concern was, if one may express it
+so, the danger of spiritual starvation; but this was a spirit which had
+renounced all outside nourishment, and was sustaining itself proudly on
+its own contempt of the usual coarse ailments which life offers to the
+common appetites of men.
+
+Neither was Heyst's body in danger of starvation, as Schomberg had so
+confidently asserted. At the beginning of the company's operations the
+island had been provisioned in a manner which had outlasted the need.
+Heyst did not need to fear hunger; and his very loneliness had not been
+without some alleviation. Of the crowd of imported Chinese labourers,
+one at least had remained in Samburan, solitary and strange, like a
+swallow left behind at the migrating season of his tribe.
+
+Wang was not a common coolie. He had been a servant to white men before.
+The agreement between him and Heyst consisted in the exchange of a few
+words on the day when the last batch of the mine coolies was leaving
+Samburan. Heyst, leaning over the balustrade of the veranda, was looking
+on, as calm in appearance as though he had never departed from the
+doctrine that this world, for the wise, is nothing but an amusing
+spectacle. Wang came round the house, and standing below, raised up his
+yellow, thin face.
+
+“All finished?” he asked. Heyst nodded slightly from above, glancing
+towards the jetty. A crowd of blue-clad figures with yellow faces and
+calves was being hustled down into the boats of the chartered steamer
+lying well out, like a painted ship on a painted sea; painted in crude
+colours, without shadows, without feeling, with brutal precision.
+
+“You had better hurry up if you don't want to be left behind.”
+
+But the Chinaman did not move.
+
+“We stop,” he declared. Heyst looked down at him for the first time.
+
+“You want to stop here?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“What were you? What was your work here?”
+
+“Mess-loom boy.”
+
+“Do you want to stay with me here as my boy?” inquired Heyst, surprised.
+
+The Chinaman unexpectedly put on a deprecatory expression, and said,
+after a marked pause:
+
+“Can do.”
+
+“You needn't,” said Heyst, “unless you like. I propose to stay on
+here--it may be for a very long time. I have no power to make you go if
+you wish to remain, but I don't see why you should.”
+
+“Catchee one piecee wife,” remarked Wang unemotionally, and marched off,
+turning his back on the wharf and the great world beyond, represented by
+the steamer waiting for her boats.
+
+Heyst learned presently that Wang had persuaded one of the women of
+Alfuro village, on the west shore of the island, beyond the central
+ridge, to come over to live with him in a remote part of the company's
+clearing. It was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros, having been
+frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had blocked the path over
+the ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept strictly on their own
+side. The coolies, as a body, mistrusting the manifest mildness of these
+harmless fisher-folk, had kept to their lines, without attempting to
+cross the island. Wang was the brilliant exception. He must have been
+uncommonly fascinating, in a way that was not apparent to Heyst, or else
+uncommonly persuasive. The woman's services to Heyst were limited to
+the fact that she had anchored Wang to the spot by her charms, which
+remained unknown to the white man, because she never came near the
+houses. The couple lived at the edge of the forest, and she could
+sometimes be seen gazing towards the bungalow shading her eyes with her
+hand. Even from a distance she appeared to be a shy, wild creature,
+and Heyst, anxious not to try her primitive nerves unduly, scrupulously
+avoided that side of the clearing in his strolls.
+
+The day--or rather the first night--after his hermit life began, he was
+aware of vague sounds of revelry in that direction. Emboldened by the
+departure of the invading strangers, some Alfuros, the woman's friends
+and relations, had ventured over the ridge to attend something in the
+nature of a wedding feast. Wang had invited them. But this was the only
+occasion when any sound louder than the buzzing of insects had troubled
+the profound silence of the clearing. The natives were never invited
+again. Wang not only knew how to live according to conventional
+proprieties, but had strong personal views as to the manner of arranging
+his domestic existence. After a time Heyst perceived that Wang had
+annexed all the keys. Any keys left lying about vanished after Wang had
+passed that way. Subsequently some of them--those that did not belong
+to the store-rooms and the empty bungalows, and could not be regarded
+as the common property of this community of two--were returned to Heyst,
+tied in a bunch with a piece of string. He found them one morning
+lying by the side of his plate. He had not been inconvenienced by their
+absence, because he never locked up anything in the way of drawers and
+boxes. Heyst said nothing. Wang also said nothing. Perhaps he had always
+been a taciturn man; perhaps he was influenced by the genius of the
+locality, which was certainly that of silence. Till Heyst and Morrison
+had landed in Black Diamond Bay, and named it, that side of Samburan had
+hardly ever heard the sound of human speech. It was easy to be taciturn
+with Heyst, who had plunged himself into an abyss of meditation over
+books, and remained in it till the shadow of Wang falling across the
+page, and the sound of a rough, low voice uttering the Malay word
+“makan,” would force him to climb out to a meal.
+
+Wang in his native province in China might have been an aggressively,
+sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in
+a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to
+except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per
+day. And he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he
+suffered he made up for it with the Alfuro woman. He always went back to
+her at the first fall of dusk, vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at
+this hour, like a sort of topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a
+white jacket and a pigtail. Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling
+passion, he could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between
+the mighty stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe. After a
+time, he discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the empty
+store-rooms, and it is to be supposed that he got on famously; but
+nothing of it could be seen, because he went to the trouble of pulling
+to pieces one of the company's sheds in order to get materials for
+making a high and very close fence round his patch, as if the growing
+of vegetables were a patented process, or an awful and holy mystery
+entrusted to the keeping of his race.
+
+Heyst, following from a distance the progress of Wang's gardening and of
+these precautions--there was nothing else to look at--was amused at
+the thought that he, in his own person, represented the market for
+its produce. The Chinaman had found several packets of seeds in the
+store-rooms, and had surrendered to an irresistible impulse to put them
+into the ground. He would make his master pay for the vegetables which
+he was raising to satisfy his instinct. And, looking silently at the
+silent Wang going about his work in the bungalow in his unhasty,
+steady way; Heyst envied the Chinaman's obedience to his instincts, the
+powerful simplicity of purpose which made his existence appear almost
+automatic in the mysterious precision of its facts.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+During his master's absence at Sourabaya, Wang had busied himself with
+the ground immediately in front of the principal bungalow. Emerging
+from the fringe of grass growing across the shore end of the coal-jetty,
+Heyst beheld a broad, clear space, black and level, with only one or two
+clumps of charred twigs, where the flame had swept from the front of his
+house to the nearest trees of the forest.
+
+“You took the risk of firing the grass?” Heyst asked.
+
+Wang nodded. Hanging on the arm of the white man before whom he stood
+was the girl called Alma; but neither from the Chinaman's eyes nor from
+his expression could anyone have guessed that he was in the slightest
+degree aware of the fact.
+
+“He has been tidying the place in his labour-saving way,” explained
+Heyst, without looking at the girl, whose hand rested on his forearm.
+“He's the whole establishment, you see. I told you I hadn't even a dog
+to keep me company here.”
+
+Wang had marched off towards the wharf.
+
+“He's like those waiters in that place,” she said. That place was
+Schomberg's hotel.
+
+“One Chinaman looks very much like another,” Heyst remarked. “We shall
+find it useful to have him here. This is the house.”
+
+They faced, at some distance, the six shallow steps leading up to the
+veranda. The girl had abandoned Heyst's arm.
+
+“This is the house,” he repeated.
+
+She did not offer to budge away from his side, but stood staring fixedly
+at the steps, as if they had been something unique and impracticable. He
+waited a little, but she did not move.
+
+“Don't you want to go in?” he asked, without turning his head to look at
+her. “The sun's too heavy to stand about here.” He tried to overcome
+a sort of fear, a sort of impatient faintness, and his voice sounded
+rough. “You had better go in,” he concluded.
+
+They both moved then, but at the foot of the stairs Heyst stopped, while
+the girl went on rapidly, as if nothing could stop her now. She crossed
+the veranda swiftly, and entered the twilight of the big central room
+opening upon it, and then the deeper twilight of the room beyond. She
+stood still in the dusk, in which her dazzled eyes could scarcely make
+out the forms of objects, and sighed a sigh of relief. The impression
+of the sunlight, of sea and sky, remained with her like a memory of a
+painful trial gone through--done with at last!
+
+Meanwhile Heyst had walked back slowly towards the jetty; but he did not
+get so far as that. The practical and automatic Wang had got hold of
+one of the little trucks that had been used for running baskets of coal
+alongside ships. He appeared pushing it before him, loaded lightly with
+Heyst's bag and the bundle of the girl's belongings, wrapped in Mrs.
+Schomberg's shawl. Heyst turned about and walked by the side of the
+rusty rails on which the truck ran. Opposite the house Wang stopped,
+lifted the bag to his shoulder, balanced it carefully, and then took the
+bundle in his hand.
+
+“Leave those things on the table in the big room--understand?”
+
+“Me savee,” grunted Wang, moving off.
+
+Heyst watched the Chinaman disappear from the veranda. It was not till
+he had seen Wang come out that he himself entered the twilight of the
+big room. By that time Wang was out of sight at the back of the house,
+but by no means out of hearing. The Chinaman could hear the voice of
+him who, when there were many people there, was generally referred to
+as “Number One.” Wang was not able to understand the words, but the tone
+interested him.
+
+“Where are you?” cried Number One.
+
+Then Wang heard, much more faint, a voice he had never heard before--a
+novel impression which he acknowledged by cocking his head slightly to
+one side.
+
+“I am here--out of the sun.”
+
+The new voice sounded remote and uncertain. Wang heard nothing more,
+though he waited for some time, very still, the top of his shaven poll
+exactly level with the floor of the back veranda. His face meanwhile
+preserved an inscrutable immobility. Suddenly he stooped to pick up
+the lid of a deal candle-box which was lying on the ground by his foot.
+Breaking it up with his fingers, he directed his steps towards the
+cook-shed, where, squatting on his heels, he proceeded to kindle a small
+fire under a very sooty kettle, possibly to make tea. Wang had some
+knowledge of the more superficial rites and ceremonies of white men's
+existence, otherwise so enigmatically remote to his mind, and containing
+unexpected possibilities of good and evil, which had to be watched for
+with prudence and care.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+That morning, as on all the others of the full tale of mornings since
+his return with the girl to Samburan, Heyst came out on the veranda and
+spread his elbows on the railing, in an easy attitude of proprietorship.
+The bulk of the central ridge of the island cut off the bungalow from
+sunrises, whether glorious or cloudy, angry or serene. The dwellers
+therein were debarred from reading early the fortune of the new-born
+day. It sprang upon them in its fulness with a swift retreat of the
+great shadow when the sun, clearing the ridge, looked down, hot and dry,
+with a devouring glare like the eye of an enemy. But Heyst, once the
+Number One of this locality, while it was comparatively teeming with
+mankind, appreciated the prolongation of early coolness, the subdued,
+lingering half-light, the faint ghost of the departed night, the
+fragrance of its dewy, dark soul captured for a moment longer between
+the great glow of the sky and the intense blaze of the uncovered sea.
+
+It was naturally difficult for Heyst to keep his mind from dwelling on
+the nature and consequences of this, his latest departure from the part
+of an unconcerned spectator. Yet he had retained enough of his wrecked
+philosophy to prevent him from asking himself consciously how it would
+end. But at the same time he could not help being temperamentally, from
+long habit and from set purpose, a spectator still, perhaps a little
+less naive but (as he discovered with some surprise) not much more far
+sighted than the common run of men. Like the rest of us who act, all he
+could say to himself, with a somewhat affected grimness, was:
+
+“We shall see!”
+
+This mood of grim doubt intruded on him only when he was alone. There
+were not many such moments in his day now; and he did not like them when
+they came. On this morning he had no time to grow uneasy. Alma came out
+to join him long before the sun, rising above the Samburan ridge, swept
+the cool shadow of the early morning and the remnant of the night's
+coolness clear off the roof under which they had dwelt for more than
+three months already. She came out as on other mornings. He had heard
+her light footsteps in the big room--the room where he had unpacked the
+cases from London; the room now lined with the backs of books halfway up
+on its three sides. Above the cases the fine matting met the ceiling of
+tightly stretched white calico. In the dusk and coolness nothing gleamed
+except the gilt frame of the portrait of Heyst's father, signed by a
+famous painter, lonely in the middle of a wall.
+
+Heyst did not turn round.
+
+“Do you know what I was thinking of?” he asked.
+
+“No,” she said. Her tone betrayed always a shade of anxiety, as though
+she were never certain how a conversation with him would end. She leaned
+on the guard-rail by his side.
+
+“No,” she repeated. “What was it?” She waited. Then, rather with
+reluctance than shyness, she asked:
+
+“Were you thinking of me?”
+
+“I was wondering when you would come out,” said Heyst, still without
+looking at the girl--to whom, after several experimental essays in
+combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given the name of
+Lena.
+
+She remarked after a pause:
+
+“I was not very far from you.”
+
+“Apparently you were not near enough for me.”
+
+“You could have called if you wanted me,” she said. “And I wasn't so
+long doing my hair.”
+
+“Apparently it was too long for me.”
+
+“Well, you were thinking of me, anyhow. I am glad of it. Do you know,
+it seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking of me I
+shouldn't be in the world at all!”
+
+He turned round and looked at her. She often said things which surprised
+him. A vague smile faded away on her lips before his scrutiny.
+
+“What is it?” he asked. “Is it a reproach?”
+
+“A reproach! Why, how could it be?” she defended herself.
+
+“Well, what did it mean?” he insisted.
+
+“What I said--just what I said. Why aren't you fair?”
+
+“Ah, this is at least a reproach!”
+
+She coloured to the roots of her hair.
+
+“It looks as if you were trying to make out that I am disagreeable,” she
+murmured. “Am I? You will make me afraid to open my mouth presently. I
+shall end by believing I am no good.”
+
+Her head drooped a little. He looked at her smooth, low brow, the
+faintly coloured cheeks, and the red lips parted slightly, with the
+gleam of her teeth within.
+
+“And then I won't be any good,” she added with conviction. “That I
+won't! I can only be what you think I am.”
+
+He made a slight movement. She put her hand on his arm, without raising
+her head, and went on, her voice animated in the stillness of her body:
+
+“It is so. It couldn't be any other way with a girl like me and a man
+like you. Here we are, we two alone, and I can't even tell where we
+are.”
+
+“A very well-known spot of the globe,” Heyst uttered gently. “There
+must have been at least fifty thousand circulars issued at the time--a
+hundred and fifty thousand, more likely. My friend was looking after
+that, and his ideas were large and his belief very strong. Of us two it
+was he who had the faith. A hundred and fifty thousand, certainly.”
+
+“What is it you mean?” she asked in a low tone.
+
+“What should I find fault with you for?” Heyst went on. “For being
+amiable, good, gracious--and pretty?”
+
+A silence fell. Then she said:
+
+“It's all right that you should think that of me. There's no one here to
+think anything of us, good or bad.”
+
+The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she uttered.
+The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave him, he was
+aware, was more physical than moral. Every time she spoke to him she
+seemed to abandon to him something of herself--something excessively
+subtle and inexpressible, to which he was infinitely sensible, which he
+would have missed horribly if she were to go away. While he was looking
+into her eyes she raised her bare forearm, out of the short sleeve, and
+held it in the air till he noticed it and hastened to pose his great
+bronze moustaches on the whiteness of the skin. Then they went in.
+
+Wang immediately appeared in front, and, squatting on his heels, began
+to potter mysteriously about some plants at the foot of the veranda.
+When Heyst and the girl came out again, the Chinaman had gone in his
+peculiar manner, which suggested vanishing out of existence rather than
+out of sight, a process of evaporation rather than of movement. They
+descended the steps, looking at each other, and started off smartly
+across the cleared ground; but they were not ten yards away when,
+without perceptible stir or sound, Wang materialized inside the empty
+room. The Chinaman stood still with roaming eyes, examining the walls as
+if for signs, for inscriptions; exploring the floor as if for pitfalls,
+for dropped coins. Then he cocked his head slightly at the profile of
+Heyst's father, pen in hand above a white sheet of paper on a crimson
+tablecloth; and, moving forward noiselessly, began to clear away the
+breakfast things.
+
+Though he proceeded without haste, the unerring precision of his
+movements, the absolute soundlessness of the operation, gave it
+something of the quality of a conjuring trick. And, the trick having
+been performed, Wang vanished from the scene, to materialize presently
+in front of the house. He materialized walking away from it, with no
+visible or guessable intention; but at the end of some ten paces he
+stopped, made a half turn, and put his hand up to shade his eyes. The
+sun had topped the grey ridge of Samburan. The great morning shadow was
+gone; and far away in the devouring sunshine Wang was in time to see
+Number One and the woman, two remote white specks against the sombre
+line of the forest. In a moment they vanished. With the smallest display
+of action, Wang also vanished from the sunlight of the clearing.
+
+Heyst and Lena entered the shade of the forest path which crossed the
+island, and which, near its highest point had been blocked by felled
+trees. But their intention was not to go so far. After keeping to the
+path for some distance, they left it at a point where the forest was
+bare of undergrowth, and the trees, festooned with creepers, stood clear
+of one another in the gloom of their own making. Here and there great
+splashes of light lay on the ground. They moved, silent in the great
+stillness, breathing the calmness, the infinite isolation, the repose of
+a slumber without dreams. They emerged at the upper limit of vegetation,
+among some rocks; and in a depression of the sharp slope, like a small
+platform, they turned about and looked from on high over the sea,
+lonely, its colour effaced by sunshine, its horizon a heat mist, a mere
+unsubstantial shimmer in the pale and blinding infinity overhung by the
+darker blaze of the sky.
+
+“It makes my head swim,” the girl murmured, shutting her eyes and
+putting her hand on his shoulder.
+
+Heyst, gazing fixedly to the southward, exclaimed:
+
+“Sail ho!”
+
+A moment of silence ensued.
+
+“It must be very far away,” he went on. “I don't think you could see it.
+Some native craft making for the Moluccas, probably. Come, we mustn't
+stay here.”
+
+With his arm round her waist, he led her down a little distance, and
+they settled themselves in the shade; she, seated on the ground, he a
+little lower, reclining at her feet.
+
+“You don't like to look at the sea from up there?” he said after a time.
+
+She shook her head. That empty space was to her the abomination of
+desolation. But she only said again:
+
+“It makes my head swim.”
+
+“Too big?” he inquired.
+
+“Too lonely. It makes my heart sink, too,” she added in a low voice, as
+if confessing a secret.
+
+“I'm afraid,” said Heyst, “that you would be justified in reproaching me
+for these sensations. But what would you have?”
+
+His tone was playful, but his eyes, directed at her face, were serious.
+She protested.
+
+“I am not feeling lonely with you--not a bit. It is only when we come up
+to that place, and I look at all that water and all that light--”
+
+“We will never come here again, then,” he interrupted her.
+
+She remained silent for a while, returning his gaze till he removed it.
+
+“It seems as if everything that there is had gone under,” she said.
+
+“Reminds you of the story of the deluge,” muttered the man, stretched at
+her feet and looking at them. “Are you frightened at it?”
+
+“I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone. When I say, I,
+of course I mean we.”
+
+“Do you?” . . . Heyst remained silent for a while. “The vision of a
+world destroyed,” he mused aloud. “Would you be sorry for it?”
+
+“I should be sorry for the happy people in it,” she said simply.
+
+His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he seemed
+to detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a glimpse of the
+sun through the clouds.
+
+“I should have thought it's they specially who ought to have been
+congratulated. Don't you?”
+
+“Oh, yes--I understand what you mean; but there were forty days before
+it was all over.”
+
+“You seem to be in possession of all the details.”
+
+Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in silence.
+She was not looking at him.
+
+“Sunday school,” she murmured. “I went regularly from the time I
+was eight till I was thirteen. We lodged in the north of London, off
+Kingsland Road. It wasn't a bad time. Father was earning good money
+then. The woman of the house used to pack me off in the afternoon with
+her own girls. She was a good woman. Her husband was in the post office.
+Sorter or something. Such a quiet man. He used to go off after supper
+for night-duty, sometimes. Then one day they had a row, and broke up the
+home. I remember I cried when we had to pack up all of a sudden and go
+into other lodgings. I never knew what it was, though--”
+
+“The deluge,” muttered Heyst absently.
+
+He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the first
+moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had come
+together. The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of
+audacity and sadness, would have given interest to the most inane
+chatter. But she was no chatterer. She was rather silent, with a
+capacity for immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the
+concert platform between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her
+hands reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey,
+unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable
+reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force--or
+simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of
+complete surrender.
+
+During a long pause she did not look at him. Then suddenly, as if
+the word “deluge” had stuck in her mind, she asked, looking up at the
+cloudless sky:
+
+“Does it ever rain here?”
+
+“There is a season when it rains almost every day,” said Heyst,
+surprised. “There are also thunderstorms. We once had a 'mud-shower.'”
+
+“Mud-shower?”
+
+“Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes. He sometimes clears his
+red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at the
+same time. It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally well
+behaved--just smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first showed
+you the smudge in the sky from the schooner's deck. He's a good-natured,
+lazy fellow of a volcano.”
+
+“I saw a mountain smoking like that before,” she said, staring at the
+slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front of her. “It wasn't
+very long after we left England--some few days, though. I was so ill at
+first that I lost count of days. A smoking mountain--I can't think how
+they called it.”
+
+“Vesuvius, perhaps,” suggested Heyst.
+
+“That's the name.”
+
+“I saw it, too, years, ages ago,” said Heyst.
+
+“On your way here?”
+
+“No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of the world. I
+was yet a boy.”
+
+She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover some
+trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the hair
+thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches. Heyst stood the frank
+examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect these
+veiled grey eyes produced--whether on his heart or on his nerves,
+whether sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he was unable to
+say.
+
+“Well, princess of Samburan,” he said at last, “have I found favour in
+your sight?”
+
+She seemed to wake up, and shook her head.
+
+“I was thinking,” she murmured very low.
+
+“Thought, action--so many snares! If you begin to think you will be
+unhappy.”
+
+“I wasn't thinking of myself!” she declared with a simplicity which took
+Heyst aback somewhat.
+
+“On the lips of a moralist this would sound like a rebuke,” he said,
+half seriously; “but I won't suspect you of being one. Moralists and I
+haven't been friends for many years.”
+
+She had listened with an air of attention.
+
+“I understood you had no friends,” she said. “I am pleased that there's
+nobody to find fault with you for what you have done. I like to think
+that I am in no one's way.”
+
+Heyst would have said something, but she did not give him time.
+Unconscious of the movement he made she went on:
+
+“What I was thinking to myself was, why are you here?”
+
+Heyst let himself sink on his elbow again.
+
+“If by 'you' you mean 'we'--well, you know why we are here.”
+
+She bent her gaze down at him.
+
+“No, it isn't that. I meant before--all that time before you came across
+me and guessed at once that I was in trouble, with no one to turn to.
+And you know it was desperate trouble too.”
+
+Her voice fell on the last words, as if she would end there; but there
+was something so expectant in Heyst's attitude as he sat at her feet,
+looking up at her steadily, that she continued, after drawing a short,
+quick breath:
+
+“It was, really. I told you I had been worried before by bad fellows.
+It made me unhappy, disturbed--angry, too. But oh, how I hated, hated,
+hated that man!”
+
+“That man” was the florid Schomberg with the military bearing,
+benefactor of white men ['decent food to eat in decent company')--mature
+victim of belated passion. The girl shuddered. The characteristic
+harmoniousness of her face became, as it were, decomposed for an
+instant. Heyst was startled.
+
+“Why think of it now?” he cried.
+
+“It's because I was cornered that time. It wasn't as before. It was
+worse, ever so much. I wished I could die of my fright--and yet it's
+only now that I begin to understand what a horror it might have been.
+Yes, only now, since we--”
+
+Heyst stirred a little.
+
+“Came here,” he finished.
+
+Her tenseness relaxed, her flushed face went gradually back to its
+normal tint.
+
+“Yes,” she said indifferently, but at the same time she gave him a
+stealthy glance of passionate appreciation; and then her face took on a
+melancholy cast, her whole figure drooped imperceptibly.
+
+“But you were coming back here anyhow?” she asked.
+
+“Yes. I was only waiting for Davidson. Yes, I was coming back here, to
+these ruins--to Wang, who perhaps did not expect to see me again. It's
+impossible to guess at the way that Chinaman draws his conclusions, and
+how he looks upon one.”
+
+“Don't talk about him. He makes me feel uncomfortable. Talk about
+yourself!”
+
+“About myself? I see you are still busy with the mystery of my existence
+here; but it isn't at all mysterious. Primarily the man with the quill
+pen in his hand in that picture you so often look at is responsible for
+my existence. He is also responsible for what my existence is, or
+rather has been. He was a great man in his way. I don't know much of his
+history. I suppose he began like other people; took fine words for good,
+ringing coin and noble ideals for valuable banknotes. He was a great
+master of both, himself, by the way. Later he discovered--how am I to
+explain it to you? Suppose the world were a factory and all mankind
+workmen in it. Well, he discovered that the wages were not good enough.
+That they were paid in counterfeit money.”
+
+“I see!” the girl said slowly.
+
+“Do you?”
+
+Heyst, who had been speaking as if to himself, looked up curiously.
+
+“It wasn't a new discovery, but he brought his capacity for scorn to
+bear on it. It was immense. It ought to have withered this globe. I
+don't know how many minds he convinced. But my mind was very young then,
+and youth I suppose can be easily seduced--even by a negation. He was
+very ruthless, and yet he was not without pity. He dominated me without
+difficulty. A heartless man could not have done so. Even to fools he was
+not utterly merciless. He could be indignant, but he was too great for
+flouts and jeers. What he said was not meant for the crowd; it could not
+be; and I was flattered to find myself among the elect. They read his
+books, but I have heard his living word. It was irresistible. It was
+as if that mind were taking me into its confidence, giving me a special
+insight into its mastery of despair. Mistake, no doubt. There is
+something of my father in every man who lives long enough. But they
+don't say anything. They can't. They wouldn't know how, or perhaps,
+they wouldn't speak if they could. Man on this earth is an unforeseen
+accident which does not stand close investigation. However, that
+particular man died as quietly as a child goes to sleep. But, after
+listening to him, I could not take my soul down into the street to fight
+there. I started off to wander about, an independent spectator--if that
+is possible.”
+
+For a long time the girl's grey eyes had been watching his face. She
+discovered that, addressing her, he was really talking to himself. Heyst
+looked up, caught sight of her as it were, and caught himself up, with a
+low laugh and a change of tone.
+
+“All this does not tell you why I ever came here. Why, indeed? It's like
+prying into inscrutable mysteries which are not worth scrutinizing. A
+man drifts. The most successful men have drifted into their successes.
+I don't want to tell you that this is a success. You wouldn't believe
+me if I did. It isn't; neither is it the ruinous failure it looks. It
+proves nothing, unless perhaps some hidden weakness in my character--and
+even that is not certain.”
+
+He looked fixedly at her, and with such grave eyes that she felt obliged
+to smile faintly at him, since she did not understand what he meant. Her
+smile was reflected, still fainter, on his lips.
+
+“This does not advance you much in your inquiry,” he went on. “And in
+truth your question is unanswerable; but facts have a certain positive
+value, and I will tell you a fact. One day I met a cornered man. I use
+the word because it expresses the man's situation exactly, and because
+you just used it yourself. You know what that means?”
+
+“What do you say?” she whispered, astounded. “A man!”
+
+Heyst laughed at her wondering eyes.
+
+“No! No! I mean in his own way.”
+
+“I knew very well it couldn't be anything like that,” she observed under
+her breath.
+
+“I won't bother you with the story. It was a custom-house affair,
+strange as it may sound to you. He would have preferred to be killed
+outright--that is, to have his soul dispatched to another world, rather
+than to be robbed of his substance, his very insignificant substance, in
+this. I saw that he believed in another world because, being cornered,
+as I have told you, he went down on his knees and prayed. What do you
+think of that?”
+
+Heyst paused. She looked at him earnestly.
+
+“You didn't make fun of him for that?” she said.
+
+Heyst made a brusque movement of protest
+
+“My dear girl, I am not a ruffian,” he cried. Then, returning to his
+usual tone: “I didn't even have to conceal a smile. Somehow it didn't
+look a smiling matter. No, it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he
+was so representative of all the past victims of the Great Joke. But it
+is by folly alone that the world moves, and so it is a respectable thing
+upon the whole. And besides, he was what one would call a good man. I
+don't mean especially because he had offered up a prayer. No! He was
+really a decent fellow, he was quite unfitted for this world, he was a
+failure, a good man cornered--a sight for the gods; for no decent mortal
+cares to look at that sort.” A thought seemed to occur to him. He turned
+his face to the girl. “And you, who have been cornered too--did you
+think of offering a prayer?”
+
+Neither her eyes nor a single one of her features moved the least bit.
+She only let fall the words:
+
+“I am not what they call a good girl.”
+
+“That sounds evasive,” said Heyst after a short silence. “Well, the good
+fellow did pray and after he had confessed to it I was struck by the
+comicality of the situation. No, don't misunderstand me--I am not
+alluding to his act, of course. And even the idea of Eternity, Infinity,
+Omnipotence, being called upon to defeat the conspiracy of two miserable
+Portuguese half-castes did not move my mirth. From the point of view of
+the supplicant, the danger to be conjured was something like the end
+of the world, or worse. No! What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel
+Heyst, the most detached of creatures in this earthly captivity, the
+veriest tramp on this earth, an indifferent stroller going through the
+world's bustle--that I should have been there to step into the situation
+of an agent of Providence. I, a man of universal scorn and unbelief. . .
+.”
+
+“You are putting it on,” she interrupted in her seductive voice, with a
+coaxing intonation.
+
+“No. I am not like that, born or fashioned, or both. I am not for
+nothing the son of my father, of that man in the painting. I am he, all
+but the genius. And there is even less in me than I make out, because
+the very scorn is falling away from me year after year. I have never
+been so amused as by that episode in which I was suddenly called to act
+such an incredible part. For a moment I enjoyed it greatly. It got him
+out of his corner, you know.”
+
+“You saved a man for fun--is that what you mean? Just for fun?”
+
+“Why this tone of suspicion?” remonstrated Heyst. “I suppose the sight
+of this particular distress was disagreeable to me. What you call fun
+came afterwards, when it dawned on me that I was for him a walking,
+breathing, incarnate proof of the efficacy of prayer. I was a little
+fascinated by it--and then, could I have argued with him? You don't
+argue against such evidence, and besides it would have looked as if
+I had wanted to claim all the merit. Already his gratitude was simply
+frightful. Funny position, wasn't it? The boredom came later, when we
+lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of inadvertence,
+created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don't know. One
+gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that
+friendship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a
+tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.”
+
+Heyst's tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which seasoned
+all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of his thoughts.
+The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose
+presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to
+live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater
+sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her
+head in both her hands.
+
+“Are you tired of sitting here?” Heyst asked.
+
+An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the answer
+she made.
+
+“Why are you looking so serious?” he pursued, and immediately thought
+that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more bearable than
+constant gaiety. “However, this expression suits you exceedingly,” he
+added, not diplomatically, but because, by the tendency of his taste,
+it was a true statement. “And as long as I can be certain that it is not
+boredom which gives you this severe air, I am willing to sit here and
+look at you till you are ready to go.”
+
+And this was true. He was still under the fresh sortilege of their
+common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his
+possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has ceased
+to be masculine. Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on him,
+then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot of the
+straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly withdrawing
+their shade. The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless head.
+She would not look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying herself.
+She felt in her innermost depths an irresistible desire to give herself
+up to him more completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice. This was
+something of which he did not seem to have an idea. He was a strange
+being without needs. She felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept
+silent, she said uneasily--for she didn't know what his silences might
+mean:
+
+“And so you lived with that friend--that good man?”
+
+“Excellent fellow,” Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did not
+expect. “But it was a weakness on my part. I really didn't want to, only
+he wouldn't let me off, and I couldn't explain. He was the sort of man
+to whom you can't explain anything. He was extremely sensitive, and it
+would have been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings
+by the sort of plain speaking that would have been necessary. His
+mind was like a white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six
+straw-bottomed chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them
+in various combinations. But they were always the same chairs. He was
+extremely easy to live with; but then he got hold of this coal idea--or,
+rather, the idea got hold of him, it entered into that scantily
+furnished chamber of which I have just spoken, and sat on all the
+chairs. There was no dislodging it, you know! It was going to make his
+fortune, my fortune, everybody's fortune. In past years, in moments of
+doubt that will come to a man determined to remain free from absurdities
+of existence, I often asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what way
+would life try to get hold of me? And this was the way. He got it into
+his head that he could do nothing without me. And was I now, he asked
+me, to spurn and ruin him? Well, one morning--I wonder if he had gone
+down on his knees to pray that night!--one morning I gave in.”
+
+Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away from
+him with a nervous gesture.
+
+“I gave in,” he repeated.
+
+Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl noticed
+the strong feeling on his face with that intense interest which his
+person awakened in her mind and in her heart. But it soon passed away,
+leaving only a moody expression.
+
+“It's difficult to resist where nothing matters,” he observed. “And
+perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me
+to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so well
+thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish
+like the veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe that I was actually
+respected for a time. I was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be
+loyal to the man. I have been, from first to last, completely, utterly
+loyal to the best of my ability. I thought he understood something about
+coal. And if I had been aware that he knew nothing of it, as in fact he
+didn't, well--I don't know what I could have done to stop him. In one
+way or another I should have had to be loyal. Truth, work, ambition,
+love itself, may be only counters in the lamentable or despicable game
+of life, but when one takes a hand one must play the game. No, the shade
+of Morrison needn't haunt me. What's the matter? I say, Lena, why are
+you staring like that? Do you feel ill?”
+
+Heyst made as if to get on his feet. The girl extended her arm to arrest
+him, and he remained staring in a sitting posture, propped on one arm,
+observing her indefinable expression of anxiety, as if she were unable
+to draw breath.
+
+“What has come to you?” he insisted, feeling strangely unwilling to
+move, to touch her.
+
+“Nothing!” She swallowed painfully. “Of course it can't be. What name
+did you say? I didn't hear it properly.”
+
+“Name?” repeated Heyst dazedly. “I only mentioned Morrison. It's the
+name of that man of whom I've been speaking. What of it?”
+
+“And you mean to say that he was your friend?”
+
+“You have heard enough to judge for yourself. You know as much of our
+connection as I know myself. The people in this part of the world
+went by appearances, and called us friends, as far as I can remember.
+Appearances--what more, what better can you ask for? In fact you can't
+have better. You can't have anything else.”
+
+“You are trying to confuse me with your talk,” she cried. “You can't
+make fun of this.”
+
+“Can't? Well, no I can't. It's a pity. Perhaps it would have been the
+best way,” said Heyst, in a tone which for him could be called gloomy.
+“Unless one could forget the silly business altogether.” His faint
+playfulness of manner and speech returned, like a habit one has schooled
+oneself into, even before his forehead had cleared completely. “But why
+are you looking so hard at me? Oh, I don't object, and I shall try not
+to flinch. Your eyes--”
+
+He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had forgotten
+all about the late Morrison at that moment.
+
+“No,” he exclaimed suddenly. “What an impenetrable girl you are Lena,
+with those grey eyes of yours! Windows of the soul, as some poet has
+said. The fellow must have been a glazier by vocation. Well, nature has
+provided excellently for the shyness of your soul.”
+
+When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of her
+breath. He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he thought he knew
+so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:
+
+“And that partner of yours is dead?”
+
+“Morrison? Oh, yes, as I've told you, he--”
+
+“You never told me.”
+
+“Didn't I? I thought I did; or, rather, I thought you must know. It
+seems impossible that anybody with whom I speak should not know that
+Morrison is dead.”
+
+She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like an
+expression of horror on her face.
+
+“Morrison!” she whispered in an appalled tone. “Morrison!” Her head
+drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her voice
+that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the syllables
+of that unromantic name. A thought flashed through his head--could she
+have known Morrison? But the mere difference of their origins made it
+wildly improbable.
+
+“This is very extraordinary!” he said. “Have you ever heard the name
+before?”
+
+Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as if she
+could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him. She was biting
+her lower lip.
+
+“Did you ever know anybody of that name?” he asked.
+
+The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke,
+jerkily, as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear. She had heard
+of that very man, she told Heyst.
+
+“Impossible!” he said positively. “You are mistaken. You couldn't have
+heard of him, it's--”
+
+He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was perfectly
+useless; that one doesn't argue against thin air.
+
+“But I did hear of him; only I didn't know then, I couldn't guess, that
+it was your partner they were talking about.”
+
+“Talking about my partner?” repeated Heyst slowly.
+
+“No.” Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as full of incredulity, as
+his. “No. They were talking of you really; only I didn't know it.”
+
+“Who were they?” Heyst raised his voice. “Who was talking of me? Talking
+where?”
+
+With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining
+position; at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on a
+level.
+
+“Why, in that town, in that hotel. Where else could it have been?” she
+said.
+
+The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst's simplified
+conception of himself. For a moment he was as much surprised as if he
+had believed himself to be a mere gliding shadow among men. Besides,
+he had in him a half-unconscious notion that he was above the level of
+island gossip.
+
+“But you said first that it was of Morrison they talked,” he remarked to
+the girl, sinking on his heels, and no longer much interested. “Strange
+that you should have the opportunity to hear any talk at all! I was
+rather under the impression that you never saw anybody belonging to the
+town except from the platform.”
+
+“You forget that I was not living with the other girls,” she said.
+“After meals they used to go back to the Pavilion, but I had to stay in
+the hotel and do my sewing, or what not, in the room where they talked.”
+
+“I didn't think of that. By the by, you never told me who they were.”
+
+“Why, that horrible red-faced beast,” she said, with all the energy of
+disgust which the mere thought of the hotel-keeper provoked in her.
+
+“Oh, Schomberg!” Heyst murmured carelessly.
+
+“He talked to the boss--to Zangiacomo, I mean. I had to sit there. That
+devil-woman sometimes wouldn't let me go away. I mean Mrs. Zangiacomo.”
+
+“I guessed,” murmured Heyst. “She liked to torment you in a variety
+of ways. But it is really strange that the hotel-keeper should talk of
+Morrison to Zangiacomo. As far as I can remember he saw very little of
+Morrison professionally. He knew many others much better.”
+
+The girl shuddered slightly.
+
+“That was the only name I ever overheard. I would get as far away from
+them as I could, to the other end of the room, but when that beast
+started shouting I could not help hearing. I wish I had never heard
+anything. If I had got up and gone out of the room I don't suppose the
+woman would have killed me for it; but she would have rowed me in a
+nasty way. She would have threatened me and called me names. That sort,
+when they know you are helpless, there's nothing to stop them. I don't
+know how it is, but bad people, real bad people that you can see are
+bad, they get over me somehow. It's the way they set about downing one.
+I am afraid of wickedness.”
+
+Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face. He encouraged her,
+profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.
+
+“I quite understand. You needn't apologize for your great delicacy in
+the perception of inhuman evil. I am a little like you.”
+
+“I am not very plucky,” she said.
+
+“Well! I don't know myself what I would do, what countenance I would
+have before a creature which would strike me as being evil incarnate.
+Don't you be ashamed!”
+
+She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid expression
+on her face, and murmured:
+
+“You don't seem to want to know what he was saying.”
+
+“About poor Morrison? It couldn't have been anything bad, for the poor
+fellow was innocence itself. And then, you know, he is dead, and nothing
+can possibly matter to him now.”
+
+“But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!” she cried.
+
+“He was saying that Morrison's partner first got all there was to get
+out of him, and then, and then--well, as good as murdered him--sent him
+out to die somewhere!”
+
+“You believe that of me?” said Heyst, after a moment of perfect silence.
+
+“I didn't know it had anything to do with you. Schomberg was talking
+of some Swede. How was I to know? It was only when you began telling me
+about how you came here--”
+
+“And now you have my version.” Heyst forced himself to speak quietly.
+“So that's how the business looked from outside!” he muttered.
+
+“I remember him saying that everybody in these parts knew the story,”
+ the girl added breathlessly.
+
+“Strange that it should hurt me!” mused Heyst to himself; “yet it does.
+I seem to be as much of a fool as those everybodies who know the story
+and no doubt believe it. Can you remember any more?” he addressed the
+girl in a grimly polite tone. “I've often heard of the moral advantages
+of seeing oneself as others see one. Let us investigate further. Can't
+you recall something else that everybody knows?”
+
+“Oh! Don't laugh!” she cried.
+
+“Did I laugh? I assure you I was not aware of it. I won't ask you
+whether you believe the hotel-keeper's version. Surely you must know the
+value of human judgement!”
+
+She unclasped her hands, moved them slightly, and twined her fingers as
+before. Protest? Assent? Was there to be nothing more? He was relieved
+when she spoke in that warm and wonderful voice which in itself
+comforted and fascinated one's heart, which made her lovable.
+
+“I heard this before you and I ever spoke to each other. It went out of
+my memory afterwards. Everything went out of my memory then; and I was
+glad of it. It was a fresh start for me, with you--and you know it. I
+wish I had forgotten who I was--that would have been best; and I very
+nearly did forget.”
+
+He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words. She seemed to
+be talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious terms of
+special significance. He thought that if she only could talk to him
+in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the sheer
+beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling.
+
+“But,” she went on, “the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when you
+mentioned it--”
+
+“It broke the spell,” muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if he
+had been deceived in some hope.
+
+The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still
+eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with
+a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before,
+because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the
+abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm. What if he should
+grow weary of the burden?
+
+“And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!”
+
+Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her
+steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise. It was a purely
+mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor puzzled. In
+fact, she could understand him better then than at any moment since she
+first set eyes on him.
+
+He laughed scornfully.
+
+“What am I thinking of?” he cried. “As if it could matter to me what
+anybody had ever said or believed, from the beginning of the world till
+the crack of doom!”
+
+“I never heard you laugh till today,” she observed. “This is the second
+time!”
+
+He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.
+
+“That's because, when one's heart has been broken into in the way you
+have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to enter--shame,
+anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears--stupid laughter, too. I wonder
+what interpretation you are putting on it?”
+
+“It wasn't gay, certainly,” she said. “But why are you angry with me?
+Are you sorry you took me away from those beasts? I told you who I was.
+You could see it.”
+
+“Heavens!” he muttered. He had regained his command of himself. “I
+assure you I could see much more than you could tell me. I could see
+quite a lot that you don't even suspect yet, but you can't be seen quite
+through.”
+
+He sank to the ground by her side and took her hand. She asked gently:
+
+“What more do you want from me?”
+
+He made no sound for a time.
+
+“The impossible, I suppose,” he said very low, as one makes a
+confidence, and pressing the hand he grasped.
+
+It did not return the pressure. He shook his head as if to drive away
+the thought of this, and added in a louder, light tone:
+
+“Nothing less. And it isn't because I think little of what I've got
+already. Oh, no! It is because I think so much of this possession of
+mine that I can't have it complete enough. I know it's unreasonable. You
+can't hold back anything--now.”
+
+“Indeed I couldn't,” she whispered, letting her hand lie passive in his
+tight grasp. “I only wish I could give you something more, or better, or
+whatever it is you want.”
+
+He was touched by the sincere accent of these simple words.
+
+“I tell you what you can do--you can tell me whether you would have gone
+with me like this if you had known of whom that abominable idiot of a
+hotel-keeper was speaking. A murderer--no less!”
+
+“But I didn't know you at all then,” she cried. “And I had the sense to
+understand what he was saying. It wasn't murder, really. I never thought
+it was.”
+
+“What made him invent such an atrocity?” Heyst exclaimed. “He seems
+a stupid animal. He is stupid. How did he manage to hatch that pretty
+tale? Have I a particularly vile countenance? Is black selfishness
+written all over my face? Or is that sort of thing so universally human
+that it might be said of anybody?”
+
+“It wasn't murder,” she insisted earnestly.
+
+“I know. I understand. It was worse. As to killing a man, which would be
+a comparatively decent thing to do, well--I have never done that.”
+
+“Why should you do it?” she asked in a frightened voice.
+
+“My dear girl, you don't know the sort of life I have been leading in
+unexplored countries, in the wilds; it's difficult to give you an idea.
+There are men who haven't been in such tight places as I have found
+myself in who have had to--to shed blood, as the saying is. Even the
+wilds hold prizes which tempt some people; but I had no schemes, no
+plans--and not even great firmness of mind to make me unduly obstinate.
+I was simply moving on, while the others, perhaps, were going somewhere.
+An indifference as to roads and purposes makes one meeker, as it were.
+And I may say truly, too, that I never did care, I won't say for life--I
+had scorned what people call by that name from the first--but for being
+alive. I don't know if that is what men call courage, but I doubt it
+very much.”
+
+“You! You have no courage?” she protested.
+
+“I really don't know. Not the sort that always itches for a weapon, for
+I have never been anxious to use one in the quarrels that a man gets
+into in the most innocent way sometimes. The differences for which
+men murder each other are, like everything else they do, the most
+contemptible, the most pitiful things to look back upon. No, I've never
+killed a man or loved a woman--not even in my thoughts, not even in my
+dreams.”
+
+He raised her hand to his lips, and let them rest on it for a space,
+during which she moved a little closer to him. After the lingering kiss
+he did not relinquish his hold.
+
+“To slay, to love--the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I
+have no experience of either. You must forgive me anything that may have
+appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive in my speeches,
+untimely in my silences.”
+
+He moved uneasily, a little disappointed by her attitude, but indulgent
+to it, and feeling, in this moment of perfect quietness, that in holding
+her surrendered hand he had found a closer communion than they had ever
+achieved before. But even then there still lingered in him a sense of
+incompleteness not altogether overcome--which, it seemed, nothing ever
+would overcome--the fatal imperfection of all the gifts of life, which
+makes of them a delusion and a snare.
+
+All of a sudden he squeezed her hand angrily. His delicately playful
+equanimity, the product of kindness and scorn, had perished with the
+loss of his bitter liberty.
+
+“Not murder, you say! I should think not. But when you led me to talk
+just now, when the name turned up, when you understood that it was of me
+that these things had been said, you showed a strange emotion. I could
+see it.”
+
+“I was a bit startled,” she said.
+
+“At the baseness of my conduct?” he asked.
+
+“I wouldn't judge you, not for anything.”
+
+“Really?”
+
+“It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is.” With her
+other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one movement the
+earth and the heaven. “I wouldn't do such a thing.”
+
+Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:
+
+“I! I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!” he cried. “I, who could
+not bear to hurt his feelings. I, who respected his very madness! Yes,
+this madness, the wreck of which you can see lying about the jetty of
+Diamond Bay. What else could I do? He insisted on regarding me as his
+saviour; he was always restraining the eternal obligation on the tip of
+his tongue, till I was burning with shame at his gratitude. What could I
+do? He was going to repay me with this infernal coal, and I had to join
+him as one joins a child's game in a nursery. One would no more have
+thought of humiliating him than one would think of humiliating a child.
+What's the use of talking of all this! Of course, the people here
+could not understand the truth of our relation to each other. But what
+business of theirs was it? Kill old Morrison! Well, it is less criminal,
+less base--I am not saying it is less difficult--to kill a man than to
+cheat him in that way. You understand that?”
+
+She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction. His
+eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.
+
+“But it was neither one nor the other,” he went on. “Then, why your
+emotion? All you confess is that you wouldn't judge me.”
+
+She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing of
+her wonder could be read.
+
+“I said I couldn't,” she whispered.
+
+“But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!” the playfulness
+of tone hardly concealed his irritation. “What power there must be in
+words, only imperfectly heard--for you did not listen with particular
+care, did you? What were they? What evil effort of invention drove them
+into that idiot's mouth out of his lying throat? If you were to try to
+remember, they would perhaps convince me, too.”
+
+“I didn't listen,” she protested. “What was it to me what they said of
+anybody? He was saying that there never were such loving friends to
+look at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him and got
+thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home and die.”
+
+Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in these
+quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice. She ceased
+abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally weary, sick
+at heart.
+
+“Of course, why shouldn't you get tired of that or any other--company?
+You aren't like anyone else, and--and the thought of it made me unhappy
+suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe anything bad of you. I--”
+
+A brusque movement of his arm, flinging her hand away, stopped her
+short. Heyst had again lost control of himself. He would have shouted,
+if shouting had been in his character.
+
+“No, this earth must be the appointed hatching planet of calumny enough
+to furnish the whole universe. I feel a disgust at my own person, as if
+I had tumbled into some filthy hole. Pah! And you--all you can say is
+that you won't judge me; that you--”
+
+She raised her head at this attack, though indeed he had not turned to
+her.
+
+“I don't believe anything bad of you,” she repeated. “I couldn't.”
+
+He made a gesture as if to say:
+
+“That's sufficient.”
+
+In his soul and in his body he experienced a nervous reaction from
+tenderness. All at once, without transition, he detested her. But only
+for a moment. He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she
+had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of
+individuality which excites--and escapes.
+
+He jumped up and began to walk to and fro. Presently his hidden fury
+fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind
+emptiness, desolation, regret. His resentment was not against the girl,
+but against life itself--that commonest of snares, in which he felt
+himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled by the
+lucidity of his mind.
+
+He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side.
+Before she could make a movement or even turn her head his way, he took
+her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness
+of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another
+appeal to his tenderness--a new seduction. The girl glanced round,
+moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed
+imperiously to him to leave her alone--a command which Heyst did not
+obey.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst scrambled quickly to
+his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had rolled a little
+way off. Meanwhile she busied herself in doing up her hair, plaited on
+the top of her head in two heavy, dark tresses, which had come loose. He
+tendered her the helmet in silence, and waited as if unwilling to hear
+the sound of his own voice.
+
+“We had better go down now,” he suggested in a low tone.
+
+He extended his hand to help her up. He had the intention to smile,
+but abandoned it at the nearer sight of her still face, in which was
+depicted the infinite lassitude of her soul. On their way to regain the
+forest path they had to pass through the spot from which the view of
+the sea could be obtained. The flaming abyss of emptiness, the liquid,
+undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light, made her long for
+the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an austere spell; for the
+velvety dark sky and the mysterious great shadow of the sea, conveying
+peace to the day-weary heart. She put her hand to her eyes. Behind her
+back Heyst spoke gently.
+
+“Let us get on, Lena.”
+
+She walked ahead in silence. Heyst remarked that they had never been
+out before during the hottest hours. It would do her no good, he feared.
+This solicitude pleased and soothed her. She felt more and more like
+herself--a poor London girl playing in an orchestra, and snatched out
+from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a miserable existence,
+by a man like whom there was not, there could not be, another in this
+world. She felt this with elation, with uneasiness, with an intimate
+pride--and with a peculiar sinking of the heart.
+
+“I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat,” she said
+decisively.
+
+“Yes, but I don't forget that you're not a tropical bird.”
+
+“You weren't born in these parts, either,” she returned.
+
+“No, and perhaps I haven't even your physique. I am a transplanted
+being. Transplanted! I ought to call myself uprooted--an unnatural state
+of existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything.”
+
+She looked back at him and received a smile. He told her to keep in the
+shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full of heat
+if free from glare. Now and then they had glimpses of the company's old
+clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps of trees stood
+charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister. They crossed the open
+in a direct line for the bungalow. On the veranda they fancied they had
+a glimpse of the vanishing Wang, though the girl was not at all sure
+that she had seen anything move. Heyst had no doubts.
+
+“Wang has been looking out for us. We are late.”
+
+“Was he? I thought I saw something white for a moment, and then I did
+not see it any more.”
+
+“That's it--he vanishes. It's a very remarkable gift in that Chinaman.”
+
+“Are they all like that?” she asked with naive curiosity and uneasiness.
+
+“Not in such perfection,” said Heyst, amused.
+
+He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk. The drops
+of perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool, white petal
+of a flower. He looked at her figure of grace and strength, solid and
+supple, with an ever-growing appreciation.
+
+“Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then Mr. Wang
+will give us something to eat,” he said.
+
+They had found the table laid. When they came together again and sat
+down to it, Wang materialized without a sound, unheard, uncalled, and
+did his office. Which being accomplished, at a given moment he was not.
+
+A great silence brooded over Samburan--the silence of the great heat
+that seems pregnant with fatal issues, like the silence of ardent
+thought. Heyst remained alone in the big room. The girl seeing him
+take up a book, had retreated to her chamber. Heyst sat down under
+his father's portrait; and the abominable calumny crept back into his
+recollection. The taste of it came on his lips, nauseating and corrosive
+like some kinds of poison. He was tempted to spit on the floor, naively,
+in sheer unsophisticated disgust of the physical sensation. He shook his
+head, surprised at himself. He was not used to receive his intellectual
+impressions in that way--reflected in movements of carnal emotion. He
+stirred impatiently in his chair, and raised the book to his eyes with
+both hands. It was one of his father's. He opened it haphazard, and
+his eyes fell on the middle of the page. The elder Heyst had written of
+everything in many books--of space and of time, of animals and of stars;
+analysing ideas and actions, the laughter and the frowns of men, and the
+grimaces of their agony. The son read, shrinking into himself, composing
+his face as if under the author's eye, with a vivid consciousness of
+the portrait on his right hand, a little above his head; a wonderful
+presence in its heavy frame on the flimsy wall of mats, looking exiled
+and at home, out of place and masterful, in the painted immobility of
+profile.
+
+And Heyst, the son, read:
+
+Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love--the
+most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.
+
+He turned the pages of the little volume, “Storm and Dust,” glancing
+here and there at the broken text of reflections, maxims, short phrases,
+enigmatical sometimes and sometimes eloquent. It seemed to him that he
+was hearing his father's voice, speaking and ceasing to speak again.
+Startled at first, he ended by finding a charm in the illusion. He
+abandoned himself to the half-belief that something of his father dwelt
+yet on earth--a ghostly voice, audible to the ear of his own flesh and
+blood. With what strange serenity, mingled with terrors, had that man
+considered the universal nothingness! He had plunged into it headlong,
+perhaps to render death, the answer that faced one at every inquiry,
+more supportable.
+
+Heyst stirred, and the ghostly voice ceased; but his eyes followed the
+words on the last page of the book:
+
+Men of tormented conscience, or of a criminal imagination, are aware of
+much that minds of a peaceful, resigned cast do not even suspect. It is
+not poets alone who dare descend into the abyss of infernal regions, or
+even who dream of such a descent. The most inexpressive of human beings
+must have said to himself, at one time or another: “Anything but this!”
+ . . .
+
+We all have our instants of clairvoyance. They are not very helpful.
+The character of the scheme does not permit that or anything else to
+be helpful. Properly speaking its character, judged by the standards
+established by its victims, is infamous. It excuses every violence of
+protest and at the same time never fails to crush it, just as it
+crushes the blindest assent. The so-called wickedness must be, like the
+so-called virtue, its own reward--to be anything at all . . .
+
+Clairvoyance or no clairvoyance, men love their captivity. To the
+unknown force of negation they prefer the miserably tumbled bed of their
+servitude. Man alone can give one the disgust of pity; yet I find it
+easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its wickedness.
+
+These were the last words. Heyst lowered the book to his knees. Lena's
+voice spoke above his drooping head:
+
+“You sit there as if you were unhappy.”
+
+“I thought you were asleep,” he said.
+
+“I was lying down right enough, but I never closed my eyes.”
+
+“The rest would have done you good after our walk. Didn't you try?”
+
+“I was lying down, I tell you, but sleep I couldn't.”
+
+“And you made no sound! What want of sincerity. Or did you want to be
+alone for a time?”
+
+“I--alone?” she murmured.
+
+He noticed her eyeing the book, and got up to put it back in the
+bookcase. When he turned round, he saw that she had dropped into the
+chair--it was the one she always used--and looked as if her strength had
+suddenly gone from her, leaving her only her youth, which seemed very
+pathetic, very much at his mercy. He moved quickly towards the chair.
+
+“Tired, are you? It's my fault, taking you up so high and keeping you
+out so long. Such a windless day, too!”
+
+She watched his concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him,
+but as unreadable as ever. He avoided looking into them for that very
+reason. He forgot himself in the contemplation of those passive arms, of
+these defenceless lips, and--yes, one had to go back to them--of these
+wide-open eyes. Something wild in their grey stare made him think of
+sea-birds in the cold murkiness of high latitudes. He started when she
+spoke, all the charm of physical intimacy revealed suddenly in that
+voice.
+
+“You should try to love me!” she said.
+
+He made a movement of astonishment.
+
+“Try,” he muttered. “But it seems to me--” He broke off, saying to
+himself that if he loved her, he had never told her so in so many words.
+Simple words! They died on his lips. “What makes you say that?” he
+asked.
+
+She lowered her eyelids and turned her head a little.
+
+“I have done nothing,” she said in a low voice. “It's you who have been
+good, helpful, and tender to me. Perhaps you love me for that--just
+for that; or perhaps you love me for company, and because--well! But
+sometimes it seems to me that you can never love me for myself, only
+for myself, as people do love each other when it is to be for ever.”
+ Her head drooped. “Forever,” she breathed out again; then, still more
+faintly, she added an entreating: “Do try!”
+
+These last words went straight to his heart--the sound of them more than
+the sense. He did not know what to say, either from want of practice in
+dealing with women or simply from his innate honesty of thought. All
+his defences were broken now. Life had him fairly by the throat. But he
+managed a smile, though she was not looking at him; yes, he did manage
+it--the well-known Heyst smile of playful courtesy, so familiar to all
+sorts and conditions of men in the islands.
+
+“My dear Lena,” he said, “it looks as if you were trying to pick a very
+unnecessary quarrel with me--of all people!”
+
+She made no movement. With his elbows spread out he was twisting the
+ends of his long moustaches, very masculine and perplexed, enveloped in
+the atmosphere of femininity as in a cloud, suspecting pitfalls, and as
+if afraid to move.
+
+“I must admit, though,” he added, “that there is no one else; and I
+suppose a certain amount of quarrelling is necessary for existence in
+this world.”
+
+That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a
+script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious, like
+any writing to the illiterate. As far as women went he was altogether
+uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which is fostered in
+the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of the heart fitting
+it for the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much
+on antagonism as on attraction. His mental attitude was that of a man
+looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable to
+decipher, but which may be big with some revelation. He didn't know what
+to say. All he found to add was:
+
+“I don't even understand what I have done or left undone to distress you
+like this.”
+
+He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense of the
+imperfections of their relations--a sense which made him desire her
+constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand, and which, when
+she was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and illusory, a
+promise that could not be embraced and held.
+
+“No! I don't see clearly what you mean. Is your mind turned towards the
+future?” he interpellated her with marked playfulness, because he
+was ashamed to let such a word pass his lips. But all his cherished
+negations were falling off him one by one.
+
+“Because if it is so there is nothing easier than to dismiss it. In our
+future, as in what people call the other life, there is nothing to be
+frightened of.”
+
+She raised her eyes to him; and if nature had formed them to express
+anything else but blank candour he would have learned how terrified
+she was by his talk and the fact that her sinking heart loved him more
+desperately than ever. He smiled at her.
+
+“Dismiss all thought of it,” he insisted. “Surely you don't suspect
+after what I have heard from you, that I am anxious to return to
+mankind. I! I! murder my poor Morrison! It's possible that I may be
+really capable of that which they say I have done. The point is that I
+haven't done it. But it is an unpleasant subject to me. I ought to be
+ashamed to confess it--but it is! Let us forget it. There's that in you,
+Lena, which can console me for worse things, for uglier passages. And if
+we forget, there are no voices here to remind us.”
+
+She had raised her head before he paused.
+
+“Nothing can break in on us here,” he went on and, as if there had been
+an appeal or a provocation in her upward glance, he bent down and took
+her under the arms, raising her straight out of the chair into a sudden
+and close embrace. Her alacrity to respond, which made her seem as light
+as a feather, warmed his heart at that moment more than closer caresses
+had done before. He had not expected that ready impulse towards himself
+which had been dormant in her passive attitude. He had just felt the
+clasp of her arms round his neck, when, with a slight exclamation--“He's
+here!”--she disengaged herself and bolted, away into her room.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+Heyst was astounded. Looking all round, as if to take the whole room
+to witness of this outrage, he became aware of Wang materialized in the
+doorway. The intrusion was as surprising as anything could be, in view
+of the strict regularity with which Wang made himself visible. Heyst
+was tempted to laugh at first. This practical comment on his affirmation
+that nothing could break in on them relieved the strain of his feelings.
+He was a little vexed, too. The Chinaman preserved a profound silence.
+
+“What do you want?” asked Heyst sternly.
+
+“Boat out there,” said the Chinaman.
+
+“Where? What do you mean? Boat adrift in the straits?”
+
+Some subtle change in Wang's bearing suggested his being out of breath;
+but he did not pant, and his voice was steady.
+
+“No--row.”
+
+It was Heyst now who was startled and raised his voice.
+
+“Malay man, eh?”
+
+Wang made a slight negative movement with his head.
+
+“Do you hear, Lena?” Heyst called out. “Wang says there is a boat in
+sight--somewhere near apparently. Where's that boat Wang?”
+
+“Round the point,” said Wang, leaping into Malay unexpectedly, and in a
+loud voice. “White men three.”
+
+“So close as that?” exclaimed Heyst, moving out on the veranda followed
+by Wang. “White men? Impossible!”
+
+Over the clearing the shadows were already lengthening. The sun
+hung low; a ruddy glare lay on the burnt black patch in front of
+the bungalow, and slanted on the ground between the straight, tall,
+mast-like trees soaring a hundred feet or more without a branch. The
+growth of bushes cut off all view of the jetty from the veranda. Far
+away to the right Wang's hut, or rather its dark roof of mats, could
+be seen above the bamboo fence which insured the privacy of the Alfuro
+woman. The Chinaman looked that way swiftly. Heyst paused, and then
+stepped back a pace into the room.
+
+“White men, Lena, apparently. What are you doing?”
+
+“I am just bathing my eyes a little,” the girl's voice said from the
+inner room.
+
+“Oh, yes; all right!”
+
+“Do you want me?”
+
+“No. You had better--I am going down to the jetty. Yes, you had better
+stay in. What an extraordinary thing!”
+
+It was so extraordinary that nobody could possibly appreciate
+how extraordinary it was but himself. His mind was full of mere
+exclamations, while his feet were carrying him in the direction of the
+jetty. He followed the line of the rails, escorted by Wang.
+
+“Where were you when you first saw the boat?” he asked over his
+shoulder.
+
+Wang explained in Malay that he had gone to the shore end of the wharf,
+to get a few lumps of coal from the big heap, when, happening to raise
+his eyes from the ground, he saw the boat--a white man boat, not a
+canoe. He had good eyes. He had seen the boat, with the men at the oars;
+and here Wang made a particular gesture over his eyes, as if his vision
+had received a blow. He had turned at once and run to the house to
+report.
+
+“No mistake, eh?” said Heyst, moving on. At the very outer edge of the
+belt he stopped short. Wang halted behind him on the path, till the
+voice of Number One called him sharply forward into the open. He obeyed.
+
+“Where's that boat?” asked Heyst forcibly. “I say--where is it?”
+
+Nothing whatever was to be seen between the point and the jetty. The
+stretch of Diamond Bay was like a piece of purple shadow, lustrous and
+empty, while beyond the land, the open sea lay blue and opaque under the
+sun. Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till they met, far off, the
+dark cone of the volcano, with its faint plume of smoke broadening and
+vanishing everlastingly at the top, without altering its shape in the
+glowing transparency of the evening.
+
+“The fellow has been dreaming,” he muttered to himself.
+
+He looked hard at the Chinaman. Wang seemed turned into stone. Suddenly,
+as if he had received a shock, he started, flung his arm out with a
+pointing forefinger, and made guttural noises to the effect that there,
+there, there, he had seen a boat.
+
+It was very uncanny. Heyst thought of some strange hallucination.
+Unlikely enough; but that a boat with three men in it should have sunk
+between the point and the jetty, suddenly, like a stone, without leaving
+as much on the surface as a floating oar, was still more unlikely. The
+theory of a phantom boat would have been more credible than that.
+
+“Confound it!” he muttered to himself.
+
+He was unpleasantly affected by this mystery; but now a simple
+explanation occurred to him. He stepped hastily out on the wharf. The
+boat, if it had existed and had retreated, could perhaps be seen from
+the far end of the long jetty.
+
+Nothing was to be seen. Heyst let his eyes roam idly over the sea. He
+was so absorbed in his perplexity that a hollow sound, as of somebody
+tumbling about in a boat, with a clatter of oars and spars, failed to
+make him move for a moment. When his mind seized its meaning, he had
+no difficulty in locating the sound. It had come from below--under the
+jetty!
+
+He ran back for a dozen yards or so, and then looked over. His sight
+plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the greater part
+of which was hidden from him by the planking of the jetty. His eyes
+fell on the thin back of a man doubled up over the tiller in a queer,
+uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow. Another man, more directly
+below Heyst, sprawled on his back from gunwale to gunwale, half off
+the after thwart, his head lower than his feet. This second man glared
+wildly upward, and struggled to raise himself, but to all appearance was
+much too drunk to succeed. The visible part of the boat contained also
+a flat, leather trunk, on which the first man's long legs were tucked
+up nervelessly. A large earthenware jug, with its wide mouth uncorked,
+rolled out on the bottom-boards from under the sprawling man.
+
+Heyst had never been so much astonished in his life. He stared dumbly at
+the strange boat's crew. From the first he was positive that these
+men were not sailors. They wore the white drill-suit of tropical
+civilization; but their apparition in a boat Heyst could not connect
+with anything plausible. The civilization of the tropics could have
+had nothing to do with it. It was more like those myths, current in
+Polynesia, of amazing strangers, who arrive at an island, gods or
+demons, bringing good or evil to the innocence of the inhabitants--gifts
+of unknown things, words never heard before.
+
+Heyst noticed a cork helmet floating alongside the boat, evidently
+fallen from the head of the man doubled over the tiller, who displayed
+a dark, bony poll. An oar, too, had been knocked overboard, probably
+by the sprawling man, who was still struggling, between the thwarts.
+By this time Heyst regarded the visitation no longer with surprise, but
+with the sustained attention demanded by a difficult problem. With one
+foot poised on the string-piece, and leaning on his raised knee, he
+was taking in everything. The sprawling man rolled off the thwart,
+collapsed, and, most unexpectedly, got on his feet. He swayed dizzily,
+spreading his arms out and uttered faintly a hoarse, dreamy “Hallo!” His
+upturned face was swollen, red, peeling all over the nose and cheeks.
+His stare was irrational. Heyst perceived stains of dried blood all over
+the front of his dirty white coat, and also on one sleeve.
+
+“What's the matter? Are you wounded?”
+
+The other glanced down, reeled--one of his feet was inside a large pith
+hat--and, recovering himself, let out a dismal, grating sound in the
+manner of a grim laugh.
+
+“Blood--not mine. Thirst's the matter. Exhausted's the matter. Done up.
+Drink, man! Give us water!”
+
+Thirst was in the very tone of his words, alternating a broken croak and
+a faint, throaty rustle which just reached Heyst's ears. The man in the
+boat raised his hands to be helped up on the jetty, whispering:
+
+“I tried. I am too weak. I tumbled down.”
+
+Wang was coming along the jetty slowly, with intent, straining eyes.
+
+“Run back and bring a crowbar here. There's one lying by the coal-heap,”
+ Heyst shouted to him.
+
+The man standing in the boat sat down on the thwart behind him. A
+horrible coughing laugh came through his swollen lips.
+
+“Crowbar? What's that for?” he mumbled, and his head dropped on his
+chest mournfully.
+
+Meantime, Heyst, as if he had forgotten the boat, started kicking hard
+at a large brass tap projecting above the planks. To accommodate ships
+that came for coal and happened to need water as well, a stream had
+been tapped in the interior and an iron pipe led along the jetty. It
+terminated with a curved end almost exactly where the strangers' boat
+had been driven between the piles; but the tap was set fast.
+
+“Hurry up!” Heyst yelled to the Chinaman, who was running with the
+crowbar in his hand.
+
+Heyst snatched it from him and, obtaining a leverage against the
+string-piece, wrung the stiff tap round with a mighty jerk. “I hope that
+pipe hasn't got choked!” he muttered to himself anxiously.
+
+It hadn't; but it did not yield a strong gush. The sound of a thin
+stream, partly breaking on the gunwale of the boat and partly
+splashing alongside, became at once audible. It was greeted by a cry of
+inarticulate and savage joy. Heyst knelt on the string-piece and peered
+down. The man who had spoken was already holding his open mouth under
+the bright trickle. Water ran over his eyelids and over his nose,
+gurgled down his throat, flowed over his chin. Then some obstruction in
+the pipe gave way, and a sudden thick jet broke on his face. In a moment
+his shoulders were soaked, the front of his coat inundated; he streamed
+and dripped; water ran into his pockets, down his legs, into his shoes;
+but he had clutched the end of the pipe, and, hanging on with both
+hands, swallowed, spluttered, choked, snorted with the noises of a
+swimmer. Suddenly a curious dull roar reached Heyst's ears. Something
+hairy and black flew from under the jetty. A dishevelled head, coming on
+like a cannonball, took the man at the pipe in flank, with enough force
+to tear his grip loose and fling him headlong into the stern-sheets. He
+fell upon the folded legs of the man at the tiller, who, roused by the
+commotion in the boat, was sitting up, silent, rigid, and very much like
+a corpse. His eyes were but two black patches, and his teeth glistened
+with a death's head grin between his retracted lips, no thicker than
+blackish parchment glued over the gums.
+
+From him Heyst's eyes wandered to the creature who had replaced the
+first man at the end of the water-pipe. Enormous brown paws clutched it
+savagely; the wild, big head hung back, and in a face covered with a wet
+mass of hair there gaped crookedly a wide mouth full of fangs. The water
+filled it, welled up in hoarse coughs, ran down on each side of the jaws
+and down the hairy throat, soaked the black pelt of the enormous chest,
+naked under a torn check shirt, heaving convulsively with a play of
+massive muscles carved in red mahogany.
+
+As soon as the first man had recovered the breath knocked out of him
+by the irresistible charge, a scream of mad cursing issued from the
+stern-sheets. With a rigid, angular crooking of the elbow, the man at
+the tiller put his hand back to his hip.
+
+“Don't shoot him, sir!” yelled the first man. “Wait! Let me have that
+tiller. I will teach him to shove himself in front of a caballero!”
+
+Martin Ricardo flourished the heavy piece of wood, leaped forward with
+astonishing vigour, and brought it down on Pedro's head with a crash
+that resounded all over the quiet sweep of Black Diamond Bay. A crimson
+patch appeared on the matted hair, red veins appeared in the water
+flowing all over his face, and it dripped in rosy drops off his head.
+But the man hung on. Not till a second furious blow descended did the
+hairy paws let go their grip and the squirming body sink limply. Before
+it could touch the bottom-boards, a tremendous kick in the ribs from
+Ricardo's foot shifted it forward out of sight, whence came the noise of
+a heavy thud, a clatter of spars, and a pitiful grunt. Ricardo stooped
+to look under the jetty.
+
+“Aha, dog! This will teach you to keep back where you belong, you
+murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you! You infidel, you robber
+of churches! Next time I will rip you open from neck to heel, you
+carrion-eater! Esclavo!”
+
+He backed a little and straightened himself up.
+
+“I don't mean it really,” he remarked to Heyst, whose steady eyes met
+his from above. He ran aft briskly.
+
+“Come along, sir. It's your turn. I oughtn't to have drunk first. 'S
+truth, I forgot myself! A gentleman like you will overlook that, I
+know.” As he made these apologies, Ricardo extended his hand. “Let me
+steady you, sir.”
+
+Slowly Mr. Jones unfolded himself in all his slenderness, rocked,
+staggered, and caught Ricardo's shoulder. His henchman assisted him
+to the pipe, which went on gushing a clear stream of water, sparkling
+exceedingly against the black piles and the gloom under the jetty.
+
+“Catch hold, sir,” Ricardo advised solicitously. “All right?”
+
+He stepped back, and, while Mr. Jones revelled in the abundance of
+water, he addressed himself to Heyst with a sort of justificatory
+speech, the tone of which, reflecting his feelings, partook of purring
+and spitting. They had been thirty hours tugging at the oars, he
+explained, and they had been more than forty hours without water, except
+that the night before they had licked the dew off the gunwales.
+
+Ricardo did not explain to Heyst how it happened. At that precise moment
+he had no explanation ready for the man on the wharf, who, he guessed,
+must be wondering much more at the presence of his visitors than at
+their plight.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+The explanation lay in the two simple facts that the light winds and
+strong currents of the Java Sea had drifted the boat about until they
+partly lost their bearings; and that by some extra-ordinary mistake
+one of the two jars put into the boat by Schomberg's man contained salt
+water. Ricardo tried to put some pathos into his tones. Pulling for
+thirty hours with eighteen-foot oars! And the sun! Ricardo relieved
+his feelings by cursing the sun. They had felt their hearts and lungs
+shrivel within them. And then, as if all that hadn't been trouble
+enough, he complained bitterly, he had had to waste his fainting
+strength in beating their servant about the head with a stretcher. The
+fool had wanted to drink sea water, and wouldn't listen to reason.
+There was no stopping him otherwise. It was better to beat him into
+insensibility than to have him go crazy in the boat, and to be obliged
+to shoot him. The preventive, administered with enough force to brain
+an elephant, boasted Ricardo, had to be applied on two occasions--the
+second time all but in sight of the jetty.
+
+“You have seen the beauty,” Ricardo went on expansively, hiding his lack
+of some sort of probable story under this loquacity. “I had to hammer
+him away from the spout. Opened afresh all the old broken spots on his
+head. You saw how hard I had to hit. He has no restraint, no restraint
+at all. If it wasn't that he can be made useful in one way or another, I
+would just as soon have let the governor shoot him.”
+
+He smiled up at Heyst in his peculiar lip-retracting manner, and added
+by way of afterthought:
+
+“That's what will happen to him in the end, if he doesn't learn to
+restrain himself. But I've taught him to mind his manners for a while,
+anyhow!”
+
+And again he addressed his quick grin up to the man on the wharf. His
+round eyes had never left Heyst's face ever since he began to deliver
+his account of the voyage.
+
+“So that's how he looks!” Ricardo was saying to himself.
+
+He had not expected Heyst to be like this. He had formed for himself
+a conception containing the helpful suggestion of a vulnerable point.
+These solitary men were often tipplers. But no!--this was not a drinking
+man's face; nor could he detect the weakness of alarm, or even the
+weakness of surprise, on these features, in those steady eyes.
+
+“We were too far gone to climb out,” Ricardo went on. “I heard you
+walking along though. I thought I shouted; I tried to. You didn't hear
+me shout?”
+
+Heyst made an almost imperceptible negative sign, which the greedy eyes
+of Ricardo--greedy for all signs--did not miss.
+
+“Throat too parched. We didn't even care to whisper to each other
+lately. Thirst chokes one. We might have died there under this wharf
+before you found us.”
+
+“I couldn't think where you had gone to.” Heyst was heard at last,
+addressing directly the newcomers from the sea. “You were seen as soon
+as you cleared that point.”
+
+“We were seen, eh?” grunted Mr. Ricardo. “We pulled like
+machines--daren't stop. The governor sat at the tiller, but he couldn't
+speak to us. She drove in between the piles till she hit something, and
+we all tumbled off the thwarts as if we had been drunk. Drunk--ha,
+ha! Too dry, by George! We fetched in here with the very last of our
+strength, and no mistake. Another mile would have done for us. When I
+heard your footsteps, above, I tried to get up, and I fell down.”
+
+“That was the first sound I heard,” said Heyst.
+
+Mr Jones, the front of his soiled white tunic soaked and plastered
+against his breast-bone, staggered away from the water-pipe. Steadying
+himself on Ricardo's shoulder, he drew a long breath, raised his
+dripping head, and produced a smile of ghastly amiability, which was
+lost upon the thoughtful Heyst. Behind his back the sun, touching the
+water, was like a disc of iron cooled to a dull red glow, ready to start
+rolling round the circular steel plate of the sea, which, under the
+darkening sky, looked more solid than the high ridge of Samburan; more
+solid than the point, whose long outlined slope melted into its own
+unfathomable shadow blurring the dim sheen on the bay. The forceful
+stream from the pipe broke like shattered glass on the boat's gunwale.
+Its loud, fitful, and persistent splashing revealed the depths of the
+world's silence.
+
+“Great notion, to lead the water out here,” pronounced Ricardo
+appreciatively.
+
+Water was life. He felt now as if he could run a mile, scale a ten-foot
+wall, sing a song. Only a few minutes ago he was next door to a corpse,
+done up, unable to stand, to lift a hand; unable to groan. A drop of
+water had done that miracle.
+
+“Didn't you feel life itself running and soaking into you, sir?” he
+asked his principal, with deferential but forced vivacity.
+
+Without a word, Mr. Jones stepped off the thwart and sat down in the
+stern-sheets.
+
+“Isn't that man of yours bleeding to death in the bows under there?”
+ inquired Heyst.
+
+Ricardo ceased his ecstasies over the life-giving water and answered in
+a tone of innocence:
+
+“He? You may call him a man, but his hide is a jolly sight tougher than
+the toughest alligator he ever skinned in the good old days. You don't
+know how much he can stand: I do. We have tried him a long time ago.
+Ola, there! Pedro! Pedro!” he yelled, with a force of lung testifying to
+the regenerative virtues of water.
+
+A weak “Senor?” came from under the wharf.
+
+“What did I tell you?” said Ricardo triumphantly. “Nothing can hurt him.
+He's all right. But, I say, the boat's getting swamped. Can't you turn
+this water off before you sink her under us? She's half full already.”
+
+At a sign from Heyst, Wang hammered at the brass tap on the wharf, then
+stood behind Number One, crowbar in hand, motionless as before. Ricardo
+was perhaps not so certain of Pedro's toughness as he affirmed; for he
+stooped, peering under the wharf, then moved forward out of sight. The
+gush of water ceasing suddenly, made a silence which became complete
+when the after-trickle stopped. Afar, the sun was reduced to a red
+spark, glowing very low in the breathless immensity of twilight. Purple
+gleams lingered on the water all round the boat. The spectral figure in
+the stern-sheets spoke in a languid tone:
+
+“That--er--companion--er--secretary of mine is a queer chap. I am afraid
+we aren't presenting ourselves in a very favourable light.”
+
+Heyst listened. It was the conventional voice of an educated man,
+only strangely lifeless. But more strange yet was this concern for
+appearances, expressed, he did not know, whether in jest or in earnest.
+Earnestness was hardly to be supposed under the circumstances, and no
+one had ever jested in such dead tones. It was something which could not
+be answered, and Heyst said nothing. The other went on:
+
+“Travelling as I do, I find a man of his sort extremely useful. He has
+his little weaknesses, no doubt.”
+
+“Indeed!” Heyst was provoked into speaking. “Weakness of the arm is not
+one of them; neither is an exaggerated humanity, as far as I can judge.”
+
+“Defects of temper,” explained Mr. Jones from the stern-sheets.
+
+The subject of this dialogue, coming out just then from under the
+wharf into the visible part of the boat, made himself heard in his own
+defence, in a voice full of life, and with nothing languid in his manner
+on the contrary, it was brisk, almost jocose. He begged pardon for
+contradicting. He was never out of temper with “our Pedro.” The
+fellow was a Dago of immense strength and of no sense whatever. This
+combination made him dangerous, and he had to be treated accordingly, in
+a manner which he could understand. Reasoning was beyond him.
+
+“And so”--Ricardo addressed Heyst with animation--“you mustn't be
+surprised if--”
+
+“I assure you,” Heyst interrupted, “that my wonder at your arrival
+in your boat here is so great that it leaves no room for minor
+astonishments. But hadn't you better land?”
+
+“That's the talk, sir!” Ricardo began to bustle about the boat, talking
+all the time. Finding himself unable to “size up” this man, he was
+inclined to credit him with extraordinary powers of penetration, which,
+it seemed to him, would be favoured by silence. Also, he feared some
+pointblank question. He had no ready-made story to tell. He and his
+patron had put off considering that rather important detail too
+long. For the last two days, the horrors of thirst, coming on them
+unexpectedly, had prevented consultation. They had had to pull for
+dear life. But the man on the wharf, were he in league with the devil
+himself, would pay for all their sufferings, thought Ricardo with an
+unholy joy.
+
+Meantime, splashing in the water which covered the bottom-boards,
+Ricardo congratulated himself aloud on the luggage being out of the way
+of the wet. He had piled it up forward. He had roughly tied up Pedro's
+head. Pedro had nothing to grumble about. On the contrary, he ought to
+be mighty thankful to him, Ricardo, for being alive at all.
+
+“Well, now, let me give you a leg up, sir,” he said cheerily to
+his motionless principal in the stern-sheets. “All our troubles are
+over--for a time, anyhow. Ain't it luck to find a white man on this
+island? I would have just as soon expected to meet an angel from
+heaven--eh, Mr. Jones? Now then--ready, sir? one, two, three, up you
+go!”
+
+Helped from below by Ricardo, and from above by the man more unexpected
+than an angel, Mr. Jones scrambled up and stood on the wharf by the side
+of Heyst. He swayed like a reed. The night descending on Samburan turned
+into dense shadow the point of land and the wharf itself, and gave a
+dark solidity to the unshimmering water extending to the last faint
+trace of light away to the west. Heyst stared at the guests whom the
+renounced world had sent him thus at the end of the day. The only other
+vestige of light left on earth lurked in the hollows of the thin man's
+eyes. They gleamed, mobile and languidly evasive. The eyelids fluttered.
+
+“You are feeling weak,” said Heyst.
+
+“For the moment, a little,” confessed the other.
+
+With loud panting, Ricardo scrambled on his hands and knees upon the
+wharf, energetic and unaided. He rose up at Heyst's elbow and stamped
+his foot on the planks, with a sharp, provocative, double beat, such
+as is heard sometimes in fencing-schools before the adversaries engage
+their foils. Not that the renegade seaman Ricardo knew anything of
+fencing. What he called “shooting-irons,” were his weapons, or the still
+less aristocratic knife, such as was even then ingeniously strapped
+to his leg. He thought of it, at that moment. A swift stooping motion,
+then, on the recovery, a ripping blow, a shove off the wharf, and no
+noise except a splash in the water that would scarcely disturb the
+silence. Heyst would have no time for a cry. It would be quick and neat,
+and immensely in accord with Ricardo's humour. But he repressed this
+gust of savagery. The job was not such a simple one. This piece had to
+be played to another tune, and in much slower time. He returned to his
+note of talkative simplicity.
+
+“Ay; and I too don't feel as strong as I thought I was when the first
+drink set me up. Great wonder-worker water is! And to get it right here
+on the spot! It was heaven--hey, sir?”
+
+Mr Jones, being directly addressed, took up his part in the concerted
+piece:
+
+“Really, when I saw a wharf on what might have been an uninhabited
+island, I couldn't believe my eyes. I doubted its existence. I thought
+it was a delusion till the boat actually drove between the piles, as you
+see her lying now.”
+
+While he was speaking faintly, in a voice which did not seem to belong
+to the earth, his henchman, in extremely loud and terrestrial accents,
+was fussing about their belongings in the boat, addressing himself to
+Pedro:
+
+“Come, now--pass up the dunnage there! Move, yourself, hombre, or I'll
+have to get down again and give you a tap on those bandages of yours,
+you growling bear, you!”
+
+“Ah! You didn't believe in the reality of the wharf?” Heyst was saying
+to Mr. Jones.
+
+“You ought to kiss my hands!”
+
+Ricardo caught hold of an ancient Gladstone bag and swung it on the
+wharf with a thump.
+
+“Yes! You ought to burn a candle before me as they do before the saints
+in your country. No saint has ever done so much for you as I have, you
+ungrateful vagabond. Now then! Up you get!”
+
+Helped by the talkative Ricardo, Pedro scrambled up on the wharf, where
+he remained for some time on all fours, swinging to and fro his shaggy
+head tied up in white rags. Then he got up clumsily, like a bulky animal
+in the dusk, balancing itself on its hind legs.
+
+Mr Jones began to explain languidly to Heyst that they were in a pretty
+bad state that morning, when they caught sight of the smoke of the
+volcano. It nerved them to make an effort for their lives. Soon
+afterwards they made out the island.
+
+“I had just wits enough left in my baked brain to alter the direction
+of the boat,” the ghostly voice went on. “As to finding assistance,
+a wharf, a white man--nobody would have dreamed of it. Simply
+preposterous!”
+
+“That's what I thought when my Chinaman came and told me he had seen a
+boat with white men pulling up,” said Heyst.
+
+“Most extraordinary luck,” interjected Ricardo, standing by anxiously
+attentive to every word. “Seems a dream,” he added. “A lovely dream!”
+
+A silence fell on that group of three, as if everyone had become afraid
+to speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis. Pedro on one side
+of them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful spectators. A few
+stars had come out pursuing the ebbing twilight. A light draught of air
+tepid enough in the thickening twilight after the scorching day, struck
+a chill into Mr. Jones in his soaked clothes.
+
+“I may infer, then, that there is a settlement of white people here?” he
+murmured, shivering visibly.
+
+Heyst roused himself.
+
+“Oh, abandoned, abandoned. I am alone here--practically alone; but
+several empty houses are still standing. No lack of accommodation. We
+may just as well--here, Wang, go back to the shore and run the trolley
+out here.”
+
+The last words having been spoken in Malay, he explained courteously
+that he had given directions for the transport of the luggage. Wang had
+melted into the night--in his soundless manner.
+
+“My word! Rails laid down and all,” exclaimed Ricardo softly, in a tone
+of admiration. “Well, I never!”
+
+“We were working a coal-mine here,” said the late manager of the
+Tropical Belt Coal Company. “These are only the ghosts of things that
+have been.”
+
+Mr Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint puff
+of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays on the
+dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the grave of the
+sun.
+
+“We might be moving on,” proposed Heyst. “My Chinaman and
+that--ah--ungrateful servant of yours, with the broken head, can load
+the things and come along after us.”
+
+The suggestion was accepted without words. Moving towards the shore,
+the three men met the trolley, a mere metallic rustle which whisked past
+them, the shadowy Wang running noiselessly behind. Only the sound of
+their footsteps accompanied them. It was a long time since so many
+footsteps had rung together on that jetty. Before they stepped on to the
+path trodden through the grass, Heyst said:
+
+“I am prevented from offering you a share of my own quarters.” The
+distant courtliness of this beginning arrested the other two suddenly,
+as if amazed by some manifest incongruity. “I should regret it more,”
+ he went on, “if I were not in a position to give you the choice of those
+empty bungalows for a temporary home.”
+
+He turned round and plunged into the narrow track, the two others
+following in single file.
+
+“Queer start!” Ricardo took the opportunity for whispering, as he fell
+behind Mr. Jones, who swayed in the gloom, enclosed by the stalks of
+tropical grass, almost as slender as a stalk of grass himself.
+
+In this order they emerged into the open space kept clear of vegetation
+by Wang's judicious system of periodic firing. The shapes of buildings,
+unlighted, high-roofed, looked mysteriously extensive and featureless
+against the increasing glitter of the stars. Heyst was pleased at
+the absence of light in his bungalow. It looked as uninhabited as
+the others. He continued to lead the way, inclining to the right. His
+equable voice was heard:
+
+“This one would be the best. It was our counting-house. There is some
+furniture in it yet. I am pretty certain that you'll find a couple of
+camp bedsteads in one of the rooms.”
+
+The high-pitched roof of the bungalow towered up very close, eclipsing
+the sky.
+
+“Here we are. Three steps. As you see, there's a wide veranda. Sorry to
+keep you waiting for a moment; the door is locked, I think.”
+
+He was heard trying it. Then he leaned against the rail, saying:
+
+“Wang will get the keys.”
+
+The others waited, two vague shapes nearly mingled together in the
+darkness of the veranda, from which issued a sudden chattering of Mr.
+Jones's teeth, directly suppressed, and a slight shuffle of Ricardo's
+feet. Their guide and host, his back against the rail, seemed to have
+forgotten their existence. Suddenly he moved, and murmured:
+
+“Ah, here's the trolley.”
+
+Then he raised his voice in Malay, and was answered, “Ya tuan,” from an
+indistinct group that could be made out in the direction of the track.
+
+“I have sent Wang for the key and a light,” he said, in a voice
+that came out without any particular direction--a peculiarity which
+disconcerted Ricardo.
+
+Wang did not tarry long on his mission. Very soon from the distant
+recesses of obscurity appeared the swinging lantern he carried. It cast
+a fugitive ray on the arrested trolley with the uncouth figure of the
+wild Pedro drooping over the load; then it moved towards the bungalow
+and ascended the stairs. After working at the stiff lock, Wang applied
+his shoulder to the door. It came open with explosive suddenness, as if
+in a passion at being thus disturbed after two years' repose. From the
+dark slope of a tall stand-up writing-desk a forgotten, solitary sheet
+of paper flew up and settled gracefully on the floor.
+
+Wang and Pedro came and went through the offended door, bringing the
+things off the trolley, one flitting swiftly in and out, the other
+staggering heavily. Later, directed by a few quiet words from Number
+One, Wang made several journeys with the lantern to the store-rooms,
+bringing in blankets, provisions in tins, coffee, sugar, and a packet of
+candles. He lighted one, and stuck it on the ledge of the stand-up desk.
+Meantime Pedro, being introduced to some kindling-wood and a bundle of
+dry sticks, had busied himself outside in lighting a fire, on which he
+placed a ready-filled kettle handed to him by Wang impassively, at arm's
+length, as if across a chasm. Having received the thanks of his guests,
+Heyst wished them goodnight and withdrew, leaving them to their repose.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+Heyst walked away slowly. There was still no light in his bungalow, and
+he thought that perhaps it was just as well. By this time he was much
+less perturbed. Wang had preceded him with the lantern, as if in a hurry
+to get away from the two white men and their hairy attendant. The light
+was not dancing along any more; it was standing perfectly still by the
+steps of the veranda.
+
+Heyst, glancing back casually, saw behind him still another light--the
+light of the strangers' open fire. A black, uncouth form, stooping over
+it monstrously, staggered away into the outlying shadows. The kettle had
+boiled, probably.
+
+With that weird vision of something questionably human impressed upon
+his senses, Heyst moved on a pace or two. What could the people be who
+had such a creature for their familiar attendant? He stopped. The vague
+apprehension, of a distant future, in which he saw Lena unavoidably
+separated from him by profound and subtle differences; the sceptical
+carelessness which had accompanied every one of his attempts at action,
+like a secret reserve of his soul, fell away from him. He no longer
+belonged to himself. There was a call far more imperious and august. He
+came up to the bungalow, and at the very limit of the lantern's light,
+on the top step, he saw her feet and the bottom part of her dress. The
+rest of her person was suggested dimly as high as her waist. She sat
+on a chair, and the gloom of the low eaves descended upon her head and
+shoulders. She didn't stir.
+
+“You haven't gone to sleep here?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, no! I was waiting for you--in the dark.”
+
+Heyst, on the top step, leaned against a wooden pillar, after moving the
+lantern to one side.
+
+“I have been thinking that it is just as well you had no light. But
+wasn't it dull for you to sit in the dark?”
+
+“I don't need a light to think of you.” Her charming voice gave a value
+to this banal answer, which had also the merit of truth. Heyst laughed
+a little, and said that he had had a curious experience. She made no
+remark. He tried to figure to himself the outlines of her easy pose.
+A spot of dim light here and there hinted at the unfailing grace of
+attitude which was one of her natural possessions.
+
+She had thought of him, but not in connection with the strangers. She
+had admired him from the first; she had been attracted by his warm
+voice, his gentle eye, but she had felt him too wonderfully difficult to
+know. He had given to life a savour, a movement, a promise mingled with
+menaces, which she had not suspected were to be found in it--or, at any
+rate, not by a girl wedded to misery as she was. She said to herself
+that she must not be irritated because he seemed too self-contained, and
+as if shut up in a world of his own. When he took her in his arms, she
+felt that his embrace had a great and compelling force, that he was
+moved deeply, and that perhaps he would not get tired of her so very
+soon. She thought that he had opened to her the feelings of delicate
+joy, that the very uneasiness he caused her was delicious in its
+sadness, and that she would try to hold him as long as she could--till
+her fainting arms, her sinking soul, could cling to him no more.
+
+“Wang's not here, of course?” Heyst said suddenly. She answered as if in
+her sleep.
+
+“He put this light down here without stopping, and ran.”
+
+“Ran, did he? H'm! Well, it's considerably later than his usual time
+to go home to his Alfuro wife; but to be seen running is a sort of
+degradation for Wang, who has mastered the art of vanishing. Do you
+think he was startled out of his perfection by something?”
+
+“Why should he be startled?”
+
+Her voice remained dreamy, a little uncertain.
+
+“I have been startled,” Heyst said.
+
+She was not listening to him. The lantern at their feet threw the
+shadows of her face upward. Her eyes glistened, as if frightened and
+attentive, above a lighted chin and a very white throat.
+
+“Upon my word,” mused Heyst, “now that I don't see them, I can hardly
+believe that those fellows exist!”
+
+“And what about me?” she asked, so swiftly that he made a movement like
+somebody pounced upon from an ambush. “When you don't see me, do you
+believe that I exist?”
+
+“Exist? Most charmingly! My dear Lena, you don't know your own
+advantages. Why, your voice alone would be enough to make you
+unforgettable!”
+
+“Oh, I didn't mean forgetting in that way. I dare say if I were to
+die you would remember me right enough. And what good would that be to
+anybody? It's while I am alive that I want--”
+
+Heyst stood by her chair, a stalwart figure imperfectly lighted. The
+broad shoulders, the martial face that was like a disguise of his
+disarmed soul, were lost in the gloom above the plane of light in which
+his feet were planted. He suffered from a trouble with which she had
+nothing to do. She had no general conception of the conditions of the
+existence he had offered to her. Drawn into its peculiar stagnation she
+remained unrelated to it because of her ignorance.
+
+For instance, she could never perceive the prodigious improbability of
+the arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it. Perhaps
+she had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst resolved suddenly
+to say nothing more of it. It was not that he shrank from alarming her.
+Not feeling anything definite himself he could not imagine a precise
+effect being produced on her by any amount of explanation. There is a
+quality in events which is apprehended differently by different minds
+or even by the same mind at different times. Any man living at all
+consciously knows that embarrassing truth. Heyst was aware that this
+visit could bode nothing pleasant. In his present soured temper
+towards all mankind he looked upon it as a visitation of a particularly
+offensive kind.
+
+He glanced along the veranda in the direction of the other bungalow. The
+fire of sticks in front of it had gone out. No faint glow of embers, not
+the slightest thread of light in that direction, hinted at the presence
+of strangers. The darker shapes in the obscurity, the dead silence,
+betrayed nothing of that strange intrusion. The peace of Samburan
+asserted itself as on any other night. Everything was as before,
+except--Heyst became aware of it suddenly--that for a whole minute,
+perhaps, with his hand on the back of the girl's chair and within a foot
+of her person, he had lost the sense of her existence, for the first
+time since he had brought her over to share this invincible, this
+undefiled peace. He picked up the lantern, and the act made a silent
+stir all along the veranda. A spoke of shadow swung swiftly across her
+face, and the strong light rested on the immobility of her features, as
+of a woman looking at a vision. Her eyes were still, her lips serious.
+Her dress, open at the neck, stirred slightly to her even breathing.
+
+“We had better go in, Lena,” suggested Heyst, very low, as if breaking a
+spell cautiously.
+
+She rose without a word. Heyst followed her indoors. As they passed
+through the living-room, he left the lantern burning on the centre
+table.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+That night the girl woke up, for the first time in her new experience,
+with the sensation of having been abandoned to her own devices. She woke
+up from a painful dream of separation brought about in a way which she
+could not understand, and missed the relief of the waking instant.
+The desolate feeling of being alone persisted. She was really alone.
+A night-light made it plain enough, in the dim, mysterious manner of a
+dream; but this was reality. It startled her exceedingly.
+
+In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway, and raised
+it with a steady hand. The conditions of their life in Samburan would
+have made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her character. This
+was not a movement of curiosity, but of downright alarm--the continued
+distress and fear of the dream. The night could not have been very far
+advanced. The light of the lantern was burning strongly, striping the
+floor and walls of the room with thick black bands. She hardly knew
+whether she expected to see Heyst or not; but she saw him at once,
+standing by the table in his sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway.
+She stepped in noiselessly with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall
+behind her. Something characteristic in Heyst's attitude made her say,
+almost in a whisper:
+
+“You are looking for something.”
+
+He could not have heard her before; but he didn't start at the
+unexpected whisper. He only pushed the drawer of the table in and,
+without even looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting her
+presence as if he had been aware of all her movements:
+
+“I say, are you certain that Wang didn't go through this room this
+evening?”
+
+“Wang? When?”
+
+“After leaving the lantern, I mean.”
+
+“Oh, no. He ran on. I watched him.”
+
+“Or before, perhaps--while I was with these boat people? Do you know?
+Can you tell?”
+
+“I hardly think so. I came out as the sun went down, and sat outside
+till you came back to me.”
+
+“He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda.”
+
+“I heard nothing in here,” she said. “What is the matter?”
+
+“Naturally you wouldn't hear. He can be as quiet as a shadow, when he
+likes. I believe he could steal the pillows from under our heads. He
+might have been here ten minutes ago.”
+
+“What woke you up? Was it a noise?”
+
+“Can't say that. Generally one can't tell, but is it likely, Lena? You
+are, I believe, the lighter sleeper of us two. A noise loud enough to
+wake me up would have awakened you, too. I tried to be as quiet as I
+could. What roused you?”
+
+“I don't know--a dream, perhaps. I woke up crying.”
+
+“What was the dream?”
+
+Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her direction,
+his round, uncovered head set on a fighter's muscular neck. She left his
+question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.
+
+“What is it you have missed?” she asked in her turn, very grave.
+
+Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses for
+the night. Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity of its
+width, its unshining whiteness. It was a sculptural forehead. He had a
+moment of acute appreciation intruding upon another order of thoughts.
+It was as if there could be no end of his discoveries about that girl,
+at the most incongruous moments.
+
+She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong--one of Heyst's few
+purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made. He had forgotten
+all about it till she came, and then had found it at the bottom of an
+old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days. She had quickly
+learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe twist, as Malay
+village girls do when going down to bathe in a river. Her shoulders and
+arms were bare; one of her tresses, hanging forward, looked almost black
+against the white skin. As she was taller than the average Malay woman,
+the sarong ended a good way above her ankles. She stood poised firmly,
+half-way between the table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her
+bare feet gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor.
+The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of
+her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something
+statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very
+big--Heyst used to think of her, at first, as “that poor little
+girl,”--but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform
+dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form
+and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction from a
+heroic size.
+
+She moved forward a step.
+
+“What is it you have missed?” she asked again.
+
+Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of
+darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in a
+path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was his turn
+to ignore a question.
+
+“You woke up in a fright, you say?” he said.
+
+She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's face
+and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise,
+but her expression was serious.
+
+“No,” she replied. “It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't there,
+and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream--the
+first I've had, too, since--”
+
+“You don't believe in dreams, do you?” asked Heyst.
+
+“I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what
+dreams mean, for a shilling.”
+
+“Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?” inquired Heyst
+jocularly.
+
+“She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!”
+
+Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
+
+“Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking
+world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning
+of.”
+
+“You have missed something out of this drawer,” she said positively.
+
+“This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them and
+come back to this again, as people do. It's difficult to believe the
+evidence of my own senses; but it isn't there. Now, Lena, are you sure
+that you didn't--”
+
+“I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me.”
+
+“Lena!” he cried.
+
+He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he had
+not made. It was what a servant might have said--an inferior open
+to suspicion--or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at being so
+wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being instinctively
+aware of the place he had secretly given her in his thoughts.
+
+“After all,” he said to himself, “we are strangers to each other.”
+
+And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke calmly:
+
+“I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that the
+Chinaman has been in this room tonight?”
+
+“You suspect him?” she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
+
+“There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude.”
+
+“You don't want to tell me what it is?” she inquired, in the equable
+tone in which one takes a fact into account.
+
+Heyst only smiled faintly.
+
+“Nothing very precious, as far as value goes,” he replied.
+
+“I thought it might have been money,” she said.
+
+“Money!” exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether
+preposterous. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add: “Of
+course, there is some money in the house--there, in that writing-desk,
+the drawer on the left. It's not locked. You can pull it right out.
+There is a recess, and the board at the back pivots: a very simple
+hiding-place, when you know the way to it. I discovered it by accident,
+and I keep our store of sovereigns in there. The treasure, my dear, is
+not big enough to require a cavern.”
+
+He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.
+
+“The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in that
+unlocked left drawer. I have no doubt Wang knows what there is in it,
+but he isn't a thief, and that's why I--no, Lena, what I've missed is
+not gold or jewels; and that's what makes the fact interesting--which
+the theft of money cannot be.”
+
+She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money. A great
+curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from pressing him
+with questions. She only gave him one of her deep-gleaming smiles.
+
+“It isn't me so it must be Wang. You ought to make him give it back to
+you.”
+
+Heyst said nothing to that naive and practical suggestion, for the
+object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.
+
+It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had never
+used in his life. Ever since the London furniture had arrived in
+Samburan, it had been reposing in the drawer of the table. The real
+dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be repelled
+by swords or bullets. On the other hand neither his manner nor his
+appearance looked sufficiently inoffensive to expose him to light-minded
+aggression.
+
+He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer
+in the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly--which was very
+unusual with him. He had found himself sitting up and extremely wide
+awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his side, lying with her
+face away from him, a vague, characteristically feminine form in the dim
+light. She was perfectly still.
+
+At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and the
+sides of the mosquito net were looped up. Heyst swung his feet to the
+floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had become
+aware of his intention to get up.
+
+Why he did this he did not know. He didn't wish to wake her up, and
+the slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very loud to him. He
+turned round apprehensively and waited for her to move, but she did not
+stir. While he looked at her, he had a vision of himself lying there
+too, also fast asleep, and--it occurred to him for the first time in his
+life--very defenceless. This quite novel impression of the dangers of
+slumber made him think suddenly of his revolver. He left the bedroom
+with noiseless footsteps. The lightness of the curtain he had to lift
+as he passed out, and the outer door, wide open on the blackness of
+the veranda--for the roof eaves came down low, shutting out the
+starlight--gave him a sense of having been dangerously exposed, he could
+not have said to what. He pulled the drawer open. Its emptiness cut his
+train of self-communion short. He murmured to the assertive fact:
+
+“Impossible! Somewhere else!”
+
+He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked
+whispers of memory were not encouraging. Foraging in every receptacle
+and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly to the
+conclusion that it was not in that room. Neither was it in the other.
+The whole bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a profuse allowance of
+veranda all round. Heyst stepped out on the veranda.
+
+“It's Wang, beyond a doubt,” he thought, staring into the night. “He has
+got hold of it for some reason.”
+
+There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materializing
+suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at any moment, and
+toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger was so irremediable
+that it was not worth worrying about, any more than the general
+precariousness of human life. Heyst speculated on this added risk. How
+long had he been at the mercy of a slender yellow finger on the trigger?
+That is, if that was the fellow's reason for purloining the revolver.
+
+“Shoot and inherit,” thought Heyst. “Very simple.” Yet there was in his
+mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of vegetables
+in the light of a murderer.
+
+“No, it wasn't that. For Wang could have done it any time this last
+twelve months or more--”
+
+Heyst's mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed
+himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at
+that period of his speculation his point of view changed. It struck him
+with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been taken
+only late in the day, or on that very night. Wang, of course. But why?
+So there had been no danger in the past. It was all ahead.
+
+“He has me at his mercy now,” thought Heyst, without particular
+excitement.
+
+The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in it: it
+was as if he were considering somebody else's strange predicament. But
+even that sort of interest was dying out when, looking to his left, he
+saw the accustomed shapes of the other bungalows looming in the night,
+and remembered the arrival of the thirsty company in the boat. Wang
+would hardly risk such a crime in the presence of other white men. It
+was a peculiar instance of the “safety in numbers,” principle, which
+somehow was not much to Heyst's taste.
+
+He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and
+unsatisfactory thought. He had just made up his mind that he must
+breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind him.
+She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to turn round
+at once under the impression that she might read his trouble in his
+face. Yes, she had taken him by surprise, and for that reason the
+conversation which began was not exactly as he would have conducted it
+if he had been prepared for her pointblank question. He ought to have
+said at once: “I've missed nothing.” It was a deplorable thing that he
+should have let it come so far as to have her ask what it was he missed.
+He closed the conversation by saying lightly:
+
+“It's an object of very small value. Don't worry about it--it isn't
+worth while. The best you can do is to go and lie down again, Lena.”
+
+Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked: “And you?”
+
+“I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda. I don't feel sleepy for
+the moment.”
+
+“Well, don't be long.”
+
+He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a frown
+on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
+
+Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the veranda.
+He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the stars how the
+night went on. It was going very slowly. Why it should have irked him he
+did not know, for he had nothing to expect from the dawn; but everything
+round him had become unreasonable, unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying
+him under an obligation, but giving him no line of action. He felt
+contemptuously irritated with the situation. The outer world had broken
+upon him; and he did not know what wrong he had done to bring this on
+himself, any more than he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible
+calumny about his treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget
+this. It had reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect
+confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.
+
+“And she only half disbelieves it,” he thought, with hopeless
+humiliation.
+
+This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength
+from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no desire to do
+anything--neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the revolver
+nor to find out from the strangers who they were, and how their
+predicament had come about. He flung his glowing cigar away into the
+night. But Samburan was no longer a solitude wherein he could indulge in
+all his moods. The fiery parabolic path the cast-out stump traced in the
+air was seen from another veranda at a distance of some twenty yards. It
+was noted as a symptom of importance by an observer with his faculties
+greedy for signs, and in a state of alertness tense enough almost to
+hear the grass grow.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+The observer was Martin Ricardo. To him life was not a matter of
+passive renunciation, but of a particularly active warfare. He was
+not mistrustful of it, he was not disgusted with it, still less was he
+inclined to be suspicious of its disenchantments; but he was vividly
+aware that it held many possibilities of failure. Though very far from
+being a pessimist, he was not a man of foolish illusions. He did
+not like failure, not only because of its unpleasant and dangerous
+consequences, but also because of its damaging effect upon his own
+appreciation of Martin Ricardo. And this was a special job, of his own
+contriving, and of considerable novelty. It was not, so to speak, in his
+usual line of business--except, perhaps, from a moral standpoint, about
+which he was not likely to trouble his head. For these reasons Martin
+Ricardo was unable to sleep.
+
+Mr Jones, after repeated shivering fits, and after drinking much hot
+tea, had apparently fallen into deep slumber. He had very peremptorily
+discouraged attempts at conversation on the part of his faithful
+follower. Ricardo listened to his regular breathing. It was all very
+well for the governor. He looked upon it as a sort of sport. A gentleman
+naturally would. But this ticklish and important job had to be pulled
+off at all costs, both for honour and for safety. Ricardo rose quietly,
+and made his way on the veranda. He could not lie still. He wanted to
+go out for air, and he had a feeling that by the force of his eagerness
+even the darkness and the silence could be made to yield something to
+his eyes and ears.
+
+He noted the stars, and stepped back again into the dense darkness.
+He resisted the growing impulse to go out and steal towards the other
+bungalow. It would have been madness to start prowling in the dark on
+unknown ground. And for what end? Unless to relieve the oppression.
+Immobility lay on his limbs like a leaden garment. And yet he was
+unwilling to give up. He persisted in his objectless vigil. The man of
+the island was keeping quiet.
+
+It was at that moment that Ricardo's eyes caught the vanishing red
+trail of light made by the cigar--a startling revelation of the man's
+wakefulness. He could not suppress a low “Hallo!” and began to sidle
+along towards the door, with his shoulders rubbing the wall. For all he
+knew, the man might have been out in front by this time, observing the
+veranda. As a matter of fact, after flinging away the cheroot, Heyst
+had gone indoors with the feeling of a man who gives up an unprofitable
+occupation. But Ricardo fancied he could hear faint footfalls on the
+open ground, and dodged quickly into the room. There he drew breath, and
+meditated for a while. His next step was to feel for the matches on
+the tall desk, and to light the candle. He had to communicate to his
+governor views and reflections of such importance that it was absolutely
+necessary for him to watch their effect on the very countenance of the
+hearer. At first he had thought that these matters could have waited
+till daylight; but Heyst's wakefulness, disclosed in that startling way,
+made him feel suddenly certain that there could be no sleep for him that
+night.
+
+He said as much to his governor. When the little dagger-like flame had
+done its best to dispel the darkness, Mr. Jones was to be seen reposing
+on a camp bedstead, in a distant part of the room. A railway rug
+concealed his spare form up to his very head, which rested on the
+other railway rug rolled up for a pillow. Ricardo plumped himself down
+cross-legged on the floor, very close to the low bedstead; so that Mr.
+Jones--who perhaps had not been so very profoundly asleep--on opening
+his eyes found them conveniently levelled at the face of his secretary.
+
+“Eh? What is it you say? No sleep for you tonight? But why can't you let
+me sleep? Confound your fussiness!”
+
+“Because that there fellow can't sleep--that's why. Dash me if he hasn't
+been doing a think just now! What business has he to think in the middle
+of the night?”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“He was out, sir--up in the middle of the night. My own eyes saw it.”
+
+“But how do you know that he was up to think?” inquired Mr. Jones. “It
+might have been anything--toothache, for instance. And you may have
+dreamed it for all I know. Didn't you try to sleep?”
+
+“No, sir. I didn't even try to go to sleep.”
+
+Ricardo informed his patron of his vigil on the veranda, and of the
+revelation which put an end to it. He concluded that a man up with a
+cigar in the middle of the night must be doing a think.
+
+Mr Jones raised himself on his elbow. This sign of interest comforted
+his faithful henchman.
+
+“Seems to me it's time we did a little think ourselves,” added Ricardo,
+with more assurance. Long as they had been together the moods of his
+governor were still a source of anxiety to his simple soul.
+
+“You are always making a fuss,” remarked Mr. Jones, in a tolerant tone.
+
+“Ay, but not for nothing, am I? You can't say that, sir. Mine may not be
+a gentleman's way of looking round a thing, but it isn't a fool's way,
+either. You've admitted that much yourself at odd times.”
+
+Ricardo was growing warmly argumentative. Mr. Jones interrupted him
+without heat.
+
+“You haven't roused me to talk about yourself, I presume?”
+
+“No, sir.” Ricardo remained silent for a minute, with the tip of
+his tongue caught between his teeth. “I don't think I could tell you
+anything about myself that you don't know,” he continued. There was a
+sort of amused satisfaction in his tone which changed completely as he
+went on. “It's that man, over there, that's got to be talked over. I
+don't like him.”
+
+He, failed to observe the flicker of a ghastly smile on his governor's
+lips.
+
+“Don't you?” murmured Mr. Jones, whose face, as he reclined on his
+elbow, was on a level with the top of his follower's head.
+
+“No, sir,” said Ricardo emphatically. The candle from the other side of
+the room threw his monstrous black shadow on the wall. “He--I don't know
+how to say it--he isn't hearty-like.”
+
+Mr Jones agreed languidly in his own manner:
+
+“He seems to be a very self-possessed man.”
+
+“Ay, that's it. Self--” Ricardo choked with indignation. “I would soon
+let out some of his self-possession through a hole between his ribs, if
+this weren't a special job!”
+
+Mr Jones had been making his own reflections, for he asked:
+
+“Do you think he is suspicious?”
+
+“I don't see very well what he can be suspicious of,” pondered Ricardo.
+“Yet there he was doing a think. And what could be the object of it?
+What made him get out of his bed in the middle of the night. 'Tain't
+fleas, surely.”
+
+“Bad conscience, perhaps,” suggested Mr. Jones jocularly.
+
+His faithful secretary suffered from irritation, and did not see the
+joke. In a fretful tone he declared that there was no such thing as
+conscience. There was such a thing as funk; but there was nothing to
+make that fellow funky in any special way. He admitted, however, that
+the man might have been uneasy at the arrival of strangers, because of
+all that plunder of his put away somewhere.
+
+Ricardo glanced here and there, as if he were afraid of being overheard
+by the heavy shadows cast by the dim light all over the room. His
+patron, very quiet, spoke in a calm whisper:
+
+“And perhaps that hotel-keeper has been lying to you about him. He may
+be a very poor devil indeed.”
+
+Ricardo shook his head slightly. The Schombergian theory of Heyst had
+become in him a profound conviction, which he had absorbed as naturally
+as a sponge takes up water. His patron's doubts were a wanton denying
+of what was self-evident; but Ricardo's voice remained as before, a soft
+purring with a snarling undertone.
+
+“I am sup-prised at you, sir! It's the very way them tame ones--the
+common 'yporcrits of the world--get on. When it comes to plunder
+drifting under one's very nose, there's not one of them that would keep
+his hands off. And I don't blame them. It's the way they do it that sets
+my back up. Just look at the story of how he got rid of that pal of his!
+Send a man home to croak of a cold on the chest--that's one of your tame
+tricks. And d'you mean to say, sir, that a man that's up to it wouldn't
+bag whatever he could lay his hands in his 'yporcritical way? What was
+all that coal business? Tame citizen dodge; 'yporcrisy--nothing else.
+No, no, sir! The thing is to extract it from him as neatly as possible.
+That's the job; and it isn't so simple as it looks. I reckon you have
+looked at it all round, sir, before you took up the notion of this
+trip.”
+
+“No.” Mr. Jones was hardly audible, staring far away from his couch. “I
+didn't think about it much. I was bored.”
+
+“Ay, that you were--bad. I was feeling pretty desperate that afternoon,
+when that bearded softy of a landlord got talking to me about this
+fellow here. Quite accidentally, it was. Well, sir, here we are after a
+mighty narrow squeak. I feel all limp yet; but never mind--his swag will
+pay for the lot!”
+
+“He's all alone here,” remarked Mr. Jones in a hollow murmur.
+
+“Ye-es, in a way. Yes, alone enough. Yes, you may say he is.”
+
+“There's that Chinaman, though.”
+
+“Ay, there's the Chink,” assented Ricardo rather absentmindedly.
+
+He was debating in his mind the advisability of making a clean breast of
+his knowledge of the girl's existence. Finally he concluded he wouldn't.
+The enterprise was difficult enough without complicating it with an
+upset to the sensibilities of the gentleman with whom he had the honour
+of being associated. Let the discovery come of itself, he thought,
+and then he could swear that he had known nothing of that offensive
+presence.
+
+He did not need to lie. He had only to hold his tongue.
+
+“Yes,” he muttered reflectively, “there's that Chink, certainly.”
+
+At bottom, he felt a certain ambiguous respect for his governor's
+exaggerated dislike of women, as if that horror of feminine presence
+were a sort of depraved morality; but still morality, since he counted
+it as an advantage. It prevented many undesirable complications. He did
+not pretend to understand it. He did not even try to investigate
+this idiosyncrasy of his chief. All he knew was that he himself was
+differently inclined, and that it did not make him any happier or safer.
+He did not know how he would have acted if he had been knocking about
+the world on his own. Luckily he was a subordinate, not a wage-slave but
+a follower--which was a restraint. Yes! The other sort of disposition
+simplified matters in general; it wasn't to be gainsaid. But it was
+clear that it could also complicate them--as in this most important and,
+in Ricardo's view, already sufficiently delicate case. And the worst of
+it was that one could not tell exactly in what precise manner it would
+act.
+
+It was unnatural, he thought somewhat peevishly. How was one to reckon
+up the unnatural? There were no rules for that. The faithful henchman
+of plain Mr. Jones, foreseeing many difficulties of a material order,
+decided to keep the girl out of the governor's knowledge, out of his
+sight, too, for as long a time as it could be managed. That, alas,
+seemed to be at most a matter of a few hours; whereas Ricardo feared
+that to get the affair properly going would take some days. Once well
+started, he was not afraid of his gentleman failing him. As is often the
+case with lawless natures, Ricardo's faith in any given individual was
+of a simple, unquestioning character. For man must have some support in
+life.
+
+Cross-legged, his head drooping a little and perfectly still, he might
+have been meditating in a bonze-like attitude upon the sacred syllable
+“Om.” It was a striking illustration of the untruth of appearances, for
+his contempt for the world was of a severely practical kind. There was
+nothing oriental about Ricardo but the amazing quietness of his pose.
+Mr. Jones was also very quiet. He had let his head sink on the rolled-up
+rug, and lay stretched out on his side with his back to the light. In
+that position the shadows gathered in the cavities of his eyes made
+them look perfectly empty. When he spoke, his ghostly voice had only to
+travel a few inches straight into Ricardo's left ear.
+
+“Why don't you say something, now that you've got me awake?”
+
+“I wonder if you were sleeping as sound as you are trying to make out,
+sir,” said the unmoved Ricardo.
+
+“I wonder,” repeated Mr. Jones. “At any rate, I was resting quietly!”
+
+“Come, sir!” Ricardo's whisper was alarmed. “You don't mean to say
+you're going to be bored?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Quite right!” The secretary was very much relieved. “There's no
+occasion to be, I can tell you, sir,” he whispered earnestly. “Anything
+but that! If I didn't say anything for a bit, it ain't because there
+isn't plenty to talk about. Ay, more than enough.”
+
+“What's the matter with you?” breathed out his patron. “Are you going to
+turn pessimist?”
+
+“Me turn? No, sir! I ain't of those that turn. You may call me hard
+names, if you like, but you know very well that I ain't a croaker.”
+ Ricardo changed his tone. “If I said nothing for a while, it was because
+I was meditating over the Chink, sir.”
+
+“You were? Waste of time, my Martin. A Chinaman is unfathomable.”
+
+Ricardo admitted that this might be so. Anyhow, a Chink was neither
+here nor there, as a general thing, unfathomable as he might be; but a
+Swedish baron wasn't--couldn't be! The woods were full of such barons.
+
+“I don't know that he is so tame,” was Mr. Jones's remark, in a
+sepulchral undertone.
+
+“How do you mean, sir? He ain't a rabbit, of course. You couldn't
+hypnotize him, as I saw you do to more than one Dago, and other kinds
+of tame citizens, when it came to the point of holding them down to a
+game.”
+
+“Don't you reckon on that,” murmured plain Mr. Jones seriously.
+
+“No, sir, I don't, though you have a wonderful power of the eye. It's a
+fact.”
+
+“I have a wonderful patience,” remarked Mr. Jones dryly.
+
+A dim smile flitted over the lips of the faithful Ricardo who never
+raised his head.
+
+“I don't want to try you too much, sir, but this is like no other job we
+ever turned our minds to.”
+
+“Perhaps not. At any rate let us think so.”
+
+A weariness with the monotony of life was reflected in the tone of this
+qualified assent. It jarred on the nerves of the sanguine Ricardo.
+
+“Let us think of the way to go to work,” he retorted a little
+impatiently. “He's a deep one. Just look at the way he treated that chum
+of his. Did you ever hear of anything so low? And the artfulness of the
+beast--the dirty, tame artfulness!”
+
+“Don't you start moralizing, Martin,” said Mr. Jones warningly. “As far
+as I can make out the story that German hotel-keeper told you, it seems
+to show a certain amount of character;--and independence from common
+feelings which is not usual. It's very remarkable, if true.”
+
+“Ay, ay! Very remarkable. It's mighty low down, all the same,” muttered,
+Ricardo obstinately. “I must say I am glad to think he will be paid off
+for it in a way that'll surprise him!”
+
+The tip of his tongue appeared lively for an instant, as if trying for
+the taste of that ferocious retribution on his compressed lips. For
+Ricardo was sincere in his indignation before the elementary principle
+of loyalty to a chum violated in cold blood, slowly, in a patient
+duplicity of years. There are standards in villainy as in virtue, and
+the act as he pictured it to himself acquired an additional horror
+from the slow pace of that treachery so atrocious and so tame. But
+he understood too the educated judgement of his governor, a gentleman
+looking on all this with the privileged detachment of a cultivated mind,
+of an elevated personality.
+
+“Ay, he's deep--he's artful,” he mumbled between his sharp teeth.
+
+“Confound you!” Mr. Jones's calm whisper crept into his ear. “Come to
+the point.”
+
+Obedient, the secretary shook off his thoughtfulness. There was a
+similarity of mind between these two--one the outcast of his vices, the
+other inspired by a spirit of scornful defiance, the aggressiveness of
+a beast of prey looking upon all the tame creatures of the earth as its
+natural victim. Both were astute enough, however, and both were aware
+that they had plunged into this adventure without a sufficient scrutiny
+of detail. The figure of a lonely man far from all assistance had
+loomed up largely, fascinating and defenceless in the middle of the sea,
+filling the whole field of their vision. There had not seemed to be any
+need for thinking. As Schomberg had been saying: “Three to one.”
+
+But it did not look so simple now in the face of that solitude which was
+like an armour for this man. The feeling voiced by the henchman in his
+own way--“We don't seem much forwarder now we are here” was acknowledged
+by the silence of the patron. It was easy enough to rip a fellow up or
+drill a hole in him, whether he was alone or not, Ricardo reflected in
+low, confidential tones, but--
+
+“He isn't alone,” Mr. Jones said faintly, in his attitude of a man
+composed for sleep. “Don't forget that Chinaman.” Ricardo started
+slightly.
+
+“Oh, ay--the Chink!”
+
+Ricardo had been on the point of confessing about the girl; but no! He
+wanted his governor to be unperturbed and steady. Vague thoughts,
+which he hardly dared to look in the face, were stirring his brain in
+connection with that girl. She couldn't be much account, he thought. She
+could be frightened. And there were also other possibilities. The Chink,
+however, could be considered openly.
+
+“What I was thinking about it, sir,” he went on earnestly, “is
+this--here we've got a man. He's nothing. If he won't be good, he can be
+made quiet. That's easy. But then there's his plunder. He doesn't carry
+it in his pocket.”
+
+“I hope not,” breathed Mr. Jones.
+
+“Same here. It's too big, we know, but if he were alone, he would not
+feel worried about it overmuch--I mean the safety of the pieces. He
+would just put the lot into any box or drawer that was handy.”
+
+“Would he?”
+
+“Yes, sir. He would keep it under his eye, as it were. Why not? It is
+natural. A fellow doesn't put his swag underground, unless there's a
+very good reason for it.”
+
+“A very good reason, eh?”
+
+“Yes, sir. What do you think a fellow is--a mole?”
+
+From his experience, Ricardo declared that man was not a burrowing
+beast. Even the misers very seldom buried their hoard, unless for
+exceptional reasons. In the given situation of a man alone on an island,
+the company of a Chink was a very good reason. Drawers would not be
+safe, nor boxes, either, from a prying, slant-eyed Chink. No, sir,
+unless a safe--a proper office safe. But the safe was there in the room.
+
+“Is there a safe in this room? I didn't notice it,” whispered Mr. Jones.
+
+That was because the thing was painted white, like the walls of the
+room; and besides, it was tucked away in the shadows of a corner. Mr.
+Jones had been too tired to observe anything on his first coming ashore;
+but Ricardo had very soon spotted the characteristic form. He only
+wished he could believe that the plunder of treachery, duplicity, and
+all the moral abominations of Heyst had been there. But no; the blamed
+thing was open.
+
+“It might have been there at one time or another,” he commented
+gloomily, “but it isn't there now.”
+
+“The man did not elect to live in this house,” remarked Mr. Jones. “And
+by the by, what could he have meant by speaking of circumstances which
+prevented him lodging us in the other bungalow? You remember what he
+said, Martin? Sounded cryptic.”
+
+Martin, who remembered and understood the phrase as directly motived by
+the existence of the girl, waited a little before saying:
+
+“Some of his artfulness, sir; and not the worst of it either. That
+manner of his to us, this asking no questions, is some more of his
+artfulness. A man's bound to be curious, and he is; yet he goes on as if
+he didn't care. He does care--or else what was he doing up with a cigar
+in the middle of the night, doing a think? I don't like it.”
+
+“He may be outside, observing the light here, and saying the very same
+thing to himself of our own wakefulness,” gravely suggested Ricardo's
+governor.
+
+“He may be, sir; but this is too important to be talked over in the
+dark. And the light is all right, it can be accounted for. There's a
+light in this bungalow in the middle of the night because--why, because
+you are not well. Not well, sir--that's what's the matter, and you will
+have to act up to it.”
+
+The consideration had suddenly occurred to the faithful henchman, in the
+light of a felicitous expedient to keep his governor and the girl apart
+as long as possible. Mr. Jones received the suggestion without the
+slightest stir, even in the deep sockets of his eyes, where a steady,
+faint gleam was the only thing telling of life and attention in his
+attenuated body. But Ricardo, as soon as he had enunciated his happy
+thought, perceived in it other possibilities more to the point and of
+greater practical advantage.
+
+“With your looks, sir, it will be easy enough,” he went on evenly, as
+if no silence had intervened, always respectful, but frank, with
+perfect simplicity of purpose. “All you've got to do is just to lie down
+quietly. I noticed him looking sort of surprised at you on the wharf,
+sir.”
+
+At these words, a naive tribute to the aspect of his physique, even more
+suggestive of the grave than of the sick-bed, a fold appeared on that
+side of the governor's face which was exposed to the dim light--a deep,
+shadowy, semicircular fold from the side of the nose to bottom of the
+chin--a silent smile. By a side-glance Ricardo had noted this play of
+features. He smiled, too, appreciative, encouraged.
+
+“And you as hard as nails all the time,” he went on. “Hang me if anybody
+would believe you aren't sick, if I were to swear myself black in
+the face! Give us a day or two to look into matters and size up that
+'yporcrit.”
+
+Ricardo's eyes remained fixed on his crossed shins. The chief, in his
+lifeless accents, approved.
+
+“Perhaps it would be a good idea.”
+
+“The Chink, he's nothing. He can be made quiet any time.”
+
+One of Ricardo's hands, reposing palm upwards on his folded legs, made
+a swift thrusting gesture, repeated by the enormous darting shadow of an
+arm very low on the wall. It broke the spell of perfect stillness in
+the room. The secretary eyed moodily the wall from which the shadow had
+gone. Anybody could be made quiet, he pointed out. It was not anything
+that the Chink could do; no, it was the effect that his company must
+have produced on the conduct of the doomed man. A man! What was a man? A
+Swedish baron could be ripped up, or else holed by a shot, as easily as
+any other creature; but that was exactly what was to be avoided, till
+one knew where he had hidden his plunder.
+
+“I shouldn't think it would be some sort of hole in his bungalow,”
+ argued Ricardo with real anxiety.
+
+No. A house can be burnt--set on fire accidentally, or on purpose, while
+a man's asleep. Under the house--or in some crack, cranny, or crevice?
+Something told him it wasn't that. The anguish of mental effort
+contracted Ricardo's brow. The skin of his head seemed to move in this
+travail of vain and tormenting suppositions.
+
+“What did you think a fellow is, sir--a baby?” he said, in answer to Mr.
+Jones's objections. “I am trying to find out what I would do myself. He
+wouldn't be likely to be cleverer than I am.”
+
+“And what do you know about yourself?”
+
+Mr Jones seemed to watch his follower's perplexities with amusement
+concealed in a death-like composure.
+
+Ricardo disregarded the question. The material vision of the spoil
+absorbed all his faculties. A great vision! He seemed to see it. A few
+small canvas bags tied up with thin cord, their distended rotundity
+showing the inside pressure of the disk-like forms of coins--gold,
+solid, heavy, eminently portable. Perhaps steel cash-boxes with a chased
+design, on the covers; or perhaps a black and brass box with a handle
+on the top, and full of goodness knows what. Bank notes? Why not? The
+fellow had been going home; so it was surely something worth going home
+with.
+
+“And he may have put it anywhere outside--anywhere!” cried Ricardo in a
+deadened voice, “in the forest--”
+
+That was it! A temporary darkness replaced the dim light of the room.
+The darkness of the forest at night and in it the gleam of a lantern, by
+which a figure is digging at the foot of a tree-trunk. As likely as not,
+another figure holding that lantern--ha, feminine! The girl!
+
+The prudent Ricardo stifled a picturesque and profane exclamation,
+partly joy, partly dismay. Had the girl been trusted or mistrusted by
+that man? Whatever it was, it was bound to be wholly! With women there
+could be no half-measures. He could not imagine a fellow half-trusting
+a woman in that intimate relation to himself, and in those particular
+circumstances of conquest and loneliness where no confidences could
+appear dangerous since, apparently, there could be no one she could
+give him away to. Moreover, in nine cases out of ten the woman would be
+trusted. But, trusted or mistrusted, was her presence a favourable or
+unfavourable condition of the problem? That was the question!
+
+The temptation to consult his chief, to talk over the weighty fact, and
+get his opinion on it, was great indeed. Ricardo resisted it; but the
+agony of his solitary mental conflict was extremely sharp. A woman in
+a problem is an incalculable quantity, even if you have something to go
+upon in forming your guess. How much more so when you haven't even once
+caught sight of her.
+
+Swift as were his mental processes, he felt that a longer silence was
+inadvisable. He hastened to speak:
+
+“And do you see us, sir, you and I, with a couple of spades having to
+tackle this whole confounded island?”
+
+He allowed himself a slight movement of the arm. The shadow enlarged it
+into a sweeping gesture.
+
+“This seems rather discouraging, Martin,” murmured the unmoved governor.
+
+“We mustn't be discouraged--that's all!” retorted his henchman. “And
+after what we had to go through in that boat too! Why it would be--”
+
+He couldn't find the qualifying words. Very calm, faithful, and yet
+astute, he expressed his new-born hopes darkly.
+
+“Something's sure to turn up to give us a hint; only this job can't be
+rushed. You may depend on me to pick up the least little bit of a hint;
+but you, sir--you've got to play him very gently. For the rest you can
+trust me.”
+
+“Yes; but I ask myself what YOU are trusting to.”
+
+“Our luck,” said the faithful Ricardo. “Don't say a word against that.
+It might spoil the run of it.”
+
+“You are a superstitious beggar. No, I won't say anything against it.”
+
+“That's right, sir. Don't you even think lightly of it. Luck's not to be
+played with.”
+
+“Yes, luck's a delicate thing,” assented Mr. Jones in a dreamy whisper.
+
+A short silence ensued, which Ricardo ended in a discreet and tentative
+voice.
+
+“Talking of luck, I suppose he could be made to take a hand with
+you, sir--two-handed picket or ekkarty, you being seedy and keeping
+indoors--just to pass the time. For all we know, he may be one of them
+hot ones once they start--”
+
+“Is it likely?” came coldly from the principal. “Considering what we
+know of his history--say with his partner.”
+
+“True, sir. He's a cold-blooded beast; a cold-blooded, inhuman--”
+
+“And I'll tell you another thing that isn't likely. He would not be
+likely to let himself be stripped bare. We haven't to do with a young
+fool that can be led on by chaff or flattery, and in the end simply
+overawed. This is a calculating man.”
+
+Ricardo recognized that clearly. What he had in his mind was something
+on a small scale, just to keep the enemy busy while he, Ricardo, had
+time to nose around a bit.
+
+“You could even lose a little money to him, sir,” he suggested.
+
+“I could.”
+
+Ricardo was thoughtful for a moment.
+
+“He strikes me, too, as the sort of man to start prancing when one
+didn't expect it. What do you think, sir? Is he a man that would prance?
+That is, if something startled him. More likely to prance than to
+run--what?”
+
+The answer came at once, because Mr. Jones understood the peculiar idiom
+of his faithful follower.
+
+“Oh, without doubt! Without doubt!”
+
+“It does me good to hear that you think so. He's a prancing beast,
+and so we mustn't startle him--not till I have located the stuff.
+Afterwards--”
+
+Ricardo paused, sinister in the stillness of his pose. Suddenly he
+got up with a swift movement and gazed down at his chief in moody
+abstraction. Mr. Jones did not stir.
+
+“There's one thing that's worrying me,” began Ricardo in a subdued
+voice.
+
+“Only one?” was the faint comment from the motionless body on the
+bedstead.
+
+“I mean more than all the others put together.”
+
+“That's grave news.”
+
+“Ay, grave enough. It's this--how do you feel in yourself, sir? Are you
+likely to get bored? I know them fits come on you suddenly; but surely
+you can tell--”
+
+“Martin, you are an ass.”
+
+The moody face of the secretary brightened up.
+
+“Really, sir? Well, I am quite content to be on these terms--I mean as
+long as you don't get bored. It wouldn't do, sir.”
+
+For coolness, Ricardo had thrown open his shirt and rolled up his
+sleeves. He moved stealthily across the room, bare-footed, towards the
+candle, the shadow of his head and shoulders growing bigger behind him
+on the opposite wall, to which the face of plain Mr. Jones was turned.
+With a feline movement, Ricardo glanced over his shoulder at the thin
+back of the spectre reposing on the bed, and then blew out the candle.
+
+“In fact, I am rather amused, Martin,” Mr. Jones said in the dark.
+
+He heard the sound of a slapped thigh and the jubilant exclamation of
+his henchman:
+
+“Good! That's the way to talk, sir!”
+
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+Ricardo advanced prudently by short darts from one tree-trunk to
+another, more in the manner of a squirrel than a cat. The sun had
+risen some time before. Already the sparkle of open sea was encroaching
+rapidly on the dark, cool, early-morning blue of Diamond Bay; but the
+deep dusk lingered yet under the mighty pillars of the forest, between
+which the secretary dodged.
+
+He was watching Number One's bungalow with an animal-like patience, if
+with a very human complexity of purpose. This was the second morning
+of such watching. The first one had not been rewarded by success. Well,
+strictly speaking, there was no hurry.
+
+The sun, swinging above the ridge all at once, inundated with light the
+space of burnt grass in front of Ricardo and the face of the bungalow,
+on which his eyes were fixed, leaving only the one dark spot of the
+doorway. To his right, to his left, and behind him, splashes of gold
+appeared in the deep shade of the forest, thinning the gloom under the
+ragged roof of leaves.
+
+This was not a very favourable circumstance for Ricardo's purpose. He
+did not wish to be detected in his patient occupation. For what he was
+watching for was a sight of the girl--that girl! just a glimpse across
+the burnt patch to see what she was like. He had excellent eyes, and
+the distance was not so great. He would be able to distinguish her face
+quite easily if she only came out on the veranda; and she was bound
+to do that sooner or later. He was confident that he could form some
+opinion about her--which, he felt, was very necessary, before venturing
+on some steps to get in touch with her behind that Swedish baron's back.
+His theoretical view of the girl was such that he was quite prepared,
+on the strength of that distant examination, to show himself
+discreetly--perhaps even make a sign. It all depended on his reading of
+the face. She couldn't be much. He knew that sort!
+
+By protruding his head a little he commanded, through the foliage of a
+festooning creeper, a view of the three bungalows. Irregularly disposed
+along a flat curve, over the veranda rail of the farthermost one hung a
+dark rug of a tartan pattern, amazingly conspicuous. Ricardo could see
+the very checks. A brisk fire of sticks was burning on the ground in
+front of the steps, and in the sunlight the thin, fluttering flame had
+paled almost to invisibility--a mere rosy stir under a faint wreath of
+smoke. He could see the white bandage on the head of Pedro bending over
+it, and the wisps of black hair standing up weirdly. He had wound that
+bandage himself, after breaking that shaggy and enormous head. The
+creature balanced it like a load, staggering towards the steps. Ricardo
+could see a small, long-handled saucepan at the end of a great hairy
+paw.
+
+Yes, he could see all that there was to be seen, far and near. Excellent
+eyes! The only thing they could not penetrate was the dark oblong of the
+doorway on the veranda under the low eaves of the bungalow's roof. And
+that was vexing. It was an outrage. Ricardo was easily outraged. Surely
+she would come out presently! Why didn't she? Surely the fellow did not
+tie her up to the bedpost before leaving the house!
+
+Nothing appeared. Ricardo was as still as the leafy cables of creepers
+depending in a convenient curtain from the mighty limb sixty feet above
+his head. His very eyelids were still, and this unblinking watchfulness
+gave him the dreamy air of a cat posed on a hearth-rug contemplating the
+fire. Was he dreaming? There, in plain sight, he had before him a white,
+blouse-like jacket, short blue trousers, a pair of bare yellow calves, a
+pigtail, long and slender--
+
+“The confounded Chink!” he muttered, astounded.
+
+He was not conscious of having looked away; and yet right there, in the
+middle of the picture, without having come round the right-hand corner
+or the left-hand corner of the house, without falling from the sky or
+surging up from the ground, Wang had become visible, large as life,
+and engaged in the young-ladyish occupation of picking flowers. Step
+by step, stooping repeatedly over the flower-beds at the foot of the
+veranda, the startlingly materialized Chinaman passed off the scene in
+a very commonplace manner, by going up the steps and disappearing in the
+darkness of the doorway.
+
+Only then the yellow eyes of Martin Ricardo lost their intent fixity. He
+understood that it was time for him to be moving. That bunch of
+flowers going into the house in the hand of a Chinaman was for the
+breakfast-table. What else could it be for?
+
+“I'll give you flowers!” he muttered threateningly. “You wait!”
+
+Another moment, just for a glance towards the Jones bungalow, whence
+he expected Heyst to issue on his way to that breakfast so offensively
+decorated, and Ricardo began his retreat. His impulse, his desire, was
+for a rush into the open, face to face with the appointed victim, for
+what he called a “ripping up,” visualized greedily, and always with
+the swift preliminary stooping movement on his part--the forerunner of
+certain death to his adversary. This was his impulse; and as it was, so
+to speak, constitutional, it was extremely difficult to resist when his
+blood was up. What could be more trying than to have to skulk and dodge
+and restrain oneself, mentally and physically, when one's blood was up?
+Mr. Secretary Ricardo began his retreat from his post of observation
+behind a tree opposite Heyst's bungalow, using great care to remain
+unseen. His proceedings were made easier by the declivity of the ground,
+which sloped sharply down to the water's edge. There, his feet feeling
+the warmth of the island's rocky foundation already heated by the sun,
+through the thin soles of his straw slippers he was, as it were, sunk
+out of sight of the houses. A short scramble of some twenty feet brought
+him up again to the upper level, at the place where the jetty had its
+root in the shore. He leaned his back against one of the lofty uprights
+which still held up the company's signboard above the mound of derelict
+coal. Nobody could have guessed how much his blood was up. To contain
+himself he folded his arms tightly on his breast.
+
+Ricardo was not used to a prolonged effort of self-control. His craft,
+his artfulness, felt themselves always at the mercy of his nature, which
+was truly feral and only held in subjection by the influence of the
+“governor,” the prestige of a gentleman. It had its cunning too, but it
+was being almost too severely tried since the feral solution of a growl
+and a spring was forbidden by the problem. Ricardo dared not venture out
+on the cleared ground. He dared not.
+
+“If I meet the beggar,” he thought, “I don't know what I mayn't do. I
+daren't trust myself.”
+
+What exasperated him just now was his inability to understand
+Heyst. Ricardo was human enough to suffer from the discovery of his
+limitations. No, he couldn't size Heyst up. He could kill him with
+extreme ease--a growl and a spring--but that was forbidden! However, he
+could not remain indefinitely under the funereal blackboard.
+
+“I must make a move,” he thought.
+
+He moved on, his head swimming a little with the repressed desire of
+violence, and came out openly in front of the bungalows, as if he had
+just been down to the jetty to look at the boat. The sunshine enveloped
+him, very brilliant, very still, very hot. The three buildings faced
+him. The one with the rug on the balustrade was the most distant; next
+to it was the empty bungalow; the nearest, with the flower-beds at the
+foot of its veranda, contained that bothersome girl, who had managed
+so provokingly to keep herself invisible. That was why Ricardo's eyes
+lingered on that building. The girl would surely be easier to “size up”
+ than Heyst. A sight of her, a mere glimpse, would have been something to
+go by, a step nearer to the goal--the first real move, in fact. Ricardo
+saw no other move. And any time she might appear on that veranda!
+
+She did not appear; but, like a concealed magnet, she exercised her
+attraction. As he went on, he deviated towards the bungalow. Though his
+movements were deliberate, his feral instincts had such sway that if he
+had met Heyst walking towards him, he would have had to satisfy his
+need of violence. But he saw nobody. Wang was at the back of the house,
+keeping the coffee hot against Number One's return for breakfast. Even
+the simian Pedro was out of sight, no doubt crouching on the door-step,
+his red little eyes fastened with animal-like devotion on Mr. Jones, who
+was in discourse with Heyst in the other bungalow--the conversation of
+an evil spectre with a disarmed man, watched by an ape.
+
+His will having very little to do with it, Ricardo, darting swift
+glances in all directions, found himself at the steps of the Heyst
+bungalow. Once there, falling under an uncontrollable force of
+attraction, he mounted them with a savage and stealthy action of his
+limbs, and paused for a moment under the eaves to listen to the silence.
+Presently he advanced over the threshold one leg--it seemed to stretch
+itself, like a limb of india-rubber--planted his foot within, brought up
+the other swiftly, and stood inside the room, turning his head from side
+to side. To his eyes, brought in there from the dazzling sunshine, all
+was gloom for a moment. His pupils, like a cat's, dilating swiftly, he
+distinguished an enormous quantity of books. He was amazed; and he was
+put off too. He was vexed in his astonishment. He had meant to note the
+aspect and nature of things, and hoped to draw some useful inference,
+some hint as to the man. But what guess could one make out of a
+multitude of books? He didn't know what to think; and he formulated his
+bewilderment in the mental exclamation:
+
+“What the devil has this fellow been trying to set up here--a school?”
+
+He gave a prolonged stare to the portrait of Heyst's father, that severe
+profile ignoring the vanities of this earth. His eyes gleamed sideways
+at the heavy silver candlesticks--signs of opulence. He prowled as a
+stray cat entering a strange place might have done, for if Ricardo had
+not Wang's miraculous gift of materializing and vanishing, rather than
+coming and going, he could be nearly as noiseless in his less elusive
+movements. He noted the back door standing just ajar; and all the time
+his slightly pointed ears, at the utmost stretch of watchfulness, kept
+in touch with the profound silence outside enveloping the absolute
+stillness of the house.
+
+He had not been in the room two minutes when it occurred to him that he
+must be alone in the bungalow. The woman, most likely, had sneaked out
+and was walking about somewhere in the grounds at the back. She had
+been probably ordered to keep out of sight. Why? Because the fellow
+mistrusted his guests; or was it because he mistrusted her?
+
+Ricardo reflected that from a certain point of view it amounted nearly
+to the same thing. He remembered Schomberg's story. He felt that
+running away with somebody only to get clear of that beastly, tame,
+hotel-keeper's attention was no proof of hopeless infatuation. She could
+be got in touch with.
+
+His moustaches stirred. For some time he had been looking at a closed
+door. He would peep into that other room, and perhaps see something more
+informing than a confounded lot of books. As he crossed over, he thought
+recklessly:
+
+“If the beggar comes in suddenly, and starts to prance, I'll rip him up
+and be done with it!”
+
+He laid his hand on the handle, and felt the door come unlatched. Before
+he pulled it open, he listened again to the silence. He felt it all
+about him, complete, without a flaw.
+
+The necessity of prudence had exasperated his self-restraint. A mood
+of ferocity woke up in him, and, as always at such times, he became
+physically aware of the sheeted knife strapped to his leg. He pulled at
+the door with fierce curiosity. It came open without a squeak of hinge,
+without a rustle, with no sound at all; and he found himself glaring at
+the opaque surface of some rough blue stuff, like serge. A curtain was
+fitted inside, heavy enough and long enough not to stir.
+
+A curtain! This unforeseen veil, baffling his curiosity checked his
+brusqueness. He did not fling it aside with an impatient movement; he
+only looked at it closely, as if its texture had to be examined before
+his hand could touch such stuff. In this interval of hesitation, he
+seemed to detect a flaw in the perfection of the silence, the faintest
+possible rustle, which his ears caught and instantly, in the effort of
+conscious listening, lost again. No! Everything was still inside and
+outside the house, only he had no longer the sense of being alone there.
+
+When he put out his hand towards the motionless folds it was with
+extreme caution, and merely to push the stuff aside a little, advancing
+his head at the same time to peep within. A moment of complete
+immobility ensued. Then, without anything else of him stirring,
+Ricardo's head shrank back on his shoulders, his arm descended slowly to
+his side. There was a woman in there. The very woman! Lighted dimly
+by the reflection of the outer glare, she loomed up strangely big and
+shadowy at the other end of the long, narrow room. With her back to
+the door, she was doing her hair with bare arms uplifted. One of them
+gleamed pearly white; the other detached its perfect form in black
+against the unshuttered, uncurtained square window-hole. She was there,
+her fingers busy with her dark hair, utterly unconscious, exposed and
+defenceless--and tempting.
+
+Ricardo drew back one foot and pressed his elbows close to his sides;
+his chest started heaving convulsively as if he were wrestling or
+running a race; his body began to sway gently back and forth. The
+self-restraint was at an end: his psychology must have its way. The
+instinct for the feral spring could no longer be denied. Ravish or
+kill--it was all one to him, as long as by the act he liberated the
+suffering soul of savagery repressed for so long. After a quick glance
+over his shoulder, which hunters of big game tell us no lion or tiger
+omits to give before charging home, Ricardo charged, head down, straight
+at the curtain. The stuff, tossed up violently by his rush, settled
+itself with a slow, floating descent into vertical folds, motionless,
+without a shudder even, in the still, warm air.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+The clock--which once upon a time had measured the hours of philosophic
+meditation--could not have ticked away more than five seconds when Wang
+materialized within the living-room. His concern primarily was with the
+delayed breakfast, but at once his slanting eyes became immovably fixed
+upon the unstirring curtain. For it was behind it that he had located
+the strange, deadened scuffling sounds which filled the empty room. The
+slanting eyes of his race could not achieve a round, amazed stare, but
+they remained still, dead still, and his impassive yellow face grew all
+at once careworn and lean with the sudden strain of intense, doubtful,
+frightened watchfulness. Contrary impulses swayed his body, rooted to
+the floor-mats. He even went so far as to extend his hand towards the
+curtain. He could not reach it, and he didn't make the necessary step
+forward.
+
+The mysterious struggle was going on with confused thuds of bare feet,
+in a mute wrestling match, no human sound, hiss, groan, murmur, or
+exclamation coming through the curtain. A chair fell over, not with a
+crash but lightly, as if just grazed, and a faint metallic ring of the
+tin bath succeeded. Finally the tense silence, as of two adversaries
+locked in a deadly grip, was ended by the heavy, dull thump of a soft
+body flung against the inner partition of planks. It seemed to shake
+the whole bungalow. By that time, walking backward, his eyes, his
+very throat, strained with fearful excitement, his extended arm still
+pointing at the curtain, Wang had disappeared through the back door.
+Once out in the compound, he bolted round the end of the house. Emerging
+innocently between the two bungalows he lingered and lounged in the
+open, where anybody issuing from any of the dwellings was bound to see
+him--a self-possessed Chinaman idling there, with nothing but perhaps an
+unserved breakfast on his mind.
+
+It was at this time that Wang made up his mind to give up all connection
+with Number One, a man not only disarmed but already half vanquished.
+Till that morning he had had doubts as to his course of action, but this
+overheard scuffle decided the question. Number One was a doomed man--one
+of those beings whom it is unlucky to help. Even as he walked in the
+open with a fine air of unconcern, Wang wondered that no sound of any
+sort was to be heard inside the house. For all he knew, the white woman
+might have been scuffling in there with an evil spirit, which had of
+course killed her. For nothing visible came out of the house he watched
+out of the slanting corner of his eye. The sunshine and the silence
+outside the bungalow reigned undisturbed.
+
+But in the house the silence of the big room would not have struck an
+acute ear as perfect. It was troubled by a stir so faint that it could
+hardly be called a ghost of whispering from behind the curtain.
+
+Ricardo, feeling his throat with tender care, breathed out admiringly:
+
+“You have fingers like steel. Jimminy! You have muscles like a giant!”
+
+Luckily for Lena, Ricardo's onset had been so sudden--she was winding
+her two heavy tresses round her head--that she had no time to lower her
+arms. This, which saved them from being pinned to her sides, gave her a
+better chance to resist. His spring had nearly thrown her down. Luckily,
+again, she was standing so near the wall that, though she was driven
+against it headlong, yet the shock was not heavy enough to knock all the
+breath out of her body. On the contrary, it helped her first instinctive
+attempt to drive her assailant backward.
+
+After the first gasp of a surprise that was really too over-powering for
+a cry, she was never in doubt of the nature of her danger. She defended
+herself in the full, clear knowledge of it, from the force of instinct
+which is the true source of every great display of energy, and with a
+determination which could hardly have been expected from a girl who,
+cornered in a dim corridor by the red-faced, stammering Schomberg, had
+trembled with shame, disgust, and fear; had drooped, terrified, before
+mere words spluttered out odiously by a man who had never in his life
+laid his big paw on her.
+
+This new enemy's attack was simple, straightforward violence. It was not
+the slimy, underhand plotting to deliver her up like a slave, which
+had sickened her heart and had made her feel in her loneliness that her
+oppressors were too many for her. She was no longer alone in the world
+now. She resisted without a moment of faltering, because she was no
+longer deprived of moral support; because she was a human being who
+counted; because she was no longer defending herself for herself alone;
+because of the faith that had been born in her--the faith in the man of
+her destiny, and perhaps in the Heaven which had sent him so wonderfully
+to cross her path.
+
+She had defended herself principally by maintaining a desperate,
+murderous clutch on Ricardo's windpipe, till she felt a sudden
+relaxation of the terrific hug in which he stupidly and ineffectually
+persisted to hold her. Then with a supreme effort of her arms and of
+her suddenly raised knee, she sent him flying against the partition.
+The cedar-wood chest stood in the way, and Ricardo, with a thump which
+boomed hollow through the whole bungalow, fell on it in a sitting
+posture, half strangled, and exhausted not so much by the efforts as by
+the emotions of the struggle.
+
+With the recoil of her exerted strength, she too reeled, staggered back,
+and sat on the edge of the bed. Out of breath, but calm and unabashed,
+she busied herself in readjusting under her arms the brown and yellow
+figured Celebes sarong, the tuck of which had come undone during the
+fight. Then, folding her bare arms tightly on her breast, she leaned
+forward on her crossed legs, determined and without fear.
+
+Ricardo, leaning forward too, his nervous force gone, crestfallen like a
+beast of prey that has missed its spring, met her big grey eyes looking
+at him--wide open, observing, mysterious--from under the dark arches of
+her courageous eyebrows. Their faces were not a foot apart. He ceased
+feeling about his aching throat and dropped the palms of his hands
+heavily on his knees. He was not looking at her bare shoulders, at her
+strong arms; he was looking down at the floor. He had lost one of his
+straw slippers. A chair with a white dress on it had been overturned.
+These, with splashes of water on the floor out of a brusquely misplaced
+sponge-bath, were the only traces of the struggle.
+
+Ricardo swallowed twice consciously, as if to make sure of his throat
+before he spoke again:
+
+“All right. I never meant to hurt you--though I am no joker when it
+comes to it.”
+
+He pulled up the leg of his pyjamas to exhibit the strapped knife.
+She glanced at it without moving her head, and murmured with scornful
+bitterness:
+
+“Ah, yes--with that thing stuck in my side. In no other way.”
+
+He shook his head with a shamefaced smile.
+
+“Listen! I am quiet now. Straight--I am. I don't need to explain
+why--you know how it is. And I can see, now, this wasn't the way with
+you.”
+
+She made no sound. Her still, upward gaze had a patient, mournfulness
+which troubled him like a suggestion of an inconceivable depth. He added
+thoughtfully:
+
+“You are not going to make a noise about this silly try of mine?”
+
+She moved her head the least bit.
+
+“Jee-miny! You are a wonder--” he murmured earnestly, relieved more than
+she could have guessed.
+
+Of course, if she had attempted to run out, he would have stuck the
+knife between her shoulders, to stop her screaming; but all the fat
+would have been in the fire, the business utterly spoiled, and the rage
+of the governor--especially when he learned the cause--boundless. A
+woman that does not make a noise after an attempt of that kind has
+tacitly condoned the offence. Ricardo had no small vanities. But
+clearly, if she would pass it over like this, then he could not be so
+utterly repugnant to her. He felt flattered. And she didn't seem afraid
+of him either. He already felt almost tender towards the girl--that
+plucky, fine girl who had not tried to run screaming from him.
+
+“We shall be friends yet. I don't give you up. Don't think it. Friends
+as friends can be!” he whispered confidently. “Jee-miny! You aren't a
+tame one. Neither am I. You will find that out before long.”
+
+He could not know that if she had not run out, it was because that
+morning, under the stress of growing uneasiness at the presence of the
+incomprehensible visitors, Heyst had confessed to her that it was his
+revolver he had been looking for in the night; that it was gone, that he
+was a disarmed, defenceless man. She had hardly comprehended the meaning
+of his confession. Now she understood better what it meant. The effort
+of her self-control, her stillness, impressed Ricardo. Suddenly she
+spoke:
+
+“What are you after?”
+
+He did not raise his eyes. His hands reposing on his knees, his drooping
+head, something reflective in his pose, suggested the weariness of a
+simple soul, the fatigue of a mental rather than physical contest. He
+answered the direct question by a direct statement, as if he were too
+tired to dissemble:
+
+“After the swag.”
+
+The word was strange to her. The veiled ardour of her grey gaze from
+under the dark eyebrows never left Ricardo's.
+
+“A swag?” she murmured quietly. “What's that?”
+
+“Why, swag, plunder--what your gentleman has been pinching right and
+left for years--the pieces. Don't you know? This!”
+
+Without looking up, he made the motion of counting money into the
+palm of his hand. She lowered her eyes slightly to observe this bit
+of pantomime, but returned them to his face at once. Then, in a mere
+breath:
+
+“How do you know anything about him?” she asked, concealing her puzzled
+alarm. “What has it got to do with you?”
+
+“Everything,” was Ricardo's concise answer, in a low, emphatic whisper.
+He reflected that this girl was really his best hope. Out of the unfaded
+impression of past violence there was growing the sort of sentiment
+which prevents a man from being indifferent to a woman he has once held
+in his arms--if even against her will--and still more so if she has
+pardoned the outrage. It becomes then a sort of bond. He felt positively
+the need to confide in her--a subtle trait of masculinity, this almost
+physical need of trust which can exist side by side with the most brutal
+readiness of suspicion.
+
+“It's a game of grab--see?” he went on, with a new inflection of
+intimacy in his murmur. He was looking straight at her now.
+
+“That fat, tame slug of a gin-slinger, Schomberg, put us up to it.”
+
+So strong is the impression of helpless and persecuted misery, that the
+girl who had fought down a savage assault without faltering could not
+completely repress a shudder at the mere sound of the abhorred name.
+
+Ricardo became more rapid and confidential:
+
+“He wants to pay him off--pay both of you, at that; so he told me. He
+was hot after you. He would have given all he had into those hands of
+yours that have nearly strangled me. But you couldn't, eh? Nohow--what?”
+ He paused. “So, rather than--you followed a gentleman?”
+
+He noticed a slight movement of her head and spoke quickly.
+
+“Same here--rather than be a wage-slave. Only these foreigners aren't to
+be trusted. You're too good for him. A man that will rob his best
+chum?” She raised her head. He went on, well pleased with his progress,
+whispering hurriedly: “Yes. I know all about him. So you may guess how
+he's likely to treat a woman after a bit!”
+
+He did not know that he was striking terror into her breast now. Still
+the grey eyes remained fixed on him unmovably watchful, as if sleepy
+under the white forehead. She was beginning to understand. His words
+conveyed a definite, dreadful meaning to her mind, which he proceeded to
+enlighten further in a convinced murmur.
+
+“You and I are made to understand each other. Born alike, bred alike, I
+guess. You are not tame. Same here! You have been chucked out into this
+rotten world of 'yporcrits. Same here!”
+
+Her stillness, her appalled stillness, wore to him an air of fascinated
+attention. He asked abruptly:
+
+“Where is it?”
+
+She made an effort to breathe out:
+
+“Where's what?”
+
+His tone expressed excited secrecy.
+
+“The swag--plunder--pieces. It's a game of grab. We must have it; but it
+isn't easy, and so you will have to lend a hand. Come! is it kept in the
+house?”
+
+As often with women, her wits were sharpened by the very terror of the
+glimpsed menace. She shook her head negatively.
+
+“No.”
+
+“Sure?”
+
+“Sure,” she said.
+
+“Ay! Thought so. Does your gentleman trust you?”
+
+Again she shook her head.
+
+“Blamed 'yporcrit,” he said feelingly, and then reflected: “He's one of
+the tame ones, ain't he?”
+
+“You had better find out for yourself,” she said.
+
+“You trust me. I don't want to die before you and I have made friends.”
+ This was said with a strange air of feline gallantry. Then, tentatively:
+“But he could be brought to trust you, couldn't he?”
+
+“Trust me?” she said, in a tone which bordered on despair, but which he
+mistook for derision.
+
+“Stand in with us,” he urged. “Give the chuck to all this blamed
+'yporcrisy. Perhaps, without being trusted, you have managed to find out
+something already, eh?”
+
+“Perhaps I have,” she uttered with lips that seemed to her to be
+freezing fast.
+
+Ricardo now looked at her calm face with something like respect. He was
+even a little awed by her stillness, by her economy of words. Womanlike,
+she felt the effect she had produced, the effect of knowing much and of
+keeping all her knowledge in reserve. So far, somehow, this had come,
+about of itself. Thus encouraged, directed in the way of duplicity, the
+refuge of the weak, she made a heroically conscious effort and forced
+her stiff, cold lips into a smile.
+
+Duplicity--the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the disarmed,
+too! Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her existence and
+a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity. It seemed to her that the man
+sitting there before her was an unavoidable presence, which had attended
+all her life. He was the embodied evil of the world. She was not ashamed
+of her duplicity. With a woman's frank courage, as soon as she saw
+that opening she threw herself into it without reserve, with only one
+doubt--that of her own strength. She was appalled by the situation; but
+already all her aroused femininity, understanding that whether Heyst
+loved her or not she loved him, and feeling that she had brought this on
+his head, faced the danger with a passionate desire to defend her own.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+To Ricardo the girl had been so unforeseen that he was unable to bring
+upon her the light of his critical faculties. Her smile appeared to him
+full of promise. He had not expected her to be what she was. Who, from
+the talk he had heard, could expect to meet a girl like this? She was
+a blooming miracle, he said to himself, familiarly, yet with a tinge
+of respect. She was no meat for the likes of that tame, respectable
+gin-slinger. Ricardo grew hot with indignation. Her courage, her
+physical strength, demonstrated at the cost of his discomfiture,
+commanded his sympathy. He felt himself drawn to her by the proofs
+of her amazing spirit. Such a girl! She had a strong soul; and her
+reflective disposition to throw over her connection proved that she was
+no hypocrite.
+
+“Is your gentleman a good shot?” he said, looking down on the floor
+again, as if indifferent.
+
+She hardly understood the phrase; but in its form it suggested some
+accomplishment. It was safe to whisper an affirmative.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Mine, too--and better than good,” Ricardo murmured, and then, in a
+confidential burst: “I am not so good at it, but I carry a pretty deadly
+thing about me, all the same!”
+
+He tapped his leg. She was past the stage of shudders now. Stiff all
+over, unable even to move her eyes, she felt an awful mental tension
+which was like blank forgetfulness. Ricardo tried to influence her in
+his own way.
+
+“And my gentleman is not the sort that would drop me. He ain't no
+foreigner; whereas you, with your baron, you don't know what's before
+you--or, rather, being a woman, you know only too well. Much better
+not to wait for the chuck. Pile in with us and get your share--of the
+plunder, I mean. You have some notion about it already.”
+
+She felt that if she as much as hinted by word or sign that there was no
+such thing on the island, Heyst's life wouldn't be worth half an hour's
+purchase; but all power of combining words had vanished in the tension
+of her mind. Words themselves were too difficult to think of--all except
+the word “yes,” the saving word! She whispered it with not a feature of
+her face moving. To Ricardo the faint and concise sound proved a cool,
+reserved assent, more worth having from that amazing mistress of herself
+than a thousand words from any other woman. He thought with exultation
+that he had come upon one in a million--in ten millions! His whisper
+became frankly entreating.
+
+“That's good! Now all you've got to do is to make sure where he keeps
+his swag. Only do be quick about it! I can't stand much longer this
+crawling-on-the-stomach business so as not to scare your gentleman. What
+do you think a fellow is--a reptile?”
+
+She stared without seeing anyone, as a person in the night sits staring
+and listening to deadly sounds, to evil incantations. And always in her
+head there was that tension of the mind trying to get hold of something,
+of a saving idea which seemed to be so near and could not be captured.
+Suddenly she seized it. Yes--she had to get that man out of the
+house. At that very moment, raised outside, not very near, but heard
+distinctly, Heyst's voice uttered the words:
+
+“Have you been looking out for me, Wang?”
+
+It was for her like a flash of lightning framed in the darkness which
+had beset her on all sides, showing a deadly precipice right under her
+feet. With a convulsive movement she sat up straight, but had no power
+to rise. Ricardo, on the contrary, was on his feet on the instant, as
+noiseless as a cat. His yellow eyes gleamed, gliding here and there;
+but he too seemed unable to make another movement. Only his moustaches
+stirred visibly, like the feelers of some animal.
+
+Wang's answer, “Ya tuan,” was heard by the two in the room, but more
+faintly. Then Heyst again:
+
+“All right! You may bring the coffee in. Mem Putih out in the room yet?”
+
+To this question Wang made no answer.
+
+Ricardo's and the girl's eyes met, utterly without expression, all their
+faculties being absorbed in listening for the first sound of Heyst's
+footsteps, for any sound outside which would mean that Ricardo's retreat
+was cut off. Both understood perfectly well that Wang must have gone
+round the house, and that he was now at the back, making it impossible
+for Ricardo to slip out unseen that way before Heyst came in at the
+front.
+
+A darkling shade settled on the face of the devoted secretary. Here was
+the business utterly spoiled! It was the gloom of anger, and even of
+apprehension. He would perhaps have made a dash for it through the back
+door, if Heyst had not been heard ascending the front steps. He climbed
+them slowly, very slowly, like a man who is discouraged or weary--or
+simply thoughtful; and Ricardo had a mental vision of his face, with its
+martial moustache, the lofty forehead, the impassive features, and the
+quiet, meditative eyes. Trapped! Confound it! After all, perhaps the
+governor was right. Women had to be shunned. Fooling with this one had
+apparently ruined the whole business. For, trapped as he was he might
+just as well kill, since, anyhow, to be seen was to be unmasked. But he
+was too fair-minded to be angry with the girl.
+
+Heyst had paused on the veranda, or in the very doorway.
+
+“I shall be shot down like a dog if I ain't quick,” Ricardo muttered
+excitedly to the girl.
+
+He stooped to get hold of his knife; and the next moment would have
+hurled himself out through the curtain, nearly, as prompt and fully as
+deadly to Heyst as an unexpected thunderbolt. The feel more than the
+strength of the girl's hand, clutching at his shoulder, checked him. He
+swung round, crouching with a yellow upward glare. Ah! Was she turning
+against him?
+
+He would have stuck his knife into the hollow of her bare throat if
+he had not seen her other hand pointing to the window. It was a long
+opening, high up, close under the ceiling almost, with a single pivoting
+shutter.
+
+While he was still looking at it she moved noiselessly away, picking
+up the overturned chair, and placed it under the wall. Then she looked
+round; but he didn't need to be beckoned to. In two long, tiptoeing
+strides he was at her side.
+
+“Be quick!” she gasped.
+
+He seized her hand and wrung it with all the force of his dumb
+gratitude, as a man does to a chum when there is no time for words. Then
+he mounted the chair. Ricardo was short--too short to get over without a
+noisy scramble. He hesitated an instant; she, watchful, bore rigidly on
+the seat with her beautiful bare arms, while, light and sure, he used
+the back of the chair as a ladder. The masses of her brown hair fell all
+about her face.
+
+Footsteps resounded in the next room, and Heyst's voice, not very loud,
+called her by name.
+
+“Lena!”
+
+“Yes! In a minute,” she answered with a particular intonation which she
+knew would prevent Heyst from coming in at once.
+
+When she looked up, Ricardo had vanished, letting himself down outside
+so lightly that she had not heard the slightest noise. She stood up
+then, bewildered, frightened, as if awakened from a drugged sleep, with
+heavy, downcast, unseeing eyes, her fortitude tired out, her imagination
+as if dead within her and unable to keep her fear alive.
+
+Heyst moved about aimlessly in the other room. This sound roused her
+exhausted wits. At once she began to think, hear, see; and what she
+saw--or rather recognized, for her eyes had been resting on it all the
+time--was Ricardo's straw slipper, lost in the scuffle, lying near the
+bath. She had just time to step forward and plant her foot on it when
+the curtains shook, and, pushed aside, disclosed Heyst in the doorway.
+
+Out of the appeased enchantment of the senses she had found with him,
+like a sort of bewitched state, his danger brought a sensation of warmth
+to her breast. She felt something stir in there, something profound,
+like a new sort of life.
+
+The room was in partial darkness, Ricardo having accidentally swung
+the pivoted shutter as he went out of the window. Heyst peered from the
+doorway.
+
+“Why, you haven't done your hair yet,” he said.
+
+“I won't stop to do it now. I shan't be long,” she replied steadily, and
+remained still, feeling Ricardo's slipper under the sole of her foot.
+
+Heyst, with a movement of retreat, let the curtain drop slowly. On the
+instant she stooped for the slipper, and, with it in her hand, spun
+round wildly, looking for some hiding-place; but there was no such spot
+in the bare room. The chest, the leather bunk, a dress or two of hers
+hanging on pegs--there was no place where the merest hazard might not
+guide Heyst's hand at any moment. Her wildly roaming eyes were caught
+by the half-closed window. She ran to it, and by raising herself on her
+toes was able to reach the shutter with her fingertips. She pushed it
+square, stole back to the middle of the room, and, turning about, swung
+her arm, regulating the force of the throw so as not to let the slipper
+fly too far out and hit the edge of the overhanging eaves. It was a
+task of the nicest judgement for the muscles of those round arms, still
+quivering from the deadly wrestle with a man, for that brain, tense with
+the excitement of the situation and for the unstrung nerves flickering
+darkness before her eyes. At last the slipper left her hand. As soon as
+it passed the opening, it was out of her sight. She listened. She did
+not hear it strike anything; it just vanished, as if it had wings to fly
+on through the air. Not a sound! It had gone clear.
+
+Her valiant arms hanging close against her side, she stood as if turned
+into stone. A faint whistle reached her ears. The forgetful Ricardo,
+becoming very much aware of his loss, had been hanging about in great
+anxiety, which was relieved by the appearance of the slipper flying from
+under the eaves; and now, thoughtfully, he had ventured a whistle to put
+her mind at ease.
+
+Suddenly the girl reeled forward. She saved herself from a fall only by
+embracing with both arms one of the tall, roughly carved posts holding
+the mosquito net above the bed. For a long time she clung to it, with
+her forehead leaning against the wood. One side of her loosened sarong
+had slipped down as low as her hip. The long brown tresses of her hair
+fell in lank wisps, as if wet, almost black against her white body. Her
+uncovered flank, damp with the sweat of anguish and fatigue, gleamed
+coldly with the immobility of polished marble in the hot, diffused
+light falling through the window above her head--a dim reflection of the
+consuming, passionate blaze of sunshine outside, all aquiver with the
+effort to set the earth on fire, to burn it to ashes.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+Heyst, seated at the table with his chin on his breast, raised his head
+at the faint rustle of Lena's dress. He was startled by the dead pallor
+of her cheeks, by something lifeless in her eyes, which looked at
+him strangely, without recognition. But to his anxious inquiries she
+answered reassuringly that there was nothing the matter with her,
+really. She had felt giddy on rising. She had even had a moment of
+faintness, after her bath. She had to sit down to wait for it to pass.
+This had made her late dressing.
+
+“I didn't try to do my hair. I didn't want to keep you waiting any
+longer,” she said.
+
+He was unwilling to press her with questions about her health, since she
+seemed to make light of this indisposition. She had not done her hair,
+but she had brushed it, and had tied it with a ribbon behind. With her
+forehead uncovered, she looked very young, almost a child, a careworn
+child; a child with something on its mind.
+
+What surprised Heyst was the non-appearance of Wang. The Chinaman had
+always materialized at the precise moment of his service, neither too
+soon nor too late. This time the usual miracle failed. What was the
+meaning of this?
+
+Heyst raised his voice--a thing he disliked doing. It was promptly
+answered from the compound:
+
+“Ada tuan!”
+
+Lena, leaning on her elbow, with her eyes on her plate, did not seem to
+hear anything. When Wang entered with a tray, his narrow eyes, tilted
+inward by the prominence of salient cheek-bones, kept her under stealthy
+observation all the time. Neither the one nor the other of that white
+couple paid the slightest attention to him and he withdrew without
+having heard them exchange a single word. He squatted on his heels on
+the back veranda. His Chinaman's mind, very clear but not far-reaching,
+was made up according to the plain reason of things, such as it appeared
+to him in the light of his simple feeling for self-preservation,
+untrammelled by any notions of romantic honour or tender conscience. His
+yellow hands, lightly clasped, hung idly between his knees. The graves
+of Wang's ancestors were far away, his parents were dead, his elder
+brother was a soldier in the yamen of some Mandarin away in Formosa. No
+one near by had a claim on his veneration or his obedience. He had been
+for years a labouring restless vagabond. His only tie in the world
+was the Alfuro woman, in exchange for whom he had given away some
+considerable part of his hard-earned substance; and his duty, in reason,
+could be to no one but himself.
+
+The scuffle behind the curtain was a thing of bad augury for that Number
+One for whom the Chinaman had neither love nor dislike. He had been awed
+enough by that development to hang back with the coffee-pot till at last
+the white man was induced to call him in. Wang went in with curiosity.
+Certainly, the white woman looked as if she had been wrestling with
+a spirit which had managed to tear half her blood out of her before
+letting her go. As to the man, Wang had long looked upon him as being in
+some sort bewitched; and now he was doomed. He heard their voices in
+the room. Heyst was urging the girl to go and lie down again. He was
+extremely concerned. She had eaten nothing.
+
+“The best thing for you. You really must!”
+
+She sat listless, shaking her head from time to time negatively, as if
+nothing could be any good. But he insisted; she saw the beginning of
+wonder in his eyes, and suddenly gave way.
+
+“Perhaps I had better.”
+
+She did not want to arouse his wonder, which would lead him straight to
+suspicion. He must not suspect!
+
+Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that
+something rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace, there
+was born in her a woman's innate mistrust of masculinity, of that
+seductive strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from the
+recognition of the naked necessity of facts, which never yet frightened
+a woman worthy of the name. She had no plan; but her mind, quieted down
+somewhat by the very effort to preserve outward composure for his sake,
+perceived that her behaviour had secured, at any rate, a short period of
+safety. Perhaps because of the similarity of their miserable origin in
+the dregs of mankind, she had understood Ricardo perfectly. He would
+keep quiet for a time now. In this momentarily soothing certitude her
+bodily fatigue asserted itself, the more overpoweringly since its cause
+was not so much the demand on her strength as the awful suddenness of
+the stress she had had to meet. She would have tried to overcome it
+from the mere instinct of resistance, if it had not been for Heyst's
+alternate pleadings and commands. Before this eminently masculine
+fussing she felt the woman's need to give way, the sweetness of
+surrender.
+
+“I will do anything you like,” she said.
+
+Getting up, she was surprised by a wave of languid weakness that came
+over her, embracing and enveloping her like warm water, with a noise in
+her ears as of a breaking sea.
+
+“You must help me along,” she added quickly.
+
+While he put his arm round her waist--not by any means an uncommon thing
+for him to do--she found a special satisfaction in the feeling of being
+thus sustained. She abandoned all her weight to that encircling and
+protecting pressure, while a thrill went through her at the sudden
+thought that it was she who would have to protect him, to be the
+defender of a man who was strong enough to lift her bodily, as he was
+doing even then in his two arms. For Heyst had done this as soon as they
+had crept through the doorway of the room. He thought it was quicker
+and simpler to carry her the last step or two. He had grown really too
+anxious to be aware of the effort. He lifted her high and deposited her
+on the bed, as one lays a child on its side in a cot. Then he sat down
+on the edge, masking his concern with a smile which obtained no response
+from the dreamy immobility of her eyes. But she sought his hand, seized
+it eagerly; and while she was pressing it with all the force of
+which she was capable, the sleep she needed overtook her suddenly,
+overwhelmingly, as it overtakes a child in a cot, with her lips parted
+for a safe, endearing word which she had thought of but had no time to
+utter.
+
+The usual flaming silence brooded over Samburan.
+
+“What in the world is this new mystery?” murmured Heyst to himself,
+contemplating her deep slumber.
+
+It was so deep, this enchanted sleep, that when some time afterwards he
+gently tried to open her fingers and free his hand, he succeeded without
+provoking the slightest stir.
+
+“There is some very simple explanation, no doubt,” he thought, as he
+stole out into the living-room.
+
+Absent-mindedly he pulled a book out of the top shelf, and sat down with
+it; but even after he had opened it on his knee, and had been staring
+at the pages for a time, he had not the slightest idea of what it was
+about. He stared and stared at the crowded, parallel lines. It was only
+when, raising his eyes for no particular reason, he saw Wang standing
+motionless on the other side of the table, that he regained complete
+control of his faculties.
+
+“Oh, yes,” he said, as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten appointment
+of a not particularly welcome sort.
+
+He waited a little, and then, with reluctant curiosity, forced himself
+to ask the silent Wang what he had to say. He had some idea that the
+matter of the vanished revolver would come up at last; but the guttural
+sounds which proceeded from the Chinaman did not refer to that delicate
+subject. His speech was concerned with cups, saucers, plates, forks, and
+knives. All these things had been put away in the cupboards on the
+back veranda, where they belonged, perfectly clean, “all plopel.” Heyst
+wondered at the scrupulosity of a man who was about to abandon him;
+for he was not surprised to hear Wang conclude the account of his
+stewardship with the words:
+
+“I go now.”
+
+“Oh! You go now?” said Heyst, leaning back, his book on his knees.
+
+“Yes. Me no likee. One man, two man, three man--no can do! Me go now.”
+
+“What's frightening you away like this?” asked Heyst, while through his
+mind flashed the hope that something enlightening might come from that
+being so unlike himself, taking contact with the world with a simplicity
+and directness of which his own mind was not capable. “Why?” he went on.
+“You are used to white men. You know them well.”
+
+“Yes. Me savee them,” assented Wang inscrutably. “Me savee plenty.”
+
+All that he really knew was his own mind. He had made it up to withdraw
+himself and the Alfuro woman from the uncertainties of the relations
+which were going to establish themselves between those white men. It
+was Pedro who had been the first cause of Wang's suspicion and fear. The
+Chinaman had seen wild men. He had penetrated, in the train of a Chinese
+pedlar, up one or two of the Bornean rivers into the country of the
+Dyaks. He had also been in the interior of Mindanao, where there are
+people who live in trees--savages, no better than animals; but a
+hairy brute like Pedro, with his great fangs and ferocious growls, was
+altogether beyond his conception of anything that could be looked upon
+as human. The strong impression made on him by Pedro was the prime
+inducement which had led Wang to purloin the revolver. Reflection on
+the general situation, and on the insecurity of Number One, came later,
+after he had obtained possession of the revolver and of the box of
+cartridges out of the table drawer in the living-room.
+
+“Oh, you savee plenty about white men,” Heyst went on in a slightly
+bantering tone, after a moment of silent reflection in which he had
+confessed to himself that the recovery of the revolver was not to be
+thought of, either by persuasion or by some more forcible means. “You
+speak in that fashion, but you are frightened of those white men over
+there.”
+
+“Me no flightened,” protested Wang raucously, throwing up his
+head--which gave to his throat a more strained, anxious appearance than
+ever. “Me no likee,” he added in a quieter tone. “Me velly sick.”
+
+He put his hand over the region under the breast-bone.
+
+“That,” said Heyst, serenely positive, “belong one piecee lie. That
+isn't proper man-talk at all. And after stealing my revolver, too!”
+
+He had suddenly decided to speak about it, because this frankness could
+not make the situation much worse than it was. He did not suppose for a
+moment that Wang had the revolver anywhere about his person; and after
+having thought the matter over, he had arrived at the conclusion that
+the Chinaman never meant to use the weapon against him. After a slight
+start, because the direct charge had taken him unawares, Wang tore open
+the front of his jacket with a convulsive show of indignation.
+
+“No hab got. Look see!” he mouthed in pretended anger.
+
+He slapped his bare chest violently; he uncovered his very ribs, all
+astir with the panting of outraged virtue; his smooth stomach heaved
+with indignation. He started his wide blue breeches flapping about his
+yellow calves. Heyst watched him quietly.
+
+“I never said you had it on you,” he observed, without raising his
+voice; “but the revolver is gone from where I kept it.”
+
+“Me no savee levolvel,” Wang said obstinately.
+
+The book lying open on Heyst's knee slipped suddenly and he made a
+sharp movement to catch it up. Wang was unable to see the reason of
+this because of the table, and leaped away from what seemed to him a
+threatening symptom. When Heyst looked up, the Chinaman was already at
+the door facing the room, not frightened, but alert.
+
+“What's the matter?” asked Heyst.
+
+Wang nodded his shaven head significantly at the curtain closing the
+doorway of the bedroom.
+
+“Me no likee,” he repeated.
+
+“What the devil do you mean?” Heyst was genuinely amazed. “Don't like
+what?”
+
+Wang pointed a long lemon-coloured finger at the motionless folds.
+
+“Two,” he said.
+
+“Two what? I don't understand.”
+
+“Suppose you savee, you no like that fashion. Me savee plenty. Me go
+now.”
+
+Heyst had risen from his chair, but Wang kept his ground in the doorway
+for a little longer. His almond-shaped eyes imparted to his face an
+expression of soft and sentimental melancholy. The muscles of his throat
+moved visibly while he uttered a distinct and guttural “Goodbye” and
+vanished from Number One's sight.
+
+The Chinaman's departure altered the situation. Heyst reflected on what
+would be best to do in view of that fact. For a long time he hesitated;
+then, shrugging his shoulders wearily, he walked out on the veranda,
+down the steps, and continued at a steady gait, with a thoughtful mien,
+in the direction of his guests' bungalow. He wanted to make an important
+communication to them, and he had no other object--least of all to give
+them the shock of a surprise call. Nevertheless, their brutish henchman
+not being on watch, it was Heyst's fate to startle Mr. Jones and his
+secretary by his sudden appearance in the doorway. Their conversation
+must have been very interesting to prevent them from hearing the
+visitor's approach. In the dim room--the shutters were kept constantly
+closed against the heat--Heyst saw them start apart. It was Mr. Jones
+who spoke:
+
+“Ah, here you are again! Come in, come in!”
+
+Heyst, taking his hat off in the doorway, entered the room.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+Waking up suddenly, Lena looked, without raising her head from the
+pillow, at the room in which she was alone. She got up quickly, as if
+to counteract the awful sinking of her heart by the vigorous use of her
+limbs. But this sinking was only momentary. Mistress of herself from
+pride, from love, from necessity, and also because of a woman's
+vanity in self-sacrifice, she met Heyst, returning from the strangers'
+bungalow, with a clear glance and a smile.
+
+The smile he managed to answer, but, noticing that he avoided her eyes,
+she composed her lips and lowered her gaze. For the same reason she
+hastened to speak to him in a tone of indifference, which she put on
+without effort, as if she had grown adept in duplicity since sunrise.
+
+“You have been over there again?”
+
+“I have. I thought--but you had better know first that we have lost Wang
+for good.”
+
+She repeated “For good?” as if she had not understood.
+
+“For good or evil--I shouldn't know which if you were to ask me. He has
+dismissed himself. He's gone.”
+
+“You expected him to go, though, didn't you?”
+
+Heyst sat down on the other side of the table.
+
+“Yes. I expected it as soon as I discovered that he had annexed my
+revolver. He says he hasn't taken it. That's untrue of course. A
+Chinaman would not see the sense of confessing under any circumstances.
+To deny any charge is a principle of right conduct; but he hardly
+expected to be believed. He was a little enigmatic at the last, Lena. He
+startled me.”
+
+Heyst paused. The girl seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.
+
+“He startled me,” repeated Heyst. She noted the anxiety in his tone, and
+turned her head slightly to look at him across the table.
+
+“It must have been something--to startle you,” she said. In the depth
+of her parted lips, like a ripe pomegranate, there was a gleam of white
+teeth.
+
+“It was only a single word--and some of his gestures. He had been making
+a good deal of noise. I wonder we didn't wake you up. How soundly you
+can sleep! I say, do you feel all right now?”
+
+“As fresh as can be,” she said, treating him to another deep gleam of
+a smile. “I heard no noise, and I'm glad of it. The way he talks in his
+harsh voice frightens me. I don't like all these foreign people.”
+
+“It was just before he went away--bolted out, I should say. He nodded
+and pointed at the curtain to our room. He knew you were there, of
+course. He seemed to think--he seemed to try to give me to understand
+that you were in special--well, danger. You know how he talks.”
+
+She said nothing; she made no sound, only the faint tinge of colour
+ebbed out of her cheek.
+
+“Yes,” Heyst went on. “He seemed to try to warn me. That must have been
+it Did he imagine I had forgotten your existence? The only word he said
+was 'two'. It sounded so, at least. Yes, 'two'--and that he didn't like
+it.”
+
+“What does that mean?” she whispered.
+
+“We know what the word two means, don't we, Lena? We are two. Never
+were such a lonely two out of the world, my dear! He might have tried
+to remind me that he himself has a woman to look after. Why are you so
+pale, Lena?”
+
+“Am I pale?” she asked negligently.
+
+“You are.” Heyst was really anxious.
+
+“Well, it isn't from fright,” she protested truthfully.
+
+Indeed, what she felt was a sort of horror which left her absolutely
+in the full possession of all her faculties; more difficult to bear,
+perhaps, for that reason, but not paralysing to her fortitude.
+
+Heyst in his turn smiled at her.
+
+“I really don't know that there is any reason to be frightened.”
+
+“I mean I am not frightened for myself.”
+
+“I believe you are very plucky,” he said. The colour had returned to her
+face. “I” continued Heyst, “am so rebellious to outward impressions
+that I can't say that much about myself. I don't react with sufficient
+distinctness.” He changed his tone. “You know I went to see those men
+first thing this morning.”
+
+“I know. Be careful!” she murmured.
+
+“I wonder how one can be careful! I had a long talk with--but I don't
+believe you have seen them. One of them is a fantastically thin, long
+person, apparently ailing; I shouldn't wonder if he were really so. He
+makes rather a point of it in a mysterious manner. I imagine he must
+have suffered from tropical fevers, but not so much as he tries to make
+out. He's what people would call a gentleman. He seemed on the point of
+volunteering a tale of his adventures--for which I didn't ask him--but
+remarked that it was a long story; some other time, perhaps.
+
+“'I suppose you would like to know who I am?' he asked me.
+
+“I told him I would leave it to him, in a tone which, between gentlemen,
+could have left no doubt in his mind. He raised himself on his elbow--he
+was lying down on the camp-bed--and said:
+
+“'I am he who is--'”
+
+Lena seemed not to be listening; but when Heyst paused, she turned her
+head quickly to him. He took it for a movement of inquiry, but in this
+he was wrong. A great vagueness enveloped her impressions, but all her
+energy was concentrated on the struggle that she wanted to take upon
+herself, in a great exaltation of love and self-sacrifice, which is
+woman's sublime faculty; altogether on herself, every bit of it, leaving
+him nothing, not even the knowledge of what she did, if that were
+possible. She would have liked to lock him up by some stratagem. Had
+she known of some means to put him to sleep for days she would have used
+incantations or philtres without misgivings. He seemed to her too good
+for such contacts, and not sufficiently equipped. This last feeling had
+nothing to do with the material fact of the revolver being stolen. She
+could hardly appreciate that fact at its full value.
+
+Observing her eyes fixed and as if sightless--for the concentration on
+her purpose took all expression out of them--Heyst imagined it to be the
+effect of a great mental effort.
+
+“No use asking me what he meant, Lena; I don't know, and I did not
+ask him. The gentleman, as I have told you before, seems devoted to
+mystification. I said nothing, and he laid down his head again on
+the bundle of rugs he uses for a pillow. He affects a state of great
+weakness, but I suspect that he's perfectly capable of leaping to his
+feet if he likes. Having been ejected, he said, from his proper social
+sphere because he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions,
+he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up and down the earth. As
+I really did not want to listen to all this nonsense, I told him that
+I had heard that sort of story about somebody else before. His grin is
+really ghastly. He confessed that I was very far from the sort of man he
+expected to meet. Then he said:
+
+“'As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are thinking of, and
+I have neither more nor less determination.'”
+
+Heyst looked across the table at Lena. Propped on her elbows, and
+holding her head in both hands, she moved it a little with an air of
+understanding.
+
+“Nothing could be plainer, eh?” said Heyst grimly. “Unless, indeed, this
+is his idea of a pleasant joke; for, when he finished speaking, he burst
+into a loud long laugh. I didn't join him!”
+
+“I wish you had,” she breathed out.
+
+“I didn't join him. It did not occur to me. I am not much of a
+diplomatist. It would probably have been wise, for, indeed, I believe
+he had said more than he meant to say, and was trying to take it back by
+this affected jocularity. Yet when one thinks of it, diplomacy without
+force in the background is but a rotten reed to lean upon. And I don't
+know whether I could have done it if I had thought of it. I don't know.
+It would have been against the grain. Could I have done it? I have lived
+too long within myself, watching the mere shadows and shades of life.
+To deceive a man on some issue which could be decided quicker, by his
+destruction while one is disarmed, helpless, without even the power to
+run away--no! That seems to me too degrading. And yet I have you here.
+I have your very existence in my keeping. What do you say, Lena? Would I
+be capable of throwing you to the lions to save my dignity?”
+
+She got up, walked quickly round the table, posed herself on his knees
+lightly, throwing one arm round his neck, and whispered in his ear:
+
+“You may if you like. And may be that's the only way I would consent to
+leave you. For something like that. If it were something no bigger than
+your little finger.”
+
+She gave him a light kiss on the lips and was gone before he could
+detain her. She regained her seat and propped her elbows again on the
+table. It was hard to believe that she had moved from the spot at all.
+The fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the hug round his neck,
+the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have been the
+unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life;
+a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts. He
+hesitated to speak till she said, businesslike:
+
+“Well. And what then?”
+
+Heyst gave a start.
+
+“Oh, yes. I didn't join him. I let him have his laugh out by himself. He
+was shaking all over, like a merry skeleton, under a cotton sheet he was
+covered with--I believe in order to conceal the revolver that he had in
+his right hand. I didn't see it, but I have a distinct impression it was
+there in his fist. As he had not been looking at me for some time, but
+staring into a certain part of the room, I turned my head and saw a
+hairy, wild sort of creature which they take about with them, squatting
+on its heels in the angle of the walls behind me. He wasn't there when
+I came in. I didn't like the notion of that watchful monster behind my
+back. If I had been less at their mercy, I should certainly have changed
+my position. As things are now, to move would have been a mere weakness.
+So I remained where I was. The gentleman on the bed said he could assure
+me of one thing; and that was that his presence here was no more morally
+reprehensible than mine.
+
+“'We pursue the same ends,' he said, 'only perhaps I pursue them with
+more openness than you--with more simplicity.'
+
+“That's what he said,” Heyst went on, after looking at Lena in a sort of
+inquiring silence. “I asked him if he knew beforehand that I was living
+here; but he only gave me a ghastly grin. I didn't press him for an
+answer, Lena. I thought I had better not.”
+
+On her smooth forehead a ray of light always seemed to rest. Her loose
+hair, parted in the middle, covered the hands sustaining her head. She
+seemed spellbound by the interest of the narrative. Heyst did not pause
+long. He managed to continue his relation smoothly enough, beginning
+afresh with a piece of comment.
+
+“He would have lied impudently--and I detest being told a lie. It makes
+me uncomfortable. It's pretty clear that I am not fitted for the affairs
+of the wide world. But I did not want him to think that I accepted his
+presence too meekly, so I said that his comings or goings on the
+earth were none of my business, of course, except that I had a natural
+curiosity to know when he would find it convenient to resume them.
+
+“He asked me to look at the state he was in. Had I been all alone here,
+as they think I am, I should have laughed at him. But not being alone--I
+say, Lena, you are sure you haven't shown yourself where you could be
+seen?”
+
+“Certain,” she said promptly.
+
+He looked relieved.
+
+“You understand, Lena, that when I ask you to keep so strictly out of
+sight, it is because you are not for them to look at--to talk about. My
+poor Lena! I can't help that feeling. Do you understand it?”
+
+She moved her head slightly in a manner that was neither affirmative nor
+negative.
+
+“People will have to see me some day,” she said.
+
+“I wonder how long it will be possible for you to keep out of sight?”
+ murmured Heyst thoughtfully. He bent over the table. “Let me finish
+telling you. I asked him point blank what it was he wanted with me; he
+appeared extremely unwilling to come to the point. It was not really
+so pressing as all that, he said. His secretary, who was in fact his
+partner, was not present, having gone down to the wharf to look at
+their boat. Finally the fellow proposed that he should put off a certain
+communication he had to make till the day after tomorrow. I agreed;
+but I also told him that I was not at all anxious to hear it. I had no
+conception in what way his affairs could concern me.
+
+“'Ah, Mr. Heyst,' he said, 'you and I have much more in common than you
+think.'”
+
+Heyst struck the table with his fist unexpectedly.
+
+“It was a jeer; I am sure it was!”
+
+He seemed ashamed of this outburst and smiled faintly into the
+motionless eyes of the girl.
+
+“What could I have done--even if I had had my pockets full of
+revolvers?”
+
+She made an appreciative sign.
+
+“Killing's a sin, sure enough,” she murmured.
+
+“I went away,” Heyst continued. “I left him there, lying on his side
+with his eyes shut. When I got back here, I found you looking ill. What
+was it, Lena? You did give me a scare! Then I had the interview with
+Wang while you rested. You were sleeping quietly. I sat here to consider
+all these things calmly, to try to penetrate their inner meaning and
+their outward bearing. It struck me that the two days we have before
+us have the character of a sort of truce. The more I thought of it, the
+more I felt that this was tacitly understood between Jones and myself.
+It was to our advantage, if anything can be of advantage to people
+caught so completely unawares as we are. Wang was gone. He, at any rate,
+had declared himself, but as I did not know what he might take it into
+his head to do, I thought I had better warn these people that I was no
+longer responsible for the Chinaman. I did not want Mr. Wang making some
+move which would precipitate the action against us. Do you see my point
+of view?”
+
+She made a sign that she did. All her soul was wrapped in her passionate
+determination, in an exalted belief in herself--in the contemplation
+of her amazing opportunity to win the certitude, the eternity, of that
+man's love.
+
+“I never saw two men,” Heyst was saying, “more affected by a piece of
+information than Jones and his secretary, who was back in the bungalow
+by then. They had not heard me come up. I told them I was sorry to
+intrude.
+
+“'Not at all! Not at all,' said Jones.
+
+“The secretary backed away into a corner and watched me like a wary cat.
+In fact, they both were visibly on their guard.
+
+“'I am come,' I told them, 'to let you know that my servant has
+deserted--gone off.'
+
+“At first they looked at each other as if they had not understood what I
+was saying; but very soon they seemed quite concerned.
+
+“'You mean to say your Chink's cleared out?' said Ricardo, coming
+forward from his corner. 'Like this--all at once? What did he do it
+for?'
+
+“I said that a Chinaman had always a simple and precise reason for what
+he did, but that to get such a reason out of him was not so easy. All he
+told me, I said, was that he 'didn't like'.
+
+“They were extremely disturbed at this. Didn't like what, they wanted to
+know.
+
+“'The looks of you and your party,' I told Jones.
+
+“'Nonsense!' he cried out, and immediately Ricardo, the short man,
+struck in.
+
+“'Told you that? What did he take you for, sir--an infant? Or do you
+take us for kids?--meaning no offence. Come, I bet you will tell us next
+that you've missed something.'”
+
+“'I didn't mean to tell you anything of the sort,' I said, 'but as a
+matter of fact it is so.'
+
+“He slapped his thigh.
+
+“'Thought so. What do you think of this trick, governor?'
+
+“Jones made some sort of sign to him, and then that extraordinary
+cat-faced associate proposed that he and their servant should come out
+and help me catch or kill the Chink.
+
+“My object, I said, was not to get assistance. I did not intend to chase
+the Chinaman. I had come only to warn them that he was armed, and that
+he really objected to their presence on the island. I wanted them to
+understand that I was not responsible for anything that might happen.
+
+“'Do you mean to tell us,' asked Ricardo, 'that there is a crazy Chink
+with a six-shooter broke loose on this island, and that you don't care?'
+
+“Strangely enough they did not seem to believe my story. They were
+exchanging significant looks all the time. Ricardo stole up close to
+his principal; they had a confabulation together, and then something
+happened which I did not expect. It's rather awkward, too.
+
+“Since I would not have their assistance to get hold of the Chink
+and recover my property, the least they could do was to send me their
+servant. It was Jones who said that, and Ricardo backed up the idea.
+
+“'Yes, yes--let our Pedro cook for all hands in your compound! He isn't
+so bad as he looks. That's what we will do!'
+
+“He bustled out of the room to the veranda, and let out an ear-splitting
+whistle for their Pedro. Having heard the brute's answering howl,
+Ricardo ran back into the room.
+
+“'Yes, Mr. Heyst. This will do capitally, Mr. Heyst. You just direct
+him to do whatever you are accustomed to have done for you in the way of
+attendance. See?'
+
+“Lena, I confess to you that I was taken completely by surprise. I had
+not expected anything of the sort. I don't know what I expected. I am so
+anxious about you that I can't keep away from these infernal scoundrels.
+And only two months ago I would not have cared. I would have defied
+their scoundrelism as much as I have scorned all the other intrusions of
+life. But now I have you! You stole into my life, and--”
+
+Heyst drew a deep breath. The girl gave him a quick, wide-eyed glance.
+
+“Ah! That's what you are thinking of--that you have me!”
+
+It was impossible to read the thoughts veiled by her steady grey eyes,
+to penetrate the meaning of her silences, her words, and even her
+embraces. He used to come out of her very arms with the feeling of a
+baffled man.
+
+“If I haven't you, if you are not here, then where are you?” cried
+Heyst. “You understand me very well.”
+
+She shook her head a little. Her red lips, at which he looked now, her
+lips as fascinating as the voice that came out of them, uttered the
+words:
+
+“I hear what you say; but what does it mean?”
+
+“It means that I could lie and perhaps cringe for your sake.”
+
+“No! No! Don't you ever do that,” she said in haste, while her eyes
+glistened suddenly. “You would hate me for it afterwards!”
+
+“Hate you?” repeated Heyst, who had recalled his polite manner. “No!
+You needn't consider the extremity of the improbable--as yet. But I will
+confess to you that I--how shall I call it?--that I dissembled. First I
+dissembled my dismay at the unforeseen result of my idiotic diplomacy.
+Do you understand, my dear girl?”
+
+It was evident that she did not understand the word. Heyst produced his
+playful smile, which contrasted oddly with the worried character of his
+whole expression. His temples seemed to have sunk in, his face looked a
+little leaner.
+
+“A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is
+true, but the sentiment which seems to prompt it. I have never been
+diplomatic in my relation with mankind--not from regard for its
+feelings, but from a certain regard for my own. Diplomacy doesn't go
+well with consistent contempt. I cared little for life and still less
+for death.”
+
+“Don't talk like that!”
+
+“I dissembled my extreme longing to take these wandering scoundrels
+by their throats,” he went on. “I have only two hands--I wish I had a
+hundred to defend you--and there were three throats. By that time
+their Pedro was in the room too. Had he seen me engaged with their two
+throats, he would have been at mine like a fierce dog, or any other
+savage and faithful brute. I had no difficulty in dissembling my longing
+for the vulgar, stupid, and hopeless argument of fight. I remarked that
+I really did not want a servant. I couldn't think of depriving them of
+their man's services; but they would not hear me. They had made up their
+minds.
+
+“'We shall send him over at once,' Ricardo said, 'to start cooking
+dinner for everybody. I hope you won't mind me coming to eat it with
+you in your bungalow; and we will send the governor's dinner over to him
+here.'
+
+“I could do nothing but hold my tongue or bring on a quarrel--some
+manifestation of their dark purpose, which we have no means to resist.
+Of course, you may remain invisible this evening; but with that
+atrocious-brute prowling all the time at the back of the house, how long
+can your presence be concealed from these men?”
+
+Heyst's distress could be felt in his silence. The girl's head,
+sustained by her hands buried in the thick masses of her hair, had a
+perfect immobility.
+
+“You are certain you have not been seen so far?” he asked suddenly.
+
+The motionless head spoke.
+
+“How can I be certain? You told me you wanted me to keep out of the way.
+I kept out of the way. I didn't ask your reason. I thought you didn't
+want people to know that you had a girl like me about you.”
+
+“What? Ashamed?” cried Heyst.
+
+“It isn't what's right, perhaps--I mean for you--is it?”
+
+Heyst lifted his hands, reproachfully courteous.
+
+“I look upon it as so very much right that I couldn't bear the idea of
+any other than sympathetic, respectful eyes resting on you. I disliked
+and mistrusted these fellows from the first. Didn't you understand?”
+
+“Yes; I did keep out of sight,” she said.
+
+A silence fell. At last Heyst stirred slightly.
+
+“All this is of very little importance now,” he said with a sigh.
+“This is a question of something infinitely worse than mere looks and
+thoughts, however base and contemptible. As I have told you, I met
+Ricardo's suggestions by silence. As I was turning away he said:
+
+“'If you happen to have the key of that store-room of yours on you,
+Mr. Heyst, you may just as well let me have it; I will give it to our
+Pedro.'
+
+“I had it on me, and I tendered it to him without speaking. The hairy
+creature was at the door by then, and caught the key, which Ricardo
+threw to him, better than any trained ape could have done. I came away.
+All the time I had been thinking anxiously of you, whom I had left
+asleep, alone here, and apparently ill.”
+
+Heyst interrupted himself, with a listening turn of his head. He had
+heard the faint sound of sticks being snapped in the compound. He rose
+and crossed the room to look out of the back door.
+
+“And here the creature is,” he said, returning to the table. “Here he
+is, already attending to the fire. Oh, my dear Lena!”
+
+She had followed him with her eyes. She watched him go out on the front
+veranda cautiously. He lowered stealthily a couple of screens that hung
+between the column, and remained outside very still, as if interested
+by something on the open ground. Meantime she had risen in her turn, to
+take a peep into the compound. Heyst, glancing over his shoulder, saw
+her returning to her seat. He beckoned to her, and she continued to
+move, crossing the shady room, pure and bright in her white dress, her
+hair loose, with something of a sleep-walker in her unhurried motion, in
+her extended hand, in the sightless effect of her grey eyes luminous in
+the half-light. He had never seen such an expression in her face
+before. It had dreaminess in it, intense attention, and something like
+sternness. Arrested in the doorway by Heyst's extended arm, she seemed
+to wake up, flushed faintly--and this flush, passing off, carried away
+with it the strange transfiguring mood. With a courageous gesture
+she pushed back the heavy masses of her hair. The light clung to her
+forehead. Her delicate nostrils quivered. Heyst seized her arm and
+whispered excitedly:
+
+“Slip out here, quickly! The screens will conceal you. Only you must
+mind the stair-space. They are actually out--I mean the other two. You
+had better see them before you--”
+
+She made a barely perceptible movement of recoil, checked at once, and
+stood still. Heyst released her arm.
+
+“Yes, perhaps I had better,” she said with unnatural deliberation, and
+stepped out on the veranda to stand close by his side.
+
+Together, one on each side of the screen, they peeped between the edge
+of the canvas and the veranda-post entwined with creepers. A great heat
+ascended from the sun-smitten ground, in an ever-rising wave, as if from
+some secret store of earth's fiery heart; for the sky was growing cooler
+already, and the sun had declined sufficiently for the shadows of Mr.
+Jones and his henchman to be projected towards the bungalow side by
+side--one infinitely slender, the other short and broad.
+
+The two visitors stood still and gazed. To keep up the fiction of his
+invalidism, Mr. Jones, the gentleman, leaned on the arm of Ricardo, the
+secretary, the top of whose hat just came up to his governor's shoulder.
+
+“Do you see them?” Heyst whispered into the girl's ear. “Here they
+are, the envoys of the outer world. Here they are before you--evil
+intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm. The brute force is at
+the back. A trio of fitting envoys perhaps--but what about the welcome?
+Suppose I were armed, could I shoot these two down where they stand?
+Could I?”
+
+Without moving her head, the girl felt for Heyst's hand, pressed it and
+thereafter did not let it go. He continued, bitterly playful:
+
+“I don't know. I don't think so. There is a strain in me which lays me
+under an insensate obligation to avoid even the appearance of murder.
+I have never pulled a trigger or lifted my hand on a man, even in
+self-defence.”
+
+The suddenly tightened grip of her hand checked him.
+
+“They are making a move,” she murmured.
+
+“Can they be thinking of coming here?” Heyst wondered anxiously.
+
+“No, they aren't coming this way,” she said; and there was another
+pause. “They are going back to their house,” she reported finally.
+
+After watching them a little longer, she let go Heyst's hand and moved
+away from the screen. He followed her into the room.
+
+“You have seen them now,” he began. “Think what it was to me to see them
+land in the dusk, fantasms from the sea--apparitions, chimeras! And they
+persist. That's the worst of it--they persist. They have no right to
+be--but they are. They ought to have aroused my fury. But I have
+refined everything away by this time--anger, indignation, scorn itself.
+Nothing's left but disgust. Since you have told me of that abominable
+calumny, it has become immense--it extends even to myself.” He looked up
+at her.
+
+“But luckily I have you. And if only Wang had not carried off that
+miserable revolver--yes, Lena, here we are, we two!”
+
+She put both her hands on his shoulders and looked straight into his
+eyes. He returned her penetrating gaze. It baffled him. He could not
+pierce the grey veil of her eyes; but the sadness of her voice thrilled
+him profoundly.
+
+“You are not reproaching me?” she asked slowly.
+
+“Reproach? What a word between us! It could only be myself--but the
+mention of Wang has given me an idea. I have been, not exactly cringing,
+not exactly lying, but still dissembling. You have been hiding
+yourself, to please me, but still you have been hiding. All this is very
+dignified. Why shouldn't we try begging now? A noble art? Yes. Lena,
+we must go out together. I couldn't think of leaving you alone, and
+I must--yes, I must speak to Wang. We shall go and seek that man, who
+knows what he wants and how to secure what he wants. We will go at
+once!”
+
+“Wait till I put my hair up,” she agreed instantly, and vanished behind
+the curtain.
+
+When the curtain had fallen behind her, she turned her head back with
+an expression of infinite and tender concern for him--for him whom she
+could never hope to understand, and whom she was afraid she could never
+satisfy, as if her passion were of a hopelessly lower quality, unable
+to appease some exalted and delicate desire of his superior soul. In a
+couple of minutes she reappeared. They left the house by the door of
+the compound, and passed within three feet of the thunderstruck Pedro,
+without even looking in his direction. He rose from stooping over a fire
+of sticks, and, balancing himself clumsily, uncovered his enormous fangs
+in gaping astonishment. Then suddenly he set off rolling on his bandy
+legs to impart to his masters the astonishing discovery of a woman.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+As luck would have it, Ricardo was lounging alone on the veranda of the
+former counting-house. He scented some new development at once, and ran
+down to meet the trotting, bear-like figure. The deep, growling noises
+it made, though they had only a very remote resemblance to the Spanish
+language, or indeed to any sort of human speech, were from long
+practice quite intelligible to Mr. Jones's secretary. Ricardo was rather
+surprised. He had imagined that the girl would continue to keep out of
+sight. That line apparently was given up. He did not mistrust her. How
+could he? Indeed, he could not think of her existence calmly.
+
+He tried to keep her image out of his mind so that he should be able
+to use its powers with some approach to that coolness which the complex
+nature of the situation demanded from him, both for his own sake and as
+the faithful follower of plain Mr. Jones, gentleman.
+
+He collected his wits and thought. This was a change of policy, probably
+on the part of Heyst. If so, what could it mean? A deep fellow! Unless
+it was her doing; in which case--h'm--all right. Must be. She would
+know what she was doing. Before him Pedro, lifting his feet alternately,
+swayed to and fro sideways--his usual attitude of expectation. His
+little red eyes, lost in the mass of hair, were motionless. Ricardo
+stared into them with calculated contempt and said in a rough, angry
+voice:
+
+“Woman! Of course there is. We know that without you!” He gave the tame
+monster a push. “Git! Vamos! Waddle! Get back and cook the dinner. Which
+way did they go, then?”
+
+Pedro extended a huge, hairy forearm to show the direction, and went off
+on his bandy legs. Advancing a few steps, Ricardo was just in time to
+see, above some bushes, two white helmets moving side by side in the
+clearing. They disappeared. Now that he had managed to keep Pedro from
+informing the governor that there was a woman on the island, he could
+indulge in speculation as to the movements of these people. His attitude
+towards Mr. Jones had undergone a spiritual change, of which he himself
+was not yet fully aware.
+
+That morning, before tiffin, after his escape from the Heyst bungalow,
+completed in such an inspiring way by the recovery of the slipper,
+Ricardo had made his way to their allotted house, reeling as he ran,
+his head in a whirl. He was wildly excited by visions of inconceivable
+promise. He waited to compose himself before he dared to meet the
+governor. On entering the room, he found Mr. Jones sitting on the camp
+bedstead like a tailor on his board, cross-legged, his long back against
+the wall.
+
+“I say, sir. You aren't going to tell me you are bored?”
+
+“Bored! No! Where the devil have you been all this time?”
+
+“Observing--watching--nosing around. What else? I knew you had company.
+Have you talked freely, sir?”
+
+“Yes, I have,” muttered Mr. Jones.
+
+“Not downright plain, sir?”
+
+“No. I wished you had been here. You loaf all the morning, and now you
+come in out of breath. What's the matter?”
+
+“I haven't been wasting my time out there,” said Ricardo. “Nothing's the
+matter. I--I--might have hurried a bit.” He was in truth still panting;
+only it was not with running, but with the tumult of thoughts and
+sensations long repressed, which had been set free by the adventure of
+the morning. He was almost distracted by them now. He forgot himself in
+the maze of possibilities threatening and inspiring. “And so you had a
+long talk?” he said, to gain time.
+
+“Confound you! The sun hasn't affected your head, has it? Why are you
+staring at me like a basilisk?”
+
+“Beg pardon, sir. Wasn't aware I stared,” Ricardo apologized
+good-humouredly. “The sun might well affect a thicker skull than mine.
+It blazes. Phew! What do you think a fellow is, sir--a salamander?”
+
+“You ought to have been here,” observed Mr. Jones.
+
+“Did the beast give any signs of wanting to prance?” asked Ricardo
+quickly, with absolutely genuine anxiety. “It wouldn't do, sir. You must
+play him easy for at least a couple of days, sir. I have a plan. I have
+a notion that I can find out a lot in a couple of days.”
+
+“You have? In what way?”
+
+“Why, by watching,” Ricardo answered slowly.
+
+Mr Jones grunted.
+
+“Nothing new, that. Watch, eh? Why not pray a little, too?”
+
+“Ha, ha, ha! That's a good one,” burst out the secretary, fixing Mr.
+Jones with mirthless eyes.
+
+The latter dropped the subject indolently.
+
+“Oh, you may be certain of at least two days,” he said.
+
+Ricardo recovered himself. His eyes gleamed voluptuously.
+
+“We'll pull this off yet--clean--whole--right through, if you will only
+trust me, sir.”
+
+“I am trusting you right enough,” said Mr. Jones. “It's your interest,
+too.”
+
+And, indeed, Ricardo was truthful enough in his statement. He did
+absolutely believe in success now. But he couldn't tell his governor
+that he had intelligences in the enemy's camp. It wouldn't do to tell
+him of the girl. Devil only knew what he would do if he learned there
+was a woman about. And how could he begin to tell of it? He couldn't
+confess his sudden escapade.
+
+“We'll pull it off, sir,” he said, with perfectly acted cheerfulness.
+He experienced gusts of awful joy expanding in his heart and hot like a
+fanned flame.
+
+“We must,” pronounced Mr. Jones. “This thing, Martin, is not like our
+other tries. I have a peculiar feeling about this. It's a different
+thing. It's a sort of test.”
+
+Ricardo was impressed by the governor's manner; for the first time a
+hint of passion could be detected in him. But also a word he used, the
+word “test,” had struck him as particularly significant somehow. It was
+the last word uttered during that morning's conversation. Immediately
+afterwards Ricardo went out of the room. It was impossible for him to
+keep still. An elation in which an extraordinary softness mingled with
+savage triumph would not allow it. It prevented his thinking, also. He
+walked up and down the veranda far into the afternoon, eyeing the other
+bungalow at every turn. It gave no sign of being inhabited. Once or
+twice he stopped dead short and looked down at his left slipper. Each
+time he chuckled audibly. His restlessness kept on increasing till at
+last it frightened him. He caught hold of the balustrade of the veranda
+and stood still, smiling not at his thought but at the strong sense of
+life within him. He abandoned himself to it carelessly, even recklessly.
+He cared for no one, friend or enemy. At that moment Mr. Jones called
+him by name from within. A shadow fell on the secretary's face.
+
+“Here, sir,” he answered; but it was a moment before he could make up
+his mind to go in.
+
+He found the governor on his feet. Mr. Jones was tired of lying down
+when there was no necessity for it. His slender form, gliding about the
+room, came to a standstill.
+
+“I've been thinking, Martin, of something you suggested. At the time it
+did not strike me as practical; but on reflection it seems to me that
+to propose a game is as good a way as any to let him understand that the
+time has come to disgorge. It's less--how should I say?--vulgar. He will
+know what it means. It's not a bad form to give to the business--which
+in itself is crude, Martin, crude.”
+
+“Want to spare his feelings?” jeered the secretary in such a bitter tone
+that Mr. Jones was really surprised.
+
+“Why, it was your own notion, confound you!”
+
+“Who says it wasn't?” retorted Ricardo sulkily. “But I am fairly sick of
+this crawling. No! No! Get the exact bearings of his swag and then a rip
+up. That's plenty good enough for him.”
+
+His passions being thoroughly aroused, a thirst for blood was allied in
+him with a thirst for tenderness--yes, tenderness. A sort of anxious,
+melting sensation pervaded and softened his heart when he thought of
+that girl--one of his own sort. And at the same time jealousy started
+gnawing at his breast as the image of Heyst intruded itself on his
+fierce anticipation of bliss.
+
+“The crudeness of your ferocity is positively gross, Martin,” Mr. Jones
+said disdainfully. “You don't even understand my purpose. I mean to
+have some sport out of him. Just try to imagine the atmosphere of the
+game--the fellow handling the cards--the agonizing mockery of it! Oh,
+I shall appreciate this greatly. Yes, let him lose his money instead of
+being forced to hand it over. You, of course, would shoot him at once,
+but I shall enjoy the refinement and the jest of it. He's a man of the
+best society. I've been hounded out of my sphere by people very much
+like that fellow. How enraged and humiliated he will be! I promise
+myself some exquisite moments while watching his play.”
+
+“Ay, and suppose he suddenly starts prancing. He may not appreciate the
+fun.”
+
+“I mean you to be present,” Mr. Jones remarked calmly.
+
+“Well, as long as I am free to plug him or rip him up whenever I think
+the time has come, you are welcome to your bit of sport, sir. I shan't
+spoil it.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+It was at this precise moment of their conversation that Heyst had
+intruded on Mr. Jones and his secretary with his warning about Wang, as
+he had related to Lena. When he left them, the two looked at each other
+in wondering silence. My Jones was the first to break it.
+
+“I say, Martin!”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“What does this mean?”
+
+“It's some move. Blame me if I can understand.”
+
+“Too deep for you?” Mr. Jones inquired dryly.
+
+“It's nothing but some of his infernal impudence,” growled the
+secretary. “You don't believe all that about the Chink, do you, sir?
+'Tain't true.”
+
+“It isn't necessary for it to be true to have a meaning for us. It's the
+why of his coming to tell us this tale that's important.”
+
+“Do you think he made it up to frighten us?” asked Ricardo.
+
+Mr Jones scowled at him thoughtfully.
+
+“The man looked worried,” he muttered, as if to himself. “Suppose that
+Chinaman has really stolen his money! The man looked very worried.”
+
+“Nothing but his artfulness, sir,” protested Ricardo earnestly, for the
+idea was too disconcerting to entertain. “Is it likely that he would
+have trusted a Chink with enough knowledge to make it possible?” he
+argued warmly. “Why, it's the very thing that he would keep close about.
+There's something else there. Ay, but what?”
+
+“Ha, ha, ha!” Mr. Jones let out a ghostly, squeaky laugh. “I've never
+been placed in such a ridiculous position before,” he went on, with a
+sepulchral equanimity of tone. “It's you, Martin, who dragged me into
+it. However, it's my own fault too. I ought to--but I was really
+too bored to use my brain, and yours is not to be trusted. You are a
+hothead!”
+
+A blasphemous exclamation of grief escaped from Ricardo. Not to be
+trusted! Hothead! He was almost tearful.
+
+“Haven't I heard you, sir, saying more than twenty times since we got
+fired out from Manila that we should want a lot of capital to work the
+East Coast with? You were always telling me that to prime properly all
+them officials and Portuguese scallywags we should have to lose heavily
+at first. Weren't you always worrying about some means of getting hold
+of a good lot of cash? It wasn't to be got hold of by allowing yourself
+to become bored in that rotten Dutch town and playing a two-penny game
+with confounded beggarly bank clerks and such like. Well, I've brought
+you here, where there is cash to be got--and a big lot, to a moral,” he
+added through his set teeth.
+
+Silence fell. Each of them was staring into a different corner of the
+room. Suddenly, with a slight stamp of his foot, Mr. Jones made for the
+door. Ricardo caught him up outside.
+
+“Put an arm through mine, sir,” he begged him gently but firmly. “No use
+giving the game away. An invalid may well come out for a breath of fresh
+air after the sun's gone down a bit. That's it, sir. But where do you
+want to go? Why did you come out, sir?”
+
+Mr Jones stopped short.
+
+“I hardly know myself,” he confessed in a hollow mutter, staring
+intently at the Number One bungalow. “It's quite irrational,” he
+declared in a still lower tone.
+
+“Better go in, sir,” suggested Ricardo. “What's that? Those screens
+weren't down before. He's spying from behind them now, I bet--the
+dodging, artful, plotting beast!”
+
+“Why not go over there and see if we can't get to the bottom of this
+game?” was the unexpected proposal uttered by Mr. Jones. “He will have
+to talk to us.”
+
+Ricardo repressed a start of dismay, but for a moment could not speak.
+He only pressed the governor's hand to his side instinctively.
+
+“No, sir. What could you say? Do you expect to get to the bottom of his
+lies? How could you make him talk? It isn't time yet to come to grips
+with that gent. You don't think I would hang back, do you? His Chink, of
+course, I'll shoot like a dog the moment I catch sight of him; but as
+to that Mr. Blasted Heyst, the time isn't yet. My head's cooler just now
+than yours. Let's go in again. Why, we are exposed here. Suppose he
+took it into his head to let off a gun on us! He's an unaccountable,
+'yporcritical skunk.”
+
+Allowing himself to be persuaded, Mr. Jones returned to his seclusion.
+The secretary, however, remained on the veranda--for the purpose, he
+said, of seeing whether that Chink wasn't sneaking around; in which
+case he proposed to take a long shot at the galoot and chance the
+consequences. His real reason was that he wanted to be alone, away from
+the governor's deep-sunk eyes. He felt a sentimental desire to indulge
+his fancies in solitude. A great change had come over Mr. Ricardo since
+that morning. A whole side of him which from prudence, from necessity,
+from loyalty, had been kept dormant, was aroused now, colouring
+his thoughts and disturbing his mental poise by the vision of such
+staggering consequences as, for instance, the possibility of an active
+conflict with the governor. The appearance of the monstrous Pedro with
+his news drew Ricardo out of a feeling of dreaminess wrapped up in a
+sense of impending trouble. A woman? Yes, there was one; and it made all
+the difference. After driving away Pedro, and watching the white
+helmets of Heyst and Lena vanishing among the bushes he stood lost in
+meditation.
+
+“Where could they be off to like this?” he mentally asked himself.
+
+The answer found by his speculative faculties on their utmost stretch
+was--to meet that Chink. For in the desertion of Wang Ricardo did not
+believe. It was a lying yarn, the organic part of a dangerous plot.
+Heyst had gone to combine some fresh move. But then Ricardo felt sure
+that the girl was with him--the girl full of pluck, full of sense, full
+of understanding; an ally of his own kind!
+
+He went indoors briskly. Mr. Jones had resumed his cross-legged pose at
+the head of the bed, with his back against the wall.
+
+“Anything new?”
+
+“No, sir.”
+
+Ricardo walked about the room as if he had no care in the world. He
+hummed snatches of song. Mr. Jones raised his waspish eyebrows, at the
+sound. The secretary got down on his knees before an old leather trunk,
+and, rummaging in there, brought out a small looking-glass. He fell to
+examining his physiognomy in it with silent absorption.
+
+“I think I'll shave,” he decided, getting up.
+
+He gave a sidelong glance to the governor, and repeated it several times
+during the operation, which did not take long, and even afterwards, when
+after putting away the implements, he resumed his walking, humming more
+snatches of unknown songs. Mr. Jones preserved a complete immobility,
+his thin lips compressed, his eyes veiled. His face was like a carving.
+
+“So you would like to try your hand at cards with that skunk, sir?” said
+Ricardo, stopping suddenly and rubbing his hands.
+
+Mr Jones gave no sign of having heard anything.
+
+“Well, why not? Why shouldn't he have the experience? You remember in
+that Mexican town--what's its name?--the robber fellow they caught in
+the mountains and condemned to be shot? He played cards half the night
+with the jailer and the sheriff. Well, this fellow is condemned, too.
+He must give you your game. Hang it all, a gentleman ought to have some
+little relaxation! And you have been uncommonly patient, sir.”
+
+“You are uncommonly volatile all of a sudden,” Mr. Jones remarked in a
+bored voice. “What's come to you?”
+
+The secretary hummed for a while, and then said:
+
+“I'll try to get him over here for you tonight, after dinner. If I ain't
+here myself, don't you worry, sir. I shall be doing a bit of nosing
+around--see?”
+
+“I see,” sneered Mr. Jones languidly. “But what do you expect to see in
+the dark?”
+
+Ricardo made no answer, and after another turn or two slipped out of the
+room. He no longer felt comfortable alone with the governor.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+Meantime Heyst and Lena, walking rather fast, approached Wang's hut.
+Asking the girl to wait, Heyst ascended the little ladder of bamboos
+giving access to the door. It was as he had expected. The smoky interior
+was empty, except for a big chest of sandalwood too heavy for hurried
+removal. Its lid was thrown up, but whatever it might have contained was
+no longer there. All Wang's possessions were gone. Without tarrying in
+the hut, Heyst came back to the girl, who asked no questions, with her
+strange air of knowing or understanding everything.
+
+“Let us push on,” he said.
+
+He went ahead, the rustle of her white skirt following him into the
+shades of the forest, along the path of their usual walk. Though the air
+lay heavy between straight denuded trunks, the sunlit patches moved on
+the ground, and raising her eyes Lena saw far above her head the
+flutter of the leaves, the surface shudder on the mighty limbs extended
+horizontally in the perfect immobility of patience. Twice Heyst looked
+over his shoulder at her. Behind the readiness of her answering smile
+there was a fund of devoted, concentrated passion, burning with the hope
+of a more perfect satisfaction. They passed the spot where it was their
+practice to turn towards the barren summit of the central hill. Heyst
+held steadily on his way towards the upper limit of the forest. The
+moment they left its shelter, a breeze enveloped them, and a great
+cloud, racing over the sun, threw a peculiar sombre tint over
+everything. Heyst pointed up a precipitous, rugged path clinging to the
+side of the hill. It ended in a barricade of felled trees, a primitively
+conceived obstacle which must have cost much labour to erect at just
+that spot.
+
+“This,” Heyst, explained in his urbane tone, “is a barrier against the
+march of civilization. The poor folk over there did not like it, as it
+appeared to them in the shape of my company--a great step forward, as
+some people used to call it with mistaken confidence. The advanced foot
+has been drawn back, but the barricade remains.”
+
+They went on climbing slowly. The cloud had driven over, leaving an
+added brightness on the face of the world.
+
+“It's a very ridiculous thing,” Heyst went on; “but then it is the
+product of honest fear--fear of the unknown, of the incomprehensible.
+It's pathetic, too, in a way. And I heartily wish, Lena, that we were on
+the other side of it.”
+
+“Oh, stop, stop!” she cried, seizing his arm.
+
+The face of the barricade they were approaching had been piled up with a
+lot of fresh-cut branches. The leaves were still green. A gentle breeze,
+sweeping over the top, stirred them a little; but what had startled the
+girl was the discovery of several spear-blades protruding from the mass
+of foliage. She had made them out suddenly. They did not gleam, but she
+saw them with extreme distinctness, very still, very vicious to look at.
+
+“You had better let me go forward alone, Lena,” said Heyst.
+
+She tugged, persistently at his arm, but after a time, during which
+he never ceased to look smilingly into her terrified eyes, he ended by
+disengaging himself.
+
+“It's a sign rather than a demonstration,” he argued, persuasively.
+“Just wait here a moment. I promise not to approach near enough to be
+stabbed.”
+
+As in a nightmare she watched Heyst go up the few yards of the path as
+if he never meant to stop; and she heard his voice, like voices heard
+in dreams, shouting unknown words in an unearthly tone. Heyst was only
+demanding to see Wang. He was not kept waiting very long. Recovering
+from the first flurry of her fright, Lena noticed a commotion in the
+green top-dressing of the barricade. She exhaled a sigh of relief when
+the spear-blades retreated out of sight, sliding inward--the horrible
+things! in a spot facing Heyst a pair of yellow hands parted the leaves,
+and a face filled the small opening--a face with very noticeable eyes.
+It was Wang's face, of course, with no suggestion of a body belonging to
+it, like those cardboard faces at which she remembered gazing as a child
+in the window of a certain dim shop kept by a mysterious little man in
+Kingsland Road. Only this face, instead of mere holes, had eyes which
+blinked. She could see the beating of the eyelids. The hands on each
+side of the face, keeping the boughs apart, also did not look as if they
+belonged to any real body. One of them was holding a revolver--a weapon
+which she recognized merely by intuition, never having seen such an
+object before.
+
+She leaned her shoulders against the rock of the perpendicular hillside
+and kept her eyes on Heyst, with comparative composure, since the spears
+were not menacing him any longer. Beyond the rigid and motionless back
+he presented to her, she saw Wang's unreal cardboard face moving its
+thin lips and grimacing artificially. She was too far down the path to
+hear the dialogue, carried on in an ordinary voice. She waited patiently
+for its end. Her shoulders felt the warmth of the rock; now and then a
+whiff of cooler air seemed to slip down upon her head from above; the
+ravine at her feet, choked full of vegetation, emitted the faint, drowsy
+hum of insect life. Everything was very quiet. She failed to notice
+the exact moment when Wang's head vanished from the foliage, taking the
+unreal hands away with it. To her horror, the spear-blades came gliding
+slowly out. The very hair on her head stirred; but before she had
+time to cry out, Heyst, who seemed rooted to the ground, turned round
+abruptly and began to move towards her. His great moustaches did not
+quite hide an ugly but irresolute smile; and when he had come down near
+enough to touch her, he burst out into a harsh laugh:
+
+“Ha, ha, ha!”
+
+She looked at him, uncomprehending. He cut short his laugh and said
+curtly:
+
+“We had better go down as we came.”
+
+She followed him into the forest. The advance of the afternoon had
+filled it with gloom. Far away a slant of light between the trees closed
+the view. All was dark beyond. Heyst stopped.
+
+“No reason to hurry, Lena,” he said in his ordinary, serenely polite
+tones. “We return unsuccessful. I suppose you know, or at least can
+guess, what was my object in coming up there?”
+
+“No, I can't guess, dear,” she said, and smiled, noticing with
+emotion that his breast was heaving as if he had been out of breath.
+Nevertheless, he tried to command his speech, pausing only a little
+between the words.
+
+“No? I went up to find Wang. I went up”--he gasped again here, but this
+was for the last time--“I made you come with me because I didn't like
+to leave you unprotected in the proximity of those fellows.” Suddenly he
+snatched his cork helmet off his head and dashed it on the ground. “No!”
+ he cried roughly. “All this is too unreal altogether. It isn't to be
+borne! I can't protect you! I haven't the power.”
+
+He glared at her for a moment, then hastened after his hat which had
+bounded away to some distance. He came back looking at her face, which
+was very white.
+
+“I ought to beg your pardon for these antics,” he said, adjusting his
+hat. “A movement of childish petulance! Indeed, I feel very much like a
+child in my ignorance, in my powerlessness, in my want of resource, in
+everything except in the dreadful consciousness of some evil hanging
+over your head--yours!”
+
+“It's you they are after,” she murmured.
+
+“No doubt, but unfortunately--”
+
+“Unfortunately--what?”
+
+“Unfortunately, I have not succeeded with Wang,” he said. “I failed to
+move his Celestial, heart--that is, if there is such a thing. He told me
+with horrible Chinese reasonableness that he could not let us pass the
+barrier, because we should be pursued. He doesn't like fights. He gave
+me to understand that he would shoot me with my own revolver without
+any sort of compunction, rather than risk a rude and distasteful
+contest with the strange barbarians for my sake. He has preached to the
+villagers. They respect him. He is the most remarkable man they have
+ever seen, and their kinsman by marriage. They understand his policy.
+And anyway only women and children and a few old fellows are left in the
+village. This is the season when the men are away in trading vessels.
+But it would have been all the same. None of them have a taste for
+fighting--and with white men too! They are peaceable, kindly folk and
+would have seen me shot with extreme satisfaction. Wang seemed to think
+my insistence--for I insisted, you know--very stupid and tactless. But a
+drowning man clutches at straws. We were talking in such Malay as we are
+both equal to.
+
+“'Your fears are foolish,' I said to him.
+
+“'Foolish? of course I am foolish,' he replied. 'If I were a wise man,
+I would be a merchant with a big hong in Singapore, instead of being a
+mine coolie turned houseboy. But if you don't go away in time, I will
+shoot you before it grows too dark to take aim. Not till then, Number
+One, but I will do it then. Now--finish!'
+
+“'All right,' I said. 'Finish as far as I am concerned; but you can have
+no objections to the mem putih coming over to stay with the Orang Kaya's
+women for a few days. I will make a present in silver for it.' Orang
+Kaya, is the head man of the village, Lena,” added Heyst.
+
+She looked at him in astonishment.
+
+“You wanted me to go to that village of savages?” she gasped. “You
+wanted me to leave you?”
+
+“It would have given me a freer hand.”
+
+Heyst stretched out his hands and looked at them for a moment, then let
+them fall by his side. Indignation was expressed more in the curve of
+her lips than in her clear eyes, which never wavered.
+
+“I believe Wang laughed,” he went on. “He made a noise like a
+turkey-cock.”
+
+“'That would be worse than anything,' he told me.
+
+“I was taken aback. I pointed out to him that he was talking nonsense.
+It could not make any difference to his security where you were, because
+the evil men, as he calls them, did not know of your existence. I did
+not lie exactly, Lena, though I did stretch the truth till it cracked;
+but the fellow seems to have an uncanny insight. He shook his head. He
+assured me they knew all about you. He made a horrible grimace at me.”
+
+“It doesn't matter,” said the girl. “I didn't want--I would not have
+gone.”
+
+Heyst raised his eyes.
+
+“Wonderful intuition! As I continued to press him, Wang made that
+very remark about you. When he smiles, his face looks like a conceited
+death's head. It was his very last remark that you wouldn't want to. I
+went away then.”
+
+She leaned back against a tree. Heyst faced her in the same attitude of
+leisure, as if they had done with time and all the other concerns of the
+earth. Suddenly, high above their heads the roof of leaves whispered at
+them tumultuously and then ceased.
+
+“That was a strange notion of yours, to send me away,” she said. “Send
+me away? What for? Yes, what for?”
+
+“You seem indignant,” he remarked listlessly.
+
+“To these savages, too!” she pursued. “And you think I would have gone?
+You can do what you like with me--but not that, not that!”
+
+Heyst looked into the dim aisles of the forest. Everything was so still
+now that the very ground on which they stood seemed to exhale silence
+into the shade.
+
+“Why be indignant?” he remonstrated. “It has not happened. I gave up
+pleading with Wang. Here we are, repulsed! Not only without power to
+resist the evil, but unable to make terms for ourselves with the worthy
+envoys, the envoys extraordinary of the world we thought we had done
+with for years and years. And that's bad, Lena, very bad.”
+
+“It's funny,” she said thoughtfully. “Bad? I suppose it is. I don't know
+that it is. But do you? Do you? You talk as if you didn't believe in
+it.”
+
+She gazed at him earnestly.
+
+“Do I? Ah! That's it. I don't know how to talk. I have managed to refine
+everything away. I've said to the Earth that bore me: 'I am I and you
+are a shadow.' And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words
+cannot be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited
+by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to
+intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them? I have lost
+all belief in realities . . . Lena, give me your hand.”
+
+She looked at him surprised, uncomprehending.
+
+“Your hand,” he cried.
+
+She obeyed; he seized it with avidity as if eager to raise it to his
+lips, but halfway up released his grasp. They looked at each other for a
+time.
+
+“What's the matter, dear?” she whispered timidly.
+
+“Neither force nor conviction,” Heyst muttered wearily to himself. “How
+am I to meet this charmingly simple problem?”
+
+“I am sorry,” she murmured.
+
+“And so am I,” he confessed quickly. “And the bitterest of this
+humiliation is its complete uselessness--which I feel, I feel!”
+
+She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling. Across his
+ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade. He spoke suddenly:
+
+“I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them in the
+night, with a knife, and cut their throats one after another, as they
+slept! I wonder--”
+
+She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words in
+his mouth, and said earnestly:
+
+“Don't you try to do such a thing! Don't you think of it!”
+
+“I don't possess anything bigger than a penknife. As to thinking of it,
+Lena, there's no saying what one may think of. I don't think. Something
+in me thinks--something foreign to my nature. What is the matter?”
+
+He noticed her parted lips, and the peculiar stare in her eyes, which
+had wandered from his face.
+
+“There's somebody after us. I saw something white moving,” she cried.
+
+Heyst did not turn his head; he only glanced at her out-stretched arm.
+
+“No doubt we are followed; we are watched.”
+
+“I don't see anything now,” she said.
+
+“And it does not matter,” Heyst went on in his ordinary voice. “Here we
+are in the forest. I have neither strength nor persuasion. Indeed, it's
+extremely difficult to be eloquent before a Chinaman's head stuck at
+one out of a lot of brushwood. But can we wander among these big trees
+indefinitely? Is this a refuge? No! What else is left to us? I did think
+for a moment of the mine; but even there we could not remain very long.
+And then that gallery is not safe. The props were too weak to begin
+with. Ants have been at work there--ants after the men. A death-trap, at
+best. One can die but once, but there are many manners of death.”
+
+The girl glanced about fearfully, in search of the watcher or follower
+whom she had glimpsed once among the trees; but if he existed, he had
+concealed himself. Nothing met her eyes but the deepening shadows of the
+short vistas between the living columns of the still roof of leaves.
+She looked at the man beside her expectantly, tenderly, with suppressed
+affright and a sort of awed wonder.
+
+“I have also thought of these people's boat,” Heyst went on. “We could
+get into that, and--only they have taken everything out of her. I have
+seen her oars and mast in a corner of their room. To shove off in an
+empty boat would be nothing but a desperate expedient, supposing even
+that she would drift out a good distance between the islands before the
+morning. It would only be a complicated manner of committing suicide--to
+be found dead in a boat, dead from sun and thirst. A sea mystery.
+I wonder who would find us! Davidson, perhaps; but Davidson passed
+westward ten days ago. I watched him steaming past one early morning,
+from the jetty.”
+
+“You never told me,” she said.
+
+“He must have been looking at me through his big binoculars. Perhaps, if
+I had raised my arm--but what did we want with Davidson then, you and
+I? He won't be back this way for three weeks or more, Lena. I wish I had
+raised my arm that morning.”
+
+“What would have been the good of it?” she sighed out.
+
+“What good? No good, of course. We had no forebodings. This seemed to be
+an inexpugnable refuge, where we could live untroubled and learn to know
+each other.”
+
+“It's perhaps in trouble that people get to know each other,” she
+suggested.
+
+“Perhaps,” he said indifferently. “At any rate, we would not have gone
+away from here with him; though I believe he would have come in eagerly
+enough, and ready for any service he could render. It's that fat man's
+nature--a delightful fellow. You would not come on the wharf that time
+I sent the shawl back to Mrs. Schomberg through him. He has never seen
+you.”
+
+“I didn't know that you wanted anybody ever to see me,” she said.
+
+He had folded his arms on his breast and hung his head.
+
+“And I did not know that you cared to be seen as yet. A misunderstanding
+evidently. An honourable misunderstanding. But it does not matter now.”
+
+He raised his head after a silence.
+
+“How gloomy this forest has grown! Yet surely the sun cannot have set
+already.”
+
+She looked round; and as if her eyes had just been opened, she perceived
+the shades of the forest surrounding her, not so much with gloom, but
+with a sullen, dumb, menacing hostility. Her heart sank in the engulfing
+stillness, at that moment she felt the nearness of death, breathing on
+her and on the man with her. If there had been a sudden stir of leaves,
+the crack of a dry branch, the faintest rustle, she would have screamed
+aloud. But she shook off the unworthy weakness. Such as she was, a
+fiddle-scraping girl picked up on the very threshold of infamy, she
+would try to rise above herself, triumphant and humble; and then
+happiness would burst on her like a torrent, flinging at her feet the
+man whom she loved.
+
+Heyst stirred slightly.
+
+“We had better be getting back, Lena, since we can't stay all night in
+the woods--or anywhere else, for that matter. We are the slaves of
+this infernal surprise which has been sprung on us by--shall I say
+fate?--your fate, or mine.”
+
+It was the man who had broken the silence, but it was the woman who
+led the way. At the very edge of the forest she stopped, concealed by a
+tree. He joined her cautiously.
+
+“What is it? What do you see, Lena?” he whispered.
+
+She said that it was only a thought that had come into her head. She
+hesitated for a moment giving him over her shoulder a shining gleam in
+her grey eyes. She wanted to know whether this trouble, this danger,
+this evil, whatever it was, finding them out in their retreat, was not a
+sort of punishment.
+
+“Punishment?” repeated Heyst. He could not understand what she meant.
+When she explained, he was still more surprised. “A sort of retribution,
+from an angry Heaven?” he said in wonder. “On us? What on earth for?”
+
+He saw her pale face darken in the dusk. She had blushed. Her whispering
+flowed very fast. It was the way they lived together--that wasn't right,
+was it? It was a guilty life. For she had not been forced into it,
+driven, scared into it. No, no--she had come to him of her own free
+will, with her whole soul yearning unlawfully.
+
+He was so profoundly touched that he could not speak for a moment. To
+conceal his trouble, he assumed his best Heystian manner.
+
+“What? Are our visitors then messengers of morality, avengers of
+righteousness, agents of Providence? That's certainly an original view.
+How flattered they would be if they could hear you!”
+
+“Now you are making fun of me,” she said in a subdued voice which broke
+suddenly.
+
+“Are you conscious of sin?” Heyst asked gravely. She made no answer.
+“For I am not,” he added; “before Heaven, I am not!”
+
+“You! You are different. Woman is the tempter. You took me up from pity.
+I threw myself at you.”
+
+“Oh, you exaggerate, you exaggerate. It was not so bad as that,” he said
+playfully, keeping his voice steady with an effort.
+
+He considered himself a dead man already, yet forced to pretend that
+he was alive for her sake, for her defence. He regretted that he had
+no Heaven to which he could recommend this fair, palpitating handful of
+ashes and dust--warm, living sentient his own--and exposed helplessly to
+insult, outrage, degradation, and infinite misery of the body.
+
+She had averted her face from him and was still. He suddenly seized her
+passive hand.
+
+“You will have it so?” he said. “Yes? Well, let us then hope for mercy
+together.”
+
+She shook her head without looking at him, like an abashed child.
+
+“Remember,” he went on incorrigible with his delicate raillery, “that
+hope is a Christian virtue, and surely you can't want all the mercy for
+yourself.”
+
+Before their eyes the bungalow across the cleared ground stood bathed in
+a sinister light. An unexpected chill gust of wind made a noise in the
+tree-tops. She snatched her hand away and stepped out into the open;
+but before she had advanced more than three yards, she stood still and
+pointed to the west.
+
+“Oh look there!” she exclaimed.
+
+Beyond the headland of Diamond Bay, lying black on a purple sea, great
+masses of cloud stood piled up and bathed in a mist of blood. A crimson
+crack like an open wound zigzagged between them, with a piece of dark
+red sun showing at the bottom. Heyst cast an indifferent glance at the
+ill-omened chaos of the sky.
+
+“Thunderstorm making up. We shall hear it all night, but it won't visit
+us, probably. The clouds generally gather round the volcano.”
+
+She was not listening to him. Her eyes reflected the sombre and violent
+hues of the sunset.
+
+“That does not look much like a sign of mercy,” she said slowly, as if
+to herself, and hurried on, followed by Heyst. Suddenly she stopped. “I
+don't care. I would do more yet! And some day you'll forgive me. You'll
+have to forgive me!”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+Stumbling up the steps, as if suddenly exhausted, Lena entered the room
+and let herself fall on the nearest chair. Before following her, Heyst
+took a survey of the surroundings from the veranda. It was a complete
+solitude. There was nothing in the aspect of this familiar scene to tell
+him that he and the girl were not as completely alone as they had been
+in the early days of their common life on this abandoned spot, with only
+Wang discreetly materializing from time to time and the uncomplaining
+memory of Morrison to keep them company.
+
+After the cold gust of wind there was an absolute stillness of the
+air. The thunder-charged mass hung unbroken beyond the low, ink-black
+headland, darkening the twilight. By contrast, the sky at the zenith
+displayed pellucid clearness, the sheen of a delicate glass bubble which
+the merest movement of air might shatter. A little to the left, between
+the black masses of the headland and of the forest, the volcano, a
+feather of smoke by day and a cigar-glow at night, took its first fiery
+expanding breath of the evening. Above it a reddish star came out like
+an expelled spark from the fiery bosom of the earth, enchanted into
+permanency by the mysterious spell of frozen spaces.
+
+In front of Heyst the forest, already full of the deepest shades, stood
+like a wall. But he lingered, watching its edge, especially where it
+ended at the line of bushes, masking the land end of the jetty. Since
+the girl had spoken of catching a glimpse of something white among the
+trees, he believed pretty firmly that they had been followed in their
+excursion up the mountain by Mr. Jones's secretary. No doubt the fellow
+had watched them out of the forest, and now, unless he took the trouble
+to go back some distance and fetch a considerable circuit inland over
+the clearing, he was bound to walk out into the open space before the
+bungalows. Heyst did, indeed, imagine at one time some movement between
+the trees, lost as soon as perceived. He stared patiently, but nothing
+more happened. After all, why should he trouble about these people's
+actions? Why this stupid concern for the preliminaries, since, when
+the issue was joined, it would find him disarmed and shrinking from the
+ugliness and degradation of it?
+
+He turned and entered the room. Deep dusk reigned in there already.
+Lena, near the door, did not move or speak. The sheen of the white
+tablecloth was very obtrusive. The brute these two vagabonds had tamed
+had entered on its service while Heyst and Lena were away. The table was
+laid. Heyst walked up and down the room several times. The girl remained
+without sound or movement on the chair. But when Heyst, placing the two
+silver candelabra on the table, struck a match to light the candles,
+she got up suddenly and went into the bedroom. She came out again almost
+immediately, having taken off her hat. Heyst looked at her over his
+shoulder.
+
+“What's the good of shirking the evil hour? I've lighted these
+candles for a sign of our return. After all, we might not have been
+watched--while returning, I mean. Of course we were seen leaving the
+house.”
+
+The girl sat down again. The great wealth of her hair looked very dark
+above her colourless face. She raised her eyes, glistening softly in
+the light with a sort of unreadable appeal, with a strange effect of
+unseeing innocence.
+
+“Yes,” said Heyst across the table, the fingertips of one hand resting
+on the immaculate cloth. “A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw,
+hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic ape, has laid this
+table. Are you awake, Lena? Am I? I would pinch myself, only I know that
+nothing would do away with this dream. Three covers. You know it is the
+shorter of the two who's coming--the gentleman who, in the play of his
+shoulders as he walks, and in his facial structure, recalls a Jaguar.
+Ah, you don't know what a jaguar is? But you have had a good look at
+these two. It's the short one, you know, who's to be our guest.”
+
+She made a sign with her head that she knew; Heyst's insistence brought
+Ricardo vividly before her mental vision. A sudden languor, like the
+physical echo of her struggle with the man, paralysed all her limbs.
+She lay still in the chair, feeling very frightened at this
+phenomenon--ready to pray aloud for strength.
+
+Heyst had started to pace the room.
+
+“Our guest! There is a proverb--in Russia, I believe--that when a
+guest enters the house, God enters the house. The sacred virtue of
+hospitality! But it leads one into trouble as well as any other.”
+
+The girl unexpectedly got up from the chair, swaying her supple figure
+and stretching her arms above her head. He stopped to look at her
+curiously, paused, and then went on:
+
+“I venture to think that God has nothing to do with such a hospitality
+and with such a guest!”
+
+She had jumped to her feet to react against the numbness, to discover
+whether her body would obey her will. It did. She could stand up, and
+she could move her arms freely. Though no physiologist, she concluded
+that all that sudden numbness was in her head, not in her limbs. Her
+fears assuaged, she thanked God for it mentally, and to Heyst murmured a
+protest:
+
+“Oh, yes! He's got to do with everything--every little thing. Nothing
+can happen--”
+
+“Yes,” he said hastily, “one of the two sparrows can't be struck to the
+ground--you are thinking of that.” The habitual playful smile faded on
+the kindly lips under the martial moustache. “Ah, you remember what you
+have been told--as a child--on Sundays.”
+
+“Yes, I do remember.” She sank into the chair again. “It was the only
+decent bit of time I ever had when I was a kid, with our landlady's two
+girls, you know.”
+
+“I wonder, Lena,” Heyst said, with a return to his urbane playfulness,
+“whether you are just a little child, or whether you represent something
+as old as the world.”
+
+She surprised Heyst by saying dreamily:
+
+“Well--and what about you?”
+
+“I? I date later--much later. I can't call myself a child, but I am so
+recent that I may call myself a man of the last hour--or is it the hour
+before last? I have been out of it so long that I am not certain how far
+the hands of the clock have moved since--since--”
+
+He glanced at the portrait of his father, exactly above the head of the
+girl, as if it were ignoring her in its painted austerity of feeling. He
+did not finish the sentence; but he did not remain silent for long.
+
+“Only what must be avoided are fallacious inferences, my dear
+Lena--especially at this hour.”
+
+“Now you are making fun of me again,” she said without looking up.
+
+“Am I?” he cried. “Making fun? No, giving warning. Hang it all, whatever
+truth people told you in the old days, there is also this one--that
+sparrows do fall to the ground, that they are brought to the ground.
+This is no vain assertion, but a fact. That's why”--again his
+tone changed, while he picked up the table knife and let it fall
+disdainfully--“that's why I wish these wretched round knives had some
+edge on them. Absolute rubbish--neither edge, point, nor substance. I
+believe one of these forks would make a better weapon at a pinch. But
+can I go about with a fork in my pocket?” He gnashed his teeth with a
+rage very real, and yet comic.
+
+“There used to be a carver here, but it was broken and thrown away a
+long time ago. Nothing much to carve here. It would have made a noble
+weapon, no doubt; but--”
+
+He stopped. The girl sat very quiet, with downcast eyes. As he kept
+silence for some time, she looked up and said thoughtfully:
+
+“Yes, a knife--it's a knife that you would want, wouldn't you, in case,
+in case--”
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“There must be a crowbar or two in the sheds; but I have given up all
+the keys together. And then, do you see me walking about with a crowbar
+in my hand? Ha, ha! And besides, that edifying sight alone might start
+the trouble for all I know. In truth, why has it not started yet?”
+
+“Perhaps they are afraid of you,” she whispered, looking down again.
+
+“By Jove, it looks like it,” he assented meditatively. “They do seem to
+hang back for some reason. Is that reason prudence, or downright fear,
+or perhaps the leisurely method of certitude?”
+
+Out in the black night, not very far from the bungalow, resounded a loud
+and prolonged whistle. Lena's hands grasped the sides of the chair, but
+she made no movement. Heyst started, and turned his face away from the
+door.
+
+The startling sound had died away.
+
+“Whistles, yells, omens, signals, portents--what do they matter?” he
+said. “But what about the crowbar? Suppose I had it! Could I stand
+in ambush at the side of the door--this door--and smash the first
+protruding head, scatter blood and brains over the floor, over these
+walls, and then run stealthily to the other door to do the same
+thing--and repeat the performance for a third time, perhaps? Could I? On
+suspicion, without compunction, with a calm and determined purpose? No,
+it is not in me. I date too late. Would you like to see me attempt this
+thing while that mysterious prestige of mine lasts--or their not less
+mysterious hesitation?”
+
+“No, no!” she whispered ardently, as if compelled to speak by his
+eyes fixed on her face. “No, it's a knife you want to defend yourself
+with--to defend--there will be time--”
+
+“And who knows if it isn't really my duty?” he began again, as if he had
+not heard her disjointed words at all. “It may be--my duty to you, to
+myself. For why should I put up with the humiliation of their secret
+menaces? Do you know what the world would say?”
+
+He emitted a low laugh, which struck her with terror. She would have got
+up, but he stooped so low over her that she could not move without first
+pushing him away.
+
+“It would say, Lena, that I--the Swede--after luring my friend and
+partner to his death from mere greed of money, have murdered these
+unoffending shipwrecked strangers from sheer funk. That would be
+the story whispered--perhaps shouted--certainly spread out, and
+believed--and believed, my dear Lena!”
+
+“Who would believe such awful things?”
+
+“Perhaps you wouldn't--not at first, at any rate; but the power of
+calumny grows with time. It's insidious and penetrating. It can even
+destroy one's faith in oneself--dry-rot the soul.”
+
+All at once her eyes leaped to the door and remained fixed, stony, a
+little enlarged. Turning his head, Heyst beheld the figure of Ricardo
+framed in the doorway. For a moment none of the three moved, then,
+looking from the newcomer to the girl in the chair, Heyst formulated a
+sardonic introduction.
+
+“Mr Ricardo, my dear.”
+
+Her head drooped a little. Ricardo's hand went up to his moustache. His
+voice exploded in the room.
+
+“At your service, ma'am!”
+
+He stepped in, taking his hat off with a flourish, and dropping it
+carelessly on a chair near the door.
+
+“At your service,” he repeated, in quite another tone. “I was made aware
+there was a lady about, by that Pedro of ours; only I didn't know I
+should have the privilege of seeing you tonight, ma'am.”
+
+Lena and Heyst looked at him covertly, but he, with a vague gaze
+avoiding them both, looked at nothing, seeming to pursue some point in
+space.
+
+“Had a pleasant walk?” he asked suddenly.
+
+“Yes. And you?” returned Heyst, who had managed to catch his glance.
+
+“I haven't been a yard away from the governor this afternoon till
+I started for here.” The genuineness of the accent surprised Heyst,
+without convincing him of the truth of the words.
+
+“Why do you ask?” pursued Ricardo with every inflection of perfect
+candour.
+
+“You might have wished to explore the island a little,” said Heyst,
+studying the man, who, to render him justice, did not try to free his
+captured gaze. “I may remind you that it wouldn't be a perfectly safe
+proceeding.”
+
+Ricardo presented a picture of innocence.
+
+“Oh, yes--meaning that Chink that has ran away from you. He ain't much!”
+
+“He has a revolver,” observed Heyst meaningly.
+
+“Well, and you have a revolver, too,” Mr. Ricardo argued unexpectedly.
+“I don't worry myself about that.”
+
+“That's different. I am not afraid of you,” Heyst made answer after a
+short pause.
+
+“Of me?”
+
+“Of all of you.”
+
+“You have a queer way of putting things,” began Ricardo.
+
+At that moment the door on the compound side of the house came open with
+some noise, and Pedro entered, pressing the edge of a loaded tray to his
+breast. His big, hairy head rolled a little, his feet fell in front of
+each other with a short, hard thump on the floor. The arrival changed
+the current of Ricardo's thought, perhaps, but certainly of his speech.
+
+“You heard me whistling a little while ago outside? That was to give him
+a hint, as I came along, that it was time to bring in the dinner; and
+here it is.”
+
+Lena rose and passed to the right of Ricardo, who lowered his glance for
+a moment. They sat down at the table. The enormous gorilla back of Pedro
+swayed out through the door.
+
+“Extraordinary strong brute, ma'am,” said Ricardo. He, had a propensity
+to talk about “his Pedro,” as some men will talk of their dog. “He ain't
+pretty, though. No, he ain't pretty. And he has got to be kept under. I
+am his keeper, as it might be. The governor don't trouble his head much
+about dee-tails. All that's left to Martin. Martin, that's me, ma'am.”
+
+Heyst saw the girl's eyes turn towards Mr. Jones's secretary and rest
+blankly on his face. Ricardo, however, looked vaguely into space,
+and, with faint flickers of a smile about his lips, made conversation
+indefatigably against the silence of his entertainers. He boasted
+largely of his long association with Mr. Jones--over four years now, he
+said. Then, glancing rapidly at Heyst:
+
+“You can see at once he's a gentleman, can't you?”
+
+“You people,” Heyst said, his habitual playful intonation tinged with
+gloom, “are divorced from all reality in my eyes.”
+
+Ricardo received this speech as if he had been expecting to hear
+those very words, or else did not mind at all what Heyst might say.
+He muttered an absent-minded “Ay, ay,” played with a bit of biscuit,
+sighed, and said, with a peculiar stare which did not seem to carry any
+distance, but to stop short at a point in the air very near his face:
+
+“Anybody can see at once you are one. You and the governor ought to
+understand each other. He expects to see you tonight. The governor isn't
+well, and we've got to think of getting away from here.”
+
+While saying these words he turned himself full towards Lena, but
+without any marked expression. Leaning back with folded arms, the girl
+stared before her as if she had been alone in the room. But under
+that aspect of almost vacant unconcern the perils and emotion that had
+entered into her life warmed her heart, exalted her mind with a sense of
+an inconceivable intensity of existence.
+
+“Really? Thinking of going away from here?” Heyst murmured.
+
+“The best of friends must part,” Ricardo pronounced slowly. “And, as
+long as they part friends, there's no harm done. We two are used to be
+on the move. You, I understand, prefer to stick in one place.”
+
+It was obvious that all this was being said merely for the sake of
+talking, and that Ricardo's mind was concentrated on some purpose
+unconnected with the words that were coming out of his mouth.
+
+“I should like to know,” Heyst asked with incisive politeness, “how you
+have come to understand this or anything else about me? As far as I can
+remember, I've made you no confidences.”
+
+Ricardo, gazing comfortably into space out of the back of his chair--for
+some time all three had given up any pretence of eating--answered
+abstractedly:
+
+“Any fellow might have guessed it!” He sat up suddenly, and uncovered
+all his teeth in a grin of extraordinary ferocity, which was belied by
+the persistent amiability of his tone. “The governor will be the man
+to tell you something about that. I wish you would say you would see my
+governor. He's the one who does all our talking. Let me take you to him
+this evening. He ain't at all well; and he can't make up his mind to go
+away without having a talk with you.”
+
+Heyst, looking up, met Lena's eyes. Their expression of candour seemed
+to hide some struggling intention. Her head, he fancied, had made an
+imperceptible affirmative movement. Why? What reason could she have? Was
+it the prompting of some obscure instinct? Or was it simply a delusion
+of his own senses? But in this strange complication invading the
+quietude of his life, in his state of doubt and disdain and almost of
+despair with which he looked at himself, he would let even a delusive
+appearance guide him through a darkness so dense that it made for
+indifference.
+
+“Well, suppose I do say so.”
+
+Ricardo did not conceal his satisfaction, which for a moment interested
+Heyst.
+
+“It can't be my life they are after,” he said to himself. “What good
+could it be to them?”
+
+He looked across the table at the girl. What did it matter whether she
+had nodded or not? As always when looking into her unconscious eyes, he
+tasted something like the dregs of tender pity. He had decided to go.
+Her nod, imaginary or not imaginary, advice or illusion, had tipped the
+scale. He reflected that Ricardo's invitation could scarcely be anything
+in the nature of a trap. It would have been too absurd. Why carry subtly
+into a trap someone already bound hand and foot, as it were?
+
+All this time he had been looking fixedly at the girl he called Lena. In
+the submissive quietness of her being, which had been her attitude ever
+since they had begun their life on the island, she remained as secret
+as ever. Heyst got up abruptly, with a smile of such enigmatic and
+despairing character that Mr. Secretary Ricardo, whose abstract gaze had
+an all-round efficiency, made a slight crouching start, as if to dive
+under the table for his leg-knife--a start that was repressed, as soon
+as begun. He had expected Heyst to spring on him or draw a revolver,
+because he created for himself a vision of him in his own image. Instead
+of doing either of these obvious things, Heyst walked across the
+room, opened the door and put his head through it to look out into the
+compound.
+
+As soon as his back was turned, Ricardo's hand sought the girl's arm
+under the table. He was not looking at her, but she felt the groping,
+nervous touch of his search, felt suddenly the grip of his fingers above
+her wrist. He leaned forward a little; still he dared not look at her.
+His hard stare remained fastened on Heyst's back. In an extremely low
+hiss, his fixed idea of argument found expression scathingly:
+
+“See! He's no good. He's not the man for you!”
+
+He glanced at her at last. Her lips moved a little, and he was awed
+by that movement without a sound. Next instant the hard grasp of his
+fingers vanished from her arm. Heyst had shut the door. On his way back
+to the table, he crossed the path of the girl they had called Alma--she
+didn't know why--also Magdalen, whose mind had remained so long in doubt
+as to the reason of her own existence. She no longer wondered at that
+bitter riddle, since her heart found its solution in a blinding, hot
+glow of passionate purpose.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+She passed by Heyst as if she had indeed been blinded by some secret,
+lurid, and consuming glare into which she was about to enter. The
+curtain of the bedroom door fell behind her into rigid folds. Ricardo's
+vacant gaze seemed to be watching the dancing flight of a fly in mid
+air.
+
+“Extra dark outside, ain't it?” he muttered.
+
+“Not so dark but that I could see that man of yours prowling about
+there,” said Heyst in measured tones.
+
+“What--Pedro? He's scarcely a man you know; or else I wouldn't be so
+fond of him as I am.”
+
+“Very well. Let's call him your worthy associate.”
+
+“Ay! Worthy enough for what we want of him. A great standby is Peter in
+a scrimmage. A growl and a bite--oh, my! And you don't want him about?”
+
+“I don't.”
+
+“You want him out of the way?” insisted Ricardo with an affectation
+of incredulity which Heyst accepted calmly, though the air in the room
+seemed to grow more oppressive with every word spoken.
+
+“That's it. I do want him out of the way.” He forced himself to speak
+equably.
+
+“Lor'! That's no great matter. Pedro's not much use here. The business
+my governor's after can be settled by ten minutes' rational talk
+with--with another gentleman. Quiet talk!”
+
+He looked up suddenly with hard, phosphorescent eyes. Heyst didn't move
+a muscle. Ricardo congratulated himself on having left his revolver
+behind. He was so exasperated that he didn't know what he might have
+done. He said at last:
+
+“You want poor, harmless Peter out of the way before you let me take you
+to see the governor--is that it?”
+
+“Yes, that is it.”
+
+“H'm! One can see,” Ricardo said with hidden venom, “that you are a
+gentleman; but all that gentlemanly fancifulness is apt to turn sour on
+a plain man's stomach. However--you'll have to pardon me.”
+
+He put his fingers into his mouth and let out a whistle which seemed to
+drive a thin, sharp shaft of air solidly against one's nearest ear-drum.
+Though he greatly enjoyed Heyst's involuntary grimace, he sat perfectly
+stolid waiting for the effect of the call.
+
+It brought Pedro in with an extraordinary, uncouth, primeval
+impetuosity. The door flew open with a clatter, and the wild figure it
+disclosed seemed anxious to devastate the room in leaps and bounds;
+but Ricardo raised his open palm, and the creature came in quietly.
+His enormous half-closed paws swung to and fro a little in front of his
+bowed trunk as he walked. Ricardo looked on truculently.
+
+“You go to the boat--understand? Go now!”
+
+The little red eyes of the tame monster blinked with painful attention
+in the mass of hair.
+
+“Well? Why don't you get? Forgot human speech, eh? Don't you know any
+longer what a boat is?”
+
+“Si--boat,” the creature stammered out doubtfully.
+
+“Well, go there--the boat at the jetty. March off to it and sit there,
+lie down there, do anything but go to sleep there--till you hear my
+call, and then fly here. Them's your orders. March! Get, vamos! No, not
+that way--out through the front door. No sulks!”
+
+Pedro obeyed with uncouth alacrity. When he had gone, the gleam of
+pitiless savagery went out of Ricardo's yellow eyes, and his physiognomy
+took on, for the first time that evening, the expression of a domestic
+cat which is being noticed.
+
+“You can watch him right into the bushes, if you like. Too dark, eh? Why
+not go with him to the very spot, then?”
+
+Heyst made a gesture of vague protest.
+
+“There's nothing to assure me that he will stay there. I have no doubt
+of his going, but it's an act without guarantee.”
+
+“There you are!” Ricardo shrugged his shoulders philosophically. “Can't
+be helped. Short of shooting our Pedro, nobody can make absolutely sure
+of his staying in the same place longer than he has a mind to; but I
+tell you, he lives in holy terror of my temper. That's why I put on my
+sudden-death air when I talk to him. And yet I wouldn't shoot him--not
+I, unless in such a fit of rage as would make a man shoot his favourite
+dog. Look here, sir! This deal is on the square. I didn't tip him a wink
+to do anything else. He won't budge from the jetty. Are you coming along
+now, sir?”
+
+A short-silence ensued. Ricardo's jaws were working ominously under his
+skin. His eyes glided: voluptuously here and there, cruel and dreamy,
+Heyst checked a sudden movement, reflected for a while, then said:
+
+“You must wait a little.”
+
+“Wait a little! Wait a little! What does he think a fellow is--a graven
+image?” grumbled Ricardo half audibly.
+
+Heyst went into the bedroom, and shut the door after him with a bang.
+Coming from the light, he could not see a thing in there at first; yet
+he received the impression of the girl getting up from the floor. On
+the less opaque darkness of the shutter-hole, her head detached itself
+suddenly, very faint, a mere hint of a round, dark shape without a face.
+
+“I am going, Lena. I am going to confront these scoundrels.” He was
+surprised to feel two arms falling on his shoulders. “I thought that
+you--” he began.
+
+“Yes, yes!” the girl whispered hastily.
+
+She neither clung to him, nor yet did she try to draw him to her. Her
+hands grasped his shoulders, and she seemed to him to be staring into
+his face in the dark. And now he could see something of her face,
+too--an oval without features--and faintly distinguish her person, in
+the blackness, a form without definite lines.
+
+“You have a black dress here, haven't you, Lena?” he asked, speaking
+rapidly, and so low that she could just hear him.
+
+“Yes--an old thing.”
+
+“Very good. Put it on at once.”
+
+“But why?”
+
+“Not for mourning!” There was something peremptory in the slightly
+ironic murmur. “Can you find it and get into it in the dark?”
+
+She could. She would try. He waited, very still. He could imagine
+her movements over there at the far end of the room; but his eyes,
+accustomed now to the darkness, had lost her completely. When she spoke,
+her voice surprised him by its nearness. She had done what he had told
+her to do, and had approached him, invisible.
+
+“Good! Where's that piece of purple veil I've seen lying about?” he
+asked.
+
+There was no answer, only a slight rustle.
+
+“Where is it?” he repeated impatiently.
+
+Her unexpected breath was on his cheek.
+
+“In my hands.”
+
+“Capital! Listen, Lena. As soon as I leave the bungalow with that
+horrible scoundrel, you slip out at the back--instantly, lose no
+time!--and run round into the forest. That will be your time, while we
+are walking away, and I am sure he won't give me the slip. Run into the
+forest behind the fringe of bushes between the big trees. You will know,
+surely, how to find a place in full view of the front door. I fear for
+you; but in this black dress, with most of your face muffled up in that
+dark veil, I defy anybody to find you there before daylight. Wait in the
+forest till the table is pushed into full view of the doorway, and you
+see three candles out of four blown out and one relighted--or, should
+the lights be put out here while you watch them, wait till three candles
+are lighted and then two put out. At either of these signals run back as
+hard as you can, for it will mean that I am waiting for you here.”
+
+While he was speaking, the girl had sought and seized one of his
+hands. She did not press it; she held it loosely, as it were timidly,
+caressingly. It was no grasp; it was a mere contact, as if only to make
+sure that he was there, that he was real and no mere darker shadow in
+the obscurity. The warmth of her hand gave Heyst a strange, intimate
+sensation of all her person. He had to fight down a new sort of emotion,
+which almost unmanned him. He went on, whispering sternly:
+
+“But if you see no such signals, don't let anything--fear, curiosity,
+despair, or hope--entice you back to this house; and with the first sign
+of dawn steal away along the edge of the clearing till you strike the
+path. Wait no longer, because I shall probably be dead.”
+
+The murmur of the word “Never!” floated into his ear as if it formed
+itself in the air.
+
+“You know the path,” he continued. “Make your way to the barricade. Go
+to Wang--yes, to Wang. Let nothing stop you!” It seemed to him that the
+girl's hand trembled a little. “The worst he can do to you is to shoot
+you, but he won't. I really think he won't, if I am not there. Stay with
+the villagers, with the wild people, and fear nothing. They will be more
+awed by you than you can be frightened of them. Davidson's bound to turn
+up before very long. Keep a look-out for a passing steamer. Think of
+some sort of signal to call him.”
+
+She made no answer. The sense of the heavy, brooding silence in the
+outside world seemed to enter and fill the room--the oppressive infinity
+of it, without breath, without light. It was as if the heart of hearts
+had ceased to beat and the end of all things had come.
+
+“Have you understood? You are to run out of the house at once,” Heyst
+whispered urgently.
+
+She lifted his hand to her lips and let it go. He was startled.
+
+“Lena!” he cried out under his breath.
+
+She was gone from his side. He dared not trust himself--no, not even to
+the extent of a tender word.
+
+Turning to go out he heard a thud somewhere in the house. To open the
+door, he had first to lift the curtain; he did so with his face over his
+shoulder. The merest trickle of light, coming through the keyhole and
+one or two cracks, was enough for his eyes to see her plainly, all
+black, down on her knees, with her head and arms flung on the foot of
+the bed--all black in the desolation of a mourning sinner. What was
+this? A suspicion that there were everywhere more things than he
+could understand crossed Heyst's mind. Her arm, detached from the bed,
+motioned him away. He obeyed, and went out, full of disquiet.
+
+The curtain behind him had not ceased to tremble when she was up on her
+feet, close against it, listening for sounds, for words, in a stooping,
+tragic attitude of stealthy attention, one hand clutching at her breast
+as if to compress, to make less loud the beating of her heart. Heyst
+had caught Mr. Jones's secretary in the contemplation of his closed
+writing-desk. Ricardo might have been meditating how to break into it;
+but when he turned about suddenly, he showed so distorted a face that
+it made Heyst pause in wonder at the upturned whites of the eyes, which
+were blinking horribly, as if the man were inwardly convulsed.
+
+“I thought you were never coming,” Ricardo mumbled.
+
+“I didn't know you were pressed for time. Even if your going away
+depends on this conversation, as you say, I doubt if you are the men to
+put to sea on such a night as this,” said Heyst, motioning Ricardo to
+precede him out of the house.
+
+With feline undulations of hip and shoulder, the secretary left the
+room at once. There was something cruel in the absolute dumbness of the
+night. The great cloud covering half the sky hung right against one,
+like an enormous curtain hiding menacing preparations of violence. As
+the feet of the two men touched the ground, a rumble came from behind
+it, preceded by a swift, mysterious gleam of light on the waters of the
+bay.
+
+“Ha!” said Ricardo. “It begins.”
+
+“It may be nothing in the end,” observed Heyst, stepping along steadily.
+
+“No! Let it come!” Ricardo said viciously. “I am in the humour for it!”
+
+By the time the two men had reached the other bungalow, the far-off
+modulated rumble growled incessantly, while pale lightning in waves of
+cold fire flooded and ran off the island in rapid succession. Ricardo,
+unexpectedly, dashed ahead up the steps and put his head through the
+doorway.
+
+“Here he is, governor! Keep him with you as long as you can--till you
+hear me whistle. I am on the track.”
+
+He flung these words into the room with inconceivable speed, and stood
+aside to let the visitor pass through the doorway; but he had to wait
+an appreciable moment, because Heyst, seeing his purpose, had scornfully
+slowed his pace. When Heyst entered the room it was with a smile, the
+Heyst smile, lurking under his martial moustache.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+Two candles were burning on the stand-up desk. Mr. Jones, tightly
+enfolded in an old but gorgeous blue silk dressing-gown, kept his
+elbows close against his sides and his hands deeply plunged into the
+extraordinarily deep pockets of the garment. The costume accentuated his
+emaciation. He resembled a painted pole leaning against the edge of the
+desk, with a dried head of dubious distinction stuck on the top of it.
+Ricardo lounged in the doorway. Indifferent in appearance to what
+was going on, he was biding his time. At a given moment, between two
+flickers of lightning, he melted out of his frame into the outer
+air. His disappearance was observed on the instant by Mr. Jones, who
+abandoned his nonchalant immobility against the desk, and made a few
+steps calculated to put him between Heyst and the doorway.
+
+“It's awfully close,” he remarked
+
+Heyst, in the middle of the room, had made up his mind to speak plainly.
+
+“We haven't met to talk about the weather. You favoured me earlier in
+the day with a rather cryptic phrase about yourself. 'I am he that is,'
+you said. What does that mean?”
+
+Mr. Jones, without looking at Heyst, continued his absentminded
+movements till, attaining the desired position, he brought his shoulders
+with a thump against the wall near the door, and raised his head. In
+the emotion of the decisive moment his haggard face glistened with
+perspiration. Drops ran down his hollow cheeks and almost blinded the
+spectral eyes in their bony caverns.
+
+“It means that I am a person to be reckoned with. No--stop! Don't put
+your hand into your pocket--don't.”
+
+His voice had a wild, unexpected shrillness. Heyst started, and there
+ensued a moment of suspended animation, during which the thunder's
+deep bass muttered distantly and the doorway to the right of Mr. Jones
+flickered with bluish light. At last Heyst shrugged his shoulders; he
+even looked at his hand. He didn't put it in his pocket, however. Mr.
+Jones, glued against the wall, watched him raise both his hands to
+the ends of his horizontal moustaches, and answered the note of
+interrogation in his steady eyes.
+
+“A matter of prudence,” said Mr. Jones in his natural hollow tones, and
+with a face of deathlike composure. “A man of your free life has surely
+perceived that. You are a much talked-about man, Mr. Heyst--and though,
+as far as I understand, you are accustomed to employ the subtler
+weapons of intelligence, still I can't afford to take any risks of
+the--er--grosser methods. I am not unscrupulous enough to be a match for
+you in the use of intelligence; but I assure you, Mr. Heyst, that in
+the other way you are no match for me. I have you covered at this
+very moment. You have been covered ever since you entered this room.
+Yes--from my pocket.”
+
+During this harangue Heyst looked deliberately over his shoulder,
+stepped back a pace, and sat down on the end of the camp bedstead.
+Leaning his elbow on one knee, he laid his cheek in the palm of his hand
+and seemed to meditate on what he should say next. Mr. Jones, planted
+against the wall, was obviously waiting for some sort of overture.
+As nothing came, he resolved to speak himself; but he hesitated. For,
+though he considered that the most difficult step had been taken, he
+said to himself that every stage of progress required great caution,
+lest the man in Ricardo's phraseology, should “start to prance”--which
+would be most inconvenient. He fell back on a previous statement:
+
+“And I am a person to be reckoned with.”
+
+The other man went on looking at the floor, as if he were alone in the
+room. There was a pause.
+
+“You have heard of me, then?” Heyst said at length, looking up.
+
+“I should think so! We have been staying at Schomberg's hotel.”
+
+“Schom--” Heyst choked on the word.
+
+“What's the matter, Mr. Heyst?”
+
+“Nothing. Nausea,” Heyst said resignedly. He resumed his former attitude
+of meditative indifference. “What is this reckoning you are talking
+about?” he asked after a time, in the quietest possible tone. “I don't
+know you.”
+
+“It's obvious that we belong to the same--social sphere,” began Mr.
+Jones with languid irony. Inwardly he was as watchful as he could be.
+“Something has driven you out--the originality of your ideas, perhaps.
+Or your tastes.”
+
+Mr Jones indulged in one of his ghastly smiles. In repose his features
+had a curious character of evil, exhausted austerity; but when he
+smiled, the whole mask took on an unpleasantly infantile expression. A
+recrudescence of the rolling thunder invaded the room loudly, and passed
+into silence.
+
+“You are not taking this very well,” observed Mr. Jones. This was
+what he said, but as a matter of fact he thought that the business
+was shaping quite satisfactorily. The man, he said to himself, had no
+stomach for a fight. Aloud he continued: “Come! You can't expect to have
+it always your own way. You are a man of the world.”
+
+“And you?” Heyst interrupted him unexpectedly. “How do you define
+yourself?”
+
+“I, my dear sir? In one way I am--yes, I am the world itself, come to
+pay you a visit. In another sense I am an outcast--almost an outlaw.
+If you prefer a less materialistic view, I am a sort of fate--the
+retribution that waits its time.”
+
+“I wish to goodness you were the commonest sort of ruffian!” said Heyst,
+raising his equable gaze to Mr. Jones. “One would be able to talk to you
+straight then, and hope for some humanity. As it is--”
+
+“I dislike violence and ferocity of every sort as much as you do,” Mr.
+Jones declared, looking very languid as he leaned against the wall, but
+speaking fairly loud. “You can ask my Martin if it is not so. This, Mr.
+Heyst, is a soft age. It is also an age without prejudices. I've heard
+that you are free from them yourself. You mustn't be shocked if I tell
+you plainly that we are after your money--or I am, if you prefer to make
+me alone responsible. Pedro, of course, knows no more of it than
+any other animal would. Ricardo is of the faithful-retainer
+class--absolutely identified with all my ideas, wishes, and even whims!”
+
+Mr Jones pulled his left hand out of his pocket, got a handkerchief out
+of another, and began to wipe the perspiration from his forehead, neck,
+and chin. The excitement from which he suffered made his breathing
+visible. In his long dressing-gown he had the air of a convalescent
+invalid who had imprudently overtaxed his strength. Heyst,
+broad-shouldered, robust, watched the operation from the end of the camp
+bedstead, very calm, his hands on his knees.
+
+“And by the by,” he asked, “where is he now, that henchman of yours?
+Breaking into my desk?”
+
+“That would be crude. Still, crudeness is one of life's conditions.”
+ There was the slightest flavour of banter in the tone of Ricardo's
+governor. “Conceivable, but unlikely. Martin is a little crude; but you
+are not, Mr. Heyst. To tell you the truth, I don't know precisely
+where he is. He has been a little mysterious of late; but he has my
+confidence. No, don't get up, Mr. Heyst!”
+
+The viciousness of his spectral face was indescribable. Heyst, who had
+moved a little, was surprised by the disclosure.
+
+“It was not my intention,” he said.
+
+“Pray remain seated,” Mr. Jones insisted in a languid voice, but with a
+very determined glitter in his black eye-caverns.
+
+“If you were more observant,” said Heyst with dispassionate contempt,
+“you would have known before I had been five minutes in the room that I
+had no weapon of any sort on me.”
+
+“Possibly; but pray keep your hands still. They are very well where they
+are. This is too big an affair for me to take any risks.”
+
+“Big? Too big?” Heyst repeated with genuine surprise. “Good Heavens!
+Whatever you are looking for, there's very little of it here--very
+little of anything.”
+
+“You would naturally say so, but that's not what we have heard,”
+ retorted Mr. Jones quickly, with a grin so ghastly that it was
+impossible to think it voluntary.
+
+Heyst's face had grown very gloomy. He knitted his brows.
+
+“What have you heard?” he asked.
+
+“A lot, Mr. Heyst--a lot,” affirmed Mr. Jones. He was vying to recover
+his manner of languid superiority. “We have heard, for instance, of a
+certain Mr. Morrison, once your partner.”
+
+Heyst could not repress a slight movement.
+
+“Aha!” said Mr. Jones, with a sort of ghostly glee on his face.
+
+The muffled thunder resembled the echo of a distant cannonade below the
+horizon, and the two men seemed to be listening to it in sullen silence.
+
+“This diabolical calumny will end in actually and literally taking my
+life from me,” thought Heyst.
+
+Then, suddenly, he laughed. Portentously spectral, Mr. Jones frowned at
+the sound.
+
+“Laugh as much as you please,” he said. “I, who have been hounded out
+from society by a lot of highly moral souls, can't see anything funny in
+that story. But here we are, and you will now have to pay for your fun,
+Mr. Heyst.”
+
+“You have heard a lot of ugly lies,” observed Heyst. “Take my word for
+it!”
+
+“You would say so, of course--very natural. As a matter of fact I
+haven't heard very much. Strictly speaking, it was Martin. He collects
+information, and so on. You don't suppose I would talk to that Schomberg
+animal more than I could help? It was Martin whom he took into his
+confidence.”
+
+“The stupidity of that creature is so great that it becomes formidable,”
+ Heyst said, as if speaking to himself.
+
+Involuntarily, his mind turned to the girl, wandering in the forest,
+alone and terrified. Would he ever see her again? At that thought he
+nearly lost his self-possession. But the idea that if she followed
+his instructions those men were not likely to find her steadied him a
+little. They did not know that the island had any inhabitants; and he
+himself once disposed of, they would be too anxious to get away to waste
+time hunting for a vanished girl.
+
+All this passed through Heyst's mind in a flash, as men think in moments
+of danger. He looked speculatively at Mr. Jones, who, of course, had
+never for a moment taken his eyes from his intended victim. And, the
+conviction came to Heyst that this outlaw from the higher spheres was an
+absolutely hard and pitiless scoundrel.
+
+Mr Jones's voice made him start.
+
+“It would be useless, for instance, to tell me that your Chinaman has
+run off with your money. A man living alone with a Chinaman on an island
+takes care to conceal property of that kind so well that the devil
+himself--”
+
+“Certainly,” Heyst muttered.
+
+Again, with his left hand, Mr. Jones mopped his frontal bone, his
+stalk-like neck, his razor jaws, his fleshless chin. Again his voice
+faltered and his aspect became still more gruesomely malevolent as of a
+wicked and pitiless corpse.
+
+“I see what you mean,” he cried, “but you mustn't put too much trust
+in your ingenuity. You don't strike me as a very ingenious person, Mr.
+Heyst. Neither am I. My talents lie another way. But Martin--”
+
+“Who is now engaged in rifling my desk,” interjected Heyst.
+
+“I don't think so. What I was going to say is that Martin is much
+cleverer than a Chinaman. Do you believe in racial superiority, Mr.
+Heyst? I do, firmly. Martin is great at ferreting out such secrets as
+yours, for instance.”
+
+“Secrets like mine!” repeated Heyst bitterly. “Well I wish him joy of
+all he can ferret out!”
+
+“That's very kind of you,” remarked Mr. Jones. He was beginning to
+be anxious for Martin's return. Of iron self-possession at the
+gaming-table, fearless in a sudden affray, he found that this rather
+special kind of work was telling on his nerves. “Keep still as you are!”
+ he cried sharply.
+
+“I've told you I am not armed,” said Heyst, folding his arms on his
+breast.
+
+“I am really inclined to believe that you are not,” admitted Mr. Jones
+seriously. “Strange!” he mused aloud, the caverns of his eyes turned
+upon Heyst. Then briskly: “But my object is to keep you in this room.
+Don't provoke me, by some unguarded movement, to smash your knee or do
+something definite of that sort.” He passed his tongue over his lips,
+which were dry and black, while his forehead glistened with moisture. “I
+don't know if it wouldn't be better to do it at once!”
+
+“He who deliberates is lost,” said Heyst with grave mockery.
+
+Mr Jones disregarded the remark. He had the air of communing with
+himself.
+
+“Physically I am no match for you,” he said slowly, his black gaze fixed
+upon the man sitting on the end of the bed. “You could spring--”
+
+“Are you trying to frighten yourself?” asked Heyst abruptly. “You don't
+seem to have quite enough pluck for your business. Why don't you do it
+at once?”
+
+Mr Jones, taking violent offence, snorted like a savage skeleton.
+
+“Strange as it may seem to you, it is because of my origin, my breeding,
+my traditions, my early associations, and such-like trifles. Not
+everybody can divest himself of the prejudices of a gentleman as easily
+as you have done, Mr. Heyst. But don't worry about my pluck. If you were
+to make a clean spring at me, you would receive in mid air, so to speak,
+something that would make you perfectly harmless by the time you landed.
+No, don't misapprehend us, Mr. Heyst. We are--er--adequate bandits; and
+we are after the fruit of your labours as a--er--successful swindler.
+It's the way of the world--gorge and disgorge!”
+
+He leaned wearily the back of his head against the wall. His vitality
+seemed exhausted. Even his sunken eyelids drooped within the bony
+sockets. Only his thin, waspish, beautifully pencilled eyebrows, drawn
+together a little, suggested the will and the power to sting--something
+vicious, unconquerable, and deadly.
+
+“Fruits! Swindler!” repeated Heyst, without heat, almost without
+contempt. “You are giving yourself no end of trouble, you and your
+faithful henchman, to crack an empty nut. There are no fruits here, as
+you imagine. There are a few sovereigns, which you may have if you like;
+and since you have called yourself a bandit--”
+
+“Yaas!” drawled Mr. Jones. “That, rather than a swindler. Open warfare
+at least!”
+
+“Very good! Only let me tell you that there were never in the world two
+more deluded bandits--never!”
+
+Heyst uttered these words with such energy that Mr. Jones, stiffening
+up, seemed to become thinner and taller in his metallic blue
+dressing-gown against the whitewashed wall.
+
+“Fooled by a silly, rascally innkeeper!” Heyst went on. “Talked over
+like a pair of children with a promise of sweets!”
+
+“I didn't talk with that disgusting animal,” muttered Mr. Jones
+sullenly; “but he convinced Martin, who is no fool.”
+
+“I should think he wanted very much to be convinced,” said Heyst, with
+the courteous intonation so well known in the Islands. “I don't want to
+disturb your touching trust in your--your follower, but he must be the
+most credulous brigand in existence. What do you imagine? If the story
+of my riches were ever so true, do you think Schomberg would have
+imparted it to you from sheer altruism? Is that the way of the world,
+Mr. Jones?”
+
+For a moment the lower jaw of Ricardo's gentleman dropped; but it came
+up with a snap of scorn, and he said with spectral intensity:
+
+“The beast is cowardly! He was frightened, and wanted to get rid of
+us, if you want to know, Mr. Heyst. I don't know that the material
+inducement was so very great, but I was bored, and we decided to accept
+the bribe. I don't regret it. All my life I have been seeking new
+impressions, and you have turned out to be something quite out of
+the common. Martin, of course, looks to the material results. He's
+simple--and faithful--and wonderfully acute.”
+
+“Ah, yes! He's on the track--” and now Heyst's speech had the character
+of politely grim raillery--“but not sufficiently on the track, as
+yet, to make it quite convenient to shoot me without more ado. Didn't
+Schomberg tell you precisely where I conceal the fruit of my rapines?
+Pah! Don't you know he would have told you anything, true or false, from
+a very clear motive? Revenge! Mad hate--the unclean idiot!”
+
+Mr Jones did not seem very much moved. On his right hand the doorway
+incessantly flickered with distant lightning, and the continuous rumble
+of thunder went on irritatingly, like the growl of an inarticulate giant
+muttering fatuously.
+
+Heyst overcame his immense repugnance to allude to her whose image,
+cowering in the forest was constantly before his eyes, with all the
+pathos and force of its appeal, august, pitiful, and almost holy to him.
+It was in a hurried, embarrassed manner that he went on:
+
+“If it had not been for that girl whom he persecuted with his insane and
+odious passion, and who threw herself on my protection, he would never
+have--but you know well enough!”
+
+“I don't know!” burst out Mr. Jones with amazing heat. “That
+hotel-keeper tried to talk to me once of some girl he had lost, but I
+told him I didn't want to hear any of his beastly women stories. It had
+something to do with you, had it?”
+
+Heyst looked on serenely at this outburst, then lost his patience a
+little.
+
+“What sort of comedy is this? You don't mean to say that you didn't know
+that I had--that there was a girl living with me here?”
+
+One could see that the eyes of Mr. Jones had become fixed in the depths
+of their black holes by the gleam of white becoming steady there. The
+whole man seemed frozen still.
+
+“Here! Here!” he screamed out twice. There was no mistaking his
+astonishment, his shocked incredulity--something like frightened
+disgust.
+
+Heyst was disgusted also, but in another way. He too was incredulous.
+He regretted having mentioned the girl; but the thing was done, his
+repugnance had been overcome in the heat of his argument against the
+absurd bandit.
+
+“Is it possible that you didn't know of that significant fact?” he
+inquired. “Of the only effective truth in the welter of silly lies that
+deceived you so easily?”
+
+“No, I didn't!” Mr. Jones shouted. “But Martin did!” he added in a faint
+whisper, which Heyst's ears just caught and no more.
+
+“I kept her out of sight as long as I could,” said Heyst. “Perhaps, with
+your bringing up, traditions, and so on; you will understand my reason
+for it.”
+
+“He knew. He knew before!” Mr. Jones mourned in a hollow voice. “He knew
+of her from the first!”
+
+Backed hard against the wall he no longer watched Heyst. He had the air
+of a man who had seen an abyss yawning under his feet.
+
+“If I want to kill him, this is my time,” thought Heyst; but he did not
+move.
+
+Next moment Mr. Jones jerked his head up, glaring with sardonic fury.
+
+“I have a good mind to shoot you, you woman-ridden hermit, you man in
+the moon, that can't exist without--no, it won't be you that I'll shoot.
+It's the other woman-lover--the prevaricating, sly, low-class, amorous
+cuss! And he shaved--shaved under my very nose. I'll shoot him!”
+
+“He's gone mad,” thought Heyst, startled by the spectre's sudden fury.
+
+He felt himself more in danger, nearer death, than ever since he had
+entered that room. An insane bandit is a deadly combination. He did not,
+could not know that Mr. Jones was quick-minded enough to see already the
+end of his reign over his excellent secretary's thoughts and feelings;
+the coming failure of Ricardo's fidelity. A woman had intervened!
+A woman, a girl, who apparently possessed the power to awaken
+men's disgusting folly. Her power had been proved in two instances
+already--the beastly innkeeper, and that man with moustaches, upon whom
+Mr. Jones, his deadly right hand twitching in his pocket, glared more in
+repulsion than in anger. The very object of the expedition was lost from
+view in his sudden and overwhelming sense of utter insecurity. And
+this made Mr. Jones feel very savage; but not against the man with the
+moustaches. Thus, while Heyst was really feeling that his life was
+not worth two minutes, purchase, he heard himself addressed with
+no affectation of languid impertinence but with a burst of feverish
+determination.
+
+“Here! Let's call a truce!” said Mr. Jones.
+
+Heyst's heart was too sick to allow him to smile.
+
+“Have I been making war on you?” he asked wearily. “How do you expect
+me to attach any meaning to your words?” he went on. “You seem to be a
+morbid, senseless sort of bandit. We don't speak the same language. If I
+were to tell you why I am here, talking to you, you wouldn't believe
+me, because you would not understand me. It certainly isn't the love
+of life, from which I have divorced myself long ago--not sufficiently,
+perhaps; but if you are thinking of yours, then I repeat to you that it
+has never been in danger from me. I am unarmed.”
+
+Mr Jones was biting his lower lip, in a deep meditation. It was only
+towards the last that he looked at Heyst.
+
+“Unarmed, eh?” Then he burst out violently: “I tell you, a gentleman is
+no match for the common herd. And yet one must make use of the brutes.
+Unarmed, eh? And I suppose that creature is of the commonest sort. You
+could hardly have got her out of a drawing-room. Though they're all
+alike, for that matter. Unarmed! It's a pity. I am in much greater
+danger than you are or were--or I am much mistaken. But I am not--I know
+my man!”
+
+He lost his air of mental vacancy and broke out into shrill
+exclamations. To Heyst they seemed madder than anything that had gone
+before.
+
+“On the track! On the scent!” he cried, forgetting himself to the point
+of executing a dance of rage in the middle of the floor.
+
+Heyst looked on, fascinated by this skeleton in a gay dressing-gown,
+jerkily agitated like a grotesque toy on the end of an invisible string.
+It became quiet suddenly.
+
+“I might have smelt a rat! I always knew that this would be the danger.”
+ He changed suddenly to a confidential tone, fixing his sepulchral stare
+on Heyst. “And yet here I am, taken in by the fellow, like the veriest
+fool. I've been always on the watch for some beastly influence, but here
+I am, fairly caught. He shaved himself right in front of me and I never
+guessed!”
+
+The shrill laugh, following on the low tone of secrecy, sounded so
+convincingly insane that Heyst got up as if moved by a spring. Mr. Jones
+stepped back two paces, but displayed no uneasiness.
+
+“It's as clear as daylight!” he uttered mournfully, and fell silent.
+
+Behind him the doorway flickered lividly, and the sound as of a naval
+action somewhere away on the horizon filled the breathless pause.
+Mr. Jones inclined his head on his shoulder. His mood had completely
+changed.
+
+“What do you say, unarmed man? Shall we go and see what is detaining
+my trusted Martin so long? He asked me to keep you engaged in friendly
+conversation till he made a further examination of that track. Ha, ha,
+ha!”
+
+“He is no doubt ransacking my house,” said Heyst.
+
+He was bewildered. It seemed to him that all this was an
+incomprehensible dream, or perhaps an elaborate other-world joke,
+contrived by that spectre in a gorgeous dressing gown.
+
+Mr Jones looked at him with a horrible, cadaverous smile of inscrutable
+mockery, and pointed to the door. Heyst passed through it first. His
+feelings had become so blunted that he did not care how soon he was shot
+in the back.
+
+“How oppressive the air is!” the voice of Mr. Jones said at his elbow.
+“This stupid storm gets on my nerves. I would welcome some rain, though
+it would be unpleasant to get wet. On the other hand, this exasperating
+thunder has the advantage of covering the sound of our approach. The
+lightning's not so convenient. Ah, your house is fully illuminated!
+My clever Martin is punishing your stock of candles. He belongs to the
+unceremonious classes, which are also unlovely, untrustworthy, and so
+on.”
+
+“I left the candles burning,” said Heyst, “to save him trouble.”
+
+“You really believed he would go to your house?” asked Mr. Jones with
+genuine interest.
+
+“I had that notion, strongly. I do believe he is there now.”
+
+“And you don't mind?”
+
+“No!”
+
+“You don't!” Mr. Jones stopped to wonder. “You are an extraordinary
+man,” he said suspiciously, and moved on, touching elbows with Heyst.
+
+In the latter's breast dwelt a deep silence, the complete silence of
+unused faculties. At this moment, by simply shouldering Mr. Jones, he
+could have thrown him down and put himself, by a couple of leaps, beyond
+the certain aim of the revolver; but he did not even think of that. His
+very will seemed dead of weariness. He moved automatically, his head
+low, like a prisoner captured by the evil power of a masquerading
+skeleton out of a grave. Mr. Jones took charge of the direction. They
+fetched a wide sweep. The echoes of distant thunder seemed to dog their
+footsteps.
+
+“By the by,” said Mr. Jones, as if unable to restrain his curiosity,
+“aren't you anxious about that--ouch!--that fascinating creature to whom
+you owe whatever pleasure you can find in our visit?”
+
+“I have placed her in safety,” said Heyst. “I--I took good care of
+that.”
+
+Mr Jones laid a hand on his arm.
+
+“You have? Look! is that what you mean?”
+
+Heyst raised his head. In the flicker of lightning the desolation of the
+cleared ground on his left leaped out and sank into the night, together
+with the elusive forms of things distant, pale, unearthly. But in the
+brilliant square of the door he saw the girl--the woman he had longed to
+see once more as if enthroned, with her hands on the arms of the chair.
+She was in black; her face was white, her head dreamily inclined on her
+breast. He saw her only as low as her knees. He saw her--there, in the
+room, alive with a sombre reality. It was no mocking vision. She was not
+in the forest--but there! She sat there in the chair, seemingly without
+strength, yet without fear, tenderly stooping.
+
+“Can you understand their power?” whispered the hot breath of Mr. Jones
+into his ear. “Can there be a more disgusting spectacle? It's enough to
+make the earth detestable. She seems to have found her affinity. Move
+on closer. If I have to shoot you in the end, then perhaps you will die
+cured.”
+
+Heyst obeyed the pushing pressure of a revolver barrel between his
+shoulders. He felt it distinctly, but he did not feel the ground under
+his feet. They found the steps, without his being aware that he was
+ascending them--slowly, one by one. Doubt entered into him--a doubt of
+a new kind, formless, hideous. It seemed to spread itself all over him,
+enter his limbs, and lodge in his entrails. He stopped suddenly, with
+a thought that he who experienced such a feeling had no business to
+live--or perhaps was no longer living.
+
+Everything--the bungalow, the forest, the open ground--trembled
+incessantly, the earth, the sky itself, shivered all the time, and the
+only thing immovable in the shuddering universe was the interior of the
+lighted room and the woman in black sitting in the light of the eight
+candle-flames. They flung around her an intolerable brilliance which
+hurt his eyes, seemed to sear his very brain with the radiation of
+infernal heat. It was some time before his scorched eyes made out
+Ricardo seated on the floor at some little distance, his back to the
+doorway, but only partly so; one side of his upturned face showing the
+absorbed, all forgetful rapture of his contemplation.
+
+The grip of Mr. Jones's hard claw drew Heyst back a little. In the roll
+of thunder, swelling and subsiding, he whispered in his ear a sarcastic:
+“Of course!”
+
+A great shame descended upon Heyst--the shame of guilt, absurd and
+maddening. Mr. Jones drew him still farther back into the darkness of
+the veranda.
+
+“This is serious,” he went on, distilling his ghostly venom into Heyst's
+very ear. “I had to shut my eyes many times to his little flings; but
+this is serious. He has found his soul-mate. Mud souls, obscene and
+cunning! Mud bodies, too--the mud of the gutter! I tell you, we are
+no match for the vile populace. I, even I, have been nearly caught. He
+asked me to detain you till he gave me the signal. It won't be you
+that I'll have to shoot, but him. I wouldn't trust him near me for five
+minutes after this!”
+
+He shook Heyst's arm a little.
+
+“If you had not happened to mention the creature, we should both have
+been dead before morning. He would have stabbed you as you came down
+the steps after leaving me and then he would have walked up to me and
+planted the same knife between my ribs. He has no prejudices. The viler
+the origin, the greater the freedom of these simple souls!”
+
+He drew a cautious, hissing breath and added in an agitated murmur: “I
+can see right into his mind, I have been nearly caught napping by his
+cunning.”
+
+He stretched his neck to peer into the room from the side. Heyst, too,
+made a step forward, under the slight impulse of that slender hand
+clasping his hand with a thin, bony grasp.
+
+“Behold!” the skeleton of the crazy bandit jabbered thinly into his ear
+in spectral fellowship. “Behold the simple, Acis kissing the sandals
+of the nymph, on the way to her lips, all forgetful, while the menacing
+fife of Polyphemus already sounds close at hand--if he could only hear
+it! Stoop a little.”
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+On returning to the Heyst bungalow, rapid as if on wings, Ricardo
+found Lena waiting for him. She was dressed in black; and at once his
+uplifting exultation was replaced by an awed and quivering patience
+before her white face, before the immobility of her reposeful pose, the
+more amazing to him who had encountered the strength of her limbs and
+the indomitable spirit in her body. She had come out after Heyst's
+departure, and had sat down under the portrait to wait for the return of
+the man of violence and death. While lifting the curtain, she felt the
+anguish of her disobedience to her lover, which was soothed by a feeling
+she had known before--a gentle flood of penetrating sweetness. She
+was not automatically obeying a momentary suggestion, she was under
+influences more deliberate, more vague, and of greater potency. She had
+been prompted, not by her will, but by a force that was outside of her
+and more worthy. She reckoned upon nothing definite; she had calculated
+nothing. She saw only her purpose of capturing death--savage, sudden,
+irresponsible death, prowling round the man who possessed her, death
+embodied in the knife ready to strike into his heart. No doubt it had
+been a sin to throw herself into his arms. With that inspiration
+that descends at times from above for the good or evil of our common
+mediocrity, she had a sense of having been for him only a violent and
+sincere choice of curiosity and pity--a thing that passes. She did not
+know him. If he were to go away from her and disappear, she would utter
+no reproach, she would not resent it; for she would hold in herself the
+impress of something most rare and precious--his embraces made her own
+by her courage in saving his life.
+
+All she thought of--the essence of her tremors, her flushes of heat, and
+her shudders of cold--was the question how to get hold of that knife,
+the mark and sign of stalking death. A tremor of impatience to clutch
+the frightful thing, glimpsed once and unforgettable, agitated her
+hands.
+
+The instinctive flinging forward of these hands stopped Ricardo dead
+short between the door and her chair, with the ready obedience of a
+conquered man who can bide his time. Her success disconcerted her. She
+listened to the man's impassioned transports of terrible eulogy and even
+more awful declarations of love. She was even able to meet his eyes,
+oblique, apt to glide away, throwing feral gleams of desire.
+
+“No!” he was saying, after a fiery outpouring of words in which the most
+ferocious phrases of love were mingled with wooing accents of entreaty.
+“I will have no more of it! Don't you mistrust me. I am sober in my
+talk. Feel how quietly my heart beats. Ten times today when you, you,
+you, swam in my eye, I thought it would burst one of my ribs or leap
+out of my throat. It has knocked itself dead and tired, waiting for this
+evening, for this very minute. And now it can do no more. Feel how quiet
+it is!”
+
+He made a step forward, but she raised her clear voice commandingly:
+
+“No nearer!”
+
+He stopped with a smile of imbecile worship on his lips, and with the
+delighted obedience of a man who could at any moment seize her in his
+hands and dash her to the ground.
+
+“Ah! If I had taken you by the throat this morning and had my way with
+you, I should never have known what you are. And now I do. You are a
+wonder! And so am I, in my way. I have nerve, and I have brains, too.
+We should have been lost many times but for me. I plan--I plot for my
+gentleman. Gentleman--pah! I am sick of him. And you are sick of yours,
+eh? You, you!”
+
+He shook all over; he cooed at her a string of endearing names, obscene
+and tender, and then asked abruptly:
+
+“Why don't you speak to me?”
+
+“It's my part to listen,” she said, giving him an inscrutable smile,
+with a flush on her cheek and her lips cold as ice.
+
+“But you will answer me?”
+
+“Yes,” she said, her eyes dilated as if with sudden interest.
+
+“Where's that plunder? Do you know?”
+
+“No! Not yet.”
+
+“But there is plunder stowed somewhere that's worth having?”
+
+“Yes, I think so. But who knows?” she added after a pause.
+
+“And who cares?” he retorted recklessly. “I've had enough of this
+crawling on my belly. It's you who are my treasure. It's I who found you
+out where a gentleman had buried you to rot for his accursed pleasure!”
+
+He looked behind him and all around for a seat, then turned to her his
+troubled eyes and dim smile.
+
+“I am dog-tired,” he said, and sat down on the floor. “I went tired this
+morning, since I came in here and started talking to you--as tired as if
+I had been pouring my life-blood here on these planks for you to dabble
+your white feet in.”
+
+Unmoved, she nodded at him thoughtfully. Woman-like, all her faculties
+remained concentrated on her heart's desire--on the knife--while the man
+went on babbling insanely at her feet, ingratiating and savage, almost
+crazy with elation. But he, too, was holding on to his purpose.
+
+“For you! For you I will throw away money, lives--all the lives but
+mine! What you want is a man, a master that will let you put the heel of
+your shoe on his neck; not that skulker, who will get tired of you in a
+year--and you of him. And then what? You are not the one to sit still;
+neither am I. I live for myself, and you shall live for yourself,
+too--not for a Swedish baron. They make a convenience of people like you
+and me. A gentleman is better than an employer, but an equal partnership
+against all the 'yporcrits is the thing for you and me. We'll go on
+wandering the world over, you and I both free and both true. You are no
+cage bird. We'll rove together, for we are of them that have no homes.
+We are born rovers!”
+
+She listened to him with the utmost attention, as if any unexpected
+word might give her some sort of opening to get that dagger, that awful
+knife--to disarm murder itself, pleading for her love at her feet. Again
+she nodded at him thoughtfully, rousing a gleam in his yellow eyes,
+yearning devotedly upon her face. When he hitched himself a little
+closer, her soul had no movement of recoil. This had to be. Anything
+had to be which would bring the knife within her reach. He talked more
+confidentially now.
+
+“We have met, and their time has come,” he began, looking up into her
+eyes. “The partnership between me and my gentleman has to be ripped up.
+There's no room for him where we two are. Why, he would shoot me like a
+dog! Don't you worry. This will settle it not later than tonight!”
+
+He tapped his folded leg below the knee, and was surprised, flattered,
+by the lighting up of her face, which stooped towards him eagerly and
+remained expectant, the lips girlishly parted, red in the pale face, and
+quivering in the quickened drawing of her breath.
+
+“You marvel, you miracle, you man's luck and joy--one in a million! No,
+the only one. You have found your man in me,” he whispered tremulously.
+“Listen! They are having their last talk together; for I'll do for your
+gentleman, too, by midnight.”
+
+Without the slightest tremor she murmured, as soon as the tightening of
+her breast had eased off and the words would come:
+
+“I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry--with him.”
+
+The pause, the tone, had all the value of meditated advice.
+
+“Good, thrifty girl!” he laughed low, with a strange feline gaiety,
+expressed by the undulating movement of his shoulders and the sparkling
+snap of his oblique eyes. “You are still thinking about the chance of
+that swag. You'll make a good partner, that you will! And, I say, what a
+decoy you will make! Jee-miny!”
+
+He was carried away for a moment, but his face darkened swiftly.
+
+“No! No reprieve. What do you think a fellow is--a scarecrow? All hat
+and clothes and no feeling, no inside, no brain to make fancies for
+himself? No!” he went on violently. “Never in his life will he go again
+into that room of yours--never any more!”
+
+A silence fell. He was gloomy with the torment of his jealousy, and did
+not even look at her. She sat up and slowly, gradually, bent lower and
+lower over him, as if ready to fall into his arms. He looked up at last,
+and checked this droop unwittingly.
+
+“Say! You, who are up to fighting a man with your bare hands, could
+you--eh?--could you manage to stick one with a thing like that knife of
+mine?”
+
+She opened her eyes very wide and gave him a wild smile.
+
+“How can I tell?” she whispered enchantingly. “Will you let me have a
+look at it?”
+
+Without taking his eyes from her face, he pulled the knife out of its
+sheath--a short, broad, cruel double-edged blade with a bone handle--and
+only then looked down at it.
+
+“A good friend,” he said simply. “Take it in your hand and feel the
+balance,” he suggested.
+
+At the moment when she bent forward to receive it from him, there was
+a flash of fire in her mysterious eyes--a red gleam in the white mist
+which wrapped the promptings and longings of her soul. She had done it!
+The very sting of death was in her hands, the venom of the viper in her
+paradise, extracted, safe in her possession--and the viper's head all
+but lying under her heel. Ricardo, stretched on the mats of the floor,
+crept closer and closer to the chair in which she sat.
+
+All her thoughts were busy planning how to keep possession of that
+weapon which had seemed to have drawn into itself every danger and
+menace on the death-ridden earth. She said with a low laugh, the
+exultation in which he failed to recognize:
+
+“I didn't think that you would ever trust me with that thing!”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“For fear I should suddenly strike you with it.”
+
+“What for? For this morning's work? Oh, no! There's no spite in you for
+that. You forgave me. You saved me. You got the better of me, too. And
+anyhow, what good would it be?”
+
+“No, no good,” she admitted.
+
+In her heart she felt that she would not know how to do it; that if it
+came to a struggle, she would have to drop the dagger and fight with her
+hands.
+
+“Listen. When we are going about the world together, you shall always
+call me husband. Do you hear?”
+
+“Yes,” she said bracing herself for the contest, in whatever shape it
+was coming.
+
+The knife was lying in her lap. She let it slip into the fold of her
+dress, and laid her forearms with clasped fingers over her knees, which
+she pressed desperately together. The dreaded thing was out of sight at
+last. She felt a dampness break out all over her.
+
+“I am not going to hide you, like that good-for-nothing, finicky, sneery
+gentleman. You shall be my pride and my chum. Isn't that better than
+rotting on an island for the pleasure of a gentleman, till he gives you
+the chuck?”
+
+“I'll be anything you like,” she said.
+
+In his intoxication he crept closer with every word she uttered, with
+every movement she made.
+
+“Give your foot,” he begged in a timid murmur, and in the full
+consciousness of his power.
+
+Anything! Anything to keep murder quiet and disarmed till strength had
+returned to her limbs and she could make up her mind what to do. Her
+fortitude had been shaken by the very facility of success that had come
+to her. She advanced her foot forward a little from under the hem of her
+skirt; and he threw himself on it greedily. She was not even aware of
+him. She had thought of the forest, to which she had been told to run.
+Yes, the forest--that was the place for her to carry off the terrible
+spoil, the sting of vanquished death. Ricardo, clasping her ankle,
+pressed his lips time after time to the instep, muttering gasping words
+that were like sobs, making little noises that resembled the sounds of
+grief and distress. Unheard by them both, the thunder growled distantly
+with angry modulations of it's tremendous voice, while the world outside
+shuddered incessantly around the dead stillness of the room where the
+framed profile of Heyst's father looked severely into space.
+
+Suddenly Ricardo felt himself spurned by the foot he had been
+cherishing--spurned with a push of such violence into the very hollow of
+his throat that it swung him back instantly into an upright position on
+his knees. He read his danger in the stony eyes of the girl; and in
+the very act of leaping to his feet he heard sharply, detached on the
+comminatory voice of the storm the brief report of a shot which half
+stunned him, in the manner of a blow. He turned his burning head, and
+saw Heyst towering in the doorway. The thought that the beggar had
+started to prance darted through his mind. For a fraction of a second
+his distracted eyes sought for his weapon all over the floor. He
+couldn't see it.
+
+“Stick him, you!” he called hoarsely to the girl, and dashed headlong
+for the door of the compound.
+
+While he thus obeyed the instinct of self-preservation, his reason was
+telling him that he could not possibly reach it alive. It flew open,
+however, with a crash, before his launched weight, and instantly he
+swung it to behind him. There, his shoulder leaning against it, his
+hands clinging to the handle, dazed and alone in the night full of
+shudders and muttered menaces, he tried to pull himself together. He
+asked himself if he had been shot at more than once. His shoulder was
+wet with the blood trickling from his head. Feeling above his ear, he
+ascertained that it was only a graze, but the shock of the surprise had
+unmanned him for the moment.
+
+What the deuce was the governor about to let the beggar break loose like
+this? Or--was the governor dead, perhaps?
+
+The silence within the room awed him. Of going back there could be no
+question.
+
+“But she knows how to take care of her self,” he muttered.
+
+She had his knife. It was she now who was deadly, while he was disarmed,
+no good for the moment. He stole away from the door, staggering, the
+warm trickle running down his neck, to find out what had become of the
+governor and to provide himself with a firearm from the armoury in the
+trunks.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+Mr Jones, after firing his shot over Heyst's shoulder, had thought it
+proper to dodge away. Like the spectre he was, he noiselessly vanished
+from the veranda. Heyst stumbled into the room and looked around. All
+the objects in there--the books, portrait on the wall--seemed shadowy,
+unsubstantial, the dumb accomplices of an amazing dream-plot ending in
+an illusory effect of awakening and the impossibility of ever closing
+his eyes again. With dread he forced himself to look at the girl. Still
+in the chair, she was leaning forward far over her knees, and had hidden
+her face in her hands. Heyst remembered Wang suddenly. How clear all
+this was--and how extremely amusing! Very.
+
+She sat up a little, then leaned back, and taking her hands from her
+face, pressed both of them to her breast as if moved to the heart by
+seeing him there looking at her with a black, horror-struck curiosity.
+He would have pitied her, if the triumphant expression of her face had
+not given him a shock which destroyed the balance of his feelings. She
+spoke with an accent of wild joy:
+
+“I knew you would come back in time! You are safe now. I have done it!
+I would never, never have let him--” Her voice died out, while her eyes
+shone at him as when the sun breaks through a mist. “Never get it back.
+Oh, my beloved!”
+
+He bowed his head gravely, and said in his polite. Heystian tone:
+
+“No doubt you acted from instinct. Women have been provided with their
+own weapon. I was a disarmed man, I have been a disarmed man all my life
+as I see it now. You may glory in your resourcefulness and your profound
+knowledge of yourself; but I may say that the other attitude, suggestive
+of shame, had its charm. For you are full of charm!”
+
+The exultation vanished from her face.
+
+“You mustn't make fun of me now. I know no shame. I was thanking God
+with all my sinful heart for having been able to do it--for giving you
+to me in that way--oh, my beloved--all my own at last!”
+
+He stared as if mad. Timidly she tried to excuse herself for disobeying
+his directions for her safety. Every modulation of her enchanting voice
+cut deep into his very breast, so that he could hardly understand the
+words for the sheer pain of it. He turned his back on her; but a sudden
+drop, an extraordinary faltering of her tone, made him spin round. On
+her white neck her pale head dropped as in a cruel drought a withered
+flower droops on its stalk. He caught his breath, looked at her closely,
+and seemed to read some awful intelligence in her eyes. At the moment
+when her eyelids fell as if smitten from above by an the gleam of
+old silver familiar to him from boyhood, the very invisible power, he
+snatched her up bodily out of the chair, and disregarding an unexpected
+metallic clatter on the floor, carried her off into the other room. The
+limpness of her body frightened him. Laying her down on the bed, he
+ran out again, seized a four-branched candlestick on the table, and ran
+back, tearing down with a furious jerk the curtain that swung stupidly
+in his way, but after putting the candlestick on the table by the bed,
+he remained absolutely idle. There did not seem anything more for him
+to do. Holding his chin in his hand he looked down intently at her still
+face.
+
+“Has she been stabbed with this thing?” asked Davidson, whom suddenly he
+saw standing by his side and holding up Ricardo's dagger to his sight.
+Heyst uttered no word of recognition or surprise. He gave Davidson only
+a dumb look of unutterable awe, then, as if possessed with a sudden
+fury, started tearing open the front of the girls dress. She remained
+insensible under his hands, and Heyst let out a groan which made
+Davidson shudder inwardly the heavy plaint of a man who falls clubbed in
+the dark.
+
+They stood side by side, looking mournfully at the little black hole
+made by Mr. Jones's bullet under the swelling breast of a dazzling and
+as it were sacred whiteness. It rose and fell slightly--so slightly that
+only the eyes of the lover could detect the faint stir of life. Heyst,
+calm and utterly unlike himself in the face, moving about noiselessly,
+prepared a wet cloth, and laid it on the insignificant wound,
+round which there was hardly a trace of blood to mar the charm, the
+fascination, of that mortal flesh.
+
+Her eyelids fluttered. She looked drowsily about, serene, as if fatigued
+only by the exertions of her tremendous victory, capturing the very
+sting of death in the service of love. But her eyes became very
+wide awake when they caught sight of Ricardo's dagger, the spoil of
+vanquished death, which Davidson was still holding, unconsciously.
+
+“Give it to me,” she said. “It's mine.”
+
+Davidson put the symbol of her victory into her feeble hands extended to
+him with the innocent gesture of a child reaching eagerly for a toy.
+
+“For you,” she gasped, turning her eyes to Heyst. “Kill nobody.”
+
+“No,” said Heyst, taking the dagger and laying it gently on her breast,
+while her hands fell powerless by her side.
+
+The faint smile on her deep-cut lips waned, and her head sank deep into
+the pillow, taking on the majestic pallor and immobility of marble.
+But over the muscles, which seemed set in their transfigured beauty for
+ever, passed a slight and awful tremor. With an amazing strength she
+asked loudly:
+
+“What's the matter with me?”
+
+“You have been shot, dear Lena,” Heyst said in a steady voice, while
+Davidson, at the question, turned away and leaned his forehead against
+the post of the foot of the bed.
+
+“Shot? I did think, too, that something had struck me.”
+
+Over Samburan the thunder had ceased to growl at last, and the world of
+material forms shuddered no more under the emerging stars. The spirit
+of the girl which was passing away from under them clung to her triumph
+convinced of the reality of her victory over death.
+
+“No more,” she muttered. “There will be no more! Oh, my beloved,” she
+cried weakly, “I've saved you! Why don't you take me into your arms and
+carry me out of this lonely place?”
+
+Heyst bent low over her, cursing his fastidious soul, which even at that
+moment kept the true cry of love from his lips in its infernal mistrust
+of all life. He dared not touch her and she had no longer the strength
+to throw her arms about his neck.
+
+“Who else could have done this for you?” she whispered gloriously.
+
+“No one in the world,” he answered her in a murmur of unconcealed
+despair.
+
+She tried to raise herself, but all she could do was to lift her head
+a little from the pillow. With a terrible and gentle movement, Heyst
+hastened to slip his arm under her neck. She felt relieved at once of
+an intolerable weight, and was content to surrender to him the infinite
+weariness of her tremendous achievement. Exulting, she saw herself
+extended on the bed, in a black dress, and profoundly at peace, while,
+stooping over her with a kindly, playful smile, he was ready to lift
+her up in his firm arms and take her into the sanctuary of his innermost
+heart--for ever! The flush of rapture flooding her whole being broke out
+in a smile of innocent, girlish happiness; and with that divine radiance
+on her lips she breathed her last--triumphant, seeking for his glance in
+the shades of death.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+ “Yes, Excellency,” said Davidson in his placid voice; “there are more dead in this affair--more white people, I mean--than have been killed in many of the battles in the last Achin war.”
+
+Davidson was talking with an Excellency, because what was alluded to in
+conversation as “the mystery of Samburan” had caused such a sensation in
+the Archipelago that even those in the highest spheres were anxious to
+hear something at first hand. Davidson had been summoned to an audience.
+It was a high official on his tour.
+
+“You knew the late Baron Heyst well?”
+
+“The truth is that nobody out here can boast of having known him well,”
+ said Davidson. “He was a queer chap. I doubt if he himself knew how
+queer he was. But everybody was aware that I was keeping my eye on him
+in a friendly way. And that's how I got the warning which made me turn
+round in my tracks. In the middle of my trip and steam back to Samburan,
+where, I am grieved to say, I arrived too late.”
+
+Without enlarging very much, Davidson explained to the attentive
+Excellency how a woman, the wife of a certain hotel-keeper named
+Schomberg, had overheard two card-sharping rascals making inquiries from
+her husband as to the exact position of the island. She caught only a
+few words referring to the neighbouring volcano, but there were enough
+to arouse her suspicions--“which,” went on Davidson, “she imparted to
+me, your Excellency. They were only too well founded!”
+
+“That was very clever of her,” remarked the great man.
+
+“She's much cleverer than people have any conception of,” said Davidson.
+
+But he refrained from disclosing to the Excellency the real cause which
+had sharpened Mrs. Schomberg's wits. The poor woman was in mortal terror
+of the girl being brought back within reach of her infatuated Wilhelm.
+Davidson only said that her agitation had impressed him; but he
+confessed that while going back, he began to have his doubts as to there
+being anything in it.
+
+“I steamed into one of those silly thunderstorms that hang about the
+volcano, and had some trouble in making the island,” narrated Davidson.
+“I had to grope my way dead slow into Diamond Bay. I don't suppose that
+anybody, even if looking out for me, could have heard me let go the
+anchor.”
+
+He admitted that he ought to have gone ashore at once; but everything
+was perfectly dark and absolutely quiet. He felt ashamed of his
+impulsiveness. What a fool he would have looked, waking up a man in the
+middle of the night just to ask him if he was all right! And then the
+girl being there, he feared that Heyst would look upon his visit as an
+unwarrantable intrusion.
+
+The first intimation he had of there being anything wrong was a big
+white boat, adrift, with the dead body of a very hairy man inside,
+bumping against the bows of his steamer. Then indeed he lost no time in
+going ashore--alone, of course, from motives of delicacy.
+
+“I arrived in time to see that poor girl die, as I have told your
+Excellency,” pursued Davidson. “I won't tell you what a time I had with
+him afterwards. He talked to me. His father seems to have been a crank,
+and to have upset his head when he was young. He was a queer chap.
+Practically the last words he said to me, as we came out on the veranda,
+were:
+
+“'Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young
+to hope, to love--and to put its trust in life!'
+
+“As we stood there, just before I left him, for he said he wanted to be
+alone with his dead for a time, we heard a snarly sort of voice near the
+bushes by the shore calling out:
+
+“'Is that you, governor?'
+
+“'Yes, it's me.'
+
+“'Jeeminy! I thought the beggar had done for you. He has started
+prancing and nearly had me. I have been dodging around, looking for you
+ever since.'
+
+“'Well, here I am,' suddenly screamed the other voice, and then a shot
+rang out.
+
+“'This time he has not missed him,' Heyst said to me bitterly, and went
+back into the house.
+
+“I returned on board as he had insisted I should do. I didn't want
+to intrude on his grief. Later, about five in the morning, some of my
+calashes came running to me, yelling that there was a fire ashore. I
+landed at once, of course. The principal bungalow was blazing. The
+heat drove us back. The other two houses caught one after another like
+kindling-wood. There was no going beyond the shore end of the jetty till
+the afternoon.”
+
+Davidson sighed placidly.
+
+“I suppose you are certain that Baron Heyst is dead?”
+
+“He is--ashes, your Excellency,” said Davidson, wheezing a little; “he
+and the girl together. I suppose he couldn't stand his thoughts before
+her dead body--and fire purifies everything. That Chinaman of whom I
+told your Excellency helped me to investigate next day, when the
+embers got cooled a little. We found enough to be sure. He's not a bad
+Chinaman. He told me that he had followed Heyst and the girl through the
+forest from pity, and partly out of curiosity. He watched the house till
+he saw Heyst go out, after dinner, and Ricardo come back alone. While he
+was dodging there, it occurred to him that he had better cast the boat
+adrift, for fear those scoundrels should come round by water and bombard
+the village from the sea with their revolvers and Winchesters. He judged
+that they were devils enough for anything. So he walked down the wharf
+quietly; and as he got into the boat, to cast her off, that hairy man
+who, it seems, was dozing in her, jumped up growling, and Wang shot him
+dead. Then he shoved the boat off as far as he could and went away.”
+
+There was a pause. Presently Davidson went on, in his tranquil manner:
+
+“Let Heaven look after what has been purified. The wind and rain will
+take care of the ashes. The carcass of that follower, secretary, or
+whatever the unclean ruffian called himself, I left where it lay, to
+swell and rot in the sun. His principal had shot him neatly through the
+head. Then, apparently, this Jones went down to the wharf to look for
+the boat and for the hairy man. I suppose he tumbled into the water by
+accident--or perhaps not by accident. The boat and the man were gone,
+and the scoundrel saw himself alone, his game clearly up, and fairly
+trapped. Who knows? The water's very clear there, and I could see him
+huddled up on the bottom, between two piles, like a heap of bones in a
+blue silk bag, with only the head and the feet sticking out. Wang was
+very pleased when he discovered him. That made everything safe, he said,
+and he went at once over the hill to fetch his Alfuro woman back to the
+hut.”
+
+Davidson took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his
+forehead.
+
+“And then, your Excellency, I went away. There was nothing to be done
+there.”
+
+“Clearly!” assented the Excellency.
+
+Davidson, thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and then
+murmured with placid sadness:
+
+“Nothing!”
+
+October 1912--May 1914
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Victory, by Joseph Conrad
+
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Victory: an Island Tale, by Joseph Conrad
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Victory, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Victory
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #6378]
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VICTORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tracy Camp and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      <a href="#linkmain">VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE</a>
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Joseph Conrad
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> AUTHOR'S NOTE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART1"> <big><b>PART ONE</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER ONE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER TWO </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER THREE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER FOUR </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER FIVE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER SIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER SEVEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART2"> <big><b>PART TWO</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER ONE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER TWO </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER THREE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER FOUR </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER FIVE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER SIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER SEVEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER EIGHT </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART3"> <big><b>PART THREE</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER ONE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER TWO </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER THREE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER FOUR </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER FIVE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER SIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER SEVEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER EIGHT </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER NINE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER TEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PART4"> <big><b>PART FOUR</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER ONE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER TWO </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0028"> CHAPTER THREE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0029"> CHAPTER FOUR </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0030"> CHAPTER FIVE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0031"> CHAPTER SIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0032"> CHAPTER SEVEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0033"> CHAPTER EIGHT </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0034"> CHAPTER NINE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0035"> CHAPTER TEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0036"> CHAPTER ELEVEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0037"> CHAPTER TWELVE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0038"> CHAPTER THIRTEEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2HCH0039"> CHAPTER FOURTEEN </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+        <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914. And that last word
+      was the single word of the title.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those were the times of peace. Now that the moment of publication
+      approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the
+      title-page. The word &ldquo;Victory&rdquo; the shining and tragic goal of noble
+      effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere
+      novel. There was also the possibility of falling under the suspicion of
+      commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book
+      had something to do with war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of that, however, I was not afraid very much. What influenced my decision
+      most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of awe and wonder
+      which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity. &ldquo;Victory&rdquo; was the
+      last word I had written in peace-time. It was the last literary thought
+      which had occurred to me before the doors of the Temple of Janus flying
+      open with a crash shook the minds, the hearts, the consciences of men all
+      over the world. Such coincidence could not be treated lightly. And I made
+      up my mind to let the word stand, in the same hopeful spirit in which some
+      simple citizen of Old Rome would have &ldquo;accepted the Omen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence (in
+      the novel) of a person named Schomberg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That I believe him to be true goes without saying. I am not likely to
+      offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an old member
+      of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far back as the
+      year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story of mine
+      published in 1902. Here he appears in a still larger part, true to life (I
+      hope), but also true to himself. Only, in this instance, his deeper
+      passions come into play, and thus his grotesque psychology is completed at
+      last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology; but it
+      is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton. My object in mentioning him
+      here is to bring out the fact that, far from being the incarnation of
+      recent animosities, he is the creature of my old deep-seated, and, as it
+      were, impartial conviction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      J. C. <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AUTHOR'S NOTE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first thing
+      I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness to me
+      personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written, and to the mixed
+      feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained when first
+      published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the war. The
+      writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the murder of an Austrian
+      Archduke sounded the first note of warning for a world already full of
+      doubts and fears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The contemporaneous very short Author's Note which is preserved in this
+      edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I consented to
+      the publication of the book. The fact of the book having been published in
+      the United States early in the year made it difficult to delay its
+      appearance in England any longer. It came out in the thirteenth month of
+      the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful incongruity of
+      throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter of reality, tragic
+      enough in all conscience, but even more cruel than tragic and more
+      inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to think there would
+      be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in the crash of the
+      big guns and in the din of brave words expressing the truth of an
+      indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp knife at its
+      throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power
+      of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that
+      the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for
+      his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly
+      on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his
+      performance of Beethoven's sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to
+      his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with
+      perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an
+      angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our
+      terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of
+      wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the
+      critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps
+      from a sense of infinite littleness and which is yet the only faculty that
+      seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our fate
+      that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
+      detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly Mr.
+      Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the man
+      of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine
+      attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of
+      stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a
+      remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this
+      minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.
+      Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting
+      himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
+      physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of
+      mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the
+      man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the
+      matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.
+      The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most
+      pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst. I
+      have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who stands behind
+      the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a mysterious
+      Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not so certain. He
+      himself never laid claim to that distinction. His detachment was too great
+      to make any claims, big or small, on one's credulity. I will not say where
+      I met him because I fear to give my readers a wrong impression, since a
+      marked incongruity between a man and his surroundings is often a very
+      misleading circumstance. We became very friendly for a time, and I would
+      not like to expose him to unpleasant suspicions though, personally, I am
+      sure he would have been indifferent to suspicions as he was indifferent to
+      all the other disadvantages of life. He was not the whole Heyst of course;
+      he is only the physical and moral foundation of my Heyst laid on the
+      ground of a short acquaintance. That it was short was certainly not my
+      fault for he had charmed me by the mere amenity of his detachment which,
+      in this case, I cannot help thinking he had carried to excess. He went
+      away from his rooms without leaving a trace. I wondered where he had gone
+      to&mdash;but now I know. He vanished from my ken only to drift into this
+      adventure that, unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted
+      in looking upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight. Often in
+      the course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense of a
+      phrase heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I have fastened
+      on to him many words heard on other men's lips and belonging to other
+      men's less perfect, less pathetic moods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who is
+      built on a much slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or whatever his name was)
+      did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out of the
+      room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West
+      Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on
+      three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his
+      immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance.
+      Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs
+      brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of
+      his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most
+      desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said: &ldquo;A professional
+      sharper?&rdquo; and got for an answer: &ldquo;He's a terror; but I must say that up to
+      a certain point he will play fair. . . .&rdquo; I wonder what the point was. I
+      never saw him again because I believe he went straight on board a
+      mail-boat which left within the hour for other ports of call in the
+      direction of Aspinall. Mr. Jones's characteristic insolence belongs to
+      another man of a quite different type. I will say nothing as to the
+      origins of his mentality because I don't intend to make any damaging
+      admissions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It so happened that the very same year Ricardo&mdash;the physical Ricardo&mdash;was
+      a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and extremely dirty
+      little schooner, during a four days' passage between two places in the
+      Gulf of Mexico whose names don't matter. For the most part he lay on deck
+      aft as it were at my feet, and raising himself from time to time on his
+      elbow would talk about himself and go on talking, not exactly to me or
+      even at me (he would not even look up but kept his eyes fixed on the deck)
+      but more as if communing in a low voice with his familiar devil. Now and
+      then he would give me a glance and make the hairs of his stiff little
+      moustache stir quaintly. His eyes were green and every cat I see to this
+      day reminds me of the exact contour of his face. What he was travelling
+      for or what was his business in life he never confided to me. Truth to
+      say, the only passenger on board that schooner who could have talked
+      openly about his activities and purposes was a very snuffy and
+      conversationally delightful friar, the superior of a convent, attended by
+      a very young lay brother, of a particularly ferocious countenance. We had
+      with us also, lying prostrate in the dark and unspeakable cuddy of that
+      schooner, an old Spanish gentleman, owner of much luggage and, as Ricardo
+      assured me, very ill indeed. Ricardo seemed to be either a servant or the
+      confidant of that aged and distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the
+      passage held a long murmured conversation with the friar, and after that
+      did nothing but groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and then call for
+      Martin in a voice full of pain. Then he who had become Ricardo in the book
+      would go below into that beastly and noisome hole, remain there
+      mysteriously, and coming up on deck again with a face on which nothing
+      could be read, would as likely as not resume for my edification the
+      exposition of his moral attitude towards life illustrated by striking
+      particular instances of the most atrocious complexion. Did he mean to
+      frighten me? Or seduce me? Or astonish me? Or arouse my admiration? All he
+      did was to arouse my amused incredulity. As scoundrels go he was far from
+      being a bore. For the rest my innocence was so great then that I could not
+      take his philosophy seriously. All the time he kept one ear turned to the
+      cuddy in the manner of a devoted servant, but I had the idea that in some
+      way or other he had imposed the connection on the invalid for some end of
+      his own. The reader, therefore, won't be surprised to hear that one
+      morning I was told without any particular emotion by the padrone of the
+      schooner that the &ldquo;rich man&rdquo; down there was dead: He had died in the
+      night. I don't remember ever being so moved by the desolate end of a
+      complete stranger. I looked down the skylight, and there was the devoted
+      Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose white
+      beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could make out in the dark
+      depths of a horrible stuffy bunk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during
+      all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late &ldquo;rich man&rdquo; had to
+      be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in sight
+      of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination. The
+      excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense
+      commiseration: &ldquo;The poor man has left a young daughter.&rdquo; Who was to look
+      after her I don't know, but I saw the devoted Martin taking the trunks
+      ashore with great care just before I landed myself. I would perhaps have
+      tracked the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a little while, but
+      I had some of my own very pressing business to attend to, which in the end
+      got mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give to Ricardo.
+      The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten him, though.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my observation of
+      him was less complete but incomparably more anxious. It ended in a sudden
+      inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a hovel of sticks and mats by
+      the side of a path. As I went in there only to ask for a bottle of
+      lemonade I have not to this day the slightest idea what in my appearance
+      or actions could have roused his terrible ire. It became manifest to me
+      less than two minutes after I had set eyes on him for the first time, and
+      though immensely surprised of course I didn't stop to think it out I took
+      the nearest short cut&mdash;through the wall. This bestial apparition and
+      a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti only a couple of
+      months afterwards, have fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning
+      rage, as manifested in the human animal, to the end of my days. Of the
+      nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. Of Pedro never. The
+      impression was less vivid. I got away from him too quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my
+      memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world&mdash;so
+      natural that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there, they
+      had to come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who
+      had taken to his trade without preparation, or premeditation, and without
+      any moral intention but that which pervades the whole scheme of this world
+      of senses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the origins
+      of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena, because if I
+      were to leave her out it would look like a slight; and nothing would be
+      further from my thoughts than putting a slight on Lena. If of all the
+      personages involved in the &ldquo;mystery of Samburan&rdquo; I have lived longest with
+      Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at her, whom I call Lena, that I
+      have looked the longest and with a most sustained attention. This
+      attention originated in idleness for which I have a natural talent. One
+      evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the tropics but of the
+      South of France. It was filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of voices, the
+      rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of strident music. The orchestra was
+      rather smaller than the one that performed at Schomberg's hotel, had the
+      air more of a family party than of an enlisted band, and, I must confess,
+      seemed rather more respectable than the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It
+      was less pretentious also, more homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch
+      that in the intervals when all the performers left the platform one of
+      them went amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous and
+      francs in a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It
+      was a girl. Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled
+      or even surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to
+      which a man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and
+      wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker and
+      with no other sound but the slight rattle of the coins to attract
+      attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed
+      but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half a
+      lifetime, and it was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that I dropped
+      a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the sleep-walker turned
+      her head to gaze at me and said &ldquo;Merci, Monsieur&rdquo; in a tone in which there
+      was no gratitude but only surprise. I must have been idle indeed to take
+      the trouble to remark on such slight evidence that the voice was very
+      charming and when the performers resumed their seats I shifted my position
+      slightly in order not to have that particular performer hidden from me by
+      the little man with the beard who conducted, and who might for all I know
+      have been her father, but whose real mission in life was to be a model for
+      the Zangiacomo of Victory. Having got a clear line of sight I naturally
+      (being idle) continued to look at the girl through all the second part of
+      the programme. The shape of her dark head inclined over the violin was
+      fascinating, and, while resting between the pieces of that interminable
+      programme she was, in her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in
+      her lap, the very image of dreamy innocence. The mature, bad-tempered
+      woman at the piano might have been her mother, though there was not the
+      slightest resemblance between them. All I am certain of in their personal
+      relation to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper part of the arm.
+      That I am sure I have seen! There could be no mistake. I was in too idle a
+      mood to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. It may have been playfulness,
+      yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. It may have
+      been playfulness. Yet I saw plainly poor &ldquo;dreamy innocence&rdquo; rub gently the
+      affected place as she filed off with the other performers down the middle
+      aisle between the marble tables in the uproar of voices, the rattling of
+      dominoes through a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke. I believe that those
+      people left the town next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the other side
+      of the Place de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did not go across to
+      find out. It was my perfect idleness that had invested the girl with a
+      peculiar charm, and I did not want to destroy it by any superfluous
+      exertion. The receptivity of my indolence made the impression so permanent
+      that when the moment came for her meeting with Heyst I felt that she would
+      be heroically equal to every demand of the risky and uncertain future. I
+      was so convinced of it that I let her go with Heyst, I won't say without a
+      pang but certainly without misgivings. And in view of her triumphant end
+      what more could I have done for her rehabilitation and her happiness?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1920. J. C. <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART1" id="link2H_PART1">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br /> <a name="linkmain" id="linkmain"></a>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      PART ONE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER ONE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close
+      chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe,
+      why some people allude to coal as &ldquo;black diamonds.&rdquo; Both these commodities
+      represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. There
+      is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal.
+      Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket&mdash;but it
+      can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme
+      commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in
+      a garish, unrestful hotel. And I suppose those two considerations, the
+      practical and the mystical, prevented Heyst&mdash;Axel Heyst&mdash;from
+      going away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of finance
+      is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear,
+      evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then
+      the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural physics, but
+      they account for the persistent inertia of Heyst, at which we &ldquo;out there&rdquo;
+       used to laugh among ourselves&mdash;but not inimically. An inert body can
+      do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is scarcely worth derision.
+      It may, indeed, be in the way sometimes; but this could not be said of
+      Axel Heyst. He was out of everybody's way, as if he were perched on the
+      highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous. Everyone in
+      that part of the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island. An
+      island is but the top of a mountain. Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably,
+      was surrounded, instead of the imponderable stormy and transparent ocean
+      of air merging into infinity, by a tepid, shallow sea; a passionless
+      offshoot of the great waters which embrace the continents of this globe.
+      His most frequent visitors were shadows, the shadows of clouds, relieving
+      the monotony of the inanimate, brooding sunshine of the tropics. His
+      nearest neighbour&mdash;I am speaking now of things showing some sort of
+      animation&mdash;was an indolent volcano which smoked faintly all day with
+      its head just above the northern horizon, and at night levelled at him,
+      from amongst the clear stars, a dull red glow, expanding and collapsing
+      spasmodically like the end of a gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently in
+      the dark. Axel Heyst was also a smoker; and when he lounged out on his
+      veranda with his cheroot, the last thing before going to bed, he made in
+      the night the same sort of glow and of the same size as that other one so
+      many miles away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the night&mdash;which
+      were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath of air through.
+      There was seldom enough wind to blow a feather along. On most evenings of
+      the year Heyst could have sat outside with a naked candle to read one of
+      the books left him by his late father. It was not a mean store. But he
+      never did that. Afraid of mosquitoes, very likely. Neither was he ever
+      tempted by the silence to address any casual remarks to the companion glow
+      of the volcano. He was not mad. Queer chap&mdash;yes, that may have been
+      said, and in fact was said; but there is a tremendous difference between
+      the two, you will allow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan&mdash;the &ldquo;Round
+      Island&rdquo; of the charts&mdash;was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light
+      Heyst could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of an
+      abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle: vague roofs above low
+      vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long grass,
+      something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged thickets
+      towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with a black jetty
+      and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted side. But the most
+      conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard raised on two posts and
+      presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over that side, the white letters
+      &ldquo;T. B. C. Co.&rdquo; in a row at least two feet high. These were the initials of
+      the Tropical Belt Coal Company, his employers&mdash;his late employers, to
+      be precise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T. B. C.
+      Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two years, the
+      company went into liquidation&mdash;forced, I believe, not voluntary.
+      There was nothing forcible in the process, however. It was slow; and while
+      the liquidation&mdash;in London and Amsterdam&mdash;pursued its languid
+      course, Axel Heyst, styled in the prospectus &ldquo;manager in the tropics,&rdquo;
+       remained at his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-station of the
+      company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine there, with
+      an outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards from the rickety
+      wharf and the imposing blackboard. The company's object had been to get
+      hold of all the outcrops on tropical islands and exploit them locally.
+      And, Lord knows, there were any amount of outcrops. It was Heyst who had
+      located most of them in this part of the tropical belt during his rather
+      aimless wanderings, and being a ready letter-writer had written pages and
+      pages about them to his friends in Europe. At least, so it was said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth&mdash;for himself, at any
+      rate. What he seemed mostly concerned for was the &ldquo;stride forward,&rdquo; as he
+      expressed it, in the general organization of the universe, apparently. He
+      was heard by more than a hundred persons in the islands talking of a
+      &ldquo;great stride forward for these regions.&rdquo; The convinced wave of the hand
+      which accompanied the phrase suggested tropical distances being impelled
+      onward. In connection with the finished courtesy of his manner, it was
+      persuasive, or at any rate silencing&mdash;for a time, at least. Nobody
+      cared to argue with him when he talked in this strain. His earnestness
+      could do no harm to anybody. There was no danger of anyone taking
+      seriously his dream of tropical coal, so what was the use of hurting his
+      feelings?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his entree as
+      a person who came out East with letters of introduction&mdash;and modest
+      letters of credit, too&mdash;some years before these coal-outcrops began
+      to crop up in his playfully courteous talk. From the first there was some
+      difficulty in making him out. He was not a traveller. A traveller arrives
+      and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not depart. I met a man once&mdash;the
+      manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking Corporation in Malacca&mdash;to
+      whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with anything in particular (it was
+      in the billiard-room of the club):
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am enchanted with these islands!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and while
+      chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment. There are
+      more spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn
+      round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic circle. It just
+      touched Manila, and he had been seen there. It just touched Saigon, and he
+      was likewise seen there once. Perhaps these were his attempts to break
+      out. If so, they were failures. The enchantment must have been an
+      unbreakable one. The manager&mdash;the man who heard the exclamation&mdash;had
+      been so impressed by the tone, fervour, rapture, what you will, or perhaps
+      by the incongruity of it that he had related the experience to more than
+      one person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Queer chap, that Swede,&rdquo; was his only comment; but this is the origin of
+      the name &ldquo;Enchanted Heyst&rdquo; which some fellows fastened on our man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He also had other names. In his early years, long before he got so
+      becomingly bald on the top, he went to present a letter of introduction to
+      Mr. Tesman of Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm&mdash;tip-top house. Well,
+      Mr. Tesman was a kindly, benevolent old gentleman. He did not know what to
+      make of that caller. After telling him that they wished to render his stay
+      among the islands as pleasant as possible, and that they were ready to
+      assist him in his plans, and so on, and after receiving Heyst's thanks&mdash;you
+      know the usual kind of conversation&mdash;he proceeded to query in a slow,
+      paternal tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you are interested in&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Facts,&rdquo; broke in Heyst in his courtly voice. &ldquo;There's nothing worth
+      knowing but facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have spoken
+      about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of &ldquo;Hard Facts.&rdquo; He
+      had the singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to him and became
+      part of his name. Thereafter he mooned about the Java Sea in some of the
+      Tesmans' trading schooners, and then vanished, on board an Arab ship, in
+      the direction of New Guinea. He remained so long in that outlying part of
+      his enchanted circle that he was nearly forgotten before he swam into view
+      again in a native proa full of Goram vagabonds, burnt black by the sun,
+      very lean, his hair much thinned, and a portfolio of sketches under his
+      arm. He showed these willingly, but was very reserved as to anything else.
+      He had had an &ldquo;amusing time,&rdquo; he said. A man who will go to New Guinea for
+      fun&mdash;well!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone off his
+      face and all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-gold pair of
+      horizontal moustaches had grown to really noble proportions, a certain
+      disreputable white man fastened upon him an epithet. Putting down with a
+      shaking hand a long glass emptied of its contents&mdash;paid for by Heyst&mdash;he
+      said, with that deliberate sagacity which no mere water-drinker ever
+      attained:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman. Puffect! But he's a ut-uto-utopist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where this
+      pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh? Upon my word, the only thing I
+      heard him say which might have had a bearing on the point was his
+      invitation to old McNab himself. Turning with that finished courtesy of
+      attitude, movement voice, which was his obvious characteristic, he had
+      said with delicate playfulness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps that was it. A man who could propose, even playfully, to quench
+      old McNab's thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer of chimeras; for of
+      downright irony Heyst was not prodigal. And, may be, this was the reason
+      why he was generally liked. At that epoch in his life, in the fulness of
+      his physical development, of a broad, martial presence, with his bald head
+      and long moustaches, he resembled the portraits of Charles XII., of
+      adventurous memory. However, there was no reason to think that Heyst was
+      in any way a fighting man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER TWO
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was about this time that Heyst became associated with Morrison on terms
+      about which people were in doubt. Some said he was a partner, others said
+      he was a sort of paying guest, but the real truth of the matter was more
+      complex. One day Heyst turned up in Timor. Why in Timor, of all places in
+      the world, no one knows. Well, he was mooning about Delli, that highly
+      pestilential place, possibly in search of some undiscovered facts, when he
+      came in the street upon Morrison, who, in his way, was also an &ldquo;enchanted&rdquo;
+       man. When you spoke to Morrison of going home&mdash;he was from
+      Dorsetshire&mdash;he shuddered. He said it was dark and wet there; that it
+      was like living with your head and shoulders in a moist gunny-bag. That
+      was only his exaggerated style of talking. Morrison was &ldquo;one of us.&rdquo; He
+      was owner and master of the Capricorn, trading brig, and was understood to
+      be doing well with her, except for the drawback of too much altruism. He
+      was the dearly beloved friend of a quantity of God-forsaken villages up
+      dark creeks and obscure bays, where he traded for produce. He would often
+      sail, through awfully dangerous channels up to some miserable settlement,
+      only to find a very hungry population clamorous for rice, and without so
+      much &ldquo;produce&rdquo; between them as would have filled Morrison's suitcase. Amid
+      general rejoicings, he would land the rice all the same, explain to the
+      people that it was an advance, that they were in debt to him now; would
+      preach to them energy and industry, and make an elaborate note in a
+      pocket-diary which he always carried; and this would be the end of that
+      transaction. I don't know if Morrison thought so, but the villagers had no
+      doubt whatever about it. Whenever a coast village sighted the brig it
+      would begin to beat all its gongs and hoist all its streamers, and all its
+      girls would put flowers in their hair and the crowd would line the river
+      bank, and Morrison would beam and glitter at all this excitement through
+      his single eyeglass with an air of intense gratification. He was tall and
+      lantern-jawed, and clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister who had
+      thrown his wig to the dogs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We used to remonstrate with him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will never see any of your advances if you go on like this,
+      Morrison.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He would put on a knowing air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall squeeze them yet some day&mdash;never you fear. And that reminds
+      me&rdquo;&mdash;pulling out his inseparable pocketbook&mdash;&ldquo;there's that
+      So-and-So village. They are pretty well off again; I may just as well
+      squeeze them to begin with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Memo: Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with
+      inflexible finality; but he never began the squeezing. Some men grumbled
+      at him. He was spoiling the trade. Well, perhaps to a certain extent; not
+      much. Most of the places he traded with were unknown not only to geography
+      but also to the traders' special lore which is transmitted by word of
+      mouth, without ostentation, and forms the stock of mysterious local
+      knowledge. It was hinted also that Morrison had a wife in each and every
+      one of them, but the majority of us repulsed these innuendoes with
+      indignation. He was a true humanitarian and rather ascetic than otherwise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street, his
+      eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the hopeless aspect
+      of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads trudging from workhouse to
+      workhouse. Being hailed on the street he looked up with a wild worried
+      expression. He was really in trouble. He had come the week before into
+      Delli and the Portuguese authorities, on some pretence of irregularity in
+      his papers, had inflicted a fine upon him and had arrested his brig.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison never had any spare cash in hand. With his system of trading it
+      would have been strange if he had; and all these debts entered in the
+      pocketbook weren't good enough to raise a millrei on&mdash;let alone a
+      shilling. The Portuguese officials begged him not to distress himself.
+      They gave him a week's grace, and then proposed to sell the brig at
+      auction. This meant ruin for Morrison; and when Heyst hailed him across
+      the street in his usual courtly tone, the week was nearly out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner of a
+      prince addressing another prince on a private occasion:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What an unexpected pleasure. Would you have any objection to drink
+      something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there? The sun is really
+      too strong to talk in the street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel which
+      he would have distained to enter at any other time. He was distracted. He
+      did not know what he was doing. You could have led him over the edge of a
+      precipice just as easily as into that wine-shop. He sat down like an
+      automaton. He was speechless, but he saw a glass full of rough red wine
+      before him, and emptied it. Heyst meantime, politely watchful, had taken a
+      seat opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are in for a bout of fever, I fear,&rdquo; he said sympathetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fever!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Give me fever. Give me plague. They are diseases. One
+      gets over them. But I am being murdered. I am being murdered by the
+      Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among them. I am to have my
+      throat cut the day after tomorrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a slight motion
+      of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a drawing-room.
+      Morrison's despairing reserve had broken down. He had been wandering with
+      a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud hovels, silent, with no
+      soul to turn to in his distress, and positively maddened by his thoughts;
+      and suddenly he had stumbled on a white man, figuratively and actually
+      white&mdash;for Morrison refused to accept the racial whiteness of the
+      Portuguese officials. He let himself go for the mere relief of violent
+      speech, his elbows planted on the table, his eyes blood-shot, his voice
+      nearly gone, the brim of his round pith hat shading an unshaven, livid
+      face. His white clothes, which he had not taken off for three days, were
+      dingy. He had already gone to the bad, past redemption. The sight was
+      shocking to Heyst; but he let nothing of it appear in his bearing,
+      concealing his impression under that consummate good-society manner of
+      his. Polite attention, what's due from one gentleman listening to another,
+      was what he showed; and, as usual, it was catching; so that Morrison
+      pulled himself together and finished his narrative in a conversational
+      tone, with a man-of-the-world air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a villainous plot. Unluckily, one is helpless. That scoundrel
+      Cousinho&mdash;Andreas, you know&mdash;has been coveting the brig for
+      years. Naturally, I would never sell. She is not only my livelihood; she's
+      my life. So he has hatched this pretty little plot with the chief of the
+      customs. The sale, of course, will be a farce. There's no one here to bid.
+      He will get the brig for a song&mdash;no, not even that&mdash;a line of a
+      song. You have been some years now in the islands, Heyst. You know us all;
+      you have seen how we live. Now you shall have the opportunity to see how
+      some of us end; for it is the end, for me. I can't deceive myself any
+      longer. You see it&mdash;don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping strain on
+      his recovered self-possession. Heyst was beginning to say that he &ldquo;could
+      very well see all the bearings of this unfortunate&mdash;&rdquo; when Morrison
+      interrupted him jerkily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upon my word, I don't know why I have been telling you all this. I
+      suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my
+      trouble to myself. Words can't do it justice; but since I've told you so
+      much I may as well tell you more. Listen. This morning on board, in my
+      cabin I went down on my knees and prayed for help. I went down on my
+      knees!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a believer, Morrison?&rdquo; asked Heyst with a distinct note of
+      respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely I am not an infidel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison was swiftly reproachful in his answer, and there came a pause,
+      Morrison perhaps interrogating his conscience, and Heyst preserving a mien
+      of unperturbed, polite interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying&mdash;well,
+      women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant. I
+      don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his silly
+      troubles. It seems such cheek. Anyhow, this morning I&mdash;I have never
+      done any harm to any God's creature knowingly&mdash;I prayed. A sudden
+      impulse&mdash;I went flop on my knees; so you may judge&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They were gazing earnestly into each other's eyes. Poor Morrison added, as
+      a discouraging afterthought:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only this is such a God-forsaken spot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst inquired with a delicate intonation whether he might know the amount
+      for which the brig was seized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison suppressed an oath, and named curtly a sum which was in itself so
+      insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have exclaimed at it.
+      And even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity out of his politely modulated
+      voice as he asked if it was a fact that Morrison had not that amount in
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison hadn't. He had only a little English gold, a few sovereigns, on
+      board. He had left all his spare cash with the Tesmans, in Samarang, to
+      meet certain bills which would fall due while he was away on his cruise.
+      Anyhow, that money would not have been any more good to him than if it had
+      been in the innermost depths of the infernal regions. He said all this
+      brusquely. He looked with sudden disfavour at that noble forehead, at
+      those great martial moustaches, at the tired eyes of the man sitting
+      opposite him. Who the devil was he? What was he, Morrison, doing there,
+      talking like this? Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us
+      trading in the Archipelago did. Had the Swede suddenly risen and hit him
+      on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than when this
+      stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a little bow across the
+      table:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! If that's the case I would be very happy if you'd allow me to be of
+      use!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison didn't understand. This was one of those things that don't happen&mdash;unheard
+      of things. He had no real inkling of what it meant, till Heyst said
+      definitely:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can lend you the amount.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have the money?&rdquo; whispered Morrison. &ldquo;Do you mean here, in your
+      pocket?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, on me. Glad to be of use.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison, staring open-mouthed, groped over his shoulder for the cord of
+      the eyeglass hanging down his back. When he found it, he stuck it in his
+      eye hastily. It was as if he expected Heyst's usual white suit of the
+      tropics to change into a shining garment, flowing down to his toes, and a
+      pair of great dazzling wings to sprout out on the Swede's shoulders&mdash;and
+      didn't want to miss a single detail of the transformation. But if Heyst
+      was an angel from on high, sent in answer to prayer, he did not betray his
+      heavenly origin by outward signs. So, instead of going on his knees, as he
+      felt inclined to do, Morrison stretched out his hand, which Heyst grasped
+      with formal alacrity and a polite murmur in which &ldquo;Trifle&mdash;delighted&mdash;of
+      service,&rdquo; could just be distinguished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miracles do happen,&rdquo; thought the awestruck Morrison. To him, as to all of
+      us in the Islands, this wandering Heyst, who didn't toil or spin visibly,
+      seemed the very last person to be the agent of Providence in an affair
+      concerned with money. The fact of his turning up in Timor or anywhere else
+      was no more wonderful than the settling of a sparrow on one's window-sill
+      at any given moment. But that he should carry a sum of money in his pocket
+      seemed somehow inconceivable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So inconceivable that as they were trudging together through the sand of
+      the roadway to the custom-house&mdash;another mud hovel&mdash;to pay the
+      fine, Morrison broke into a cold sweat, stopped short, and exclaimed in
+      faltering accents:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say! You aren't joking, Heyst?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Joking!&rdquo; Heyst's blue eyes went hard as he turned them on the discomposed
+      Morrison. &ldquo;In what way, may I ask?&rdquo; he continued with austere politeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Morrison was abashed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me, Heyst. You must have been sent by God in answer to my prayer.
+      But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with worry; and it
+      suddenly struck me: 'What if it's the Devil who has sent him?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no connection with the supernatural,&rdquo; said Heyst graciously,
+      moving on. &ldquo;Nobody has sent me. I just happened along.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know better,&rdquo; contradicted Morrison. &ldquo;I may be unworthy, but I have
+      been heard. I know it. I feel it. For why should you offer&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst inclined his head, as from respect for a conviction in which he
+      could not share. But he stuck to his point by muttering that in the
+      presence of an odious fact like this, it was natural&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later in the day, the fine paid, and the two of them on board the brig,
+      from which the guard had been removed, Morrison who, besides, being a
+      gentleman was also an honest fellow began to talk about repayment. He knew
+      very well his inability to lay by any sum of money. It was partly the
+      fault of circumstances and partly of his temperament; and it would have
+      been very difficult to apportion the responsibility between the two. Even
+      Morrison himself could not say, while confessing to the fact. With a
+      worried air he ascribed it to fatality:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know how it is that I've never been able to save. It's some sort
+      of curse. There's always a bill or two to meet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He plunged his hand into his pocket for the famous notebook so well known
+      in the islands, the fetish of his hopes, and fluttered the pages
+      feverishly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet&mdash;look,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;There it is&mdash;more than five
+      thousand dollars owing. Surely that's something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He ceased suddenly. Heyst, who had been all the time trying to look as
+      unconcerned as he could, made reassuring noises in his throat. But
+      Morrison was not only honest. He was honourable, too; and on this
+      stressful day, before this amazing emissary of Providence and in the
+      revulsion of his feelings, he made his great renunciation. He cast off the
+      abiding illusion of his existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. No. They are not good. I'll never be able to squeeze them. Never.
+      I've been saying for years I would, but I give it up. I never really
+      believed I could. Don't reckon on that, Heyst. I have robbed you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and remained in
+      that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him soothingly with the utmost
+      courtesy. The Swede was as much distressed as Morrison; for he understood
+      the other's feelings perfectly. No decent feeling was ever scorned by
+      Heyst. But he was incapable of outward cordiality of manner, and he felt
+      acutely his defect. Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an
+      emotional collapse. They must have had, both of them, a fairly painful
+      time of it in the cabin of the brig. In the end Morrison, casting
+      desperately for an idea in the blackness of his despondency, hit upon the
+      notion of inviting Heyst to travel with him in his brig and have a share
+      in his trading ventures up to the amount of his loan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is characteristic of Heyst's unattached, floating existence that he was
+      in a position to accept this proposal. There is no reason to think that he
+      wanted particularly just then to go poking aboard the brig into all the
+      holes and corners of the Archipelago where Morrison picked up most of his
+      trade. Far from it; but he would have consented to almost any arrangement
+      in order to put an end to the harrowing scene in the cabin. There was at
+      once a great transformation act: Morrison raising his diminished head, and
+      sticking the glass in his eye to look affectionately at Heyst, a bottle
+      being uncorked, and so on. It was agreed that nothing should be said to
+      anyone of this transaction. Morrison, you understand, was not proud of the
+      episode, and he was afraid of being unmercifully chaffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An old bird like me! To let myself be trapped by those damned Portuguese
+      rascals! I should never hear the last of it. We must keep it dark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From quite other motives, among which his native delicacy was the
+      principal, Heyst was even more anxious to bind himself to silence. A
+      gentleman would naturally shrink from the part of heavenly messenger that
+      Morrison would force upon him. It made Heyst uncomfortable, as it was. And
+      perhaps he did not care that it should be known that he had some means,
+      whatever they might have been&mdash;sufficient, at any rate, to enable him
+      to lend money to people. These two had a duet down there, like
+      conspirators in a comic opera, of &ldquo;Sh&mdash;ssh, shssh! Secrecy! Secrecy!&rdquo;
+       It must have been funny, because they were very serious about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And for a time the conspiracy was successful in so far that we all
+      concluded that Heyst was boarding with the good-natured&mdash;some said:
+      sponging on the imbecile&mdash;Morrison, in his brig. But you know how it
+      is with all such mysteries. There is always a leak somewhere. Morrison
+      himself, not a perfect vessel by any means, was bursting with gratitude,
+      and under the stress he must have let out something vague&mdash;enough to
+      give the island gossip a chance. And you know how kindly the world is in
+      its comments on what it does not understand. A rumour sprang out that
+      Heyst, having obtained some mysterious hold on Morrison, had fastened
+      himself on him and was sucking him dry. Those who had traced these mutters
+      back to their origin were very careful not to believe them. The
+      originator, it seems, was a certain Schomberg, a big, manly, bearded
+      creature of the Teutonic persuasion, with an ungovernable tongue which
+      surely must have worked on a pivot. Whether he was a Lieutenant of the
+      Reserve, as he declared, I don't know. Out there he was by profession a
+      hotel-keeper, first in Bangkok, then somewhere else, and ultimately in
+      Sourabaya. He dragged after him up and down that section of the tropical
+      belt a silent, frightened, little woman with long ringlets, who smiled at
+      one stupidly, showing a blue tooth. I don't know why so many of us
+      patronized his various establishments. He was a noxious ass, and he
+      satisfied his lust for silly gossip at the cost of his customers. It was
+      he who, one evening, as Morrison and Heyst went past the hotel&mdash;they
+      were not his regular patrons&mdash;whispered mysteriously to the mixed
+      company assembled on the veranda:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The spider and the fly just gone by, gentlemen.&rdquo; Then, very important and
+      confidential, his thick paw at the side of his mouth: &ldquo;We are among
+      ourselves; well, gentlemen, all I can say is, don't you ever get mixed up
+      with that Swede. Don't you ever get caught in his web.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THREE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Human nature being what it is, having a silly side to it as well as a mean
+      side, there were not a few who pretended to be indignant on no better
+      authority than a general propensity to believe every evil report; and a
+      good many others who found it simply funny to call Heyst the Spider&mdash;behind
+      his back, of course. He was as serenely unconscious of this as of his
+      several other nicknames. But soon people found other things to say of
+      Heyst; not long afterwards he came very much to the fore in larger
+      affairs. He blossomed out into something definite. He filled the public
+      eye as the manager on the spot of the Tropical Belt Coal Company with
+      offices in London and Amsterdam, and other things about it that sounded
+      and looked grandiose. The offices in the two capitals may have consisted&mdash;and
+      probably did&mdash;of one room in each; but at that distance, out East
+      there, all this had an air. We were more puzzled than dazzled, it is true;
+      but even the most sober-minded among us began to think that there was
+      something in it. The Tesmans appointed agents, a contract for government
+      mail-boats secured, the era of steam beginning for the islands&mdash;a
+      great stride forward&mdash;Heyst's stride!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And all this sprang from the meeting of the cornered Morrison and of the
+      wandering Heyst, which may or may not have been the direct outcome of a
+      prayer. Morrison was not an imbecile, but he seemed to have got himself
+      into a state of remarkable haziness as to his exact position towards
+      Heyst. For, if Heyst had been sent with money in his pocket by a direct
+      decree of the Almighty in answer to Morrison's prayer then there was no
+      reason for special gratitude, since obviously he could not help himself.
+      But Morrison believed both, in the efficacy of prayer and in the infinite
+      goodness of Heyst. He thanked God with awed sincerity for his mercy, and
+      could not thank Heyst enough for the service rendered as between man and
+      man. In this (highly creditable) tangle of strong feelings Morrison's
+      gratitude insisted on Heyst's partnership in the great discovery.
+      Ultimately we heard that Morrison had gone home through the Suez Canal in
+      order to push the magnificent coal idea personally in London. He parted
+      from his brig and disappeared from our ken; but we heard that he had
+      written a letter or letters to Heyst, saying that London was cold and
+      gloomy; that he did not like either the men or things, that he was &ldquo;as
+      lonely as a crow in a strange country.&rdquo; In truth, he pined after the
+      Capricorn&mdash;I don't mean only the tropic; I mean the ship too. Finally
+      he went into Dorsetshire to see his people, caught a bad cold, and died
+      with extraordinary precipitation in the bosom of his appalled family.
+      Whether his exertions in the City of London had enfeebled his vitality I
+      don't know; but I believe it was this visit which put life into the coal
+      idea. Be it as it may, the Tropical Belt Coal Company was born very
+      shortly after Morrison, the victim of gratitude and his native climate,
+      had gone to join his forefathers in a Dorsetshire churchyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst was immensely shocked. He got the news in the Moluccas through the
+      Tesmans, and then disappeared for a time. It appears that he stayed with a
+      Dutch government doctor in Amboyna, a friend of his who looked after him
+      for a bit in his bungalow. He became visible again rather suddenly, his
+      eyes sunk in his head, and with a sort of guarded attitude, as if afraid
+      someone would reproach him with the death of Morrison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Naive Heyst! As if anybody would . . . Nobody amongst us had any interest
+      in men who went home. They were all right; they did not count any more.
+      Going to Europe was nearly as final as going to Heaven. It removed a man
+      from the world of hazard and adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a matter of fact, many of us did not hear of this death till months
+      afterwards&mdash;from Schomberg, who disliked Heyst gratuitously and made
+      up a piece of sinister whispered gossip:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what comes of having anything to do with that fellow. He squeezes
+      you dry like a lemon, then chucks you out&mdash;sends you home to die.
+      Take warning by Morrison!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, we laughed at the innkeeper's suggestions of black mystery.
+      Several of us heard that Heyst was prepared to go to Europe himself, to
+      push on his coal enterprise personally; but he never went. It wasn't
+      necessary. The company was formed without him, and his nomination of
+      manager in the tropics came out to him by post.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the first he had selected Samburan, or Round Island, for the central
+      station. Some copies of the prospectus issued in Europe, having found
+      their way out East, were passed from hand to hand. We greatly admired the
+      map which accompanied them for the edification of the shareholders. On it
+      Samburan was represented as the central spot of the Eastern Hemisphere
+      with its name engraved in enormous capitals. Heavy lines radiated from it
+      in all directions through the tropics, figuring a mysterious and effective
+      star&mdash;lines of influence or lines of distance, or something of that
+      sort. Company promoters have an imagination of their own. There's no more
+      romantic temperament on earth than the temperament of a company promoter.
+      Engineers came out, coolies were imported, bungalows were put up on
+      Samburan, a gallery driven into the hillside, and actually some coal got
+      out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These manifestations shook the soberest minds. For a time everybody in the
+      islands was talking of the Tropical Belt Coal, and even those who smiled
+      quietly to themselves were only hiding their uneasiness. Oh, yes; it had
+      come, and anybody could see what would be the consequences&mdash;the end
+      of the individual trader, smothered under a great invasion of steamers. We
+      could not afford to buy steamers. Not we. And Heyst was the manager.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, Heyst, enchanted Heyst.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, come! He has been no better than a loafer around here as far back as
+      any of us can remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he said he was looking for facts. Well, he's got hold of one that
+      will do for all of us,&rdquo; commented a bitter voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what they call development&mdash;and be hanged to it!&rdquo; muttered
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never was Heyst talked about so much in the tropical belt before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't he a Swedish baron or something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He, a baron? Get along with you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For my part I haven't the slightest doubt that he was. While he was still
+      drifting amongst the islands, enigmatical and disregarded like an
+      insignificant ghost, he told me so himself on a certain occasion. It was a
+      long time before he materialized in this alarming way into the destroyer
+      of our little industry&mdash;Heyst the Enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became the fashion with a good many to speak of Heyst as the Enemy. He
+      was very concrete, very visible now. He was rushing all over the
+      Archipelago, jumping in and out of local mail-packets as if they had been
+      tram-cars, here, there, and everywhere&mdash;organizing with all his
+      might. This was no mooning about. This was business. And this sudden
+      display of purposeful energy shook the incredulity of the most sceptical
+      more than any scientific demonstration of the value of these coal-outcrops
+      could have done. It was impressive. Schomberg was the only one who
+      resisted the infection. Big, manly in a portly style, and profusely
+      bearded, with a glass of beer in his thick paw, he would approach some
+      table where the topic of the hour was being discussed, would listen for a
+      moment, and then come out with his invariable declaration:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this is very well, gentlemen; but he can't throw any of his coal-dust
+      in my eyes. There's nothing in it. Why, there can't be anything in it. A
+      fellow like that for manager? Phoo!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it the clairvoyance of imbecile hatred, or mere stupid tenacity of
+      opinion, which ends sometimes by scoring against the world in a most
+      astonishing manner? Most of us can remember instances of triumphant folly;
+      and that ass Schomberg triumphed. The T.B.C. Company went into
+      liquidation, as I began by telling you. The Tesmans washed their hands of
+      it. The Government cancelled those famous contracts, the talk died out,
+      and presently it was remarked here and there that Heyst had faded
+      completely away. He had become invisible, as in those early days when he
+      used to make a bolt clear out of sight in his attempts to break away from
+      the enchantment of &ldquo;these isles,&rdquo; either in the direction of New Guinea or
+      in the direction of Saigon&mdash;to cannibals or to cafes. The enchanted
+      Heyst! Had he at last broken the spell? Had he died? We were too
+      indifferent to wonder overmuch. You see we had on the whole liked him well
+      enough. And liking is not sufficient to keep going the interest one takes
+      in a human being. With hatred, apparently, it is otherwise. Schomberg
+      couldn't forget Heyst. The keen, manly Teutonic creature was a good hater.
+      A fool often is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good evening, gentlemen. Have you got everything you want? So! Good! You
+      see? What was I always telling you? Aha! There was nothing in it. I knew
+      it. But what I would like to know is what became of that&mdash;Swede.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put a stress on the word Swede as if it meant scoundrel. He detested
+      Scandinavians generally. Why? Goodness only knows. A fool like that is
+      unfathomable. He continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's five months or more since I have spoken to anybody who has seen
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, we were not much interested; but Schomberg, of course,
+      could not understand that. He was grotesquely dense. Whenever three people
+      came together in his hotel, he took good care that Heyst should be with
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope the fellow did not go and drown himself,&rdquo; he would add with a
+      comical earnestness that ought to have made us shudder; only our crowd was
+      superficial, and did not apprehend the psychology of this pious hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? Heyst isn't in debt to you for drinks is he?&rdquo; somebody asked him
+      once with shallow scorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drinks! Oh, dear no!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The innkeeper was not mercenary. Teutonic temperament seldom is. But he
+      put on a sinister expression to tell us that Heyst had not paid perhaps
+      three visits altogether to his &ldquo;establishment.&rdquo; This was Heyst's crime,
+      for which Schomberg wished him nothing less than a long and tormented
+      existence. Observe the Teutonic sense of proportion and nice forgiving
+      temper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, one afternoon, Schomberg was seen approaching a group of his
+      customers. He was obviously in high glee. He squared his manly chest with
+      great importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen, I have news of him. Who? why, that Swede. He is still on
+      Samburan. He's never been away from it. The company is gone, the engineers
+      are gone, the clerks are gone, the coolies are gone, everything's gone;
+      but there he sticks. Captain Davidson, coming by from the westward, saw
+      him with his own eyes. Something white on the wharf, so he steamed in and
+      went ashore in a small boat. Heyst, right enough. Put a book into his
+      pocket, always very polite. Been strolling on the wharf and reading. 'I
+      remain in possession here,' he told Captain Davidson. What I want to know
+      is what he gets to eat there. A piece of dried fish now and then&mdash;what?
+      That's coming down pretty low for a man who turned up his nose at my table
+      d'hote!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He winked with immense malice. A bell started ringing, and he led the way
+      to the dining-room as if into a temple, very grave, with the air of a
+      benefactor of mankind. His ambition was to feed it at a profitable price,
+      and his delight was to talk of it behind its back. It was very
+      characteristic of him to gloat over the idea of Heyst having nothing
+      decent to eat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FOUR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A few of us who were sufficiently interested went to Davidson for details.
+      These were not many. He told us that he passed to the north of Samburan on
+      purpose to see what was going on. At first, it looked as if that side of
+      the island had been altogether abandoned. This was what he expected.
+      Presently, above the dense mass of vegetation that Samburan presents to
+      view, he saw the head of the flagstaff without a flag. Then, while
+      steaming across the slight indentation which for a time was known
+      officially as Black Diamond Bay, he made out with his glass the white
+      figure on the coaling-wharf. It could be no one but Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought for certain he wanted to be taken off, so I steamed in. He made
+      no signs. However, I lowered a boat. I could not see another living being
+      anywhere. Yes. He had a book in his hand. He looked exactly as we have
+      always seen him&mdash;very neat, white shoes, cork helmet. He explained to
+      me that he had always had a taste for solitude. It was the first I ever
+      heard of it, I told him. He only smiled. What could I say? He isn't the
+      sort of man one can speak familiarly to. There's something in him. One
+      doesn't care to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'But what's the object? Are you thinking of keeping possession of the
+      mine?' I asked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Something of the sort,' he says. 'I am keeping hold.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'But all this is as dead as Julius Caesar,' I cried. 'In fact, you have
+      nothing worth holding on to, Heyst.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Oh, I am done with facts,' says he, putting his hand to his helmet
+      sharply with one of his short bows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus dismissed, Davidson went on board his ship, swung her out, and as he
+      was steaming away he watched from the bridge Heyst walking shoreward along
+      the wharf. He marched into the long grass and vanished&mdash;all but the
+      top of his white cork helmet, which seemed to swim in a green sea. Then
+      that too disappeared, as if it had sunk into the living depths of the
+      tropical vegetation, which is more jealous of men's conquests than the
+      ocean, and which was about to close over the last vestiges of the
+      liquidated Tropical Belt Coal Company&mdash;A. Heyst, manager in the East.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson, a good, simple fellow in his way, was strangely affected. It is
+      to be noted that he knew very little of Heyst. He was one of those whom
+      Heyst's finished courtesy of attitude and intonation most strongly
+      disconcerted. He himself was a fellow of fine feeling, I think, though of
+      course he had no more polish than the rest of us. We were naturally a
+      hail-fellow-well-met crowd, with standards of our own&mdash;no worse, I
+      daresay, than other people's; but polish was not one of them. Davidson's
+      fineness was real enough to alter the course of the steamer he commanded.
+      Instead of passing to the south of Samburan, he made it his practice to
+      take the passage along the north shore, within about a mile of the wharf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He can see us if he likes to see us,&rdquo; remarked Davidson. Then he had an
+      afterthought: &ldquo;I say! I hope he won't think I am intruding, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We reassured him on the point of correct behaviour. The sea is open to
+      all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This slight deviation added some ten miles to Davidson's round trip, but
+      as that was sixteen hundred miles it did not matter much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have told my owner of it,&rdquo; said the conscientious commander of the
+      Sissie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His owner had a face like an ancient lemon. He was small and wizened&mdash;which
+      was strange, because generally a Chinaman, as he grows in prosperity, puts
+      on inches of girth and stature. To serve a Chinese firm is not so bad.
+      Once they become convinced you deal straight by them, their confidence
+      becomes unlimited. You can do no wrong. So Davidson's old Chinaman
+      squeaked hurriedly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, all right, all right. You do what you like, captain&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was an end of the matter; not altogether, though. From time to
+      time the Chinaman used to ask Davidson about the white man. He was still
+      there, eh?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never see him,&rdquo; Davidson had to confess to his owner, who would peer at
+      him silently through round, horn-rimmed spectacles, several sizes too
+      large for his little old face. &ldquo;I never see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To me, on occasions he would say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't a doubt he's there. He hides. It's very unpleasant.&rdquo; Davidson
+      was a little vexed with Heyst. &ldquo;Funny thing,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Of all the
+      people I speak to, nobody ever asks after him but that Chinaman of mine&mdash;and
+      Schomberg,&rdquo; he added after a while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, Schomberg, of course. He was asking everybody about everything, and
+      arranging the information into the most scandalous shape his imagination
+      could invent. From time to time he would step up, his blinking, cushioned
+      eyes, his thick lips, his very chestnut beard, looking full of malice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Evening, gentlemen. Have you got all you want? So! Good! Well, I am told
+      the jungle has choked the very sheds in Black Diamond Bay. Fact. He's a
+      hermit in the wilderness now. But what can this manager get to eat there?
+      It beats me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes a stranger would inquire with natural curiosity:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who? What manager?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, a certain Swede,&rdquo;&mdash;with a sinister emphasis, as if he were
+      saying &ldquo;a certain brigand.&rdquo; &ldquo;Well known here. He's turned hermit from
+      shame. That's what the devil does when he's found out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hermit. This was the latest of the more or less witty labels applied to
+      Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of the tropical belt,
+      where the inane clacking of Schomberg's tongue vexed our ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But apparently Heyst was not a hermit by temperament. The sight of his
+      land was not invincibly odious to him. We must believe this, since for
+      some reason or other he did come out from his retreat for a while. Perhaps
+      it was only to see whether there were any letters for him at the Tesmans.
+      I don't know. No one knows. But this reappearance shows that his
+      detachment from the world was not complete. And incompleteness of any sort
+      leads to trouble. Axel Heyst ought not to have cared for his letters&mdash;or
+      whatever it was that brought him out after something more than a year and
+      a half in Samburan. But it was of no use. He had not the hermit's
+      vocation! That was the trouble, it seems.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Be this as it may, he suddenly reappeared in the world, broad chest, bald
+      forehead, long moustaches, polite manner, and all&mdash;the complete
+      Heyst, even to the kindly sunken eyes on which there still rested the
+      shadow of Morrison's death. Naturally, it was Davidson who had given him a
+      lift out of his forsaken island. There were no other opportunities, unless
+      some native craft were passing by&mdash;a very remote and unsatisfactory
+      chance to wait for. Yes, he came out with Davidson, to whom he volunteered
+      the statement that it was only for a short time&mdash;a few days, no more.
+      He meant to go back to Samburan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson expressing his horror and incredulity of such foolishness, Heyst
+      explained that when the company came into being he had his few belongings
+      sent out from Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Davidson, as to any of us, the idea of Heyst, the wandering drifting,
+      unattached Heyst, having any belongings of the sort that can furnish a
+      house was startlingly novel. It was grotesquely fantastic. It was like a
+      bird owning real property.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Belongings? Do you mean chairs and tables?&rdquo; Davidson asked with
+      unconcealed astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst did mean that. &ldquo;My poor father died in London. It has been all
+      stored there ever since,&rdquo; he explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For all these years?&rdquo; exclaimed Davidson, thinking how long we all had
+      known Heyst flitting from tree to tree in a wilderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even longer,&rdquo; said Heyst, who had understood very well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This seemed to imply that he had been wandering before he came under our
+      observation. In what regions? And what early age? Mystery. Perhaps he was
+      a bird that had never had a nest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I left school early,&rdquo; he remarked once to Davidson, on the passage. &ldquo;It
+      was in England. A very good school. I was not a shining success there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The confessions of Heyst. Not one of us&mdash;with the probable exception
+      of Morrison, who was dead&mdash;had ever heard so much of his history. It
+      looks as if the experience of hermit life had the power to loosen one's
+      tongue, doesn't it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During that memorable passage, in the Sissie, which took about two days,
+      he volunteered other hints&mdash;for you could not call it information&mdash;about
+      his history. And Davidson was interested. He was interested not because
+      the hints were exciting but because of that innate curiosity about our
+      fellows which is a trait of human nature. Davidson's existence, too,
+      running the Sissie along the Java Sea and back again, was distinctly
+      monotonous and, in a sense, lonely. He never had any sort of company on
+      board. Native deck-passengers in plenty, of course, but never a white man,
+      so the presence of Heyst for two days must have been a godsend. Davidson
+      was telling us all about it afterwards. Heyst said that his father had
+      written a lot of books. He was a philosopher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seems to me he must have been something of a crank, too,&rdquo; was Davidson's
+      comment. &ldquo;Apparently he had quarrelled with his people in Sweden. Just the
+      sort of father you would expect Heyst to have. Isn't he a bit of a crank
+      himself? He told me that directly his father died he lit out into the wide
+      world on his own, and had been on the move till he fetched up against this
+      famous coal business. Fits the son of the father somehow, don't you
+      think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the rest, Heyst was as polite as ever. He offered to pay for his
+      passage; but when Davidson refused to hear of it he seized him heartily by
+      the hand, gave one of his courtly bows, and declared that he was touched
+      by his friendly proceedings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not alluding to this trifling amount which you decline to take,&rdquo; he
+      went on, giving a shake to Davidson's hand. &ldquo;But I am touched by your
+      humanity.&rdquo; Another shake. &ldquo;Believe me, I am profoundly aware of having
+      been an object of it.&rdquo; Final shake of the hand. All this meant that Heyst
+      understood in a proper sense the little Sissie's periodic appearance in
+      sight of his hermitage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a genuine gentleman,&rdquo; Davidson said to us. &ldquo;I was really sorry when
+      he went ashore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We asked him where he had left Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, in Sourabaya&mdash;where else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Tesmans had their principal counting-house in Sourabaya. There had
+      long existed a connection between Heyst and the Tesmans. The incongruity
+      of a hermit having agents did not strike us, nor yet the absurdity of a
+      forgotten cast-off, derelict manager of a wrecked, collapsed, vanished
+      enterprise, having business to attend to. We said Sourabaya, of course,
+      and took it for granted that he would stay with one of the Tesmans. One of
+      us even wondered what sort of reception he would get; for it was known
+      that Julius Tesman was unreasonably bitter about the Tropical Belt Coal
+      fiasco. But Davidson set us right. It was nothing of the kind. Heyst went
+      to stay in Schomberg's hotel, going ashore in the hotel launch. Not that
+      Schomberg would think of sending his launch alongside a mere trader like
+      the Sissie. But she had been meeting a coasting mail-packet, and had been
+      signalled to. Schomberg himself was steering her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You should have seen Schomberg's eyes bulge out when Heyst jumped in with
+      an ancient brown leather bag!&rdquo; said Davidson. &ldquo;He pretended not to know
+      who it was&mdash;at first, anyway. I didn't go ashore with them. We didn't
+      stay more than a couple of hours altogether. Landed two thousand coconuts
+      and cleared out. I have agreed to pick him up again on my next trip in
+      twenty days' time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FIVE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Davidson happened to be two days late on his return trip; no great matter,
+      certainly, but he made a point of going ashore at once, during the hottest
+      hour of the afternoon, to look for Heyst. Schomberg's hotel stood back in
+      an extensive enclosure containing a garden, some large trees, and, under
+      their spreading boughs, a detached &ldquo;hall available for concerts and other
+      performances,&rdquo; as Schomberg worded it in his advertisements. Torn, and
+      fluttering bills, intimating in heavy red capitals CONCERTS EVERY NIGHT,
+      were stuck on the brick pillars on each side of the gateway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The walk had been long and confoundedly sunny. Davidson stood wiping his
+      wet neck and face on what Schomberg called &ldquo;the piazza.&rdquo; Several doors
+      opened on to it, but all the screens were down. Not a soul was in sight,
+      not even a China boy&mdash;nothing but a lot of painted iron chairs and
+      tables. Solitude, shade, and gloomy silence&mdash;and a faint, treacherous
+      breeze which came from under the trees and quite unexpectedly caused the
+      melting Davidson to shiver slightly&mdash;the little shiver of the tropics
+      which in Sourabaya, especially, often means fever and the hospital to the
+      incautious white man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prudent Davidson sought shelter in the nearest darkened room. In the
+      artificial dusk, beyond the levels of shrouded billiard-tables, a white
+      form heaved up from two chairs on which it had been extended. The middle
+      of the day, table d'hote tiffin once over, was Schomberg's easy time. He
+      lounged out, portly, deliberate, on the defensive, the great fair beard
+      like a cuirass over his manly chest. He did not like Davidson, never a
+      very faithful client of his. He hit a bell on one of the tables as he went
+      by, and asked in a distant, Officer-in-Reserve manner:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You desire?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The good Davidson, still sponging his wet neck, declared with simplicity
+      that he had come to fetch away Heyst, as agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A Chinaman appeared in response to the bell. Schomberg turned to him very
+      severely:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the gentleman's order.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson had to be going. Couldn't wait&mdash;only begged that Heyst
+      should be informed that the Sissie would leave at midnight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not&mdash;here, I am telling you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson slapped his thigh in concern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear me! Hospital, I suppose.&rdquo; A natural enough surmise in a very
+      feverish locality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Lieutenant of the Reserve only pursed up his mouth and raised his
+      eyebrows without looking at him. It might have meant anything, but
+      Davidson dismissed the hospital idea with confidence. However, he had to
+      get hold of Heyst between this and midnight:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has been staying here?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he was staying here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you tell me where he is now?&rdquo; Davidson went on placidly. Within
+      himself he was beginning to grow anxious, having developed the affection
+      of a self-appointed protector towards Heyst. The answer he got was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't tell. It's none of my business,&rdquo; accompanied by majestic
+      oscillations of the hotel-keeper's head, hinting at some awful mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson was placidity itself. It was his nature. He did not betray his
+      sentiments, which were not favourable to Schomberg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure to find out at the Tesmans' office,&rdquo; he thought. But it was a
+      very hot hour, and if Heyst was down at the port he would have learned
+      already that the Sissie was in. It was even possible that Heyst had
+      already gone on board, where he could enjoy a coolness denied to the town.
+      Davidson, being stout, was much preoccupied with coolness and inclined to
+      immobility. He lingered awhile, as if irresolute. Schomberg, at the door,
+      looking out, affected perfect indifference. He could not keep it up,
+      though. Suddenly he turned inward and asked with brusque rage:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wanted to see him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, yes,&rdquo; said Davidson. &ldquo;We agreed to meet&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you bother. He doesn't care about that now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doesn't he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you can judge for yourself. He isn't here, is he? You take my word
+      for it. Don't you bother about him. I am advising you as a friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; said, Davidson, inwardly startled at the savage tone. &ldquo;I
+      think I will sit down for a moment and have a drink, after all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not what Schomberg had expected to hear. He called brutally:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Boy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Chinaman approached, and after referring him to the white man by a nod
+      the hotel-keeper departed, muttering to himself. Davidson heard him gnash
+      his teeth as he went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson sat alone with the billiard-tables as if there had been not a
+      soul staying in the hotel. His placidity was so genuine that he was not
+      unduly, fretting himself over the absence of Heyst, or the mysterious
+      manners Schomberg had treated him to. He was considering these things in
+      his own fairly shrewd way. Something had happened; and he was loath to go
+      away to investigate, being restrained by a presentiment that somehow
+      enlightenment would come to him there. A poster of CONCERTS EVERY EVENING,
+      like those on the gate, but in a good state of preservation, hung on the
+      wall fronting him. He looked at it idly and was struck by the fact&mdash;then
+      not so very common&mdash;that it was a ladies' orchestra; &ldquo;Zangiacomo's
+      eastern tour&mdash;eighteen performers.&rdquo; The poster stated that they had
+      had the honour of playing their select repertoire before various colonial
+      excellencies, also before pashas, sheiks, chiefs, H. H. the Sultan of
+      Mascate, etc., etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson felt sorry for the eighteen lady-performers. He knew what that
+      sort of life was like, the sordid conditions and brutal incidents of such
+      tours led by such Zangiacomos who often were anything but musicians by
+      profession. While he was staring at the poster, a door somewhere at his
+      back opened, and a woman came in who was looked upon as Schomberg's wife,
+      no doubt with truth. As somebody remarked cynically once, she was too
+      unattractive to be anything else. The opinion that he treated her
+      abominably was based on her frightened expression. Davidson lifted his hat
+      to her. Mrs. Schomberg gave him an inclination of her sallow head and
+      incontinently sat down behind a sort of raised counter, facing the door,
+      with a mirror and rows of bottles at her back. Her hair was very
+      elaborately done with two ringlets on the left side of her scraggy neck;
+      her dress was of silk, and she had come on duty for the afternoon. For
+      some reason or other Schomberg exacted this from her, though she added
+      nothing to the fascinations of the place. She sat there in the smoke and
+      noise, like an enthroned idol, smiling stupidly over the billiards from
+      time to time, speaking to no one, and no one speaking to her. Schomberg
+      himself took no more interest in her than may be implied in a sudden and
+      totally unmotived scowl. Otherwise the very Chinamen ignored her
+      existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had interrupted Davidson in his reflections. Being alone with her, her
+      silence and open-eyed immobility made him uncomfortable. He was easily
+      sorry for people. It seemed rude not to take any notice of her. He said,
+      in allusion to the poster:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you having these people in the house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was so unused to being addressed by customers that at the sound of his
+      voice she jumped in her seat. Davidson was telling us afterwards that she
+      jumped exactly like a figure made of wood, without losing her rigid
+      immobility. She did not even move her eyes; but she answered him freely,
+      though her very lips seemed made of wood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They stayed here over a month. They are gone now. They played every
+      evening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty good, were they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this she said nothing; and as she kept on staring fixedly in front of
+      her, her silence disconcerted Davidson. It looked as if she had not heard
+      him&mdash;which was impossible. Perhaps she drew the line of speech at the
+      expression of opinions. Schomberg might have trained her, for domestic
+      reasons, to keep them to herself. But Davidson felt in honour obliged to
+      converse; so he said, putting his own interpretation on this surprising
+      silence:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see&mdash;not much account. Such bands hardly ever are. An Italian lot,
+      Mrs. Schomberg, to judge by the name of the boss?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head negatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. He is a German really; only he dyes his hair and beard black for
+      business. Zangiacomo is his business name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a curious fact,&rdquo; said Davidson. His head being full of Heyst, it
+      occurred to him that she might be aware of other facts. This was a very
+      amazing discovery to anyone who looked at Mrs. Schomberg. Nobody had ever
+      suspected her of having a mind. I mean even a little of it, I mean any at
+      all. One was inclined to think of her as an It&mdash;an automaton, a very
+      plain dummy, with an arrangement for bowing the head at times and smiling
+      stupidly now and then. Davidson viewed her profile with a flattened nose,
+      a hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye. He asked himself:
+      Did that speak just now? Will it speak again? It was as exciting, for the
+      mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with a mechanism. A smile played
+      about the fat features of Davidson; the smile of a man making an amusing
+      experiment. He spoke again to her:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the other members of that orchestra were real Italians, were they
+      not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, he didn't care. He wanted to see whether the mechanism would
+      work again. It did. It said they were not. They were of all sorts,
+      apparently. It paused, with the one goggle eye immovably gazing down the
+      whole length of the room and through the door opening on to the &ldquo;piazza.&rdquo;
+       It paused, then went on in the same low pitch:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was even one English girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor devil!&rdquo;&mdash;said Davidson, &ldquo;I suppose these women are not much
+      better than slaves really. Was that fellow with the dyed beard decent in
+      his way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The mechanism remained silent. The sympathetic soul of Davidson drew its
+      own conclusions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beastly life for these women!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;When you say an English girl,
+      Mrs. Schomberg, do you really mean a young girl? Some of these orchestra
+      girls are no chicks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Young enough,&rdquo; came the low voice out of Mrs. Schomberg's unmoved
+      physiognomy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson, encouraged, remarked that he was sorry for her. He was easily
+      sorry for people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did they go to from here?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She did not go with them. She ran away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the pronouncement Davidson obtained next. It introduced a new
+      sort of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! Well!&rdquo; he exclaimed placidly; and then, with the air of a man who
+      knows life: &ldquo;Who with?&rdquo; he inquired with assurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Schomberg's immobility gave her an appearance of listening intently.
+      Perhaps she was really listening; but Schomberg must have been finishing
+      his sleep in some distant part of the house. The silence was profound, and
+      lasted long enough to become startling. Then, enthroned above Davidson,
+      she whispered at last:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That friend of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you know I am here looking for a friend,&rdquo; said Davidson hopefully.
+      &ldquo;Won't you tell me&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A mist seemed to roll away from before Davidson's eyes, disclosing
+      something he could not believe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't mean it!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;He's not the man for it.&rdquo; But the last
+      words came out in a faint voice. Mrs. Schomberg never moved her head the
+      least bit. Davidson, after the shock which made him sit up, went slack all
+      over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heyst! Such a perfect gentleman!&rdquo; he exclaimed weakly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Schomberg did not seem to have heard him. This startling fact did not
+      tally somehow with the idea Davidson had of Heyst. He never talked of
+      women, he never seemed to think of them, or to remember that they existed;
+      and then all at once&mdash;like this! Running off with a casual orchestra
+      girl!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might have knocked me down with a feather,&rdquo; Davidson told us some
+      time afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By then he was taking an indulgent view of both the parties to that
+      amazing transaction. First of all, on reflection, he was by no means
+      certain that it prevented Heyst from being a perfect gentleman, as before.
+      He confronted our open grins or quiet smiles with a serious round face.
+      Heyst had taken the girl away to Samburan; and that was no joking matter.
+      The loneliness, the ruins of the spot, had impressed Davidson's simple
+      soul. They were incompatible with the frivolous comments of people who had
+      not seen it. That black jetty, sticking out of the jungle into the empty
+      sea; these roof-ridges of deserted houses peeping dismally above the long
+      grass! Ough! The gigantic and funereal blackboard sign of the Tropical
+      Belt Coal Company, still emerging from a wild growth of bushes like an
+      inscription stuck above a grave figured by the tall heap of unsold coal at
+      the shore end of the wharf, added to the general desolation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus was the sensitive Davidson. The girl must have been miserable indeed
+      to follow such a strange man to such a spot. Heyst had, no doubt, told her
+      the truth. He was a gentleman. But no words could do justice to the
+      conditions of life on Samburan. A desert island was nothing to it.
+      Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert island&mdash;why, you could
+      not help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-playing girl out of an ambulant
+      ladies' orchestra to remain content there for a day, for one single day,
+      was inconceivable. She would be frightened at the first sight of it. She
+      would scream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The capacity for sympathy in these stout, placid men! Davidson was stirred
+      to the depths; and it was easy to see that it was about Heyst that he was
+      concerned. We asked him if he had passed that way lately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes. I always do&mdash;about half a mile off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seen anybody about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not a soul. Not a shadow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you blow your whistle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Blow the whistle? You think I would do such a thing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rejected the mere possibility of such an unwarrantable intrusion.
+      Wonderfully delicate fellow, Davidson!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, but how do you know that they are there?&rdquo; he was naturally asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had entrusted Mrs. Schomberg with a message for Davidson&mdash;a few
+      lines in pencil on a scrap of crumpled paper. It was to the effect: that
+      an unforeseen necessity was driving him away before the appointed time. He
+      begged Davidson's indulgence for the apparent discourtesy. The woman of
+      the house&mdash;meaning Mrs. Schomberg&mdash;would give him the facts,
+      though unable to explain them, of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was there to explain?&rdquo; wondered Davidson dubiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He took a fancy to that fiddle-playing girl, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she to him, apparently,&rdquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonderfully quick work,&rdquo; reflected Davidson. &ldquo;What do you think will come
+      of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Repentance, I should say. But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg has been
+      selected for a confidante?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that woman
+      whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the two
+      billiard-tables&mdash;without expression, without movement, without voice,
+      without sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, she helped the girl to bolt,&rdquo; said Davidson turning at me his
+      innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which this
+      affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow which sometimes
+      leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling. It looked as though he
+      would never get over it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst's note, twisted like a pipe-light, into my
+      lap while I sat there unsuspecting,&rdquo; Davidson went on. &ldquo;Directly I had
+      recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth she had to do with it that
+      Heyst should leave it with her. And then, behaving like a painted image
+      rather than a live woman, she whispered, just loud enough for me to hear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I helped them. I got her things together, tied them up in my own shawl,
+      and threw them into the compound out of a back window. I did it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That woman that you would say hadn't the pluck to lift her little
+      finger!&rdquo; marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice. &ldquo;What do
+      you think of that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve. She was too
+      lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion. It was impossible to
+      think that Heyst had bribed her. Whatever means he had, he had not the
+      means to do that. Or could it be that she was moved by that disinterested
+      passion for delivering a woman to a man which in respectable spheres is
+      called matchmaking?&mdash;a highly irregular example of it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It must have been a very small bundle,&rdquo; remarked Davidson further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. She was miserable. I don't suppose it was more than a
+      little linen and a couple of those white frocks they wear on the
+      platform.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson pursued his own train of thought. He supposed that such a thing
+      had never been heard of in the history of the tropics. For where could you
+      find anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra? No doubt fellows here and
+      there took a fancy to some pretty one&mdash;but it was not for running
+      away with her. Oh dear no! It needed a lunatic like Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only think what it means,&rdquo; wheezed Davidson, imaginative under his
+      invincible placidity. &ldquo;Just only try to think! Brooding alone on Samburan
+      has upset his brain. He never stopped to consider, or he couldn't have
+      done it. No sane man . . . How is a thing like that to go on? What's he
+      going to do with her in the end? It's madness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say that he's mad. Schomberg tells us that he must be starving on his
+      island; so he may end yet by eating her,&rdquo; I suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told us.
+      Indeed, the wonder was that they had been left alone so long. The drowsy
+      afternoon was slipping by. Footsteps and voices resounded on the veranda&mdash;I
+      beg pardon, the piazza; the scraping of chairs, the ping of a smitten
+      bell. Customers were turning up. Mrs. Schomberg was begging Davidson
+      hurriedly, but without looking at him, to say nothing to anyone, when on a
+      half-uttered word her nervous whisper was cut short. Through a small inner
+      door Schomberg came in, his hair brushed, his beard combed neatly, but his
+      eyelids still heavy from his nap. He looked with suspicion at Davidson,
+      and even glanced at his wife; but he was baffled by the natural placidity
+      of the one and the acquired habit of immobility in the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you sent out the drinks?&rdquo; he asked surlily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared with a
+      loaded tray, on his way out. Schomberg went to the door and greeted the
+      customers outside, but did not join them. He remained blocking half the
+      doorway, with his back to the room, and was still there when Davidson,
+      after sitting still for a while, rose to go. At the noise he made
+      Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his hat to Mrs. Schomberg and
+      receive her wooden bow accompanied by a stupid grin, and then looked away.
+      He was loftily dignified. Davidson stopped at the door, deep in his
+      simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry you won't tell me anything about my friend's absence,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;My friend Heyst, you know. I suppose the only course for me now is
+      to make inquiries down at the port. I shall hear something there, I don't
+      doubt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make inquiries of the devil!&rdquo; replied Schomberg in a hoarse mutter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson's purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been mainly to make
+      Mrs. Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain have heard something
+      more of Heyst's exploit from another point of view. It was a shrewd try.
+      It was successful in a rather startling way, because the hotel-keeper's
+      point of view was horribly abusive. All of a sudden, in the same hoarse
+      sinister tone, he proceeded to call Heyst many names, of which &ldquo;pig-dog&rdquo;
+       was not the worst, with such vehemence that he actually choked himself.
+      Profiting from the pause, Davidson, whose temperament could withstand
+      worse shocks, remonstrated in an undertone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's unreasonable to get so angry as that. Even if he had run off with
+      your cash-box&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close to
+      Davidson's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My cash-box! My&mdash;he&mdash;look here, Captain Davidson! He ran off
+      with a girl. What do I care for the girl? The girl is nothing to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start. That's what the
+      girl was; and he reiterated the assertion that she was nothing to him.
+      What he was concerned for was the good name of his house. Wherever he had
+      been established, he had always had &ldquo;artist parties&rdquo; staying in his house.
+      One recommended him to the others; but what would happen now, when it got
+      about that leaders ran the risk in his house&mdash;his house&mdash;of
+      losing members of their troupe? And just now, when he had spent seven
+      hundred and thirty-four guilders in building a concert-hall in his
+      compound. Was that a thing to do in a respectable hotel? The cheek, the
+      indecency, the impudence, the atrocity! Vagabond, impostor, swindler,
+      ruffian, schwein-hund!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had seized Davidson by a button of his coat, detaining him in the
+      doorway, and exactly in the line of Mrs. Schomberg's stony gaze. Davidson
+      stole a glance in that direction and thought of making some sort of
+      reassuring sign to her, but she looked so bereft of senses, and almost of
+      life, perched up there, that it seemed not worth while. He disengaged his
+      button with firm placidity. Thereupon, with a last stifled curse,
+      Schomberg vanished somewhere within, to try and compose his spirits in
+      solitude. Davidson stepped out on the veranda. The party of customers
+      there had become aware of the explosive interlude in the doorway. Davidson
+      knew one of these men, and nodded to him in passing; but his acquaintance
+      called out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't he in a filthy temper? He's been like that ever since.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The speaker laughed aloud, while all the others sat smiling. Davidson
+      stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, rather.&rdquo; His feelings were, he told us, those of bewildered
+      resignation; but of course that was no more visible to the others than the
+      emotions of a turtle when it withdraws into its shell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems unreasonable,&rdquo; he murmured thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but they had a scrap!&rdquo; the other said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean? Was there a fight!&mdash;a fight with Heyst?&rdquo; asked
+      Davidson, much perturbed, if somewhat incredulous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heyst? No, these two&mdash;the bandmaster, the fellow who's taking these
+      women about and our Schomberg. Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in the morning,
+      and went for our worthy friend. I tell you, they were rolling on the floor
+      together on this very veranda, after chasing each other all over the
+      house, doors slamming, women screaming, seventeen of them, in the
+      dining-room; Chinamen up the trees. Hey, John? You climb tree to see the
+      fight, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy, almond-eyed and impassive, emitted a scornful grunt, finished
+      wiping the table, and withdrew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what it was&mdash;a real, go-as-you-please scrap. And Zangiacomo
+      began it. Oh, here's Schomberg. Say, Schomberg, didn't he fly at you, when
+      the girl was missed, because it was you who insisted that the artists
+      should go about the audience during the interval?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg had reappeared in the doorway. He advanced. His bearing was
+      stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded, and he controlled
+      his voice with apparent effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly. That was only business. I quoted him special terms and all for
+      your sake, gentlemen. I was thinking of my regular customers. There's
+      nothing to do in the evenings in this town. I think, gentlemen, you were
+      all pleased at the opportunity of hearing a little good music; and where's
+      the harm of offering a grenadine, or what not, to a lady artist? But that
+      fellow&mdash;that Swede&mdash;he got round the girl. He got round all the
+      people out here. I've been watching him for years. You remember how he got
+      round Morrison.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off. The customers
+      at the table exchanged glances silently. Davidson's attitude was that of a
+      spectator. Schomberg's moody pacing of the billiard-room could be heard on
+      the veranda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the funniest part is,&rdquo; resumed the man who had been speaking before&mdash;an
+      English clerk in a Dutch house&mdash;&ldquo;the funniest part is that before
+      nine o'clock that same morning those two were driving together in a gharry
+      down to the port, to look for Heyst and the girl. I saw them rushing
+      around making inquiries. I don't know what they would have done to the
+      girl, but they seemed quite ready to fall upon your Heyst, Davidson, and
+      kill him on the quay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had never, he said, seen anything so queer. Those two investigators
+      working feverishly to the same end were glaring at each other with
+      surprising ferocity. In hatred and mistrust they entered a steam-launch,
+      and went flying from ship to ship all over the harbour, causing no end of
+      sensation. The captains of vessels, coming on shore later in the day,
+      brought tales of a strange invasion, and wanted to know who were the two
+      offensive lunatics in a steam-launch, apparently after a man and a girl,
+      and telling a story of which one could make neither head nor tail. Their
+      reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the point
+      of the mate of an American ship bundling them out over the rail with
+      unseemly precipitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone in the
+      night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the eastward. This was
+      known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom Heyst hired for the
+      purpose at three o'clock in the morning. The Tesman schooner had sailed at
+      daylight with the usual land breeze, and was probably still in sight in
+      the offing at the time. However, the two pursuers after their experience
+      with the American mate, made for the shore. On landing, they had another
+      violent row in the German language. But there was no second fight; and
+      finally, with looks of fierce animosity, they got together into a gharry&mdash;obviously
+      with the frugal view of sharing expenses&mdash;and drove away, leaving an
+      astonished little crowd of Europeans and natives on the quay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After hearing this wondrous tale, Davidson went away from the hotel
+      veranda, which was filling with Schomberg's regular customers. Heyst's
+      escapade was the general topic of conversation. Never before had that
+      unaccountable individual been the cause of so much gossip, he judged. No!
+      Not even in the beginnings of the Tropical Belt Coal Company when becoming
+      for a moment a public character was he the object of a silly criticism and
+      unintelligent envy for every vagabond and adventurer in the islands.
+      Davidson concluded that people liked to discuss that sort of scandal
+      better than any other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I asked him if he believed that this was such a great scandal after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens, no!&rdquo; said that excellent man who, himself, was incapable of any
+      impropriety of conduct. &ldquo;But it isn't a thing I would have done myself; I
+      mean even if I had not been married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no implied condemnation in the statement; rather something like
+      regret. Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its essence the
+      rescue of a distressed human being. Not that we were two romantics,
+      tingeing the world to the hue of our temperament, but that both of us had
+      been acute enough to discover a long time ago that Heyst was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shouldn't have had the pluck,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;I see a thing all round,
+      as it were; but Heyst doesn't, or else he would have been scared. You
+      don't take a woman into a desert jungle without being made sorry for it
+      sooner or later, in one way or another; and Heyst being a gentleman only
+      makes it worse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER SIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened that I
+      did not meet Davidson again for some three months. When we did come
+      together, almost the first thing he said to me was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've seen him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty, that
+      he had not intruded. He was called in. Otherwise he would not have dreamed
+      of breaking in upon Heyst's privacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am certain you wouldn't,&rdquo; I assured him, concealing my amusement at his
+      wonderful delicacy. He was the most delicate man that ever took a small
+      steamer to and fro among the islands. But his humanity, which was not less
+      strong and praiseworthy, had induced him to take his steamer past Samburan
+      wharf (at an average distance of a mile) every twenty-three days&mdash;exactly.
+      Davidson was delicate, humane, and regular.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heyst called you in?&rdquo; I asked, interested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date.
+      Davidson was examining the shore through his glasses with his unwearied
+      and punctual humanity as he steamed past Samburan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw a man in white. It could only have been Heyst. He had fastened some
+      sort of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was waving it at the end of
+      the old wharf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson didn't like to take his steamer alongside&mdash;for fear of being
+      indiscreet, I suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped his engines,
+      and lowered a boat. He went himself in that boat, which was manned, of
+      course, by his Malay seamen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his
+      signalling-pole; and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down engaged
+      busily in unfastening the flag from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there anything wrong?&rdquo; I inquired, Davidson having paused in his
+      narrative and my curiosity being naturally aroused. You must remember that
+      Heyst as the Archipelago knew him was not&mdash;what shall I say&mdash;was
+      not a signalling sort of man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The very words that came out of my mouth,&rdquo; said Davidson, &ldquo;before I laid
+      the boat against the piles. I could not help it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag thing,
+      which struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, nothing wrong,&rdquo; he cried. His white teeth flashed agreeably below the
+      coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I don't know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which prevented
+      Davidson from clambering upon the wharf. He stood up in the boat, and,
+      above him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles, thanking him and
+      apologizing for the liberty, exactly in his usual manner. Davidson had
+      expected some change in the man, but there was none. Nothing in him
+      betrayed the momentous fact that within that jungle there was a girl, a
+      performer in a ladies' orchestra, whom he had carried straight off the
+      concert platform into the wilderness. He was not ashamed or defiant or
+      abashed about it. He might have been a shade confidential when addressing
+      Davidson. And his words were enigmatical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I took this course of signalling to you,&rdquo; he said to Davidson, &ldquo;because
+      to preserve appearances might be of the utmost importance. Not to me, of
+      course. I don't care what people may say, and of course no one can hurt
+      me. I suppose I have done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed myself
+      to be tempted into action. It seemed innocent enough, but all action is
+      bound to be harmful. It is devilish. That is why this world is evil upon
+      the whole. But I have done with it! I shall never lift a little finger
+      again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the
+      best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we want it
+      or not; but now I, have done with observation, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms alongside an
+      abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush. He had never heard
+      anybody speak like this before; certainly not Heyst, whose conversation
+      was concise, polite, with a faint ring of playfulness in the cultivated
+      tones of his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's gone mad,&rdquo; Davidson thought to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged to
+      dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly most unusual
+      talk. Then he remembered&mdash;in his surprise he had lost sight of it&mdash;that
+      Heyst now had a girl there. This bizarre discourse was probably the effect
+      of the girl. Davidson shook off the absurd feeling, and asked, wishing to
+      make clear his friendliness, and not knowing what else to say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't run short of stores or anything like that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst smiled and shook his head:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no. Nothing of the kind. We are fairly well off here. Thanks, all the
+      same. If I have taken the liberty to detain you, it is not from any
+      uneasiness for myself and my&mdash;companion. The person I was thinking of
+      when I made up my mind to invoke your assistance is Mrs. Schomberg.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have talked with her,&rdquo; interjected Davidson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! You? Yes, I hoped she would find means to&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she didn't tell me much,&rdquo; interrupted Davidson, who was not averse
+      from hearing something&mdash;he hardly knew what.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm&mdash;Yes. But that note of mine? Yes? She found an opportunity to
+      give it to you? That's good, very good. She's more resourceful than one
+      would give her credit for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Women often are&mdash;&rdquo; remarked Davidson. The strangeness from which he
+      had suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried off a girl, wore
+      off as the minutes went by. &ldquo;There's a lot of unexpectedness about women,&rdquo;
+       he generalized with a didactic aim which seemed to miss its mark; for the
+      next thing Heyst said was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is Mrs. Schomberg's shawl.&rdquo; He touched the stuff hanging over his
+      arm. &ldquo;An Indian thing, I believe,&rdquo; he added, glancing at his arm sideways.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't of particular value,&rdquo; said Davidson truthfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very likely. The point is that it belongs to Schomberg's wife. That
+      Schomberg seems to be an unconscionable ruffian&mdash;don't you think so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson smiled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We out here have got used to him,&rdquo; he said, as if excusing a universal
+      and guilty toleration of a manifest nuisance. &ldquo;I'd hardly call him that. I
+      only know him as a hotel-keeper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never knew him even as that&mdash;not till this time, when you were so
+      obliging as to take me to Sourabaya, I went to stay there from economy.
+      The Netherlands House is very expensive, and they expect you to bring your
+      own servant with you. It's a nuisance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, of course,&rdquo; protested Davidson hastily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a short silence Heyst returned to the matter of the shawl. He wanted
+      to send it back to Mrs. Schomberg. He said that it might be very awkward
+      for her if she were unable, if asked, to produce it. This had given him,
+      Heyst, much uneasiness. She was terrified of Schomberg. Apparently she had
+      reason to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson had remarked that, too. Which did not prevent her, he pointed
+      out, from making a fool of him, in a way, for the sake of a stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! You know!&rdquo; said Heyst. &ldquo;Yes, she helped me&mdash;us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She told me so. I had quite a talk with her,&rdquo; Davidson informed him.
+      &ldquo;Fancy anyone having a talk with Mrs. Schomberg! If I were to tell the
+      fellows they wouldn't believe me. How did you get round her, Heyst? How
+      did you think of it? Why, she looks too stupid to understand human speech
+      and too scared to shoo a chicken away. Oh, the women, the women! You don't
+      know what there may be in the quietest of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life,&rdquo; said
+      Heyst. &ldquo;It's a very respectable task.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that it? I had some idea it was that,&rdquo; confessed Davidson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He then imparted to Heyst the story of the violent proceedings following
+      on the discovery of his flight. Heyst's polite attention to the tale took
+      on a sombre cast; but he manifested no surprise, and offered no comment.
+      When Davidson had finished he handed down the shawl into the boat, and
+      Davidson promised to do his best to return it to Mrs. Schomberg in some
+      secret fashion. Heyst expressed his thanks in a few simple words, set off
+      by his manner of finished courtesy. Davidson prepared to depart. They were
+      not looking at each other. Suddenly Heyst spoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You understand that this was a case of odious persecution, don't you? I
+      became aware of it and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a view which the sympathetic Davidson was capable of appreciating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not surprised to hear it,&rdquo; he said placidly. &ldquo;Odious enough, I dare
+      say. And you, of course&mdash;not being a married man&mdash;were free to
+      step in. Ah, well!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines in his
+      hands when Heyst observed abruptly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I
+      think that here we can safely defy the fates.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When relating all this to me, Davidson's only comment was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Funny notion of defying the fates&mdash;to take a woman in tow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER SEVEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Some considerable time afterwards&mdash;we did not meet very often&mdash;I
+      asked Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he had
+      tackled his mission in a direct way, and had found it easy enough. At the
+      very first call he made in Samarang he rolled the shawl as tightly as he
+      could into the smallest possible brown-paper parcel, which he carried
+      ashore with him. His business in the town being transacted, he got into a
+      gharry with the parcel and drove to the hotel. With his precious
+      experience, he timed his arrival accurately for the hour of Schomberg's
+      siesta. Finding the place empty as on the former occasion, he marched into
+      the billiard-room, took a seat at the back, near the sort of dais which
+      Mrs. Schomberg would in due course come to occupy, and broke the
+      slumbering silence of the house by thumping a bell vigorously. Of course a
+      Chinaman appeared promptly. Davidson ordered a drink and sat tight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if necessary,&rdquo; he
+      said&mdash;Davidson's a very abstemious man&mdash;&ldquo;rather than take that
+      parcel out of the house again. Couldn't leave it in a corner without
+      letting the woman know it was there. It might have turned out worse for
+      her than not bringing the thing back at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing two or
+      three iced drinks which he did not want. Presently, as he hoped it would
+      happen, Mrs. Schomberg came in, silk dress, long neck, ringlets, scared
+      eyes, and silly grin&mdash;all complete. Probably that lazy beast had sent
+      her out to see who was the thirsty customer waking up the echoes of the
+      house at this quiet hour. Bow, nod&mdash;and she clambered up to her post
+      behind the raised counter, looking so helpless, so inane, as she sat
+      there, that if it hadn't been for the parcel, Davidson declared, he would
+      have thought he had merely dreamed all that had passed between them. He
+      ordered another drink, to get the Chinaman out of the room, and then
+      seized the parcel, which was reposing on a chair near him, and with no
+      more than a mutter&mdash;&ldquo;this is something of yours&rdquo;&mdash;he rammed it
+      swiftly into a recess in the counter, at her feet. There! The rest was her
+      affair. And just in time, too. Schomberg turned up, yawning affectedly,
+      almost before Davidson had regained his seat. He cast about suspicious and
+      irate glances. An invincible placidity of expression helped Davidson
+      wonderfully at the moment, and the other, of course, could have no grounds
+      for the slightest suspicion of any sort of understanding between his wife
+      and this customer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss. Davidson was lost in
+      admiration. He believed, now, that the woman had been putting it on for
+      years. She never even winked. It was immense! The insight he had obtained
+      almost frightened him; he couldn't get over his wonder at knowing more of
+      the real Mrs. Schomberg than anybody in the Islands, including Schomberg
+      himself. She was a miracle of dissimulation. No wonder Heyst got the girl
+      away from under two men's noses, if he had her to help with the job!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The greatest wonder, after all, was Heyst getting mixed up with
+      petticoats. The fellow's life had been open to us for years and nothing
+      could have been more detached from feminine associations. Except that he
+      stood drinks to people on suitable occasions, like any other man, this
+      observer of facts seemed to have no connection with earthly affairs and
+      passions. The very courtesy of his manner, the flavour of playfulness in
+      the voice set him apart. He was like a feather floating lightly in the
+      workaday atmosphere which was the breath of our nostrils. For this reason
+      whenever this looker-on took contact with things he attracted attention.
+      First, it was the Morrison partnership of mystery, then came the great
+      sensation of the Tropical Belt Coal where indeed varied interests were
+      involved: a real business matter. And then came this elopement, this
+      incongruous phenomenon of self-assertion, the greatest wonder of all,
+      astonishing and amusing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson admitted to me that, the hubbub was subsiding; and the affair
+      would have been already forgotten, perhaps, if that ass Schomberg had not
+      kept on gnashing his teeth publicly about it. It was really provoking that
+      Davidson should not be able to give one some idea of the girl. Was she
+      pretty? He didn't know. He had stayed the whole afternoon in Schomberg's
+      hotel, mainly for the purpose of finding out something about her. But the
+      story was growing stale. The parties at the tables on the veranda had
+      other, fresher, events to talk about and Davidson shrank from making
+      direct inquiries. He sat placidly there, content to be disregarded and
+      hoping for some chance word to turn up. I shouldn't wonder if the good
+      fellow hadn't been dozing. It's difficult to give you an adequate idea of
+      Davidson's placidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Schomberg, wandering about, joined a party that had taken the
+      table next to Davidson's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man like that Swede, gentlemen, is a public danger,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;I
+      remember him for years. I won't say anything of his spying&mdash;well, he
+      used to say himself he was looking for out-of-the-way facts and what is
+      that if not spying? He was spying into everybody's business. He got hold
+      of Captain Morrison, squeezed him dry, like you would an orange, and
+      scared him off to Europe to die there. Everybody knows that Captain
+      Morrison had a weak chest. Robbed first and murdered afterwards! I don't
+      mince words&mdash;not I. Next he gets up that swindle of the Belt Coal.
+      You know all about it. And now, after lining his pockets with other
+      people's money, he kidnaps a white girl belonging to an orchestra which is
+      performing in my public room for the benefit of my patrons, and goes off
+      to live like a prince on that island, where nobody can get at him. A damn
+      silly girl . . . It's disgusting&mdash;tfui!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spat. He choked with rage&mdash;for he saw visions, no doubt. He jumped
+      up from his chair, and went away to flee from them&mdash;perhaps. He went
+      into the room where Mrs. Schomberg sat. Her aspect could not have been
+      very soothing to the sort of torment from which he was suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst. His proceeding was to
+      enter into conversation with one and another, casually, and showing no
+      particular knowledge of the affair, in order to discover something about
+      the girl. Was she anything out of the way? Was she pretty? She couldn't
+      have been markedly so. She had not attracted special notice. She was young&mdash;on
+      that everybody agreed. The English clerk of Tesmans remembered that she
+      had a sallow face. He was respectable and highly proper. He was not the
+      sort to associate with such people. Most of these women were fairly
+      battered specimens. Schomberg had them housed in what he called the
+      Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending and washing
+      their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out to dry between the
+      trees, like a lot of washerwomen. They looked very much like middle-aged
+      washerwomen on the platform, too. But the girl had been living in the main
+      building along with the boss, the director, the fellow with the black
+      beard, and a hard-bitten, oldish woman who took the piano and was
+      understood to be the fellow's wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not a very satisfactory result. Davidson stayed on, and even
+      joined the table d'hote dinner, without gleaning any more information. He
+      was resigned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he wheezed placidly, &ldquo;I am bound to see her some day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He meant to take the Samburan channel every trip, as before of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;No doubt you will. Some day Heyst will be signalling to
+      you again; and I wonder what it will be for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson made no reply. He had his own ideas about that, and his silence
+      concealed a good deal of thought. We spoke no more of Heyst's girl. Before
+      we separated, he gave me a piece of unrelated observation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's funny,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I fancy there's some gambling going on in the
+      evening at Schomberg's place, on the quiet. I've noticed men strolling
+      away in twos and threes towards that hall where the orchestra used to
+      play. The windows must be specially well shuttered, because I could not
+      spy the smallest gleam of light from that direction; but I can't believe
+      that those beggars would go in there only to sit and think of their sins
+      in the dark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's strange. It's incredible that Schomberg should risk that sort of
+      thing,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART2" id="link2H_PART2">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART TWO
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER ONE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As we know, Heyst had gone to stay in Schomberg's hotel in complete
+      ignorance that his person was odious to that worthy. When he arrived,
+      Zangiacomo's Ladies' Orchestra had been established there for some time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost
+      corner of the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had something to
+      do with money. He transacted it quickly, and then found himself with
+      nothing to do while he awaited Davidson, who was to take him back to his
+      solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst meant to go. He whom we used to
+      refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was suffering from thorough
+      disenchantment. Not with the islands, however. The Archipelago has a
+      lasting fascination. It is not easy to shake off the spell of island life.
+      Heyst was disenchanted with life as a whole. His scornful temperament,
+      beguiled into action, suffered from failure in a subtle way unknown to men
+      accustomed to grapple with the realities of common human enterprise. It
+      was like the gnawing pain of useless apostasy, a sort of shame before his
+      own betrayed nature; and in addition, he also suffered from plain,
+      downright remorse. He deemed himself guilty of Morrison's death. A rather
+      absurd feeling, since no one could possibly have foreseen the horrors of
+      the cold, wet summer lying in wait for poor Morrison at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not in Heyst's character to turn morose; but his mental state was
+      not compatible with a sociable mood. He spent his evenings sitting apart
+      on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. The lamentations of string
+      instruments issued from the building in the hotel compound, the approaches
+      to which were decorated with Japanese paper lanterns strung up between the
+      trunks of several big trees. Scraps of tunes more or less plaintive
+      reached his ears. They pursued him even into his bedroom, which opened
+      into an upstairs veranda. The fragmentary and rasping character of these
+      sounds made their intrusion inexpressibly tedious in the long run. Like
+      most dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear the music of the
+      spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had a taste for silence
+      which he had been able to gratify for years. The islands are very quiet.
+      One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a
+      great hush of silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the
+      sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of smiling somnolence broods over
+      them; the very voices of their people are soft and subdued, as if afraid
+      to break some protecting spell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early
+      days. For him, however, that was broken. He was no longer enchanted,
+      though he was still a captive of the islands. He had no intention to leave
+      them ever. Where could he have gone to, after all these years? Not a
+      single soul belonging to him lived anywhere on earth. Of this fact&mdash;not
+      such a remote one, after all&mdash;he had only lately become aware; for it
+      is failure that makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his
+      resources. And though he had made up his mind to retire from the world in
+      hermit fashion, yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of loneliness
+      which had come to him in the hour of renunciation. It hurt him. Nothing is
+      more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our
+      intelligence and our feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye. Towards the
+      unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
+      lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour. Nudging certain of his customers with
+      his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs &ldquo;that Swede&rdquo; was giving
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house. This place isn't
+      good enough for him. I wish to goodness he had gone somewhere else to show
+      off his superiority. Here I have got up this series of concerts for you
+      gentlemen, just to make things a little brighter generally; and do you
+      think he'll condescend to step in and listen to a piece or two of an
+      evening? Not he. I know him of old. There he sits at the dark end of the
+      piazza, all the evening long&mdash;planning some new swindle, no doubt.
+      For two-pence I would ask him to go and look for quarters somewhere else;
+      only one doesn't like to treat a white man like that out in the tropics. I
+      don't know how long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet a trifle that
+      he'll never work himself up to the point of spending the fifty cents of
+      entrance money for the sake of a little good music.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening
+      Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped snatches
+      of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress as thin as a
+      pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among the trees, where
+      the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out parts of their great rugged
+      trunks, here and there, in the great mass of darkness under the lofty
+      foliage. More lanterns, of the shape of cylindrical concertinas, hanging
+      in a row from a slack string, decorated the doorway of what Schomberg
+      called grandiloquently &ldquo;my concert-hall.&rdquo; In his desperate mood Heyst
+      ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain, and went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported pine
+      boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning. An
+      instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing, scraping,
+      squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano, operated upon by a
+      bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered nostrils, rained hard notes like
+      hail through the tempest of fiddles. The small platform was filled with
+      white muslin dresses and crimson sashes slanting from shoulders provided
+      with bare arms, which sawed away without respite. Zangiacomo conducted. He
+      wore a white mess-jacket, a black dress waistcoat, and white trousers. His
+      longish, tousled hair and his great beard were purple-black. He was
+      horrible. The heat was terrific. There were perhaps thirty people having
+      drinks at several little tables. Heyst, quite overcome by the volume of
+      noise, dropped into a chair. In the quick time of that music, in the
+      varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the movements of the bare
+      arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces, the stony eyes of the
+      executants, there was a suggestion of brutality&mdash;something cruel,
+      sensual and repulsive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is awful!&rdquo; Heyst murmured to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not flee
+      from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He remained,
+      astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have been more
+      repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and, so to speak,
+      more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition of vigour. The
+      Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with
+      a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence;
+      and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to see the
+      people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their
+      glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst averted
+      his gaze from the unnatural spectacle of their indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the piece of music came to an end the relief was so great that he
+      felt slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his feet. When
+      he raised his eyes, the audience, most perversely, was exhibiting signs of
+      animation and interest in their faces, and the women in white muslin
+      dresses were coming down in pairs from the platform into the body of
+      Schomberg's &ldquo;concert-hall.&rdquo; They dispersed themselves all over the place.
+      The male creature with the hooked nose and purple-black beard disappeared
+      somewhere. This was the interval during which, as the astute Schomberg had
+      stipulated, the members of the orchestra were encouraged to favour the
+      members of the audience with their company&mdash;that is, such members as
+      seemed inclined to fraternize with the arts in a familiar and generous
+      manner; the symbol of familiarity and generosity consisting in offers of
+      refreshment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The procedure struck Heyst as highly incorrect. However, the impropriety
+      of Schomberg's ingenious scheme was defeated by the circumstance that most
+      of the women were no longer young, and that none of them had ever been
+      beautiful. Their more or less worn cheeks were slightly rouged, but apart
+      from that fact, which might have been simply a matter of routine, they did
+      not seem to take the success of the scheme unduly to heart. The impulse to
+      fraternize with the arts being obviously weak in the audience, some of the
+      musicians sat down listlessly at unoccupied tables, while others went on
+      perambulating the central passage: arm in arm, glad enough, no doubt, to
+      stretch their legs while resting their arms. Their crimson sashes gave a
+      factitious touch of gaiety to the smoky atmosphere of the concert-hall;
+      and Heyst felt a sudden pity for these beings, exploited, hopeless, devoid
+      of charm and grace, whose fate of cheerless dependence invested their
+      coarse and joyless features with a touch of pathos.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst was temperamentally sympathetic. To have them passing and repassing
+      close to his little table was painful to him. He was preparing to rise and
+      go out when he noticed that two white muslin dresses and crimson sashes
+      had not yet left the platform. One of these dresses concealed the
+      raw-boned frame of the woman with the bad-tempered curve to her nostrils.
+      She was no less a personage than Mrs. Zangiacomo. She had left the piano,
+      and, with her back to the hall, was preparing the parts for the second
+      half of the concert, with a brusque, impatient action of her ugly elbow.
+      This task done, she turned, and, perceiving the other white muslin dress
+      motionless on a chair in the second row, she strode towards it between the
+      music-stands with an aggressive and masterful gait. On the lap of that
+      dress there lay, unclasped and idle, a pair of small hands, not very
+      white, attached to well-formed arms. The next detail Heyst was led to
+      observe was the arrangement of the hair&mdash;two thick, brown tresses
+      rolled round an attractively shaped head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A girl, by Jove!&rdquo; he exclaimed mentally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that she was a girl. It was evident in the outline of the
+      shoulders, in the slender white bust springing up, barred slantwise by the
+      crimson sash, from the bell-shaped spread of muslin skirt hiding the chair
+      on which she sat averted a little from the body of the hall. Her feet, in
+      low white shoes, were crossed prettily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had captured Heyst's awakened faculty of observation; he had the
+      sensation of a new experience. That was because his faculty of observation
+      had never before been captured by any feminine creature in that marked and
+      exclusive fashion. He looked at her anxiously, as no man ever looks at
+      another man; and he positively forgot where he was. He had lost touch with
+      his surroundings. The big woman, advancing, concealed the girl from his
+      sight for a moment. She bent over the seated youthful figure, in passing
+      it very close, as if to drop a word into its ear. Her lips did certainly
+      move. But what sort of word could it have been to make the girl jump up so
+      swiftly? Heyst, at his table, was surprised into a sympathetic start. He
+      glanced quickly round. Nobody was looking towards the platform; and when
+      his eyes swept back there again, the girl, with the big woman treading at
+      her heels, was coming down the three steps from the platform to the floor
+      of the hall. There she paused, stumbled one pace forward, and stood still
+      again, while the other&mdash;the escort, the dragoon, the coarse big woman
+      of the piano&mdash;passed her roughly, and, marching truculently down the
+      centre aisle between the chairs and tables, went out to rejoin the
+      hook-nosed Zangiacomo somewhere outside. During her extraordinary transit,
+      as if everything in the hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes
+      met the upward glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl.
+      She had not moved. Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips. Then he got
+      up. It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made him cross the
+      sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the island of Timor and
+      accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him then, a man in trouble,
+      expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it. He was not thinking
+      of Morrison then. It may be said that, for the first time since the final
+      abandonment of the Samburan coal mine, he had completely forgotten the
+      late Morrison. It is true that to a certain extent he had forgotten also
+      where he was. Thus, unchecked by any sort of self consciousness, Heyst
+      walked up the central passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several of the women, by this time, had found anchorage here and there
+      among the occupied tables. They talked to the men, leaning on their
+      elbows, and suggesting funnily&mdash;if it hadn't been for the crimson
+      sashes&mdash;in their white dresses an assembly of middle-aged brides with
+      free and easy manners and hoarse voices. The murmuring noise of
+      conversations carried on with some spirit filled Schomberg's concert-room.
+      Nobody remarked Heyst's movements; for indeed he was not the only man on
+      his legs there. He had been confronting the girl for some time before she
+      became aware of his presence. She was looking down, very still, without
+      colour, without glances, without voice, without movement. It was only when
+      Heyst addressed her in his courteous tone that she raised her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me,&rdquo; he said in English, &ldquo;but that horrible female has done
+      something to you. She has pinched you, hasn't she? I am sure she pinched
+      you just now, when she stood by your chair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl received this overture with the wide, motionless stare of
+      profound astonishment. Heyst, vexed with himself, suspected that she did
+      not understand what he said. One could not tell what nationality these
+      women were, except that they were of all sorts. But she was astonished
+      almost more by the near presence of the man himself, by his largely bald
+      head, by the white brow, the sunburnt cheeks, the long, horizontal
+      moustaches of crinkly bronze hair, by the kindly expression of the man's
+      blue eyes looking into her own. He saw the stony amazement in hers give
+      way to a momentary alarm, which was succeeded by an expression of
+      resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure she pinched your arm most cruelly,&rdquo; he murmured, rather
+      disconcerted now at what he had done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a great comfort to hear her say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wouldn't have been the first time. And suppose she did&mdash;what are
+      you going to do about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; he said with a faint, remote playfulness in his tone which
+      had not been heard in it lately, and which seemed to catch her ear
+      pleasantly. &ldquo;I am grieved to say that I don't know. But can I do anything?
+      What would you wish me to do? Pray command me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, the greatest astonishment became visible in her face; for she now
+      perceived how different he was from the other men in the room. He was as
+      different from them as she was different from the other members of the
+      ladies' orchestra.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Command you?&rdquo; she breathed, after a time, in a bewildered tone. &ldquo;Who are
+      you?&rdquo; she asked a little louder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am staying in this hotel for a few days. I just dropped in casually
+      here. This outrage&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you try to interfere,&rdquo; she said so earnestly that Heyst asked, in
+      his faintly playful tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it your wish that I should leave you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't said that,&rdquo; the girl answered. &ldquo;She pinched me because I didn't
+      get down here quick enough&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't tell you how indignant I am&mdash;&rdquo; said Heyst. &ldquo;But since you
+      are down here now,&rdquo; he went on, with the ease of a man of the world
+      speaking to a young lady in a drawing-room, &ldquo;hadn't we better sit down?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She obeyed his inviting gesture, and they sat down on the nearest chairs.
+      They looked at each other across a little round table with a surprised,
+      open gaze, self-consciousness growing on them so slowly that it was a long
+      time before they averted their eyes; and very soon they met again,
+      temporarily, only to rebound, as it were. At last they steadied in
+      contact, but by that time, say some fifteen minutes from the moment when
+      they sat down, the &ldquo;interval&rdquo; came to an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for their eyes. As to the conversation, it had been perfectly
+      insignificant because naturally they had nothing to say to each other.
+      Heyst had been interested by the girl's physiognomy. Its expression was
+      neither simple nor yet very clear. It was not distinguished&mdash;that
+      could not be expected&mdash;but the features had more fineness than those
+      of any other feminine countenance he had ever had the opportunity to
+      observe so closely. There was in it something indefinably audacious and
+      infinitely miserable&mdash;because the temperament and the existence of
+      that girl were reflected in it. But her voice! It seduced Heyst by its
+      amazing quality. It was a voice fit to utter the most exquisite things, a
+      voice which would have made silly chatter supportable and the roughest
+      talk fascinating. Heyst drank in its charm as one listens to the tone of
+      some instrument without heeding the tune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you sing as well as play?&rdquo; he asked her abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never sang a note in my life,&rdquo; she said, obviously surprised by the
+      irrelevant question; for they had not been discoursing of sweet sounds.
+      She was clearly unaware of her voice. &ldquo;I don't remember that I ever had
+      much reason to sing since I was little,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That inelegant phrase, by the mere vibrating, warm nobility of the sound,
+      found its way into Heyst's heart. His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink
+      there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation,
+      till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our unexpressed longings
+      lie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are English, of course?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think?&rdquo; she answered in the most charming accents. Then, as
+      if thinking that it was her turn to place a question: &ldquo;Why do you always
+      smile when you speak?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was enough to make anyone look grave, but her good faith was so evident
+      that Heyst recovered himself at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's my unfortunate manner&mdash;&rdquo; he said with his delicate, polished
+      playfulness. &ldquo;Is is very objectionable to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was very serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I only noticed it. I haven't come across so many pleasant people as
+      all that, in my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's certain that this woman who plays the piano is infinitely more
+      disagreeable than any cannibal I have ever had to do with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe you!&rdquo; She shuddered. &ldquo;How did you come to have anything to do
+      with cannibals?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be too long a tale,&rdquo; said Heyst with a faint smile. Heyst's
+      smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his great
+      moustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as comfortable as a
+      shy bird in its native thicket. &ldquo;Much too long. How did you get amongst
+      this lot here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bad luck,&rdquo; she answered briefly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt, no doubt,&rdquo; Heyst assented with slight nods. Then, still
+      indignant at the pinch which he had divined rather than actually seen
+      inflicted: &ldquo;I say, couldn't you defend yourself somehow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had risen already. The ladies of the orchestra were slowly regaining
+      their places. Some were already seated, idle stony-eyed, before the
+      music-stands. Heyst was standing up, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are too many for me,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These few words came out of the common experience of mankind; yet by
+      virtue of her voice, they thrilled Heyst like a revelation. His feelings
+      were in a state of confusion, but his mind was clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's bad. But it isn't actual ill-usage that this girl is complaining
+      of,&rdquo; he thought lucidly after she left him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER TWO
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That was how it began. How it was that it ended, as we know it did end, is
+      not so easy to state precisely. It is very clear that Heyst was not
+      indifferent, I won't say to the girl, but to the girl's fate. He was the
+      same man who had plunged after the submerged Morrison whom he hardly knew
+      otherwise than by sight and through the usual gossip of the islands. But
+      this was another sort of plunge altogether, and likely to lead to a very
+      different kind of partnership.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did he reflect at all? Probably. He was sufficiently reflective. But if he
+      did, it was with insufficient knowledge. For there is no evidence that he
+      paused at any time between the date of that evening and the morning of the
+      flight. Truth to say, Heyst was not one of those men who pause much. Those
+      dreamy spectators of the world's agitation are terrible once the desire to
+      act gets hold of them. They lower their heads and charge a wall with an
+      amazing serenity which nothing but an indisciplined imagination can give.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not a fool. I suppose he knew&mdash;or at least he felt&mdash;where
+      this was leading him. But his complete inexperience gave him the necessary
+      audacity. The girl's voice was charming when she spoke to him of her
+      miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of unconscious cynicism
+      inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of poverty. And whether
+      because he was humane or because her voice included all the modulations of
+      pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in its compass, it was not disgust that
+      the tale awakened in him, but the sense of an immense sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of the
+      concert, the girl told Heyst about herself. She was almost a child of the
+      streets. Her father was a musician in the orchestras of small theatres.
+      Her mother ran away from him while she was little, and the landladies of
+      various poor lodging-houses had attended casually to her abandoned
+      childhood. It was never positive starvation and absolute rags, but it was
+      the hopeless grip of poverty all the time. It was her father who taught
+      her to play the violin. It seemed that he used to get drunk sometimes, but
+      without pleasure, and only because he was unable to forget his fugitive
+      wife. After he had a paralytic stroke, falling over with a crash in the
+      well of a music-hall orchestra during the performance, she had joined the
+      Zangiacomo company. He was now in a home for incurables.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I am here,&rdquo; she finished, &ldquo;with no one to care if I make a hole in
+      the water the next chance I get or not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst told her that he thought she could do a little better than that, if
+      it was only a question of getting out of the world. She looked at him with
+      special attention, and with a puzzled expression which gave to her face an
+      air of innocence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was during one of the &ldquo;intervals&rdquo; between the two parts of the
+      concert. She had come down that time without being incited thereto by a
+      pinch from the awful Zangiacomo woman. It is difficult to suppose that she
+      was seduced by the uncovered intellectual forehead and the long reddish
+      moustaches of her new friend. New is not the right word. She had never had
+      a friend before; and the sensation of this friendliness going out to her
+      was exciting by its novelty alone. Besides, any man who did not resemble
+      Schomberg appeared for that very reason attractive. She was afraid of the
+      hotel-keeper, who, in the daytime, taking advantage of the fact that she
+      lived in the hotel itself, and not in the Pavilion with the other
+      &ldquo;artists&rdquo; prowled round her, mute, hungry, portentous behind his great
+      beard, or else assailed her in quiet corners and empty passages with deep,
+      mysterious murmurs from behind, which, not withstanding their clear
+      import, sounded horribly insane somehow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The contrast of Heyst's quiet, polished manner gave her special delight
+      and filled her with admiration. She had never seen anything like that
+      before. If she had, perhaps, known kindness in her life, she had never met
+      the forms of simple courtesy. She was interested by it as a very novel
+      experience, not very intelligible, but distinctly pleasurable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you they are too many for me,&rdquo; she repeated, sometimes recklessly,
+      but more often shaking her head with ominous dejection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had, of course, no money at all. The quantities of &ldquo;black men&rdquo; all
+      about frightened her. She really had no definite idea where she was on the
+      surface of the globe. The orchestra was generally taken from the steamer
+      to some hotel, and kept shut up there till it was time to go on board
+      another steamer. She could not remember the names she heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you call this place again?&rdquo; she used to ask Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sourabaya,&rdquo; he would say distinctly, and would watch the discouragement
+      at the outlandish sound coming into her eyes, which were fastened on his
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not defend himself from compassion. He suggested that she might
+      go to the consul, but it was his conscience that dictated this advice, not
+      his conviction. She had never heard of the animal or of its uses. A
+      consul! What was it? Who was he? What could he do? And when she learned
+      that perhaps he could be induced to send her home, her head dropped on her
+      breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What am I to do when I get there?&rdquo; she murmured with an intonation so
+      just, with an accent so penetrating&mdash;the charm of her voice did not
+      fail her even in whispering&mdash;that Heyst seemed to see the illusion of
+      human fellowship on earth vanish before the naked truth of her existence,
+      and leave them both face to face in a moral desert as arid as the sands of
+      Sahara, without restful shade, without refreshing water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned slightly over the little table, the same little table at which
+      they had sat when they first met each other; and with no other memories
+      but of the stones in the streets her childhood had known, in the distress
+      of the incoherent, confused, rudimentary impressions of her travels
+      inspiring her with a vague terror of the world she said rapidly, as one
+      speaks in desperation:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>You</i> do something! You are a gentleman. It wasn't I who spoke to
+      you first, was it? I didn't begin, did I? It was you who came along and
+      spoke to me when I was standing over there. What did you want to speak to
+      me for? I don't care what it is, but you must do something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her attitude was fierce and entreating at the same time&mdash;clamorous,
+      in fact though her voice had hardly risen above a breath. It was clamorous
+      enough to be noticed. Heyst, on purpose, laughed aloud. She nearly choked
+      with indignation at this brutal heartlessness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you mean, then, by saying 'command me!'?&rdquo; she almost hissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something hard in his mirthless stare, and a quiet final &ldquo;All right,&rdquo;
+       steadied her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not rich enough to buy you out,&rdquo; he went on, speaking with an
+      extraordinary detached grin, &ldquo;even if it were to be done; but I can always
+      steal you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him profoundly, as though these words had a hidden and very
+      complicated meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get away now,&rdquo; he said rapidly, &ldquo;and try to smile as you go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She obeyed with unexpected readiness; and as she had a set of very good
+      white teeth, the effect of the mechanical, ordered smile was joyous,
+      radiant. It astonished Heyst. No wonder, it flashed through his mind,
+      women can deceive men so completely. The faculty was inherent in them;
+      they seemed to be created with a special aptitude. Here was a smile the
+      origin of which was well known to him; and yet it had conveyed a sensation
+      of warmth, had given him a sort of ardour to live which was very new to
+      his experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time she was gone from the table, and had joined the other &ldquo;ladies
+      of the orchestra.&rdquo; They trooped towards the platform, driven in
+      truculently by the haughty mate of Zangiacomo, who looked as though she
+      were restraining herself with difficulty from punching their backs.
+      Zangiacomo followed, with his great, pendulous dyed beard and short
+      mess-jacket, with an aspect of hang-dog concentration imparted by his
+      drooping head and the uneasiness of his eyes, which were set very close
+      together. He climbed the steps last of all, turned about, displaying his
+      purple beard to the hall, and tapped with his bow. Heyst winced in
+      anticipation of the horrible racket. It burst out immediately unabashed
+      and awful. At the end of the platform the woman at the piano, presenting
+      her cruel profile, her head tilted back, banged the keys without looking
+      at the music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst could not stand the uproar for more than a minute. He went out, his
+      brain racked by the rhythm of some more or less Hungarian dance music. The
+      forests inhabited by the New Guinea cannibals where he had encountered the
+      most exciting of his earlier futile adventures were silent. And this
+      adventure, not in its execution, perhaps, but in its nature, required even
+      more nerve than anything he had faced before. Walking among the paper
+      lanterns suspended to trees he remembered with regret the gloom and the
+      dead stillness of the forests at the back of Geelvink Bay, perhaps the
+      wildest, the unsafest, the most deadly spot on earth from which the sea
+      can be seen. Oppressed by his thoughts, he sought the obscurity and peace
+      of his bedroom; but they were not complete. The distant sounds of the
+      concert reached his ear, faint indeed, but still disturbing. Neither did
+      he feel very safe in there; for that sentiment depends not on extraneous
+      circumstances but on our inward conviction. He did not attempt to go to
+      sleep; he did not even unbutton the top button of his tunic. He sat in a
+      chair and mused. Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to
+      think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the
+      flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional
+      self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness. But now he was troubled; a
+      light veil seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening of a
+      tenderness, indistinct and confused as yet, towards an unknown woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradually silence, a real silence, had established itself round him. The
+      concert was over; the audience had gone; the concert-hall was dark; and
+      even the Pavilion, where the ladies' orchestra slept after its noisy
+      labours, showed not a gleam of light. Heyst suddenly felt restless in all
+      his limbs, as this reaction from the long immobility would not be denied,
+      he humoured it by passing quietly along the back veranda and out into the
+      grounds at the side of the house, into the black shadows under the trees,
+      where the extinguished paper lanterns were gently swinging their globes
+      like withered fruit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paced there to and fro for a long time, a calm, meditative ghost in his
+      white drill-suit, revolving in his head thoughts absolutely novel,
+      disquieting, and seductive; accustoming his mind to the contemplation of
+      his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily it should appear
+      praiseworthy and wise. For the use of reason is to justify the obscure
+      desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices, and
+      follies, and also our fears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt that he had engaged himself by a rash promise to an action big
+      with incalculable consequences. And then he asked himself if the girl had
+      understood what he meant. Who could tell? He was assailed by all sorts of
+      doubts. Raising his head, he perceived something white flitting between
+      the trees. It vanished almost at once; but there could be no mistake. He
+      was vexed at being detected roaming like this in the middle of the night.
+      Who could that be? It never occurred to him that perhaps the girl, too,
+      would not be able to sleep. He advanced prudently. Then he saw the white,
+      phantom-like apparition again; and the next moment all his doubts as to
+      the state of her mind were laid at rest, because he felt her clinging to
+      him after the manner of supplicants all the world over. Her whispers were
+      so incoherent that he could not understand anything; but this did not
+      prevent him from being profoundly moved. He had no illusions about her;
+      but his sceptical mind was dominated by the fulness of his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Calm yourself, calm yourself,&rdquo; he murmured in her ear, returning her
+      clasp at first mechanically, and afterwards with a growing appreciation of
+      her distressed humanity. The heaving of her breast and the trembling of
+      all her limbs, in the closeness of his embrace, seemed to enter his body,
+      to infect his very heart. While she was growing quieter in his arms, he
+      was becoming more agitated, as if there were only a fixed quantity of
+      violent emotion on this earth. The very night seemed more dumb, more
+      still, and the immobility of the vague, black shapes, surrounding him more
+      perfect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be all right,&rdquo; he tried to reassure her, with a tone of
+      conviction, speaking into her ear, and of necessity clasping her more
+      closely than before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Either the words or the action had a very good effect. He heard a light
+      sigh of relief. She spoke with a calmed ardour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I knew it would be all right from the first time you spoke to me!
+      Yes, indeed, I knew directly you came up to me that evening. I knew it
+      would be all right, if you only cared to make it so; but of course I could
+      not tell if you meant it. 'Command me,' you said. Funny thing for a man
+      like you to say. Did you really mean it? You weren't making fun of me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He protested that he had been a serious person all his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe you,&rdquo; she said ardently. He was touched by this declaration.
+      &ldquo;It's the way you have of speaking as if you were amused with people,&rdquo; she
+      went on. &ldquo;But I wasn't deceived. I could see you were angry with that
+      beast of a woman. And you are clever. You spotted something at once. You
+      saw it in my face, eh? It isn't a bad face&mdash;say? You'll never be
+      sorry. Listen&mdash;I'm not twenty yet. It's the truth, and I can't be so
+      bad looking, or else&mdash;I will tell you straight that I have been
+      worried and pestered by fellows like this before. I don't know what comes
+      to them&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was speaking hurriedly. She choked, and then exclaimed, with an accent
+      of despair:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it? What's the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had removed his arms from her suddenly, and had recoiled a little.
+      &ldquo;Is it my fault? I didn't even look at them, I tell you straight. Never!
+      Have I looked at you? Tell me. It was you that began it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In truth, Heyst had shrunk from the idea of competition with fellows
+      unknown, with Schomberg the hotel-keeper. The vaporous white figure before
+      him swayed pitifully in the darkness. He felt ashamed of his
+      fastidiousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid we have been detected,&rdquo; he murmured. &ldquo;I think I saw somebody
+      on the path between the house and the bushes behind you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had seen no one. It was a compassionate lie, if there ever was one. His
+      compassion was as genuine as his shrinking had been, and in his judgement
+      more honourable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She didn't turn her head. She was obviously relieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would it be that brute?&rdquo; she breathed out, meaning Schomberg, of course.
+      &ldquo;He's getting too forward with me now. What can you expect? Only this
+      evening, after supper, he&mdash;but I slipped away. You don't mind him, do
+      you? Why, I could face him myself now that I know you care for me. A girl
+      can always put up a fight. You believe me? Only it isn't easy to stand up
+      for yourself when you feel there's nothing and nobody at your back.
+      There's nothing so lonely in the world as a girl who has got to look after
+      herself. When I left poor dad in that home&mdash;it was in the country,
+      near a village&mdash;I came out of the gates with seven shillings and
+      threepence in my old purse, and my railway ticket. I tramped a mile, and
+      got into a train&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She broke off, and was silent for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you throw me over now,&rdquo; she went on. &ldquo;If you did, what should I do?
+      I should have to live, to be sure, because I'd be afraid to kill myself,
+      but you would have done a thousand times worse than killing a body. You
+      told me you had been always alone, you had never had a dog even. Well,
+      then, I won't be in anybody's way if I live with you&mdash;not even a
+      dog's. And what else did you mean when you came up and looked at me so
+      close?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Close? Did I?&rdquo; he murmured unstirring before her in the profound
+      darkness. &ldquo;So close as that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had an outbreak of anger and despair in subdued tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you forgotten, then? What did you expect to find? I know what sort
+      of girl I am; but all the same I am not the sort that men turn their backs
+      on&mdash;and you ought to know it, unless you aren't made like the others.
+      Oh, forgive me! You aren't like the others; you are like no one in the
+      world I ever spoke to. Don't you care for me? Don't you see&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What he saw was that, white and spectral, she was putting out her arms to
+      him out of the black shadows like an appealing ghost. He took her hands,
+      and was affected, almost surprised, to find them so warm, so real, so
+      firm, so living in his grasp. He drew her to him, and she dropped her head
+      on his shoulder with a deep-sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am dead tired,&rdquo; she whispered plaintively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his arms around her, and only by the convulsive movements of her
+      body became aware that she was sobbing without a sound. Sustaining her, he
+      lost himself in the profound silence of the night. After a while she
+      became still, and cried quietly. Then, suddenly, as if waking up, she
+      asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't seen any more of that somebody you thought was spying about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He started at her quick, sharp whisper, and answered that very likely he
+      had been mistaken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it was anybody at all,&rdquo; she reflected aloud, &ldquo;it wouldn't have been
+      anyone but that hotel woman&mdash;the landlord's wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Schomberg,&rdquo; Heyst said, surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Another one that can't sleep o' nights. Why? Don't you see why?
+      Because, of course, she sees what's going on. That beast doesn't even try
+      to keep it from her. If she had only the least bit of spirit! She knows
+      how I feel, too, only she's too frightened even to look him in the face,
+      let alone open her mouth. He would tell her to go hang herself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some time Heyst said nothing. A public, active contest with the
+      hotel-keeper was not to be thought of. The idea was horrible. Whispering
+      gently to the girl, he tried to explain to her that as things stood, an
+      open withdrawal from the company would be probably opposed. She listened
+      to his explanation anxiously, from time to time pressing the hand she had
+      sought and got hold of in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I told you, I am not rich enough to buy you out so I shall steal you
+      as soon as I can arrange some means of getting away from here. Meantime it
+      would be fatal to be seen together at night. We mustn't give ourselves
+      away. We had better part at once. I think I was mistaken just now; but if,
+      as you say, that poor Mrs. Schomberg can't sleep of nights, we must be
+      more careful. She would tell the fellow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl had disengaged herself from his loose hold while he talked, and
+      now stood free of him, but still clasping his hand firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; she said with perfect assurance. &ldquo;I tell you she daren't open
+      her mouth to him. And she isn't as silly as she looks. She wouldn't give
+      us away. She knows a trick worth two of that. She'll help&mdash;that's
+      what she'll do, if she dares do anything at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to have a very clear view of the situation,&rdquo; said Heyst, and
+      received a warm, lingering kiss for this commendation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He discovered that to part from her was not such an easy matter as he had
+      supposed it would be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upon my word,&rdquo; he said before they separated, &ldquo;I don't even know your
+      name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you? They call me Alma. I don't know why. Silly name! Magdalen too.
+      It doesn't matter; you can call me by whatever name you choose. Yes, you
+      give me a name. Think of one you would like the sound of&mdash;something
+      quite new. How I should like to forget everything that has gone before, as
+      one forgets a dream that's done with, fright and all! I would try.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you really?&rdquo; he asked in a murmur. &ldquo;But that's not forbidden. I
+      understand that women easily forget whatever in their past diminishes them
+      in their eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's your eyes that I was thinking of, for I'm sure I've never wished to
+      forget anything till you came up to me that night and looked me through
+      and through. I know I'm not much account; but I know how to stand by a
+      man. I stood by father ever since I could understand. He wasn't a bad
+      chap. Now that I can't be of any use to him, I would just as soon forget
+      all that and make a fresh start. But these aren't things that I could talk
+      to you about. What could I ever talk to you about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't let it trouble you,&rdquo; Heyst said. &ldquo;Your voice is enough. I am in
+      love with it, whatever it says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained silent for a while, as if rendered breathless by this quiet
+      statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I wanted to ask you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected the
+      question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation she went
+      on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-room
+      there&mdash;you remember?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought we were being observed. A smile is the best of masks. Schomberg
+      was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some Dutch clerks from
+      the town. No doubt he was watching us&mdash;watching you, at least. That's
+      why I asked you to smile.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, that's why. It never came into my head!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you did it very well, too&mdash;very readily, as if you had
+      understood my intention.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Readily!&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Oh, I was ready enough to smile then. That's the
+      truth. It was the first time for years I may say that I felt disposed to
+      smile. I've not had many chances to smile in my life, I can tell you;
+      especially of late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you do it most charmingly&mdash;in a perfectly fascinating way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused. She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of extreme
+      delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It astonished me,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;It went as straight to my heart as though
+      you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling me. I felt as if I had never
+      seen a smile before in my life. I thought of it after I left you. It made
+      me restless.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It did all that?&rdquo; came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and incredulous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come out here
+      tonight,&rdquo; he said, with his playful earnestness of tone. &ldquo;It was your
+      triumph.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt her lips touch his lightly, and the next moment she was gone. Her
+      white dress gleamed in the distance, and then the opaque darkness of the
+      house seemed to swallow it. Heyst waited a little before he went the same
+      way, round the corner, up the steps of the veranda, and into his room,
+      where he lay down at last&mdash;not to sleep, but to go over in his mind
+      all that had been said at their meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's exactly true about that smile,&rdquo; he thought. There he had spoken the
+      truth to her; and about her voice, too. For the rest&mdash;what must be
+      must be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great wave of heat passed over him. He turned on his back, flung his
+      arms crosswise on the broad, hard bed, and lay still, open-eyed under the
+      mosquito net, till daylight entered his room, brightened swiftly, and
+      turned to unfailing sunlight. He got up then, went to a small
+      looking-glass hanging on the wall, and stared at himself steadily. It was
+      not a new-born vanity which induced this long survey. He felt so strange
+      that he could not resist the suspicion of his personal appearance having
+      changed during the night. What he saw in the glass, however, was the man
+      he knew before. It was almost a disappointment&mdash;a belittling of his
+      recent experience. And then he smiled at his naiveness; for, being over
+      five and thirty years of age, he ought to have known that in most cases
+      the body is the unalterable mask of the soul, which even death itself
+      changes but little, till it is put out of sight where no changes matter
+      any more, either to our friends or to our enemies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies. It was the very
+      essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by
+      hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by a system of
+      restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst
+      changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of passing
+      through life without suffering and almost without a single care in the
+      world&mdash;invulnerable because elusive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THREE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and
+      unapproachable, and in return was generally considered a &ldquo;queer chap.&rdquo; He
+      had started off on these travels of his after the death of his father, an
+      expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his country and
+      angry with all the world, which had instinctively rejected his wisdom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst had
+      begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the
+      humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty
+      years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the
+      most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of
+      disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness,
+      for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst
+      had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face in
+      affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue
+      dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three years,
+      after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with the elder
+      Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at the end of his
+      life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual
+      liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age
+      were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young man
+      learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning of the
+      cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements
+      are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the pitiless cold
+      blasts of the father's analysis had blown away from the son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll drift,&rdquo; Heyst had said to himself deliberately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He meant to
+      drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf
+      drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable trees of a forest glade;
+      to drift without ever catching on to anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This shall be my defence against life,&rdquo; he had said to himself with a
+      sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his father there was no
+      other worthy alternative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others do
+      through drink, from vice, from some weakness of character&mdash;with
+      deliberation, as others do in despair. This, stripped of its facts, had
+      been Heyst's life up to that disturbing night. Next day, when he saw the
+      girl called Alma, she managed to give him a glance of frank tenderness,
+      quick as lightning and leaving a profound impression, a secret touch on
+      the heart. It was in the grounds of the hotel, about tiffin time, while
+      the Ladies of the orchestra were strolling back to their pavilion after
+      rehearsal, or practice, or whatever they called their morning musical
+      exercises in the hall. Heyst, returning from the town, where he had
+      discovered that there would be difficulties in the way of getting away at
+      once, was crossing the compound, disappointed and worried. He had walked
+      almost unwittingly into the straggling group of Zangiacomo's performers.
+      It was a shock to him, on coming out of his brown study, to find the girl
+      so near to him, as if one waking suddenly should see the figure of his
+      dream turned into flesh and blood. She did not raise her shapely head, but
+      her glance was no dream thing. It was real, the most real impression of
+      his detached existence&mdash;so far.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had not acknowledged it in any way, though it seemed to him
+      impossible that its effect on him should not be visible to anyone who
+      happened to be looking on. And there were several men on the veranda,
+      steady customers of Schomberg's table d'hote, gazing in his direction&mdash;at
+      the ladies of the orchestra, in fact. Heyst's dread arose, not out of
+      shame or timidity, but from his fastidiousness. On getting amongst them,
+      however, he noticed no signs of interest or astonishment in their faces,
+      any more than if they had been blind men. Even Schomberg himself, who had
+      to make way for him at the top of the stairs, was completely unperturbed,
+      and continued the conversation he was carrying on with a client.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg, indeed, had observed &ldquo;that Swede&rdquo; talking with the girl in the
+      intervals. A crony of his had nudged him; and he had thought that it was
+      so much the better; the silly fellow would keep everybody else off. He was
+      rather pleased than otherwise and watched them out of the corner of his
+      eye with a malicious enjoyment of the situation&mdash;a sort of Satanic
+      glee. For he had little doubt of his personal fascination, and still less
+      of his power to get hold of the girl, who seemed too ignorant to know how
+      to help herself, and who was worse than friendless, since she had for some
+      reason incurred the animosity of Mrs. Zangiacomo, a woman with no
+      conscience. The aversion she showed him as far as she dared (for it is not
+      always safe for the helpless to display the delicacy of their sentiments),
+      Schomberg pardoned on the score of feminine conventional silliness. He had
+      told Alma, as an argument, that she was a clever enough girl to see that
+      she could do no better than to put her trust in a man of substance, in the
+      prime of life, who knew his way about. But for the excited trembling of
+      his voice, and the extraordinary way in which his eyes seemed to be
+      starting out of his crimson, hirsute countenance, such speeches had every
+      character of calm, unselfish advice&mdash;which, after the manner of
+      lovers, passed easily into sanguine plans for the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll soon get rid of the old woman,&rdquo; he whispered to her hurriedly, with
+      panting ferocity. &ldquo;Hang her! I've never cared for her. The climate don't
+      suit her; I shall tell her to go to her people in Europe. She will have to
+      go, too! I will see to it. Eins, zwei, march! And then we shall sell this
+      hotel and start another somewhere else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it was
+      true. Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in
+      defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister
+      valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. Her shrinking form, her
+      downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at the end of an
+      empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to the overpowering
+      force of his will, the recognition of his personal fascinations. For every
+      age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human
+      race come to an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It's easy to imagine Schomberg's humiliation, his shocked fury, when he
+      discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks, his
+      prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched from under his
+      nose by &ldquo;that Swede,&rdquo; apparently without any trouble worth speaking of. He
+      refused to believe the fact. He would have it, at first, that the
+      Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable reason, had played him a scurvy trick,
+      but when no further doubt was possible, he changed his view of Heyst. The
+      despised Swede became for Schomberg the deepest, the most dangerous, the
+      most hateful of scoundrels. He could not believe that the creature he had
+      coveted with so much force and with so little effect, was in reality
+      tender, docile to her impulse, and had almost offered herself to Heyst
+      without a sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and from a profound need
+      of placing her trust where her woman's instinct guided her ignorance.
+      Nothing would serve Schomberg but that she must have been circumvented by
+      some occult exercise of force or craft, by the laying of some subtle trap.
+      His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly at the means &ldquo;that Swede&rdquo; had
+      employed to seduce her away from a man like him&mdash;Schomberg&mdash;as
+      though those means were bound to have been extraordinary, unheard of,
+      inconceivable. He slapped his forehead openly before his customers; he
+      would sit brooding in silence or else would burst out unexpectedly
+      declaiming against Heyst without measure, discretion, or prudence, with
+      swollen features and an affectation of outraged virtue which could not
+      have deceived the most childlike of moralists for a moment&mdash;and
+      greatly amused his audience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of Heyst,
+      while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel. It was, in a
+      manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo concerts had ever been&mdash;intervals
+      and all. There was never any difficulty in starting the performer off.
+      Anybody could do it, by almost any distant allusion. As likely as not he
+      would start his endless denunciations in the very billiard-room where Mrs.
+      Schomberg sat enthroned as usual, swallowing her sobs, concealing her
+      tortures of abject humiliation and terror under her stupid, set,
+      everlasting grin, which, having been provided for her by nature, was an
+      excellent mask, in as much as nothing&mdash;not even death itself, perhaps&mdash;could
+      tear it away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its
+      physiognomy. So, after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward calm,
+      as if his indignation had dried up within him. And it was time. He was
+      becoming a bore with his inability to talk of anything else but Heyst's
+      unfitness to be at large, Heyst's wickedness, his wiles, his astuteness,
+      and his criminality. Schomberg no longer pretended to despise him. He
+      could not have done it. After what had happened he could not pretend, even
+      to himself. But his bottled-up indignation was fermenting venomously. At
+      the time of his immoderate loquacity one of his customers, an elderly man,
+      had remarked one evening:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this belief was less than half wrong. Schomberg had Heyst on the
+      brain. Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which had never been
+      so unpromising since he came out East directly after the Franco-Prussian
+      War, he referred to some subtly noxious influence of Heyst. It seemed to
+      him that he could never be himself again till he had got even with that
+      artful Swede. He was ready to swear that Heyst had ruined his life. The
+      girl so unfairly, craftily, basely decoyed away would have inspired him to
+      success in a new start. Obviously Mrs. Schomberg, whom he terrified by
+      savagely silent moods combined with underhand, poisoned glances, could
+      give him no inspiration. He had grown generally neglectful, but with a
+      partiality for reckless expedients, as if he did not care when and how his
+      career as a hotel-keeper was to be brought to an end. This demoralized
+      state accounted for what Davidson had observed on his last visit to the
+      Schomberg establishment, some two months after Heyst's secret departure
+      with the girl to the solitude of Samburan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Schomberg of a few years ago&mdash;the Schomberg of the Bangkok days,
+      for instance, when he started the first of his famed table d'hote dinners&mdash;would
+      never have risked anything of the sort. His genius ran to catering, &ldquo;white
+      man for white men&rdquo; and to the inventing, elaborating, and retailing of
+      scandalous gossip with asinine unction and impudent delight. But now his
+      mind was perverted by the pangs of wounded vanity and of thwarted passion.
+      In this state of moral weakness Schomberg allowed himself to be corrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FOUR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The business was done by a guest who arrived one fine morning by mail-boat&mdash;immediately
+      from Celebes, having boarded her in Macassar, but generally, Schomberg
+      understood, from up China Sea way; a wanderer clearly, even as Heyst was,
+      but not alone and of quite another kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg, looking up from the stern-sheets of his steam-launch, which he
+      used for boarding passenger ships on arrival, discovered a dark sunken
+      stare plunging down on him over the rail of the first-class part of the
+      deck. He was no great judge of physiognomy. Human beings, for him, were
+      either the objects of scandalous gossip or else recipients of narrow
+      strips of paper, with proper bill-heads stating the name of his hotel&mdash;&ldquo;W.
+      Schomberg, proprietor, accounts settled weekly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So in the clean-shaven, extremely thin face hanging over the mail-boat's
+      rail Schomberg saw only the face of a possible &ldquo;account.&rdquo; The
+      steam-launches of other hotels were also alongside, but he obtained the
+      preference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are Mr. Schomberg, aren't you?&rdquo; the face asked quite unexpectedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am at your service,&rdquo; he answered from below; for business is business,
+      and its forms and formulas must be observed, even if one's manly bosom is
+      tortured by that dull rage which succeeds the fury of baffled passion,
+      like the glow of embers after a fierce blaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the possessor of the handsome but emaciated face was seated
+      beside Schomberg in the stern-sheets of the launch. His body was long and
+      loose-jointed, his slender fingers, intertwined, clasped the leg resting
+      on the knee, as he lolled back in a careless yet tense attitude. On the
+      other side of Schomberg sat another passenger, who was introduced by the
+      clean-shaven man as&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My secretary. He must have the room next to mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can manage that easily for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg steered with dignity, staring straight ahead, but very much
+      interested by these two promising &ldquo;accounts.&rdquo; Their belongings, a couple
+      of large leather trunks browned by age and a few smaller packages, were
+      piled up in the bows. A third individual&mdash;a nondescript, hairy
+      creature&mdash;had modestly made his way forward and had perched himself
+      on the luggage. The lower part of his physiognomy was over-developed; his
+      narrow and low forehead, unintelligently furrowed by horizontal wrinkles,
+      surmounted wildly hirsute cheeks and a flat nose with wide, baboon-like
+      nostrils. There was something equivocal in the appearance of his shaggy,
+      hair-smothered humanity. He, too, seemed to be a follower of the
+      clean-shaven man, and apparently had travelled on deck with native
+      passengers, sleeping under the awnings. His broad, squat frame denoted
+      great strength. Grasping the gunwales of the launch, he displayed a pair
+      of remarkably long arms, terminating in thick, brown hairy paws of simian
+      aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall we do with the fellow of mine?&rdquo; the chief of the party asked
+      Schomberg. &ldquo;There must be a boarding-house somewhere near the port&mdash;some
+      grog-shop where they could let him have a mat to sleep on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg said there was a place kept by a Portuguese half-caste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A servant of yours?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he hangs on to me. He is an alligator-hunter. I picked him up in
+      Colombia, you know. Ever been in Colombia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Schomberg, very much surprised. &ldquo;An alligator-hunter? Funny
+      trade! Are you coming from Colombia, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but I have been coming for a long time. I come from a good many
+      places. I am travelling west, you see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For sport, perhaps?&rdquo; suggested Schomberg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Sort of sport. What do you say to chasing the sun?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see&mdash;a gentleman at large,&rdquo; said Schomberg, watching a sailing
+      canoe about to cross his bow, and ready to clear it by a touch of the
+      helm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other passenger made himself heard suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang these native craft! They always get in the way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a harsh
+      voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a thin,
+      dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of a rigid
+      nose. Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing secretarial
+      about him. Both he and his long, lank principal wore the usual white suit
+      of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white shoes&mdash;all correct.
+      The hairy nondescript creature perched on their luggage in the bow had a
+      check shirt and blue dungaree trousers. He gazed in their direction from
+      forward in an expectant, trained-animal manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You spoke to me first,&rdquo; said Schomberg in his manly tones. &ldquo;You were
+      acquainted with my name. Where did you hear of me, gentlemen, may I ask?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Manila,&rdquo; answered the gentleman at large, readily. &ldquo;From a man with
+      whom I had a game of cards one evening in the Hotel Castille.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What man? I've no friends in Manila that I know of,&rdquo; wondered Schomberg
+      with a severe frown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't tell you his name. I've clean forgotten it; but don't you worry.
+      He was anything but a friend of yours. He called you all the names he
+      could think of. He said you set a lot of scandal going about him once,
+      somewhere&mdash;in Bangkok, I think. Yes, that's it. You were running a
+      table d'hote in Bangkok at one time, weren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only throw out
+      his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve
+      manner. A table d'hote? Yes, certainly. He always&mdash;for the sake of
+      white men. And here in this place, too? Yes, in this place, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right, then.&rdquo; The stranger turned his black, cavernous,
+      mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg, who sat gripping the
+      brass tiller in a sweating palm. &ldquo;Many people in the evening at your
+      place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg had recovered somewhat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Twenty covers or so, take one day with another,&rdquo; he answered feelingly,
+      as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive. &ldquo;Ought to be more, if
+      only people would see that it's for their own good. Precious little profit
+      I get out of it. You are partial to tables d'hote, gentlemen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The new guest made answer that he liked a hotel where one could find some
+      local people in the evening. It was infernally dull otherwise. The
+      secretary, in sign of approval, emitted a grunt of astonishing ferocity,
+      as if proposing to himself to eat the local people. All this sounded like
+      a longish stay, thought Schomberg, satisfied under his grave air; till,
+      remembering the girl snatched away from him by the last guest who had made
+      a prolonged stay in his hotel, he ground his teeth so audibly that the
+      other two looked at him in wonder. The momentary convulsion of his florid
+      physiognomy seemed to strike them dumb. They exchanged a quick glance.
+      Presently the clean-shaven man fired out another question in his curt,
+      unceremonious manner:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have no women in your hotel, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Women!&rdquo; Schomberg exclaimed indignantly, but also as if a little
+      frightened. &ldquo;What on earth do you mean by women? What women? There's Mrs.
+      Schomberg, of course,&rdquo; he added, suddenly appeased, with lofty
+      indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she knows how to keep her place, then it will do. I can't stand women
+      near me. They give me the horrors,&rdquo; declared the other. &ldquo;They are a
+      perfect curse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During this outburst the secretary wore a savage grin. The chief guest
+      closed his sunken eyes, as if exhausted, and leaned the back of his head
+      against the stanchion of the awning. In this pose, his long, feminine
+      eyelashes were very noticeable, and his regular features, sharp line of
+      the jaw, and well-cut chin were brought into prominence, giving him a
+      used-up, weary, depraved distinction. He did not open his eyes till the
+      steam-launch touched the quay. Then he and the other man got ashore
+      quickly, entered a carriage, and drove away to the hotel, leaving
+      Schomberg to look after their luggage and take care of their strange
+      companion. The latter, looking more like a performing bear abandoned by
+      his show men than a human being, followed all Schomberg's movements step
+      by step, close behind his back, muttering to himself in a language that
+      sounded like some sort of uncouth Spanish. The hotel-keeper felt
+      uncomfortable till at last he got rid of him at an obscure den where a
+      very clean, portly Portuguese half-caste, standing serenely in the
+      doorway, seemed to understand exactly how to deal with clients of every
+      kind. He took from the creature the strapped bundle it had been hugging
+      closely through all its peregrinations in that strange town, and cut short
+      Schomberg's attempts at explanation by a most confident&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I comprehend very well, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's more than I do,&rdquo; thought Schomberg, going away thankful at being
+      relieved of the alligator-hunter's company. He wondered what these fellows
+      were, without being able to form a guess of sufficient probability. Their
+      names he learned that very day by direct inquiry &ldquo;to enter in my books,&rdquo;
+       he explained in his formal military manner, chest thrown out, beard very
+      much in evidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shaven man, sprawling in a long chair, with his air of withered youth,
+      raised his eyes languidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name? Oh, plain Mr. Jones&mdash;put that down&mdash;a gentleman at
+      large. And this is Ricardo.&rdquo; The pock-marked man, lying prostrate in
+      another long chair, made a grimace, as if something had tickled the end of
+      his nose, but did not come out of his supineness. &ldquo;Martin Ricardo,
+      secretary. You don't want any more of our history, do you? Eh, what?
+      Occupation? Put down, well&mdash;tourists. We've been called harder names
+      before now; it won't hurt our feelings. And that fellow of mine&mdash;where
+      did you tuck him away? Oh, he will be all right. When he wants anything
+      he'll take it. He's Peter. Citizen of Colombia. Peter, Pedro&mdash;I don't
+      know that he ever had any other name. Pedro, alligator hunter. Oh, yes&mdash;I'll
+      pay his board with the half-caste. Can't help myself. He's so confoundedly
+      devoted to me that if I were to give him the sack he would fly at my
+      throat. Shall I tell you how I killed his brother in the wilds of
+      Colombia? Well, perhaps some other time&mdash;it's a rather long story.
+      What I shall always regret is that I didn't kill him, too. I could have
+      done it without any extra trouble then; now it's too late. Great nuisance;
+      but he's useful sometimes. I hope you are not going to put all this in
+      your book?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The offhand, hard manner and the contemptuous tone of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo;
+       disconcerted Schomberg utterly. He had never been spoken to like this in
+      his life. He shook his head in silence and withdrew, not exactly scared&mdash;though
+      he was in reality of a timid disposition under his manly exterior&mdash;but
+      distinctly mystified and impressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FIVE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which
+      filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned towards
+      his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must get rid of these two. It won't do!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first; but she
+      had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself. Sitting in
+      her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was careful not to
+      make a sound, knowing from experience that her very assent would be
+      resented. With her eyes she followed the figure of Schomberg, clad in his
+      sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in her night
+      attire, looked the most unattractive object in existence&mdash;miserable,
+      insignificant, faded, crushed, old. And the contrast with the feminine
+      form he had ever in his mind's eye made his wife's appearance painful to
+      his aesthetic sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of screwing his
+      courage up to the sticking point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into his bedroom,
+      and tell him to be off&mdash;him and that secretary of his&mdash;early in
+      the morning. I don't mind a round game of cards, but to make a decoy of my
+      table d'hote&mdash;my blood boils! He came here because some lying rascal
+      in Manila told him I kept a table d'hote.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said these things, not for Mrs. Schomberg's information, but simply
+      thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point where it would
+      give him courage enough to face &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I have a good mind
+      to&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so unlike the
+      picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though his eyes strayed
+      about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features awakened in the
+      miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing for years a fear for his
+      precious carcass, since the poor creature had nothing else but that to
+      hold on to in the world. She knew him well; but she did not know him
+      altogether. The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom
+      she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage. And, timid
+      in her corner, she ventured to say pressingly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be careful, Wilhelm! Remember the knives and revolvers in their trunks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In guise of thanks for that anxious reminder, he swore horribly in the
+      direction of her shrinking person. In her scanty nightdress, and
+      barefooted, she recalled a mediaeval penitent being reproved for her sins
+      in blasphemous terms. Those lethal weapons were always present to
+      Schomberg's mind. Personally, he had never seen them. His part, ten days
+      after his guests' arrival, had been to lounge in manly, careless attitudes
+      on the veranda&mdash;keeping watch&mdash;while Mrs. Schomberg, provided
+      with a bunch of assorted keys, her discoloured teeth chattering and her
+      globular eyes absolutely idiotic with fright, was &ldquo;going through&rdquo; the
+      luggage of these strange clients. Her terrible Wilhelm had insisted on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll be on the look-out, I tell you,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I shall give you a
+      whistle when I see them coming back. You couldn't whistle. And if he were
+      to catch you at it, and chuck you out by the scruff of the neck, it
+      wouldn't hurt you much; but he won't touch a woman. Not he! He has told me
+      so. Affected beast. I must find out something about their little game, and
+      so there's an end of it. Go in! Go now! Quick march!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been an awful job; but she did go in, because she was much more
+      afraid of Schomberg than of any possible consequences of the act. Her
+      greatest concern was lest no key of the bunch he had provided her with
+      should fit the locks. It would have been such a disappointment for
+      Wilhelm. However, the trunks, she found, had been left open; but her
+      investigation did not last long. She was frightened of firearms, and
+      generally of all weapons, not from personal cowardice, but as some women
+      are, almost superstitiously, from an abstract horror of violence and
+      murder. She was out again on the veranda long before Wilhelm had any
+      occasion for a warning whistle. The instinctive, motiveless fear being the
+      most difficult to overcome, nothing could induce her to return to her
+      investigations, neither threatening growls nor ferocious hisses, nor yet a
+      poke or two in the ribs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stupid female!&rdquo; muttered the hotel-keeper, perturbed by the notion of
+      that armoury in one of his bedrooms. This was from no abstract sentiment,
+      with him it was constitutional. &ldquo;Get out of my sight,&rdquo; he snarled. &ldquo;Go and
+      dress yourself for the table d'hote.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Left to himself, Schomberg had meditated. What the devil did this mean?
+      His thinking processes were sluggish and spasmodic; but suddenly the truth
+      came to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By heavens, they are desperadoes!&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then he beheld &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo; and his secretary with the ambiguous
+      name of Ricardo entering the grounds of the hotel. They had been down to
+      the port on some business, and now were returning; Mr. Jones lank, spare,
+      opening his long legs with angular regularity like a pair of compasses,
+      the other stepping out briskly by his side. Conviction entered Schomberg's
+      heart. They <i>were</i> two desperadoes&mdash;no doubt about it. But as
+      the funk which he experienced was merely a general sensation, he managed
+      to put on his most severe Officer-of-the-Reserve manner, long before they
+      had closed with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good morning, gentlemen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Being answered with derisive civility, he became confirmed in his sudden
+      conviction of their desperate character. The way Mr. Jones turned his
+      hollow eyes on one, like an incurious spectre, and the way the other, when
+      addressed, suddenly retracted his lips and exhibited his teeth without
+      looking round&mdash;here was evidence enough to settle that point.
+      Desperadoes! They passed through the billiard-room, inscrutably
+      mysterious, to the back of the house, to join their violated trunks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tiffin bell will ring in five minutes, gentlemen.&rdquo; Schomberg called after
+      them, exaggerating the deep manliness of his tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had managed to upset himself very much. He expected to see them come
+      back infuriated and begin to bully him with an odious lack of restraint.
+      Desperadoes! However they didn't; they had not noticed anything unusual
+      about their trunks and Schomberg recovered his composure and said to
+      himself that he must get rid of this deadly incubus as soon as
+      practicable. They couldn't possibly want to stay very long; this was not
+      the town&mdash;the colony&mdash;for desperate characters. He shrank from
+      action. He dreaded any kind of disturbance&mdash;&ldquo;fracas&rdquo; he called it&mdash;in
+      his hotel. Such things were not good for business. Of course, sometimes
+      one had to have a &ldquo;fracas;&rdquo; but it had been a comparatively trifling task
+      to seize the frail Zangiacomo&mdash;whose bones were no larger than a
+      chicken's&mdash;round the ribs, lift him up bodily, dash him to the
+      ground, and fall on him. It had been easy. The wretched, hook-nosed
+      creature lay without movement, buried under its purple beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, remembering the occasion of that &ldquo;fracas,&rdquo; Schomberg groaned
+      with the pain as of a hot coal under his breastbone, and gave himself up
+      to desolation. Ah, if he only had that girl with him he would have been
+      masterful and resolute and fearless&mdash;fight twenty desperadoes&mdash;care
+      for nobody on earth! Whereas the possession of Mrs. Schomberg was no
+      incitement to a display of manly virtues. Instead of caring for no one, he
+      felt that he cared for nothing. Life was a hollow sham; he wasn't going to
+      risk a shot through his lungs or his liver in order to preserve its
+      integrity. It had no savour&mdash;damn it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his state of moral decomposition, Schomberg, master as he was of the
+      art of hotel-keeping, and careful of giving no occasion for criticism to
+      the powers regulating that branch of human activity, let things take their
+      course; though he saw very well where that course was tending. It began
+      first with a game or two after dinner&mdash;for the drinks, apparently&mdash;with
+      some lingering customer, at one of the little tables ranged against the
+      walls of the billiard-room. Schomberg detected the meaning of it at once.
+      &ldquo;That's what it was! This was what they were!&rdquo; And, moving about
+      restlessly (at that time his morose silent period had set in), he cast
+      sidelong looks at the game; but he said nothing. It was not worth while
+      having a row with men who were so overbearing. Even when money appeared in
+      connection with these postprandial games, into which more and more people
+      were being drawn, he still refrained from raising the question; he was
+      reluctant to draw unduly the attention of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo; and of the
+      equivocal Ricardo, to his person. One evening, however, after the public
+      rooms of the hotel had become empty, Schomberg made an attempt to grapple
+      with the problem in an indirect way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a distant corner the tired China boy dozed on his heels, his back
+      against the wall. Mrs. Schomberg had disappeared, as usual, between ten
+      and eleven. Schomberg walked about slowly in and out of the room and the
+      veranda, thoughtful, waiting for his two guests to go to bed. Then
+      suddenly he approached them, militarily, his chest thrown out, his voice
+      curt and soldierly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hot night, gentlemen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones, lolling back idly in a chair, looked up. Ricardo, as idle, but
+      more upright, made no sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you have a drink with me before retiring?&rdquo; went on Schomberg,
+      sitting down by the little table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By all means,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones lazily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo showed his teeth in a strange, quick grin. Schomberg felt
+      painfully how difficult it was to get in touch with these men, both so
+      quiet, so deliberate, so menacingly unceremonious. He ordered the Chinaman
+      to bring in the drinks. His purpose was to discover how long these guests
+      intended to stay. Ricardo displayed no conversational vein, but Mr. Jones
+      appeared communicative enough. His voice somehow matched his sunken eyes.
+      It was hollow without being in the least mournful; it sounded distant,
+      uninterested, as though he were speaking from the bottom of a well.
+      Schomberg learned that he would have the privilege of lodging and boarding
+      these gentlemen for at least a month more. He could not conceal his
+      discomfiture at this piece of news.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter? Don't you like to have people in your house?&rdquo; asked
+      plain Mr. Jones languidly. &ldquo;I should have thought the owner of a hotel
+      would be pleased.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his delicate and beautifully pencilled eyebrows. Schomberg
+      muttered something about the locality being dull and uninteresting to
+      travellers&mdash;nothing going on&mdash;too quiet altogether, but he only
+      provoked the declaration that quiet had its charm sometimes, and even
+      dullness was welcome as a change.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We haven't had time to be dull for the last three years,&rdquo; added plain Mr.
+      Jones, his eyes fixed darkly on Schomberg whom he further more invited to
+      have another drink, this time with him, and not to worry himself about
+      things he did not understand; and especially not to be inhospitable&mdash;which
+      in a hotel-keeper is highly unprofessional.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand,&rdquo; grumbled Schomberg. &ldquo;Oh, yes, I understand perfectly
+      well. I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are frightened,&rdquo; interrupted Mr. Jones. &ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want any scandal in my place. That's what's the matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg tried to face the situation bravely, but that steady, black
+      stare affected him. And when he glanced aside uncomfortably, he met
+      Ricardo's grin uncovering a lot of teeth, though the man seemed absorbed
+      in his thoughts all the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, moreover,&rdquo; went on Mr. Jones in that distant tone of his, &ldquo;you can't
+      help yourself. Here we are and here we stay. Would you try to put us out?
+      I dare say you could do it; but you couldn't do it without getting hurt&mdash;very
+      badly hurt. We can promise him that, can't we, Martin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The secretary retracted his lips and looked up sharply at Schomberg, as if
+      only too anxious to leap upon him with teeth and claws.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg managed to produce a deep laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha! Ha! Ha!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones closed his eyes wearily, as if the light hurt them, and looked
+      remarkably like a corpse for a moment. This was bad enough; but when he
+      opened them again, it was almost a worse trial for Schomberg's nerves. The
+      spectral intensity of that glance, fixed on the hotel-keeper (and this was
+      most frightful) without any definite expression, seemed to dissolve the
+      last grain of resolution in his character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't think, by any chance, that you have to do with ordinary people,
+      do you?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Jones, in his lifeless manner, which seemed to imply
+      some sort of menace from beyond the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a gentleman,&rdquo; testified Martin Ricardo with a sudden snap of the
+      lips, after which his moustaches stirred by themselves in an odd, feline
+      manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I wasn't thinking of that,&rdquo; said plain Mr. Jones, while Schomberg,
+      dumb and planted heavily in his chair looked from one to the other,
+      leaning forward a little. &ldquo;Of course I am that; but Ricardo attaches too
+      much importance to a social advantage. What I mean, for instance, is that
+      he, quiet and inoffensive as you see him sitting here, would think nothing
+      of setting fire to this house of entertainment of yours. It would blaze
+      like a box of matches. Think of that! It wouldn't advance your affairs
+      much, would it?&mdash;whatever happened to us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come gentlemen,&rdquo; remonstrated Schomberg, in a murmur. &ldquo;This is very
+      wild talk!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you have been used to deal with tame people, haven't you? But we
+      aren't tame. We once kept a whole angry town at bay for two days, and then
+      we got away with our plunder. It was in Venezuela. Ask Martin here&mdash;he
+      can tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Instinctively Schomberg looked at Ricardo, who only passed the tip of his
+      tongue over his lips with an uncanny sort of gusto, but did not offer to
+      begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, perhaps it would be a rather long story,&rdquo; Mr. Jones conceded after
+      a short silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no desire to hear it, I am sure,&rdquo; said Schomberg. &ldquo;This isn't
+      Venezuela. You wouldn't get away from here like that. But all this is
+      silly talk of the worst sort. Do you mean to say you would make deadly
+      trouble for the sake of a few guilders that you and that other&rdquo;&mdash;eyeing
+      Ricardo suspiciously, as one would look at a strange animal&mdash;&ldquo;gentleman
+      can win of an evening? Isn't as if my customers were a lot of rich men
+      with pockets full of cash. I wonder you take so much trouble and risk for
+      so little money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg's argument was met by Mr. Jones's statement that one must do
+      something to kill time. Killing time was not forbidden. For the rest,
+      being in a communicative mood, Mr. Jones said languidly and in a voice
+      indifferent, as if issuing from a tomb, that he depended on himself, as if
+      the world were still one great, wild jungle without law. Martin was
+      something like that, too&mdash;for reasons of his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these statements Ricardo confirmed by short, inhuman grins. Schomberg
+      lowered his eyes, for the sight of these two men intimidated him; but he
+      was losing patience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, I could see at once that you were two desperate characters&mdash;something
+      like what you say. But what would you think if I told you that I am pretty
+      near as desperate as you two gentlemen? 'Here's that Schomberg has an easy
+      time running his hotel,' people think; and yet it seems to me I would just
+      as soon let you rip me open and burn the whole show as not. There!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A low whistle was heard. It came from Ricardo, and was derisive.
+      Schomberg, breathing heavily, looked on the floor. He was really
+      desperate. Mr. Jones remained languidly sceptical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut, tut! You have a tolerable business. You are perfectly tame; you&mdash;&rdquo;
+       He paused, then added in a tone of disgust: &ldquo;You have a wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg tapped the floor angrily with his foot and uttered an
+      indistinct, laughing curse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean by flinging that damned trouble at my head?&rdquo; he cried.
+      &ldquo;I wish you would carry her off with you some where to the devil! I
+      wouldn't run after you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The unexpected outburst affected Mr. Jones strangely. He had a horrified
+      recoil, chair and all, as if Schomberg had thrust a wriggling viper in his
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's this infernal nonsense?&rdquo; he muttered thickly. &ldquo;What do you mean?
+      How dare you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo chuckled audibly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you I am desperate,&rdquo; Schomberg repeated. &ldquo;I am as desperate as any
+      man ever was. I don't care a hang what happens to me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then&rdquo;&mdash;Mr. Jones began to speak with a quietly threatening
+      effect, as if the common words of daily use had some other deadly meaning
+      to his mind&mdash;&ldquo;well, then, why should you make yourself ridiculously
+      disagreeable to us? If you don't care, as you say, you might just as well
+      let us have the key of that music-shed of yours for a quiet game; a modest
+      bank&mdash;a dozen candles or so. It would be greatly appreciated by your
+      clients, as far as I can judge from the way they betted on a game of
+      ecarte I had with that fair, baby-faced man&mdash;what's his name? They
+      just yearn for a modest bank. And I am afraid Martin here would take it
+      badly if you objected; but of course you won't. Think of the calls for
+      drinks!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg, raising his eyes, at last met the gleams in two dark caverns
+      under Mr. Jones's devilish eyebrows, directed upon him impenetrably. He
+      shuddered as if horrors worse than murder had been lurking there, and
+      said, nodding towards Ricardo:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say he wouldn't think twice about sticking me, if he had you at
+      his back! I wish I had sunk my launch, and gone to the bottom myself in
+      her, before I boarded the steamer you came by. Ah, well, I've been already
+      living in hell for weeks, so you don't make much difference. I'll let you
+      have the concert-room&mdash;and hang the consequences. But what about the
+      boy on late duty? If he sees the cards and actual money passing, he will
+      be sure to blab, and it will be all over the town in no time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A ghastly smile stirred the lips of Mr. Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I see you want to make a success of it. Very good. That's the way to
+      get on. Don't let it disturb you. You chase all the Chinamen to bed early,
+      and we'll get Pedro here every evening. He isn't the conventional waiter's
+      cut, but he will do to run to and fro with the tray, while you sit here
+      from nine to eleven serving out drinks and gathering the money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There will be three of them now,&rdquo; thought the unlucky Schomberg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if a
+      murderous one. There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny, no
+      suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man, or of an
+      insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and a
+      subtle power of terror. Pedro with his fangs, his tangled beard, and queer
+      stare of his little bear's eyes was, by comparison, delightfully natural.
+      Besides, Schomberg could no longer help himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will do very well,&rdquo; he asserted mournfully. &ldquo;But if you gentlemen,
+      if you had turned up here only three months ago&mdash;ay, less than three
+      months ago&mdash;you would have found somebody very different from what I
+      am now to talk to you. It's true. What do you think of that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I scarcely know what to think. I should think it was a lie. You were
+      probably as tame three months ago as you are now. You were born tame, like
+      most people in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones got up spectrally, and Ricardo imitated him with a snarl and a
+      stretch. Schomberg, in a brown study, went on, as if to himself:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There has been an orchestra here&mdash;eighteen women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones let out an exclamation of dismay, and looked about as if the
+      walls around him and the whole house had been infected with plague. Then
+      he became very angry, and swore violently at Schomberg for daring to bring
+      up such subjects. The hotel-keeper was too much surprised to get up. He
+      gazed from his chair at Mr. Jones's anger, which had nothing spectral in
+      it but was not the more comprehensible for that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter?&rdquo; he stammered out. &ldquo;What subject? Didn't you hear me
+      say it was an orchestra? There's nothing wrong in that. Well, there was a
+      girl amongst them&mdash;&rdquo; Schomberg's eyes went stony; he clasped his
+      hands in front of his breast with such force that his knuckles came out
+      white. &ldquo;Such a girl! Tame, am I? I would have kicked everything to pieces
+      about me for her. And she, of course . . . I am in the prime of life . . .
+      then a fellow bewitched her&mdash;a vagabond, a false, lying, swindling,
+      underhand, stick-at-nothing brute. Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out his
+      arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury. The other two
+      looked at his shaking back&mdash;the attenuated Mr. Jones with mingled
+      scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of a cat which sees
+      a piece of fish in the pantry out of reach. Schomberg flung himself
+      backwards. He was dry-eyed, but he gulped as if swallowing sobs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder you can do with me what you like. You have no idea&mdash;just
+      let me tell you of my trouble&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to know anything of your beastly trouble,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones,
+      in his most lifelessly positive voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stretched forth an arresting hand, and, as Schomberg remained
+      open-mouthed, he walked out of the billiard-room in all the uncanniness of
+      his thin shanks. Ricardo followed at his leader's heels; but he showed his
+      teeth to Schomberg over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER SIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      From that evening dated those mysterious but significant phenomena in
+      Schomberg's establishment which attracted Captain Davidson's casual notice
+      when he dropped in, placid yet astute, in order to return Mrs. Schomberg's
+      Indian shawl. And strangely enough, they lasted some considerable time. It
+      argued either honesty and bad luck or extraordinary restraint on the part
+      of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones and Co.&rdquo; in their discreet operations with cards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg's
+      concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled up on
+      and about the musicians' platform, and lighted at the other by two dozen
+      candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with green cloth. In
+      the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned into a banker, faced
+      Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned into a croupier. By
+      contrast, the other faces round that table, anything between twenty and
+      thirty, must have looked like collected samples of intensely artless,
+      helpless humanity&mdash;pathetic in their innocent watch for the small
+      turns of luck which indeed might have been serious enough for them. They
+      had no notice to spare for the hairy Pedro, carrying a tray with the
+      clumsiness of a creature caught in the woods and taught to walk on its
+      hind legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way. He remained in the billiard-room,
+      serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an air of not seeing the
+      growling monster, of not knowing where the drinks went, of ignoring that
+      there was such a thing as a music-room over there under the trees within
+      fifty yards of the hotel. He submitted himself to the situation with a
+      low-spirited stoicism compounded of fear and resignation. Directly the
+      party had broken up, (he could see dark shapes of the men drifting singly
+      and in knots through the gate of the compound), he would withdraw out of
+      sight behind a door not quite closed, in order to avoid meeting his two
+      extraordinary guests; but he would watch through the crack their
+      contrasted forms pass through the billiard-room and disappear on their way
+      to bed. Then he would hear doors being slammed upstairs; and a profound
+      silence would fall upon the whole house, upon his hotel appropriated,
+      haunted by those insolently outspoken men provided with a whole armoury of
+      weapons in their trunks. A profound silence. Schomberg sometimes could not
+      resist the notion that he must be dreaming. Shuddering, he would pull
+      himself together, and creep out, with movements strangely inappropriate to
+      the Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve bearing by which he tried to keep up his
+      self-respect before the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great loneliness oppressed him. One after another he would extinguish
+      the lamps, and move softly towards his bedroom, where Mrs. Schomberg
+      waited for him&mdash;no fit companion for a man of his ability and &ldquo;in the
+      prime of life.&rdquo; But that life, alas, was blighted. He felt it; and never
+      with such force as when on opening the door he perceived that woman
+      sitting patiently in a chair, her toes peeping out under the edge of her
+      night-dress, an amazingly small amount of hair on her head drooping on the
+      long stalk of scraggy neck, with that everlasting scared grin showing a
+      blue tooth and meaning nothing&mdash;not even real fear. For she was used
+      to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes he was tempted to screw the head off the stalk. He imagined
+      himself doing it&mdash;with one hand, a twisting movement. Not seriously,
+      of course. Just a simple indulgence for his exasperated feelings. He
+      wasn't capable of murder. He was certain of that. And, remembering
+      suddenly the plain speeches of Mr. Jones, he would think: &ldquo;I suppose I am
+      too tame for that&rdquo;&mdash;quite unaware that he had murdered the poor woman
+      morally years ago. He was too unintelligent to have the notion of such a
+      crime. Her bodily presence was bitterly offensive, because of its contrast
+      with a very different feminine image. And it was no use getting rid of
+      her. She was a habit of years, and there would be nothing to put in her
+      place. At any rate, he could talk to that idiot half the night if he
+      chose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night he had been vapouring before her as to his intention to face
+      his two guests and, instead of that inspiration he needed, had merely
+      received the usual warning: &ldquo;Be careful, Wilhelm.&rdquo; He did not want to be
+      told to be careful by an imbecile female. What he needed was a pair of
+      woman's arms which, flung round his neck, would brace him up for the
+      encounter. Inspire him, he called it to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lay awake a long time; and his slumbers, when they came, were
+      unsatisfactory and short. The morning light had no joy for his eyes. He
+      listened dismally to the movements in the house. The Chinamen were
+      unlocking and flinging wide the doors of the public rooms which opened on
+      the veranda. Horrors! Another poisoned day to get through somehow! The
+      recollection of his resolve made him feel actually sick for a moment.
+      First of all the lordly, abandoned attitudes of Mr. Jones disconcerted
+      him. Then there was his contemptuous silence. Mr. Jones never addressed
+      himself to Schomberg with any general remarks, never opened his lips to
+      him unless to say &ldquo;Good morning&rdquo;&mdash;two simple words which, uttered by
+      that man, seemed a mockery of a threatening character. And, lastly, it was
+      not a frank physical fear he inspired&mdash;for as to that, even a
+      cornered rat will fight&mdash;but a superstitious shrinking awe, something
+      like an invincible repugnance to seek speech with a wicked ghost. That it
+      was a daylight ghost surprisingly angular in his attitudes, and for the
+      most part spread out on three chairs, did not make it any easier. Daylight
+      only made him a more weird, a more disturbing and unlawful apparition.
+      Strangely enough in the evening when he came out of his mute supineness,
+      this unearthly side of him was less obtrusive. At the gaming-table, when
+      actually handling the cards, it was probably sunk quite out of sight; but
+      Schomberg, having made up his mind in ostrich-like fashion to ignore what
+      was going on, never entered the desecrated music-room. He had never seen
+      Mr. Jones in the exercise of his vocation&mdash;or perhaps it was only his
+      trade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will speak to him tonight,&rdquo; Schomberg said to himself, while he drank
+      his morning tea, in pyjamas, on the veranda, before the rising sun had
+      topped the trees of the compound, and while the undried dew still lay
+      silvery on the grass, sparkled on the blossoms of the central flower-bed,
+      and darkened the yellow gravel of the drive. &ldquo;That's what I'll do. I won't
+      keep out of sight tonight. I shall come out and catch him as he goes to
+      bed carrying the cash-box.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, what was the fellow but a common desperado? Murderous? Oh, yes;
+      murderous enough, perhaps&mdash;and the muscles of Schomberg's stomach had
+      a quivering contraction under his airy attire. But even a common desperado
+      would think twice or, more likely, a hundred times, before openly
+      murdering an inoffensive citizen in a civilized, European-ruled town. He
+      jerked his shoulders. Of course! He shuddered again, and paddled back to
+      his room to dress himself. His mind was made up, and he would think no
+      more about it; but still he had his doubts. They grew and unfolded
+      themselves with the progress of the day, as some plants do. At times they
+      made him perspire more than usual, and they did away with the possibility
+      of his afternoon siesta. After turning over on his couch more than a dozen
+      times, he gave up this mockery of repose, got up, and went downstairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was between three and four o'clock, the hour of profound peace. The
+      very flowers seemed to doze on their stalks set with sleepy leaves. Not
+      even the air stirred, for the sea-breeze was not due till later. The
+      servants were out of sight, catching naps in the shade somewhere behind
+      the house. Mrs. Schomberg in a dim up-stair room with closed jalousies,
+      was elaborating those two long pendant ringlets which were such a feature
+      of her hairdressing for her afternoon duties. At that time no customers
+      ever troubled the repose of the establishment. Wandering about his
+      premises in profound solitude, Schomberg recoiled at the door of the
+      billiard-room, as if he had seen a snake in his path. All alone with the
+      billiards, the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs, Mr.
+      Secretary Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning rapidity
+      something that looked like tricks with his own personal pack of cards,
+      which he always carried about in his pocket. Schomberg would have backed
+      out quietly if Ricardo had not turned his head. Having been seen, the
+      hotel-keeper elected to walk in as the lesser risk of the two. The
+      consciousness of his inwardly abject attitude towards these men caused him
+      always to throw his chest out and assume a severe expression. Ricardo
+      watched his approach, clasping the pack of cards in both hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want something, perhaps?&rdquo; suggested Schomberg in his
+      lieutenant-of-the-Reserve voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo shook his head in silence and looked expectant. With him Schomberg
+      exchanged at least twenty words every day. He was infinitely more
+      communicative than his patron. At times he looked very much like an
+      ordinary human being of his class; and he seemed to be in an amiable mood
+      at that moment. Suddenly spreading some ten cards face downward in the
+      form of a fan, he thrust them towards Schomberg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, man, take one quick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg was so surprised that he took one hurriedly, after a very
+      perceptible start. The eyes of Martin Ricardo gleamed phosphorescent in
+      the half-light of the room screened from the heat and glare of the
+      tropics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the king of hearts you've got,&rdquo; he chuckled, showing his teeth in
+      a quick flash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg, after looking at the card, admitted that it was, and laid it
+      down on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can make you take any card I like nine times out of ten,&rdquo; exulted the
+      secretary, with a strange curl of his lips and a green flicker in his
+      raised eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg looked down at him dumbly. For a few seconds neither of them
+      stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his fingers, let
+      the whole pack fall on the table. Schomberg sat down. He sat down because
+      of the faintness in his legs, and for no other reason. His mouth was dry.
+      Having sat down, he felt that he must speak. He squared his shoulders in
+      parade style.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are pretty good at that sort of thing,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Practice makes perfect,&rdquo; replied the secretary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His precarious amiability made it impossible for Schomberg to get away.
+      Thus, from his very timidity, the hotel-keeper found himself engaged in a
+      conversation the thought of which filled him with apprehension. It must be
+      said, in justice to Schomberg, that he concealed his funk very creditably.
+      The habit of throwing out his chest and speaking in a severe voice stood
+      him in good stead. With him, too, practice made perfect; and he would
+      probably have kept it up to the end, to the very last moment, to the
+      ultimate instant of breaking strain which would leave him grovelling on
+      the floor. To add to his secret trouble, he was at a loss what to say. He
+      found nothing else but the remark:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you are fond of cards.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would you expect?&rdquo; asked Ricardo in a simple, philosophical tone.
+      &ldquo;It is likely I should not be?&rdquo; Then, with sudden fire: &ldquo;Fond of cards?
+      Ay, passionately!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of this outburst was augmented by the quiet lowering of the
+      eyelids, by a reserved pause as though this had been a confession of
+      another kind of love. Schomberg cudgelled his brains for a new topic, but
+      he could not find one. His usual scandalous gossip would not serve this
+      turn. That desperado did not know anyone anywhere within a thousand miles.
+      Schomberg was almost compelled to keep to the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you've always been so&mdash;from your early youth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo's eyes remained cast down. His fingers toyed absently with the
+      pack on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that it was so early. I first got in the way of it playing
+      for tobacco&mdash;in forecastles of ships, you know&mdash;common sailor
+      games. We used to spend whole watches below at it, round a chest, under a
+      slush lamp. We would hardly spare the time to get a bite of salt horse&mdash;neither
+      eat nor sleep. We could hardly stand when the watches were mustered on
+      deck. Talk of gambling!&rdquo; He dropped the reminiscent tone to add the
+      information, &ldquo;I was bred to the sea from a boy, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg had fallen into a reverie, but without losing the sense of
+      impending calamity. The next words he heard were:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got on all right at sea, too. Worked up to be mate. I was mate of a
+      schooner&mdash;a yacht, you might call her&mdash;a special good berth too,
+      in the Gulf of Mexico, a soft job that you don't run across more than once
+      in a lifetime. Yes, I was mate of her when I left the sea to follow him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo tossed up his chin to indicate the room above; from which
+      Schomberg, his wits painfully aroused by this reminder of Mr. Jones's
+      existence, concluded that the latter had withdrawn into his bedroom.
+      Ricardo, observing him from under lowered eyelids, went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It so happened that we were shipmates.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Jones, you mean? Is he a sailor too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo raised his eyelids at that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's no more Mr. Jones than you are,&rdquo; he said with obvious pride. &ldquo;He a
+      sailor! That just shows your ignorance. But there! A foreigner can't be
+      expected to know any better. I am an Englishman, and I know a gentleman at
+      sight. I should know one drunk, in the gutter, in jail, under the gallows.
+      There's a something&mdash;it isn't exactly the appearance, it's a&mdash;no
+      use me trying to tell you. You ain't an Englishman, and if you were, you
+      wouldn't need to be told.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An unsuspected stream of loquacity had broken its dam somewhere deep
+      within the man, had diluted his fiery blood and softened his pitiless
+      fibre. Schomberg experienced mingled relief and apprehension, as if
+      suddenly an enormous savage cat had begun to wind itself about his legs in
+      inexplicable friendliness. No prudent man under such circumstances would
+      dare to stir. Schomberg didn't stir. Ricardo assumed an easy attitude,
+      with an elbow on the table. Schomberg squared his shoulders afresh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was employed, in that there yacht&mdash;schooner, whatever you call it&mdash;by
+      ten gentlemen at once. That surprises you, eh? Yes, yes, ten. Leastwise
+      there were nine of them gents good enough in their way, and one downright
+      gentleman, and that was . . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo gave another upward jerk of his chin as much as to say: He! The
+      only one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And no mistake,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I spotted him from the first day. How? Why?
+      Ay, you may ask. Hadn't seen that many gentlemen in my life. Well, somehow
+      I did. If you were an Englishman, you would&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was your yacht?&rdquo; Schomberg interrupted as impatiently as he dared;
+      for this harping on nationality jarred on his already tried nerves. &ldquo;What
+      was the game?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a headpiece on you! Game! 'Xactly. That's what it was&mdash;the
+      sort of silliness gentlemen will get up among themselves to play at
+      adventure. A treasure-hunting expedition. Each of them put down so much
+      money, you understand, to buy the schooner. Their agent in the city
+      engaged me and the skipper. The greatest secrecy and all that. I reckon he
+      had a twinkle in his eye all the time&mdash;and no mistake. But that
+      wasn't our business. Let them bust their money as they like. The pity of
+      it was that so little of it came our way. Just fair pay and no more. And
+      damn any pay, much or little, anyhow&mdash;that's what I say!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He blinked his eyes greenishly in the dim light. The heat seemed to have
+      stilled everything in the world but his voice. He swore at large,
+      abundantly, in snarling undertones, it was impossible to say why, then
+      calmed down as inexplicably, and went on, as a sailor yarns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At first there were only nine of them adventurous sparks, then, just a
+      day or two before the sailing date, he turned up. Heard of it somehow,
+      somewhere&mdash;I would say from some woman, if I didn't know him as I do.
+      He would give any woman a ten-mile berth. He can't stand them. Or maybe in
+      a flash bar. Or maybe in one of them grand clubs in Pall Mall. Anyway, the
+      agent netted him in all right&mdash;cash down, and only about four and
+      twenty hours for him to get ready; but he didn't miss his ship. Not he!
+      You might have called it a pier-head jump&mdash;for a gentleman. I saw him
+      come along. Know the West India Docks, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg did not know the West India Docks. Ricardo looked at him
+      pensively for a while, and then continued, as if such ignorance had to be
+      disregarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our tug was already alongside. Two loafers were carrying his dunnage
+      behind him. I told the dockman at our moorings to keep all fast for a
+      minute. The gangway was down already; but he made nothing of it. Up he
+      jumps, one leap, swings his long legs over the rail, and there he is on
+      board. They pass up his swell dunnage, and he puts his hand in his
+      trousers pocket and throws all his small change on the wharf for them
+      chaps to pick up. They were still promenading that wharf on all fours when
+      we cast off. It was only then that he looked at me&mdash;quietly, you
+      know; in a slow way. He wasn't so thin then as he is now; but I noticed he
+      wasn't so young as he looked&mdash;not by a long chalk. He seemed to touch
+      me inside somewhere. I went away pretty quick from there; I was wanted
+      forward anyhow. I wasn't frightened. What should I be frightened for? I
+      only felt touched&mdash;on the very spot. But Jee-miny, if anybody had
+      told me we should be partners before the year was out&mdash;well, I would
+      have&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He swore a variety of strange oaths, some common, others quaintly horrible
+      to Schomberg's ears, and all mere innocent exclamations of wonder at the
+      shifts and changes of human fortune. Schomberg moved slightly in his
+      chair. But the admirer and partner of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo; seemed to have
+      forgotten Schomberg's existence for the moment. The stream of ingenuous
+      blasphemy&mdash;some of it in bad Spanish&mdash;had run dry, and Martin
+      Ricardo, connoisseur in gentlemen, sat dumb with a stony gaze as if still
+      marvelling inwardly at the amazing elections, conjunctions, and
+      associations of events which influence man's pilgrimage on this earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last Schomberg spoke tentatively:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so the&mdash;the gentleman, up there, talked you over into leaving a
+      good berth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo started.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talked me over! Didn't need to talk me over. Just beckoned to me, and
+      that was enough. By that time we were in the Gulf of Mexico. One night we
+      were lying at anchor, close to a dry sandbank&mdash;to this day I am not
+      sure where it was&mdash;off the Colombian coast or thereabouts. We were to
+      start digging the next morning, and all hands had turned in early,
+      expecting a hard day with the shovels. Up he comes, and in his quiet,
+      tired way of speaking&mdash;you can tell a gentleman by that as much as by
+      anything else almost&mdash;up he comes behind me and says, just like that
+      into my ear, in a manner: 'Well, what do you think of our treasure hunt
+      now?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't even turn my head; 'xactly as I stood, I remained, and I spoke
+      no louder than himself:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'If you want to know, sir, it's nothing but just damned tom-foolery.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had, of course, been having short talks together at one time or
+      another during the passage. I dare say he had read me like a book. There
+      ain't much to me, except that I have never been tame, even when walking
+      the pavement and cracking jokes and standing drinks to chums&mdash;ay, and
+      to strangers, too. I would watch them lifting their elbows at my expense,
+      or splitting their side at my fun&mdash;I <i>can</i> be funny when I like,
+      you bet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A pause for self-complacent contemplation of his own fun and generosity
+      checked the flow of Ricardo's speech. Schomberg was concerned to keep
+      within bounds the enlargement of his eyes, which he seemed to feel growing
+      bigger in his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he whispered hastily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would watch them and think: 'You boys don't know who I am. If you did&mdash;!'
+      With girls, too. Once I was courting a girl. I used to kiss her behind the
+      ear and say to myself: 'If you only knew who's kissing you, my dear, you
+      would scream and bolt!' Ha! ha! Not that I wanted to do them any harm; but
+      I felt the power in myself. Now, here we sit, friendly like, and that's
+      all right. You aren't in my way. But I am not friendly to you. I just
+      don't care. Some men do say that; but I really don't. You are no more to
+      me one way or another than that fly there. Just so. I'd squash you or
+      leave you alone. I don't care what I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If real force of character consists in overcoming our sudden weaknesses,
+      Schomberg displayed plenty of that quality. At the mention of the fly, he
+      re-enforced the severe dignity of his attitude as one inflates a
+      collapsing toy balloon with a great effort of breath. The easy-going,
+      relaxed attitude of Ricardo was really appalling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's so,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I am that sort of fellow. You wouldn't think it,
+      would you? No. You have to be told. So I am telling you, and I dare say
+      you only half believe it. But you can't say to yourself that I am drunk,
+      stare at me as you may. I haven't had anything stronger than a glass of
+      iced water all day. Takes a real gentleman to see through a fellow. Oh,
+      yes&mdash;he spotted me. I told you we had a few talks at sea about one
+      thing or another. And I used to watch him down the skylight, playing cards
+      in the cuddy with the others. They had to pass the time away somehow. By
+      the same token he caught me at it once, and it was then that I told him I
+      was fond of cards&mdash;and generally lucky in gambling, too. Yes, he had
+      sized me up. Why not? A gentleman's just like any other man&mdash;and
+      something more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It flashed through Schomberg's mind: that these two were indeed well
+      matched in their enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in different
+      disguises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Says he to me&rdquo;&mdash;Ricardo started again in a gossiping manner&mdash;'I'm
+      packed up. It's about time to go, Martin.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the first time he called me Martin. Says I:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Is that it, sir?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You didn't think I was after that sort of treasure, did you? I wanted to
+      clear out from home quietly. It's a pretty expensive way of getting a
+      passage across, but it has served my turn.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I let him know very soon that I was game for anything, from pitch and
+      toss to wilful murder, in his company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Wilful murder?' says he in his quiet way. 'What the deuce is that? What
+      are you talking about? People do get killed sometimes when they get in
+      one's way, but that's self-defence&mdash;you understand?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him I did. And then I said I would run below for a minute, to ram
+      a few of my things into a sailor's bag I had. I've never cared for a lot
+      of dunnage; I believed in going about flying light when I was at sea. I
+      came back and found him strolling up and down the deck, as if he were
+      taking a breath of fresh air before turning in, like any other evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ready?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Yes, sir.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He didn't even look at me. We had had a boat in the water astern ever
+      since we came to anchor in the afternoon. He throws the stump of his cigar
+      overboard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Can you get the captain out on deck?' he asks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was the last thing in the world I should have thought of doing. I
+      lost my tongue for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I can try,' says I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Well, then, I am going below. You get him up and keep him with you till
+      I come back on deck. Mind! Don't let him go below till I return.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could not help asking why he told me to rouse a sleeping man, when we
+      wanted everybody on board to sleep sweetly till we got clear of the
+      schooner. He laughs a little and says that I didn't see all the bearings
+      of this business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Mind,' he says, 'don't let him leave you till you see me come up again.'
+      He puts his eyes close to mine. 'Keep him with you at all costs.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'And that means?' says I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'All costs to him&mdash;by every possible or impossible means. I don't
+      want to be interrupted in my business down below. He would give me lots of
+      trouble. I take you with me to save myself trouble in various
+      circumstances; and you've got to enter on your work right away.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Just so, sir,' says I; and he slips down the companion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With a gentleman you know at once where you are; but it was a ticklish
+      job. The skipper was nothing to me one way or another, any more than you
+      are at this moment, Mr. Schomberg. You may light your cigar or blow your
+      brains out this minute, and I don't care a hang which you do, both or
+      neither. To bring the skipper up was easy enough. I had only to stamp on
+      the deck a few times over his head. I stamped hard. But how to keep him up
+      when he got there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Anything the matter; Mr. Ricardo?' I heard his voice behind me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There he was, and I hadn't thought of anything to say to him; so I didn't
+      turn round. The moonlight was brighter than many a day I could remember in
+      the North Sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Why did you call me? What are you staring at out there, Mr. Ricardo?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was deceived by my keeping my back to him. I wasn't staring at
+      anything, but his mistake gave me a notion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I am staring at something that looks like a canoe over there,' I said
+      very slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The skipper got concerned at once. It wasn't any danger from the
+      inhabitants, whoever they were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Oh, hang it!' says he. 'That's very unfortunate.' He had hoped that the
+      schooner being on the coast would not get known so very soon. 'Dashed
+      awkward, with the business we've got in hand, to have a lot of niggers
+      watching operations. But are you certain this is a canoe?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'It may be a drift-log,' I said; 'but I thought you had better have a
+      look with your own eyes. You may make it out better than I can.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His eyes weren't anything as good as mine. But he says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Certainly. Certainly. You did quite right.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it's a fact I had seen some drift-logs at sunset. I saw what they
+      were then and didn't trouble my head about them, forgot all about it till
+      that very moment. Nothing strange in seeing drift-logs off a coast like
+      that; and I'm hanged if the skipper didn't make one out in the wake of the
+      moon. Strange what a little thing a man's life hangs on sometimes&mdash;a
+      single word! Here you are, sitting unsuspicious before me, and you may let
+      out something unbeknown to you that would settle your hash. Not that I
+      have any ill-feeling. I have no feelings. If the skipper had said, 'O,
+      bosh!' and had turned his back on me, he would not have gone three steps
+      towards his bed; but he stood there and stared. And now the job was to get
+      him off the deck when he was no longer wanted there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'We are just trying to make out if that object there is a canoe or a
+      log,' says he to Mr. Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Jones had come up, lounging as carelessly as when he went below. While
+      the skipper was jawing about boats and drifting logs. I asked by signs,
+      from behind, if I hadn't better knock him on the head and drop him quietly
+      overboard. The night was slipping by, and we had to go. It couldn't be put
+      off till next night no more. No. No more. And do you know why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg made a slight negative sign with his head. This direct appeal
+      annoyed him, jarred on the induced quietude of a great talker forced into
+      the part of a listener and sunk in it as a man sinks into slumber. Mr.
+      Ricardo struck a note of scorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't know why? Can't you guess? No? Because the boss had got hold of the
+      skipper's cash-box by then. See?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER SEVEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A common thief!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg bit his tongue just too late, and woke up completely as he saw
+      Ricardo retract his lips in a cat-like grin; but the companion of &ldquo;plain
+      Mr. Jones&rdquo; didn't alter his comfortable, gossiping attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Garn! What if he did want to see his money back, like any tame
+      shopkeeper, hash-seller, gin-slinger, or ink-spewer does? Fancy a mud
+      turtle like you trying to pass an opinion on a gentleman! A gentleman
+      isn't to be sized up so easily. Even I ain't up to it sometimes. For
+      instance, that night, all he did was to waggle his finger at me. The
+      skipper stops his silly chatter, surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Eh? What's the matter?' asks he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The matter! It was his reprieve&mdash;that's what was the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'O, nothing, nothing,' says my gentleman. 'You are perfectly right. A log&mdash;nothing
+      but a log.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, ha! Reprieve, I call it, because if the skipper had gone on with his
+      silly argument much longer he would have had to be knocked out of the way.
+      I could hardly hold myself in on account of the precious minutes. However,
+      his guardian angel put it into his head to shut up and go back to his bed.
+      I was ramping mad about the lost time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Why didn't you let me give him one on his silly coconut sir?' I asks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'No ferocity, no ferocity,' he says, raising his finger at me as calm as
+      you please.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't tell how a gentleman takes that sort of thing. They don't lose
+      their temper. It's bad form. You'll never see him lose his temper&mdash;not
+      for anybody to see anyhow. Ferocity ain't good form, either&mdash;that
+      much I've learned by this time, and more, too. I've had that schooling
+      that you couldn't tell by my face if I meant to rip you up the next minute&mdash;as
+      of course I could do in less than a jiffy. I have a knife up the leg of my
+      trousers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't!&rdquo; exclaimed Schomberg incredulously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Ricardo was as quick as lightning in changing his lounging, idle
+      attitude for a stooping position, and exhibiting the weapon with one jerk
+      at the left leg of his trousers. Schomberg had just a view of it, strapped
+      to a very hairy limb, when Mr. Ricardo, jumping up, stamped his foot to
+      get the trouser-leg down, and resumed his careless pose with one elbow on
+      the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a more handy way to carry a tool than you would think,&rdquo; he went on,
+      gazing abstractedly into Schomberg's wide-open eyes. &ldquo;Suppose some little
+      difference comes up during a game. Well, you stoop to pick up a dropped
+      card, and when you come up&mdash;there you are ready to strike, or with
+      the thing up you sleeve ready to throw. Or you just dodge under the table
+      when there's some shooting coming. You wouldn't believe the damage a
+      fellow with a knife under the table can do to ill-conditioned skunks that
+      want to raise trouble, before they begin to understand what the
+      screaming's about, and make a bolt&mdash;those that can, that is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The roses of Schomberg's cheek at the root of his chestnut beard faded
+      perceptibly. Ricardo chuckled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no ferocity&mdash;no ferocity! A gentleman knows. What's the good of
+      getting yourself into a state? And no shirking necessity, either. No
+      gentleman ever shirks. What I learn I don't forget. Why! We gambled on the
+      plains, with a damn lot of cattlemen in ranches; played fair, mind&mdash;and
+      then had to fight for our winnings afterwards as often as not. We've
+      gambled on the hills and in the valleys and on the sea-shore, and out of
+      sight of land&mdash;mostly fair. Generally it's good enough. We began in
+      Nicaragua first, after we left that schooner and her fool errand. There
+      were one hundred and twenty-seven sovereigns and some Mexican dollars in
+      that skipper's cash-box. Hardly enough to knock a man on the head for from
+      behind, I must confess; but that the skipper had a narrow escape the
+      governor himself could not deny afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Do you want me to understand, sir, that you mind there being one life
+      more or less on this earth?' I asked him, a few hours after we got away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Certainly not,' says he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Well, then, why did you stop me?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'There's a proper way of doing things. You'll have to learn to be
+      correct. There's also unnecessary exertion. That must be avoided, too&mdash;if
+      only for the look of the thing.' A gentleman's way of putting things to
+      you&mdash;and no mistake!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At sunrise we got into a creek, to lie hidden in case the treasure hunt
+      party had a mind to take a spell hunting for us. And dash me if they
+      didn't! We saw the schooner away out, running to leeward, with ten pairs
+      of binoculars sweeping the sea, no doubt on all sides. I advised the
+      governor to give her time to beat back again before we made a start. So we
+      stayed up that creek something like ten days, as snug as can be. On the
+      seventh day we had to kill a man, though&mdash;the brother of this Pedro
+      here. They were alligator-hunters, right enough. We got our lodgings in
+      their hut. Neither the boss nor I could habla Espanol&mdash;speak Spanish,
+      you know&mdash;much then. Dry bank, nice shade, jolly hammocks, fresh
+      fish, good game, everything lovely. The governor chucked them a few
+      dollars to begin with; but it was like boarding with a pair of savage
+      apes, anyhow. By and by we noticed them talking a lot together. They had
+      twigged the cash-box, and the leather portmanteaus, and my bag&mdash;a
+      jolly lot of plunder to look at. They must have been saying to each other:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'No one's ever likely to come looking for these two fellows, who seem to
+      have fallen from the moon. Let's cut their throats.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, of course! Clear as daylight. I didn't need to spy one of them
+      sharpening a devilish long knife behind some bushes, while glancing right
+      and left with his wild eyes, to know what was in the wind. Pedro was
+      standing by, trying the edge of another long knife. They thought we were
+      away on our lookout at the mouth of the river, as was usual with us during
+      the day. Not that we expected to see much of the schooner, but it was just
+      as well to make certain, if possible; and then it was cooler out of the
+      woods, in the breeze. Well, the governor was there right enough, lying
+      comfortable on a rug, where he could watch the offing, but I had gone back
+      to the hut to get a chew of tobacco out of my bag. I had not broken myself
+      of the habit then, and I couldn't be happy unless I had a lump as big as a
+      baby's fist in my cheek.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the cannibalistic comparison, Schomberg muttered a faint, sickly
+      &ldquo;don't.&rdquo; Ricardo hitched himself up in his seat and glanced down his
+      outstretched legs complacently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am tolerably light on my feet, as a general thing,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Dash
+      me if I don't think I could drop a pinch of salt on a sparrow's tail, if I
+      tried. Anyhow, they didn't hear me. I watched them two brown, hairy brutes
+      not ten yards off. All they had on was white linen drawers rolled up on
+      their thighs. Not a word they said to each other. Antonio was down on his
+      thick hams, busy rubbing a knife on a flat stone; Pedro was leaning
+      against a small tree and passing his thumb along the edge of his blade. I
+      got away quieter than a mouse, you bet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't say anything to the boss then. He was leaning on his elbow on
+      his rug, and didn't seem to want to be spoken to. He's like that&mdash;sometimes
+      that familiar you might think he would eat out of your hand, and at others
+      he would snub you sharper than a devil&mdash;but always quiet. Perfect
+      gentleman, I tell you. I didn't bother him, then; but I wasn't likely to
+      forget them two fellows, so businesslike with their knives. At that time
+      we had only one revolver between us two&mdash;the governor's six-shooter,
+      but loaded only in five chambers; and we had no more cartridges. He had
+      left the box behind in a drawer in his cabin. Awkward! I had nothing but
+      an old clasp-knife&mdash;no good at all for anything serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the evening we four sat round a bit of fire outside the sleeping-shed,
+      eating broiled fish off plantain leaves, with roast yams for bread&mdash;the
+      usual thing. The governor and I were on one side, and these two beauties
+      cross-legged on the other, grunting a word or two to each other, now and
+      then, hardly human speech at all, and their eyes down, fast on the ground.
+      For the last three days we couldn't get them to look us in the face.
+      Presently I began to talk to the boss quietly, just as I am talking to you
+      now, careless like, and I told him all I had observed. He goes on picking
+      up pieces of fish and putting them into his mouth as calm as anything.
+      It's a pleasure to have anything to do with a gentleman. Never looked
+      across at them once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'And now,' says I, yawning on purpose, 'we've got to stand watch at
+      night, turn about, and keep our eyes skinned all day, too, and mind we
+      don't get jumped upon suddenly.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'It's perfectly intolerable,' says the governor. 'And you with no weapon
+      of any sort!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I mean to stick pretty close to you, sir, from this on, if you don't
+      mind,' says I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He just nods the least bit, wipes his fingers on the plantain leaf, puts
+      his hand behind his back, as if to help himself to rise from the ground,
+      snatches his revolver from under his jacket and plugs a bullet plumb
+      centre into Mr. Antonio's chest. See what it is to have to do with a
+      gentleman. No confounded fuss, and things done out of hand. But he might
+      have tipped me a wink or something. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Scared
+      ain't in it! I didn't even know who had fired. Everything had been so
+      still just before that the bang of the shot seemed the loudest noise I had
+      ever heard. The honourable Antonio pitches forward&mdash;they always do,
+      towards the shot; you must have noticed that yourself&mdash;yes, he
+      pitches forward on to the embers, and all that lot of hair on his face and
+      head flashes up like a pinch of gunpowder. Greasy, I expect; always
+      scraping the fat off them alligators' hides&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; exclaimed Schomberg violently, as if trying to burst some
+      invisible bonds, &ldquo;do you mean to say that all this happened?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Ricardo coolly. &ldquo;I am making it all up as I go along, just to
+      help you through the hottest part of the afternoon. So down he pitches his
+      nose on the red embers, and up jumps our handsome Pedro and I at the same
+      time, like two Jacks-in-the-box. He starts to bolt away, with his head
+      over his shoulder, and I, hardly knowing what I was doing, spring on his
+      back. I had the sense to get my hands round his neck at once, and it's
+      about all I could do to lock my fingers tight under his jaw. You saw the
+      beauty's neck, didn't you? Hard as iron, too. Down we both went. Seeing
+      this the governor puts his revolver in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Tie his legs together, sir,' I yell. 'I'm trying to strangle him.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was a lot of their fibre-lines lying about. I gave him a last
+      squeeze and then got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I might have shot you,' says the governor, quite concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'But you are glad to have saved a cartridge, sir,' I tell him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My jump did save it. It wouldn't have done to let him get away in the
+      dark like that, and have the beauty dodging around in the bushes, perhaps,
+      with the rusty flint-lock gun they had. The governor owned up that the
+      jump was the correct thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'But he isn't dead,' says he, bending over him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Might as well hope to strangle an ox. We made haste to tie his elbows
+      back, and then, before he came to himself, we dragged him to a small tree,
+      sat him up, and bound him to it, not by the waist but by the neck&mdash;some
+      twenty turns of small line round his throat and the trunk, finished off
+      with a reef-knot under his ear. Next thing we did was to attend to the
+      honourable Antonio, who was making a great smell frizzling his face on the
+      red coals. We pushed and rolled him into the creek, and left the rest to
+      the alligators.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was tired. That little scrap took it out of me something awful. The
+      governor hadn't turned a hair. That's where a gentleman has the pull of
+      you. He don't get excited. No gentleman does&mdash;or hardly ever. I fell
+      asleep all of a sudden and left him smoking by the fire I had made up, his
+      railway rug round his legs, as calm as if he were sitting in a first-class
+      carriage. We hardly spoke ten words to each other after it was over, and
+      from that day to this we have never talked of the business. I wouldn't
+      have known he remembered it if he hadn't alluded to it when talking with
+      you the other day&mdash;you know, with regard to Pedro.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It surprised you, didn't it? That's why I am giving you this yarn of how
+      he came to be with us, like a sort of dog&mdash;dashed sight more useful,
+      though. You know how he can trot around with trays? Well, he could bring
+      down an ox with his fist, at a word from the boss, just as cleverly. And
+      fond of the governor! Oh, my word! More than any dog is of any man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg squared his chest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, and that's one of the things I wanted to mention to Mr. Jones,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;It's unpleasant to have that fellow round the house so early. He
+      sits on the stairs at the back for hours before he is needed here, and
+      frightens people so that the service suffers. The Chinamen&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo nodded and raised his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I first saw him he was fit to frighten a grizzly bear, let alone a
+      Chinaman. He's become civilized now to what he once was. Well, that
+      morning, first thing on opening my eyes, I saw him sitting there, tied up
+      by the neck to the tree. He was blinking. We spent the day watching the
+      sea, and we actually made out the schooner working to windward, which
+      showed that she had given us up. Good! When the sun rose again, I took a
+      squint at our Pedro. He wasn't blinking. He was rolling his eyes, all
+      white one minute and black the next, and his tongue was hanging out a
+      yard. Being tied up short by the neck like this would daunt the arch devil
+      himself&mdash;in time&mdash;in time, mind! I don't know but that even a
+      real gentleman would find it difficult to keep a stiff lip to the end.
+      Presently we went to work getting our boat ready. I was busying myself
+      setting up the mast, when the governor passes the remark:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I think he wants to say something.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had heard a sort of croaking going on for some time, only I wouldn't
+      take any notice; but then I got out of the boat and went up to him, with
+      some water. His eyes were red&mdash;red and black and half out of his
+      head. He drank all the water I gave him, but he hadn't much to say for
+      himself. I walked back to the governor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'He asks for a bullet in his head before we go,' I said. I wasn't at all
+      pleased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Oh, that's out of the question altogether,' says the governor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was right there. Only four shots left, and ninety miles of wild coast
+      to put behind us before coming to the first place where you could expect
+      to buy revolver cartridges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Anyhow,' I tells him, 'he wants to be killed some way or other, as a
+      favour.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then I go on setting up the boat's mast. I didn't care much for the
+      notion of butchering a man bound hand and foot and fastened by the neck
+      besides. I had a knife then&mdash;the honourable Antonio's knife; and that
+      knife is this knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ricardo gave his leg a resounding slap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First spoil in my new life,&rdquo; he went on with harsh joviality. &ldquo;The dodge
+      of carrying it down there I learned later. I carried it stuck in my belt
+      that day. No, I hadn't much stomach for the job; but when you work with a
+      gentleman of the real right sort you may depend on your feelings being
+      seen through your skin. Says the governor suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'It may even be looked upon as his right'&mdash;you hear a gentleman
+      speaking there?&mdash;'but what do you think of taking him with us in the
+      boat?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the governor starts arguing that the beggar would be useful in
+      working our way along the coast. We could get rid of him before coming to
+      the first place that was a little civilized. I didn't want much talking
+      over. Out I scrambled from the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ay, but will he be manageable, sir?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Oh, yes. He's daunted. Go on, cut him loose&mdash;I take the
+      responsibility.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Right you are, sir.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He sees me come along smartly with his brother's knife in my hand&mdash;I
+      wasn't thinking how it looked from his side of the fence, you know&mdash;and
+      jiminy, it nearly killed him! He stared like a crazed bullock and began to
+      sweat and twitch all over, something amazing. I was so surprised, that I
+      stopped to look at him. The drops were pouring over his eyebrows, down his
+      beard, off his nose&mdash;and he gurgled. Then it struck me that he
+      couldn't see what was in my mind. By favour or by right he didn't like to
+      die when it came to it; not in that way, anyhow. When I stepped round to
+      get at the lashing, he let out a sort of soft bellow. Thought I was going
+      to stick him from behind, I guess. I cut all the turns with one slash, and
+      he went over on his side, flop, and started kicking with his tied legs.
+      Laugh! I don't know what there was so funny about it, but I fairly
+      shouted. What between my laughing and his wriggling, I had a job in
+      cutting him free. As soon as he could feel his limbs he makes for the
+      bank, where the governor was standing, crawls up to him on his hands and
+      knees, and embraces his legs. Gratitude, eh? You could see that being
+      allowed to live suited that chap down to the ground. The governor gets his
+      legs away from him gently and just mutters to me:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Let's be off. Get him into the boat.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not difficult,&rdquo; continued Ricardo, after eyeing Schomberg fixedly
+      for a moment. &ldquo;He was ready enough to get into the boat, and&mdash;here he
+      is. He would let himself be chopped into small pieces&mdash;with a smile,
+      mind; with a smile!&mdash;for the governor. I don't know about him doing
+      that much for me; but pretty near, pretty near. I did the tying up and the
+      untying, but he could see who was the boss. And then he knows a gentleman.
+      A dog knows a gentleman&mdash;any dog. It's only some foreigners that
+      don't know; and nothing can teach them, either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you mean to say,&rdquo; asked Schomberg, disregarding what might have been
+      annoying for himself in the emphasis of the final remark, &ldquo;you mean to say
+      that you left steady employment at good wages for a life like this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There!&rdquo; began Ricardo quietly. &ldquo;That's just what a man like you would
+      say. You are that tame! I follow a gentleman. That ain't the same thing as
+      to serve an employer. They give you wages as they'd fling a bone to a dog,
+      and they expect you to be grateful. It's worse than slavery. You don't
+      expect a slave that's bought for money to be grateful. And if you sell
+      your work&mdash;what is it but selling your own self? You've got so many
+      days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me
+      enough for my life? Ay! But they throw at you your week's money and expect
+      you to say 'thank you' before you pick it up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He mumbled some curses, directed at employers generally, as it seemed,
+      then blazed out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Work be damned! I ain't a dog walking on its hind legs for a bone; I am a
+      man who's following a gentleman. There's a difference which you will never
+      understand, Mr. Tame Schomberg.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He yawned slightly. Schomberg, preserving a military stiffness reinforced
+      by a slight frown, had allowed his thoughts to stray away. They were busy
+      detailing the image of a young girl&mdash;absent&mdash;gone&mdash;stolen
+      from him. He became enraged. There was that rascal looking at him
+      insolently. If the girl had not been shamefully decoyed away from him, he
+      would not have allowed anyone to look at him insolently. He would have
+      made nothing of hitting that rogue between the eyes. Afterwards he would
+      have kicked the other without hesitation. He saw himself doing it; and in
+      sympathy with this glorious vision Schomberg's right foot, and arm moved
+      convulsively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment he came out of his sudden reverie to note with alarm the
+      wide-awake curiosity of Mr. Ricardo's stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so you go like this about the world, gambling,&rdquo; he remarked inanely,
+      to cover his confusion. But Ricardo's stare did not change its character,
+      and he continued vaguely:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here and there and everywhere.&rdquo; He pulled himself together, squared his
+      shoulders. &ldquo;Isn't it very precarious?&rdquo; he said firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word precarious&mdash;seemed to be effective, because Ricardo's eyes
+      lost their dangerously interested expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not so bad,&rdquo; Ricardo said, with indifference. &ldquo;It's my opinion that
+      men will gamble as long as they have anything to put on a card. Gamble?
+      That's nature. What's life itself? You never know what may turn up. The
+      worst of it is that you never can tell exactly what sort of cards you are
+      holding yourself. What's trumps?&mdash;that is the question. See? Any man
+      will gamble if only he's given a chance, for anything or everything. You
+      too&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't touched a card now for twenty years,&rdquo; said Schomberg in an
+      austere tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, if you got your living that way you would be no worse than you are
+      now, selling drinks to people&mdash;beastly beer and spirits, rotten stuff
+      fit to make an old he-goat yell if you poured it down its throat. Pooh! I
+      can't stand the confounded liquor. Never could. A whiff of neat brandy in
+      a glass makes me feel sick. Always did. If everybody was like me, liquor
+      would be going a-begging. You think it's funny in a man, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg made a vague gesture of toleration. Ricardo hitched up his chair
+      and settled his elbow afresh on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;French siros I must say I do like. Saigon's the place for them. I see you
+      have siros in the bar. Hang me if I ain't getting dry, conversing like
+      this with you. Come, Mr. Schomberg, be hospitable, as the governor says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg rose and walked with dignity to the counter. His footsteps
+      echoed loudly on the floor of polished boards. He took down a bottle,
+      labelled &ldquo;Sirop de Groseille.&rdquo; The little sounds he made, the clink of
+      glass, the gurgling of the liquid, the pop of the soda-water cork had a
+      preternatural sharpness. He came back carrying a pink and glistening
+      tumbler. Mr. Ricardo had followed his movements with oblique, coyly
+      expectant yellow eyes, like a cat watching the preparation of a saucer of
+      milk, and the satisfied sound after he had drunk might have been a
+      slightly modified form of purring, very soft and deep in his throat. It
+      affected Schomberg unpleasantly as another example of something inhuman in
+      those men wherein lay the difficulty of dealing with them. A spectre, a
+      cat, an ape&mdash;there was a pretty association for a mere man to
+      remonstrate with, he reflected with an inward shudder; for Schomberg had
+      been overpowered, as it were, by his imagination, and his reason could not
+      react against that fanciful view of his guests. And it was not only their
+      appearance. The morals of Mr. Ricardo seemed to him to be pretty much the
+      morals of a cat. Too much. What sort of argument could a mere man offer to
+      a . . . or to a spectre, either! What the morals of a spectre could be,
+      Schomberg had no idea. Something dreadful, no doubt. Compassion certainly
+      had no place in them. As to the ape&mdash;well, everybody knew what an ape
+      was. It had no morals. Nothing could be more hopeless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outwardly, however, having picked up the cigar which he had laid aside to
+      get the drink, with his thick fingers, one of them ornamented by a gold
+      ring, Schomberg smoked with moody composure. Facing him, Ricardo blinked
+      slowly for a time, then closed his eyes altogether, with the placidity of
+      the domestic cat dozing on the hearth-rug. In another moment he opened
+      them very wide, and seemed surprised to see Schomberg there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're having a very slack time today, aren't you?&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;But
+      then this whole town is confoundedly slack, anyhow; and I've never faced
+      such a slack party at a table before. Come eleven o'clock, they begin to
+      talk of breaking up. What's the matter with them? Want to go to bed so
+      early, or what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I reckon you don't lose a fortune by their wanting to go to bed,&rdquo; said
+      Schomberg, with sombre sarcasm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; admitted Ricardo, with a grin that stretched his thin mouth from ear
+      to ear, giving a sudden glimpse of his white teeth. &ldquo;Only, you see, when I
+      once start, I would play for nuts, for parched peas, for any rubbish. I
+      would play them for their souls. But these Dutchmen aren't any good. They
+      never seem to get warmed up properly, win or lose. I've tried them both
+      ways, too. Hang them for a beggarly, bloodless lot of animated cucumbers!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if anything out of the way was to happen, they would be just as cool
+      in locking you and your gentleman up,&rdquo; Schomberg snarled unpleasantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo; said Ricardo slowly, taking Schomberg's measure with his eyes.
+      &ldquo;And what about you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talk mighty big,&rdquo; burst out the hotel-keeper. &ldquo;You talk of ranging
+      all over the world, and doing great things, and taking fortune by the
+      scruff of the neck, but here you stick at this miserable business!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't much of a lay&mdash;that's a fact,&rdquo; admitted Ricardo
+      unexpectedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg was red in the face with audacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I call it paltry,&rdquo; he spluttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's how it looks. Can't call it anything else.&rdquo; Ricardo seemed to be
+      in an accommodating mood. &ldquo;I should be ashamed of it myself, only you see
+      the governor is subject to fits&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fits!&rdquo; Schomberg cried out, but in a low tone. &ldquo;You don't say so!&rdquo; He
+      exulted inwardly, as if this disclosure had in some way diminished the
+      difficulty of the situation. &ldquo;Fits! That's a serious thing, isn't it? You
+      ought to take him to the civil hospital&mdash;a lovely place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo nodded slightly, with a faint grin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Serious enough. Regular fits of laziness, I call them. Now and then he
+      lays down on me like this, and there's no moving him. If you think I like
+      it, you're a long way out. Generally speaking, I can talk him over. I know
+      how to deal with a gentleman. I am no daily-bread slave. But when he has
+      said, 'Martin, I am bored,' then look out! There's nothing to do but to
+      shut up, confound it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg, very much cast down, had listened open-mouthed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the cause of it?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Why is he like this? I don't
+      understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I do,&rdquo; said Ricardo. &ldquo;A gentleman, you know, is not such a simple
+      person as you or I; and not so easy to manage, either. If only I had
+      something to lever him out with!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean, to lever him out with?&rdquo; muttered Schomberg hopelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo was impatient with this denseness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you understand English? Look here! I couldn't make this billiard
+      table move an inch if I talked to it from now till the end of days&mdash;could
+      I? Well, the governor is like that, too, when the fits are on him. He's
+      bored. Nothing's worthwhile, nothing's good enough, that's mere sense. But
+      if I saw a capstan bar lying about here, I would soon manage to shift that
+      billiard table of yours a good many inches. And that's all there is to
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose noiselessly, stretched himself, supple and stealthy, with curious
+      sideways movements of his head and unexpected elongations of his thick
+      body, glanced out of the corners of his eyes in the direction of the door,
+      and finally leaned back against the table, folding his arms on his breast
+      comfortably, in a completely human attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's another thing you can tell a gentleman by&mdash;his freakishness.
+      A gentleman ain't accountable to nobody, any more than a tramp on the
+      roads. He ain't got to keep time. The governor got like this once in a
+      one-horse Mexican pueblo on the uplands, away from everywhere. He lay all
+      day long in a dark room&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drunk?&rdquo; This word escaped Schomberg by inadvertence at which he became
+      frightened. But the devoted secretary seemed to find it natural.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, that never comes on together with this kind of fit. He just lay there
+      full length on a mat, while a ragged, bare-legged boy that he had picked
+      up in the street sat in the patio, between two oleanders near the open
+      door of his room, strumming on a guitar and singing tristes to him from
+      morning to night. You know tristes&mdash;twang, twang, twang, aouh, hoo!
+      Chroo, yah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg uplifted his hands in distress. This tribute seemed to flatter
+      Ricardo. His mouth twitched grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like that&mdash;enough to give colic to an ostrich, eh? Awful. Well,
+      there was a cook there who loved me&mdash;an old fat, Negro woman with
+      spectacles. I used to hide in the kitchen and turn her to, to make me
+      dulces&mdash;sweet things, you know, mostly eggs and sugar&mdash;to pass
+      the time away. I am like a kid for sweet things. And, by the way, why
+      don't you ever have a pudding at your tablydott, Mr. Schomberg? Nothing
+      but fruit, morning, noon, and night. Sickening! What do you think a fellow
+      is&mdash;a wasp?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg disregarded the injured tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how long did that fit, as you call it, last?&rdquo; he asked anxiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Weeks, months, years, centuries, it seemed to me,&rdquo; returned Mr. Ricardo
+      with feeling. &ldquo;Of an evening the governor would stroll out into the sala
+      and fritter his life away playing cards with the juez of the place&mdash;a
+      little Dago with a pair of black whiskers&mdash;ekarty, you know, a quick
+      French game, for small change. And the comandante, a one-eyed,
+      half-Indian, flat-nosed ruffian, and I, we had to stand around and bet on
+      their hands. It was awful!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Awful,&rdquo; echoed Schomberg, in a Teutonic throaty tone of despair. &ldquo;Look
+      here, I need your rooms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure. I have been thinking that for some time past,&rdquo; said Ricardo
+      indifferently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was mad when I listened to you. This must end!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you are mad yet,&rdquo; said Ricardo, not even unfolding his arms or
+      shifting his attitude an inch. He lowered his voice to add: &ldquo;And if I
+      thought you had been to the police, I would tell Pedro to catch you round
+      the waist and break your fat neck by jerking your head backward&mdash;snap!
+      I saw him do it to a big buck nigger who was flourishing a razor in front
+      of the governor. It can be done. You hear a low crack, that's all&mdash;and
+      the man drops down like a limp rag.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Not even Ricardo's head, slightly inclined on the left shoulder, had
+      moved; but when he ceased the greenish irises which had been staring out
+      of doors glided into the corners of his eyes nearest to Schomberg and
+      stayed there with a coyly voluptuous expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER EIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg felt desperation, that lamentable substitute for courage, ooze
+      out of him. It was not so much the threat of death as the weirdly
+      circumstantial manner of its declaration which affected him. A mere &ldquo;I'll
+      murder you,&rdquo; however ferocious in tone, and earnest, in purpose, he could
+      have faced; but before this novel mode of speech and procedure, his
+      imagination being very sensitive to the unusual, he collapsed as if indeed
+      his moral neck had been broken&mdash;snap!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go to the police? Of course not. Never dreamed of it. Too late now. I've
+      let myself be mixed up in this. You got my consent while I wasn't myself.
+      I explained it to you at the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo's eye glided gently off Schomberg to stare far away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay! Some trouble with a girl. But that's nothing to us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally. What I say is, what's the good of all that savage talk to me?&rdquo;
+       A bright argument occurred to him. &ldquo;It's out of proportion; for even if I
+      were fool enough to go to the police now, there's nothing serious to
+      complain about. It would only mean deportation for you. They would put you
+      on board the first west-bound steamer to Singapore.&rdquo; He had become
+      animated. &ldquo;Out of this to the devil,&rdquo; he added between his teeth for his
+      own private satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo made no comment, and gave no sign of having heard a single word.
+      This discouraged Schomberg, who had looked up hopefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you want to stick here?&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;It can't pay you people to
+      fool around like this. Didn't you worry just now about moving your
+      governor? Well, the police would move him for you; and from Singapore you
+      can go on to the east coast of Africa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll be hanged if the fellow isn't up to that silly trick!&rdquo; was Ricardo's
+      comment, spoken in an ominous tone which recalled Schomberg to the
+      realities of his position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No!&rdquo; he protested. &ldquo;It's a manner of speaking. Of course I wouldn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that trouble about the girl has really muddled your brains, Mr.
+      Schomberg. Believe me, you had better part friends with us; for,
+      deportation or no deportation, you'll be seeing one of us turning up
+      before long to pay you off for any nasty dodge you may be hatching in that
+      fat head of yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gott im Himmel!&rdquo; groaned Schomberg. &ldquo;Will nothing move him out? Will he
+      stop here immer&mdash;I mean always? Suppose I were to make it worth your
+      while, couldn't you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; Ricardo interrupted. &ldquo;I couldn't, unless I had something to lever
+      him out with. I've told you that before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An inducement?&rdquo; muttered Schomberg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay. The east coast of Africa isn't good enough. He told me the other day
+      that it will have to wait till he is ready for it; and he may not be ready
+      for a long time, because the east coast can't run away, and no one is
+      likely to run off with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These remarks, whether considered as truisms or as depicting Mr. Jones's
+      mental state, were distinctly discouraging to the long-suffering
+      Schomberg; but there is truth in the well-known saying that places the
+      darkest hour before the dawn. The sound of words, apart from the context,
+      has its power; and these two words, 'run off,' had a special affinity to
+      the hotel-keeper's, haunting idea. It was always present in his brain, and
+      now it came forward evoked by a purely fortuitous expression. No, nobody
+      could run off with a continent; but Heyst had run off with the girl!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo could have had no conception of the cause of Schomberg's changed
+      expression. Yet it was noticeable enough to interest him so much that he
+      stopped the careless swinging of his leg and said, looking at the
+      hotel-keeper:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's not much use arguing against that sort of talk&mdash;is there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg was not listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could put you on another track,&rdquo; he said slowly, and stopped, as if
+      suddenly choked by an unholy emotion of intense eagerness combined with
+      fear of failure. Ricardo waited, attentive, yet not without a certain
+      contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the track of a man!&rdquo; Schomberg uttered convulsively, and paused again,
+      consulting his rage and his conscience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man in the moon, eh?&rdquo; suggested Ricardo, in a jeering murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the moon.
+      You go and try. It isn't so very far.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He reflected. These men were thieves and murderers as well as gamblers.
+      Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly complete. But he
+      preferred not to think of it in detail. He put it to himself summarily
+      that he would be paying Heyst out and would, at the same time, relieve
+      himself of these men's oppression. He had only to let loose his natural
+      gift for talking scandalously about his fellow creatures. And in this case
+      his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love, has an
+      eloquence of its own. With the utmost ease he portrayed for Ricardo, now
+      seriously attentive, a Heyst fattened by years of private and public
+      rapines, the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many shareholders, a
+      wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep purposes and simple
+      wiles, of mystery and futility. In this exercise of his natural function
+      Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his face, loquacious, florid,
+      eager, his manliness set off by the military bearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the exact story. He was seen hanging about this part of the world
+      for years, spying into everybody's business: but I am the only one who has
+      seen through him from the first&mdash;contemptible, double-faced,
+      stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dangerous, is he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo's voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you know what I mean,&rdquo; he said uneasily. &ldquo;A lying, circumventing,
+      soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal. Nothing open about him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the room in
+      an oblique, noiseless manner. He flashed a grin at Schomberg in passing,
+      and a snarling:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! H'm!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what more dangerous do you want?&rdquo; argued Schomberg. &ldquo;He's in no way
+      a fighting man, I believe,&rdquo; he added negligently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you say he has been living alone there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like the man in the moon,&rdquo; answered Schomberg readily. &ldquo;There's no one
+      that cares a rap what becomes of him. He has been lying low, you
+      understand, after bagging all that plunder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Plunder, eh? Why didn't he go home with it?&rdquo; inquired Ricardo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this was
+      something worth looking into. And he was pursuing truth in the manner of
+      men of sounder morality and purer intentions than his own; that is he
+      pursued it in the light of his own experience and prejudices. For facts,
+      whatever their origin (and God only knows where they come from), can be
+      only tested by our own particular suspicions. Ricardo was suspicious all
+      round. Schomberg, such is the tonic of recovered self-esteem, Schomberg
+      retorted fearlessly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go home? Why don't you go home? To hear your talk, you must have made a
+      pretty considerable pile going round winning people's money. You ought to
+      be ready by this time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo stopped to look at Schomberg with surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think yourself very clever, don't you?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg just then was so conscious of being clever that the snarling
+      irony left him unmoved. There was positively a smile in his noble Teutonic
+      beard, the first smile for weeks. He was in a felicitous vein.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know that he wasn't thinking of going home? As a matter of
+      fact, he was on his way home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how do I know that you are not amusing yourself by spinning out a
+      blamed fairy tale?&rdquo; interrupted Ricardo roughly. &ldquo;I wonder at myself
+      listening to the silly rot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg received this turn of temper unmoved. He did not require to be
+      very subtly observant to notice that he had managed to arouse some sort of
+      feeling, perhaps of greed, in Ricardo's breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't believe me? Well! You can ask anybody that comes here if that&mdash;that
+      Swede hadn't got as far as this house on his way home. Why should he turn
+      up here if not for that? You ask anybody.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask, indeed!&rdquo; returned the other. &ldquo;Catch me asking at large about a man I
+      mean to drop on! Such jobs must be done on the quiet&mdash;or not at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The peculiar intonation of the last phrase touched the nape of Schomberg's
+      neck with a chill. He cleared his throat slightly and looked away as
+      though he had heard something indelicate. Then, with a jump as it were:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course he didn't tell me. Is it likely? But haven't I got eyes?
+      Haven't I got my common sense to tell me? I can see through people. By the
+      same token, he called on the Tesmans. Why did he call on the Tesmans two
+      days running, eh? You don't know? You can't tell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited complacently till Ricardo had finished swearing quite openly at
+      him for a confounded chatterer, and then went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fellow doesn't go to a counting-house in business hours for a chat
+      about the weather, two days running. Then why? To close his account with
+      them one day, and to get his money out the next! Clear, what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo, with his trick of looking one way and moving another approached
+      Schomberg slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To get his money?&rdquo; he purred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gewiss,&rdquo; snapped Schomberg with impatient superiority. &ldquo;What else? That
+      is, only the money he had with the Tesmans. What he has buried or put away
+      on the island, devil only knows. When you think of the lot of hard cash
+      that passed through that man's hands, for wages and stores and all that&mdash;and
+      he's just a cunning thief, I tell you.&rdquo; Ricardo's hard stare discomposed
+      the hotel-keeper, and he added in an embarrassed tone: &ldquo;I mean a common,
+      sneaking thief&mdash;no account at all. And he calls himself a Swedish
+      baron, too! Tfui!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a baron, is he? That foreign nobility ain't much,&rdquo; commented Mr.
+      Ricardo seriously. &ldquo;And then what? He hung about here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he hung about,&rdquo; said Schomberg, making a wry mouth. &ldquo;He&mdash;hung
+      about. That's it. Hung&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice died out. Curiosity was depicted in Ricardo's countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just like that; for nothing? And then turned about and went back to that
+      island again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And went back to that island again,&rdquo; Schomberg echoed lifelessly, fixing
+      his gaze on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter with you?&rdquo; asked Ricardo with genuine surprise. &ldquo;What
+      is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg, without looking up, made an impatient gesture. His face was
+      crimson, and he kept it lowered. Ricardo went back to the point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, but how do you account for it? What was his reason? What did he go
+      back to the island for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Honeymoon!&rdquo; spat out Schomberg viciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perfectly still, his eyes downcast, he suddenly, with no preliminary stir,
+      hit the table with his fist a blow which caused the utterly unprepared
+      Ricardo to leap aside. And only then did Schomberg look up with a dull,
+      resentful expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo stared hard for a moment, spun on his heel, walked to the end of
+      the room, came back smartly, and muttered a profound &ldquo;Ay! Ay!&rdquo; above
+      Schomberg's rigid head. That the hotel-keeper was capable of a great moral
+      effort was proved by a gradual return of his severe,
+      Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, ay!&rdquo; repeated Ricardo more deliberately than before, and as if after
+      a further survey of the circumstances, &ldquo;I wish I hadn't asked you, or that
+      you had told me a lie. It don't suit me to know that there's a woman mixed
+      up in this affair. What's she like? It's the girl you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave off!&rdquo; muttered Schomberg, utterly pitiful behind his stiff military
+      front.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, ay!&rdquo; Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more and more enlightened
+      and perplexed. &ldquo;Can't bear to talk about it&mdash;so bad as that? And yet
+      I would bet she isn't a miracle to look at.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn't know, as if he didn't care. Then
+      he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Swedish baron&mdash;h'm!&rdquo; Ricardo continued meditatively. &ldquo;I believe the
+      governor would think that business worth looking up, quite, if I put it to
+      him properly. The governor likes a duel, if you will call it so; but I
+      don't know a man that can stand up to him on the square. Have you ever
+      seen a cat play with a mouse? It's a pretty sight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression,
+      looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the alarm of
+      a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession of his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are no lies between you and me,&rdquo; he said, more steadily than he
+      thought he could speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the good now? He funks women. In that Mexican pueblo where we lay
+      grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak, I used to go to dances of an
+      evening. The girls there would ask me if the English caballero in the
+      posada was a monk in disguise, or if he had taken a vow to the sancissima
+      madre not to speak to a woman, or whether&mdash;You can imagine what
+      fairly free-spoken girls will ask when they come to the point of not
+      caring what they say; and it used to vex me. Yes, the governor funks
+      facing women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One woman?&rdquo; interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred, for that
+      matter. In a place that's full of women you needn't look at them unless
+      you like; but if you go into a room where there is only one woman, young
+      or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her. And, unless you are
+      after her, then&mdash;the governor is right enough&mdash;she's in the
+      way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why notice them?&rdquo; muttered Schomberg. &ldquo;What can they do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make a noise, if nothing else,&rdquo; opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the
+      distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed, nothing is
+      more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty and absorbing
+      card game. &ldquo;Noise, noise, my friend,&rdquo; he went on forcibly; &ldquo;confounded
+      screeching about something or other, and I like it no more than the
+      governor does. But with the governor there's something else besides. He
+      can't stand them at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no
+      philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment
+      without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little
+      fetishism, he emitted his own conclusion, which surely could not go to the
+      root of the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm hanged if I don't think they are to him what liquor is to me. Brandy&mdash;pah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder. Schomberg
+      listened to him in wonder. It looked as if the very scoundrelism, of that&mdash;that
+      Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity standing between the
+      thief and the retribution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's so, old buck.&rdquo; Ricardo broke the silence after contemplating
+      Schomberg's mute dejection with a sort of sympathy. &ldquo;I don't think this
+      trick will work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that's silly,&rdquo; whispered the man deprived of the vengeance which he
+      had seemed already to hold in his hand, by a mysterious and exasperating
+      idiosyncrasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you set yourself to judge a gentleman.&rdquo; Ricardo without anger
+      administered a moody rebuke. &ldquo;Even I can't understand the governor
+      thoroughly. And I am an Englishman and his follower. No, I don't think I
+      care to put it before him, sick as I am of staying here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of seeing him
+      stay. Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of Heyst as created by
+      his own power of false inferences, of his hate, of his love of scandal,
+      that he could not contain a stifled cry of conviction as sincere as most
+      of our convictions, the disguised servants of our passions, can appear at
+      a supreme moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand pounds,
+      or two or three times as much, for all I know. No trouble, no&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The petticoat's the trouble,&rdquo; Ricardo struck in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which an
+      observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such as a wild
+      animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might betray.
+      Schomberg saw nothing. It would probably have cheered his drooping
+      spirits; but in a general way he preferred not to look at Ricardo.
+      Ricardo, however, with one of his slanting, gliding, restless glances,
+      observed the bitter smile on Schomberg's bearded lips&mdash;the
+      unmistakable smile of ruined hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a pretty unforgiving sort of chap,&rdquo; he said, stopping for a
+      moment with an air of interest. &ldquo;Hang me if I ever saw anybody look so
+      disappointed! I bet you would send black plague to that island if you only
+      knew how&mdash;eh, what? Plague too good for them? Ha, ha, ha!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent down to stare at Schomberg who sat unstirring with stony eyes and
+      set features, and apparently deaf to the rasping derision of that laughter
+      so close to his red fleshy ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Black plague too good for them, ha, ha!&rdquo; Ricardo pressed the point on the
+      tormented hotel-keeper. Schomberg kept his eyes down obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't wish any harm to the girl&mdash;&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But did she bolt from you? A fair bilk? Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her&mdash;what he
+      promised her, how he frightened her. She couldn't have cared for him, I
+      know.&rdquo; Schomberg's vanity clung to the belief in some atrocious,
+      extraordinary means of seduction employed by Heyst. &ldquo;Look how he bewitched
+      that poor Morrison,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Morrison&mdash;got all his money, what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;and his life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Terrible fellow, that Swedish baron! How is one to get at him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg exploded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Three against one! Are you shy? Do you want me to give you a letter of
+      introduction?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to look at yourself in a glass,&rdquo; Ricardo said quietly. &ldquo;Dash me
+      if you don't get a stroke of some kind presently. And this is the fellow
+      who says women can do nothing! That one will do for you, unless you manage
+      to forget her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I could,&rdquo; Schomberg admitted earnestly. &ldquo;And it's all the doing of
+      that Swede. I don't get enough sleep, Mr. Ricardo. And then, to finish me
+      off, you gentlemen turn up . . . as if I hadn't enough worry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's done you good,&rdquo; suggested the secretary with ironic seriousness.
+      &ldquo;Takes your mind off that silly trouble. At your age too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He checked himself, as if in pity, and changing his tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would really like to oblige you while doing a stroke of business at the
+      same time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A good stroke,&rdquo; insisted Schomberg, as if it were mechanically. In his
+      simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered his head.
+      An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with Schomberg ideas were
+      rare and therefore tenacious. &ldquo;Minted gold,&rdquo; he murmured with a sort of
+      anguish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such an expressive combination of words was not without effect upon
+      Ricardo. Both these men were amenable to the influence of verbal
+      suggestions. The secretary of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo; sighed and murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. But how is one to get at it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Being three to one,&rdquo; said Schomberg, &ldquo;I suppose you could get it for the
+      asking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One would think the fellow lived next door,&rdquo; Ricardo growled impatiently.
+      &ldquo;Hang it all, can't you understand a plain question? I have asked you the
+      way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg seemed to revive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The torpor of deceived hopes underlying his superficial changes of mood
+      had been pricked by these words which seemed pointed with purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The way is over the water, of course,&rdquo; said the hotel-keeper. &ldquo;For people
+      like you, three days in a good, big boat is nothing. It's no more than a
+      little outing, a bit of a change. At this season the Java Sea is a pond. I
+      have an excellent, safe boat&mdash;a ship's life-boat&mdash;carry thirty,
+      let alone three, and a child could handle her. You wouldn't get a wet face
+      at this time of the year. You might call it a pleasure-trip.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet, having this boat, you didn't go after her yourself&mdash;or
+      after him? Well, you are a fine fellow for a disappointed lover.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg gave a start at the suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not three men,&rdquo; he said sulkily, as the shortest answer of the
+      several he could have given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I know your sort,&rdquo; Ricardo let fall negligently. &ldquo;You are like most
+      people&mdash;or perhaps just a little more peaceable than the rest of the
+      buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten show. Well, well, you
+      respectable citizen,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;let us go thoroughly into the matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones's henchman was
+      ready to discuss, in his own words, &ldquo;this boat of yours, with courses and
+      distances,&rdquo; and such concrete matters of no good augury to that villainous
+      Swede, he recovered his soldierly bearing, squared his shoulders, and
+      asked in his military manner:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wish, then, to proceed with the business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo nodded. He had a great mind to, he said. A gentleman had to be
+      humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too, on occasions,
+      for his own good. And it was the business of the right sort of &ldquo;follower&rdquo;
+       to know the proper time and the proper methods of that delicate part of
+      his duty. Having exposed this theory Ricardo proceeded to the application.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've never actually lied to him,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I ain't going to now. I
+      shall just say nothing about the girl. He will have to get over the shock
+      the best he can. Hang it all! Too much humouring won't do here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Funny thing,&rdquo; Schomberg observed crisply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it? Ay, you wouldn't mind taking a woman by the throat in some dark
+      corner and nobody by, I bet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo's dreadful, vicious, cat-like readiness to get his claws out at
+      any moment startled Schomberg as usual. But it was provoking too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you?&rdquo; he defended himself. &ldquo;Don't you want me to believe you are up
+      to anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I, my boy? Oh, yes. I am not that gentleman; neither are you. Take 'em by
+      the throat or chuck 'em under the chin is all one to me&mdash;almost,&rdquo;
+       affirmed Ricardo, with something obscurely ironical in his complacency.
+      &ldquo;Now, as to this business. A three days' jaunt in a good boat isn't a
+      thing to frighten people like us. You are right, so far; but there are
+      other details.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg was ready enough to enter into details. He explained that he had
+      a small plantation, with a fairly habitable hut on it, on Madura. He
+      proposed that his guest should start from town in his boat, as if going
+      for an excursion to that rural spot. The custom-house people on the quay
+      were used to see his boat go off on such trips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Madura, after some repose and on a convenient day, Mr. Jones and
+      party would make the real start. It would all be plain sailing. Schomberg
+      undertook to provision the boat. The greatest hardship the voyagers need
+      apprehend would be a mild shower of rain. At that season of the year there
+      were no serious thunderstorms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg's heart began to thump as he saw himself nearing his vengeance.
+      His speech was thick but persuasive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No risk at all&mdash;none whatever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo dismissed these assurances of safety with an impatient gesture. He
+      was thinking of other risks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted at sea,
+      and that may bring awkwardness later on. A ship's boat with three white
+      men in her, knocking about out of sight of land, is bound to make talk.
+      Are we likely to be seen on our way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, unless by native craft,&rdquo; said Schomberg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo nodded, satisfied. Both these white men looked on native life as a
+      mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk
+      through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible
+      aims and needs. No. Native craft did not count, of course. It was an
+      empty, solitary part of the sea, Schomberg expounded further. Only the
+      Ternate mail-boat crossed that region about the eighth of every month,
+      regularly&mdash;nowhere near the island though. Rigid, his voice hoarse,
+      his heart thumping, his mind concentrated on the success of his plan, the
+      hotel-keeper multiplied words, as if to keep as many of them as possible
+      between himself and the murderous aspect of his purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on the
+      eighth&mdash;always best to make a start at night, with a land breeze&mdash;it's
+      a hundred to one&mdash;What am I saying?&mdash;it's a thousand to one that
+      no human eye will see you on the passage. All you've got to do is keep her
+      heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps not quite so long. There
+      will always be draft enough to keep a boat moving; you may reckon on that;
+      and then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with eagerness,
+      with impatience, and with something like apprehension, the true nature of
+      which was not clear to him. And he did not want to investigate it. Ricardo
+      regarded him steadily, with those dry eyes of his shining more like
+      polished stones than living tissue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then what?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then&mdash;why, you will astonish der herr baron&mdash;ha, ha!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in a
+      hoarse bass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you believe he has all that plunder by him?&rdquo; asked Ricardo, rather
+      perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely probable when
+      looked at all round by his acute mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can it be otherwise? He was going home, he was on his way, in this
+      hotel. Ask people. Was it likely he would leave it behind him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo was thoughtful. Then, suddenly raising his head, he remarked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh? That's not much of a sailing
+      direction. I've heard of a port being missed before on better information.
+      Can't you say what sort of landfall a fellow may expect? But I suppose you
+      have never seen that island yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a man
+      congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an unsavoury
+      experience. No, certainly not. He had never had any business to call
+      there. But what of that? He could give Mr. Ricardo as good a sea-mark as
+      anybody need wish for. He laughed nervously. Miss it! He defied anyone
+      that came within forty miles of it to miss the retreat of that villainous
+      Swede.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at
+      night? There's a volcano in full blast near that island&mdash;enough to
+      guide almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano to
+      steer by?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared. The
+      door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs. Schomberg, dressed
+      for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room. She clung to
+      the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her place, where she
+      sat down to stare straight before her, as usual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART3" id="link2H_PART3">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART THREE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER ONE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial enterprise.
+      The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal Company had
+      been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where prying eyes&mdash;if
+      any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or in sorrow&mdash;could
+      have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine enterprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass of
+      two wet seasons' growth. The silence of his surroundings, broken only by
+      such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain through the
+      foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing the leaves of the
+      forest, and of the short seas breaking against the shore, favoured rather
+      than hindered his solitary meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A meditation is always&mdash;in a white man, at least&mdash;more or less
+      an interrogative exercise. Heyst meditated in simple terms on the mystery
+      of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest reflection:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that this
+      primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed. The oldest voice in the world
+      is just the one that never ceases to speak. If anybody could have silenced
+      its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst's father, with his
+      contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but apparently he could
+      not. There was in the son a lot of that first ancestor who, as soon as he
+      could uplift his muddy frame from the celestial mould, started inspecting
+      and naming the animals of that paradise which he was so soon to lose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Action&mdash;the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth!
+      The barbed hook, baited with the illusions of progress, to bring out of
+      the lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the silliest fish
+      of them all.&rdquo; Heyst said to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He suffered. He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought to have
+      been a masterpiece of aloofness. He remembered always his last evening
+      with his father. He remembered the thin features, the great mass of white
+      hair, and the ivory complexion. A five-branched candlestick stood on a
+      little table by the side of the easy chair. They had been talking a long
+      time. The noises of the street had died out one by one, till at last, in
+      the moonlight, the London houses began to look like the tombs of an
+      unvisited, unhonoured, cemetery of hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had listened. Then, after a silence, he had asked&mdash;for he was
+      really young then:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there no guidance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the moon
+      swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You still believe in something, then?&rdquo; he said in a clear voice, which
+      had been growing feeble of late. &ldquo;You believe in flesh and blood, perhaps?
+      A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too. But since
+      you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of
+      contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least difficult&mdash;always
+      remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as pitiful as the
+      rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is one to do, then?&rdquo; sighed the young man, regarding his father,
+      rigid in the high-backed chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look on&mdash;make no sound,&rdquo; were the last words of the man who had
+      spent his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which filled
+      heaven and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That very night he died in his bed, so quietly that they found him in his
+      usual attitude of sleep, lying on his side, one hand under his cheek, and
+      his knees slightly bent. He had not even straightened his legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His son buried the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of beliefs. He
+      observed that the death of that bitter contemner of life did not trouble
+      the flow of life's stream, where men and women go by thick as dust,
+      revolving and jostling one another like figures cut out of cork and
+      weighted with lead just sufficiently to keep them in their proudly upright
+      posture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the funeral, Heyst sat alone, in the dusk, and his meditation took
+      the form of a definite vision of the stream, of the fatuously jostling,
+      nodding, spinning figures hurried irresistibly along, and giving no sign
+      of being aware that the voice on the bank had been suddenly silenced . . .
+      Yes. A few obituary notices generally insignificant and some grossly
+      abusive. The son had read them all with mournful detachment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the hate and rage of their fear,&rdquo; he thought to himself, &ldquo;and
+      also of wounded vanity. They shriek their little shriek as they fly past.
+      I suppose I ought to hate him too . . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He became aware of his eyes being wet. It was not that the man was his
+      father. For him it was purely a matter of hearsay which could not in
+      itself cause this emotion. No! It was because he had looked at him so long
+      that he missed him so much. The dead man had kept him on the bank by his
+      side. And now Heyst felt acutely that he was alone on the bank of the
+      stream. In his pride he determined not to enter it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few slow tears rolled down his face. The rooms, filling with shadows,
+      seemed haunted by a melancholy, uneasy presence which could not express
+      itself. The young man got up with a strange sense of making way for
+      something impalpable that claimed possession, went out of the house, and
+      locked the door. A fortnight later he started on his travels&mdash;to
+      &ldquo;look on and never make a sound.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain quantity
+      of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and pictures, which
+      might have complained of heartless desertion after many years of faithful
+      service; for there is a soul in things. Heyst, our Heyst, had often
+      thought of them, reproachful and mute, shrouded and locked up in those
+      rooms, far away in London with the sounds of the street reaching them
+      faintly, and sometimes a little sunshine, when the blinds were pulled up
+      and the windows opened from time to time in pursuance of his original
+      instructions and later reminders. It seemed as if in his conception of a
+      world not worth touching, and perhaps not substantial enough to grasp,
+      these objects familiar to his childhood and his youth, and associated with
+      the memory of an old man, were the only realities, something having an
+      absolute existence. He would never have them sold, or even moved from the
+      places they occupied when he looked upon them last. When he was advised
+      from London that his lease had expired, and that the house, with some
+      others as like it as two peas, was to be demolished, he was surprisingly
+      distressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. Already
+      the Tropical Belt Coal Company was in existence. He sent instructions to
+      have some of the things sent out to him at Samburan, just as any ordinary,
+      credulous person would have done. They came, torn out from their long
+      repose&mdash;a lot of books, some chairs and tables, his father's portrait
+      in oils, which surprised Heyst by its air of youth, because he remembered
+      his father as a much older man; a lot of small objects, such as
+      candlesticks, inkstands, and statuettes from his father's study, which
+      surprised him because they looked so old and so much worn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, unpacking them on the
+      veranda in the shade besieged by a fierce sunshine, must have felt like a
+      remorseful apostate before these relics. He handled them tenderly; and it
+      was perhaps their presence there which attached him to the island when he
+      woke up to the failure of his apostasy. Whatever the decisive reason,
+      Heyst had remained where another would have been glad to be off. The
+      excellent Davidson had discovered the fact without discovering the reason,
+      and took a humane interest in Heyst's strange existence, while at the same
+      time his native delicacy kept him from intruding on the other's whim of
+      solitude. He could not possibly guess that Heyst, alone on the island,
+      felt neither more nor less lonely than in any other place, desert or
+      populous. Davidson's concern was, if one may express it so, the danger of
+      spiritual starvation; but this was a spirit which had renounced all
+      outside nourishment, and was sustaining itself proudly on its own contempt
+      of the usual coarse ailments which life offers to the common appetites of
+      men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither was Heyst's body in danger of starvation, as Schomberg had so
+      confidently asserted. At the beginning of the company's operations the
+      island had been provisioned in a manner which had outlasted the need.
+      Heyst did not need to fear hunger; and his very loneliness had not been
+      without some alleviation. Of the crowd of imported Chinese labourers, one
+      at least had remained in Samburan, solitary and strange, like a swallow
+      left behind at the migrating season of his tribe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang was not a common coolie. He had been a servant to white men before.
+      The agreement between him and Heyst consisted in the exchange of a few
+      words on the day when the last batch of the mine coolies was leaving
+      Samburan. Heyst, leaning over the balustrade of the veranda, was looking
+      on, as calm in appearance as though he had never departed from the
+      doctrine that this world, for the wise, is nothing but an amusing
+      spectacle. Wang came round the house, and standing below, raised up his
+      yellow, thin face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All finished?&rdquo; he asked. Heyst nodded slightly from above, glancing
+      towards the jetty. A crowd of blue-clad figures with yellow faces and
+      calves was being hustled down into the boats of the chartered steamer
+      lying well out, like a painted ship on a painted sea; painted in crude
+      colours, without shadows, without feeling, with brutal precision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better hurry up if you don't want to be left behind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Chinaman did not move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We stop,&rdquo; he declared. Heyst looked down at him for the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want to stop here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What were you? What was your work here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mess-loom boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want to stay with me here as my boy?&rdquo; inquired Heyst, surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Chinaman unexpectedly put on a deprecatory expression, and said, after
+      a marked pause:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You needn't,&rdquo; said Heyst, &ldquo;unless you like. I propose to stay on here&mdash;it
+      may be for a very long time. I have no power to make you go if you wish to
+      remain, but I don't see why you should.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Catchee one piecee wife,&rdquo; remarked Wang unemotionally, and marched off,
+      turning his back on the wharf and the great world beyond, represented by
+      the steamer waiting for her boats.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst learned presently that Wang had persuaded one of the women of Alfuro
+      village, on the west shore of the island, beyond the central ridge, to
+      come over to live with him in a remote part of the company's clearing. It
+      was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros, having been frightened by the
+      sudden invasion of Chinamen, had blocked the path over the ridge by
+      felling a few trees, and had kept strictly on their own side. The coolies,
+      as a body, mistrusting the manifest mildness of these harmless
+      fisher-folk, had kept to their lines, without attempting to cross the
+      island. Wang was the brilliant exception. He must have been uncommonly
+      fascinating, in a way that was not apparent to Heyst, or else uncommonly
+      persuasive. The woman's services to Heyst were limited to the fact that
+      she had anchored Wang to the spot by her charms, which remained unknown to
+      the white man, because she never came near the houses. The couple lived at
+      the edge of the forest, and she could sometimes be seen gazing towards the
+      bungalow shading her eyes with her hand. Even from a distance she appeared
+      to be a shy, wild creature, and Heyst, anxious not to try her primitive
+      nerves unduly, scrupulously avoided that side of the clearing in his
+      strolls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day&mdash;or rather the first night&mdash;after his hermit life began,
+      he was aware of vague sounds of revelry in that direction. Emboldened by
+      the departure of the invading strangers, some Alfuros, the woman's friends
+      and relations, had ventured over the ridge to attend something in the
+      nature of a wedding feast. Wang had invited them. But this was the only
+      occasion when any sound louder than the buzzing of insects had troubled
+      the profound silence of the clearing. The natives were never invited
+      again. Wang not only knew how to live according to conventional
+      proprieties, but had strong personal views as to the manner of arranging
+      his domestic existence. After a time Heyst perceived that Wang had annexed
+      all the keys. Any keys left lying about vanished after Wang had passed
+      that way. Subsequently some of them&mdash;those that did not belong to the
+      store-rooms and the empty bungalows, and could not be regarded as the
+      common property of this community of two&mdash;were returned to Heyst,
+      tied in a bunch with a piece of string. He found them one morning lying by
+      the side of his plate. He had not been inconvenienced by their absence,
+      because he never locked up anything in the way of drawers and boxes. Heyst
+      said nothing. Wang also said nothing. Perhaps he had always been a
+      taciturn man; perhaps he was influenced by the genius of the locality,
+      which was certainly that of silence. Till Heyst and Morrison had landed in
+      Black Diamond Bay, and named it, that side of Samburan had hardly ever
+      heard the sound of human speech. It was easy to be taciturn with Heyst,
+      who had plunged himself into an abyss of meditation over books, and
+      remained in it till the shadow of Wang falling across the page, and the
+      sound of a rough, low voice uttering the Malay word &ldquo;makan,&rdquo; would force
+      him to climb out to a meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang in his native province in China might have been an aggressively,
+      sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in a
+      mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to except
+      in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per day. And
+      he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he suffered he
+      made up for it with the Alfuro woman. He always went back to her at the
+      first fall of dusk, vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at this hour,
+      like a sort of topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a white jacket
+      and a pigtail. Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling passion, he
+      could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between the mighty
+      stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe. After a time, he
+      discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the empty store-rooms,
+      and it is to be supposed that he got on famously; but nothing of it could
+      be seen, because he went to the trouble of pulling to pieces one of the
+      company's sheds in order to get materials for making a high and very close
+      fence round his patch, as if the growing of vegetables were a patented
+      process, or an awful and holy mystery entrusted to the keeping of his
+      race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, following from a distance the progress of Wang's gardening and of
+      these precautions&mdash;there was nothing else to look at&mdash;was amused
+      at the thought that he, in his own person, represented the market for its
+      produce. The Chinaman had found several packets of seeds in the
+      store-rooms, and had surrendered to an irresistible impulse to put them
+      into the ground. He would make his master pay for the vegetables which he
+      was raising to satisfy his instinct. And, looking silently at the silent
+      Wang going about his work in the bungalow in his unhasty, steady way;
+      Heyst envied the Chinaman's obedience to his instincts, the powerful
+      simplicity of purpose which made his existence appear almost automatic in
+      the mysterious precision of its facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER TWO
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      During his master's absence at Sourabaya, Wang had busied himself with the
+      ground immediately in front of the principal bungalow. Emerging from the
+      fringe of grass growing across the shore end of the coal-jetty, Heyst
+      beheld a broad, clear space, black and level, with only one or two clumps
+      of charred twigs, where the flame had swept from the front of his house to
+      the nearest trees of the forest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You took the risk of firing the grass?&rdquo; Heyst asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang nodded. Hanging on the arm of the white man before whom he stood was
+      the girl called Alma; but neither from the Chinaman's eyes nor from his
+      expression could anyone have guessed that he was in the slightest degree
+      aware of the fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has been tidying the place in his labour-saving way,&rdquo; explained Heyst,
+      without looking at the girl, whose hand rested on his forearm. &ldquo;He's the
+      whole establishment, you see. I told you I hadn't even a dog to keep me
+      company here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang had marched off towards the wharf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's like those waiters in that place,&rdquo; she said. That place was
+      Schomberg's hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One Chinaman looks very much like another,&rdquo; Heyst remarked. &ldquo;We shall
+      find it useful to have him here. This is the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They faced, at some distance, the six shallow steps leading up to the
+      veranda. The girl had abandoned Heyst's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the house,&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not offer to budge away from his side, but stood staring fixedly
+      at the steps, as if they had been something unique and impracticable. He
+      waited a little, but she did not move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you want to go in?&rdquo; he asked, without turning his head to look at
+      her. &ldquo;The sun's too heavy to stand about here.&rdquo; He tried to overcome a
+      sort of fear, a sort of impatient faintness, and his voice sounded rough.
+      &ldquo;You had better go in,&rdquo; he concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They both moved then, but at the foot of the stairs Heyst stopped, while
+      the girl went on rapidly, as if nothing could stop her now. She crossed
+      the veranda swiftly, and entered the twilight of the big central room
+      opening upon it, and then the deeper twilight of the room beyond. She
+      stood still in the dusk, in which her dazzled eyes could scarcely make out
+      the forms of objects, and sighed a sigh of relief. The impression of the
+      sunlight, of sea and sky, remained with her like a memory of a painful
+      trial gone through&mdash;done with at last!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Heyst had walked back slowly towards the jetty; but he did not
+      get so far as that. The practical and automatic Wang had got hold of one
+      of the little trucks that had been used for running baskets of coal
+      alongside ships. He appeared pushing it before him, loaded lightly with
+      Heyst's bag and the bundle of the girl's belongings, wrapped in Mrs.
+      Schomberg's shawl. Heyst turned about and walked by the side of the rusty
+      rails on which the truck ran. Opposite the house Wang stopped, lifted the
+      bag to his shoulder, balanced it carefully, and then took the bundle in
+      his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave those things on the table in the big room&mdash;understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me savee,&rdquo; grunted Wang, moving off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst watched the Chinaman disappear from the veranda. It was not till he
+      had seen Wang come out that he himself entered the twilight of the big
+      room. By that time Wang was out of sight at the back of the house, but by
+      no means out of hearing. The Chinaman could hear the voice of him who,
+      when there were many people there, was generally referred to as &ldquo;Number
+      One.&rdquo; Wang was not able to understand the words, but the tone interested
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are you?&rdquo; cried Number One.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Wang heard, much more faint, a voice he had never heard before&mdash;a
+      novel impression which he acknowledged by cocking his head slightly to one
+      side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am here&mdash;out of the sun.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The new voice sounded remote and uncertain. Wang heard nothing more,
+      though he waited for some time, very still, the top of his shaven poll
+      exactly level with the floor of the back veranda. His face meanwhile
+      preserved an inscrutable immobility. Suddenly he stooped to pick up the
+      lid of a deal candle-box which was lying on the ground by his foot.
+      Breaking it up with his fingers, he directed his steps towards the
+      cook-shed, where, squatting on his heels, he proceeded to kindle a small
+      fire under a very sooty kettle, possibly to make tea. Wang had some
+      knowledge of the more superficial rites and ceremonies of white men's
+      existence, otherwise so enigmatically remote to his mind, and containing
+      unexpected possibilities of good and evil, which had to be watched for
+      with prudence and care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THREE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That morning, as on all the others of the full tale of mornings since his
+      return with the girl to Samburan, Heyst came out on the veranda and spread
+      his elbows on the railing, in an easy attitude of proprietorship. The bulk
+      of the central ridge of the island cut off the bungalow from sunrises,
+      whether glorious or cloudy, angry or serene. The dwellers therein were
+      debarred from reading early the fortune of the new-born day. It sprang
+      upon them in its fulness with a swift retreat of the great shadow when the
+      sun, clearing the ridge, looked down, hot and dry, with a devouring glare
+      like the eye of an enemy. But Heyst, once the Number One of this locality,
+      while it was comparatively teeming with mankind, appreciated the
+      prolongation of early coolness, the subdued, lingering half-light, the
+      faint ghost of the departed night, the fragrance of its dewy, dark soul
+      captured for a moment longer between the great glow of the sky and the
+      intense blaze of the uncovered sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was naturally difficult for Heyst to keep his mind from dwelling on the
+      nature and consequences of this, his latest departure from the part of an
+      unconcerned spectator. Yet he had retained enough of his wrecked
+      philosophy to prevent him from asking himself consciously how it would
+      end. But at the same time he could not help being temperamentally, from
+      long habit and from set purpose, a spectator still, perhaps a little less
+      naive but (as he discovered with some surprise) not much more far sighted
+      than the common run of men. Like the rest of us who act, all he could say
+      to himself, with a somewhat affected grimness, was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall see!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This mood of grim doubt intruded on him only when he was alone. There were
+      not many such moments in his day now; and he did not like them when they
+      came. On this morning he had no time to grow uneasy. Alma came out to join
+      him long before the sun, rising above the Samburan ridge, swept the cool
+      shadow of the early morning and the remnant of the night's coolness clear
+      off the roof under which they had dwelt for more than three months
+      already. She came out as on other mornings. He had heard her light
+      footsteps in the big room&mdash;the room where he had unpacked the cases
+      from London; the room now lined with the backs of books halfway up on its
+      three sides. Above the cases the fine matting met the ceiling of tightly
+      stretched white calico. In the dusk and coolness nothing gleamed except
+      the gilt frame of the portrait of Heyst's father, signed by a famous
+      painter, lonely in the middle of a wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst did not turn round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what I was thinking of?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said. Her tone betrayed always a shade of anxiety, as though she
+      were never certain how a conversation with him would end. She leaned on
+      the guard-rail by his side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;What was it?&rdquo; She waited. Then, rather with
+      reluctance than shyness, she asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you thinking of me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was wondering when you would come out,&rdquo; said Heyst, still without
+      looking at the girl&mdash;to whom, after several experimental essays in
+      combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given the name of
+      Lena.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She remarked after a pause:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was not very far from you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apparently you were not near enough for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could have called if you wanted me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And I wasn't so long
+      doing my hair.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apparently it was too long for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you were thinking of me, anyhow. I am glad of it. Do you know, it
+      seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking of me I shouldn't
+      be in the world at all!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned round and looked at her. She often said things which surprised
+      him. A vague smile faded away on her lips before his scrutiny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Is it a reproach?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A reproach! Why, how could it be?&rdquo; she defended herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what did it mean?&rdquo; he insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I said&mdash;just what I said. Why aren't you fair?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, this is at least a reproach!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She coloured to the roots of her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It looks as if you were trying to make out that I am disagreeable,&rdquo; she
+      murmured. &ldquo;Am I? You will make me afraid to open my mouth presently. I
+      shall end by believing I am no good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her head drooped a little. He looked at her smooth, low brow, the faintly
+      coloured cheeks, and the red lips parted slightly, with the gleam of her
+      teeth within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then I won't be any good,&rdquo; she added with conviction. &ldquo;That I won't!
+      I can only be what you think I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a slight movement. She put her hand on his arm, without raising
+      her head, and went on, her voice animated in the stillness of her body:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is so. It couldn't be any other way with a girl like me and a man like
+      you. Here we are, we two alone, and I can't even tell where we are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very well-known spot of the globe,&rdquo; Heyst uttered gently. &ldquo;There must
+      have been at least fifty thousand circulars issued at the time&mdash;a
+      hundred and fifty thousand, more likely. My friend was looking after that,
+      and his ideas were large and his belief very strong. Of us two it was he
+      who had the faith. A hundred and fifty thousand, certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it you mean?&rdquo; she asked in a low tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What should I find fault with you for?&rdquo; Heyst went on. &ldquo;For being
+      amiable, good, gracious&mdash;and pretty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence fell. Then she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right that you should think that of me. There's no one here to
+      think anything of us, good or bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she uttered. The
+      indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave him, he was aware, was
+      more physical than moral. Every time she spoke to him she seemed to
+      abandon to him something of herself&mdash;something excessively subtle and
+      inexpressible, to which he was infinitely sensible, which he would have
+      missed horribly if she were to go away. While he was looking into her eyes
+      she raised her bare forearm, out of the short sleeve, and held it in the
+      air till he noticed it and hastened to pose his great bronze moustaches on
+      the whiteness of the skin. Then they went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang immediately appeared in front, and, squatting on his heels, began to
+      potter mysteriously about some plants at the foot of the veranda. When
+      Heyst and the girl came out again, the Chinaman had gone in his peculiar
+      manner, which suggested vanishing out of existence rather than out of
+      sight, a process of evaporation rather than of movement. They descended
+      the steps, looking at each other, and started off smartly across the
+      cleared ground; but they were not ten yards away when, without perceptible
+      stir or sound, Wang materialized inside the empty room. The Chinaman stood
+      still with roaming eyes, examining the walls as if for signs, for
+      inscriptions; exploring the floor as if for pitfalls, for dropped coins.
+      Then he cocked his head slightly at the profile of Heyst's father, pen in
+      hand above a white sheet of paper on a crimson tablecloth; and, moving
+      forward noiselessly, began to clear away the breakfast things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though he proceeded without haste, the unerring precision of his
+      movements, the absolute soundlessness of the operation, gave it something
+      of the quality of a conjuring trick. And, the trick having been performed,
+      Wang vanished from the scene, to materialize presently in front of the
+      house. He materialized walking away from it, with no visible or guessable
+      intention; but at the end of some ten paces he stopped, made a half turn,
+      and put his hand up to shade his eyes. The sun had topped the grey ridge
+      of Samburan. The great morning shadow was gone; and far away in the
+      devouring sunshine Wang was in time to see Number One and the woman, two
+      remote white specks against the sombre line of the forest. In a moment
+      they vanished. With the smallest display of action, Wang also vanished
+      from the sunlight of the clearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst and Lena entered the shade of the forest path which crossed the
+      island, and which, near its highest point had been blocked by felled
+      trees. But their intention was not to go so far. After keeping to the path
+      for some distance, they left it at a point where the forest was bare of
+      undergrowth, and the trees, festooned with creepers, stood clear of one
+      another in the gloom of their own making. Here and there great splashes of
+      light lay on the ground. They moved, silent in the great stillness,
+      breathing the calmness, the infinite isolation, the repose of a slumber
+      without dreams. They emerged at the upper limit of vegetation, among some
+      rocks; and in a depression of the sharp slope, like a small platform, they
+      turned about and looked from on high over the sea, lonely, its colour
+      effaced by sunshine, its horizon a heat mist, a mere unsubstantial shimmer
+      in the pale and blinding infinity overhung by the darker blaze of the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It makes my head swim,&rdquo; the girl murmured, shutting her eyes and putting
+      her hand on his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, gazing fixedly to the southward, exclaimed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sail ho!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment of silence ensued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It must be very far away,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I don't think you could see it.
+      Some native craft making for the Moluccas, probably. Come, we mustn't stay
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With his arm round her waist, he led her down a little distance, and they
+      settled themselves in the shade; she, seated on the ground, he a little
+      lower, reclining at her feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't like to look at the sea from up there?&rdquo; he said after a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head. That empty space was to her the abomination of
+      desolation. But she only said again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It makes my head swim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too big?&rdquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too lonely. It makes my heart sink, too,&rdquo; she added in a low voice, as if
+      confessing a secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid,&rdquo; said Heyst, &ldquo;that you would be justified in reproaching me
+      for these sensations. But what would you have?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His tone was playful, but his eyes, directed at her face, were serious.
+      She protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not feeling lonely with you&mdash;not a bit. It is only when we come
+      up to that place, and I look at all that water and all that light&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will never come here again, then,&rdquo; he interrupted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She remained silent for a while, returning his gaze till he removed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems as if everything that there is had gone under,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Reminds you of the story of the deluge,&rdquo; muttered the man, stretched at
+      her feet and looking at them. &ldquo;Are you frightened at it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone. When I say, I, of
+      course I mean we.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you?&rdquo; . . . Heyst remained silent for a while. &ldquo;The vision of a world
+      destroyed,&rdquo; he mused aloud. &ldquo;Would you be sorry for it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should be sorry for the happy people in it,&rdquo; she said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he seemed to
+      detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a glimpse of the sun
+      through the clouds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should have thought it's they specially who ought to have been
+      congratulated. Don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes&mdash;I understand what you mean; but there were forty days
+      before it was all over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to be in possession of all the details.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in silence.
+      She was not looking at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sunday school,&rdquo; she murmured. &ldquo;I went regularly from the time I was eight
+      till I was thirteen. We lodged in the north of London, off Kingsland Road.
+      It wasn't a bad time. Father was earning good money then. The woman of the
+      house used to pack me off in the afternoon with her own girls. She was a
+      good woman. Her husband was in the post office. Sorter or something. Such
+      a quiet man. He used to go off after supper for night-duty, sometimes.
+      Then one day they had a row, and broke up the home. I remember I cried
+      when we had to pack up all of a sudden and go into other lodgings. I never
+      knew what it was, though&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The deluge,&rdquo; muttered Heyst absently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the first
+      moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had come
+      together. The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of
+      audacity and sadness, would have given interest to the most inane chatter.
+      But she was no chatterer. She was rather silent, with a capacity for
+      immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the concert platform
+      between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her hands reposing on her
+      lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced
+      upon him the sensation of something inexplicable reposing within her;
+      stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force&mdash;or simply an abysmal
+      emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of complete surrender.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During a long pause she did not look at him. Then suddenly, as if the word
+      &ldquo;deluge&rdquo; had stuck in her mind, she asked, looking up at the cloudless
+      sky:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it ever rain here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a season when it rains almost every day,&rdquo; said Heyst, surprised.
+      &ldquo;There are also thunderstorms. We once had a 'mud-shower.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mud-shower?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes. He sometimes clears his
+      red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at the same time.
+      It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally well behaved&mdash;just
+      smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first showed you the smudge in
+      the sky from the schooner's deck. He's a good-natured, lazy fellow of a
+      volcano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw a mountain smoking like that before,&rdquo; she said, staring at the
+      slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front of her. &ldquo;It wasn't
+      very long after we left England&mdash;some few days, though. I was so ill
+      at first that I lost count of days. A smoking mountain&mdash;I can't think
+      how they called it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vesuvius, perhaps,&rdquo; suggested Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw it, too, years, ages ago,&rdquo; said Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On your way here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of the world. I
+      was yet a boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover some
+      trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the hair thin at
+      the top and the long, thick moustaches. Heyst stood the frank examination
+      with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect these veiled grey eyes
+      produced&mdash;whether on his heart or on his nerves, whether sensuous or
+      spiritual, tender or irritating, he was unable to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, princess of Samburan,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;have I found favour in
+      your sight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to wake up, and shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking,&rdquo; she murmured very low.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thought, action&mdash;so many snares! If you begin to think you will be
+      unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn't thinking of myself!&rdquo; she declared with a simplicity which took
+      Heyst aback somewhat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the lips of a moralist this would sound like a rebuke,&rdquo; he said, half
+      seriously; &ldquo;but I won't suspect you of being one. Moralists and I haven't
+      been friends for many years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had listened with an air of attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understood you had no friends,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I am pleased that there's
+      nobody to find fault with you for what you have done. I like to think that
+      I am in no one's way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst would have said something, but she did not give him time.
+      Unconscious of the movement he made she went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I was thinking to myself was, why are you here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst let himself sink on his elbow again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If by 'you' you mean 'we'&mdash;well, you know why we are here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She bent her gaze down at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it isn't that. I meant before&mdash;all that time before you came
+      across me and guessed at once that I was in trouble, with no one to turn
+      to. And you know it was desperate trouble too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice fell on the last words, as if she would end there; but there was
+      something so expectant in Heyst's attitude as he sat at her feet, looking
+      up at her steadily, that she continued, after drawing a short, quick
+      breath:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was, really. I told you I had been worried before by bad fellows. It
+      made me unhappy, disturbed&mdash;angry, too. But oh, how I hated, hated,
+      <i>hated</i> that man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man&rdquo; was the florid Schomberg with the military bearing, benefactor
+      of white men ('decent food to eat in decent company')&mdash;mature victim
+      of belated passion. The girl shuddered. The characteristic harmoniousness
+      of her face became, as it were, decomposed for an instant. Heyst was
+      startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why think of it now?&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's because I was cornered that time. It wasn't as before. It was worse,
+      ever so much. I wished I could die of my fright&mdash;and yet it's only
+      now that I begin to understand what a horror it might have been. Yes, only
+      now, since we&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst stirred a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Came here,&rdquo; he finished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her tenseness relaxed, her flushed face went gradually back to its normal
+      tint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said indifferently, but at the same time she gave him a
+      stealthy glance of passionate appreciation; and then her face took on a
+      melancholy cast, her whole figure drooped imperceptibly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you were coming back here anyhow?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I was only waiting for Davidson. Yes, I was coming back here, to
+      these ruins&mdash;to Wang, who perhaps did not expect to see me again.
+      It's impossible to guess at the way that Chinaman draws his conclusions,
+      and how he looks upon one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't talk about him. He makes me feel uncomfortable. Talk about
+      yourself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About myself? I see you are still busy with the mystery of my existence
+      here; but it isn't at all mysterious. Primarily the man with the quill pen
+      in his hand in that picture you so often look at is responsible for my
+      existence. He is also responsible for what my existence is, or rather has
+      been. He was a great man in his way. I don't know much of his history. I
+      suppose he began like other people; took fine words for good, ringing coin
+      and noble ideals for valuable banknotes. He was a great master of both,
+      himself, by the way. Later he discovered&mdash;how am I to explain it to
+      you? Suppose the world were a factory and all mankind workmen in it. Well,
+      he discovered that the wages were not good enough. That they were paid in
+      counterfeit money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see!&rdquo; the girl said slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, who had been speaking as if to himself, looked up curiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn't a new discovery, but he brought his capacity for scorn to bear
+      on it. It was immense. It ought to have withered this globe. I don't know
+      how many minds he convinced. But my mind was very young then, and youth I
+      suppose can be easily seduced&mdash;even by a negation. He was very
+      ruthless, and yet he was not without pity. He dominated me without
+      difficulty. A heartless man could not have done so. Even to fools he was
+      not utterly merciless. He could be indignant, but he was too great for
+      flouts and jeers. What he said was not meant for the crowd; it could not
+      be; and I was flattered to find myself among the elect. They read his
+      books, but I have heard his living word. It was irresistible. It was as if
+      that mind were taking me into its confidence, giving me a special insight
+      into its mastery of despair. Mistake, no doubt. There is something of my
+      father in every man who lives long enough. But they don't say anything.
+      They can't. They wouldn't know how, or perhaps, they wouldn't speak if
+      they could. Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not
+      stand close investigation. However, that particular man died as quietly as
+      a child goes to sleep. But, after listening to him, I could not take my
+      soul down into the street to fight there. I started off to wander about,
+      an independent spectator&mdash;if that is possible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time the girl's grey eyes had been watching his face. She
+      discovered that, addressing her, he was really talking to himself. Heyst
+      looked up, caught sight of her as it were, and caught himself up, with a
+      low laugh and a change of tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this does not tell you why I ever came here. Why, indeed? It's like
+      prying into inscrutable mysteries which are not worth scrutinizing. A man
+      drifts. The most successful men have drifted into their successes. I don't
+      want to tell you that this is a success. You wouldn't believe me if I did.
+      It isn't; neither is it the ruinous failure it looks. It proves nothing,
+      unless perhaps some hidden weakness in my character&mdash;and even that is
+      not certain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked fixedly at her, and with such grave eyes that she felt obliged
+      to smile faintly at him, since she did not understand what he meant. Her
+      smile was reflected, still fainter, on his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This does not advance you much in your inquiry,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;And in
+      truth your question is unanswerable; but facts have a certain positive
+      value, and I will tell you a fact. One day I met a cornered man. I use the
+      word because it expresses the man's situation exactly, and because you
+      just used it yourself. You know what that means?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you say?&rdquo; she whispered, astounded. &ldquo;A man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst laughed at her wondering eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No! I mean in his own way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew very well it couldn't be anything like that,&rdquo; she observed under
+      her breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won't bother you with the story. It was a custom-house affair, strange
+      as it may sound to you. He would have preferred to be killed outright&mdash;that
+      is, to have his soul dispatched to another world, rather than to be robbed
+      of his substance, his very insignificant substance, in this. I saw that he
+      believed in another world because, being cornered, as I have told you, he
+      went down on his knees and prayed. What do you think of that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst paused. She looked at him earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't make fun of him for that?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst made a brusque movement of protest
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear girl, I am not a ruffian,&rdquo; he cried. Then, returning to his usual
+      tone: &ldquo;I didn't even have to conceal a smile. Somehow it didn't look a
+      smiling matter. No, it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he was so
+      representative of all the past victims of the Great Joke. But it is by
+      folly alone that the world moves, and so it is a respectable thing upon
+      the whole. And besides, he was what one would call a good man. I don't
+      mean especially because he had offered up a prayer. No! He was really a
+      decent fellow, he was quite unfitted for this world, he was a failure, a
+      good man cornered&mdash;a sight for the gods; for no decent mortal cares
+      to look at that sort.&rdquo; A thought seemed to occur to him. He turned his
+      face to the girl. &ldquo;And you, who have been cornered too&mdash;did you think
+      of offering a prayer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither her eyes nor a single one of her features moved the least bit. She
+      only let fall the words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not what they call a good girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That sounds evasive,&rdquo; said Heyst after a short silence. &ldquo;Well, the good
+      fellow did pray and after he had confessed to it I was struck by the
+      comicality of the situation. No, don't misunderstand me&mdash;I am not
+      alluding to his act, of course. And even the idea of Eternity, Infinity,
+      Omnipotence, being called upon to defeat the conspiracy of two miserable
+      Portuguese half-castes did not move my mirth. From the point of view of
+      the supplicant, the danger to be conjured was something like the end of
+      the world, or worse. No! What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel Heyst,
+      the most detached of creatures in this earthly captivity, the veriest
+      tramp on this earth, an indifferent stroller going through the world's
+      bustle&mdash;that I should have been there to step into the situation of
+      an agent of Providence. <i>I</i>, a man of universal scorn and unbelief. .
+      . .&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are putting it on,&rdquo; she interrupted in her seductive voice, with a
+      coaxing intonation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I am not like that, born or fashioned, or both. I am not for nothing
+      the son of my father, of that man in the painting. I am he, all but the
+      genius. And there is even less in me than I make out, because the very
+      scorn is falling away from me year after year. I have never been so amused
+      as by that episode in which I was suddenly called to act such an
+      incredible part. For a moment I enjoyed it greatly. It got him out of his
+      corner, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You saved a man for fun&mdash;is that what you mean? Just for fun?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why this tone of suspicion?&rdquo; remonstrated Heyst. &ldquo;I suppose the sight of
+      this particular distress was disagreeable to me. What you call fun came
+      afterwards, when it dawned on me that I was for him a walking, breathing,
+      incarnate proof of the efficacy of prayer. I was a little fascinated by it&mdash;and
+      then, could I have argued with him? You don't argue against such evidence,
+      and besides it would have looked as if I had wanted to claim all the
+      merit. Already his gratitude was simply frightful. Funny position, wasn't
+      it? The boredom came later, when we lived together on board his ship. I
+      had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define
+      it precisely I don't know. One gets attached in a way to people one has
+      done something for. But is that friendship? I am not sure what it was. I
+      only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has
+      entered into his soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst's tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which seasoned all
+      his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of his thoughts. The
+      girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose
+      presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to
+      live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater
+      sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FOUR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her head
+      in both her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you tired of sitting here?&rdquo; Heyst asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the answer
+      she made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why are you looking so serious?&rdquo; he pursued, and immediately thought that
+      habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more bearable than
+      constant gaiety. &ldquo;However, this expression suits you exceedingly,&rdquo; he
+      added, not diplomatically, but because, by the tendency of his taste, it
+      was a true statement. &ldquo;And as long as I can be certain that it is not
+      boredom which gives you this severe air, I am willing to sit here and look
+      at you till you are ready to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this was true. He was still under the fresh sortilege of their common
+      life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his possession of
+      this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has ceased to be
+      masculine. Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on him, then returned
+      to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot of the straight
+      tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly withdrawing their shade.
+      The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless head. She would not
+      look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying herself. She felt in her
+      innermost depths an irresistible desire to give herself up to him more
+      completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice. This was something of which
+      he did not seem to have an idea. He was a strange being without needs. She
+      felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept silent, she said uneasily&mdash;for
+      she didn't know what his silences might mean:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so you lived with that friend&mdash;that good man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excellent fellow,&rdquo; Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did not
+      expect. &ldquo;But it was a weakness on my part. I really didn't want to, only
+      he wouldn't let me off, and I couldn't explain. He was the sort of man to
+      whom you can't explain anything. He was extremely sensitive, and it would
+      have been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings by the
+      sort of plain speaking that would have been necessary. His mind was like a
+      white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six straw-bottomed
+      chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them in various
+      combinations. But they were always the same chairs. He was extremely easy
+      to live with; but then he got hold of this coal idea&mdash;or, rather, the
+      idea got hold of him, it entered into that scantily furnished chamber of
+      which I have just spoken, and sat on all the chairs. There was no
+      dislodging it, you know! It was going to make his fortune, my fortune,
+      everybody's fortune. In past years, in moments of doubt that will come to
+      a man determined to remain free from absurdities of existence, I often
+      asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what way would life try to get
+      hold of me? And this was the way. He got it into his head that he could do
+      nothing without me. And was I now, he asked me, to spurn and ruin him?
+      Well, one morning&mdash;I wonder if he had gone down on his knees to pray
+      that night!&mdash;one morning I gave in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away from him
+      with a nervous gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I gave in,&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl noticed the
+      strong feeling on his face with that intense interest which his person
+      awakened in her mind and in her heart. But it soon passed away, leaving
+      only a moody expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's difficult to resist where nothing matters,&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;And
+      perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me to go
+      about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so well thought of
+      in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish like the
+      veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe that I was actually respected for a
+      time. I was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be loyal to the man. I
+      have been, from first to last, completely, utterly loyal to the best of my
+      ability. I thought he understood something about coal. And if I had been
+      aware that he knew nothing of it, as in fact he didn't, well&mdash;I don't
+      know what I could have done to stop him. In one way or another I should
+      have had to be loyal. Truth, work, ambition, love itself, may be only
+      counters in the lamentable or despicable game of life, but when one takes
+      a hand one must play the game. No, the shade of Morrison needn't haunt me.
+      What's the matter? I say, Lena, why are you staring like that? Do you feel
+      ill?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst made as if to get on his feet. The girl extended her arm to arrest
+      him, and he remained staring in a sitting posture, propped on one arm,
+      observing her indefinable expression of anxiety, as if she were unable to
+      draw breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What has come to you?&rdquo; he insisted, feeling strangely unwilling to move,
+      to touch her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing!&rdquo; She swallowed painfully. &ldquo;Of course it can't be. What name did
+      you say? I didn't hear it properly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Name?&rdquo; repeated Heyst dazedly. &ldquo;I only mentioned Morrison. It's the name
+      of that man of whom I've been speaking. What of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you mean to say that he was your friend?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have heard enough to judge for yourself. You know as much of our
+      connection as I know myself. The people in this part of the world went by
+      appearances, and called us friends, as far as I can remember. Appearances&mdash;what
+      more, what better can you ask for? In fact you can't have better. You
+      can't have anything else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are trying to confuse me with your talk,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;You can't make
+      fun of this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't? Well, no I can't. It's a pity. Perhaps it would have been the best
+      way,&rdquo; said Heyst, in a tone which for him could be called gloomy. &ldquo;Unless
+      one could forget the silly business altogether.&rdquo; His faint playfulness of
+      manner and speech returned, like a habit one has schooled oneself into,
+      even before his forehead had cleared completely. &ldquo;But why are you looking
+      so hard at me? Oh, I don't object, and I shall try not to flinch. Your
+      eyes&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had forgotten
+      all about the late Morrison at that moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he exclaimed suddenly. &ldquo;What an impenetrable girl you are Lena, with
+      those grey eyes of yours! Windows of the soul, as some poet has said. The
+      fellow must have been a glazier by vocation. Well, nature has provided
+      excellently for the shyness of your soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of her
+      breath. He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he thought he knew
+      so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that partner of yours is dead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Morrison? Oh, yes, as I've told you, he&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You never told me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't I? I thought I did; or, rather, I thought you must know. It seems
+      impossible that anybody with whom I speak should not know that Morrison is
+      dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like an
+      expression of horror on her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Morrison!&rdquo; she whispered in an appalled tone. &ldquo;Morrison!&rdquo; Her head
+      drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her voice that
+      for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the syllables of that
+      unromantic name. A thought flashed through his head&mdash;could she have
+      known Morrison? But the mere difference of their origins made it wildly
+      improbable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very extraordinary!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Have you ever heard the name
+      before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as if she
+      could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him. She was biting
+      her lower lip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever know anybody of that name?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke, jerkily,
+      as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear. She had heard of that
+      very man, she told Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impossible!&rdquo; he said positively. &ldquo;You are mistaken. You couldn't have
+      heard of him, it's&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was perfectly
+      useless; that one doesn't argue against thin air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I did hear of him; only I didn't know then, I couldn't guess, that it
+      was your partner they were talking about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talking about my partner?&rdquo; repeated Heyst slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo; Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as full of incredulity, as
+      his. &ldquo;No. They were talking of you really; only I didn't know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who were they?&rdquo; Heyst raised his voice. &ldquo;Who was talking of me? Talking
+      where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining position;
+      at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on a level.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, in that town, in that hotel. Where else could it have been?&rdquo; she
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst's simplified
+      conception of himself. For a moment he was as much surprised as if he had
+      believed himself to be a mere gliding shadow among men. Besides, he had in
+      him a half-unconscious notion that he was above the level of island
+      gossip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you said first that it was of Morrison they talked,&rdquo; he remarked to
+      the girl, sinking on his heels, and no longer much interested. &ldquo;Strange
+      that you should have the opportunity to hear any talk at all! I was rather
+      under the impression that you never saw anybody belonging to the town
+      except from the platform.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget that I was not living with the other girls,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;After
+      meals they used to go back to the Pavilion, but I had to stay in the hotel
+      and do my sewing, or what not, in the room where they talked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't think of that. By the by, you never told me who they were.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, that horrible red-faced beast,&rdquo; she said, with all the energy of
+      disgust which the mere thought of the hotel-keeper provoked in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Schomberg!&rdquo; Heyst murmured carelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He talked to the boss&mdash;to Zangiacomo, I mean. I had to sit there.
+      That devil-woman sometimes wouldn't let me go away. I mean Mrs.
+      Zangiacomo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I guessed,&rdquo; murmured Heyst. &ldquo;She liked to torment you in a variety of
+      ways. But it is really strange that the hotel-keeper should talk of
+      Morrison to Zangiacomo. As far as I can remember he saw very little of
+      Morrison professionally. He knew many others much better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl shuddered slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was the only name I ever overheard. I would get as far away from
+      them as I could, to the other end of the room, but when that beast started
+      shouting I could not help hearing. I wish I had never heard anything. If I
+      had got up and gone out of the room I don't suppose the woman would have
+      killed me for it; but she would have rowed me in a nasty way. She would
+      have threatened me and called me names. That sort, when they know you are
+      helpless, there's nothing to stop them. I don't know how it is, but bad
+      people, real bad people that you can see are bad, they get over me
+      somehow. It's the way they set about downing one. I am afraid of
+      wickedness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face. He encouraged her,
+      profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I quite understand. You needn't apologize for your great delicacy in the
+      perception of inhuman evil. I am a little like you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not very plucky,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! I don't know myself what I would do, what countenance I would have
+      before a creature which would strike me as being evil incarnate. Don't you
+      be ashamed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid expression on
+      her face, and murmured:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't seem to want to know what he was saying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About poor Morrison? It couldn't have been anything bad, for the poor
+      fellow was innocence itself. And then, you know, he is dead, and nothing
+      can possibly matter to him now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was saying that Morrison's partner first got all there was to get out
+      of him, and then, and then&mdash;well, as good as murdered him&mdash;sent
+      him out to die somewhere!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You believe that of me?&rdquo; said Heyst, after a moment of perfect silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know it had anything to do with you. Schomberg was talking of
+      some Swede. How was I to know? It was only when you began telling me about
+      how you came here&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now you have my version.&rdquo; Heyst forced himself to speak quietly. &ldquo;So
+      that's how the business looked from outside!&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember him saying that everybody in these parts knew the story,&rdquo; the
+      girl added breathlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strange that it should hurt me!&rdquo; mused Heyst to himself; &ldquo;yet it does. I
+      seem to be as much of a fool as those everybodies who know the story and
+      no doubt believe it. Can you remember any more?&rdquo; he addressed the girl in
+      a grimly polite tone. &ldquo;I've often heard of the moral advantages of seeing
+      oneself as others see one. Let us investigate further. Can't you recall
+      something else that everybody knows?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Don't laugh!&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I laugh? I assure you I was not aware of it. I won't ask you whether
+      you believe the hotel-keeper's version. Surely you must know the value of
+      human judgement!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She unclasped her hands, moved them slightly, and twined her fingers as
+      before. Protest? Assent? Was there to be nothing more? He was relieved
+      when she spoke in that warm and wonderful voice which in itself comforted
+      and fascinated one's heart, which made her lovable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard this before you and I ever spoke to each other. It went out of my
+      memory afterwards. Everything went out of my memory then; and I was glad
+      of it. It was a fresh start for me, with you&mdash;and you know it. I wish
+      I had forgotten who I was&mdash;that would have been best; and I very
+      nearly did forget.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words. She seemed to be
+      talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious terms of special
+      significance. He thought that if she only could talk to him in some
+      unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the sheer beauty of
+      the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when you
+      mentioned it&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It broke the spell,&rdquo; muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if he had
+      been deceived in some hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still eyes
+      the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with a
+      completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before, because,
+      till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the abysses of
+      earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm. What if he should grow weary of
+      the burden?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her
+      steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise. It was a purely
+      mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor puzzled. In fact,
+      she could understand him better then than at any moment since she first
+      set eyes on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed scornfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What am I thinking of?&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;As if it could matter to me what
+      anybody had ever said or believed, from the beginning of the world till
+      the crack of doom!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never heard you laugh till today,&rdquo; she observed. &ldquo;This is the second
+      time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's because, when one's heart has been broken into in the way you have
+      broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to enter&mdash;shame,
+      anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears&mdash;stupid laughter, too. I
+      wonder what interpretation you are putting on it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn't gay, certainly,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But why are you angry with me? Are
+      you sorry you took me away from those beasts? I told you who I was. You
+      could see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; he muttered. He had regained his command of himself. &ldquo;I assure
+      you I could see much more than you could tell me. I could see quite a lot
+      that you don't even suspect yet, but you can't be seen quite through.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sank to the ground by her side and took her hand. She asked gently:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What more do you want from me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no sound for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The impossible, I suppose,&rdquo; he said very low, as one makes a confidence,
+      and pressing the hand he grasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not return the pressure. He shook his head as if to drive away the
+      thought of this, and added in a louder, light tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing less. And it isn't because I think little of what I've got
+      already. Oh, no! It is because I think so much of this possession of mine
+      that I can't have it complete enough. I know it's unreasonable. You can't
+      hold back anything&mdash;now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed I couldn't,&rdquo; she whispered, letting her hand lie passive in his
+      tight grasp. &ldquo;I only wish I could give you something more, or better, or
+      whatever it is you want.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was touched by the sincere accent of these simple words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you what you can do&mdash;you can tell me whether you would have
+      gone with me like this if you had known of whom that abominable idiot of a
+      hotel-keeper was speaking. A murderer&mdash;no less!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I didn't know you at all then,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;And I had the sense to
+      understand what he was saying. It wasn't murder, really. I never thought
+      it was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What made him invent such an atrocity?&rdquo; Heyst exclaimed. &ldquo;He seems a
+      stupid animal. He <i>is</i> stupid. How did he manage to hatch that pretty
+      tale? Have I a particularly vile countenance? Is black selfishness written
+      all over my face? Or is that sort of thing so universally human that it
+      might be said of anybody?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn't murder,&rdquo; she insisted earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. I understand. It was worse. As to killing a man, which would be a
+      comparatively decent thing to do, well&mdash;I have never done that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you do it?&rdquo; she asked in a frightened voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear girl, you don't know the sort of life I have been leading in
+      unexplored countries, in the wilds; it's difficult to give you an idea.
+      There are men who haven't been in such tight places as I have found myself
+      in who have had to&mdash;to shed blood, as the saying is. Even the wilds
+      hold prizes which tempt some people; but I had no schemes, no plans&mdash;and
+      not even great firmness of mind to make me unduly obstinate. I was simply
+      moving on, while the others, perhaps, were going somewhere. An
+      indifference as to roads and purposes makes one meeker, as it were. And I
+      may say truly, too, that I never did care, I won't say for life&mdash;I
+      had scorned what people call by that name from the first&mdash;but for
+      being alive. I don't know if that is what men call courage, but I doubt it
+      very much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You! You have no courage?&rdquo; she protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know. Not the sort that always itches for a weapon, for I
+      have never been anxious to use one in the quarrels that a man gets into in
+      the most innocent way sometimes. The differences for which men murder each
+      other are, like everything else they do, the most contemptible, the most
+      pitiful things to look back upon. No, I've never killed a man or loved a
+      woman&mdash;not even in my thoughts, not even in my dreams.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised her hand to his lips, and let them rest on it for a space,
+      during which she moved a little closer to him. After the lingering kiss he
+      did not relinquish his hold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To slay, to love&mdash;the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I
+      have no experience of either. You must forgive me anything that may have
+      appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive in my speeches,
+      untimely in my silences.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved uneasily, a little disappointed by her attitude, but indulgent to
+      it, and feeling, in this moment of perfect quietness, that in holding her
+      surrendered hand he had found a closer communion than they had ever
+      achieved before. But even then there still lingered in him a sense of
+      incompleteness not altogether overcome&mdash;which, it seemed, nothing
+      ever would overcome&mdash;the fatal imperfection of all the gifts of life,
+      which makes of them a delusion and a snare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All of a sudden he squeezed her hand angrily. His delicately playful
+      equanimity, the product of kindness and scorn, had perished with the loss
+      of his bitter liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not murder, you say! I should think not. But when you led me to talk just
+      now, when the name turned up, when you understood that it was of me that
+      these things had been said, you showed a strange emotion. I could see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was a bit startled,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the baseness of my conduct?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't judge you, not for anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is.&rdquo; With her
+      other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one movement the
+      earth and the heaven. &ldquo;I wouldn't do such a thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I! I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I, who could not
+      bear to hurt his feelings. I, who respected his very madness! Yes, this
+      madness, the wreck of which you can see lying about the jetty of Diamond
+      Bay. What else could I do? He insisted on regarding me as his saviour; he
+      was always restraining the eternal obligation on the tip of his tongue,
+      till I was burning with shame at his gratitude. What could I do? He was
+      going to repay me with this infernal coal, and I had to join him as one
+      joins a child's game in a nursery. One would no more have thought of
+      humiliating him than one would think of humiliating a child. What's the
+      use of talking of all this! Of course, the people here could not
+      understand the truth of our relation to each other. But what business of
+      theirs was it? Kill old Morrison! Well, it is less criminal, less base&mdash;I
+      am not saying it is less difficult&mdash;to kill a man than to cheat him
+      in that way. You understand that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction. His
+      eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it was neither one nor the other,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Then, why your
+      emotion? All you confess is that you wouldn't judge me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing of her
+      wonder could be read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said I couldn't,&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!&rdquo; the playfulness of
+      tone hardly concealed his irritation. &ldquo;What power there must be in words,
+      only imperfectly heard&mdash;for you did not listen with particular care,
+      did you? What were they? What evil effort of invention drove them into
+      that idiot's mouth out of his lying throat? If you were to try to
+      remember, they would perhaps convince me, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't listen,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;What was it to me what they said of
+      anybody? He was saying that there never were such loving friends to look
+      at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him and got
+      thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home and die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in these
+      quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice. She ceased
+      abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally weary, sick at
+      heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, why shouldn't you get tired of that or any other&mdash;company?
+      You aren't like anyone else, and&mdash;and the thought of it made me
+      unhappy suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe anything bad of you. I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A brusque movement of his arm, flinging her hand away, stopped her short.
+      Heyst had again lost control of himself. He would have shouted, if
+      shouting had been in his character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, this earth must be the appointed hatching planet of calumny enough to
+      furnish the whole universe. I feel a disgust at my own person, as if I had
+      tumbled into some filthy hole. Pah! And you&mdash;all you can say is that
+      you won't judge me; that you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her head at this attack, though indeed he had not turned to
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe anything bad of you,&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;I couldn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a gesture as if to say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's sufficient.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In his soul and in his body he experienced a nervous reaction from
+      tenderness. All at once, without transition, he detested her. But only for
+      a moment. He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a
+      special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality
+      which excites&mdash;and escapes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He jumped up and began to walk to and fro. Presently his hidden fury fell
+      into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind emptiness,
+      desolation, regret. His resentment was not against the girl, but against
+      life itself&mdash;that commonest of snares, in which he felt himself
+      caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled by the lucidity of
+      his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side. Before
+      she could make a movement or even turn her head his way, he took her in
+      his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness of a tear
+      fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another appeal to his
+      tenderness&mdash;a new seduction. The girl glanced round, moved suddenly
+      away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed imperiously to him to
+      leave her alone&mdash;a command which Heyst did not obey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FIVE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst scrambled quickly to
+      his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had rolled a little
+      way off. Meanwhile she busied herself in doing up her hair, plaited on the
+      top of her head in two heavy, dark tresses, which had come loose. He
+      tendered her the helmet in silence, and waited as if unwilling to hear the
+      sound of his own voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had better go down now,&rdquo; he suggested in a low tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He extended his hand to help her up. He had the intention to smile, but
+      abandoned it at the nearer sight of her still face, in which was depicted
+      the infinite lassitude of her soul. On their way to regain the forest path
+      they had to pass through the spot from which the view of the sea could be
+      obtained. The flaming abyss of emptiness, the liquid, undulating glare,
+      the tragic brutality of the light, made her long for the friendly night,
+      with its stars stilled by an austere spell; for the velvety dark sky and
+      the mysterious great shadow of the sea, conveying peace to the day-weary
+      heart. She put her hand to her eyes. Behind her back Heyst spoke gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us get on, Lena.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She walked ahead in silence. Heyst remarked that they had never been out
+      before during the hottest hours. It would do her no good, he feared. This
+      solicitude pleased and soothed her. She felt more and more like herself&mdash;a
+      poor London girl playing in an orchestra, and snatched out from the
+      humiliations, the squalid dangers of a miserable existence, by a man like
+      whom there was not, there could not be, another in this world. She felt
+      this with elation, with uneasiness, with an intimate pride&mdash;and with
+      a peculiar sinking of the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat,&rdquo; she said
+      decisively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but I don't forget that you're not a tropical bird.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You weren't born in these parts, either,&rdquo; she returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, and perhaps I haven't even your physique. I am a transplanted being.
+      Transplanted! I ought to call myself uprooted&mdash;an unnatural state of
+      existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked back at him and received a smile. He told her to keep in the
+      shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full of heat
+      if free from glare. Now and then they had glimpses of the company's old
+      clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps of trees stood
+      charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister. They crossed the open in
+      a direct line for the bungalow. On the veranda they fancied they had a
+      glimpse of the vanishing Wang, though the girl was not at all sure that
+      she had seen anything move. Heyst had no doubts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wang has been looking out for us. We are late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was he? I thought I saw something white for a moment, and then I did not
+      see it any more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's it&mdash;he vanishes. It's a very remarkable gift in that
+      Chinaman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are they all like that?&rdquo; she asked with naive curiosity and uneasiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in such perfection,&rdquo; said Heyst, amused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk. The drops of
+      perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool, white petal of a
+      flower. He looked at her figure of grace and strength, solid and supple,
+      with an ever-growing appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then Mr. Wang will
+      give us something to eat,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had found the table laid. When they came together again and sat down
+      to it, Wang materialized without a sound, unheard, uncalled, and did his
+      office. Which being accomplished, at a given moment he was not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great silence brooded over Samburan&mdash;the silence of the great heat
+      that seems pregnant with fatal issues, like the silence of ardent thought.
+      Heyst remained alone in the big room. The girl seeing him take up a book,
+      had retreated to her chamber. Heyst sat down under his father's portrait;
+      and the abominable calumny crept back into his recollection. The taste of
+      it came on his lips, nauseating and corrosive like some kinds of poison.
+      He was tempted to spit on the floor, naively, in sheer unsophisticated
+      disgust of the physical sensation. He shook his head, surprised at
+      himself. He was not used to receive his intellectual impressions in that
+      way&mdash;reflected in movements of carnal emotion. He stirred impatiently
+      in his chair, and raised the book to his eyes with both hands. It was one
+      of his father's. He opened it haphazard, and his eyes fell on the middle
+      of the page. The elder Heyst had written of everything in many books&mdash;of
+      space and of time, of animals and of stars; analysing ideas and actions,
+      the laughter and the frowns of men, and the grimaces of their agony. The
+      son read, shrinking into himself, composing his face as if under the
+      author's eye, with a vivid consciousness of the portrait on his right
+      hand, a little above his head; a wonderful presence in its heavy frame on
+      the flimsy wall of mats, looking exiled and at home, out of place and
+      masterful, in the painted immobility of profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Heyst, the son, read:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love&mdash;the
+      most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned the pages of the little volume, &ldquo;Storm and Dust,&rdquo; glancing here
+      and there at the broken text of reflections, maxims, short phrases,
+      enigmatical sometimes and sometimes eloquent. It seemed to him that he was
+      hearing his father's voice, speaking and ceasing to speak again. Startled
+      at first, he ended by finding a charm in the illusion. He abandoned
+      himself to the half-belief that something of his father dwelt yet on earth&mdash;a
+      ghostly voice, audible to the ear of his own flesh and blood. With what
+      strange serenity, mingled with terrors, had that man considered the
+      universal nothingness! He had plunged into it headlong, perhaps to render
+      death, the answer that faced one at every inquiry, more supportable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst stirred, and the ghostly voice ceased; but his eyes followed the
+      words on the last page of the book:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men of tormented conscience, or of a criminal imagination, are aware of
+      much that minds of a peaceful, resigned cast do not even suspect. It is
+      not poets alone who dare descend into the abyss of infernal regions, or
+      even who dream of such a descent. The most inexpressive of human beings
+      must have said to himself, at one time or another: &ldquo;Anything but this!&rdquo; .
+      . .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all have our instants of clairvoyance. They are not very helpful. The
+      character of the scheme does not permit that or anything else to be
+      helpful. Properly speaking its character, judged by the standards
+      established by its victims, is infamous. It excuses every violence of
+      protest and at the same time never fails to crush it, just as it crushes
+      the blindest assent. The so-called wickedness must be, like the so-called
+      virtue, its own reward&mdash;to be anything at all . . .
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clairvoyance or no clairvoyance, men love their captivity. To the unknown
+      force of negation they prefer the miserably tumbled bed of their
+      servitude. Man alone can give one the disgust of pity; yet I find it
+      easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its wickedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These were the last words. Heyst lowered the book to his knees. Lena's
+      voice spoke above his drooping head:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You sit there as if you were unhappy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you were asleep,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was lying down right enough, but I never closed my eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The rest would have done you good after our walk. Didn't you try?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was lying down, I tell you, but sleep I couldn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you made no sound! What want of sincerity. Or did you want to be
+      alone for a time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;alone?&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He noticed her eyeing the book, and got up to put it back in the bookcase.
+      When he turned round, he saw that she had dropped into the chair&mdash;it
+      was the one she always used&mdash;and looked as if her strength had
+      suddenly gone from her, leaving her only her youth, which seemed very
+      pathetic, very much at his mercy. He moved quickly towards the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tired, are you? It's my fault, taking you up so high and keeping you out
+      so long. Such a windless day, too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She watched his concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him, but as
+      unreadable as ever. He avoided looking into them for that very reason. He
+      forgot himself in the contemplation of those passive arms, of these
+      defenceless lips, and&mdash;yes, one had to go back to them&mdash;of these
+      wide-open eyes. Something wild in their grey stare made him think of
+      sea-birds in the cold murkiness of high latitudes. He started when she
+      spoke, all the charm of physical intimacy revealed suddenly in that voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You should try to love me!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a movement of astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try,&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;But it seems to me&mdash;&rdquo; He broke off, saying to
+      himself that if he loved her, he had never told her so in so many words.
+      Simple words! They died on his lips. &ldquo;What makes you say that?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lowered her eyelids and turned her head a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have done nothing,&rdquo; she said in a low voice. &ldquo;It's you who have been
+      good, helpful, and tender to me. Perhaps you love me for that&mdash;just
+      for that; or perhaps you love me for company, and because&mdash;well! But
+      sometimes it seems to me that you can never love me for myself, only for
+      myself, as people do love each other when it is to be for ever.&rdquo; Her head
+      drooped. &ldquo;Forever,&rdquo; she breathed out again; then, still more faintly, she
+      added an entreating: &ldquo;Do try!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These last words went straight to his heart&mdash;the sound of them more
+      than the sense. He did not know what to say, either from want of practice
+      in dealing with women or simply from his innate honesty of thought. All
+      his defences were broken now. Life had him fairly by the throat. But he
+      managed a smile, though she was not looking at him; yes, he did manage it&mdash;the
+      well-known Heyst smile of playful courtesy, so familiar to all sorts and
+      conditions of men in the islands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear Lena,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it looks as if you were trying to pick a very
+      unnecessary quarrel with me&mdash;of all people!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no movement. With his elbows spread out he was twisting the ends
+      of his long moustaches, very masculine and perplexed, enveloped in the
+      atmosphere of femininity as in a cloud, suspecting pitfalls, and as if
+      afraid to move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must admit, though,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;that there is no one else; and I
+      suppose a certain amount of quarrelling is necessary for existence in this
+      world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a
+      script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious, like any
+      writing to the illiterate. As far as women went he was altogether
+      uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which is fostered in the
+      days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of the heart fitting it for
+      the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much on
+      antagonism as on attraction. His mental attitude was that of a man looking
+      this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable to decipher,
+      but which may be big with some revelation. He didn't know what to say. All
+      he found to add was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't even understand what I have done or left undone to distress you
+      like this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense of the
+      imperfections of their relations&mdash;a sense which made him desire her
+      constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand, and which, when she
+      was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and illusory, a
+      promise that could not be embraced and held.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! I don't see clearly what you mean. Is your mind turned towards the
+      future?&rdquo; he interpellated her with marked playfulness, because he was
+      ashamed to let such a word pass his lips. But all his cherished negations
+      were falling off him one by one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because if it is so there is nothing easier than to dismiss it. In our
+      future, as in what people call the other life, there is nothing to be
+      frightened of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her eyes to him; and if nature had formed them to express
+      anything else but blank candour he would have learned how terrified she
+      was by his talk and the fact that her sinking heart loved him more
+      desperately than ever. He smiled at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dismiss all thought of it,&rdquo; he insisted. &ldquo;Surely you don't suspect after
+      what I have heard from you, that I am anxious to return to mankind. I! I!
+      murder my poor Morrison! It's possible that I may be really capable of
+      that which they say I have done. The point is that I haven't done it. But
+      it is an unpleasant subject to me. I ought to be ashamed to confess it&mdash;but
+      it is! Let us forget it. There's that in you, Lena, which can console me
+      for worse things, for uglier passages. And if we forget, there are no
+      voices here to remind us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had raised her head before he paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing can break in on us here,&rdquo; he went on and, as if there had been an
+      appeal or a provocation in her upward glance, he bent down and took her
+      under the arms, raising her straight out of the chair into a sudden and
+      close embrace. Her alacrity to respond, which made her seem as light as a
+      feather, warmed his heart at that moment more than closer caresses had
+      done before. He had not expected that ready impulse towards himself which
+      had been dormant in her passive attitude. He had just felt the clasp of
+      her arms round his neck, when, with a slight exclamation&mdash;&ldquo;He's
+      here!&rdquo;&mdash;she disengaged herself and bolted, away into her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER SIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Heyst was astounded. Looking all round, as if to take the whole room to
+      witness of this outrage, he became aware of Wang materialized in the
+      doorway. The intrusion was as surprising as anything could be, in view of
+      the strict regularity with which Wang made himself visible. Heyst was
+      tempted to laugh at first. This practical comment on his affirmation that
+      nothing could break in on them relieved the strain of his feelings. He was
+      a little vexed, too. The Chinaman preserved a profound silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo; asked Heyst sternly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Boat out there,&rdquo; said the Chinaman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where? What do you mean? Boat adrift in the straits?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some subtle change in Wang's bearing suggested his being out of breath;
+      but he did not pant, and his voice was steady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;row.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Heyst now who was startled and raised his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Malay man, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang made a slight negative movement with his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you hear, Lena?&rdquo; Heyst called out. &ldquo;Wang says there is a boat in sight&mdash;somewhere
+      near apparently. Where's that boat Wang?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Round the point,&rdquo; said Wang, leaping into Malay unexpectedly, and in a
+      loud voice. &ldquo;White men three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So close as that?&rdquo; exclaimed Heyst, moving out on the veranda followed by
+      Wang. &ldquo;White men? Impossible!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Over the clearing the shadows were already lengthening. The sun hung low;
+      a ruddy glare lay on the burnt black patch in front of the bungalow, and
+      slanted on the ground between the straight, tall, mast-like trees soaring
+      a hundred feet or more without a branch. The growth of bushes cut off all
+      view of the jetty from the veranda. Far away to the right Wang's hut, or
+      rather its dark roof of mats, could be seen above the bamboo fence which
+      insured the privacy of the Alfuro woman. The Chinaman looked that way
+      swiftly. Heyst paused, and then stepped back a pace into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;White men, Lena, apparently. What are you doing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am just bathing my eyes a little,&rdquo; the girl's voice said from the inner
+      room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes; all right!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. You had better&mdash;I am going down to the jetty. Yes, you had
+      better stay in. What an extraordinary thing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so extraordinary that nobody could possibly appreciate how
+      extraordinary it was but himself. His mind was full of mere exclamations,
+      while his feet were carrying him in the direction of the jetty. He
+      followed the line of the rails, escorted by Wang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where were you when you first saw the boat?&rdquo; he asked over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang explained in Malay that he had gone to the shore end of the wharf, to
+      get a few lumps of coal from the big heap, when, happening to raise his
+      eyes from the ground, he saw the boat&mdash;a white man boat, not a canoe.
+      He had good eyes. He had seen the boat, with the men at the oars; and here
+      Wang made a particular gesture over his eyes, as if his vision had
+      received a blow. He had turned at once and run to the house to report.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No mistake, eh?&rdquo; said Heyst, moving on. At the very outer edge of the
+      belt he stopped short. Wang halted behind him on the path, till the voice
+      of Number One called him sharply forward into the open. He obeyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where's that boat?&rdquo; asked Heyst forcibly. &ldquo;I say&mdash;where is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing whatever was to be seen between the point and the jetty. The
+      stretch of Diamond Bay was like a piece of purple shadow, lustrous and
+      empty, while beyond the land, the open sea lay blue and opaque under the
+      sun. Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till they met, far off, the
+      dark cone of the volcano, with its faint plume of smoke broadening and
+      vanishing everlastingly at the top, without altering its shape in the
+      glowing transparency of the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fellow has been dreaming,&rdquo; he muttered to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked hard at the Chinaman. Wang seemed turned into stone. Suddenly,
+      as if he had received a shock, he started, flung his arm out with a
+      pointing forefinger, and made guttural noises to the effect that there,
+      there, there, he had seen a boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very uncanny. Heyst thought of some strange hallucination. Unlikely
+      enough; but that a boat with three men in it should have sunk between the
+      point and the jetty, suddenly, like a stone, without leaving as much on
+      the surface as a floating oar, was still more unlikely. The theory of a
+      phantom boat would have been more credible than that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confound it!&rdquo; he muttered to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was unpleasantly affected by this mystery; but now a simple explanation
+      occurred to him. He stepped hastily out on the wharf. The boat, if it had
+      existed and had retreated, could perhaps be seen from the far end of the
+      long jetty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing was to be seen. Heyst let his eyes roam idly over the sea. He was
+      so absorbed in his perplexity that a hollow sound, as of somebody tumbling
+      about in a boat, with a clatter of oars and spars, failed to make him move
+      for a moment. When his mind seized its meaning, he had no difficulty in
+      locating the sound. It had come from below&mdash;under the jetty!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He ran back for a dozen yards or so, and then looked over. His sight
+      plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the greater part of
+      which was hidden from him by the planking of the jetty. His eyes fell on
+      the thin back of a man doubled up over the tiller in a queer,
+      uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow. Another man, more directly
+      below Heyst, sprawled on his back from gunwale to gunwale, half off the
+      after thwart, his head lower than his feet. This second man glared wildly
+      upward, and struggled to raise himself, but to all appearance was much too
+      drunk to succeed. The visible part of the boat contained also a flat,
+      leather trunk, on which the first man's long legs were tucked up
+      nervelessly. A large earthenware jug, with its wide mouth uncorked, rolled
+      out on the bottom-boards from under the sprawling man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had never been so much astonished in his life. He stared dumbly at
+      the strange boat's crew. From the first he was positive that these men
+      were not sailors. They wore the white drill-suit of tropical civilization;
+      but their apparition in a boat Heyst could not connect with anything
+      plausible. The civilization of the tropics could have had nothing to do
+      with it. It was more like those myths, current in Polynesia, of amazing
+      strangers, who arrive at an island, gods or demons, bringing good or evil
+      to the innocence of the inhabitants&mdash;gifts of unknown things, words
+      never heard before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst noticed a cork helmet floating alongside the boat, evidently fallen
+      from the head of the man doubled over the tiller, who displayed a dark,
+      bony poll. An oar, too, had been knocked overboard, probably by the
+      sprawling man, who was still struggling, between the thwarts. By this time
+      Heyst regarded the visitation no longer with surprise, but with the
+      sustained attention demanded by a difficult problem. With one foot poised
+      on the string-piece, and leaning on his raised knee, he was taking in
+      everything. The sprawling man rolled off the thwart, collapsed, and, most
+      unexpectedly, got on his feet. He swayed dizzily, spreading his arms out
+      and uttered faintly a hoarse, dreamy &ldquo;Hallo!&rdquo; His upturned face was
+      swollen, red, peeling all over the nose and cheeks. His stare was
+      irrational. Heyst perceived stains of dried blood all over the front of
+      his dirty white coat, and also on one sleeve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter? Are you wounded?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other glanced down, reeled&mdash;one of his feet was inside a large
+      pith hat&mdash;and, recovering himself, let out a dismal, grating sound in
+      the manner of a grim laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Blood&mdash;not mine. Thirst's the matter. Exhausted's the matter. Done
+      up. Drink, man! Give us water!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thirst was in the very tone of his words, alternating a broken croak and a
+      faint, throaty rustle which just reached Heyst's ears. The man in the boat
+      raised his hands to be helped up on the jetty, whispering:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tried. I am too weak. I tumbled down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang was coming along the jetty slowly, with intent, straining eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Run back and bring a crowbar here. There's one lying by the coal-heap,&rdquo;
+       Heyst shouted to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man standing in the boat sat down on the thwart behind him. A horrible
+      coughing laugh came through his swollen lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Crowbar? What's that for?&rdquo; he mumbled, and his head dropped on his chest
+      mournfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, Heyst, as if he had forgotten the boat, started kicking hard at
+      a large brass tap projecting above the planks. To accommodate ships that
+      came for coal and happened to need water as well, a stream had been tapped
+      in the interior and an iron pipe led along the jetty. It terminated with a
+      curved end almost exactly where the strangers' boat had been driven
+      between the piles; but the tap was set fast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hurry up!&rdquo; Heyst yelled to the Chinaman, who was running with the crowbar
+      in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst snatched it from him and, obtaining a leverage against the
+      string-piece, wrung the stiff tap round with a mighty jerk. &ldquo;I hope that
+      pipe hasn't got choked!&rdquo; he muttered to himself anxiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It hadn't; but it did not yield a strong gush. The sound of a thin stream,
+      partly breaking on the gunwale of the boat and partly splashing alongside,
+      became at once audible. It was greeted by a cry of inarticulate and savage
+      joy. Heyst knelt on the string-piece and peered down. The man who had
+      spoken was already holding his open mouth under the bright trickle. Water
+      ran over his eyelids and over his nose, gurgled down his throat, flowed
+      over his chin. Then some obstruction in the pipe gave way, and a sudden
+      thick jet broke on his face. In a moment his shoulders were soaked, the
+      front of his coat inundated; he streamed and dripped; water ran into his
+      pockets, down his legs, into his shoes; but he had clutched the end of the
+      pipe, and, hanging on with both hands, swallowed, spluttered, choked,
+      snorted with the noises of a swimmer. Suddenly a curious dull roar reached
+      Heyst's ears. Something hairy and black flew from under the jetty. A
+      dishevelled head, coming on like a cannonball, took the man at the pipe in
+      flank, with enough force to tear his grip loose and fling him headlong
+      into the stern-sheets. He fell upon the folded legs of the man at the
+      tiller, who, roused by the commotion in the boat, was sitting up, silent,
+      rigid, and very much like a corpse. His eyes were but two black patches,
+      and his teeth glistened with a death's head grin between his retracted
+      lips, no thicker than blackish parchment glued over the gums.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From him Heyst's eyes wandered to the creature who had replaced the first
+      man at the end of the water-pipe. Enormous brown paws clutched it
+      savagely; the wild, big head hung back, and in a face covered with a wet
+      mass of hair there gaped crookedly a wide mouth full of fangs. The water
+      filled it, welled up in hoarse coughs, ran down on each side of the jaws
+      and down the hairy throat, soaked the black pelt of the enormous chest,
+      naked under a torn check shirt, heaving convulsively with a play of
+      massive muscles carved in red mahogany.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as the first man had recovered the breath knocked out of him by
+      the irresistible charge, a scream of mad cursing issued from the
+      stern-sheets. With a rigid, angular crooking of the elbow, the man at the
+      tiller put his hand back to his hip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't shoot him, sir!&rdquo; yelled the first man. &ldquo;Wait! Let me have that
+      tiller. I will teach him to shove himself in front of a caballero!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Martin Ricardo flourished the heavy piece of wood, leaped forward with
+      astonishing vigour, and brought it down on Pedro's head with a crash that
+      resounded all over the quiet sweep of Black Diamond Bay. A crimson patch
+      appeared on the matted hair, red veins appeared in the water flowing all
+      over his face, and it dripped in rosy drops off his head. But the man hung
+      on. Not till a second furious blow descended did the hairy paws let go
+      their grip and the squirming body sink limply. Before it could touch the
+      bottom-boards, a tremendous kick in the ribs from Ricardo's foot shifted
+      it forward out of sight, whence came the noise of a heavy thud, a clatter
+      of spars, and a pitiful grunt. Ricardo stooped to look under the jetty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha, dog! This will teach you to keep back where you belong, you
+      murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you! You infidel, you robber of
+      churches! Next time I will rip you open from neck to heel, you
+      carrion-eater! Esclavo!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He backed a little and straightened himself up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't mean it really,&rdquo; he remarked to Heyst, whose steady eyes met his
+      from above. He ran aft briskly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come along, sir. It's your turn. I oughtn't to have drunk first. 'S
+      truth, I forgot myself! A gentleman like you will overlook that, I know.&rdquo;
+       As he made these apologies, Ricardo extended his hand. &ldquo;Let me steady you,
+      sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly Mr. Jones unfolded himself in all his slenderness, rocked,
+      staggered, and caught Ricardo's shoulder. His henchman assisted him to the
+      pipe, which went on gushing a clear stream of water, sparkling exceedingly
+      against the black piles and the gloom under the jetty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Catch hold, sir,&rdquo; Ricardo advised solicitously. &ldquo;All right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stepped back, and, while Mr. Jones revelled in the abundance of water,
+      he addressed himself to Heyst with a sort of justificatory speech, the
+      tone of which, reflecting his feelings, partook of purring and spitting.
+      They had been thirty hours tugging at the oars, he explained, and they had
+      been more than forty hours without water, except that the night before
+      they had licked the dew off the gunwales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo did not explain to Heyst how it happened. At that precise moment
+      he had no explanation ready for the man on the wharf, who, he guessed,
+      must be wondering much more at the presence of his visitors than at their
+      plight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER SEVEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The explanation lay in the two simple facts that the light winds and
+      strong currents of the Java Sea had drifted the boat about until they
+      partly lost their bearings; and that by some extra-ordinary mistake one of
+      the two jars put into the boat by Schomberg's man contained salt water.
+      Ricardo tried to put some pathos into his tones. Pulling for thirty hours
+      with eighteen-foot oars! And the sun! Ricardo relieved his feelings by
+      cursing the sun. They had felt their hearts and lungs shrivel within them.
+      And then, as if all that hadn't been trouble enough, he complained
+      bitterly, he had had to waste his fainting strength in beating their
+      servant about the head with a stretcher. The fool had wanted to drink sea
+      water, and wouldn't listen to reason. There was no stopping him otherwise.
+      It was better to beat him into insensibility than to have him go crazy in
+      the boat, and to be obliged to shoot him. The preventive, administered
+      with enough force to brain an elephant, boasted Ricardo, had to be applied
+      on two occasions&mdash;the second time all but in sight of the jetty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have seen the beauty,&rdquo; Ricardo went on expansively, hiding his lack
+      of some sort of probable story under this loquacity. &ldquo;I had to hammer him
+      away from the spout. Opened afresh all the old broken spots on his head.
+      You saw how hard I had to hit. He has no restraint, no restraint at all.
+      If it wasn't that he can be made useful in one way or another, I would
+      just as soon have let the governor shoot him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled up at Heyst in his peculiar lip-retracting manner, and added by
+      way of afterthought:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what will happen to him in the end, if he doesn't learn to
+      restrain himself. But I've taught him to mind his manners for a while,
+      anyhow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And again he addressed his quick grin up to the man on the wharf. His
+      round eyes had never left Heyst's face ever since he began to deliver his
+      account of the voyage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So that's how he looks!&rdquo; Ricardo was saying to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not expected Heyst to be like this. He had formed for himself a
+      conception containing the helpful suggestion of a vulnerable point. These
+      solitary men were often tipplers. But no!&mdash;this was not a drinking
+      man's face; nor could he detect the weakness of alarm, or even the
+      weakness of surprise, on these features, in those steady eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were too far gone to climb out,&rdquo; Ricardo went on. &ldquo;I heard you walking
+      along though. I thought I shouted; I tried to. You didn't hear me shout?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst made an almost imperceptible negative sign, which the greedy eyes of
+      Ricardo&mdash;greedy for all signs&mdash;did not miss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Throat too parched. We didn't even care to whisper to each other lately.
+      Thirst chokes one. We might have died there under this wharf before you
+      found us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't think where you had gone to.&rdquo; Heyst was heard at last,
+      addressing directly the newcomers from the sea. &ldquo;You were seen as soon as
+      you cleared that point.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were seen, eh?&rdquo; grunted Mr. Ricardo. &ldquo;We pulled like machines&mdash;daren't
+      stop. The governor sat at the tiller, but he couldn't speak to us. She
+      drove in between the piles till she hit something, and we all tumbled off
+      the thwarts as if we had been drunk. Drunk&mdash;ha, ha! Too dry, by
+      George! We fetched in here with the very last of our strength, and no
+      mistake. Another mile would have done for us. When I heard your footsteps,
+      above, I tried to get up, and I fell down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was the first sound I heard,&rdquo; said Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones, the front of his soiled white tunic soaked and plastered against
+      his breast-bone, staggered away from the water-pipe. Steadying himself on
+      Ricardo's shoulder, he drew a long breath, raised his dripping head, and
+      produced a smile of ghastly amiability, which was lost upon the thoughtful
+      Heyst. Behind his back the sun, touching the water, was like a disc of
+      iron cooled to a dull red glow, ready to start rolling round the circular
+      steel plate of the sea, which, under the darkening sky, looked more solid
+      than the high ridge of Samburan; more solid than the point, whose long
+      outlined slope melted into its own unfathomable shadow blurring the dim
+      sheen on the bay. The forceful stream from the pipe broke like shattered
+      glass on the boat's gunwale. Its loud, fitful, and persistent splashing
+      revealed the depths of the world's silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great notion, to lead the water out here,&rdquo; pronounced Ricardo
+      appreciatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Water was life. He felt now as if he could run a mile, scale a ten-foot
+      wall, sing a song. Only a few minutes ago he was next door to a corpse,
+      done up, unable to stand, to lift a hand; unable to groan. A drop of water
+      had done that miracle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't you feel life itself running and soaking into you, sir?&rdquo; he asked
+      his principal, with deferential but forced vivacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a word, Mr. Jones stepped off the thwart and sat down in the
+      stern-sheets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't that man of yours bleeding to death in the bows under there?&rdquo;
+       inquired Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo ceased his ecstasies over the life-giving water and answered in a
+      tone of innocence:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He? You may call him a man, but his hide is a jolly sight tougher than
+      the toughest alligator he ever skinned in the good old days. You don't
+      know how much he can stand: I do. We have tried him a long time ago. Ola,
+      there! Pedro! Pedro!&rdquo; he yelled, with a force of lung testifying to the
+      regenerative virtues of water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A weak &ldquo;Senor?&rdquo; came from under the wharf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did I tell you?&rdquo; said Ricardo triumphantly. &ldquo;Nothing can hurt him.
+      He's all right. But, I say, the boat's getting swamped. Can't you turn
+      this water off before you sink her under us? She's half full already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At a sign from Heyst, Wang hammered at the brass tap on the wharf, then
+      stood behind Number One, crowbar in hand, motionless as before. Ricardo
+      was perhaps not so certain of Pedro's toughness as he affirmed; for he
+      stooped, peering under the wharf, then moved forward out of sight. The
+      gush of water ceasing suddenly, made a silence which became complete when
+      the after-trickle stopped. Afar, the sun was reduced to a red spark,
+      glowing very low in the breathless immensity of twilight. Purple gleams
+      lingered on the water all round the boat. The spectral figure in the
+      stern-sheets spoke in a languid tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&mdash;er&mdash;companion&mdash;er&mdash;secretary of mine is a queer
+      chap. I am afraid we aren't presenting ourselves in a very favourable
+      light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst listened. It was the conventional voice of an educated man, only
+      strangely lifeless. But more strange yet was this concern for appearances,
+      expressed, he did not know, whether in jest or in earnest. Earnestness was
+      hardly to be supposed under the circumstances, and no one had ever jested
+      in such dead tones. It was something which could not be answered, and
+      Heyst said nothing. The other went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Travelling as I do, I find a man of his sort extremely useful. He has his
+      little weaknesses, no doubt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo; Heyst was provoked into speaking. &ldquo;Weakness of the arm is not
+      one of them; neither is an exaggerated humanity, as far as I can judge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Defects of temper,&rdquo; explained Mr. Jones from the stern-sheets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The subject of this dialogue, coming out just then from under the wharf
+      into the visible part of the boat, made himself heard in his own defence,
+      in a voice full of life, and with nothing languid in his manner on the
+      contrary, it was brisk, almost jocose. He begged pardon for contradicting.
+      He was never out of temper with &ldquo;our Pedro.&rdquo; The fellow was a Dago of
+      immense strength and of no sense whatever. This combination made him
+      dangerous, and he had to be treated accordingly, in a manner which he
+      could understand. Reasoning was beyond him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so&rdquo;&mdash;Ricardo addressed Heyst with animation&mdash;&ldquo;you mustn't
+      be surprised if&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I assure you,&rdquo; Heyst interrupted, &ldquo;that my wonder at your arrival in your
+      boat here is so great that it leaves no room for minor astonishments. But
+      hadn't you better land?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the talk, sir!&rdquo; Ricardo began to bustle about the boat, talking
+      all the time. Finding himself unable to &ldquo;size up&rdquo; this man, he was
+      inclined to credit him with extraordinary powers of penetration, which, it
+      seemed to him, would be favoured by silence. Also, he feared some
+      pointblank question. He had no ready-made story to tell. He and his patron
+      had put off considering that rather important detail too long. For the
+      last two days, the horrors of thirst, coming on them unexpectedly, had
+      prevented consultation. They had had to pull for dear life. But the man on
+      the wharf, were he in league with the devil himself, would pay for all
+      their sufferings, thought Ricardo with an unholy joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, splashing in the water which covered the bottom-boards, Ricardo
+      congratulated himself aloud on the luggage being out of the way of the
+      wet. He had piled it up forward. He had roughly tied up Pedro's head.
+      Pedro had nothing to grumble about. On the contrary, he ought to be mighty
+      thankful to him, Ricardo, for being alive at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, now, let me give you a leg up, sir,&rdquo; he said cheerily to his
+      motionless principal in the stern-sheets. &ldquo;All our troubles are over&mdash;for
+      a time, anyhow. Ain't it luck to find a white man on this island? I would
+      have just as soon expected to meet an angel from heaven&mdash;eh, Mr.
+      Jones? Now then&mdash;ready, sir? one, two, three, up you go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Helped from below by Ricardo, and from above by the man more unexpected
+      than an angel, Mr. Jones scrambled up and stood on the wharf by the side
+      of Heyst. He swayed like a reed. The night descending on Samburan turned
+      into dense shadow the point of land and the wharf itself, and gave a dark
+      solidity to the unshimmering water extending to the last faint trace of
+      light away to the west. Heyst stared at the guests whom the renounced
+      world had sent him thus at the end of the day. The only other vestige of
+      light left on earth lurked in the hollows of the thin man's eyes. They
+      gleamed, mobile and languidly evasive. The eyelids fluttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are feeling weak,&rdquo; said Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the moment, a little,&rdquo; confessed the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With loud panting, Ricardo scrambled on his hands and knees upon the
+      wharf, energetic and unaided. He rose up at Heyst's elbow and stamped his
+      foot on the planks, with a sharp, provocative, double beat, such as is
+      heard sometimes in fencing-schools before the adversaries engage their
+      foils. Not that the renegade seaman Ricardo knew anything of fencing. What
+      he called &ldquo;shooting-irons,&rdquo; were his weapons, or the still less
+      aristocratic knife, such as was even then ingeniously strapped to his leg.
+      He thought of it, at that moment. A swift stooping motion, then, on the
+      recovery, a ripping blow, a shove off the wharf, and no noise except a
+      splash in the water that would scarcely disturb the silence. Heyst would
+      have no time for a cry. It would be quick and neat, and immensely in
+      accord with Ricardo's humour. But he repressed this gust of savagery. The
+      job was not such a simple one. This piece had to be played to another
+      tune, and in much slower time. He returned to his note of talkative
+      simplicity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay; and I too don't feel as strong as I thought I was when the first
+      drink set me up. Great wonder-worker water is! And to get it right here on
+      the spot! It was heaven&mdash;hey, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones, being directly addressed, took up his part in the concerted
+      piece:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, when I saw a wharf on what might have been an uninhabited island,
+      I couldn't believe my eyes. I doubted its existence. I thought it was a
+      delusion till the boat actually drove between the piles, as you see her
+      lying now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was speaking faintly, in a voice which did not seem to belong to
+      the earth, his henchman, in extremely loud and terrestrial accents, was
+      fussing about their belongings in the boat, addressing himself to Pedro:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, now&mdash;pass up the dunnage there! Move, yourself, hombre, or
+      I'll have to get down again and give you a tap on those bandages of yours,
+      you growling bear, you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! You didn't believe in the reality of the wharf?&rdquo; Heyst was saying to
+      Mr. Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to kiss my hands!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo caught hold of an ancient Gladstone bag and swung it on the wharf
+      with a thump.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! You ought to burn a candle before me as they do before the saints in
+      your country. No saint has ever done so much for you as I have, you
+      ungrateful vagabond. Now then! Up you get!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Helped by the talkative Ricardo, Pedro scrambled up on the wharf, where he
+      remained for some time on all fours, swinging to and fro his shaggy head
+      tied up in white rags. Then he got up clumsily, like a bulky animal in the
+      dusk, balancing itself on its hind legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones began to explain languidly to Heyst that they were in a pretty
+      bad state that morning, when they caught sight of the smoke of the
+      volcano. It nerved them to make an effort for their lives. Soon afterwards
+      they made out the island.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had just wits enough left in my baked brain to alter the direction of
+      the boat,&rdquo; the ghostly voice went on. &ldquo;As to finding assistance, a wharf,
+      a white man&mdash;nobody would have dreamed of it. Simply preposterous!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I thought when my Chinaman came and told me he had seen a
+      boat with white men pulling up,&rdquo; said Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most extraordinary luck,&rdquo; interjected Ricardo, standing by anxiously
+      attentive to every word. &ldquo;Seems a dream,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;A lovely dream!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence fell on that group of three, as if everyone had become afraid to
+      speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis. Pedro on one side of
+      them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful spectators. A few stars
+      had come out pursuing the ebbing twilight. A light draught of air tepid
+      enough in the thickening twilight after the scorching day, struck a chill
+      into Mr. Jones in his soaked clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I may infer, then, that there is a settlement of white people here?&rdquo; he
+      murmured, shivering visibly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst roused himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, abandoned, abandoned. I am alone here&mdash;practically alone; but
+      several empty houses are still standing. No lack of accommodation. We may
+      just as well&mdash;here, Wang, go back to the shore and run the trolley
+      out here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The last words having been spoken in Malay, he explained courteously that
+      he had given directions for the transport of the luggage. Wang had melted
+      into the night&mdash;in his soundless manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My word! Rails laid down and all,&rdquo; exclaimed Ricardo softly, in a tone of
+      admiration. &ldquo;Well, I never!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were working a coal-mine here,&rdquo; said the late manager of the Tropical
+      Belt Coal Company. &ldquo;These are only the ghosts of things that have been.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint puff of
+      wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays on the dark
+      edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the grave of the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might be moving on,&rdquo; proposed Heyst. &ldquo;My Chinaman and that&mdash;ah&mdash;ungrateful
+      servant of yours, with the broken head, can load the things and come along
+      after us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The suggestion was accepted without words. Moving towards the shore, the
+      three men met the trolley, a mere metallic rustle which whisked past them,
+      the shadowy Wang running noiselessly behind. Only the sound of their
+      footsteps accompanied them. It was a long time since so many footsteps had
+      rung together on that jetty. Before they stepped on to the path trodden
+      through the grass, Heyst said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am prevented from offering you a share of my own quarters.&rdquo; The distant
+      courtliness of this beginning arrested the other two suddenly, as if
+      amazed by some manifest incongruity. &ldquo;I should regret it more,&rdquo; he went
+      on, &ldquo;if I were not in a position to give you the choice of those empty
+      bungalows for a temporary home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned round and plunged into the narrow track, the two others
+      following in single file.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Queer start!&rdquo; Ricardo took the opportunity for whispering, as he fell
+      behind Mr. Jones, who swayed in the gloom, enclosed by the stalks of
+      tropical grass, almost as slender as a stalk of grass himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this order they emerged into the open space kept clear of vegetation by
+      Wang's judicious system of periodic firing. The shapes of buildings,
+      unlighted, high-roofed, looked mysteriously extensive and featureless
+      against the increasing glitter of the stars. Heyst was pleased at the
+      absence of light in his bungalow. It looked as uninhabited as the others.
+      He continued to lead the way, inclining to the right. His equable voice
+      was heard:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This one would be the best. It was our counting-house. There is some
+      furniture in it yet. I am pretty certain that you'll find a couple of camp
+      bedsteads in one of the rooms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The high-pitched roof of the bungalow towered up very close, eclipsing the
+      sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here we are. Three steps. As you see, there's a wide veranda. Sorry to
+      keep you waiting for a moment; the door is locked, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was heard trying it. Then he leaned against the rail, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wang will get the keys.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The others waited, two vague shapes nearly mingled together in the
+      darkness of the veranda, from which issued a sudden chattering of Mr.
+      Jones's teeth, directly suppressed, and a slight shuffle of Ricardo's
+      feet. Their guide and host, his back against the rail, seemed to have
+      forgotten their existence. Suddenly he moved, and murmured:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, here's the trolley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he raised his voice in Malay, and was answered, &ldquo;Ya tuan,&rdquo; from an
+      indistinct group that could be made out in the direction of the track.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have sent Wang for the key and a light,&rdquo; he said, in a voice that came
+      out without any particular direction&mdash;a peculiarity which
+      disconcerted Ricardo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang did not tarry long on his mission. Very soon from the distant
+      recesses of obscurity appeared the swinging lantern he carried. It cast a
+      fugitive ray on the arrested trolley with the uncouth figure of the wild
+      Pedro drooping over the load; then it moved towards the bungalow and
+      ascended the stairs. After working at the stiff lock, Wang applied his
+      shoulder to the door. It came open with explosive suddenness, as if in a
+      passion at being thus disturbed after two years' repose. From the dark
+      slope of a tall stand-up writing-desk a forgotten, solitary sheet of paper
+      flew up and settled gracefully on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang and Pedro came and went through the offended door, bringing the
+      things off the trolley, one flitting swiftly in and out, the other
+      staggering heavily. Later, directed by a few quiet words from Number One,
+      Wang made several journeys with the lantern to the store-rooms, bringing
+      in blankets, provisions in tins, coffee, sugar, and a packet of candles.
+      He lighted one, and stuck it on the ledge of the stand-up desk. Meantime
+      Pedro, being introduced to some kindling-wood and a bundle of dry sticks,
+      had busied himself outside in lighting a fire, on which he placed a
+      ready-filled kettle handed to him by Wang impassively, at arm's length, as
+      if across a chasm. Having received the thanks of his guests, Heyst wished
+      them goodnight and withdrew, leaving them to their repose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER EIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Heyst walked away slowly. There was still no light in his bungalow, and he
+      thought that perhaps it was just as well. By this time he was much less
+      perturbed. Wang had preceded him with the lantern, as if in a hurry to get
+      away from the two white men and their hairy attendant. The light was not
+      dancing along any more; it was standing perfectly still by the steps of
+      the veranda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, glancing back casually, saw behind him still another light&mdash;the
+      light of the strangers' open fire. A black, uncouth form, stooping over it
+      monstrously, staggered away into the outlying shadows. The kettle had
+      boiled, probably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With that weird vision of something questionably human impressed upon his
+      senses, Heyst moved on a pace or two. What could the people be who had
+      such a creature for their familiar attendant? He stopped. The vague
+      apprehension, of a distant future, in which he saw Lena unavoidably
+      separated from him by profound and subtle differences; the sceptical
+      carelessness which had accompanied every one of his attempts at action,
+      like a secret reserve of his soul, fell away from him. He no longer
+      belonged to himself. There was a call far more imperious and august. He
+      came up to the bungalow, and at the very limit of the lantern's light, on
+      the top step, he saw her feet and the bottom part of her dress. The rest
+      of her person was suggested dimly as high as her waist. She sat on a
+      chair, and the gloom of the low eaves descended upon her head and
+      shoulders. She didn't stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't gone to sleep here?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no! I was waiting for you&mdash;in the dark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, on the top step, leaned against a wooden pillar, after moving the
+      lantern to one side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking that it is just as well you had no light. But wasn't
+      it dull for you to sit in the dark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't need a light to think of you.&rdquo; Her charming voice gave a value to
+      this banal answer, which had also the merit of truth. Heyst laughed a
+      little, and said that he had had a curious experience. She made no remark.
+      He tried to figure to himself the outlines of her easy pose. A spot of dim
+      light here and there hinted at the unfailing grace of attitude which was
+      one of her natural possessions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had thought of him, but not in connection with the strangers. She had
+      admired him from the first; she had been attracted by his warm voice, his
+      gentle eye, but she had felt him too wonderfully difficult to know. He had
+      given to life a savour, a movement, a promise mingled with menaces, which
+      she had not suspected were to be found in it&mdash;or, at any rate, not by
+      a girl wedded to misery as she was. She said to herself that she must not
+      be irritated because he seemed too self-contained, and as if shut up in a
+      world of his own. When he took her in his arms, she felt that his embrace
+      had a great and compelling force, that he was moved deeply, and that
+      perhaps he would not get tired of her so very soon. She thought that he
+      had opened to her the feelings of delicate joy, that the very uneasiness
+      he caused her was delicious in its sadness, and that she would try to hold
+      him as long as she could&mdash;till her fainting arms, her sinking soul,
+      could cling to him no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wang's not here, of course?&rdquo; Heyst said suddenly. She answered as if in
+      her sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He put this light down here without stopping, and ran.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ran, did he? H'm! Well, it's considerably later than his usual time to go
+      home to his Alfuro wife; but to be seen running is a sort of degradation
+      for Wang, who has mastered the art of vanishing. Do you think he was
+      startled out of his perfection by something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should he be startled?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice remained dreamy, a little uncertain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been startled,&rdquo; Heyst said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was not listening to him. The lantern at their feet threw the shadows
+      of her face upward. Her eyes glistened, as if frightened and attentive,
+      above a lighted chin and a very white throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Upon my word,&rdquo; mused Heyst, &ldquo;now that I don't see them, I can hardly
+      believe that those fellows exist!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what about me?&rdquo; she asked, so swiftly that he made a movement like
+      somebody pounced upon from an ambush. &ldquo;When you don't see me, do you
+      believe that I exist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exist? Most charmingly! My dear Lena, you don't know your own advantages.
+      Why, your voice alone would be enough to make you unforgettable!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I didn't mean forgetting in that way. I dare say if I were to die you
+      would remember me right enough. And what good would that be to anybody?
+      It's while I am alive that I want&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst stood by her chair, a stalwart figure imperfectly lighted. The broad
+      shoulders, the martial face that was like a disguise of his disarmed soul,
+      were lost in the gloom above the plane of light in which his feet were
+      planted. He suffered from a trouble with which she had nothing to do. She
+      had no general conception of the conditions of the existence he had
+      offered to her. Drawn into its peculiar stagnation she remained unrelated
+      to it because of her ignorance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For instance, she could never perceive the prodigious improbability of the
+      arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it. Perhaps she
+      had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst resolved suddenly to say
+      nothing more of it. It was not that he shrank from alarming her. Not
+      feeling anything definite himself he could not imagine a precise effect
+      being produced on her by any amount of explanation. There is a quality in
+      events which is apprehended differently by different minds or even by the
+      same mind at different times. Any man living at all consciously knows that
+      embarrassing truth. Heyst was aware that this visit could bode nothing
+      pleasant. In his present soured temper towards all mankind he looked upon
+      it as a visitation of a particularly offensive kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced along the veranda in the direction of the other bungalow. The
+      fire of sticks in front of it had gone out. No faint glow of embers, not
+      the slightest thread of light in that direction, hinted at the presence of
+      strangers. The darker shapes in the obscurity, the dead silence, betrayed
+      nothing of that strange intrusion. The peace of Samburan asserted itself
+      as on any other night. Everything was as before, except&mdash;Heyst became
+      aware of it suddenly&mdash;that for a whole minute, perhaps, with his hand
+      on the back of the girl's chair and within a foot of her person, he had
+      lost the sense of her existence, for the first time since he had brought
+      her over to share this invincible, this undefiled peace. He picked up the
+      lantern, and the act made a silent stir all along the veranda. A spoke of
+      shadow swung swiftly across her face, and the strong light rested on the
+      immobility of her features, as of a woman looking at a vision. Her eyes
+      were still, her lips serious. Her dress, open at the neck, stirred
+      slightly to her even breathing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had better go in, Lena,&rdquo; suggested Heyst, very low, as if breaking a
+      spell cautiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose without a word. Heyst followed her indoors. As they passed
+      through the living-room, he left the lantern burning on the centre table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER NINE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That night the girl woke up, for the first time in her new experience,
+      with the sensation of having been abandoned to her own devices. She woke
+      up from a painful dream of separation brought about in a way which she
+      could not understand, and missed the relief of the waking instant. The
+      desolate feeling of being alone persisted. She was really alone. A
+      night-light made it plain enough, in the dim, mysterious manner of a
+      dream; but this was reality. It startled her exceedingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway, and raised it
+      with a steady hand. The conditions of their life in Samburan would have
+      made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her character. This was not a
+      movement of curiosity, but of downright alarm&mdash;the continued distress
+      and fear of the dream. The night could not have been very far advanced.
+      The light of the lantern was burning strongly, striping the floor and
+      walls of the room with thick black bands. She hardly knew whether she
+      expected to see Heyst or not; but she saw him at once, standing by the
+      table in his sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway. She stepped in
+      noiselessly with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall behind her.
+      Something characteristic in Heyst's attitude made her say, almost in a
+      whisper:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are looking for something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not have heard her before; but he didn't start at the unexpected
+      whisper. He only pushed the drawer of the table in and, without even
+      looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting her presence as if he
+      had been aware of all her movements:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, are you certain that Wang didn't go through this room this
+      evening?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wang? When?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After leaving the lantern, I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no. He ran on. I watched him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or before, perhaps&mdash;while I was with these boat people? Do you know?
+      Can you tell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly think so. I came out as the sun went down, and sat outside till
+      you came back to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard nothing in here,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Naturally you wouldn't hear. He can be as quiet as a shadow, when he
+      likes. I believe he could steal the pillows from under our heads. He might
+      have been here ten minutes ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What woke you up? Was it a noise?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't say that. Generally one can't tell, but is it likely, Lena? You
+      are, I believe, the lighter sleeper of us two. A noise loud enough to wake
+      me up would have awakened you, too. I tried to be as quiet as I could.
+      What roused you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know&mdash;a dream, perhaps. I woke up crying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was the dream?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her direction,
+      his round, uncovered head set on a fighter's muscular neck. She left his
+      question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it you have missed?&rdquo; she asked in her turn, very grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses for the
+      night. Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity of its width,
+      its unshining whiteness. It was a sculptural forehead. He had a moment of
+      acute appreciation intruding upon another order of thoughts. It was as if
+      there could be no end of his discoveries about that girl, at the most
+      incongruous moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong&mdash;one of Heyst's few
+      purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made. He had forgotten
+      all about it till she came, and then had found it at the bottom of an old
+      sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days. She had quickly learned
+      to wind it up under her armpits with a safe twist, as Malay village girls
+      do when going down to bathe in a river. Her shoulders and arms were bare;
+      one of her tresses, hanging forward, looked almost black against the white
+      skin. As she was taller than the average Malay woman, the sarong ended a
+      good way above her ankles. She stood poised firmly, half-way between the
+      table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her bare feet gleaming
+      like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor. The fall of her
+      lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her arms hanging down
+      her sides, her immobility, too, had something statuesque, the charm of art
+      tense with life. She was not very big&mdash;Heyst used to think of her, at
+      first, as &ldquo;that poor little girl,&rdquo;&mdash;but revealed free from the shabby
+      banality of a white platform dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong,
+      there was that in her form and in the proportions of her body which
+      suggested a reduction from a heroic size.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved forward a step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it you have missed?&rdquo; she asked again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of
+      darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in a path
+      of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was his turn to
+      ignore a question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You woke up in a fright, you say?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's face and
+      shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise, but her
+      expression was serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't there,
+      and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream&mdash;the
+      first I've had, too, since&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't believe in dreams, do you?&rdquo; asked Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what
+      dreams mean, for a shilling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?&rdquo; inquired Heyst
+      jocularly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking world,
+      while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have missed something out of this drawer,&rdquo; she said positively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them and come
+      back to this again, as people do. It's difficult to believe the evidence
+      of my own senses; but it isn't there. Now, Lena, are you sure that you
+      didn't&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lena!&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he had not
+      made. It was what a servant might have said&mdash;an inferior open to
+      suspicion&mdash;or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at being so
+      wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being instinctively
+      aware of the place he had secretly given her in his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;we are strangers to each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke calmly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that the
+      Chinaman has been in this room tonight?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You suspect him?&rdquo; she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't want to tell me what it is?&rdquo; she inquired, in the equable tone
+      in which one takes a fact into account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst only smiled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing very precious, as far as value goes,&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought it might have been money,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Money!&rdquo; exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether
+      preposterous. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add: &ldquo;Of
+      course, there is some money in the house&mdash;there, in that
+      writing-desk, the drawer on the left. It's not locked. You can pull it
+      right out. There is a recess, and the board at the back pivots: a very
+      simple hiding-place, when you know the way to it. I discovered it by
+      accident, and I keep our store of sovereigns in there. The treasure, my
+      dear, is not big enough to require a cavern.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in that
+      unlocked left drawer. I have no doubt Wang knows what there is in it, but
+      he isn't a thief, and that's why I&mdash;no, Lena, what I've missed is not
+      gold or jewels; and that's what makes the fact interesting&mdash;which the
+      theft of money cannot be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money. A great
+      curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from pressing him
+      with questions. She only gave him one of her deep-gleaming smiles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't me so it must be Wang. You ought to make him give it back to
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst said nothing to that naive and practical suggestion, for the object
+      that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had never used
+      in his life. Ever since the London furniture had arrived in Samburan, it
+      had been reposing in the drawer of the table. The real dangers of life,
+      for him, were not those which could be repelled by swords or bullets. On
+      the other hand neither his manner nor his appearance looked sufficiently
+      inoffensive to expose him to light-minded aggression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer in
+      the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly&mdash;which was very
+      unusual with him. He had found himself sitting up and extremely wide awake
+      all at once, with the girl reposing by his side, lying with her face away
+      from him, a vague, characteristically feminine form in the dim light. She
+      was perfectly still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and the
+      sides of the mosquito net were looped up. Heyst swung his feet to the
+      floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had become aware
+      of his intention to get up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why he did this he did not know. He didn't wish to wake her up, and the
+      slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very loud to him. He turned
+      round apprehensively and waited for her to move, but she did not stir.
+      While he looked at her, he had a vision of himself lying there too, also
+      fast asleep, and&mdash;it occurred to him for the first time in his life&mdash;very
+      defenceless. This quite novel impression of the dangers of slumber made
+      him think suddenly of his revolver. He left the bedroom with noiseless
+      footsteps. The lightness of the curtain he had to lift as he passed out,
+      and the outer door, wide open on the blackness of the veranda&mdash;for
+      the roof eaves came down low, shutting out the starlight&mdash;gave him a
+      sense of having been dangerously exposed, he could not have said to what.
+      He pulled the drawer open. Its emptiness cut his train of self-communion
+      short. He murmured to the assertive fact:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impossible! Somewhere else!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked
+      whispers of memory were not encouraging. Foraging in every receptacle and
+      nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly to the conclusion
+      that it was not in that room. Neither was it in the other. The whole
+      bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a profuse allowance of veranda all
+      round. Heyst stepped out on the veranda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's Wang, beyond a doubt,&rdquo; he thought, staring into the night. &ldquo;He has
+      got hold of it for some reason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materializing
+      suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at any moment, and
+      toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger was so irremediable
+      that it was not worth worrying about, any more than the general
+      precariousness of human life. Heyst speculated on this added risk. How
+      long had he been at the mercy of a slender yellow finger on the trigger?
+      That is, if that was the fellow's reason for purloining the revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shoot and inherit,&rdquo; thought Heyst. &ldquo;Very simple.&rdquo; Yet there was in his
+      mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of vegetables
+      in the light of a murderer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it wasn't that. For Wang could have done it any time this last twelve
+      months or more&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst's mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed himself
+      of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at that period
+      of his speculation his point of view changed. It struck him with the force
+      of manifest certitude that the revolver had been taken only late in the
+      day, or on that very night. Wang, of course. But why? So there had been no
+      danger in the past. It was all ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has me at his mercy now,&rdquo; thought Heyst, without particular
+      excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in it: it
+      was as if he were considering somebody else's strange predicament. But
+      even that sort of interest was dying out when, looking to his left, he saw
+      the accustomed shapes of the other bungalows looming in the night, and
+      remembered the arrival of the thirsty company in the boat. Wang would
+      hardly risk such a crime in the presence of other white men. It was a
+      peculiar instance of the &ldquo;safety in numbers,&rdquo; principle, which somehow was
+      not much to Heyst's taste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and
+      unsatisfactory thought. He had just made up his mind that he must breathe
+      nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind him. She had
+      taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to turn round at once
+      under the impression that she might read his trouble in his face. Yes, she
+      had taken him by surprise, and for that reason the conversation which
+      began was not exactly as he would have conducted it if he had been
+      prepared for her pointblank question. He ought to have said at once: &ldquo;I've
+      missed nothing.&rdquo; It was a deplorable thing that he should have let it come
+      so far as to have her ask what it was he missed. He closed the
+      conversation by saying lightly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's an object of very small value. Don't worry about it&mdash;it isn't
+      worth while. The best you can do is to go and lie down again, Lena.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked: &ldquo;And you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda. I don't feel sleepy for
+      the moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, don't be long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a frown on
+      his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the veranda. He
+      glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the stars how the night
+      went on. It was going very slowly. Why it should have irked him he did not
+      know, for he had nothing to expect from the dawn; but everything round him
+      had become unreasonable, unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying him under
+      an obligation, but giving him no line of action. He felt contemptuously
+      irritated with the situation. The outer world had broken upon him; and he
+      did not know what wrong he had done to bring this on himself, any more
+      than he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible calumny about his
+      treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget this. It had reached
+      the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect confidence in the
+      rectitude of his conduct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she only half disbelieves it,&rdquo; he thought, with hopeless humiliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength from
+      him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no desire to do anything&mdash;neither
+      to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the revolver nor to find out from
+      the strangers who they were, and how their predicament had come about. He
+      flung his glowing cigar away into the night. But Samburan was no longer a
+      solitude wherein he could indulge in all his moods. The fiery parabolic
+      path the cast-out stump traced in the air was seen from another veranda at
+      a distance of some twenty yards. It was noted as a symptom of importance
+      by an observer with his faculties greedy for signs, and in a state of
+      alertness tense enough almost to hear the grass grow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER TEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The observer was Martin Ricardo. To him life was not a matter of passive
+      renunciation, but of a particularly active warfare. He was not mistrustful
+      of it, he was not disgusted with it, still less was he inclined to be
+      suspicious of its disenchantments; but he was vividly aware that it held
+      many possibilities of failure. Though very far from being a pessimist, he
+      was not a man of foolish illusions. He did not like failure, not only
+      because of its unpleasant and dangerous consequences, but also because of
+      its damaging effect upon his own appreciation of Martin Ricardo. And this
+      was a special job, of his own contriving, and of considerable novelty. It
+      was not, so to speak, in his usual line of business&mdash;except, perhaps,
+      from a moral standpoint, about which he was not likely to trouble his
+      head. For these reasons Martin Ricardo was unable to sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones, after repeated shivering fits, and after drinking much hot tea,
+      had apparently fallen into deep slumber. He had very peremptorily
+      discouraged attempts at conversation on the part of his faithful follower.
+      Ricardo listened to his regular breathing. It was all very well for the
+      governor. He looked upon it as a sort of sport. A gentleman naturally
+      would. But this ticklish and important job had to be pulled off at all
+      costs, both for honour and for safety. Ricardo rose quietly, and made his
+      way on the veranda. He could not lie still. He wanted to go out for air,
+      and he had a feeling that by the force of his eagerness even the darkness
+      and the silence could be made to yield something to his eyes and ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He noted the stars, and stepped back again into the dense darkness. He
+      resisted the growing impulse to go out and steal towards the other
+      bungalow. It would have been madness to start prowling in the dark on
+      unknown ground. And for what end? Unless to relieve the oppression.
+      Immobility lay on his limbs like a leaden garment. And yet he was
+      unwilling to give up. He persisted in his objectless vigil. The man of the
+      island was keeping quiet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at that moment that Ricardo's eyes caught the vanishing red trail
+      of light made by the cigar&mdash;a startling revelation of the man's
+      wakefulness. He could not suppress a low &ldquo;Hallo!&rdquo; and began to sidle along
+      towards the door, with his shoulders rubbing the wall. For all he knew,
+      the man might have been out in front by this time, observing the veranda.
+      As a matter of fact, after flinging away the cheroot, Heyst had gone
+      indoors with the feeling of a man who gives up an unprofitable occupation.
+      But Ricardo fancied he could hear faint footfalls on the open ground, and
+      dodged quickly into the room. There he drew breath, and meditated for a
+      while. His next step was to feel for the matches on the tall desk, and to
+      light the candle. He had to communicate to his governor views and
+      reflections of such importance that it was absolutely necessary for him to
+      watch their effect on the very countenance of the hearer. At first he had
+      thought that these matters could have waited till daylight; but Heyst's
+      wakefulness, disclosed in that startling way, made him feel suddenly
+      certain that there could be no sleep for him that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said as much to his governor. When the little dagger-like flame had
+      done its best to dispel the darkness, Mr. Jones was to be seen reposing on
+      a camp bedstead, in a distant part of the room. A railway rug concealed
+      his spare form up to his very head, which rested on the other railway rug
+      rolled up for a pillow. Ricardo plumped himself down cross-legged on the
+      floor, very close to the low bedstead; so that Mr. Jones&mdash;who perhaps
+      had not been so very profoundly asleep&mdash;on opening his eyes found
+      them conveniently levelled at the face of his secretary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh? What is it you say? No sleep for you tonight? But why can't you let
+      <i>me</i> sleep? Confound your fussiness!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because that there fellow can't sleep&mdash;that's why. Dash me if he
+      hasn't been doing a think just now! What business has he to think in the
+      middle of the night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was out, sir&mdash;up in the middle of the night. My own eyes saw it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how do you know that he was up to think?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Jones. &ldquo;It
+      might have been anything&mdash;toothache, for instance. And you may have
+      dreamed it for all I know. Didn't you try to sleep?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir. I didn't even try to go to sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo informed his patron of his vigil on the veranda, and of the
+      revelation which put an end to it. He concluded that a man up with a cigar
+      in the middle of the night must be doing a think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones raised himself on his elbow. This sign of interest comforted his
+      faithful henchman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seems to me it's time we did a little think ourselves,&rdquo; added Ricardo,
+      with more assurance. Long as they had been together the moods of his
+      governor were still a source of anxiety to his simple soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are always making a fuss,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones, in a tolerant tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, but not for nothing, am I? You can't say that, sir. Mine may not be a
+      gentleman's way of looking round a thing, but it isn't a fool's way,
+      either. You've admitted that much yourself at odd times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo was growing warmly argumentative. Mr. Jones interrupted him
+      without heat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't roused me to talk about yourself, I presume?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo; Ricardo remained silent for a minute, with the tip of his
+      tongue caught between his teeth. &ldquo;I don't think I could tell you anything
+      about myself that you don't know,&rdquo; he continued. There was a sort of
+      amused satisfaction in his tone which changed completely as he went on.
+      &ldquo;It's that man, over there, that's got to be talked over. I don't like
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He, failed to observe the flicker of a ghastly smile on his governor's
+      lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you?&rdquo; murmured Mr. Jones, whose face, as he reclined on his elbow,
+      was on a level with the top of his follower's head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo; said Ricardo emphatically. The candle from the other side of
+      the room threw his monstrous black shadow on the wall. &ldquo;He&mdash;I don't
+      know how to say it&mdash;he isn't hearty-like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones agreed languidly in his own manner:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He seems to be a very self-possessed man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, that's it. Self&mdash;&rdquo; Ricardo choked with indignation. &ldquo;I would
+      soon let out some of his self-possession through a hole between his ribs,
+      if this weren't a special job!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones had been making his own reflections, for he asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think he is suspicious?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see very well what he can be suspicious of,&rdquo; pondered Ricardo.
+      &ldquo;Yet there he was doing a think. And what could be the object of it? What
+      made him get out of his bed in the middle of the night. 'Tain't fleas,
+      surely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bad conscience, perhaps,&rdquo; suggested Mr. Jones jocularly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His faithful secretary suffered from irritation, and did not see the joke.
+      In a fretful tone he declared that there was no such thing as conscience.
+      There was such a thing as funk; but there was nothing to make that fellow
+      funky in any special way. He admitted, however, that the man might have
+      been uneasy at the arrival of strangers, because of all that plunder of
+      his put away somewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo glanced here and there, as if he were afraid of being overheard by
+      the heavy shadows cast by the dim light all over the room. His patron,
+      very quiet, spoke in a calm whisper:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And perhaps that hotel-keeper has been lying to you about him. He may be
+      a very poor devil indeed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo shook his head slightly. The Schombergian theory of Heyst had
+      become in him a profound conviction, which he had absorbed as naturally as
+      a sponge takes up water. His patron's doubts were a wanton denying of what
+      was self-evident; but Ricardo's voice remained as before, a soft purring
+      with a snarling undertone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sup-prised at you, sir! It's the very way them tame ones&mdash;the
+      common 'yporcrits of the world&mdash;get on. When it comes to plunder
+      drifting under one's very nose, there's not one of them that would keep
+      his hands off. And I don't blame them. It's the way they do it that sets
+      my back up. Just look at the story of how he got rid of that pal of his!
+      Send a man home to croak of a cold on the chest&mdash;that's one of your
+      tame tricks. And d'you mean to say, sir, that a man that's up to it
+      wouldn't bag whatever he could lay his hands in his 'yporcritical way?
+      What was all that coal business? Tame citizen dodge; 'yporcrisy&mdash;nothing
+      else. No, no, sir! The thing is to extract it from him as neatly as
+      possible. That's the job; and it isn't so simple as it looks. I reckon you
+      have looked at it all round, sir, before you took up the notion of this
+      trip.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo; Mr. Jones was hardly audible, staring far away from his couch. &ldquo;I
+      didn't think about it much. I was bored.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, that you were&mdash;bad. I was feeling pretty desperate that
+      afternoon, when that bearded softy of a landlord got talking to me about
+      this fellow here. Quite accidentally, it was. Well, sir, here we are after
+      a mighty narrow squeak. I feel all limp yet; but never mind&mdash;his swag
+      will pay for the lot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's all alone here,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones in a hollow murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-es, in a way. Yes, alone enough. Yes, you may say he is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's that Chinaman, though.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, there's the Chink,&rdquo; assented Ricardo rather absentmindedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was debating in his mind the advisability of making a clean breast of
+      his knowledge of the girl's existence. Finally he concluded he wouldn't.
+      The enterprise was difficult enough without complicating it with an upset
+      to the sensibilities of the gentleman with whom he had the honour of being
+      associated. Let the discovery come of itself, he thought, and then he
+      could swear that he had known nothing of that offensive presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not need to lie. He had only to hold his tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he muttered reflectively, &ldquo;there's that Chink, certainly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At bottom, he felt a certain ambiguous respect for his governor's
+      exaggerated dislike of women, as if that horror of feminine presence were
+      a sort of depraved morality; but still morality, since he counted it as an
+      advantage. It prevented many undesirable complications. He did not pretend
+      to understand it. He did not even try to investigate this idiosyncrasy of
+      his chief. All he knew was that he himself was differently inclined, and
+      that it did not make him any happier or safer. He did not know how he
+      would have acted if he had been knocking about the world on his own.
+      Luckily he was a subordinate, not a wage-slave but a follower&mdash;which
+      was a restraint. Yes! The other sort of disposition simplified matters in
+      general; it wasn't to be gainsaid. But it was clear that it could also
+      complicate them&mdash;as in this most important and, in Ricardo's view,
+      already sufficiently delicate case. And the worst of it was that one could
+      not tell exactly in what precise manner it would act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was unnatural, he thought somewhat peevishly. How was one to reckon up
+      the unnatural? There were no rules for that. The faithful henchman of
+      plain Mr. Jones, foreseeing many difficulties of a material order, decided
+      to keep the girl out of the governor's knowledge, out of his sight, too,
+      for as long a time as it could be managed. That, alas, seemed to be at
+      most a matter of a few hours; whereas Ricardo feared that to get the
+      affair properly going would take some days. Once well started, he was not
+      afraid of his gentleman failing him. As is often the case with lawless
+      natures, Ricardo's faith in any given individual was of a simple,
+      unquestioning character. For man must have some support in life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cross-legged, his head drooping a little and perfectly still, he might
+      have been meditating in a bonze-like attitude upon the sacred syllable
+      &ldquo;Om.&rdquo; It was a striking illustration of the untruth of appearances, for
+      his contempt for the world was of a severely practical kind. There was
+      nothing oriental about Ricardo but the amazing quietness of his pose. Mr.
+      Jones was also very quiet. He had let his head sink on the rolled-up rug,
+      and lay stretched out on his side with his back to the light. In that
+      position the shadows gathered in the cavities of his eyes made them look
+      perfectly empty. When he spoke, his ghostly voice had only to travel a few
+      inches straight into Ricardo's left ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you say something, now that you've got me awake?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if you were sleeping as sound as you are trying to make out,
+      sir,&rdquo; said the unmoved Ricardo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; repeated Mr. Jones. &ldquo;At any rate, I was resting quietly!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, sir!&rdquo; Ricardo's whisper was alarmed. &ldquo;You don't mean to say you're
+      going to be bored?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite right!&rdquo; The secretary was very much relieved. &ldquo;There's no occasion
+      to be, I can tell you, sir,&rdquo; he whispered earnestly. &ldquo;Anything but that!
+      If I didn't say anything for a bit, it ain't because there isn't plenty to
+      talk about. Ay, more than enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter with you?&rdquo; breathed out his patron. &ldquo;Are you going to
+      turn pessimist?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me turn? No, sir! I ain't of those that turn. You may call me hard names,
+      if you like, but you know very well that I ain't a croaker.&rdquo; Ricardo
+      changed his tone. &ldquo;If I said nothing for a while, it was because I was
+      meditating over the Chink, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were? Waste of time, my Martin. A Chinaman is unfathomable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo admitted that this might be so. Anyhow, a Chink was neither here
+      nor there, as a general thing, unfathomable as he might be; but a Swedish
+      baron wasn't&mdash;couldn't be! The woods were full of such barons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that he is so tame,&rdquo; was Mr. Jones's remark, in a sepulchral
+      undertone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean, sir? He ain't a rabbit, of course. You couldn't
+      hypnotize him, as I saw you do to more than one Dago, and other kinds of
+      tame citizens, when it came to the point of holding them down to a game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you reckon on that,&rdquo; murmured plain Mr. Jones seriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir, I don't, though you have a wonderful power of the eye. It's a
+      fact.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a wonderful patience,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dim smile flitted over the lips of the faithful Ricardo who never raised
+      his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to try you too much, sir, but this is like no other job we
+      ever turned our minds to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps not. At any rate let us think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A weariness with the monotony of life was reflected in the tone of this
+      qualified assent. It jarred on the nerves of the sanguine Ricardo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us think of the way to go to work,&rdquo; he retorted a little impatiently.
+      &ldquo;He's a deep one. Just look at the way he treated that chum of his. Did
+      you ever hear of anything so low? And the artfulness of the beast&mdash;the
+      dirty, tame artfulness!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you start moralizing, Martin,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones warningly. &ldquo;As far as
+      I can make out the story that German hotel-keeper told you, it seems to
+      show a certain amount of character;&mdash;and independence from common
+      feelings which is not usual. It's very remarkable, if true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, ay! Very remarkable. It's mighty low down, all the same,&rdquo; muttered,
+      Ricardo obstinately. &ldquo;I must say I am glad to think he will be paid off
+      for it in a way that'll surprise him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tip of his tongue appeared lively for an instant, as if trying for the
+      taste of that ferocious retribution on his compressed lips. For Ricardo
+      was sincere in his indignation before the elementary principle of loyalty
+      to a chum violated in cold blood, slowly, in a patient duplicity of years.
+      There are standards in villainy as in virtue, and the act as he pictured
+      it to himself acquired an additional horror from the slow pace of that
+      treachery so atrocious and so tame. But he understood too the educated
+      judgement of his governor, a gentleman looking on all this with the
+      privileged detachment of a cultivated mind, of an elevated personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, he's deep&mdash;he's artful,&rdquo; he mumbled between his sharp teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confound you!&rdquo; Mr. Jones's calm whisper crept into his ear. &ldquo;Come to the
+      point.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Obedient, the secretary shook off his thoughtfulness. There was a
+      similarity of mind between these two&mdash;one the outcast of his vices,
+      the other inspired by a spirit of scornful defiance, the aggressiveness of
+      a beast of prey looking upon all the tame creatures of the earth as its
+      natural victim. Both were astute enough, however, and both were aware that
+      they had plunged into this adventure without a sufficient scrutiny of
+      detail. The figure of a lonely man far from all assistance had loomed up
+      largely, fascinating and defenceless in the middle of the sea, filling the
+      whole field of their vision. There had not seemed to be any need for
+      thinking. As Schomberg had been saying: &ldquo;Three to one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But it did not look so simple now in the face of that solitude which was
+      like an armour for this man. The feeling voiced by the henchman in his own
+      way&mdash;&ldquo;We don't seem much forwarder now we are here&rdquo; was acknowledged
+      by the silence of the patron. It was easy enough to rip a fellow up or
+      drill a hole in him, whether he was alone or not, Ricardo reflected in
+      low, confidential tones, but&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He isn't alone,&rdquo; Mr. Jones said faintly, in his attitude of a man
+      composed for sleep. &ldquo;Don't forget that Chinaman.&rdquo; Ricardo started
+      slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, ay&mdash;the Chink!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo had been on the point of confessing about the girl; but no! He
+      wanted his governor to be unperturbed and steady. Vague thoughts, which he
+      hardly dared to look in the face, were stirring his brain in connection
+      with that girl. She couldn't be much account, he thought. She could be
+      frightened. And there were also other possibilities. The Chink, however,
+      could be considered openly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I was thinking about it, sir,&rdquo; he went on earnestly, &ldquo;is this&mdash;here
+      we've got a man. He's nothing. If he won't be good, he can be made quiet.
+      That's easy. But then there's his plunder. He doesn't carry it in his
+      pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope not,&rdquo; breathed Mr. Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Same here. It's too big, we know, but if he were alone, he would not feel
+      worried about it overmuch&mdash;I mean the safety of the pieces. He would
+      just put the lot into any box or drawer that was handy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir. He would keep it under his eye, as it were. Why not? It is
+      natural. A fellow doesn't put his swag underground, unless there's a very
+      good reason for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very good reason, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir. What do you think a fellow is&mdash;a mole?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From his experience, Ricardo declared that man was not a burrowing beast.
+      Even the misers very seldom buried their hoard, unless for exceptional
+      reasons. In the given situation of a man alone on an island, the company
+      of a Chink was a very good reason. Drawers would not be safe, nor boxes,
+      either, from a prying, slant-eyed Chink. No, sir, unless a safe&mdash;a
+      proper office safe. But the safe was there in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there a safe in this room? I didn't notice it,&rdquo; whispered Mr. Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was because the thing was painted white, like the walls of the room;
+      and besides, it was tucked away in the shadows of a corner. Mr. Jones had
+      been too tired to observe anything on his first coming ashore; but Ricardo
+      had very soon spotted the characteristic form. He only wished he could
+      believe that the plunder of treachery, duplicity, and all the moral
+      abominations of Heyst had been there. But no; the blamed thing was open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It might have been there at one time or another,&rdquo; he commented gloomily,
+      &ldquo;but it isn't there now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man did not elect to live in this house,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones. &ldquo;And by
+      the by, what could he have meant by speaking of circumstances which
+      prevented him lodging us in the other bungalow? You remember what he said,
+      Martin? Sounded cryptic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Martin, who remembered and understood the phrase as directly motived by
+      the existence of the girl, waited a little before saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some of his artfulness, sir; and not the worst of it either. That manner
+      of his to us, this asking no questions, is some more of his artfulness. A
+      man's bound to be curious, and he is; yet he goes on as if he didn't care.
+      He does care&mdash;or else what was he doing up with a cigar in the middle
+      of the night, doing a think? I don't like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He may be outside, observing the light here, and saying the very same
+      thing to himself of our own wakefulness,&rdquo; gravely suggested Ricardo's
+      governor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He may be, sir; but this is too important to be talked over in the dark.
+      And the light is all right, it can be accounted for. There's a light in
+      this bungalow in the middle of the night because&mdash;why, because you
+      are not well. Not well, sir&mdash;that's what's the matter, and you will
+      have to act up to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The consideration had suddenly occurred to the faithful henchman, in the
+      light of a felicitous expedient to keep his governor and the girl apart as
+      long as possible. Mr. Jones received the suggestion without the slightest
+      stir, even in the deep sockets of his eyes, where a steady, faint gleam
+      was the only thing telling of life and attention in his attenuated body.
+      But Ricardo, as soon as he had enunciated his happy thought, perceived in
+      it other possibilities more to the point and of greater practical
+      advantage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With your looks, sir, it will be easy enough,&rdquo; he went on evenly, as if
+      no silence had intervened, always respectful, but frank, with perfect
+      simplicity of purpose. &ldquo;All you've got to do is just to lie down quietly.
+      I noticed him looking sort of surprised at you on the wharf, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At these words, a naive tribute to the aspect of his physique, even more
+      suggestive of the grave than of the sick-bed, a fold appeared on that side
+      of the governor's face which was exposed to the dim light&mdash;a deep,
+      shadowy, semicircular fold from the side of the nose to bottom of the chin&mdash;a
+      silent smile. By a side-glance Ricardo had noted this play of features. He
+      smiled, too, appreciative, encouraged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you as hard as nails all the time,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Hang me if anybody
+      would believe you aren't sick, if I were to swear myself black in the
+      face! Give us a day or two to look into matters and size up that
+      'yporcrit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo's eyes remained fixed on his crossed shins. The chief, in his
+      lifeless accents, approved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps it would be a good idea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Chink, he's nothing. He can be made quiet any time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One of Ricardo's hands, reposing palm upwards on his folded legs, made a
+      swift thrusting gesture, repeated by the enormous darting shadow of an arm
+      very low on the wall. It broke the spell of perfect stillness in the room.
+      The secretary eyed moodily the wall from which the shadow had gone.
+      Anybody could be made quiet, he pointed out. It was not anything that the
+      Chink could do; no, it was the effect that his company must have produced
+      on the conduct of the doomed man. A man! What was a man? A Swedish baron
+      could be ripped up, or else holed by a shot, as easily as any other
+      creature; but that was exactly what was to be avoided, till one knew where
+      he had hidden his plunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shouldn't think it would be some sort of hole in his bungalow,&rdquo; argued
+      Ricardo with real anxiety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No. A house can be burnt&mdash;set on fire accidentally, or on purpose,
+      while a man's asleep. Under the house&mdash;or in some crack, cranny, or
+      crevice? Something told him it wasn't that. The anguish of mental effort
+      contracted Ricardo's brow. The skin of his head seemed to move in this
+      travail of vain and tormenting suppositions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you think a fellow is, sir&mdash;a baby?&rdquo; he said, in answer to
+      Mr. Jones's objections. &ldquo;I am trying to find out what I would do myself.
+      He wouldn't be likely to be cleverer than I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what do you know about yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones seemed to watch his follower's perplexities with amusement
+      concealed in a death-like composure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo disregarded the question. The material vision of the spoil
+      absorbed all his faculties. A great vision! He seemed to see it. A few
+      small canvas bags tied up with thin cord, their distended rotundity
+      showing the inside pressure of the disk-like forms of coins&mdash;gold,
+      solid, heavy, eminently portable. Perhaps steel cash-boxes with a chased
+      design, on the covers; or perhaps a black and brass box with a handle on
+      the top, and full of goodness knows what. Bank notes? Why not? The fellow
+      had been going home; so it was surely something worth going home with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he may have put it anywhere outside&mdash;anywhere!&rdquo; cried Ricardo in
+      a deadened voice, &ldquo;in the forest&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was it! A temporary darkness replaced the dim light of the room. The
+      darkness of the forest at night and in it the gleam of a lantern, by which
+      a figure is digging at the foot of a tree-trunk. As likely as not, another
+      figure holding that lantern&mdash;ha, feminine! The girl!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prudent Ricardo stifled a picturesque and profane exclamation, partly
+      joy, partly dismay. Had the girl been trusted or mistrusted by that man?
+      Whatever it was, it was bound to be wholly! With women there could be no
+      half-measures. He could not imagine a fellow half-trusting a woman in that
+      intimate relation to himself, and in those particular circumstances of
+      conquest and loneliness where no confidences could appear dangerous since,
+      apparently, there could be no one she could give him away to. Moreover, in
+      nine cases out of ten the woman would be trusted. But, trusted or
+      mistrusted, was her presence a favourable or unfavourable condition of the
+      problem? That was the question!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The temptation to consult his chief, to talk over the weighty fact, and
+      get his opinion on it, was great indeed. Ricardo resisted it; but the
+      agony of his solitary mental conflict was extremely sharp. A woman in a
+      problem is an incalculable quantity, even if you have something to go upon
+      in forming your guess. How much more so when you haven't even once caught
+      sight of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swift as were his mental processes, he felt that a longer silence was
+      inadvisable. He hastened to speak:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And do you see us, sir, you and I, with a couple of spades having to
+      tackle this whole confounded island?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He allowed himself a slight movement of the arm. The shadow enlarged it
+      into a sweeping gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This seems rather discouraging, Martin,&rdquo; murmured the unmoved governor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We mustn't be discouraged&mdash;that's all!&rdquo; retorted his henchman. &ldquo;And
+      after what we had to go through in that boat too! Why it would be&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He couldn't find the qualifying words. Very calm, faithful, and yet
+      astute, he expressed his new-born hopes darkly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something's sure to turn up to give us a hint; only this job can't be
+      rushed. You may depend on me to pick up the least little bit of a hint;
+      but you, sir&mdash;you've got to play him very gently. For the rest you
+      can trust me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; but I ask myself what YOU are trusting to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our luck,&rdquo; said the faithful Ricardo. &ldquo;Don't say a word against that. It
+      might spoil the run of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a superstitious beggar. No, I won't say anything against it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's right, sir. Don't you even think lightly of it. Luck's not to be
+      played with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, luck's a delicate thing,&rdquo; assented Mr. Jones in a dreamy whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A short silence ensued, which Ricardo ended in a discreet and tentative
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talking of luck, I suppose he could be made to take a hand with you, sir&mdash;two-handed
+      picket or ekkarty, you being seedy and keeping indoors&mdash;just to pass
+      the time. For all we know, he may be one of them hot ones once they start&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it likely?&rdquo; came coldly from the principal. &ldquo;Considering what we know
+      of his history&mdash;say with his partner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True, sir. He's a cold-blooded beast; a cold-blooded, inhuman&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I'll tell you another thing that isn't likely. He would not be likely
+      to let himself be stripped bare. We haven't to do with a young fool that
+      can be led on by chaff or flattery, and in the end simply overawed. This
+      is a calculating man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo recognized that clearly. What he had in his mind was something on
+      a small scale, just to keep the enemy busy while he, Ricardo, had time to
+      nose around a bit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You could even lose a little money to him, sir,&rdquo; he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo was thoughtful for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He strikes me, too, as the sort of man to start prancing when one didn't
+      expect it. What do you think, sir? Is he a man that would prance? That is,
+      if something startled him. More likely to prance than to run&mdash;what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer came at once, because Mr. Jones understood the peculiar idiom
+      of his faithful follower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, without doubt! Without doubt!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It does me good to hear that you think so. He's a prancing beast, and so
+      we mustn't startle him&mdash;not till I have located the stuff. Afterwards&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo paused, sinister in the stillness of his pose. Suddenly he got up
+      with a swift movement and gazed down at his chief in moody abstraction.
+      Mr. Jones did not stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's one thing that's worrying me,&rdquo; began Ricardo in a subdued voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only one?&rdquo; was the faint comment from the motionless body on the
+      bedstead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean more than all the others put together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's grave news.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, grave enough. It's this&mdash;how do you feel in yourself, sir? Are
+      you likely to get bored? I know them fits come on you suddenly; but surely
+      you can tell&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Martin, you are an ass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The moody face of the secretary brightened up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really, sir? Well, I am quite content to be on these terms&mdash;I mean
+      as long as you don't get bored. It wouldn't do, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For coolness, Ricardo had thrown open his shirt and rolled up his sleeves.
+      He moved stealthily across the room, bare-footed, towards the candle, the
+      shadow of his head and shoulders growing bigger behind him on the opposite
+      wall, to which the face of plain Mr. Jones was turned. With a feline
+      movement, Ricardo glanced over his shoulder at the thin back of the
+      spectre reposing on the bed, and then blew out the candle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In fact, I am rather amused, Martin,&rdquo; Mr. Jones said in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard the sound of a slapped thigh and the jubilant exclamation of his
+      henchman:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good! That's the way to talk, sir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PART4" id="link2H_PART4">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART FOUR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER ONE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo advanced prudently by short darts from one tree-trunk to another,
+      more in the manner of a squirrel than a cat. The sun had risen some time
+      before. Already the sparkle of open sea was encroaching rapidly on the
+      dark, cool, early-morning blue of Diamond Bay; but the deep dusk lingered
+      yet under the mighty pillars of the forest, between which the secretary
+      dodged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was watching Number One's bungalow with an animal-like patience, if
+      with a very human complexity of purpose. This was the second morning of
+      such watching. The first one had not been rewarded by success. Well,
+      strictly speaking, there was no hurry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun, swinging above the ridge all at once, inundated with light the
+      space of burnt grass in front of Ricardo and the face of the bungalow, on
+      which his eyes were fixed, leaving only the one dark spot of the doorway.
+      To his right, to his left, and behind him, splashes of gold appeared in
+      the deep shade of the forest, thinning the gloom under the ragged roof of
+      leaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not a very favourable circumstance for Ricardo's purpose. He did
+      not wish to be detected in his patient occupation. For what he was
+      watching for was a sight of the girl&mdash;that girl! just a glimpse
+      across the burnt patch to see what she was like. He had excellent eyes,
+      and the distance was not so great. He would be able to distinguish her
+      face quite easily if she only came out on the veranda; and she was bound
+      to do that sooner or later. He was confident that he could form some
+      opinion about her&mdash;which, he felt, was very necessary, before
+      venturing on some steps to get in touch with her behind that Swedish
+      baron's back. His theoretical view of the girl was such that he was quite
+      prepared, on the strength of that distant examination, to show himself
+      discreetly&mdash;perhaps even make a sign. It all depended on his reading
+      of the face. She couldn't be much. He knew that sort!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By protruding his head a little he commanded, through the foliage of a
+      festooning creeper, a view of the three bungalows. Irregularly disposed
+      along a flat curve, over the veranda rail of the farthermost one hung a
+      dark rug of a tartan pattern, amazingly conspicuous. Ricardo could see the
+      very checks. A brisk fire of sticks was burning on the ground in front of
+      the steps, and in the sunlight the thin, fluttering flame had paled almost
+      to invisibility&mdash;a mere rosy stir under a faint wreath of smoke. He
+      could see the white bandage on the head of Pedro bending over it, and the
+      wisps of black hair standing up weirdly. He had wound that bandage
+      himself, after breaking that shaggy and enormous head. The creature
+      balanced it like a load, staggering towards the steps. Ricardo could see a
+      small, long-handled saucepan at the end of a great hairy paw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, he could see all that there was to be seen, far and near. Excellent
+      eyes! The only thing they could not penetrate was the dark oblong of the
+      doorway on the veranda under the low eaves of the bungalow's roof. And
+      that was vexing. It was an outrage. Ricardo was easily outraged. Surely
+      she would come out presently! Why didn't she? Surely the fellow did not
+      tie her up to the bedpost before leaving the house!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing appeared. Ricardo was as still as the leafy cables of creepers
+      depending in a convenient curtain from the mighty limb sixty feet above
+      his head. His very eyelids were still, and this unblinking watchfulness
+      gave him the dreamy air of a cat posed on a hearth-rug contemplating the
+      fire. Was he dreaming? There, in plain sight, he had before him a white,
+      blouse-like jacket, short blue trousers, a pair of bare yellow calves, a
+      pigtail, long and slender&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The confounded Chink!&rdquo; he muttered, astounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not conscious of having looked away; and yet right there, in the
+      middle of the picture, without having come round the right-hand corner or
+      the left-hand corner of the house, without falling from the sky or surging
+      up from the ground, Wang had become visible, large as life, and engaged in
+      the young-ladyish occupation of picking flowers. Step by step, stooping
+      repeatedly over the flower-beds at the foot of the veranda, the
+      startlingly materialized Chinaman passed off the scene in a very
+      commonplace manner, by going up the steps and disappearing in the darkness
+      of the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only then the yellow eyes of Martin Ricardo lost their intent fixity. He
+      understood that it was time for him to be moving. That bunch of flowers
+      going into the house in the hand of a Chinaman was for the
+      breakfast-table. What else could it be for?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll give you flowers!&rdquo; he muttered threateningly. &ldquo;You wait!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Another moment, just for a glance towards the Jones bungalow, whence he
+      expected Heyst to issue on his way to that breakfast so offensively
+      decorated, and Ricardo began his retreat. His impulse, his desire, was for
+      a rush into the open, face to face with the appointed victim, for what he
+      called a &ldquo;ripping up,&rdquo; visualized greedily, and always with the swift
+      preliminary stooping movement on his part&mdash;the forerunner of certain
+      death to his adversary. This was his impulse; and as it was, so to speak,
+      constitutional, it was extremely difficult to resist when his blood was
+      up. What could be more trying than to have to skulk and dodge and restrain
+      oneself, mentally and physically, when one's blood was up? Mr. Secretary
+      Ricardo began his retreat from his post of observation behind a tree
+      opposite Heyst's bungalow, using great care to remain unseen. His
+      proceedings were made easier by the declivity of the ground, which sloped
+      sharply down to the water's edge. There, his feet feeling the warmth of
+      the island's rocky foundation already heated by the sun, through the thin
+      soles of his straw slippers he was, as it were, sunk out of sight of the
+      houses. A short scramble of some twenty feet brought him up again to the
+      upper level, at the place where the jetty had its root in the shore. He
+      leaned his back against one of the lofty uprights which still held up the
+      company's signboard above the mound of derelict coal. Nobody could have
+      guessed how much his blood was up. To contain himself he folded his arms
+      tightly on his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo was not used to a prolonged effort of self-control. His craft, his
+      artfulness, felt themselves always at the mercy of his nature, which was
+      truly feral and only held in subjection by the influence of the
+      &ldquo;governor,&rdquo; the prestige of a gentleman. It had its cunning too, but it
+      was being almost too severely tried since the feral solution of a growl
+      and a spring was forbidden by the problem. Ricardo dared not venture out
+      on the cleared ground. He dared not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I meet the beggar,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;I don't know what I mayn't do. I
+      daren't trust myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What exasperated him just now was his inability to understand Heyst.
+      Ricardo was human enough to suffer from the discovery of his limitations.
+      No, he couldn't size Heyst up. He could kill him with extreme ease&mdash;a
+      growl and a spring&mdash;but that was forbidden! However, he could not
+      remain indefinitely under the funereal blackboard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must make a move,&rdquo; he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved on, his head swimming a little with the repressed desire of
+      violence, and came out openly in front of the bungalows, as if he had just
+      been down to the jetty to look at the boat. The sunshine enveloped him,
+      very brilliant, very still, very hot. The three buildings faced him. The
+      one with the rug on the balustrade was the most distant; next to it was
+      the empty bungalow; the nearest, with the flower-beds at the foot of its
+      veranda, contained that bothersome girl, who had managed so provokingly to
+      keep herself invisible. That was why Ricardo's eyes lingered on that
+      building. The girl would surely be easier to &ldquo;size up&rdquo; than Heyst. A sight
+      of her, a mere glimpse, would have been something to go by, a step nearer
+      to the goal&mdash;the first real move, in fact. Ricardo saw no other move.
+      And any time she might appear on that veranda!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not appear; but, like a concealed magnet, she exercised her
+      attraction. As he went on, he deviated towards the bungalow. Though his
+      movements were deliberate, his feral instincts had such sway that if he
+      had met Heyst walking towards him, he would have had to satisfy his need
+      of violence. But he saw nobody. Wang was at the back of the house, keeping
+      the coffee hot against Number One's return for breakfast. Even the simian
+      Pedro was out of sight, no doubt crouching on the door-step, his red
+      little eyes fastened with animal-like devotion on Mr. Jones, who was in
+      discourse with Heyst in the other bungalow&mdash;the conversation of an
+      evil spectre with a disarmed man, watched by an ape.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His will having very little to do with it, Ricardo, darting swift glances
+      in all directions, found himself at the steps of the Heyst bungalow. Once
+      there, falling under an uncontrollable force of attraction, he mounted
+      them with a savage and stealthy action of his limbs, and paused for a
+      moment under the eaves to listen to the silence. Presently he advanced
+      over the threshold one leg&mdash;it seemed to stretch itself, like a limb
+      of india-rubber&mdash;planted his foot within, brought up the other
+      swiftly, and stood inside the room, turning his head from side to side. To
+      his eyes, brought in there from the dazzling sunshine, all was gloom for a
+      moment. His pupils, like a cat's, dilating swiftly, he distinguished an
+      enormous quantity of books. He was amazed; and he was put off too. He was
+      vexed in his astonishment. He had meant to note the aspect and nature of
+      things, and hoped to draw some useful inference, some hint as to the man.
+      But what guess could one make out of a multitude of books? He didn't know
+      what to think; and he formulated his bewilderment in the mental
+      exclamation:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the devil has this fellow been trying to set up here&mdash;a
+      school?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave a prolonged stare to the portrait of Heyst's father, that severe
+      profile ignoring the vanities of this earth. His eyes gleamed sideways at
+      the heavy silver candlesticks&mdash;signs of opulence. He prowled as a
+      stray cat entering a strange place might have done, for if Ricardo had not
+      Wang's miraculous gift of materializing and vanishing, rather than coming
+      and going, he could be nearly as noiseless in his less elusive movements.
+      He noted the back door standing just ajar; and all the time his slightly
+      pointed ears, at the utmost stretch of watchfulness, kept in touch with
+      the profound silence outside enveloping the absolute stillness of the
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not been in the room two minutes when it occurred to him that he
+      must be alone in the bungalow. The woman, most likely, had sneaked out and
+      was walking about somewhere in the grounds at the back. She had been
+      probably ordered to keep out of sight. Why? Because the fellow mistrusted
+      his guests; or was it because he mistrusted <i>her</i>?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo reflected that from a certain point of view it amounted nearly to
+      the same thing. He remembered Schomberg's story. He felt that running away
+      with somebody only to get clear of that beastly, tame, hotel-keeper's
+      attention was no proof of hopeless infatuation. She could be got in touch
+      with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His moustaches stirred. For some time he had been looking at a closed
+      door. He would peep into that other room, and perhaps see something more
+      informing than a confounded lot of books. As he crossed over, he thought
+      recklessly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the beggar comes in suddenly, and starts to prance, I'll rip him up
+      and be done with it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He laid his hand on the handle, and felt the door come unlatched. Before
+      he pulled it open, he listened again to the silence. He felt it all about
+      him, complete, without a flaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The necessity of prudence had exasperated his self-restraint. A mood of
+      ferocity woke up in him, and, as always at such times, he became
+      physically aware of the sheeted knife strapped to his leg. He pulled at
+      the door with fierce curiosity. It came open without a squeak of hinge,
+      without a rustle, with no sound at all; and he found himself glaring at
+      the opaque surface of some rough blue stuff, like serge. A curtain was
+      fitted inside, heavy enough and long enough not to stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A curtain! This unforeseen veil, baffling his curiosity checked his
+      brusqueness. He did not fling it aside with an impatient movement; he only
+      looked at it closely, as if its texture had to be examined before his hand
+      could touch such stuff. In this interval of hesitation, he seemed to
+      detect a flaw in the perfection of the silence, the faintest possible
+      rustle, which his ears caught and instantly, in the effort of conscious
+      listening, lost again. No! Everything was still inside and outside the
+      house, only he had no longer the sense of being alone there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he put out his hand towards the motionless folds it was with extreme
+      caution, and merely to push the stuff aside a little, advancing his head
+      at the same time to peep within. A moment of complete immobility ensued.
+      Then, without anything else of him stirring, Ricardo's head shrank back on
+      his shoulders, his arm descended slowly to his side. There was a woman in
+      there. The very woman! Lighted dimly by the reflection of the outer glare,
+      she loomed up strangely big and shadowy at the other end of the long,
+      narrow room. With her back to the door, she was doing her hair with bare
+      arms uplifted. One of them gleamed pearly white; the other detached its
+      perfect form in black against the unshuttered, uncurtained square
+      window-hole. She was there, her fingers busy with her dark hair, utterly
+      unconscious, exposed and defenceless&mdash;and tempting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo drew back one foot and pressed his elbows close to his sides; his
+      chest started heaving convulsively as if he were wrestling or running a
+      race; his body began to sway gently back and forth. The self-restraint was
+      at an end: his psychology must have its way. The instinct for the feral
+      spring could no longer be denied. Ravish or kill&mdash;it was all one to
+      him, as long as by the act he liberated the suffering soul of savagery
+      repressed for so long. After a quick glance over his shoulder, which
+      hunters of big game tell us no lion or tiger omits to give before charging
+      home, Ricardo charged, head down, straight at the curtain. The stuff,
+      tossed up violently by his rush, settled itself with a slow, floating
+      descent into vertical folds, motionless, without a shudder even, in the
+      still, warm air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER TWO
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The clock&mdash;which once upon a time had measured the hours of
+      philosophic meditation&mdash;could not have ticked away more than five
+      seconds when Wang materialized within the living-room. His concern
+      primarily was with the delayed breakfast, but at once his slanting eyes
+      became immovably fixed upon the unstirring curtain. For it was behind it
+      that he had located the strange, deadened scuffling sounds which filled
+      the empty room. The slanting eyes of his race could not achieve a round,
+      amazed stare, but they remained still, dead still, and his impassive
+      yellow face grew all at once careworn and lean with the sudden strain of
+      intense, doubtful, frightened watchfulness. Contrary impulses swayed his
+      body, rooted to the floor-mats. He even went so far as to extend his hand
+      towards the curtain. He could not reach it, and he didn't make the
+      necessary step forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mysterious struggle was going on with confused thuds of bare feet, in
+      a mute wrestling match, no human sound, hiss, groan, murmur, or
+      exclamation coming through the curtain. A chair fell over, not with a
+      crash but lightly, as if just grazed, and a faint metallic ring of the tin
+      bath succeeded. Finally the tense silence, as of two adversaries locked in
+      a deadly grip, was ended by the heavy, dull thump of a soft body flung
+      against the inner partition of planks. It seemed to shake the whole
+      bungalow. By that time, walking backward, his eyes, his very throat,
+      strained with fearful excitement, his extended arm still pointing at the
+      curtain, Wang had disappeared through the back door. Once out in the
+      compound, he bolted round the end of the house. Emerging innocently
+      between the two bungalows he lingered and lounged in the open, where
+      anybody issuing from any of the dwellings was bound to see him&mdash;a
+      self-possessed Chinaman idling there, with nothing but perhaps an unserved
+      breakfast on his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at this time that Wang made up his mind to give up all connection
+      with Number One, a man not only disarmed but already half vanquished. Till
+      that morning he had had doubts as to his course of action, but this
+      overheard scuffle decided the question. Number One was a doomed man&mdash;one
+      of those beings whom it is unlucky to help. Even as he walked in the open
+      with a fine air of unconcern, Wang wondered that no sound of any sort was
+      to be heard inside the house. For all he knew, the white woman might have
+      been scuffling in there with an evil spirit, which had of course killed
+      her. For nothing visible came out of the house he watched out of the
+      slanting corner of his eye. The sunshine and the silence outside the
+      bungalow reigned undisturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the house the silence of the big room would not have struck an
+      acute ear as perfect. It was troubled by a stir so faint that it could
+      hardly be called a ghost of whispering from behind the curtain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo, feeling his throat with tender care, breathed out admiringly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have fingers like steel. Jimminy! You have muscles like a giant!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Luckily for Lena, Ricardo's onset had been so sudden&mdash;she was winding
+      her two heavy tresses round her head&mdash;that she had no time to lower
+      her arms. This, which saved them from being pinned to her sides, gave her
+      a better chance to resist. His spring had nearly thrown her down. Luckily,
+      again, she was standing so near the wall that, though she was driven
+      against it headlong, yet the shock was not heavy enough to knock all the
+      breath out of her body. On the contrary, it helped her first instinctive
+      attempt to drive her assailant backward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the first gasp of a surprise that was really too over-powering for a
+      cry, she was never in doubt of the nature of her danger. She defended
+      herself in the full, clear knowledge of it, from the force of instinct
+      which is the true source of every great display of energy, and with a
+      determination which could hardly have been expected from a girl who,
+      cornered in a dim corridor by the red-faced, stammering Schomberg, had
+      trembled with shame, disgust, and fear; had drooped, terrified, before
+      mere words spluttered out odiously by a man who had never in his life laid
+      his big paw on her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This new enemy's attack was simple, straightforward violence. It was not
+      the slimy, underhand plotting to deliver her up like a slave, which had
+      sickened her heart and had made her feel in her loneliness that her
+      oppressors were too many for her. She was no longer alone in the world
+      now. She resisted without a moment of faltering, because she was no longer
+      deprived of moral support; because she was a human being who counted;
+      because she was no longer defending herself for herself alone; because of
+      the faith that had been born in her&mdash;the faith in the man of her
+      destiny, and perhaps in the Heaven which had sent him so wonderfully to
+      cross her path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had defended herself principally by maintaining a desperate, murderous
+      clutch on Ricardo's windpipe, till she felt a sudden relaxation of the
+      terrific hug in which he stupidly and ineffectually persisted to hold her.
+      Then with a supreme effort of her arms and of her suddenly raised knee,
+      she sent him flying against the partition. The cedar-wood chest stood in
+      the way, and Ricardo, with a thump which boomed hollow through the whole
+      bungalow, fell on it in a sitting posture, half strangled, and exhausted
+      not so much by the efforts as by the emotions of the struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the recoil of her exerted strength, she too reeled, staggered back,
+      and sat on the edge of the bed. Out of breath, but calm and unabashed, she
+      busied herself in readjusting under her arms the brown and yellow figured
+      Celebes sarong, the tuck of which had come undone during the fight. Then,
+      folding her bare arms tightly on her breast, she leaned forward on her
+      crossed legs, determined and without fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo, leaning forward too, his nervous force gone, crestfallen like a
+      beast of prey that has missed its spring, met her big grey eyes looking at
+      him&mdash;wide open, observing, mysterious&mdash;from under the dark
+      arches of her courageous eyebrows. Their faces were not a foot apart. He
+      ceased feeling about his aching throat and dropped the palms of his hands
+      heavily on his knees. He was not looking at her bare shoulders, at her
+      strong arms; he was looking down at the floor. He had lost one of his
+      straw slippers. A chair with a white dress on it had been overturned.
+      These, with splashes of water on the floor out of a brusquely misplaced
+      sponge-bath, were the only traces of the struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo swallowed twice consciously, as if to make sure of his throat
+      before he spoke again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. I never meant to hurt you&mdash;though I am no joker when it
+      comes to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pulled up the leg of his pyjamas to exhibit the strapped knife. She
+      glanced at it without moving her head, and murmured with scornful
+      bitterness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes&mdash;with that thing stuck in my side. In no other way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head with a shamefaced smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen! I am quiet now. Straight&mdash;I am. I don't need to explain why&mdash;you
+      know how it is. And I can see, now, this wasn't the way with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no sound. Her still, upward gaze had a patient, mournfulness
+      which troubled him like a suggestion of an inconceivable depth. He added
+      thoughtfully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not going to make a noise about this silly try of mine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved her head the least bit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jee-miny! You are a wonder&mdash;&rdquo; he murmured earnestly, relieved more
+      than she could have guessed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, if she had attempted to run out, he would have stuck the knife
+      between her shoulders, to stop her screaming; but all the fat would have
+      been in the fire, the business utterly spoiled, and the rage of the
+      governor&mdash;especially when he learned the cause&mdash;boundless. A
+      woman that does not make a noise after an attempt of that kind has tacitly
+      condoned the offence. Ricardo had no small vanities. But clearly, if she
+      would pass it over like this, then he could not be so utterly repugnant to
+      her. He felt flattered. And she didn't seem afraid of him either. He
+      already felt almost tender towards the girl&mdash;that plucky, fine girl
+      who had not tried to run screaming from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We shall be friends yet. I don't give you up. Don't think it. Friends as
+      friends can be!&rdquo; he whispered confidently. &ldquo;Jee-miny! You aren't a tame
+      one. Neither am I. You will find that out before long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not know that if she had not run out, it was because that
+      morning, under the stress of growing uneasiness at the presence of the
+      incomprehensible visitors, Heyst had confessed to her that it was his
+      revolver he had been looking for in the night; that it was gone, that he
+      was a disarmed, defenceless man. She had hardly comprehended the meaning
+      of his confession. Now she understood better what it meant. The effort of
+      her self-control, her stillness, impressed Ricardo. Suddenly she spoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you after?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not raise his eyes. His hands reposing on his knees, his drooping
+      head, something reflective in his pose, suggested the weariness of a
+      simple soul, the fatigue of a mental rather than physical contest. He
+      answered the direct question by a direct statement, as if he were too
+      tired to dissemble:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After the swag.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The word was strange to her. The veiled ardour of her grey gaze from under
+      the dark eyebrows never left Ricardo's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A swag?&rdquo; she murmured quietly. &ldquo;What's that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, swag, plunder&mdash;what your gentleman has been pinching right and
+      left for years&mdash;the pieces. Don't you know? This!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without looking up, he made the motion of counting money into the palm of
+      his hand. She lowered her eyes slightly to observe this bit of pantomime,
+      but returned them to his face at once. Then, in a mere breath:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know anything about him?&rdquo; she asked, concealing her puzzled
+      alarm. &ldquo;What has it got to do with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything,&rdquo; was Ricardo's concise answer, in a low, emphatic whisper. He
+      reflected that this girl was really his best hope. Out of the unfaded
+      impression of past violence there was growing the sort of sentiment which
+      prevents a man from being indifferent to a woman he has once held in his
+      arms&mdash;if even against her will&mdash;and still more so if she has
+      pardoned the outrage. It becomes then a sort of bond. He felt positively
+      the need to confide in her&mdash;a subtle trait of masculinity, this
+      almost physical need of trust which can exist side by side with the most
+      brutal readiness of suspicion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a game of grab&mdash;see?&rdquo; he went on, with a new inflection of
+      intimacy in his murmur. He was looking straight at her now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That fat, tame slug of a gin-slinger, Schomberg, put us up to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So strong is the impression of helpless and persecuted misery, that the
+      girl who had fought down a savage assault without faltering could not
+      completely repress a shudder at the mere sound of the abhorred name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo became more rapid and confidential:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He wants to pay him off&mdash;pay both of you, at that; so he told me. He
+      was hot after you. He would have given all he had into those hands of
+      yours that have nearly strangled me. But you couldn't, eh? Nohow&mdash;what?&rdquo;
+       He paused. &ldquo;So, rather than&mdash;you followed a gentleman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He noticed a slight movement of her head and spoke quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Same here&mdash;rather than be a wage-slave. Only these foreigners aren't
+      to be trusted. You're too good for him. A man that will rob his best
+      chum?&rdquo; She raised her head. He went on, well pleased with his progress,
+      whispering hurriedly: &ldquo;Yes. I know all about him. So you may guess how
+      he's likely to treat a woman after a bit!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not know that he was striking terror into her breast now. Still the
+      grey eyes remained fixed on him unmovably watchful, as if sleepy under the
+      white forehead. She was beginning to understand. His words conveyed a
+      definite, dreadful meaning to her mind, which he proceeded to enlighten
+      further in a convinced murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You and I are made to understand each other. Born alike, bred alike, I
+      guess. You are not tame. Same here! You have been chucked out into this
+      rotten world of 'yporcrits. Same here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her stillness, her appalled stillness, wore to him an air of fascinated
+      attention. He asked abruptly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made an effort to breathe out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where's what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His tone expressed excited secrecy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The swag&mdash;plunder&mdash;pieces. It's a game of grab. We must have
+      it; but it isn't easy, and so you will have to lend a hand. Come! is it
+      kept in the house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As often with women, her wits were sharpened by the very terror of the
+      glimpsed menace. She shook her head negatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay! Thought so. Does your gentleman trust you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again she shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Blamed 'yporcrit,&rdquo; he said feelingly, and then reflected: &ldquo;He's one of
+      the tame ones, ain't he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better find out for yourself,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You trust me. I don't want to die before you and I have made friends.&rdquo;
+       This was said with a strange air of feline gallantry. Then, tentatively:
+      &ldquo;But he could be brought to trust you, couldn't he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Trust me?&rdquo; she said, in a tone which bordered on despair, but which he
+      mistook for derision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stand in with us,&rdquo; he urged. &ldquo;Give the chuck to all this blamed
+      'yporcrisy. Perhaps, without being trusted, you have managed to find out
+      something already, eh?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I have,&rdquo; she uttered with lips that seemed to her to be freezing
+      fast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo now looked at her calm face with something like respect. He was
+      even a little awed by her stillness, by her economy of words. Womanlike,
+      she felt the effect she had produced, the effect of knowing much and of
+      keeping all her knowledge in reserve. So far, somehow, this had come,
+      about of itself. Thus encouraged, directed in the way of duplicity, the
+      refuge of the weak, she made a heroically conscious effort and forced her
+      stiff, cold lips into a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Duplicity&mdash;the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the
+      disarmed, too! Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her existence
+      and a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity. It seemed to her that the man
+      sitting there before her was an unavoidable presence, which had attended
+      all her life. He was the embodied evil of the world. She was not ashamed
+      of her duplicity. With a woman's frank courage, as soon as she saw that
+      opening she threw herself into it without reserve, with only one doubt&mdash;that
+      of her own strength. She was appalled by the situation; but already all
+      her aroused femininity, understanding that whether Heyst loved her or not
+      she loved him, and feeling that she had brought this on his head, faced
+      the danger with a passionate desire to defend her own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0028" id="link2HCH0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THREE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To Ricardo the girl had been so unforeseen that he was unable to bring
+      upon her the light of his critical faculties. Her smile appeared to him
+      full of promise. He had not expected her to be what she was. Who, from the
+      talk he had heard, could expect to meet a girl like this? She was a
+      blooming miracle, he said to himself, familiarly, yet with a tinge of
+      respect. She was no meat for the likes of that tame, respectable
+      gin-slinger. Ricardo grew hot with indignation. Her courage, her physical
+      strength, demonstrated at the cost of his discomfiture, commanded his
+      sympathy. He felt himself drawn to her by the proofs of her amazing
+      spirit. Such a girl! She had a strong soul; and her reflective disposition
+      to throw over her connection proved that she was no hypocrite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is your gentleman a good shot?&rdquo; he said, looking down on the floor again,
+      as if indifferent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hardly understood the phrase; but in its form it suggested some
+      accomplishment. It was safe to whisper an affirmative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mine, too&mdash;and better than good,&rdquo; Ricardo murmured, and then, in a
+      confidential burst: &ldquo;I am not so good at it, but I carry a pretty deadly
+      thing about me, all the same!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tapped his leg. She was past the stage of shudders now. Stiff all over,
+      unable even to move her eyes, she felt an awful mental tension which was
+      like blank forgetfulness. Ricardo tried to influence her in his own way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And my gentleman is not the sort that would drop me. He ain't no
+      foreigner; whereas you, with your baron, you don't know what's before you&mdash;or,
+      rather, being a woman, you know only too well. Much better not to wait for
+      the chuck. Pile in with us and get your share&mdash;of the plunder, I
+      mean. You have some notion about it already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt that if she as much as hinted by word or sign that there was no
+      such thing on the island, Heyst's life wouldn't be worth half an hour's
+      purchase; but all power of combining words had vanished in the tension of
+      her mind. Words themselves were too difficult to think of&mdash;all except
+      the word &ldquo;yes,&rdquo; the saving word! She whispered it with not a feature of
+      her face moving. To Ricardo the faint and concise sound proved a cool,
+      reserved assent, more worth having from that amazing mistress of herself
+      than a thousand words from any other woman. He thought with exultation
+      that he had come upon one in a million&mdash;in ten millions! His whisper
+      became frankly entreating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's good! Now all you've got to do is to make sure where he keeps his
+      swag. Only do be quick about it! I can't stand much longer this
+      crawling-on-the-stomach business so as not to scare your gentleman. What
+      do you think a fellow is&mdash;a reptile?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared without seeing anyone, as a person in the night sits staring
+      and listening to deadly sounds, to evil incantations. And always in her
+      head there was that tension of the mind trying to get hold of something,
+      of a saving idea which seemed to be so near and could not be captured.
+      Suddenly she seized it. Yes&mdash;she had to get that man out of the
+      house. At that very moment, raised outside, not very near, but heard
+      distinctly, Heyst's voice uttered the words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you been looking out for me, Wang?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was for her like a flash of lightning framed in the darkness which had
+      beset her on all sides, showing a deadly precipice right under her feet.
+      With a convulsive movement she sat up straight, but had no power to rise.
+      Ricardo, on the contrary, was on his feet on the instant, as noiseless as
+      a cat. His yellow eyes gleamed, gliding here and there; but he too seemed
+      unable to make another movement. Only his moustaches stirred visibly, like
+      the feelers of some animal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang's answer, &ldquo;Ya tuan,&rdquo; was heard by the two in the room, but more
+      faintly. Then Heyst again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right! You may bring the coffee in. Mem Putih out in the room yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this question Wang made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo's and the girl's eyes met, utterly without expression, all their
+      faculties being absorbed in listening for the first sound of Heyst's
+      footsteps, for any sound outside which would mean that Ricardo's retreat
+      was cut off. Both understood perfectly well that Wang must have gone round
+      the house, and that he was now at the back, making it impossible for
+      Ricardo to slip out unseen that way before Heyst came in at the front.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A darkling shade settled on the face of the devoted secretary. Here was
+      the business utterly spoiled! It was the gloom of anger, and even of
+      apprehension. He would perhaps have made a dash for it through the back
+      door, if Heyst had not been heard ascending the front steps. He climbed
+      them slowly, very slowly, like a man who is discouraged or weary&mdash;or
+      simply thoughtful; and Ricardo had a mental vision of his face, with its
+      martial moustache, the lofty forehead, the impassive features, and the
+      quiet, meditative eyes. Trapped! Confound it! After all, perhaps the
+      governor was right. Women had to be shunned. Fooling with this one had
+      apparently ruined the whole business. For, trapped as he was he might just
+      as well kill, since, anyhow, to be seen was to be unmasked. But he was too
+      fair-minded to be angry with the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had paused on the veranda, or in the very doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be shot down like a dog if I ain't quick,&rdquo; Ricardo muttered
+      excitedly to the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stooped to get hold of his knife; and the next moment would have hurled
+      himself out through the curtain, nearly, as prompt and fully as deadly to
+      Heyst as an unexpected thunderbolt. The feel more than the strength of the
+      girl's hand, clutching at his shoulder, checked him. He swung round,
+      crouching with a yellow upward glare. Ah! Was she turning against him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would have stuck his knife into the hollow of her bare throat if he had
+      not seen her other hand pointing to the window. It was a long opening,
+      high up, close under the ceiling almost, with a single pivoting shutter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was still looking at it she moved noiselessly away, picking up
+      the overturned chair, and placed it under the wall. Then she looked round;
+      but he didn't need to be beckoned to. In two long, tiptoeing strides he
+      was at her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be quick!&rdquo; she gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized her hand and wrung it with all the force of his dumb gratitude,
+      as a man does to a chum when there is no time for words. Then he mounted
+      the chair. Ricardo was short&mdash;too short to get over without a noisy
+      scramble. He hesitated an instant; she, watchful, bore rigidly on the seat
+      with her beautiful bare arms, while, light and sure, he used the back of
+      the chair as a ladder. The masses of her brown hair fell all about her
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Footsteps resounded in the next room, and Heyst's voice, not very loud,
+      called her by name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lena!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! In a minute,&rdquo; she answered with a particular intonation which she
+      knew would prevent Heyst from coming in at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she looked up, Ricardo had vanished, letting himself down outside so
+      lightly that she had not heard the slightest noise. She stood up then,
+      bewildered, frightened, as if awakened from a drugged sleep, with heavy,
+      downcast, unseeing eyes, her fortitude tired out, her imagination as if
+      dead within her and unable to keep her fear alive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst moved about aimlessly in the other room. This sound roused her
+      exhausted wits. At once she began to think, hear, see; and what she saw&mdash;or
+      rather recognized, for her eyes had been resting on it all the time&mdash;was
+      Ricardo's straw slipper, lost in the scuffle, lying near the bath. She had
+      just time to step forward and plant her foot on it when the curtains
+      shook, and, pushed aside, disclosed Heyst in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the appeased enchantment of the senses she had found with him, like
+      a sort of bewitched state, his danger brought a sensation of warmth to her
+      breast. She felt something stir in there, something profound, like a new
+      sort of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was in partial darkness, Ricardo having accidentally swung the
+      pivoted shutter as he went out of the window. Heyst peered from the
+      doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you haven't done your hair yet,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won't stop to do it now. I shan't be long,&rdquo; she replied steadily, and
+      remained still, feeling Ricardo's slipper under the sole of her foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, with a movement of retreat, let the curtain drop slowly. On the
+      instant she stooped for the slipper, and, with it in her hand, spun round
+      wildly, looking for some hiding-place; but there was no such spot in the
+      bare room. The chest, the leather bunk, a dress or two of hers hanging on
+      pegs&mdash;there was no place where the merest hazard might not guide
+      Heyst's hand at any moment. Her wildly roaming eyes were caught by the
+      half-closed window. She ran to it, and by raising herself on her toes was
+      able to reach the shutter with her fingertips. She pushed it square, stole
+      back to the middle of the room, and, turning about, swung her arm,
+      regulating the force of the throw so as not to let the slipper fly too far
+      out and hit the edge of the overhanging eaves. It was a task of the nicest
+      judgement for the muscles of those round arms, still quivering from the
+      deadly wrestle with a man, for that brain, tense with the excitement of
+      the situation and for the unstrung nerves flickering darkness before her
+      eyes. At last the slipper left her hand. As soon as it passed the opening,
+      it was out of her sight. She listened. She did not hear it strike
+      anything; it just vanished, as if it had wings to fly on through the air.
+      Not a sound! It had gone clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her valiant arms hanging close against her side, she stood as if turned
+      into stone. A faint whistle reached her ears. The forgetful Ricardo,
+      becoming very much aware of his loss, had been hanging about in great
+      anxiety, which was relieved by the appearance of the slipper flying from
+      under the eaves; and now, thoughtfully, he had ventured a whistle to put
+      her mind at ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the girl reeled forward. She saved herself from a fall only by
+      embracing with both arms one of the tall, roughly carved posts holding the
+      mosquito net above the bed. For a long time she clung to it, with her
+      forehead leaning against the wood. One side of her loosened sarong had
+      slipped down as low as her hip. The long brown tresses of her hair fell in
+      lank wisps, as if wet, almost black against her white body. Her uncovered
+      flank, damp with the sweat of anguish and fatigue, gleamed coldly with the
+      immobility of polished marble in the hot, diffused light falling through
+      the window above her head&mdash;a dim reflection of the consuming,
+      passionate blaze of sunshine outside, all aquiver with the effort to set
+      the earth on fire, to burn it to ashes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0029" id="link2HCH0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FOUR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, seated at the table with his chin on his breast, raised his head at
+      the faint rustle of Lena's dress. He was startled by the dead pallor of
+      her cheeks, by something lifeless in her eyes, which looked at him
+      strangely, without recognition. But to his anxious inquiries she answered
+      reassuringly that there was nothing the matter with her, really. She had
+      felt giddy on rising. She had even had a moment of faintness, after her
+      bath. She had to sit down to wait for it to pass. This had made her late
+      dressing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't try to do my hair. I didn't want to keep you waiting any
+      longer,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was unwilling to press her with questions about her health, since she
+      seemed to make light of this indisposition. She had not done her hair, but
+      she had brushed it, and had tied it with a ribbon behind. With her
+      forehead uncovered, she looked very young, almost a child, a careworn
+      child; a child with something on its mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What surprised Heyst was the non-appearance of Wang. The Chinaman had
+      always materialized at the precise moment of his service, neither too soon
+      nor too late. This time the usual miracle failed. What was the meaning of
+      this?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst raised his voice&mdash;a thing he disliked doing. It was promptly
+      answered from the compound:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ada tuan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lena, leaning on her elbow, with her eyes on her plate, did not seem to
+      hear anything. When Wang entered with a tray, his narrow eyes, tilted
+      inward by the prominence of salient cheek-bones, kept her under stealthy
+      observation all the time. Neither the one nor the other of that white
+      couple paid the slightest attention to him and he withdrew without having
+      heard them exchange a single word. He squatted on his heels on the back
+      veranda. His Chinaman's mind, very clear but not far-reaching, was made up
+      according to the plain reason of things, such as it appeared to him in the
+      light of his simple feeling for self-preservation, untrammelled by any
+      notions of romantic honour or tender conscience. His yellow hands, lightly
+      clasped, hung idly between his knees. The graves of Wang's ancestors were
+      far away, his parents were dead, his elder brother was a soldier in the
+      yamen of some Mandarin away in Formosa. No one near by had a claim on his
+      veneration or his obedience. He had been for years a labouring restless
+      vagabond. His only tie in the world was the Alfuro woman, in exchange for
+      whom he had given away some considerable part of his hard-earned
+      substance; and his duty, in reason, could be to no one but himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The scuffle behind the curtain was a thing of bad augury for that Number
+      One for whom the Chinaman had neither love nor dislike. He had been awed
+      enough by that development to hang back with the coffee-pot till at last
+      the white man was induced to call him in. Wang went in with curiosity.
+      Certainly, the white woman looked as if she had been wrestling with a
+      spirit which had managed to tear half her blood out of her before letting
+      her go. As to the man, Wang had long looked upon him as being in some sort
+      bewitched; and now he was doomed. He heard their voices in the room. Heyst
+      was urging the girl to go and lie down again. He was extremely concerned.
+      She had eaten nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The best thing for you. You really must!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat listless, shaking her head from time to time negatively, as if
+      nothing could be any good. But he insisted; she saw the beginning of
+      wonder in his eyes, and suddenly gave way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I had better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not want to arouse his wonder, which would lead him straight to
+      suspicion. He must not suspect!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that
+      something rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace, there was
+      born in her a woman's innate mistrust of masculinity, of that seductive
+      strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from the recognition of
+      the naked necessity of facts, which never yet frightened a woman worthy of
+      the name. She had no plan; but her mind, quieted down somewhat by the very
+      effort to preserve outward composure for his sake, perceived that her
+      behaviour had secured, at any rate, a short period of safety. Perhaps
+      because of the similarity of their miserable origin in the dregs of
+      mankind, she had understood Ricardo perfectly. He would keep quiet for a
+      time now. In this momentarily soothing certitude her bodily fatigue
+      asserted itself, the more overpoweringly since its cause was not so much
+      the demand on her strength as the awful suddenness of the stress she had
+      had to meet. She would have tried to overcome it from the mere instinct of
+      resistance, if it had not been for Heyst's alternate pleadings and
+      commands. Before this eminently masculine fussing she felt the woman's
+      need to give way, the sweetness of surrender.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will do anything you like,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Getting up, she was surprised by a wave of languid weakness that came over
+      her, embracing and enveloping her like warm water, with a noise in her
+      ears as of a breaking sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must help me along,&rdquo; she added quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he put his arm round her waist&mdash;not by any means an uncommon
+      thing for him to do&mdash;she found a special satisfaction in the feeling
+      of being thus sustained. She abandoned all her weight to that encircling
+      and protecting pressure, while a thrill went through her at the sudden
+      thought that it was she who would have to protect him, to be the defender
+      of a man who was strong enough to lift her bodily, as he was doing even
+      then in his two arms. For Heyst had done this as soon as they had crept
+      through the doorway of the room. He thought it was quicker and simpler to
+      carry her the last step or two. He had grown really too anxious to be
+      aware of the effort. He lifted her high and deposited her on the bed, as
+      one lays a child on its side in a cot. Then he sat down on the edge,
+      masking his concern with a smile which obtained no response from the
+      dreamy immobility of her eyes. But she sought his hand, seized it eagerly;
+      and while she was pressing it with all the force of which she was capable,
+      the sleep she needed overtook her suddenly, overwhelmingly, as it
+      overtakes a child in a cot, with her lips parted for a safe, endearing
+      word which she had thought of but had no time to utter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The usual flaming silence brooded over Samburan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What in the world is this new mystery?&rdquo; murmured Heyst to himself,
+      contemplating her deep slumber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so deep, this enchanted sleep, that when some time afterwards he
+      gently tried to open her fingers and free his hand, he succeeded without
+      provoking the slightest stir.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is some very simple explanation, no doubt,&rdquo; he thought, as he stole
+      out into the living-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Absent-mindedly he pulled a book out of the top shelf, and sat down with
+      it; but even after he had opened it on his knee, and had been staring at
+      the pages for a time, he had not the slightest idea of what it was about.
+      He stared and stared at the crowded, parallel lines. It was only when,
+      raising his eyes for no particular reason, he saw Wang standing motionless
+      on the other side of the table, that he regained complete control of his
+      faculties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; he said, as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten appointment of
+      a not particularly welcome sort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited a little, and then, with reluctant curiosity, forced himself to
+      ask the silent Wang what he had to say. He had some idea that the matter
+      of the vanished revolver would come up at last; but the guttural sounds
+      which proceeded from the Chinaman did not refer to that delicate subject.
+      His speech was concerned with cups, saucers, plates, forks, and knives.
+      All these things had been put away in the cupboards on the back veranda,
+      where they belonged, perfectly clean, &ldquo;all plopel.&rdquo; Heyst wondered at the
+      scrupulosity of a man who was about to abandon him; for he was not
+      surprised to hear Wang conclude the account of his stewardship with the
+      words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I go now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! You go now?&rdquo; said Heyst, leaning back, his book on his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Me no likee. One man, two man, three man&mdash;no can do! Me go
+      now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's frightening you away like this?&rdquo; asked Heyst, while through his
+      mind flashed the hope that something enlightening might come from that
+      being so unlike himself, taking contact with the world with a simplicity
+      and directness of which his own mind was not capable. &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; he went on.
+      &ldquo;You are used to white men. You know them well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Me savee them,&rdquo; assented Wang inscrutably. &ldquo;Me savee plenty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All that he really knew was his own mind. He had made it up to withdraw
+      himself and the Alfuro woman from the uncertainties of the relations which
+      were going to establish themselves between those white men. It was Pedro
+      who had been the first cause of Wang's suspicion and fear. The Chinaman
+      had seen wild men. He had penetrated, in the train of a Chinese pedlar, up
+      one or two of the Bornean rivers into the country of the Dyaks. He had
+      also been in the interior of Mindanao, where there are people who live in
+      trees&mdash;savages, no better than animals; but a hairy brute like Pedro,
+      with his great fangs and ferocious growls, was altogether beyond his
+      conception of anything that could be looked upon as human. The strong
+      impression made on him by Pedro was the prime inducement which had led
+      Wang to purloin the revolver. Reflection on the general situation, and on
+      the insecurity of Number One, came later, after he had obtained possession
+      of the revolver and of the box of cartridges out of the table drawer in
+      the living-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you savee plenty about white men,&rdquo; Heyst went on in a slightly
+      bantering tone, after a moment of silent reflection in which he had
+      confessed to himself that the recovery of the revolver was not to be
+      thought of, either by persuasion or by some more forcible means. &ldquo;You
+      speak in that fashion, but you are frightened of those white men over
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me no flightened,&rdquo; protested Wang raucously, throwing up his head&mdash;which
+      gave to his throat a more strained, anxious appearance than ever. &ldquo;Me no
+      likee,&rdquo; he added in a quieter tone. &ldquo;Me velly sick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand over the region under the breast-bone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Heyst, serenely positive, &ldquo;belong one piecee lie. That isn't
+      proper man-talk at all. And after stealing my revolver, too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had suddenly decided to speak about it, because this frankness could
+      not make the situation much worse than it was. He did not suppose for a
+      moment that Wang had the revolver anywhere about his person; and after
+      having thought the matter over, he had arrived at the conclusion that the
+      Chinaman never meant to use the weapon against him. After a slight start,
+      because the direct charge had taken him unawares, Wang tore open the front
+      of his jacket with a convulsive show of indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No hab got. Look see!&rdquo; he mouthed in pretended anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He slapped his bare chest violently; he uncovered his very ribs, all astir
+      with the panting of outraged virtue; his smooth stomach heaved with
+      indignation. He started his wide blue breeches flapping about his yellow
+      calves. Heyst watched him quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never said you had it on you,&rdquo; he observed, without raising his voice;
+      &ldquo;but the revolver is gone from where I kept it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me no savee levolvel,&rdquo; Wang said obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The book lying open on Heyst's knee slipped suddenly and he made a sharp
+      movement to catch it up. Wang was unable to see the reason of this because
+      of the table, and leaped away from what seemed to him a threatening
+      symptom. When Heyst looked up, the Chinaman was already at the door facing
+      the room, not frightened, but alert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter?&rdquo; asked Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang nodded his shaven head significantly at the curtain closing the
+      doorway of the bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me no likee,&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the devil do you mean?&rdquo; Heyst was genuinely amazed. &ldquo;Don't like
+      what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wang pointed a long lemon-coloured finger at the motionless folds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two what? I don't understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose you savee, you no like that fashion. Me savee plenty. Me go now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had risen from his chair, but Wang kept his ground in the doorway
+      for a little longer. His almond-shaped eyes imparted to his face an
+      expression of soft and sentimental melancholy. The muscles of his throat
+      moved visibly while he uttered a distinct and guttural &ldquo;Goodbye&rdquo; and
+      vanished from Number One's sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Chinaman's departure altered the situation. Heyst reflected on what
+      would be best to do in view of that fact. For a long time he hesitated;
+      then, shrugging his shoulders wearily, he walked out on the veranda, down
+      the steps, and continued at a steady gait, with a thoughtful mien, in the
+      direction of his guests' bungalow. He wanted to make an important
+      communication to them, and he had no other object&mdash;least of all to
+      give them the shock of a surprise call. Nevertheless, their brutish
+      henchman not being on watch, it was Heyst's fate to startle Mr. Jones and
+      his secretary by his sudden appearance in the doorway. Their conversation
+      must have been very interesting to prevent them from hearing the visitor's
+      approach. In the dim room&mdash;the shutters were kept constantly closed
+      against the heat&mdash;Heyst saw them start apart. It was Mr. Jones who
+      spoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, here you are again! Come in, come in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, taking his hat off in the doorway, entered the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0030" id="link2HCH0030">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FIVE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Waking up suddenly, Lena looked, without raising her head from the pillow,
+      at the room in which she was alone. She got up quickly, as if to
+      counteract the awful sinking of her heart by the vigorous use of her
+      limbs. But this sinking was only momentary. Mistress of herself from
+      pride, from love, from necessity, and also because of a woman's vanity in
+      self-sacrifice, she met Heyst, returning from the strangers' bungalow,
+      with a clear glance and a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The smile he managed to answer, but, noticing that he avoided her eyes,
+      she composed her lips and lowered her gaze. For the same reason she
+      hastened to speak to him in a tone of indifference, which she put on
+      without effort, as if she had grown adept in duplicity since sunrise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been over there again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have. I thought&mdash;but you had better know first that we have lost
+      Wang for good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She repeated &ldquo;For good?&rdquo; as if she had not understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For good or evil&mdash;I shouldn't know which if you were to ask me. He
+      has dismissed himself. He's gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You expected him to go, though, didn't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst sat down on the other side of the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I expected it as soon as I discovered that he had annexed my
+      revolver. He says he hasn't taken it. That's untrue of course. A Chinaman
+      would not see the sense of confessing under any circumstances. To deny any
+      charge is a principle of right conduct; but he hardly expected to be
+      believed. He was a little enigmatic at the last, Lena. He startled me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst paused. The girl seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He startled me,&rdquo; repeated Heyst. She noted the anxiety in his tone, and
+      turned her head slightly to look at him across the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It must have been something&mdash;to startle you,&rdquo; she said. In the depth
+      of her parted lips, like a ripe pomegranate, there was a gleam of white
+      teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was only a single word&mdash;and some of his gestures. He had been
+      making a good deal of noise. I wonder we didn't wake you up. How soundly
+      you can sleep! I say, do you feel all right now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As fresh as can be,&rdquo; she said, treating him to another deep gleam of a
+      smile. &ldquo;I heard no noise, and I'm glad of it. The way he talks in his
+      harsh voice frightens me. I don't like all these foreign people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was just before he went away&mdash;bolted out, I should say. He nodded
+      and pointed at the curtain to our room. He knew you were there, of course.
+      He seemed to think&mdash;he seemed to try to give me to understand that
+      you were in special&mdash;well, danger. You know how he talks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She said nothing; she made no sound, only the faint tinge of colour ebbed
+      out of her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Heyst went on. &ldquo;He seemed to try to warn me. That must have been it
+      Did he imagine I had forgotten your existence? The only word he said was
+      'two'. It sounded so, at least. Yes, 'two'&mdash;and that he didn't like
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does that mean?&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We know what the word two means, don't we, Lena? We are two. Never were
+      such a lonely two out of the world, my dear! He might have tried to remind
+      me that he himself has a woman to look after. Why are you so pale, Lena?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I pale?&rdquo; she asked negligently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are.&rdquo; Heyst was really anxious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it isn't from fright,&rdquo; she protested truthfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, what she felt was a sort of horror which left her absolutely in
+      the full possession of all her faculties; more difficult to bear, perhaps,
+      for that reason, but not paralysing to her fortitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst in his turn smiled at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know that there is any reason to be frightened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean I am not frightened for myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe you are very plucky,&rdquo; he said. The colour had returned to her
+      face. &ldquo;I&rdquo; continued Heyst, &ldquo;am so rebellious to outward impressions that I
+      can't say that much about myself. I don't react with sufficient
+      distinctness.&rdquo; He changed his tone. &ldquo;You know I went to see those men
+      first thing this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. Be careful!&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder how one can be careful! I had a long talk with&mdash;but I don't
+      believe you have seen them. One of them is a fantastically thin, long
+      person, apparently ailing; I shouldn't wonder if he were really so. He
+      makes rather a point of it in a mysterious manner. I imagine he must have
+      suffered from tropical fevers, but not so much as he tries to make out.
+      He's what people would call a gentleman. He seemed on the point of
+      volunteering a tale of his adventures&mdash;for which I didn't ask him&mdash;but
+      remarked that it was a long story; some other time, perhaps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I suppose you would like to know who I am?' he asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him I would leave it to him, in a tone which, between gentlemen,
+      could have left no doubt in his mind. He raised himself on his elbow&mdash;he
+      was lying down on the camp-bed&mdash;and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I am he who is&mdash;'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lena seemed not to be listening; but when Heyst paused, she turned her
+      head quickly to him. He took it for a movement of inquiry, but in this he
+      was wrong. A great vagueness enveloped her impressions, but all her energy
+      was concentrated on the struggle that she wanted to take upon herself, in
+      a great exaltation of love and self-sacrifice, which is woman's sublime
+      faculty; altogether on herself, every bit of it, leaving him nothing, not
+      even the knowledge of what she did, if that were possible. She would have
+      liked to lock him up by some stratagem. Had she known of some means to put
+      him to sleep for days she would have used incantations or philtres without
+      misgivings. He seemed to her too good for such contacts, and not
+      sufficiently equipped. This last feeling had nothing to do with the
+      material fact of the revolver being stolen. She could hardly appreciate
+      that fact at its full value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Observing her eyes fixed and as if sightless&mdash;for the concentration
+      on her purpose took all expression out of them&mdash;Heyst imagined it to
+      be the effect of a great mental effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No use asking me what he meant, Lena; I don't know, and I did not ask
+      him. The gentleman, as I have told you before, seems devoted to
+      mystification. I said nothing, and he laid down his head again on the
+      bundle of rugs he uses for a pillow. He affects a state of great weakness,
+      but I suspect that he's perfectly capable of leaping to his feet if he
+      likes. Having been ejected, he said, from his proper social sphere because
+      he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions, he was a rebel
+      now, and was coming and going up and down the earth. As I really did not
+      want to listen to all this nonsense, I told him that I had heard that sort
+      of story about somebody else before. His grin is really ghastly. He
+      confessed that I was very far from the sort of man he expected to meet.
+      Then he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are thinking of, and I
+      have neither more nor less determination.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst looked across the table at Lena. Propped on her elbows, and holding
+      her head in both hands, she moved it a little with an air of
+      understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing could be plainer, eh?&rdquo; said Heyst grimly. &ldquo;Unless, indeed, this
+      is his idea of a pleasant joke; for, when he finished speaking, he burst
+      into a loud long laugh. I didn't join him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you had,&rdquo; she breathed out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't join him. It did not occur to me. I am not much of a
+      diplomatist. It would probably have been wise, for, indeed, I believe he
+      had said more than he meant to say, and was trying to take it back by this
+      affected jocularity. Yet when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force in
+      the background is but a rotten reed to lean upon. And I don't know whether
+      I could have done it if I had thought of it. I don't know. It would have
+      been against the grain. Could I have done it? I have lived too long within
+      myself, watching the mere shadows and shades of life. To deceive a man on
+      some issue which could be decided quicker, by his destruction while one is
+      disarmed, helpless, without even the power to run away&mdash;no! That
+      seems to me too degrading. And yet I have you here. I have your very
+      existence in my keeping. What do you say, Lena? Would I be capable of
+      throwing you to the lions to save my dignity?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She got up, walked quickly round the table, posed herself on his knees
+      lightly, throwing one arm round his neck, and whispered in his ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may if you like. And may be that's the only way I would consent to
+      leave you. For something like that. If it were something no bigger than
+      your little finger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave him a light kiss on the lips and was gone before he could detain
+      her. She regained her seat and propped her elbows again on the table. It
+      was hard to believe that she had moved from the spot at all. The fleeting
+      weight of her body on his knees, the hug round his neck, the whisper in
+      his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have been the unsubstantial
+      sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life; a sort of
+      charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts. He hesitated to
+      speak till she said, businesslike:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well. And what then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst gave a start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes. I didn't join him. I let him have his laugh out by himself. He
+      was shaking all over, like a merry skeleton, under a cotton sheet he was
+      covered with&mdash;I believe in order to conceal the revolver that he had
+      in his right hand. I didn't see it, but I have a distinct impression it
+      was there in his fist. As he had not been looking at me for some time, but
+      staring into a certain part of the room, I turned my head and saw a hairy,
+      wild sort of creature which they take about with them, squatting on its
+      heels in the angle of the walls behind me. He wasn't there when I came in.
+      I didn't like the notion of that watchful monster behind my back. If I had
+      been less at their mercy, I should certainly have changed my position. As
+      things are now, to move would have been a mere weakness. So I remained
+      where I was. The gentleman on the bed said he could assure me of one
+      thing; and that was that his presence here was no more morally
+      reprehensible than mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'We pursue the same ends,' he said, 'only perhaps I pursue them with more
+      openness than you&mdash;with more simplicity.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what he said,&rdquo; Heyst went on, after looking at Lena in a sort of
+      inquiring silence. &ldquo;I asked him if he knew beforehand that I was living
+      here; but he only gave me a ghastly grin. I didn't press him for an
+      answer, Lena. I thought I had better not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On her smooth forehead a ray of light always seemed to rest. Her loose
+      hair, parted in the middle, covered the hands sustaining her head. She
+      seemed spellbound by the interest of the narrative. Heyst did not pause
+      long. He managed to continue his relation smoothly enough, beginning
+      afresh with a piece of comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He would have lied impudently&mdash;and I detest being told a lie. It
+      makes me uncomfortable. It's pretty clear that I am not fitted for the
+      affairs of the wide world. But I did not want him to think that I accepted
+      his presence too meekly, so I said that his comings or goings on the earth
+      were none of my business, of course, except that I had a natural curiosity
+      to know when he would find it convenient to resume them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He asked me to look at the state he was in. Had I been all alone here, as
+      they think I am, I should have laughed at him. But not being alone&mdash;I
+      say, Lena, you are sure you haven't shown yourself where you could be
+      seen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certain,&rdquo; she said promptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked relieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You understand, Lena, that when I ask you to keep so strictly out of
+      sight, it is because you are not for them to look at&mdash;to talk about.
+      My poor Lena! I can't help that feeling. Do you understand it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved her head slightly in a manner that was neither affirmative nor
+      negative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People will have to see me some day,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder how long it will be possible for you to keep out of sight?&rdquo;
+       murmured Heyst thoughtfully. He bent over the table. &ldquo;Let me finish
+      telling you. I asked him point blank what it was he wanted with me; he
+      appeared extremely unwilling to come to the point. It was not really so
+      pressing as all that, he said. His secretary, who was in fact his partner,
+      was not present, having gone down to the wharf to look at their boat.
+      Finally the fellow proposed that he should put off a certain communication
+      he had to make till the day after tomorrow. I agreed; but I also told him
+      that I was not at all anxious to hear it. I had no conception in what way
+      his affairs could concern me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ah, Mr. Heyst,' he said, 'you and I have much more in common than you
+      think.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst struck the table with his fist unexpectedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a jeer; I am sure it was!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed ashamed of this outburst and smiled faintly into the motionless
+      eyes of the girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What could I have done&mdash;even if I had had my pockets full of
+      revolvers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made an appreciative sign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Killing's a sin, sure enough,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went away,&rdquo; Heyst continued. &ldquo;I left him there, lying on his side with
+      his eyes shut. When I got back here, I found you looking ill. What was it,
+      Lena? You did give me a scare! Then I had the interview with Wang while
+      you rested. You were sleeping quietly. I sat here to consider all these
+      things calmly, to try to penetrate their inner meaning and their outward
+      bearing. It struck me that the two days we have before us have the
+      character of a sort of truce. The more I thought of it, the more I felt
+      that this was tacitly understood between Jones and myself. It was to our
+      advantage, if anything can be of advantage to people caught so completely
+      unawares as we are. Wang was gone. He, at any rate, had declared himself,
+      but as I did not know what he might take it into his head to do, I thought
+      I had better warn these people that I was no longer responsible for the
+      Chinaman. I did not want Mr. Wang making some move which would precipitate
+      the action against us. Do you see my point of view?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a sign that she did. All her soul was wrapped in her passionate
+      determination, in an exalted belief in herself&mdash;in the contemplation
+      of her amazing opportunity to win the certitude, the eternity, of that
+      man's love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never saw two men,&rdquo; Heyst was saying, &ldquo;more affected by a piece of
+      information than Jones and his secretary, who was back in the bungalow by
+      then. They had not heard me come up. I told them I was sorry to intrude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Not at all! Not at all,' said Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The secretary backed away into a corner and watched me like a wary cat.
+      In fact, they both were visibly on their guard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I am come,' I told them, 'to let you know that my servant has deserted&mdash;gone
+      off.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At first they looked at each other as if they had not understood what I
+      was saying; but very soon they seemed quite concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'You mean to say your Chink's cleared out?' said Ricardo, coming forward
+      from his corner. 'Like this&mdash;all at once? What did he do it for?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said that a Chinaman had always a simple and precise reason for what he
+      did, but that to get such a reason out of him was not so easy. All he told
+      me, I said, was that he 'didn't like'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They were extremely disturbed at this. Didn't like what, they wanted to
+      know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'The looks of you and your party,' I told Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Nonsense!' he cried out, and immediately Ricardo, the short man, struck
+      in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Told you that? What did he take you for, sir&mdash;an infant? Or do you
+      take us for kids?&mdash;meaning no offence. Come, I bet you will tell us
+      next that you've missed something.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'I didn't mean to tell you anything of the sort,' I said, 'but as a
+      matter of fact it is so.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He slapped his thigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Thought so. What do you think of this trick, governor?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jones made some sort of sign to him, and then that extraordinary
+      cat-faced associate proposed that he and their servant should come out and
+      help me catch or kill the Chink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My object, I said, was not to get assistance. I did not intend to chase
+      the Chinaman. I had come only to warn them that he was armed, and that he
+      really objected to their presence on the island. I wanted them to
+      understand that I was not responsible for anything that might happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Do you mean to tell us,' asked Ricardo, 'that there is a crazy Chink
+      with a six-shooter broke loose on this island, and that you don't care?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strangely enough they did not seem to believe my story. They were
+      exchanging significant looks all the time. Ricardo stole up close to his
+      principal; they had a confabulation together, and then something happened
+      which I did not expect. It's rather awkward, too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since I would not have their assistance to get hold of the Chink and
+      recover my property, the least they could do was to send me their servant.
+      It was Jones who said that, and Ricardo backed up the idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Yes, yes&mdash;let our Pedro cook for all hands in your compound! He
+      isn't so bad as he looks. That's what we will do!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He bustled out of the room to the veranda, and let out an ear-splitting
+      whistle for their Pedro. Having heard the brute's answering howl, Ricardo
+      ran back into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Yes, Mr. Heyst. This will do capitally, Mr. Heyst. You just direct him
+      to do whatever you are accustomed to have done for you in the way of
+      attendance. See?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lena, I confess to you that I was taken completely by surprise. I had not
+      expected anything of the sort. I don't know what I expected. I am so
+      anxious about you that I can't keep away from these infernal scoundrels.
+      And only two months ago I would not have cared. I would have defied their
+      scoundrelism as much as I have scorned all the other intrusions of life.
+      But now I have you! You stole into my life, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst drew a deep breath. The girl gave him a quick, wide-eyed glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! That's what you are thinking of&mdash;that you have me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible to read the thoughts veiled by her steady grey eyes, to
+      penetrate the meaning of her silences, her words, and even her embraces.
+      He used to come out of her very arms with the feeling of a baffled man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I haven't you, if you are not here, then where are you?&rdquo; cried Heyst.
+      &ldquo;You understand me very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head a little. Her red lips, at which he looked now, her
+      lips as fascinating as the voice that came out of them, uttered the words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hear what you say; but what does it mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means that I could lie and perhaps cringe for your sake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No! Don't you ever do that,&rdquo; she said in haste, while her eyes
+      glistened suddenly. &ldquo;You would hate me for it afterwards!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hate you?&rdquo; repeated Heyst, who had recalled his polite manner. &ldquo;No! You
+      needn't consider the extremity of the improbable&mdash;as yet. But I will
+      confess to you that I&mdash;how shall I call it?&mdash;that I dissembled.
+      First I dissembled my dismay at the unforeseen result of my idiotic
+      diplomacy. Do you understand, my dear girl?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was evident that she did not understand the word. Heyst produced his
+      playful smile, which contrasted oddly with the worried character of his
+      whole expression. His temples seemed to have sunk in, his face looked a
+      little leaner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is true,
+      but the sentiment which seems to prompt it. I have never been diplomatic
+      in my relation with mankind&mdash;not from regard for its feelings, but
+      from a certain regard for my own. Diplomacy doesn't go well with
+      consistent contempt. I cared little for life and still less for death.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't talk like that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dissembled my extreme longing to take these wandering scoundrels by
+      their throats,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I have only two hands&mdash;I wish I had a
+      hundred to defend you&mdash;and there were three throats. By that time
+      their Pedro was in the room too. Had he seen me engaged with their two
+      throats, he would have been at mine like a fierce dog, or any other savage
+      and faithful brute. I had no difficulty in dissembling my longing for the
+      vulgar, stupid, and hopeless argument of fight. I remarked that I really
+      did not want a servant. I couldn't think of depriving them of their man's
+      services; but they would not hear me. They had made up their minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'We shall send him over at once,' Ricardo said, 'to start cooking dinner
+      for everybody. I hope you won't mind me coming to eat it with you in your
+      bungalow; and we will send the governor's dinner over to him here.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could do nothing but hold my tongue or bring on a quarrel&mdash;some
+      manifestation of their dark purpose, which we have no means to resist. Of
+      course, you may remain invisible this evening; but with that
+      atrocious-brute prowling all the time at the back of the house, how long
+      can your presence be concealed from these men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst's distress could be felt in his silence. The girl's head, sustained
+      by her hands buried in the thick masses of her hair, had a perfect
+      immobility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are certain you have not been seen so far?&rdquo; he asked suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The motionless head spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I be certain? You told me you wanted me to keep out of the way. I
+      kept out of the way. I didn't ask your reason. I thought you didn't want
+      people to know that you had a girl like me about you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What? Ashamed?&rdquo; cried Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't what's right, perhaps&mdash;I mean for you&mdash;is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst lifted his hands, reproachfully courteous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I look upon it as so very much right that I couldn't bear the idea of any
+      other than sympathetic, respectful eyes resting on you. I disliked and
+      mistrusted these fellows from the first. Didn't you understand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; I did keep out of sight,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence fell. At last Heyst stirred slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this is of very little importance now,&rdquo; he said with a sigh. &ldquo;This is
+      a question of something infinitely worse than mere looks and thoughts,
+      however base and contemptible. As I have told you, I met Ricardo's
+      suggestions by silence. As I was turning away he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'If you happen to have the key of that store-room of yours on you, Mr.
+      Heyst, you may just as well let me have it; I will give it to our Pedro.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had it on me, and I tendered it to him without speaking. The hairy
+      creature was at the door by then, and caught the key, which Ricardo threw
+      to him, better than any trained ape could have done. I came away. All the
+      time I had been thinking anxiously of you, whom I had left asleep, alone
+      here, and apparently ill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst interrupted himself, with a listening turn of his head. He had heard
+      the faint sound of sticks being snapped in the compound. He rose and
+      crossed the room to look out of the back door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And here the creature is,&rdquo; he said, returning to the table. &ldquo;Here he is,
+      already attending to the fire. Oh, my dear Lena!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had followed him with her eyes. She watched him go out on the front
+      veranda cautiously. He lowered stealthily a couple of screens that hung
+      between the column, and remained outside very still, as if interested by
+      something on the open ground. Meantime she had risen in her turn, to take
+      a peep into the compound. Heyst, glancing over his shoulder, saw her
+      returning to her seat. He beckoned to her, and she continued to move,
+      crossing the shady room, pure and bright in her white dress, her hair
+      loose, with something of a sleep-walker in her unhurried motion, in her
+      extended hand, in the sightless effect of her grey eyes luminous in the
+      half-light. He had never seen such an expression in her face before. It
+      had dreaminess in it, intense attention, and something like sternness.
+      Arrested in the doorway by Heyst's extended arm, she seemed to wake up,
+      flushed faintly&mdash;and this flush, passing off, carried away with it
+      the strange transfiguring mood. With a courageous gesture she pushed back
+      the heavy masses of her hair. The light clung to her forehead. Her
+      delicate nostrils quivered. Heyst seized her arm and whispered excitedly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slip out here, quickly! The screens will conceal you. Only you must mind
+      the stair-space. They are actually out&mdash;I mean the other two. You had
+      better see them before you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a barely perceptible movement of recoil, checked at once, and
+      stood still. Heyst released her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, perhaps I had better,&rdquo; she said with unnatural deliberation, and
+      stepped out on the veranda to stand close by his side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Together, one on each side of the screen, they peeped between the edge of
+      the canvas and the veranda-post entwined with creepers. A great heat
+      ascended from the sun-smitten ground, in an ever-rising wave, as if from
+      some secret store of earth's fiery heart; for the sky was growing cooler
+      already, and the sun had declined sufficiently for the shadows of Mr.
+      Jones and his henchman to be projected towards the bungalow side by side&mdash;one
+      infinitely slender, the other short and broad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two visitors stood still and gazed. To keep up the fiction of his
+      invalidism, Mr. Jones, the gentleman, leaned on the arm of Ricardo, the
+      secretary, the top of whose hat just came up to his governor's shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you see them?&rdquo; Heyst whispered into the girl's ear. &ldquo;Here they are,
+      the envoys of the outer world. Here they are before you&mdash;evil
+      intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm. The brute force is at the
+      back. A trio of fitting envoys perhaps&mdash;but what about the welcome?
+      Suppose I were armed, could I shoot these two down where they stand? Could
+      I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without moving her head, the girl felt for Heyst's hand, pressed it and
+      thereafter did not let it go. He continued, bitterly playful:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. I don't think so. There is a strain in me which lays me
+      under an insensate obligation to avoid even the appearance of murder. I
+      have never pulled a trigger or lifted my hand on a man, even in
+      self-defence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The suddenly tightened grip of her hand checked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are making a move,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can they be thinking of coming here?&rdquo; Heyst wondered anxiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, they aren't coming this way,&rdquo; she said; and there was another pause.
+      &ldquo;They are going back to their house,&rdquo; she reported finally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After watching them a little longer, she let go Heyst's hand and moved
+      away from the screen. He followed her into the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have seen them now,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;Think what it was to me to see them
+      land in the dusk, fantasms from the sea&mdash;apparitions, chimeras! And
+      they persist. That's the worst of it&mdash;they persist. They have no
+      right to be&mdash;but they are. They ought to have aroused my fury. But I
+      have refined everything away by this time&mdash;anger, indignation, scorn
+      itself. Nothing's left but disgust. Since you have told me of that
+      abominable calumny, it has become immense&mdash;it extends even to
+      myself.&rdquo; He looked up at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But luckily I have you. And if only Wang had not carried off that
+      miserable revolver&mdash;yes, Lena, here we are, we two!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put both her hands on his shoulders and looked straight into his eyes.
+      He returned her penetrating gaze. It baffled him. He could not pierce the
+      grey veil of her eyes; but the sadness of her voice thrilled him
+      profoundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not reproaching me?&rdquo; she asked slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Reproach? What a word between us! It could only be myself&mdash;but the
+      mention of Wang has given me an idea. I have been, not exactly cringing,
+      not exactly lying, but still dissembling. You have been hiding yourself,
+      to please me, but still you have been hiding. All this is very dignified.
+      Why shouldn't we try begging now? A noble art? Yes. Lena, we must go out
+      together. I couldn't think of leaving you alone, and I must&mdash;yes, I
+      must speak to Wang. We shall go and seek that man, who knows what he wants
+      and how to secure what he wants. We will go at once!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait till I put my hair up,&rdquo; she agreed instantly, and vanished behind
+      the curtain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the curtain had fallen behind her, she turned her head back with an
+      expression of infinite and tender concern for him&mdash;for him whom she
+      could never hope to understand, and whom she was afraid she could never
+      satisfy, as if her passion were of a hopelessly lower quality, unable to
+      appease some exalted and delicate desire of his superior soul. In a couple
+      of minutes she reappeared. They left the house by the door of the
+      compound, and passed within three feet of the thunderstruck Pedro, without
+      even looking in his direction. He rose from stooping over a fire of
+      sticks, and, balancing himself clumsily, uncovered his enormous fangs in
+      gaping astonishment. Then suddenly he set off rolling on his bandy legs to
+      impart to his masters the astonishing discovery of a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0031" id="link2HCH0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER SIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As luck would have it, Ricardo was lounging alone on the veranda of the
+      former counting-house. He scented some new development at once, and ran
+      down to meet the trotting, bear-like figure. The deep, growling noises it
+      made, though they had only a very remote resemblance to the Spanish
+      language, or indeed to any sort of human speech, were from long practice
+      quite intelligible to Mr. Jones's secretary. Ricardo was rather surprised.
+      He had imagined that the girl would continue to keep out of sight. That
+      line apparently was given up. He did not mistrust her. How could he?
+      Indeed, he could not think of her existence calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to keep her image out of his mind so that he should be able to
+      use its powers with some approach to that coolness which the complex
+      nature of the situation demanded from him, both for his own sake and as
+      the faithful follower of plain Mr. Jones, gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He collected his wits and thought. This was a change of policy, probably
+      on the part of Heyst. If so, what could it mean? A deep fellow! Unless it
+      was her doing; in which case&mdash;h'm&mdash;all right. Must be. She would
+      know what she was doing. Before him Pedro, lifting his feet alternately,
+      swayed to and fro sideways&mdash;his usual attitude of expectation. His
+      little red eyes, lost in the mass of hair, were motionless. Ricardo stared
+      into them with calculated contempt and said in a rough, angry voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Woman! Of course there is. We know that without you!&rdquo; He gave the tame
+      monster a push. &ldquo;Git! Vamos! Waddle! Get back and cook the dinner. Which
+      way did they go, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pedro extended a huge, hairy forearm to show the direction, and went off
+      on his bandy legs. Advancing a few steps, Ricardo was just in time to see,
+      above some bushes, two white helmets moving side by side in the clearing.
+      They disappeared. Now that he had managed to keep Pedro from informing the
+      governor that there was a woman on the island, he could indulge in
+      speculation as to the movements of these people. His attitude towards Mr.
+      Jones had undergone a spiritual change, of which he himself was not yet
+      fully aware.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That morning, before tiffin, after his escape from the Heyst bungalow,
+      completed in such an inspiring way by the recovery of the slipper, Ricardo
+      had made his way to their allotted house, reeling as he ran, his head in a
+      whirl. He was wildly excited by visions of inconceivable promise. He
+      waited to compose himself before he dared to meet the governor. On
+      entering the room, he found Mr. Jones sitting on the camp bedstead like a
+      tailor on his board, cross-legged, his long back against the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, sir. You aren't going to tell me you are bored?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bored! No! Where the devil have you been all this time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Observing&mdash;watching&mdash;nosing around. What else? I knew you had
+      company. Have you talked freely, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I have,&rdquo; muttered Mr. Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not downright plain, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I wished you had been here. You loaf all the morning, and now you
+      come in out of breath. What's the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't been wasting my time out there,&rdquo; said Ricardo. &ldquo;Nothing's the
+      matter. I&mdash;I&mdash;might have hurried a bit.&rdquo; He was in truth still
+      panting; only it was not with running, but with the tumult of thoughts and
+      sensations long repressed, which had been set free by the adventure of the
+      morning. He was almost distracted by them now. He forgot himself in the
+      maze of possibilities threatening and inspiring. &ldquo;And so you had a long
+      talk?&rdquo; he said, to gain time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confound you! The sun hasn't affected your head, has it? Why are you
+      staring at me like a basilisk?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beg pardon, sir. Wasn't aware I stared,&rdquo; Ricardo apologized
+      good-humouredly. &ldquo;The sun might well affect a thicker skull than mine. It
+      blazes. Phew! What do you think a fellow is, sir&mdash;a salamander?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to have been here,&rdquo; observed Mr. Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did the beast give any signs of wanting to prance?&rdquo; asked Ricardo
+      quickly, with absolutely genuine anxiety. &ldquo;It wouldn't do, sir. You must
+      play him easy for at least a couple of days, sir. I have a plan. I have a
+      notion that I can find out a lot in a couple of days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have? In what way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, by watching,&rdquo; Ricardo answered slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones grunted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing new, that. Watch, eh? Why not pray a little, too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, ha, ha! That's a good one,&rdquo; burst out the secretary, fixing Mr. Jones
+      with mirthless eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The latter dropped the subject indolently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you may be certain of at least two days,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo recovered himself. His eyes gleamed voluptuously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll pull this off yet&mdash;clean&mdash;whole&mdash;right through, if
+      you will only trust me, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am trusting you right enough,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones. &ldquo;It's your interest,
+      too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And, indeed, Ricardo was truthful enough in his statement. He did
+      absolutely believe in success now. But he couldn't tell his governor that
+      he had intelligences in the enemy's camp. It wouldn't do to tell him of
+      the girl. Devil only knew what he would do if he learned there was a woman
+      about. And how could he begin to tell of it? He couldn't confess his
+      sudden escapade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll pull it off, sir,&rdquo; he said, with perfectly acted cheerfulness. He
+      experienced gusts of awful joy expanding in his heart and hot like a
+      fanned flame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must,&rdquo; pronounced Mr. Jones. &ldquo;This thing, Martin, is not like our
+      other tries. I have a peculiar feeling about this. It's a different thing.
+      It's a sort of test.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo was impressed by the governor's manner; for the first time a hint
+      of passion could be detected in him. But also a word he used, the word
+      &ldquo;test,&rdquo; had struck him as particularly significant somehow. It was the
+      last word uttered during that morning's conversation. Immediately
+      afterwards Ricardo went out of the room. It was impossible for him to keep
+      still. An elation in which an extraordinary softness mingled with savage
+      triumph would not allow it. It prevented his thinking, also. He walked up
+      and down the veranda far into the afternoon, eyeing the other bungalow at
+      every turn. It gave no sign of being inhabited. Once or twice he stopped
+      dead short and looked down at his left slipper. Each time he chuckled
+      audibly. His restlessness kept on increasing till at last it frightened
+      him. He caught hold of the balustrade of the veranda and stood still,
+      smiling not at his thought but at the strong sense of life within him. He
+      abandoned himself to it carelessly, even recklessly. He cared for no one,
+      friend or enemy. At that moment Mr. Jones called him by name from within.
+      A shadow fell on the secretary's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here, sir,&rdquo; he answered; but it was a moment before he could make up his
+      mind to go in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found the governor on his feet. Mr. Jones was tired of lying down when
+      there was no necessity for it. His slender form, gliding about the room,
+      came to a standstill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been thinking, Martin, of something you suggested. At the time it
+      did not strike me as practical; but on reflection it seems to me that to
+      propose a game is as good a way as any to let him understand that the time
+      has come to disgorge. It's less&mdash;how should I say?&mdash;vulgar. He
+      will know what it means. It's not a bad form to give to the business&mdash;which
+      in itself is crude, Martin, crude.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Want to spare his feelings?&rdquo; jeered the secretary in such a bitter tone
+      that Mr. Jones was really surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, it was your own notion, confound you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who says it wasn't?&rdquo; retorted Ricardo sulkily. &ldquo;But I am fairly sick of
+      this crawling. No! No! Get the exact bearings of his swag and then a rip
+      up. That's plenty good enough for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His passions being thoroughly aroused, a thirst for blood was allied in
+      him with a thirst for tenderness&mdash;yes, tenderness. A sort of anxious,
+      melting sensation pervaded and softened his heart when he thought of that
+      girl&mdash;one of his own sort. And at the same time jealousy started
+      gnawing at his breast as the image of Heyst intruded itself on his fierce
+      anticipation of bliss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The crudeness of your ferocity is positively gross, Martin,&rdquo; Mr. Jones
+      said disdainfully. &ldquo;You don't even understand my purpose. I mean to have
+      some sport out of him. Just try to imagine the atmosphere of the game&mdash;the
+      fellow handling the cards&mdash;the agonizing mockery of it! Oh, I shall
+      appreciate this greatly. Yes, let him lose his money instead of being
+      forced to hand it over. You, of course, would shoot him at once, but I
+      shall enjoy the refinement and the jest of it. He's a man of the best
+      society. I've been hounded out of my sphere by people very much like that
+      fellow. How enraged and humiliated he will be! I promise myself some
+      exquisite moments while watching his play.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay, and suppose he suddenly starts prancing. He may not appreciate the
+      fun.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean you to be present,&rdquo; Mr. Jones remarked calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, as long as I am free to plug him or rip him up whenever I think the
+      time has come, you are welcome to your bit of sport, sir. I shan't spoil
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0032" id="link2HCH0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER SEVEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was at this precise moment of their conversation that Heyst had
+      intruded on Mr. Jones and his secretary with his warning about Wang, as he
+      had related to Lena. When he left them, the two looked at each other in
+      wondering silence. My Jones was the first to break it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, Martin!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does this mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's some move. Blame me if I can understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too deep for you?&rdquo; Mr. Jones inquired dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's nothing but some of his infernal impudence,&rdquo; growled the secretary.
+      &ldquo;You don't believe all that about the Chink, do you, sir? 'Tain't true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't necessary for it to be true to have a meaning for us. It's the
+      why of his coming to tell us this tale that's important.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think he made it up to frighten us?&rdquo; asked Ricardo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones scowled at him thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man looked worried,&rdquo; he muttered, as if to himself. &ldquo;Suppose that
+      Chinaman has really stolen his money! The man looked very worried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing but his artfulness, sir,&rdquo; protested Ricardo earnestly, for the
+      idea was too disconcerting to entertain. &ldquo;Is it likely that he would have
+      trusted a Chink with enough knowledge to make it possible?&rdquo; he argued
+      warmly. &ldquo;Why, it's the very thing that he would keep close about. There's
+      something else there. Ay, but what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, ha, ha!&rdquo; Mr. Jones let out a ghostly, squeaky laugh. &ldquo;I've never been
+      placed in such a ridiculous position before,&rdquo; he went on, with a
+      sepulchral equanimity of tone. &ldquo;It's you, Martin, who dragged me into it.
+      However, it's my own fault too. I ought to&mdash;but I was really too
+      bored to use my brain, and yours is not to be trusted. You are a hothead!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A blasphemous exclamation of grief escaped from Ricardo. Not to be
+      trusted! Hothead! He was almost tearful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't I heard you, sir, saying more than twenty times since we got
+      fired out from Manila that we should want a lot of capital to work the
+      East Coast with? You were always telling me that to prime properly all
+      them officials and Portuguese scallywags we should have to lose heavily at
+      first. Weren't you always worrying about some means of getting hold of a
+      good lot of cash? It wasn't to be got hold of by allowing yourself to
+      become bored in that rotten Dutch town and playing a two-penny game with
+      confounded beggarly bank clerks and such like. Well, I've brought you
+      here, where there is cash to be got&mdash;and a big lot, to a moral,&rdquo; he
+      added through his set teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence fell. Each of them was staring into a different corner of the
+      room. Suddenly, with a slight stamp of his foot, Mr. Jones made for the
+      door. Ricardo caught him up outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put an arm through mine, sir,&rdquo; he begged him gently but firmly. &ldquo;No use
+      giving the game away. An invalid may well come out for a breath of fresh
+      air after the sun's gone down a bit. That's it, sir. But where do you want
+      to go? Why did you come out, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones stopped short.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly know myself,&rdquo; he confessed in a hollow mutter, staring intently
+      at the Number One bungalow. &ldquo;It's quite irrational,&rdquo; he declared in a
+      still lower tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better go in, sir,&rdquo; suggested Ricardo. &ldquo;What's that? Those screens
+      weren't down before. He's spying from behind them now, I bet&mdash;the
+      dodging, artful, plotting beast!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not go over there and see if we can't get to the bottom of this
+      game?&rdquo; was the unexpected proposal uttered by Mr. Jones. &ldquo;He will have to
+      talk to us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo repressed a start of dismay, but for a moment could not speak. He
+      only pressed the governor's hand to his side instinctively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir. What could you say? Do you expect to get to the bottom of his
+      lies? How could you make him talk? It isn't time yet to come to grips with
+      that gent. You don't think I would hang back, do you? His Chink, of
+      course, I'll shoot like a dog the moment I catch sight of him; but as to
+      that Mr. Blasted Heyst, the time isn't yet. My head's cooler just now than
+      yours. Let's go in again. Why, we are exposed here. Suppose he took it
+      into his head to let off a gun on us! He's an unaccountable, 'yporcritical
+      skunk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Allowing himself to be persuaded, Mr. Jones returned to his seclusion. The
+      secretary, however, remained on the veranda&mdash;for the purpose, he
+      said, of seeing whether that Chink wasn't sneaking around; in which case
+      he proposed to take a long shot at the galoot and chance the consequences.
+      His real reason was that he wanted to be alone, away from the governor's
+      deep-sunk eyes. He felt a sentimental desire to indulge his fancies in
+      solitude. A great change had come over Mr. Ricardo since that morning. A
+      whole side of him which from prudence, from necessity, from loyalty, had
+      been kept dormant, was aroused now, colouring his thoughts and disturbing
+      his mental poise by the vision of such staggering consequences as, for
+      instance, the possibility of an active conflict with the governor. The
+      appearance of the monstrous Pedro with his news drew Ricardo out of a
+      feeling of dreaminess wrapped up in a sense of impending trouble. A woman?
+      Yes, there was one; and it made all the difference. After driving away
+      Pedro, and watching the white helmets of Heyst and Lena vanishing among
+      the bushes he stood lost in meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where could they be off to like this?&rdquo; he mentally asked himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer found by his speculative faculties on their utmost stretch was&mdash;to
+      meet that Chink. For in the desertion of Wang Ricardo did not believe. It
+      was a lying yarn, the organic part of a dangerous plot. Heyst had gone to
+      combine some fresh move. But then Ricardo felt sure that the girl was with
+      him&mdash;the girl full of pluck, full of sense, full of understanding; an
+      ally of his own kind!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went indoors briskly. Mr. Jones had resumed his cross-legged pose at
+      the head of the bed, with his back against the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anything new?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo walked about the room as if he had no care in the world. He hummed
+      snatches of song. Mr. Jones raised his waspish eyebrows, at the sound. The
+      secretary got down on his knees before an old leather trunk, and,
+      rummaging in there, brought out a small looking-glass. He fell to
+      examining his physiognomy in it with silent absorption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I'll shave,&rdquo; he decided, getting up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave a sidelong glance to the governor, and repeated it several times
+      during the operation, which did not take long, and even afterwards, when
+      after putting away the implements, he resumed his walking, humming more
+      snatches of unknown songs. Mr. Jones preserved a complete immobility, his
+      thin lips compressed, his eyes veiled. His face was like a carving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you would like to try your hand at cards with that skunk, sir?&rdquo; said
+      Ricardo, stopping suddenly and rubbing his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones gave no sign of having heard anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, why not? Why shouldn't he have the experience? You remember in that
+      Mexican town&mdash;what's its name?&mdash;the robber fellow they caught in
+      the mountains and condemned to be shot? He played cards half the night
+      with the jailer and the sheriff. Well, this fellow is condemned, too. He
+      must give you your game. Hang it all, a gentleman ought to have some
+      little relaxation! And you have been uncommonly patient, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are uncommonly volatile all of a sudden,&rdquo; Mr. Jones remarked in a
+      bored voice. &ldquo;What's come to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The secretary hummed for a while, and then said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll try to get him over here for you tonight, after dinner. If I ain't
+      here myself, don't you worry, sir. I shall be doing a bit of nosing around&mdash;see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; sneered Mr. Jones languidly. &ldquo;But what do you expect to see in
+      the dark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo made no answer, and after another turn or two slipped out of the
+      room. He no longer felt comfortable alone with the governor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0033" id="link2HCH0033">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER EIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Meantime Heyst and Lena, walking rather fast, approached Wang's hut.
+      Asking the girl to wait, Heyst ascended the little ladder of bamboos
+      giving access to the door. It was as he had expected. The smoky interior
+      was empty, except for a big chest of sandalwood too heavy for hurried
+      removal. Its lid was thrown up, but whatever it might have contained was
+      no longer there. All Wang's possessions were gone. Without tarrying in the
+      hut, Heyst came back to the girl, who asked no questions, with her strange
+      air of knowing or understanding everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us push on,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went ahead, the rustle of her white skirt following him into the shades
+      of the forest, along the path of their usual walk. Though the air lay
+      heavy between straight denuded trunks, the sunlit patches moved on the
+      ground, and raising her eyes Lena saw far above her head the flutter of
+      the leaves, the surface shudder on the mighty limbs extended horizontally
+      in the perfect immobility of patience. Twice Heyst looked over his
+      shoulder at her. Behind the readiness of her answering smile there was a
+      fund of devoted, concentrated passion, burning with the hope of a more
+      perfect satisfaction. They passed the spot where it was their practice to
+      turn towards the barren summit of the central hill. Heyst held steadily on
+      his way towards the upper limit of the forest. The moment they left its
+      shelter, a breeze enveloped them, and a great cloud, racing over the sun,
+      threw a peculiar sombre tint over everything. Heyst pointed up a
+      precipitous, rugged path clinging to the side of the hill. It ended in a
+      barricade of felled trees, a primitively conceived obstacle which must
+      have cost much labour to erect at just that spot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This,&rdquo; Heyst, explained in his urbane tone, &ldquo;is a barrier against the
+      march of civilization. The poor folk over there did not like it, as it
+      appeared to them in the shape of my company&mdash;a great step forward, as
+      some people used to call it with mistaken confidence. The advanced foot
+      has been drawn back, but the barricade remains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went on climbing slowly. The cloud had driven over, leaving an added
+      brightness on the face of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a very ridiculous thing,&rdquo; Heyst went on; &ldquo;but then it is the product
+      of honest fear&mdash;fear of the unknown, of the incomprehensible. It's
+      pathetic, too, in a way. And I heartily wish, Lena, that we were on the
+      other side of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, stop, stop!&rdquo; she cried, seizing his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The face of the barricade they were approaching had been piled up with a
+      lot of fresh-cut branches. The leaves were still green. A gentle breeze,
+      sweeping over the top, stirred them a little; but what had startled the
+      girl was the discovery of several spear-blades protruding from the mass of
+      foliage. She had made them out suddenly. They did not gleam, but she saw
+      them with extreme distinctness, very still, very vicious to look at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better let me go forward alone, Lena,&rdquo; said Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She tugged, persistently at his arm, but after a time, during which he
+      never ceased to look smilingly into her terrified eyes, he ended by
+      disengaging himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a sign rather than a demonstration,&rdquo; he argued, persuasively. &ldquo;Just
+      wait here a moment. I promise not to approach near enough to be stabbed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As in a nightmare she watched Heyst go up the few yards of the path as if
+      he never meant to stop; and she heard his voice, like voices heard in
+      dreams, shouting unknown words in an unearthly tone. Heyst was only
+      demanding to see Wang. He was not kept waiting very long. Recovering from
+      the first flurry of her fright, Lena noticed a commotion in the green
+      top-dressing of the barricade. She exhaled a sigh of relief when the
+      spear-blades retreated out of sight, sliding inward&mdash;the horrible
+      things! in a spot facing Heyst a pair of yellow hands parted the leaves,
+      and a face filled the small opening&mdash;a face with very noticeable
+      eyes. It was Wang's face, of course, with no suggestion of a body
+      belonging to it, like those cardboard faces at which she remembered gazing
+      as a child in the window of a certain dim shop kept by a mysterious little
+      man in Kingsland Road. Only this face, instead of mere holes, had eyes
+      which blinked. She could see the beating of the eyelids. The hands on each
+      side of the face, keeping the boughs apart, also did not look as if they
+      belonged to any real body. One of them was holding a revolver&mdash;a
+      weapon which she recognized merely by intuition, never having seen such an
+      object before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned her shoulders against the rock of the perpendicular hillside
+      and kept her eyes on Heyst, with comparative composure, since the spears
+      were not menacing him any longer. Beyond the rigid and motionless back he
+      presented to her, she saw Wang's unreal cardboard face moving its thin
+      lips and grimacing artificially. She was too far down the path to hear the
+      dialogue, carried on in an ordinary voice. She waited patiently for its
+      end. Her shoulders felt the warmth of the rock; now and then a whiff of
+      cooler air seemed to slip down upon her head from above; the ravine at her
+      feet, choked full of vegetation, emitted the faint, drowsy hum of insect
+      life. Everything was very quiet. She failed to notice the exact moment
+      when Wang's head vanished from the foliage, taking the unreal hands away
+      with it. To her horror, the spear-blades came gliding slowly out. The very
+      hair on her head stirred; but before she had time to cry out, Heyst, who
+      seemed rooted to the ground, turned round abruptly and began to move
+      towards her. His great moustaches did not quite hide an ugly but
+      irresolute smile; and when he had come down near enough to touch her, he
+      burst out into a harsh laugh:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha, ha, ha!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him, uncomprehending. He cut short his laugh and said
+      curtly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had better go down as we came.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She followed him into the forest. The advance of the afternoon had filled
+      it with gloom. Far away a slant of light between the trees closed the
+      view. All was dark beyond. Heyst stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No reason to hurry, Lena,&rdquo; he said in his ordinary, serenely polite
+      tones. &ldquo;We return unsuccessful. I suppose you know, or at least can guess,
+      what was my object in coming up there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I can't guess, dear,&rdquo; she said, and smiled, noticing with emotion
+      that his breast was heaving as if he had been out of breath. Nevertheless,
+      he tried to command his speech, pausing only a little between the words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No? I went up to find Wang. I went up&rdquo;&mdash;he gasped again here, but
+      this was for the last time&mdash;&ldquo;I made you come with me because I didn't
+      like to leave you unprotected in the proximity of those fellows.&rdquo; Suddenly
+      he snatched his cork helmet off his head and dashed it on the ground.
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; he cried roughly. &ldquo;All this is too unreal altogether. It isn't to be
+      borne! I can't protect you! I haven't the power.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glared at her for a moment, then hastened after his hat which had
+      bounded away to some distance. He came back looking at her face, which was
+      very white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to beg your pardon for these antics,&rdquo; he said, adjusting his hat.
+      &ldquo;A movement of childish petulance! Indeed, I feel very much like a child
+      in my ignorance, in my powerlessness, in my want of resource, in
+      everything except in the dreadful consciousness of some evil hanging over
+      your head&mdash;yours!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's you they are after,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt, but unfortunately&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unfortunately&mdash;what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unfortunately, I have not succeeded with Wang,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I failed to
+      move his Celestial, heart&mdash;that is, if there is such a thing. He told
+      me with horrible Chinese reasonableness that he could not let us pass the
+      barrier, because we should be pursued. He doesn't like fights. He gave me
+      to understand that he would shoot me with my own revolver without any sort
+      of compunction, rather than risk a rude and distasteful contest with the
+      strange barbarians for my sake. He has preached to the villagers. They
+      respect him. He is the most remarkable man they have ever seen, and their
+      kinsman by marriage. They understand his policy. And anyway only women and
+      children and a few old fellows are left in the village. This is the season
+      when the men are away in trading vessels. But it would have been all the
+      same. None of them have a taste for fighting&mdash;and with white men too!
+      They are peaceable, kindly folk and would have seen me shot with extreme
+      satisfaction. Wang seemed to think my insistence&mdash;for I insisted, you
+      know&mdash;very stupid and tactless. But a drowning man clutches at
+      straws. We were talking in such Malay as we are both equal to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Your fears are foolish,' I said to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Foolish? of course I am foolish,' he replied. 'If I were a wise man, I
+      would be a merchant with a big hong in Singapore, instead of being a mine
+      coolie turned houseboy. But if you don't go away in time, I will shoot you
+      before it grows too dark to take aim. Not till then, Number One, but I
+      will do it then. Now&mdash;finish!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'All right,' I said. 'Finish as far as I am concerned; but you can have
+      no objections to the mem putih coming over to stay with the Orang Kaya's
+      women for a few days. I will make a present in silver for it.' Orang Kaya,
+      is the head man of the village, Lena,&rdquo; added Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him in astonishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wanted me to go to that village of savages?&rdquo; she gasped. &ldquo;You wanted
+      me to leave you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would have given me a freer hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst stretched out his hands and looked at them for a moment, then let
+      them fall by his side. Indignation was expressed more in the curve of her
+      lips than in her clear eyes, which never wavered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe Wang laughed,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;He made a noise like a
+      turkey-cock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'That would be worse than anything,' he told me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was taken aback. I pointed out to him that he was talking nonsense. It
+      could not make any difference to his security where you were, because the
+      evil men, as he calls them, did not know of your existence. I did not lie
+      exactly, Lena, though I did stretch the truth till it cracked; but the
+      fellow seems to have an uncanny insight. He shook his head. He assured me
+      they knew all about you. He made a horrible grimace at me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It doesn't matter,&rdquo; said the girl. &ldquo;I didn't want&mdash;I would not have
+      gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst raised his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonderful intuition! As I continued to press him, Wang made that very
+      remark about you. When he smiles, his face looks like a conceited death's
+      head. It was his very last remark that you wouldn't want to. I went away
+      then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned back against a tree. Heyst faced her in the same attitude of
+      leisure, as if they had done with time and all the other concerns of the
+      earth. Suddenly, high above their heads the roof of leaves whispered at
+      them tumultuously and then ceased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was a strange notion of yours, to send me away,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Send me
+      away? What for? Yes, what for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem indignant,&rdquo; he remarked listlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To these savages, too!&rdquo; she pursued. &ldquo;And you think I would have gone?
+      You can do what you like with me&mdash;but not that, not that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst looked into the dim aisles of the forest. Everything was so still
+      now that the very ground on which they stood seemed to exhale silence into
+      the shade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why be indignant?&rdquo; he remonstrated. &ldquo;It has not happened. I gave up
+      pleading with Wang. Here we are, repulsed! Not only without power to
+      resist the evil, but unable to make terms for ourselves with the worthy
+      envoys, the envoys extraordinary of the world we thought we had done with
+      for years and years. And that's bad, Lena, very bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's funny,&rdquo; she said thoughtfully. &ldquo;Bad? I suppose it is. I don't know
+      that it is. But do you? Do you? You talk as if you didn't believe in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gazed at him earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I? Ah! That's it. I don't know how to talk. I have managed to refine
+      everything away. I've said to the Earth that bore me: 'I am I and you are
+      a shadow.' And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words cannot
+      be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited by Shades. How
+      helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to intimidate, persuade,
+      resist, assert oneself against them? I have lost all belief in realities .
+      . . Lena, give me your hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him surprised, uncomprehending.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your hand,&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She obeyed; he seized it with avidity as if eager to raise it to his lips,
+      but halfway up released his grasp. They looked at each other for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter, dear?&rdquo; she whispered timidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neither force nor conviction,&rdquo; Heyst muttered wearily to himself. &ldquo;How am
+      I to meet this charmingly simple problem?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sorry,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so am I,&rdquo; he confessed quickly. &ldquo;And the bitterest of this
+      humiliation is its complete uselessness&mdash;which I feel, I feel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling. Across his
+      ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade. He spoke suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them in the night,
+      with a knife, and cut their throats one after another, as they slept! I
+      wonder&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words in
+      his mouth, and said earnestly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you try to do such a thing! Don't you think of it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't possess anything bigger than a penknife. As to thinking of it,
+      Lena, there's no saying what one may think of. I don't think. Something in
+      me thinks&mdash;something foreign to my nature. What is the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He noticed her parted lips, and the peculiar stare in her eyes, which had
+      wandered from his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's somebody after us. I saw something white moving,&rdquo; she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst did not turn his head; he only glanced at her out-stretched arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt we are followed; we are watched.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see anything now,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it does not matter,&rdquo; Heyst went on in his ordinary voice. &ldquo;Here we
+      are in the forest. I have neither strength nor persuasion. Indeed, it's
+      extremely difficult to be eloquent before a Chinaman's head stuck at one
+      out of a lot of brushwood. But can we wander among these big trees
+      indefinitely? Is this a refuge? No! What else is left to us? I did think
+      for a moment of the mine; but even there we could not remain very long.
+      And then that gallery is not safe. The props were too weak to begin with.
+      Ants have been at work there&mdash;ants after the men. A death-trap, at
+      best. One can die but once, but there are many manners of death.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl glanced about fearfully, in search of the watcher or follower
+      whom she had glimpsed once among the trees; but if he existed, he had
+      concealed himself. Nothing met her eyes but the deepening shadows of the
+      short vistas between the living columns of the still roof of leaves. She
+      looked at the man beside her expectantly, tenderly, with suppressed
+      affright and a sort of awed wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have also thought of these people's boat,&rdquo; Heyst went on. &ldquo;We could get
+      into that, and&mdash;only they have taken everything out of her. I have
+      seen her oars and mast in a corner of their room. To shove off in an empty
+      boat would be nothing but a desperate expedient, supposing even that she
+      would drift out a good distance between the islands before the morning. It
+      would only be a complicated manner of committing suicide&mdash;to be found
+      dead in a boat, dead from sun and thirst. A sea mystery. I wonder who
+      would find us! Davidson, perhaps; but Davidson passed westward ten days
+      ago. I watched him steaming past one early morning, from the jetty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You never told me,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He must have been looking at me through his big binoculars. Perhaps, if I
+      had raised my arm&mdash;but what did we want with Davidson then, you and
+      I? He won't be back this way for three weeks or more, Lena. I wish I had
+      raised my arm that morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would have been the good of it?&rdquo; she sighed out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What good? No good, of course. We had no forebodings. This seemed to be
+      an inexpugnable refuge, where we could live untroubled and learn to know
+      each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's perhaps in trouble that people get to know each other,&rdquo; she
+      suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; he said indifferently. &ldquo;At any rate, we would not have gone
+      away from here with him; though I believe he would have come in eagerly
+      enough, and ready for any service he could render. It's that fat man's
+      nature&mdash;a delightful fellow. You would not come on the wharf that
+      time I sent the shawl back to Mrs. Schomberg through him. He has never
+      seen you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know that you wanted anybody ever to see me,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had folded his arms on his breast and hung his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I did not know that you cared to be seen as yet. A misunderstanding
+      evidently. An honourable misunderstanding. But it does not matter now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his head after a silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How gloomy this forest has grown! Yet surely the sun cannot have set
+      already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked round; and as if her eyes had just been opened, she perceived
+      the shades of the forest surrounding her, not so much with gloom, but with
+      a sullen, dumb, menacing hostility. Her heart sank in the engulfing
+      stillness, at that moment she felt the nearness of death, breathing on her
+      and on the man with her. If there had been a sudden stir of leaves, the
+      crack of a dry branch, the faintest rustle, she would have screamed aloud.
+      But she shook off the unworthy weakness. Such as she was, a
+      fiddle-scraping girl picked up on the very threshold of infamy, she would
+      try to rise above herself, triumphant and humble; and then happiness would
+      burst on her like a torrent, flinging at her feet the man whom she loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst stirred slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had better be getting back, Lena, since we can't stay all night in the
+      woods&mdash;or anywhere else, for that matter. We are the slaves of this
+      infernal surprise which has been sprung on us by&mdash;shall I say fate?&mdash;your
+      fate, or mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the man who had broken the silence, but it was the woman who led
+      the way. At the very edge of the forest she stopped, concealed by a tree.
+      He joined her cautiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it? What do you see, Lena?&rdquo; he whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said that it was only a thought that had come into her head. She
+      hesitated for a moment giving him over her shoulder a shining gleam in her
+      grey eyes. She wanted to know whether this trouble, this danger, this
+      evil, whatever it was, finding them out in their retreat, was not a sort
+      of punishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Punishment?&rdquo; repeated Heyst. He could not understand what she meant. When
+      she explained, he was still more surprised. &ldquo;A sort of retribution, from
+      an angry Heaven?&rdquo; he said in wonder. &ldquo;On us? What on earth for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw her pale face darken in the dusk. She had blushed. Her whispering
+      flowed very fast. It was the way they lived together&mdash;that wasn't
+      right, was it? It was a guilty life. For she had not been forced into it,
+      driven, scared into it. No, no&mdash;she had come to him of her own free
+      will, with her whole soul yearning unlawfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was so profoundly touched that he could not speak for a moment. To
+      conceal his trouble, he assumed his best Heystian manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What? Are our visitors then messengers of morality, avengers of
+      righteousness, agents of Providence? That's certainly an original view.
+      How flattered they would be if they could hear you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you are making fun of me,&rdquo; she said in a subdued voice which broke
+      suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you conscious of sin?&rdquo; Heyst asked gravely. She made no answer. &ldquo;For
+      I am not,&rdquo; he added; &ldquo;before Heaven, I am not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You! You are different. Woman is the tempter. You took me up from pity. I
+      threw myself at you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you exaggerate, you exaggerate. It was not so bad as that,&rdquo; he said
+      playfully, keeping his voice steady with an effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He considered himself a dead man already, yet forced to pretend that he
+      was alive for her sake, for her defence. He regretted that he had no
+      Heaven to which he could recommend this fair, palpitating handful of ashes
+      and dust&mdash;warm, living sentient his own&mdash;and exposed helplessly
+      to insult, outrage, degradation, and infinite misery of the body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had averted her face from him and was still. He suddenly seized her
+      passive hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have it so?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Yes? Well, let us then hope for mercy
+      together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head without looking at him, like an abashed child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remember,&rdquo; he went on incorrigible with his delicate raillery, &ldquo;that hope
+      is a Christian virtue, and surely you can't want all the mercy for
+      yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before their eyes the bungalow across the cleared ground stood bathed in a
+      sinister light. An unexpected chill gust of wind made a noise in the
+      tree-tops. She snatched her hand away and stepped out into the open; but
+      before she had advanced more than three yards, she stood still and pointed
+      to the west.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh look there!&rdquo; she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the headland of Diamond Bay, lying black on a purple sea, great
+      masses of cloud stood piled up and bathed in a mist of blood. A crimson
+      crack like an open wound zigzagged between them, with a piece of dark red
+      sun showing at the bottom. Heyst cast an indifferent glance at the
+      ill-omened chaos of the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thunderstorm making up. We shall hear it all night, but it won't visit
+      us, probably. The clouds generally gather round the volcano.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was not listening to him. Her eyes reflected the sombre and violent
+      hues of the sunset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That does not look much like a sign of mercy,&rdquo; she said slowly, as if to
+      herself, and hurried on, followed by Heyst. Suddenly she stopped. &ldquo;I don't
+      care. I would do more yet! And some day you'll forgive me. You'll have to
+      forgive me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0034" id="link2HCH0034">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER NINE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Stumbling up the steps, as if suddenly exhausted, Lena entered the room
+      and let herself fall on the nearest chair. Before following her, Heyst
+      took a survey of the surroundings from the veranda. It was a complete
+      solitude. There was nothing in the aspect of this familiar scene to tell
+      him that he and the girl were not as completely alone as they had been in
+      the early days of their common life on this abandoned spot, with only Wang
+      discreetly materializing from time to time and the uncomplaining memory of
+      Morrison to keep them company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the cold gust of wind there was an absolute stillness of the air.
+      The thunder-charged mass hung unbroken beyond the low, ink-black headland,
+      darkening the twilight. By contrast, the sky at the zenith displayed
+      pellucid clearness, the sheen of a delicate glass bubble which the merest
+      movement of air might shatter. A little to the left, between the black
+      masses of the headland and of the forest, the volcano, a feather of smoke
+      by day and a cigar-glow at night, took its first fiery expanding breath of
+      the evening. Above it a reddish star came out like an expelled spark from
+      the fiery bosom of the earth, enchanted into permanency by the mysterious
+      spell of frozen spaces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In front of Heyst the forest, already full of the deepest shades, stood
+      like a wall. But he lingered, watching its edge, especially where it ended
+      at the line of bushes, masking the land end of the jetty. Since the girl
+      had spoken of catching a glimpse of something white among the trees, he
+      believed pretty firmly that they had been followed in their excursion up
+      the mountain by Mr. Jones's secretary. No doubt the fellow had watched
+      them out of the forest, and now, unless he took the trouble to go back
+      some distance and fetch a considerable circuit inland over the clearing,
+      he was bound to walk out into the open space before the bungalows. Heyst
+      did, indeed, imagine at one time some movement between the trees, lost as
+      soon as perceived. He stared patiently, but nothing more happened. After
+      all, why should he trouble about these people's actions? Why this stupid
+      concern for the preliminaries, since, when the issue was joined, it would
+      find him disarmed and shrinking from the ugliness and degradation of it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned and entered the room. Deep dusk reigned in there already. Lena,
+      near the door, did not move or speak. The sheen of the white tablecloth
+      was very obtrusive. The brute these two vagabonds had tamed had entered on
+      its service while Heyst and Lena were away. The table was laid. Heyst
+      walked up and down the room several times. The girl remained without sound
+      or movement on the chair. But when Heyst, placing the two silver
+      candelabra on the table, struck a match to light the candles, she got up
+      suddenly and went into the bedroom. She came out again almost immediately,
+      having taken off her hat. Heyst looked at her over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the good of shirking the evil hour? I've lighted these candles for
+      a sign of our return. After all, we might not have been watched&mdash;while
+      returning, I mean. Of course we were seen leaving the house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl sat down again. The great wealth of her hair looked very dark
+      above her colourless face. She raised her eyes, glistening softly in the
+      light with a sort of unreadable appeal, with a strange effect of unseeing
+      innocence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Heyst across the table, the fingertips of one hand resting on
+      the immaculate cloth. &ldquo;A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw, hairy
+      like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic ape, has laid this table.
+      Are you awake, Lena? Am I? I would pinch myself, only I know that nothing
+      would do away with this dream. Three covers. You know it is the shorter of
+      the two who's coming&mdash;the gentleman who, in the play of his shoulders
+      as he walks, and in his facial structure, recalls a Jaguar. Ah, you don't
+      know what a jaguar is? But you have had a good look at these two. It's the
+      short one, you know, who's to be our guest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a sign with her head that she knew; Heyst's insistence brought
+      Ricardo vividly before her mental vision. A sudden languor, like the
+      physical echo of her struggle with the man, paralysed all her limbs. She
+      lay still in the chair, feeling very frightened at this phenomenon&mdash;ready
+      to pray aloud for strength.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst had started to pace the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our guest! There is a proverb&mdash;in Russia, I believe&mdash;that when
+      a guest enters the house, God enters the house. The sacred virtue of
+      hospitality! But it leads one into trouble as well as any other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl unexpectedly got up from the chair, swaying her supple figure and
+      stretching her arms above her head. He stopped to look at her curiously,
+      paused, and then went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I venture to think that God has nothing to do with such a hospitality and
+      with such a guest!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had jumped to her feet to react against the numbness, to discover
+      whether her body would obey her will. It did. She could stand up, and she
+      could move her arms freely. Though no physiologist, she concluded that all
+      that sudden numbness was in her head, not in her limbs. Her fears
+      assuaged, she thanked God for it mentally, and to Heyst murmured a
+      protest:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes! He's got to do with everything&mdash;every little thing. Nothing
+      can happen&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said hastily, &ldquo;one of the two sparrows can't be struck to the
+      ground&mdash;you are thinking of that.&rdquo; The habitual playful smile faded
+      on the kindly lips under the martial moustache. &ldquo;Ah, you remember what you
+      have been told&mdash;as a child&mdash;on Sundays.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I do remember.&rdquo; She sank into the chair again. &ldquo;It was the only
+      decent bit of time I ever had when I was a kid, with our landlady's two
+      girls, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder, Lena,&rdquo; Heyst said, with a return to his urbane playfulness,
+      &ldquo;whether you are just a little child, or whether you represent something
+      as old as the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She surprised Heyst by saying dreamily:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;and what about you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? I date later&mdash;much later. I can't call myself a child, but I am
+      so recent that I may call myself a man of the last hour&mdash;or is it the
+      hour before last? I have been out of it so long that I am not certain how
+      far the hands of the clock have moved since&mdash;since&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at the portrait of his father, exactly above the head of the
+      girl, as if it were ignoring her in its painted austerity of feeling. He
+      did not finish the sentence; but he did not remain silent for long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only what must be avoided are fallacious inferences, my dear Lena&mdash;especially
+      at this hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you are making fun of me again,&rdquo; she said without looking up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I?&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Making fun? No, giving warning. Hang it all, whatever
+      truth people told you in the old days, there is also this one&mdash;that
+      sparrows do fall to the ground, that they are brought to the ground. This
+      is no vain assertion, but a fact. That's why&rdquo;&mdash;again his tone
+      changed, while he picked up the table knife and let it fall disdainfully&mdash;&ldquo;that's
+      why I wish these wretched round knives had some edge on them. Absolute
+      rubbish&mdash;neither edge, point, nor substance. I believe one of these
+      forks would make a better weapon at a pinch. But can I go about with a
+      fork in my pocket?&rdquo; He gnashed his teeth with a rage very real, and yet
+      comic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There used to be a carver here, but it was broken and thrown away a long
+      time ago. Nothing much to carve here. It would have made a noble weapon,
+      no doubt; but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped. The girl sat very quiet, with downcast eyes. As he kept
+      silence for some time, she looked up and said thoughtfully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, a knife&mdash;it's a knife that you would want, wouldn't you, in
+      case, in case&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There must be a crowbar or two in the sheds; but I have given up all the
+      keys together. And then, do you see me walking about with a crowbar in my
+      hand? Ha, ha! And besides, that edifying sight alone might start the
+      trouble for all I know. In truth, why has it not started yet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps they are afraid of you,&rdquo; she whispered, looking down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Jove, it looks like it,&rdquo; he assented meditatively. &ldquo;They do seem to
+      hang back for some reason. Is that reason prudence, or downright fear, or
+      perhaps the leisurely method of certitude?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Out in the black night, not very far from the bungalow, resounded a loud
+      and prolonged whistle. Lena's hands grasped the sides of the chair, but
+      she made no movement. Heyst started, and turned his face away from the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The startling sound had died away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whistles, yells, omens, signals, portents&mdash;what do they matter?&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;But what about the crowbar? Suppose I had it! Could I stand in
+      ambush at the side of the door&mdash;this door&mdash;and smash the first
+      protruding head, scatter blood and brains over the floor, over these
+      walls, and then run stealthily to the other door to do the same thing&mdash;and
+      repeat the performance for a third time, perhaps? Could I? On suspicion,
+      without compunction, with a calm and determined purpose? No, it is not in
+      me. I date too late. Would you like to see me attempt this thing while
+      that mysterious prestige of mine lasts&mdash;or their not less mysterious
+      hesitation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no!&rdquo; she whispered ardently, as if compelled to speak by his eyes
+      fixed on her face. &ldquo;No, it's a knife you want to defend yourself with&mdash;to
+      defend&mdash;there will be time&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who knows if it isn't really my duty?&rdquo; he began again, as if he had
+      not heard her disjointed words at all. &ldquo;It may be&mdash;my duty to you, to
+      myself. For why should I put up with the humiliation of their secret
+      menaces? Do you know what the world would say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He emitted a low laugh, which struck her with terror. She would have got
+      up, but he stooped so low over her that she could not move without first
+      pushing him away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would say, Lena, that I&mdash;the Swede&mdash;after luring my friend
+      and partner to his death from mere greed of money, have murdered these
+      unoffending shipwrecked strangers from sheer funk. That would be the story
+      whispered&mdash;perhaps shouted&mdash;certainly spread out, and believed&mdash;and
+      believed, my dear Lena!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who would believe such awful things?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you wouldn't&mdash;not at first, at any rate; but the power of
+      calumny grows with time. It's insidious and penetrating. It can even
+      destroy one's faith in oneself&mdash;dry-rot the soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once her eyes leaped to the door and remained fixed, stony, a
+      little enlarged. Turning his head, Heyst beheld the figure of Ricardo
+      framed in the doorway. For a moment none of the three moved, then, looking
+      from the newcomer to the girl in the chair, Heyst formulated a sardonic
+      introduction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr Ricardo, my dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her head drooped a little. Ricardo's hand went up to his moustache. His
+      voice exploded in the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At your service, ma'am!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stepped in, taking his hat off with a flourish, and dropping it
+      carelessly on a chair near the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At your service,&rdquo; he repeated, in quite another tone. &ldquo;I was made aware
+      there was a lady about, by that Pedro of ours; only I didn't know I should
+      have the privilege of seeing you tonight, ma'am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lena and Heyst looked at him covertly, but he, with a vague gaze avoiding
+      them both, looked at nothing, seeming to pursue some point in space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had a pleasant walk?&rdquo; he asked suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. And you?&rdquo; returned Heyst, who had managed to catch his glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't been a yard away from the governor this afternoon till I
+      started for here.&rdquo; The genuineness of the accent surprised Heyst, without
+      convincing him of the truth of the words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you ask?&rdquo; pursued Ricardo with every inflection of perfect
+      candour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might have wished to explore the island a little,&rdquo; said Heyst,
+      studying the man, who, to render him justice, did not try to free his
+      captured gaze. &ldquo;I may remind you that it wouldn't be a perfectly safe
+      proceeding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo presented a picture of innocence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes&mdash;meaning that Chink that has ran away from you. He ain't
+      much!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has a revolver,&rdquo; observed Heyst meaningly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, and you have a revolver, too,&rdquo; Mr. Ricardo argued unexpectedly. &ldquo;I
+      don't worry myself about that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's different. I am not afraid of you,&rdquo; Heyst made answer after a
+      short pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of all of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a queer way of putting things,&rdquo; began Ricardo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment the door on the compound side of the house came open with
+      some noise, and Pedro entered, pressing the edge of a loaded tray to his
+      breast. His big, hairy head rolled a little, his feet fell in front of
+      each other with a short, hard thump on the floor. The arrival changed the
+      current of Ricardo's thought, perhaps, but certainly of his speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You heard me whistling a little while ago outside? That was to give him a
+      hint, as I came along, that it was time to bring in the dinner; and here
+      it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lena rose and passed to the right of Ricardo, who lowered his glance for a
+      moment. They sat down at the table. The enormous gorilla back of Pedro
+      swayed out through the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Extraordinary strong brute, ma'am,&rdquo; said Ricardo. He, had a propensity to
+      talk about &ldquo;his Pedro,&rdquo; as some men will talk of their dog. &ldquo;He ain't
+      pretty, though. No, he ain't pretty. And he has got to be kept under. I am
+      his keeper, as it might be. The governor don't trouble his head much about
+      dee-tails. All that's left to Martin. Martin, that's me, ma'am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst saw the girl's eyes turn towards Mr. Jones's secretary and rest
+      blankly on his face. Ricardo, however, looked vaguely into space, and,
+      with faint flickers of a smile about his lips, made conversation
+      indefatigably against the silence of his entertainers. He boasted largely
+      of his long association with Mr. Jones&mdash;over four years now, he said.
+      Then, glancing rapidly at Heyst:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can see at once he's a gentleman, can't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You people,&rdquo; Heyst said, his habitual playful intonation tinged with
+      gloom, &ldquo;are divorced from all reality in my eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo received this speech as if he had been expecting to hear those
+      very words, or else did not mind at all what Heyst might say. He muttered
+      an absent-minded &ldquo;Ay, ay,&rdquo; played with a bit of biscuit, sighed, and said,
+      with a peculiar stare which did not seem to carry any distance, but to
+      stop short at a point in the air very near his face:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anybody can see at once <i>you</i> are one. You and the governor ought to
+      understand each other. He expects to see you tonight. The governor isn't
+      well, and we've got to think of getting away from here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While saying these words he turned himself full towards Lena, but without
+      any marked expression. Leaning back with folded arms, the girl stared
+      before her as if she had been alone in the room. But under that aspect of
+      almost vacant unconcern the perils and emotion that had entered into her
+      life warmed her heart, exalted her mind with a sense of an inconceivable
+      intensity of existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really? Thinking of going away from here?&rdquo; Heyst murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The best of friends must part,&rdquo; Ricardo pronounced slowly. &ldquo;And, as long
+      as they part friends, there's no harm done. We two are used to be on the
+      move. You, I understand, prefer to stick in one place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was obvious that all this was being said merely for the sake of
+      talking, and that Ricardo's mind was concentrated on some purpose
+      unconnected with the words that were coming out of his mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to know,&rdquo; Heyst asked with incisive politeness, &ldquo;how you
+      have come to understand this or anything else about me? As far as I can
+      remember, I've made you no confidences.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo, gazing comfortably into space out of the back of his chair&mdash;for
+      some time all three had given up any pretence of eating&mdash;answered
+      abstractedly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any fellow might have guessed it!&rdquo; He sat up suddenly, and uncovered all
+      his teeth in a grin of extraordinary ferocity, which was belied by the
+      persistent amiability of his tone. &ldquo;The governor will be the man to tell
+      you something about that. I wish you would say you would see my governor.
+      He's the one who does all our talking. Let me take you to him this
+      evening. He ain't at all well; and he can't make up his mind to go away
+      without having a talk with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, looking up, met Lena's eyes. Their expression of candour seemed to
+      hide some struggling intention. Her head, he fancied, had made an
+      imperceptible affirmative movement. Why? What reason could she have? Was
+      it the prompting of some obscure instinct? Or was it simply a delusion of
+      his own senses? But in this strange complication invading the quietude of
+      his life, in his state of doubt and disdain and almost of despair with
+      which he looked at himself, he would let even a delusive appearance guide
+      him through a darkness so dense that it made for indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, suppose I <i>do</i> say so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ricardo did not conceal his satisfaction, which for a moment interested
+      Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It can't be my life they are after,&rdquo; he said to himself. &ldquo;What good could
+      it be to them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked across the table at the girl. What did it matter whether she had
+      nodded or not? As always when looking into her unconscious eyes, he tasted
+      something like the dregs of tender pity. He had decided to go. Her nod,
+      imaginary or not imaginary, advice or illusion, had tipped the scale. He
+      reflected that Ricardo's invitation could scarcely be anything in the
+      nature of a trap. It would have been too absurd. Why carry subtly into a
+      trap someone already bound hand and foot, as it were?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this time he had been looking fixedly at the girl he called Lena. In
+      the submissive quietness of her being, which had been her attitude ever
+      since they had begun their life on the island, she remained as secret as
+      ever. Heyst got up abruptly, with a smile of such enigmatic and despairing
+      character that Mr. Secretary Ricardo, whose abstract gaze had an all-round
+      efficiency, made a slight crouching start, as if to dive under the table
+      for his leg-knife&mdash;a start that was repressed, as soon as begun. He
+      had expected Heyst to spring on him or draw a revolver, because he created
+      for himself a vision of him in his own image. Instead of doing either of
+      these obvious things, Heyst walked across the room, opened the door and
+      put his head through it to look out into the compound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as his back was turned, Ricardo's hand sought the girl's arm under
+      the table. He was not looking at her, but she felt the groping, nervous
+      touch of his search, felt suddenly the grip of his fingers above her
+      wrist. He leaned forward a little; still he dared not look at her. His
+      hard stare remained fastened on Heyst's back. In an extremely low hiss,
+      his fixed idea of argument found expression scathingly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See! He's no good. He's not the man for you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at her at last. Her lips moved a little, and he was awed by
+      that movement without a sound. Next instant the hard grasp of his fingers
+      vanished from her arm. Heyst had shut the door. On his way back to the
+      table, he crossed the path of the girl they had called Alma&mdash;she
+      didn't know why&mdash;also Magdalen, whose mind had remained so long in
+      doubt as to the reason of her own existence. She no longer wondered at
+      that bitter riddle, since her heart found its solution in a blinding, hot
+      glow of passionate purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0035" id="link2HCH0035">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER TEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      She passed by Heyst as if she had indeed been blinded by some secret,
+      lurid, and consuming glare into which she was about to enter. The curtain
+      of the bedroom door fell behind her into rigid folds. Ricardo's vacant
+      gaze seemed to be watching the dancing flight of a fly in mid air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Extra dark outside, ain't it?&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so dark but that I could see that man of yours prowling about there,&rdquo;
+       said Heyst in measured tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&mdash;Pedro? He's scarcely a man you know; or else I wouldn't be so
+      fond of him as I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. Let's call him your worthy associate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ay! Worthy enough for what we want of him. A great standby is Peter in a
+      scrimmage. A growl and a bite&mdash;oh, my! And you don't want him about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want him out of the way?&rdquo; insisted Ricardo with an affectation of
+      incredulity which Heyst accepted calmly, though the air in the room seemed
+      to grow more oppressive with every word spoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's it. I do want him out of the way.&rdquo; He forced himself to speak
+      equably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lor'! That's no great matter. Pedro's not much use here. The business my
+      governor's after can be settled by ten minutes' rational talk with&mdash;with
+      another gentleman. Quiet talk!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up suddenly with hard, phosphorescent eyes. Heyst didn't move a
+      muscle. Ricardo congratulated himself on having left his revolver behind.
+      He was so exasperated that he didn't know what he might have done. He said
+      at last:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want poor, harmless Peter out of the way before you let me take you
+      to see the governor&mdash;is that it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that is it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm! One can see,&rdquo; Ricardo said with hidden venom, &ldquo;that you are a
+      gentleman; but all that gentlemanly fancifulness is apt to turn sour on a
+      plain man's stomach. However&mdash;you'll have to pardon me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his fingers into his mouth and let out a whistle which seemed to
+      drive a thin, sharp shaft of air solidly against one's nearest ear-drum.
+      Though he greatly enjoyed Heyst's involuntary grimace, he sat perfectly
+      stolid waiting for the effect of the call.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It brought Pedro in with an extraordinary, uncouth, primeval impetuosity.
+      The door flew open with a clatter, and the wild figure it disclosed seemed
+      anxious to devastate the room in leaps and bounds; but Ricardo raised his
+      open palm, and the creature came in quietly. His enormous half-closed paws
+      swung to and fro a little in front of his bowed trunk as he walked.
+      Ricardo looked on truculently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You go to the boat&mdash;understand? Go now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The little red eyes of the tame monster blinked with painful attention in
+      the mass of hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well? Why don't you get? Forgot human speech, eh? Don't you know any
+      longer what a boat is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Si&mdash;boat,&rdquo; the creature stammered out doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, go there&mdash;the boat at the jetty. March off to it and sit
+      there, lie down there, do anything but go to sleep there&mdash;till you
+      hear my call, and then fly here. Them's your orders. March! Get, vamos!
+      No, not that way&mdash;out through the front door. No sulks!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pedro obeyed with uncouth alacrity. When he had gone, the gleam of
+      pitiless savagery went out of Ricardo's yellow eyes, and his physiognomy
+      took on, for the first time that evening, the expression of a domestic cat
+      which is being noticed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can watch him right into the bushes, if you like. Too dark, eh? Why
+      not go with him to the very spot, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst made a gesture of vague protest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's nothing to assure me that he will stay there. I have no doubt of
+      his going, but it's an act without guarantee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There you are!&rdquo; Ricardo shrugged his shoulders philosophically. &ldquo;Can't be
+      helped. Short of shooting our Pedro, nobody can make absolutely sure of
+      his staying in the same place longer than he has a mind to; but I tell
+      you, he lives in holy terror of my temper. That's why I put on my
+      sudden-death air when I talk to him. And yet I wouldn't shoot him&mdash;not
+      I, unless in such a fit of rage as would make a man shoot his favourite
+      dog. Look here, sir! This deal is on the square. I didn't tip him a wink
+      to do anything else. He won't budge from the jetty. Are you coming along
+      now, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A short-silence ensued. Ricardo's jaws were working ominously under his
+      skin. His eyes glided: voluptuously here and there, cruel and dreamy,
+      Heyst checked a sudden movement, reflected for a while, then said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must wait a little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait a little! Wait a little! What does he think a fellow is&mdash;a
+      graven image?&rdquo; grumbled Ricardo half audibly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst went into the bedroom, and shut the door after him with a bang.
+      Coming from the light, he could not see a thing in there at first; yet he
+      received the impression of the girl getting up from the floor. On the less
+      opaque darkness of the shutter-hole, her head detached itself suddenly,
+      very faint, a mere hint of a round, dark shape without a face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going, Lena. I am going to confront these scoundrels.&rdquo; He was
+      surprised to feel two arms falling on his shoulders. &ldquo;I thought that you&mdash;&rdquo;
+       he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes!&rdquo; the girl whispered hastily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She neither clung to him, nor yet did she try to draw him to her. Her
+      hands grasped his shoulders, and she seemed to him to be staring into his
+      face in the dark. And now he could see something of her face, too&mdash;an
+      oval without features&mdash;and faintly distinguish her person, in the
+      blackness, a form without definite lines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a black dress here, haven't you, Lena?&rdquo; he asked, speaking
+      rapidly, and so low that she could just hear him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;an old thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good. Put it on at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not for mourning!&rdquo; There was something peremptory in the slightly ironic
+      murmur. &ldquo;Can you find it and get into it in the dark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She could. She would try. He waited, very still. He could imagine her
+      movements over there at the far end of the room; but his eyes, accustomed
+      now to the darkness, had lost her completely. When she spoke, her voice
+      surprised him by its nearness. She had done what he had told her to do,
+      and had approached him, invisible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good! Where's that piece of purple veil I've seen lying about?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no answer, only a slight rustle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is it?&rdquo; he repeated impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her unexpected breath was on his cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In my hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Capital! Listen, Lena. As soon as I leave the bungalow with that horrible
+      scoundrel, you slip out at the back&mdash;instantly, lose no time!&mdash;and
+      run round into the forest. That will be your time, while we are walking
+      away, and I am sure he won't give me the slip. Run into the forest behind
+      the fringe of bushes between the big trees. You will know, surely, how to
+      find a place in full view of the front door. I fear for you; but in this
+      black dress, with most of your face muffled up in that dark veil, I defy
+      anybody to find you there before daylight. Wait in the forest till the
+      table is pushed into full view of the doorway, and you see three candles
+      out of four blown out and one relighted&mdash;or, should the lights be put
+      out here while you watch them, wait till three candles are lighted and
+      then two put out. At either of these signals run back as hard as you can,
+      for it will mean that I am waiting for you here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was speaking, the girl had sought and seized one of his hands.
+      She did not press it; she held it loosely, as it were timidly,
+      caressingly. It was no grasp; it was a mere contact, as if only to make
+      sure that he was there, that he was real and no mere darker shadow in the
+      obscurity. The warmth of her hand gave Heyst a strange, intimate sensation
+      of all her person. He had to fight down a new sort of emotion, which
+      almost unmanned him. He went on, whispering sternly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if you see no such signals, don't let anything&mdash;fear, curiosity,
+      despair, or hope&mdash;entice you back to this house; and with the first
+      sign of dawn steal away along the edge of the clearing till you strike the
+      path. Wait no longer, because I shall probably be dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The murmur of the word &ldquo;Never!&rdquo; floated into his ear as if it formed
+      itself in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know the path,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;Make your way to the barricade. Go to
+      Wang&mdash;yes, to Wang. Let nothing stop you!&rdquo; It seemed to him that the
+      girl's hand trembled a little. &ldquo;The worst he can do to you is to shoot
+      you, but he won't. I really think he won't, if I am not there. Stay with
+      the villagers, with the wild people, and fear nothing. They will be more
+      awed by you than you can be frightened of them. Davidson's bound to turn
+      up before very long. Keep a look-out for a passing steamer. Think of some
+      sort of signal to call him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no answer. The sense of the heavy, brooding silence in the
+      outside world seemed to enter and fill the room&mdash;the oppressive
+      infinity of it, without breath, without light. It was as if the heart of
+      hearts had ceased to beat and the end of all things had come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you understood? You are to run out of the house at once,&rdquo; Heyst
+      whispered urgently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted his hand to her lips and let it go. He was startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lena!&rdquo; he cried out under his breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was gone from his side. He dared not trust himself&mdash;no, not even
+      to the extent of a tender word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turning to go out he heard a thud somewhere in the house. To open the
+      door, he had first to lift the curtain; he did so with his face over his
+      shoulder. The merest trickle of light, coming through the keyhole and one
+      or two cracks, was enough for his eyes to see her plainly, all black, down
+      on her knees, with her head and arms flung on the foot of the bed&mdash;all
+      black in the desolation of a mourning sinner. What was this? A suspicion
+      that there were everywhere more things than he could understand crossed
+      Heyst's mind. Her arm, detached from the bed, motioned him away. He
+      obeyed, and went out, full of disquiet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The curtain behind him had not ceased to tremble when she was up on her
+      feet, close against it, listening for sounds, for words, in a stooping,
+      tragic attitude of stealthy attention, one hand clutching at her breast as
+      if to compress, to make less loud the beating of her heart. Heyst had
+      caught Mr. Jones's secretary in the contemplation of his closed
+      writing-desk. Ricardo might have been meditating how to break into it; but
+      when he turned about suddenly, he showed so distorted a face that it made
+      Heyst pause in wonder at the upturned whites of the eyes, which were
+      blinking horribly, as if the man were inwardly convulsed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you were never coming,&rdquo; Ricardo mumbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know you were pressed for time. Even if your going away depends
+      on this conversation, as you say, I doubt if you are the men to put to sea
+      on such a night as this,&rdquo; said Heyst, motioning Ricardo to precede him out
+      of the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With feline undulations of hip and shoulder, the secretary left the room
+      at once. There was something cruel in the absolute dumbness of the night.
+      The great cloud covering half the sky hung right against one, like an
+      enormous curtain hiding menacing preparations of violence. As the feet of
+      the two men touched the ground, a rumble came from behind it, preceded by
+      a swift, mysterious gleam of light on the waters of the bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha!&rdquo; said Ricardo. &ldquo;It begins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may be nothing in the end,&rdquo; observed Heyst, stepping along steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! Let it come!&rdquo; Ricardo said viciously. &ldquo;I am in the humour for it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By the time the two men had reached the other bungalow, the far-off
+      modulated rumble growled incessantly, while pale lightning in waves of
+      cold fire flooded and ran off the island in rapid succession. Ricardo,
+      unexpectedly, dashed ahead up the steps and put his head through the
+      doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here he is, governor! Keep him with you as long as you can&mdash;till you
+      hear me whistle. I am on the track.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung these words into the room with inconceivable speed, and stood
+      aside to let the visitor pass through the doorway; but he had to wait an
+      appreciable moment, because Heyst, seeing his purpose, had scornfully
+      slowed his pace. When Heyst entered the room it was with a smile, the
+      Heyst smile, lurking under his martial moustache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0036" id="link2HCH0036">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER ELEVEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Two candles were burning on the stand-up desk. Mr. Jones, tightly enfolded
+      in an old but gorgeous blue silk dressing-gown, kept his elbows close
+      against his sides and his hands deeply plunged into the extraordinarily
+      deep pockets of the garment. The costume accentuated his emaciation. He
+      resembled a painted pole leaning against the edge of the desk, with a
+      dried head of dubious distinction stuck on the top of it. Ricardo lounged
+      in the doorway. Indifferent in appearance to what was going on, he was
+      biding his time. At a given moment, between two flickers of lightning, he
+      melted out of his frame into the outer air. His disappearance was observed
+      on the instant by Mr. Jones, who abandoned his nonchalant immobility
+      against the desk, and made a few steps calculated to put him between Heyst
+      and the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's awfully close,&rdquo; he remarked
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst, in the middle of the room, had made up his mind to speak plainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We haven't met to talk about the weather. You favoured me earlier in the
+      day with a rather cryptic phrase about yourself. 'I am he that is,' you
+      said. What does that mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Jones, without looking at Heyst, continued his absentminded movements
+      till, attaining the desired position, he brought his shoulders with a
+      thump against the wall near the door, and raised his head. In the emotion
+      of the decisive moment his haggard face glistened with perspiration. Drops
+      ran down his hollow cheeks and almost blinded the spectral eyes in their
+      bony caverns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It means that I am a person to be reckoned with. No&mdash;stop! Don't put
+      your hand into your pocket&mdash;don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice had a wild, unexpected shrillness. Heyst started, and there
+      ensued a moment of suspended animation, during which the thunder's deep
+      bass muttered distantly and the doorway to the right of Mr. Jones
+      flickered with bluish light. At last Heyst shrugged his shoulders; he even
+      looked at his hand. He didn't put it in his pocket, however. Mr. Jones,
+      glued against the wall, watched him raise both his hands to the ends of
+      his horizontal moustaches, and answered the note of interrogation in his
+      steady eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A matter of prudence,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones in his natural hollow tones, and
+      with a face of deathlike composure. &ldquo;A man of your free life has surely
+      perceived that. You are a much talked-about man, Mr. Heyst&mdash;and
+      though, as far as I understand, you are accustomed to employ the subtler
+      weapons of intelligence, still I can't afford to take any risks of the&mdash;er&mdash;grosser
+      methods. I am not unscrupulous enough to be a match for you in the use of
+      intelligence; but I assure you, Mr. Heyst, that in the other way you are
+      no match for me. I have you covered at this very moment. You have been
+      covered ever since you entered this room. Yes&mdash;from my pocket.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During this harangue Heyst looked deliberately over his shoulder, stepped
+      back a pace, and sat down on the end of the camp bedstead. Leaning his
+      elbow on one knee, he laid his cheek in the palm of his hand and seemed to
+      meditate on what he should say next. Mr. Jones, planted against the wall,
+      was obviously waiting for some sort of overture. As nothing came, he
+      resolved to speak himself; but he hesitated. For, though he considered
+      that the most difficult step had been taken, he said to himself that every
+      stage of progress required great caution, lest the man in Ricardo's
+      phraseology, should &ldquo;start to prance&rdquo;&mdash;which would be most
+      inconvenient. He fell back on a previous statement:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I am a person to be reckoned with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The other man went on looking at the floor, as if he were alone in the
+      room. There was a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have heard of me, then?&rdquo; Heyst said at length, looking up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think so! We have been staying at Schomberg's hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Schom&mdash;&rdquo; Heyst choked on the word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter, Mr. Heyst?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing. Nausea,&rdquo; Heyst said resignedly. He resumed his former attitude
+      of meditative indifference. &ldquo;What is this reckoning you are talking
+      about?&rdquo; he asked after a time, in the quietest possible tone. &ldquo;I don't
+      know you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's obvious that we belong to the same&mdash;social sphere,&rdquo; began Mr.
+      Jones with languid irony. Inwardly he was as watchful as he could be.
+      &ldquo;Something has driven you out&mdash;the originality of your ideas,
+      perhaps. Or your tastes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones indulged in one of his ghastly smiles. In repose his features had
+      a curious character of evil, exhausted austerity; but when he smiled, the
+      whole mask took on an unpleasantly infantile expression. A recrudescence
+      of the rolling thunder invaded the room loudly, and passed into silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not taking this very well,&rdquo; observed Mr. Jones. This was what he
+      said, but as a matter of fact he thought that the business was shaping
+      quite satisfactorily. The man, he said to himself, had no stomach for a
+      fight. Aloud he continued: &ldquo;Come! You can't expect to have it always your
+      own way. You are a man of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you?&rdquo; Heyst interrupted him unexpectedly. &ldquo;How do you define
+      yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I, my dear sir? In one way I am&mdash;yes, I am the world itself, come to
+      pay you a visit. In another sense I am an outcast&mdash;almost an outlaw.
+      If you prefer a less materialistic view, I am a sort of fate&mdash;the
+      retribution that waits its time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish to goodness you were the commonest sort of ruffian!&rdquo; said Heyst,
+      raising his equable gaze to Mr. Jones. &ldquo;One would be able to talk to you
+      straight then, and hope for some humanity. As it is&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dislike violence and ferocity of every sort as much as you do,&rdquo; Mr.
+      Jones declared, looking very languid as he leaned against the wall, but
+      speaking fairly loud. &ldquo;You can ask my Martin if it is not so. This, Mr.
+      Heyst, is a soft age. It is also an age without prejudices. I've heard
+      that you are free from them yourself. You mustn't be shocked if I tell you
+      plainly that we are after your money&mdash;or I am, if you prefer to make
+      me alone responsible. Pedro, of course, knows no more of it than any other
+      animal would. Ricardo is of the faithful-retainer class&mdash;absolutely
+      identified with all my ideas, wishes, and even whims!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones pulled his left hand out of his pocket, got a handkerchief out of
+      another, and began to wipe the perspiration from his forehead, neck, and
+      chin. The excitement from which he suffered made his breathing visible. In
+      his long dressing-gown he had the air of a convalescent invalid who had
+      imprudently overtaxed his strength. Heyst, broad-shouldered, robust,
+      watched the operation from the end of the camp bedstead, very calm, his
+      hands on his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And by the by,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;where is he now, that henchman of yours?
+      Breaking into my desk?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That would be crude. Still, crudeness is one of life's conditions.&rdquo; There
+      was the slightest flavour of banter in the tone of Ricardo's governor.
+      &ldquo;Conceivable, but unlikely. Martin is a little crude; but you are not, Mr.
+      Heyst. To tell you the truth, I don't know precisely where he is. He has
+      been a little mysterious of late; but he has my confidence. No, don't get
+      up, Mr. Heyst!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The viciousness of his spectral face was indescribable. Heyst, who had
+      moved a little, was surprised by the disclosure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was not my intention,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray remain seated,&rdquo; Mr. Jones insisted in a languid voice, but with a
+      very determined glitter in his black eye-caverns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were more observant,&rdquo; said Heyst with dispassionate contempt, &ldquo;you
+      would have known before I had been five minutes in the room that I had no
+      weapon of any sort on me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Possibly; but pray keep your hands still. They are very well where they
+      are. This is too big an affair for me to take any risks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Big? Too big?&rdquo; Heyst repeated with genuine surprise. &ldquo;Good Heavens!
+      Whatever you are looking for, there's very little of it here&mdash;very
+      little of anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would naturally say so, but that's not what we have heard,&rdquo; retorted
+      Mr. Jones quickly, with a grin so ghastly that it was impossible to think
+      it voluntary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst's face had grown very gloomy. He knitted his brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you heard?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A lot, Mr. Heyst&mdash;a lot,&rdquo; affirmed Mr. Jones. He was vying to
+      recover his manner of languid superiority. &ldquo;We have heard, for instance,
+      of a certain Mr. Morrison, once your partner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst could not repress a slight movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha!&rdquo; said Mr. Jones, with a sort of ghostly glee on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The muffled thunder resembled the echo of a distant cannonade below the
+      horizon, and the two men seemed to be listening to it in sullen silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This diabolical calumny will end in actually and literally taking my life
+      from me,&rdquo; thought Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, suddenly, he laughed. Portentously spectral, Mr. Jones frowned at
+      the sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Laugh as much as you please,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I, who have been hounded out from
+      society by a lot of highly moral souls, can't see anything funny in that
+      story. But here we are, and you will now have to pay for your fun, Mr.
+      Heyst.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have heard a lot of ugly lies,&rdquo; observed Heyst. &ldquo;Take my word for
+      it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would say so, of course&mdash;very natural. As a matter of fact I
+      haven't heard very much. Strictly speaking, it was Martin. He collects
+      information, and so on. You don't suppose I would talk to that Schomberg
+      animal more than I could help? It was Martin whom he took into his
+      confidence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The stupidity of that creature is so great that it becomes formidable,&rdquo;
+       Heyst said, as if speaking to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Involuntarily, his mind turned to the girl, wandering in the forest, alone
+      and terrified. Would he ever see her again? At that thought he nearly lost
+      his self-possession. But the idea that if she followed his instructions
+      those men were not likely to find her steadied him a little. They did not
+      know that the island had any inhabitants; and he himself once disposed of,
+      they would be too anxious to get away to waste time hunting for a vanished
+      girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this passed through Heyst's mind in a flash, as men think in moments
+      of danger. He looked speculatively at Mr. Jones, who, of course, had never
+      for a moment taken his eyes from his intended victim. And, the conviction
+      came to Heyst that this outlaw from the higher spheres was an absolutely
+      hard and pitiless scoundrel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones's voice made him start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be useless, for instance, to tell me that your Chinaman has run
+      off with your money. A man living alone with a Chinaman on an island takes
+      care to conceal property of that kind so well that the devil himself&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; Heyst muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, with his left hand, Mr. Jones mopped his frontal bone, his
+      stalk-like neck, his razor jaws, his fleshless chin. Again his voice
+      faltered and his aspect became still more gruesomely malevolent as of a
+      wicked and pitiless corpse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;but you mustn't put too much trust in
+      your ingenuity. You don't strike me as a very ingenious person, Mr. Heyst.
+      Neither am I. My talents lie another way. But Martin&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is now engaged in rifling my desk,&rdquo; interjected Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think so. What I was going to say is that Martin is much cleverer
+      than a Chinaman. Do you believe in racial superiority, Mr. Heyst? I do,
+      firmly. Martin is great at ferreting out such secrets as yours, for
+      instance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Secrets like mine!&rdquo; repeated Heyst bitterly. &ldquo;Well I wish him joy of all
+      he can ferret out!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's very kind of you,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones. He was beginning to be
+      anxious for Martin's return. Of iron self-possession at the gaming-table,
+      fearless in a sudden affray, he found that this rather special kind of
+      work was telling on his nerves. &ldquo;Keep still as you are!&rdquo; he cried sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you I am not armed,&rdquo; said Heyst, folding his arms on his
+      breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am really inclined to believe that you are not,&rdquo; admitted Mr. Jones
+      seriously. &ldquo;Strange!&rdquo; he mused aloud, the caverns of his eyes turned upon
+      Heyst. Then briskly: &ldquo;But my object is to keep you in this room. Don't
+      provoke me, by some unguarded movement, to smash your knee or do something
+      definite of that sort.&rdquo; He passed his tongue over his lips, which were dry
+      and black, while his forehead glistened with moisture. &ldquo;I don't know if it
+      wouldn't be better to do it at once!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He who deliberates is lost,&rdquo; said Heyst with grave mockery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones disregarded the remark. He had the air of communing with himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Physically I am no match for you,&rdquo; he said slowly, his black gaze fixed
+      upon the man sitting on the end of the bed. &ldquo;You could spring&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you trying to frighten yourself?&rdquo; asked Heyst abruptly. &ldquo;You don't
+      seem to have quite enough pluck for your business. Why don't you do it at
+      once?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones, taking violent offence, snorted like a savage skeleton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strange as it may seem to you, it is because of my origin, my breeding,
+      my traditions, my early associations, and such-like trifles. Not everybody
+      can divest himself of the prejudices of a gentleman as easily as you have
+      done, Mr. Heyst. But don't worry about my pluck. If you were to make a
+      clean spring at me, you would receive in mid air, so to speak, something
+      that would make you perfectly harmless by the time you landed. No, don't
+      misapprehend us, Mr. Heyst. We are&mdash;er&mdash;adequate bandits; and we
+      are after the fruit of your labours as a&mdash;er&mdash;successful
+      swindler. It's the way of the world&mdash;gorge and disgorge!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned wearily the back of his head against the wall. His vitality
+      seemed exhausted. Even his sunken eyelids drooped within the bony sockets.
+      Only his thin, waspish, beautifully pencilled eyebrows, drawn together a
+      little, suggested the will and the power to sting&mdash;something vicious,
+      unconquerable, and deadly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fruits! Swindler!&rdquo; repeated Heyst, without heat, almost without contempt.
+      &ldquo;You are giving yourself no end of trouble, you and your faithful
+      henchman, to crack an empty nut. There are no fruits here, as you imagine.
+      There are a few sovereigns, which you may have if you like; and since you
+      have called yourself a bandit&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yaas!&rdquo; drawled Mr. Jones. &ldquo;That, rather than a swindler. Open warfare at
+      least!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good! Only let me tell you that there were never in the world two
+      more deluded bandits&mdash;never!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst uttered these words with such energy that Mr. Jones, stiffening up,
+      seemed to become thinner and taller in his metallic blue dressing-gown
+      against the whitewashed wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fooled by a silly, rascally innkeeper!&rdquo; Heyst went on. &ldquo;Talked over like
+      a pair of children with a promise of sweets!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't talk with that disgusting animal,&rdquo; muttered Mr. Jones sullenly;
+      &ldquo;but he convinced Martin, who is no fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think he wanted very much to be convinced,&rdquo; said Heyst, with the
+      courteous intonation so well known in the Islands. &ldquo;I don't want to
+      disturb your touching trust in your&mdash;your follower, but he must be
+      the most credulous brigand in existence. What do you imagine? If the story
+      of my riches were ever so true, do you think Schomberg would have imparted
+      it to you from sheer altruism? Is that the way of the world, Mr. Jones?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment the lower jaw of Ricardo's gentleman dropped; but it came up
+      with a snap of scorn, and he said with spectral intensity:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The beast is cowardly! He was frightened, and wanted to get rid of us, if
+      you want to know, Mr. Heyst. I don't know that the material inducement was
+      so very great, but I was bored, and we decided to accept the bribe. I
+      don't regret it. All my life I have been seeking new impressions, and you
+      have turned out to be something quite out of the common. Martin, of
+      course, looks to the material results. He's simple&mdash;and faithful&mdash;and
+      wonderfully acute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes! He's on the track&mdash;&rdquo; and now Heyst's speech had the
+      character of politely grim raillery&mdash;&ldquo;but not sufficiently on the
+      track, as yet, to make it quite convenient to shoot me without more ado.
+      Didn't Schomberg tell you precisely where I conceal the fruit of my
+      rapines? Pah! Don't you know he would have told you anything, true or
+      false, from a very clear motive? Revenge! Mad hate&mdash;the unclean
+      idiot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones did not seem very much moved. On his right hand the doorway
+      incessantly flickered with distant lightning, and the continuous rumble of
+      thunder went on irritatingly, like the growl of an inarticulate giant
+      muttering fatuously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst overcame his immense repugnance to allude to her whose image,
+      cowering in the forest was constantly before his eyes, with all the pathos
+      and force of its appeal, august, pitiful, and almost holy to him. It was
+      in a hurried, embarrassed manner that he went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it had not been for that girl whom he persecuted with his insane and
+      odious passion, and who threw herself on my protection, he would never
+      have&mdash;but you know well enough!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know!&rdquo; burst out Mr. Jones with amazing heat. &ldquo;That hotel-keeper
+      tried to talk to me once of some girl he had lost, but I told him I didn't
+      want to hear any of his beastly women stories. It had something to do with
+      you, had it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst looked on serenely at this outburst, then lost his patience a
+      little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of comedy is this? You don't mean to say that you didn't know
+      that I had&mdash;that there was a girl living with me here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One could see that the eyes of Mr. Jones had become fixed in the depths of
+      their black holes by the gleam of white becoming steady there. The whole
+      man seemed frozen still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here! Here!&rdquo; he screamed out twice. There was no mistaking his
+      astonishment, his shocked incredulity&mdash;something like frightened
+      disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst was disgusted also, but in another way. He too was incredulous. He
+      regretted having mentioned the girl; but the thing was done, his
+      repugnance had been overcome in the heat of his argument against the
+      absurd bandit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it possible that you didn't know of that significant fact?&rdquo; he
+      inquired. &ldquo;Of the only effective truth in the welter of silly lies that
+      deceived you so easily?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I didn't!&rdquo; Mr. Jones shouted. &ldquo;But Martin did!&rdquo; he added in a faint
+      whisper, which Heyst's ears just caught and no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I kept her out of sight as long as I could,&rdquo; said Heyst. &ldquo;Perhaps, with
+      your bringing up, traditions, and so on; you will understand my reason for
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He knew. He knew before!&rdquo; Mr. Jones mourned in a hollow voice. &ldquo;He knew
+      of her from the first!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Backed hard against the wall he no longer watched Heyst. He had the air of
+      a man who had seen an abyss yawning under his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I want to kill him, this is my time,&rdquo; thought Heyst; but he did not
+      move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next moment Mr. Jones jerked his head up, glaring with sardonic fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a good mind to shoot you, you woman-ridden hermit, you man in the
+      moon, that can't exist without&mdash;no, it won't be you that I'll shoot.
+      It's the other woman-lover&mdash;the prevaricating, sly, low-class,
+      amorous cuss! And he shaved&mdash;shaved under my very nose. I'll shoot
+      him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's gone mad,&rdquo; thought Heyst, startled by the spectre's sudden fury.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt himself more in danger, nearer death, than ever since he had
+      entered that room. An insane bandit is a deadly combination. He did not,
+      could not know that Mr. Jones was quick-minded enough to see already the
+      end of his reign over his excellent secretary's thoughts and feelings; the
+      coming failure of Ricardo's fidelity. A woman had intervened! A woman, a
+      girl, who apparently possessed the power to awaken men's disgusting folly.
+      Her power had been proved in two instances already&mdash;the beastly
+      innkeeper, and that man with moustaches, upon whom Mr. Jones, his deadly
+      right hand twitching in his pocket, glared more in repulsion than in
+      anger. The very object of the expedition was lost from view in his sudden
+      and overwhelming sense of utter insecurity. And this made Mr. Jones feel
+      very savage; but not against the man with the moustaches. Thus, while
+      Heyst was really feeling that his life was not worth two minutes,
+      purchase, he heard himself addressed with no affectation of languid
+      impertinence but with a burst of feverish determination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here! Let's call a truce!&rdquo; said Mr. Jones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst's heart was too sick to allow him to smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have I been making war on you?&rdquo; he asked wearily. &ldquo;How do you expect me
+      to attach any meaning to your words?&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;You seem to be a
+      morbid, senseless sort of bandit. We don't speak the same language. If I
+      were to tell you why I am here, talking to you, you wouldn't believe me,
+      because you would not understand me. It certainly isn't the love of life,
+      from which I have divorced myself long ago&mdash;not sufficiently,
+      perhaps; but if you are thinking of yours, then I repeat to you that it
+      has never been in danger from me. I am unarmed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones was biting his lower lip, in a deep meditation. It was only
+      towards the last that he looked at Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unarmed, eh?&rdquo; Then he burst out violently: &ldquo;I tell you, a gentleman is no
+      match for the common herd. And yet one must make use of the brutes.
+      Unarmed, eh? And I suppose that creature is of the commonest sort. You
+      could hardly have got her out of a drawing-room. Though they're all alike,
+      for that matter. Unarmed! It's a pity. I am in much greater danger than
+      you are or were&mdash;or I am much mistaken. But I am not&mdash;I know my
+      man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lost his air of mental vacancy and broke out into shrill exclamations.
+      To Heyst they seemed madder than anything that had gone before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the track! On the scent!&rdquo; he cried, forgetting himself to the point of
+      executing a dance of rage in the middle of the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst looked on, fascinated by this skeleton in a gay dressing-gown,
+      jerkily agitated like a grotesque toy on the end of an invisible string.
+      It became quiet suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might have smelt a rat! I always knew that this would be the danger.&rdquo;
+       He changed suddenly to a confidential tone, fixing his sepulchral stare on
+      Heyst. &ldquo;And yet here I am, taken in by the fellow, like the veriest fool.
+      I've been always on the watch for some beastly influence, but here I am,
+      fairly caught. He shaved himself right in front of me and I never
+      guessed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The shrill laugh, following on the low tone of secrecy, sounded so
+      convincingly insane that Heyst got up as if moved by a spring. Mr. Jones
+      stepped back two paces, but displayed no uneasiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's as clear as daylight!&rdquo; he uttered mournfully, and fell silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind him the doorway flickered lividly, and the sound as of a naval
+      action somewhere away on the horizon filled the breathless pause. Mr.
+      Jones inclined his head on his shoulder. His mood had completely changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you say, unarmed man? Shall we go and see what is detaining my
+      trusted Martin so long? He asked me to keep you engaged in friendly
+      conversation till he made a further examination of that track. Ha, ha,
+      ha!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is no doubt ransacking my house,&rdquo; said Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was bewildered. It seemed to him that all this was an incomprehensible
+      dream, or perhaps an elaborate other-world joke, contrived by that spectre
+      in a gorgeous dressing gown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones looked at him with a horrible, cadaverous smile of inscrutable
+      mockery, and pointed to the door. Heyst passed through it first. His
+      feelings had become so blunted that he did not care how soon he was shot
+      in the back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How oppressive the air is!&rdquo; the voice of Mr. Jones said at his elbow.
+      &ldquo;This stupid storm gets on my nerves. I would welcome some rain, though it
+      would be unpleasant to get wet. On the other hand, this exasperating
+      thunder has the advantage of covering the sound of our approach. The
+      lightning's not so convenient. Ah, your house is fully illuminated! My
+      clever Martin is punishing your stock of candles. He belongs to the
+      unceremonious classes, which are also unlovely, untrustworthy, and so on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I left the candles burning,&rdquo; said Heyst, &ldquo;to save him trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You really believed he would go to your house?&rdquo; asked Mr. Jones with
+      genuine interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had that notion, strongly. I do believe he is there now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you don't mind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't!&rdquo; Mr. Jones stopped to wonder. &ldquo;You are an extraordinary man,&rdquo;
+       he said suspiciously, and moved on, touching elbows with Heyst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the latter's breast dwelt a deep silence, the complete silence of
+      unused faculties. At this moment, by simply shouldering Mr. Jones, he
+      could have thrown him down and put himself, by a couple of leaps, beyond
+      the certain aim of the revolver; but he did not even think of that. His
+      very will seemed dead of weariness. He moved automatically, his head low,
+      like a prisoner captured by the evil power of a masquerading skeleton out
+      of a grave. Mr. Jones took charge of the direction. They fetched a wide
+      sweep. The echoes of distant thunder seemed to dog their footsteps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the by,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones, as if unable to restrain his curiosity,
+      &ldquo;aren't you anxious about that&mdash;ouch!&mdash;that fascinating creature
+      to whom you owe whatever pleasure you can find in our visit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have placed her in safety,&rdquo; said Heyst. &ldquo;I&mdash;I took good care of
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones laid a hand on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have? Look! is that what you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst raised his head. In the flicker of lightning the desolation of the
+      cleared ground on his left leaped out and sank into the night, together
+      with the elusive forms of things distant, pale, unearthly. But in the
+      brilliant square of the door he saw the girl&mdash;the woman he had longed
+      to see once more as if enthroned, with her hands on the arms of the chair.
+      She was in black; her face was white, her head dreamily inclined on her
+      breast. He saw her only as low as her knees. He saw her&mdash;there, in
+      the room, alive with a sombre reality. It was no mocking vision. She was
+      not in the forest&mdash;but there! She sat there in the chair, seemingly
+      without strength, yet without fear, tenderly stooping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you understand their power?&rdquo; whispered the hot breath of Mr. Jones
+      into his ear. &ldquo;Can there be a more disgusting spectacle? It's enough to
+      make the earth detestable. She seems to have found her affinity. Move on
+      closer. If I have to shoot you in the end, then perhaps you will die
+      cured.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst obeyed the pushing pressure of a revolver barrel between his
+      shoulders. He felt it distinctly, but he did not feel the ground under his
+      feet. They found the steps, without his being aware that he was ascending
+      them&mdash;slowly, one by one. Doubt entered into him&mdash;a doubt of a
+      new kind, formless, hideous. It seemed to spread itself all over him,
+      enter his limbs, and lodge in his entrails. He stopped suddenly, with a
+      thought that he who experienced such a feeling had no business to live&mdash;or
+      perhaps was no longer living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything&mdash;the bungalow, the forest, the open ground&mdash;trembled
+      incessantly, the earth, the sky itself, shivered all the time, and the
+      only thing immovable in the shuddering universe was the interior of the
+      lighted room and the woman in black sitting in the light of the eight
+      candle-flames. They flung around her an intolerable brilliance which hurt
+      his eyes, seemed to sear his very brain with the radiation of infernal
+      heat. It was some time before his scorched eyes made out Ricardo seated on
+      the floor at some little distance, his back to the doorway, but only
+      partly so; one side of his upturned face showing the absorbed, all
+      forgetful rapture of his contemplation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grip of Mr. Jones's hard claw drew Heyst back a little. In the roll of
+      thunder, swelling and subsiding, he whispered in his ear a sarcastic: &ldquo;Of
+      course!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A great shame descended upon Heyst&mdash;the shame of guilt, absurd and
+      maddening. Mr. Jones drew him still farther back into the darkness of the
+      veranda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is serious,&rdquo; he went on, distilling his ghostly venom into Heyst's
+      very ear. &ldquo;I had to shut my eyes many times to his little flings; but this
+      is serious. He has found his soul-mate. Mud souls, obscene and cunning!
+      Mud bodies, too&mdash;the mud of the gutter! I tell you, we are no match
+      for the vile populace. I, even I, have been nearly caught. He asked me to
+      detain you till he gave me the signal. It won't be you that I'll have to
+      shoot, but him. I wouldn't trust him near me for five minutes after this!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook Heyst's arm a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you had not happened to mention the creature, we should both have been
+      dead before morning. He would have stabbed you as you came down the steps
+      after leaving me and then he would have walked up to me and planted the
+      same knife between my ribs. He has no prejudices. The viler the origin,
+      the greater the freedom of these simple souls!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew a cautious, hissing breath and added in an agitated murmur: &ldquo;I can
+      see right into his mind, I have been nearly caught napping by his
+      cunning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stretched his neck to peer into the room from the side. Heyst, too,
+      made a step forward, under the slight impulse of that slender hand
+      clasping his hand with a thin, bony grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Behold!&rdquo; the skeleton of the crazy bandit jabbered thinly into his ear in
+      spectral fellowship. &ldquo;Behold the simple, Acis kissing the sandals of the
+      nymph, on the way to her lips, all forgetful, while the menacing fife of
+      Polyphemus already sounds close at hand&mdash;if he could only hear it!
+      Stoop a little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0037" id="link2HCH0037">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER TWELVE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On returning to the Heyst bungalow, rapid as if on wings, Ricardo found
+      Lena waiting for him. She was dressed in black; and at once his uplifting
+      exultation was replaced by an awed and quivering patience before her white
+      face, before the immobility of her reposeful pose, the more amazing to him
+      who had encountered the strength of her limbs and the indomitable spirit
+      in her body. She had come out after Heyst's departure, and had sat down
+      under the portrait to wait for the return of the man of violence and
+      death. While lifting the curtain, she felt the anguish of her disobedience
+      to her lover, which was soothed by a feeling she had known before&mdash;a
+      gentle flood of penetrating sweetness. She was not automatically obeying a
+      momentary suggestion, she was under influences more deliberate, more
+      vague, and of greater potency. She had been prompted, not by her will, but
+      by a force that was outside of her and more worthy. She reckoned upon
+      nothing definite; she had calculated nothing. She saw only her purpose of
+      capturing death&mdash;savage, sudden, irresponsible death, prowling round
+      the man who possessed her, death embodied in the knife ready to strike
+      into his heart. No doubt it had been a sin to throw herself into his arms.
+      With that inspiration that descends at times from above for the good or
+      evil of our common mediocrity, she had a sense of having been for him only
+      a violent and sincere choice of curiosity and pity&mdash;a thing that
+      passes. She did not know him. If he were to go away from her and
+      disappear, she would utter no reproach, she would not resent it; for she
+      would hold in herself the impress of something most rare and precious&mdash;his
+      embraces made her own by her courage in saving his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All she thought of&mdash;the essence of her tremors, her flushes of heat,
+      and her shudders of cold&mdash;was the question how to get hold of that
+      knife, the mark and sign of stalking death. A tremor of impatience to
+      clutch the frightful thing, glimpsed once and unforgettable, agitated her
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instinctive flinging forward of these hands stopped Ricardo dead short
+      between the door and her chair, with the ready obedience of a conquered
+      man who can bide his time. Her success disconcerted her. She listened to
+      the man's impassioned transports of terrible eulogy and even more awful
+      declarations of love. She was even able to meet his eyes, oblique, apt to
+      glide away, throwing feral gleams of desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; he was saying, after a fiery outpouring of words in which the most
+      ferocious phrases of love were mingled with wooing accents of entreaty. &ldquo;I
+      will have no more of it! Don't you mistrust me. I am sober in my talk.
+      Feel how quietly my heart beats. Ten times today when you, you, you, swam
+      in my eye, I thought it would burst one of my ribs or leap out of my
+      throat. It has knocked itself dead and tired, waiting for this evening,
+      for this very minute. And now it can do no more. Feel how quiet it is!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a step forward, but she raised her clear voice commandingly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No nearer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped with a smile of imbecile worship on his lips, and with the
+      delighted obedience of a man who could at any moment seize her in his
+      hands and dash her to the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! If I had taken you by the throat this morning and had my way with
+      you, I should never have known what you are. And now I do. You are a
+      wonder! And so am I, in my way. I have nerve, and I have brains, too. We
+      should have been lost many times but for me. I plan&mdash;I plot for my
+      gentleman. Gentleman&mdash;pah! I am sick of him. And you are sick of
+      yours, eh? You, you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook all over; he cooed at her a string of endearing names, obscene
+      and tender, and then asked abruptly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you speak to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's my part to listen,&rdquo; she said, giving him an inscrutable smile, with
+      a flush on her cheek and her lips cold as ice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you will answer me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, her eyes dilated as if with sudden interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where's that plunder? Do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! Not yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is plunder stowed somewhere that's worth having?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think so. But who knows?&rdquo; she added after a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who cares?&rdquo; he retorted recklessly. &ldquo;I've had enough of this crawling
+      on my belly. It's you who are my treasure. It's I who found you out where
+      a gentleman had buried you to rot for his accursed pleasure!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked behind him and all around for a seat, then turned to her his
+      troubled eyes and dim smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am dog-tired,&rdquo; he said, and sat down on the floor. &ldquo;I went tired this
+      morning, since I came in here and started talking to you&mdash;as tired as
+      if I had been pouring my life-blood here on these planks for you to dabble
+      your white feet in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Unmoved, she nodded at him thoughtfully. Woman-like, all her faculties
+      remained concentrated on her heart's desire&mdash;on the knife&mdash;while
+      the man went on babbling insanely at her feet, ingratiating and savage,
+      almost crazy with elation. But he, too, was holding on to his purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you! For you I will throw away money, lives&mdash;all the lives but
+      mine! What you want is a man, a master that will let you put the heel of
+      your shoe on his neck; not that skulker, who will get tired of you in a
+      year&mdash;and you of him. And then what? You are not the one to sit
+      still; neither am I. I live for myself, and you shall live for yourself,
+      too&mdash;not for a Swedish baron. They make a convenience of people like
+      you and me. A gentleman is better than an employer, but an equal
+      partnership against all the 'yporcrits is the thing for you and me. We'll
+      go on wandering the world over, you and I both free and both true. You are
+      no cage bird. We'll rove together, for we are of them that have no homes.
+      We are born rovers!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She listened to him with the utmost attention, as if any unexpected word
+      might give her some sort of opening to get that dagger, that awful knife&mdash;to
+      disarm murder itself, pleading for her love at her feet. Again she nodded
+      at him thoughtfully, rousing a gleam in his yellow eyes, yearning
+      devotedly upon her face. When he hitched himself a little closer, her soul
+      had no movement of recoil. This had to be. Anything had to be which would
+      bring the knife within her reach. He talked more confidentially now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have met, and their time has come,&rdquo; he began, looking up into her
+      eyes. &ldquo;The partnership between me and my gentleman has to be ripped up.
+      There's no room for him where we two are. Why, he would shoot me like a
+      dog! Don't you worry. This will settle it not later than tonight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tapped his folded leg below the knee, and was surprised, flattered, by
+      the lighting up of her face, which stooped towards him eagerly and
+      remained expectant, the lips girlishly parted, red in the pale face, and
+      quivering in the quickened drawing of her breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You marvel, you miracle, you man's luck and joy&mdash;one in a million!
+      No, the only one. You have found your man in me,&rdquo; he whispered
+      tremulously. &ldquo;Listen! They are having their last talk together; for I'll
+      do for your gentleman, too, by midnight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without the slightest tremor she murmured, as soon as the tightening of
+      her breast had eased off and the words would come:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry&mdash;with him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The pause, the tone, had all the value of meditated advice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good, thrifty girl!&rdquo; he laughed low, with a strange feline gaiety,
+      expressed by the undulating movement of his shoulders and the sparkling
+      snap of his oblique eyes. &ldquo;You are still thinking about the chance of that
+      swag. You'll make a good partner, that you will! And, I say, what a decoy
+      you will make! Jee-miny!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was carried away for a moment, but his face darkened swiftly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! No reprieve. What do you think a fellow is&mdash;a scarecrow? All hat
+      and clothes and no feeling, no inside, no brain to make fancies for
+      himself? No!&rdquo; he went on violently. &ldquo;Never in his life will he go again
+      into that room of yours&mdash;never any more!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence fell. He was gloomy with the torment of his jealousy, and did
+      not even look at her. She sat up and slowly, gradually, bent lower and
+      lower over him, as if ready to fall into his arms. He looked up at last,
+      and checked this droop unwittingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say! You, who are up to fighting a man with your bare hands, could you&mdash;eh?&mdash;could
+      you manage to stick one with a thing like that knife of mine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She opened her eyes very wide and gave him a wild smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I tell?&rdquo; she whispered enchantingly. &ldquo;Will you let me have a look
+      at it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without taking his eyes from her face, he pulled the knife out of its
+      sheath&mdash;a short, broad, cruel double-edged blade with a bone handle&mdash;and
+      only then looked down at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A good friend,&rdquo; he said simply. &ldquo;Take it in your hand and feel the
+      balance,&rdquo; he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment when she bent forward to receive it from him, there was a
+      flash of fire in her mysterious eyes&mdash;a red gleam in the white mist
+      which wrapped the promptings and longings of her soul. She had done it!
+      The very sting of death was in her hands, the venom of the viper in her
+      paradise, extracted, safe in her possession&mdash;and the viper's head all
+      but lying under her heel. Ricardo, stretched on the mats of the floor,
+      crept closer and closer to the chair in which she sat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All her thoughts were busy planning how to keep possession of that weapon
+      which had seemed to have drawn into itself every danger and menace on the
+      death-ridden earth. She said with a low laugh, the exultation in which he
+      failed to recognize:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't think that you would ever trust me with that thing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For fear I should suddenly strike you with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What for? For this morning's work? Oh, no! There's no spite in you for
+      that. You forgave me. You saved me. You got the better of me, too. And
+      anyhow, what good would it be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no good,&rdquo; she admitted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her heart she felt that she would not know how to do it; that if it
+      came to a struggle, she would have to drop the dagger and fight with her
+      hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen. When we are going about the world together, you shall always call
+      me husband. Do you hear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said bracing herself for the contest, in whatever shape it was
+      coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The knife was lying in her lap. She let it slip into the fold of her
+      dress, and laid her forearms with clasped fingers over her knees, which
+      she pressed desperately together. The dreaded thing was out of sight at
+      last. She felt a dampness break out all over her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not going to hide you, like that good-for-nothing, finicky, sneery
+      gentleman. You shall be my pride and my chum. Isn't that better than
+      rotting on an island for the pleasure of a gentleman, till he gives you
+      the chuck?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll be anything you like,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his intoxication he crept closer with every word she uttered, with
+      every movement she made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give your foot,&rdquo; he begged in a timid murmur, and in the full
+      consciousness of his power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anything! Anything to keep murder quiet and disarmed till strength had
+      returned to her limbs and she could make up her mind what to do. Her
+      fortitude had been shaken by the very facility of success that had come to
+      her. She advanced her foot forward a little from under the hem of her
+      skirt; and he threw himself on it greedily. She was not even aware of him.
+      She had thought of the forest, to which she had been told to run. Yes, the
+      forest&mdash;that was the place for her to carry off the terrible spoil,
+      the sting of vanquished death. Ricardo, clasping her ankle, pressed his
+      lips time after time to the instep, muttering gasping words that were like
+      sobs, making little noises that resembled the sounds of grief and
+      distress. Unheard by them both, the thunder growled distantly with angry
+      modulations of it's tremendous voice, while the world outside shuddered
+      incessantly around the dead stillness of the room where the framed profile
+      of Heyst's father looked severely into space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Ricardo felt himself spurned by the foot he had been cherishing&mdash;spurned
+      with a push of such violence into the very hollow of his throat that it
+      swung him back instantly into an upright position on his knees. He read
+      his danger in the stony eyes of the girl; and in the very act of leaping
+      to his feet he heard sharply, detached on the comminatory voice of the
+      storm the brief report of a shot which half stunned him, in the manner of
+      a blow. He turned his burning head, and saw Heyst towering in the doorway.
+      The thought that the beggar had started to prance darted through his mind.
+      For a fraction of a second his distracted eyes sought for his weapon all
+      over the floor. He couldn't see it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stick him, you!&rdquo; he called hoarsely to the girl, and dashed headlong for
+      the door of the compound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he thus obeyed the instinct of self-preservation, his reason was
+      telling him that he could not possibly reach it alive. It flew open,
+      however, with a crash, before his launched weight, and instantly he swung
+      it to behind him. There, his shoulder leaning against it, his hands
+      clinging to the handle, dazed and alone in the night full of shudders and
+      muttered menaces, he tried to pull himself together. He asked himself if
+      he had been shot at more than once. His shoulder was wet with the blood
+      trickling from his head. Feeling above his ear, he ascertained that it was
+      only a graze, but the shock of the surprise had unmanned him for the
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What the deuce was the governor about to let the beggar break loose like
+      this? Or&mdash;was the governor dead, perhaps?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The silence within the room awed him. Of going back there could be no
+      question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she knows how to take care of her self,&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had his knife. It was she now who was deadly, while he was disarmed,
+      no good for the moment. He stole away from the door, staggering, the warm
+      trickle running down his neck, to find out what had become of the governor
+      and to provide himself with a firearm from the armoury in the trunks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0038" id="link2HCH0038">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr Jones, after firing his shot over Heyst's shoulder, had thought it
+      proper to dodge away. Like the spectre he was, he noiselessly vanished
+      from the veranda. Heyst stumbled into the room and looked around. All the
+      objects in there&mdash;the books, portrait on the wall&mdash;seemed
+      shadowy, unsubstantial, the dumb accomplices of an amazing dream-plot
+      ending in an illusory effect of awakening and the impossibility of ever
+      closing his eyes again. With dread he forced himself to look at the girl.
+      Still in the chair, she was leaning forward far over her knees, and had
+      hidden her face in her hands. Heyst remembered Wang suddenly. How clear
+      all this was&mdash;and how extremely amusing! Very.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat up a little, then leaned back, and taking her hands from her face,
+      pressed both of them to her breast as if moved to the heart by seeing him
+      there looking at her with a black, horror-struck curiosity. He would have
+      pitied her, if the triumphant expression of her face had not given him a
+      shock which destroyed the balance of his feelings. She spoke with an
+      accent of wild joy:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew you would come back in time! You are safe now. I have done it! I
+      would never, never have let him&mdash;&rdquo; Her voice died out, while her eyes
+      shone at him as when the sun breaks through a mist. &ldquo;Never get it back.
+      Oh, my beloved!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bowed his head gravely, and said in his polite. Heystian tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt you acted from instinct. Women have been provided with their own
+      weapon. I was a disarmed man, I have been a disarmed man all my life as I
+      see it now. You may glory in your resourcefulness and your profound
+      knowledge of yourself; but I may say that the other attitude, suggestive
+      of shame, had its charm. For you are full of charm!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The exultation vanished from her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mustn't make fun of me now. I know no shame. I was thanking God with
+      all my sinful heart for having been able to do it&mdash;for giving you to
+      me in that way&mdash;oh, my beloved&mdash;all my own at last!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared as if mad. Timidly she tried to excuse herself for disobeying
+      his directions for her safety. Every modulation of her enchanting voice
+      cut deep into his very breast, so that he could hardly understand the
+      words for the sheer pain of it. He turned his back on her; but a sudden
+      drop, an extraordinary faltering of her tone, made him spin round. On her
+      white neck her pale head dropped as in a cruel drought a withered flower
+      droops on its stalk. He caught his breath, looked at her closely, and
+      seemed to read some awful intelligence in her eyes. At the moment when her
+      eyelids fell as if smitten from above by an the gleam of old silver
+      familiar to him from boyhood, the very invisible power, he snatched her up
+      bodily out of the chair, and disregarding an unexpected metallic clatter
+      on the floor, carried her off into the other room. The limpness of her
+      body frightened him. Laying her down on the bed, he ran out again, seized
+      a four-branched candlestick on the table, and ran back, tearing down with
+      a furious jerk the curtain that swung stupidly in his way, but after
+      putting the candlestick on the table by the bed, he remained absolutely
+      idle. There did not seem anything more for him to do. Holding his chin in
+      his hand he looked down intently at her still face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has she been stabbed with this thing?&rdquo; asked Davidson, whom suddenly he
+      saw standing by his side and holding up Ricardo's dagger to his sight.
+      Heyst uttered no word of recognition or surprise. He gave Davidson only a
+      dumb look of unutterable awe, then, as if possessed with a sudden fury,
+      started tearing open the front of the girls dress. She remained insensible
+      under his hands, and Heyst let out a groan which made Davidson shudder
+      inwardly the heavy plaint of a man who falls clubbed in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood side by side, looking mournfully at the little black hole made
+      by Mr. Jones's bullet under the swelling breast of a dazzling and as it
+      were sacred whiteness. It rose and fell slightly&mdash;so slightly that
+      only the eyes of the lover could detect the faint stir of life. Heyst,
+      calm and utterly unlike himself in the face, moving about noiselessly,
+      prepared a wet cloth, and laid it on the insignificant wound, round which
+      there was hardly a trace of blood to mar the charm, the fascination, of
+      that mortal flesh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyelids fluttered. She looked drowsily about, serene, as if fatigued
+      only by the exertions of her tremendous victory, capturing the very sting
+      of death in the service of love. But her eyes became very wide awake when
+      they caught sight of Ricardo's dagger, the spoil of vanquished death,
+      which Davidson was still holding, unconsciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give it to me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It's mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson put the symbol of her victory into her feeble hands extended to
+      him with the innocent gesture of a child reaching eagerly for a toy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For you,&rdquo; she gasped, turning her eyes to Heyst. &ldquo;Kill nobody.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Heyst, taking the dagger and laying it gently on her breast,
+      while her hands fell powerless by her side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The faint smile on her deep-cut lips waned, and her head sank deep into
+      the pillow, taking on the majestic pallor and immobility of marble. But
+      over the muscles, which seemed set in their transfigured beauty for ever,
+      passed a slight and awful tremor. With an amazing strength she asked
+      loudly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter with me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have been shot, dear Lena,&rdquo; Heyst said in a steady voice, while
+      Davidson, at the question, turned away and leaned his forehead against the
+      post of the foot of the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shot? I did think, too, that something had struck me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Over Samburan the thunder had ceased to growl at last, and the world of
+      material forms shuddered no more under the emerging stars. The spirit of
+      the girl which was passing away from under them clung to her triumph
+      convinced of the reality of her victory over death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more,&rdquo; she muttered. &ldquo;There will be no more! Oh, my beloved,&rdquo; she
+      cried weakly, &ldquo;I've saved you! Why don't you take me into your arms and
+      carry me out of this lonely place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Heyst bent low over her, cursing his fastidious soul, which even at that
+      moment kept the true cry of love from his lips in its infernal mistrust of
+      all life. He dared not touch her and she had no longer the strength to
+      throw her arms about his neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who else could have done this for you?&rdquo; she whispered gloriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one in the world,&rdquo; he answered her in a murmur of unconcealed despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She tried to raise herself, but all she could do was to lift her head a
+      little from the pillow. With a terrible and gentle movement, Heyst
+      hastened to slip his arm under her neck. She felt relieved at once of an
+      intolerable weight, and was content to surrender to him the infinite
+      weariness of her tremendous achievement. Exulting, she saw herself
+      extended on the bed, in a black dress, and profoundly at peace, while,
+      stooping over her with a kindly, playful smile, he was ready to lift her
+      up in his firm arms and take her into the sanctuary of his innermost heart&mdash;for
+      ever! The flush of rapture flooding her whole being broke out in a smile
+      of innocent, girlish happiness; and with that divine radiance on her lips
+      she breathed her last--triumphant, seeking for his glance in the shades of
+      death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0039" id="link2HCH0039">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Excellency,&rdquo; said Davidson in his placid voice; &ldquo;there are more dead
+      in this affair&mdash;more white people, I mean&mdash;than have been killed
+      in many of the battles in the last Achin war.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson was talking with an Excellency, because what was alluded to in
+      conversation as &ldquo;the mystery of Samburan&rdquo; had caused such a sensation in
+      the Archipelago that even those in the highest spheres were anxious to
+      hear something at first hand. Davidson had been summoned to an audience.
+      It was a high official on his tour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You knew the late Baron Heyst well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The truth is that nobody out here can boast of having known him well,&rdquo;
+       said Davidson. &ldquo;He was a queer chap. I doubt if he himself knew how queer
+      he was. But everybody was aware that I was keeping my eye on him in a
+      friendly way. And that's how I got the warning which made me turn round in
+      my tracks. In the middle of my trip and steam back to Samburan, where, I
+      am grieved to say, I arrived too late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without enlarging very much, Davidson explained to the attentive
+      Excellency how a woman, the wife of a certain hotel-keeper named
+      Schomberg, had overheard two card-sharping rascals making inquiries from
+      her husband as to the exact position of the island. She caught only a few
+      words referring to the neighbouring volcano, but there were enough to
+      arouse her suspicions&mdash;&ldquo;which,&rdquo; went on Davidson, &ldquo;she imparted to
+      me, your Excellency. They were only too well founded!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was very clever of her,&rdquo; remarked the great man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's much cleverer than people have any conception of,&rdquo; said Davidson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he refrained from disclosing to the Excellency the real cause which
+      had sharpened Mrs. Schomberg's wits. The poor woman was in mortal terror
+      of the girl being brought back within reach of her infatuated Wilhelm.
+      Davidson only said that her agitation had impressed him; but he confessed
+      that while going back, he began to have his doubts as to there being
+      anything in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I steamed into one of those silly thunderstorms that hang about the
+      volcano, and had some trouble in making the island,&rdquo; narrated Davidson. &ldquo;I
+      had to grope my way dead slow into Diamond Bay. I don't suppose that
+      anybody, even if looking out for me, could have heard me let go the
+      anchor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He admitted that he ought to have gone ashore at once; but everything was
+      perfectly dark and absolutely quiet. He felt ashamed of his impulsiveness.
+      What a fool he would have looked, waking up a man in the middle of the
+      night just to ask him if he was all right! And then the girl being there,
+      he feared that Heyst would look upon his visit as an unwarrantable
+      intrusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first intimation he had of there being anything wrong was a big white
+      boat, adrift, with the dead body of a very hairy man inside, bumping
+      against the bows of his steamer. Then indeed he lost no time in going
+      ashore&mdash;alone, of course, from motives of delicacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I arrived in time to see that poor girl die, as I have told your
+      Excellency,&rdquo; pursued Davidson. &ldquo;I won't tell you what a time I had with
+      him afterwards. He talked to me. His father seems to have been a crank,
+      and to have upset his head when he was young. He was a queer chap.
+      Practically the last words he said to me, as we came out on the veranda,
+      were:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to
+      hope, to love&mdash;and to put its trust in life!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As we stood there, just before I left him, for he said he wanted to be
+      alone with his dead for a time, we heard a snarly sort of voice near the
+      bushes by the shore calling out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Is that you, governor?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Yes, it's me.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Jeeminy! I thought the beggar had done for you. He has started prancing
+      and nearly had me. I have been dodging around, looking for you ever
+      since.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Well, here I am,' suddenly screamed the other voice, and then a shot
+      rang out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'This time he has not missed him,' Heyst said to me bitterly, and went
+      back into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I returned on board as he had insisted I should do. I didn't want to
+      intrude on his grief. Later, about five in the morning, some of my
+      calashes came running to me, yelling that there was a fire ashore. I
+      landed at once, of course. The principal bungalow was blazing. The heat
+      drove us back. The other two houses caught one after another like
+      kindling-wood. There was no going beyond the shore end of the jetty till
+      the afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson sighed placidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you are certain that Baron Heyst is dead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is&mdash;ashes, your Excellency,&rdquo; said Davidson, wheezing a little;
+      &ldquo;he and the girl together. I suppose he couldn't stand his thoughts before
+      her dead body&mdash;and fire purifies everything. That Chinaman of whom I
+      told your Excellency helped me to investigate next day, when the embers
+      got cooled a little. We found enough to be sure. He's not a bad Chinaman.
+      He told me that he had followed Heyst and the girl through the forest from
+      pity, and partly out of curiosity. He watched the house till he saw Heyst
+      go out, after dinner, and Ricardo come back alone. While he was dodging
+      there, it occurred to him that he had better cast the boat adrift, for
+      fear those scoundrels should come round by water and bombard the village
+      from the sea with their revolvers and Winchesters. He judged that they
+      were devils enough for anything. So he walked down the wharf quietly; and
+      as he got into the boat, to cast her off, that hairy man who, it seems,
+      was dozing in her, jumped up growling, and Wang shot him dead. Then he
+      shoved the boat off as far as he could and went away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause. Presently Davidson went on, in his tranquil manner:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let Heaven look after what has been purified. The wind and rain will take
+      care of the ashes. The carcass of that follower, secretary, or whatever
+      the unclean ruffian called himself, I left where it lay, to swell and rot
+      in the sun. His principal had shot him neatly through the head. Then,
+      apparently, this Jones went down to the wharf to look for the boat and for
+      the hairy man. I suppose he tumbled into the water by accident&mdash;or
+      perhaps not by accident. The boat and the man were gone, and the scoundrel
+      saw himself alone, his game clearly up, and fairly trapped. Who knows? The
+      water's very clear there, and I could see him huddled up on the bottom,
+      between two piles, like a heap of bones in a blue silk bag, with only the
+      head and the feet sticking out. Wang was very pleased when he discovered
+      him. That made everything safe, he said, and he went at once over the hill
+      to fetch his Alfuro woman back to the hut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his
+      forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then, your Excellency, I went away. There was nothing to be done
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clearly!&rdquo; assented the Excellency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Davidson, thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and then
+      murmured with placid sadness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>October 1912&mdash;May 1914</b>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Victory, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
+no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
+it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Victory
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #6378]
+Last Updated: November 4,2010
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VICTORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tracy Camp and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914. And that last
+word was the single word of the title.
+
+Those were the times of peace. Now that the moment of publication
+approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the
+title-page. The word "Victory" the shining and tragic goal of noble
+effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere
+novel. There was also the possibility of falling under the suspicion of
+commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book
+had something to do with war.
+
+Of that, however, I was not afraid very much. What influenced my
+decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of
+awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.
+"Victory" was the last word I had written in peace-time. It was the last
+literary thought which had occurred to me before the doors of the Temple
+of Janus flying open with a crash shook the minds, the hearts, the
+consciences of men all over the world. Such coincidence could not be
+treated lightly. And I made up my mind to let the word stand, in the
+same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen of Old Rome would have
+"accepted the Omen."
+
+The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence (in
+the novel) of a person named Schomberg.
+
+That I believe him to be true goes without saying. I am not likely to
+offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an old
+member of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far
+back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story
+of mine published in 1902. Here he appears in a still larger part, true
+to life (I hope), but also true to himself. Only, in this instance, his
+deeper passions come into play, and thus his grotesque psychology is
+completed at last.
+
+I don't pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology; but
+it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton. My object in mentioning
+him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being the incarnation
+of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old deep-seated, and, as
+it were, impartial conviction.
+
+J. C.
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first
+thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness
+to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written, and to
+the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained
+when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the
+war. The writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the murder of an
+Austrian Archduke sounded the first note of warning for a world already
+full of doubts and fears.
+
+The contemporaneous very short Author's Note which is preserved in this
+edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I consented
+to the publication of the book. The fact of the book having been
+published in the United States early in the year made it difficult
+to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the
+thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful
+incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter
+of reality, tragic enough in all conscience, but even more cruel than
+tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to
+think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which
+in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing
+the truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp
+knife at its throat.
+
+The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power
+of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to
+be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too
+mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement
+to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on
+with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and the cobbler at his
+stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the
+leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be
+disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too
+awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly
+by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book
+pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of
+detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is
+yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.
+
+It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
+fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
+detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly
+Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the
+man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine
+attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of
+stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a
+remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this
+minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.
+Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting
+himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
+physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness
+of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead
+the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the
+matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.
+The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most
+pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
+
+But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst. I
+have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who stands
+behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a
+mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not so
+certain. He himself never laid claim to that distinction. His detachment
+was too great to make any claims, big or small, on one's credulity. I
+will not say where I met him because I fear to give my readers a
+wrong impression, since a marked incongruity between a man and his
+surroundings is often a very misleading circumstance. We became very
+friendly for a time, and I would not like to expose him to unpleasant
+suspicions though, personally, I am sure he would have been indifferent
+to suspicions as he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of
+life. He was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only the physical and
+moral foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance.
+That it was short was certainly not my fault for he had charmed me by
+the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, I cannot help
+thinking he had carried to excess. He went away from his rooms without
+leaving a trace. I wondered where he had gone to--but now I know.
+He vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure that,
+unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in looking
+upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight. Often in the
+course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense of a phrase
+heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I have fastened on
+to him many words heard on other men's lips and belonging to other men's
+less perfect, less pathetic moods.
+
+The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who is
+built on a much slenderer connection. Mr. Jones (or whatever his name
+was) did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out
+of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in
+the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon
+extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to
+which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome
+significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off
+the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird
+impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the
+fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said:
+"A professional sharper?" and got for an answer: "He's a terror; but I
+must say that up to a certain point he will play fair. . . ." I wonder
+what the point was. I never saw him again because I believe he went
+straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other
+ports of call in the direction of Aspinall. Mr. Jones's characteristic
+insolence belongs to another man of a quite different type. I will say
+nothing as to the origins of his mentality because I don't intend to
+make any damaging admissions.
+
+It so happened that the very same year Ricardo--the physical
+Ricardo--was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and
+extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days' passage between two
+places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names don't matter. For the most part
+he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and raising himself from time
+to time on his elbow would talk about himself and go on talking, not
+exactly to me or even at me (he would not even look up but kept his
+eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if communing in a low voice with
+his familiar devil. Now and then he would give me a glance and make the
+hairs of his stiff little moustache stir quaintly. His eyes were green
+and every cat I see to this day reminds me of the exact contour of his
+face. What he was travelling for or what was his business in life he
+never confided to me. Truth to say, the only passenger on board that
+schooner who could have talked openly about his activities and purposes
+was a very snuffy and conversationally delightful friar, the superior
+of a convent, attended by a very young lay brother, of a particularly
+ferocious countenance. We had with us also, lying prostrate in the dark
+and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner, an old Spanish gentleman, owner
+of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured me, very ill indeed. Ricardo
+seemed to be either a servant or the confidant of that aged and
+distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the passage held a long
+murmured conversation with the friar, and after that did nothing but
+groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and then call for Martin in a
+voice full of pain. Then he who had become Ricardo in the book would go
+below into that beastly and noisome hole, remain there mysteriously,
+and coming up on deck again with a face on which nothing could be read,
+would as likely as not resume for my edification the exposition of his
+moral attitude towards life illustrated by striking particular instances
+of the most atrocious complexion. Did he mean to frighten me? Or seduce
+me? Or astonish me? Or arouse my admiration? All he did was to arouse my
+amused incredulity. As scoundrels go he was far from being a bore.
+For the rest my innocence was so great then that I could not take his
+philosophy seriously. All the time he kept one ear turned to the cuddy
+in the manner of a devoted servant, but I had the idea that in some way
+or other he had imposed the connection on the invalid for some end of
+his own. The reader, therefore, won't be surprised to hear that one
+morning I was told without any particular emotion by the padrone of the
+schooner that the "rich man" down there was dead: He had died in the
+night. I don't remember ever being so moved by the desolate end of a
+complete stranger. I looked down the skylight, and there was the devoted
+Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose white
+beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could make out in the dark
+depths of a horrible stuffy bunk.
+
+As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during
+all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late "rich man" had
+to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in
+sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination.
+The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense
+commiseration: "The poor man has left a young daughter." Who was to look
+after her I don't know, but I saw the devoted Martin taking the trunks
+ashore with great care just before I landed myself. I would perhaps have
+tracked the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a little while,
+but I had some of my own very pressing business to attend to, which in
+the end got mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give
+to Ricardo. The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten him,
+though.
+
+My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my observation
+of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious. It ended in a
+sudden inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a hovel of sticks
+and mats by the side of a path. As I went in there only to ask for a
+bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the slightest idea what in
+my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible ire. It became
+manifest to me less than two minutes after I had set eyes on him for the
+first time, and though immensely surprised of course I didn't stop
+to think it out I took the nearest short cut--through the wall. This
+bestial apparition and a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in
+Haiti only a couple of months afterwards, have fixed my conception of
+blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal, to
+the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.
+Of Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too
+quickly.
+
+It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my
+memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world--so natural
+that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there, they had to
+come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who had
+taken to his trade without preparation, or premeditation, and without
+any moral intention but that which pervades the whole scheme of this
+world of senses.
+
+Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the
+origins of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena,
+because if I were to leave her out it would look like a slight; and
+nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a slight on Lena.
+If of all the personages involved in the "mystery of Samburan" I have
+lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at her, whom
+I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and with a most sustained
+attention. This attention originated in idleness for which I have a
+natural talent. One evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the
+tropics but of the South of France. It was filled with tobacco smoke,
+the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of strident
+music. The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed
+at Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an
+enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable than
+the Zangiacomo musical enterprise. It was less pretentious also, more
+homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the intervals when
+all the performers left the platform one of them went amongst the
+marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in a battered
+tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. It was a girl.
+Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even
+surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which
+a man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. Silent and
+wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker
+and with no other sound but the slight rattle of the coins to attract
+attention. It was long after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed
+but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half
+a lifetime, and it was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that
+I dropped a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the
+sleep-walker turned her head to gaze at me and said "Merci, Monsieur"
+in a tone in which there was no gratitude but only surprise. I must have
+been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence
+that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed
+their seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that
+particular performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard who
+conducted, and who might for all I know have been her father, but whose
+real mission in life was to be a model for the Zangiacomo of Victory.
+Having got a clear line of sight I naturally (being idle) continued to
+look at the girl through all the second part of the programme. The shape
+of her dark head inclined over the violin was fascinating, and, while
+resting between the pieces of that interminable programme she was, in
+her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in her lap, the very
+image of dreamy innocence. The mature, bad-tempered woman at the
+piano might have been her mother, though there was not the slightest
+resemblance between them. All I am certain of in their personal relation
+to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper part of the arm. That I
+am sure I have seen! There could be no mistake. I was in too idle a mood
+to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. It may have been playfulness,
+yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. It may have
+been playfulness. Yet I saw plainly poor "dreamy innocence" rub gently
+the affected place as she filed off with the other performers down the
+middle aisle between the marble tables in the uproar of voices, the
+rattling of dominoes through a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke. I
+believe that those people left the town next day.
+
+Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the other
+side of the Place de la Comedie. It is very possible. I did not go
+across to find out. It was my perfect idleness that had invested the
+girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want to destroy it by
+any superfluous exertion. The receptivity of my indolence made the
+impression so permanent that when the moment came for her meeting with
+Heyst I felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand of the
+risky and uncertain future. I was so convinced of it that I let her go
+with Heyst, I won't say without a pang but certainly without misgivings.
+And in view of her triumphant end what more could I have done for her
+rehabilitation and her happiness?
+
+1920. J. C.
+
+
+
+
+VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE PART ONE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very
+close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I
+believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these
+commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form
+of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of
+concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's
+waistcoat pocket--but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination
+in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like
+bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel. And I suppose
+those two considerations, the practical and the mystical, prevented
+Heyst--Axel Heyst--from going away.
+
+The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation. The world of
+finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may
+appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates,
+and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural
+physics, but they account for the persistent inertia of Heyst, at which
+we "out there" used to laugh among ourselves--but not inimically. An
+inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is scarcely
+worth derision. It may, indeed, be in the way sometimes; but this could
+not be said of Axel Heyst. He was out of everybody's way, as if he
+were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as
+conspicuous. Everyone in that part of the world knew of him, dwelling on
+his little island. An island is but the top of a mountain. Axel Heyst,
+perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of the imponderable
+stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid,
+shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which embrace
+the continents of this globe. His most frequent visitors were shadows,
+the shadows of clouds, relieving the monotony of the inanimate, brooding
+sunshine of the tropics. His nearest neighbour--I am speaking now of
+things showing some sort of animation--was an indolent volcano which
+smoked faintly all day with its head just above the northern horizon,
+and at night levelled at him, from amongst the clear stars, a dull red
+glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of a gigantic
+cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was also a
+smoker; and when he lounged out on his veranda with his cheroot, the
+last thing before going to bed, he made in the night the same sort of
+glow and of the same size as that other one so many miles away.
+
+In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the
+night--which were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath of
+air through. There was seldom enough wind to blow a feather along. On
+most evenings of the year Heyst could have sat outside with a naked
+candle to read one of the books left him by his late father. It was not
+a mean store. But he never did that. Afraid of mosquitoes, very likely.
+Neither was he ever tempted by the silence to address any casual remarks
+to the companion glow of the volcano. He was not mad. Queer chap--yes,
+that may have been said, and in fact was said; but there is a tremendous
+difference between the two, you will allow.
+
+On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan--the "Round
+Island" of the charts--was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light
+Heyst could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of
+an abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle: vague roofs above low
+vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long grass,
+something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged thickets
+towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with a black
+jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted side. But
+the most conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard raised on two
+posts and presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over that side, the
+white letters "T. B. C. Co." in a row at least two feet high. These were
+the initials of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, his employers--his late
+employers, to be precise.
+
+According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T. B.
+C. Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two years, the
+company went into liquidation--forced, I believe, not voluntary. There
+was nothing forcible in the process, however. It was slow; and while the
+liquidation--in London and Amsterdam--pursued its languid course, Axel
+Heyst, styled in the prospectus "manager in the tropics," remained at
+his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-station of the company.
+
+And it was not merely a coaling-station. There was a coal-mine there,
+with an outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards from the
+rickety wharf and the imposing blackboard. The company's object had been
+to get hold of all the outcrops on tropical islands and exploit them
+locally. And, Lord knows, there were any amount of outcrops. It was
+Heyst who had located most of them in this part of the tropical belt
+during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a ready letter-writer
+had written pages and pages about them to his friends in Europe. At
+least, so it was said.
+
+We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth--for himself, at any
+rate. What he seemed mostly concerned for was the "stride forward,"
+as he expressed it, in the general organization of the universe,
+apparently. He was heard by more than a hundred persons in the islands
+talking of a "great stride forward for these regions." The convinced
+wave of the hand which accompanied the phrase suggested tropical
+distances being impelled onward. In connection with the finished
+courtesy of his manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate silencing--for
+a time, at least. Nobody cared to argue with him when he talked in this
+strain. His earnestness could do no harm to anybody. There was no danger
+of anyone taking seriously his dream of tropical coal, so what was the
+use of hurting his feelings?
+
+Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his entree
+as a person who came out East with letters of introduction--and modest
+letters of credit, too--some years before these coal-outcrops began to
+crop up in his playfully courteous talk. From the first there was
+some difficulty in making him out. He was not a traveller. A traveller
+arrives and departs, goes on somewhere. Heyst did not depart. I met a
+man once--the manager of the branch of the Oriental Banking Corporation
+in Malacca--to whom Heyst exclaimed, in no connection with anything in
+particular (it was in the billiard-room of the club):
+
+"I am enchanted with these islands!"
+
+He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and
+while chalking his cue. And perhaps it was some sort of enchantment.
+There are more spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of.
+
+Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn
+round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic circle. It
+just touched Manila, and he had been seen there. It just touched Saigon,
+and he was likewise seen there once. Perhaps these were his attempts to
+break out. If so, they were failures. The enchantment must have been
+an unbreakable one. The manager--the man who heard the exclamation--had
+been so impressed by the tone, fervour, rapture, what you will, or
+perhaps by the incongruity of it that he had related the experience to
+more than one person.
+
+"Queer chap, that Swede," was his only comment; but this is the origin
+of the name "Enchanted Heyst" which some fellows fastened on our man.
+
+He also had other names. In his early years, long before he got so
+becomingly bald on the top, he went to present a letter of introduction
+to Mr. Tesman of Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm--tip-top house. Well,
+Mr. Tesman was a kindly, benevolent old gentleman. He did not know what
+to make of that caller. After telling him that they wished to render his
+stay among the islands as pleasant as possible, and that they were
+ready to assist him in his plans, and so on, and after receiving Heyst's
+thanks--you know the usual kind of conversation--he proceeded to query
+in a slow, paternal tone:
+
+"And you are interested in--?"
+
+"Facts," broke in Heyst in his courtly voice. "There's nothing worth
+knowing but facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman."
+
+I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have
+spoken about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of "Hard
+Facts." He had the singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to him
+and became part of his name. Thereafter he mooned about the Java Sea in
+some of the Tesmans' trading schooners, and then vanished, on board an
+Arab ship, in the direction of New Guinea. He remained so long in that
+outlying part of his enchanted circle that he was nearly forgotten
+before he swam into view again in a native proa full of Goram vagabonds,
+burnt black by the sun, very lean, his hair much thinned, and a
+portfolio of sketches under his arm. He showed these willingly, but
+was very reserved as to anything else. He had had an "amusing time," he
+said. A man who will go to New Guinea for fun--well!
+
+Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone off
+his face and all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-gold
+pair of horizontal moustaches had grown to really noble proportions,
+a certain disreputable white man fastened upon him an epithet. Putting
+down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of its contents--paid
+for by Heyst--he said, with that deliberate sagacity which no mere
+water-drinker ever attained:
+
+"Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman. Puffect! But he's a ut-uto-utopist."
+
+Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where this
+pronouncement was voiced. Utopist, eh? Upon my word, the only thing
+I heard him say which might have had a bearing on the point was his
+invitation to old McNab himself. Turning with that finished courtesy of
+attitude, movement voice, which was his obvious characteristic, he had
+said with delicate playfulness:
+
+"Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!"
+
+Perhaps that was it. A man who could propose, even playfully, to quench
+old McNab's thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer of chimeras; for
+of downright irony Heyst was not prodigal. And, may be, this was the
+reason why he was generally liked. At that epoch in his life, in the
+fulness of his physical development, of a broad, martial presence, with
+his bald head and long moustaches, he resembled the portraits of Charles
+XII., of adventurous memory. However, there was no reason to think that
+Heyst was in any way a fighting man.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+It was about this time that Heyst became associated with Morrison on
+terms about which people were in doubt. Some said he was a partner,
+others said he was a sort of paying guest, but the real truth of the
+matter was more complex. One day Heyst turned up in Timor. Why in Timor,
+of all places in the world, no one knows. Well, he was mooning about
+Delli, that highly pestilential place, possibly in search of some
+undiscovered facts, when he came in the street upon Morrison, who, in
+his way, was also an "enchanted" man. When you spoke to Morrison of
+going home--he was from Dorsetshire--he shuddered. He said it was dark
+and wet there; that it was like living with your head and shoulders in
+a moist gunny-bag. That was only his exaggerated style of talking.
+Morrison was "one of us." He was owner and master of the Capricorn,
+trading brig, and was understood to be doing well with her, except for
+the drawback of too much altruism. He was the dearly beloved friend of a
+quantity of God-forsaken villages up dark creeks and obscure bays, where
+he traded for produce. He would often sail, through awfully dangerous
+channels up to some miserable settlement, only to find a very hungry
+population clamorous for rice, and without so much "produce" between
+them as would have filled Morrison's suitcase. Amid general rejoicings,
+he would land the rice all the same, explain to the people that it was
+an advance, that they were in debt to him now; would preach to them
+energy and industry, and make an elaborate note in a pocket-diary which
+he always carried; and this would be the end of that transaction.
+I don't know if Morrison thought so, but the villagers had no doubt
+whatever about it. Whenever a coast village sighted the brig it would
+begin to beat all its gongs and hoist all its streamers, and all its
+girls would put flowers in their hair and the crowd would line the river
+bank, and Morrison would beam and glitter at all this excitement through
+his single eyeglass with an air of intense gratification. He was tall
+and lantern-jawed, and clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister who had
+thrown his wig to the dogs.
+
+We used to remonstrate with him:
+
+"You will never see any of your advances if you go on like this,
+Morrison."
+
+He would put on a knowing air.
+
+"I shall squeeze them yet some day--never you fear. And that reminds
+me"--pulling out his inseparable pocketbook--"there's that So-and-So
+village. They are pretty well off again; I may just as well squeeze them
+to begin with."
+
+He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.
+
+Memo: Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.
+
+Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with
+inflexible finality; but he never began the squeezing. Some men grumbled
+at him. He was spoiling the trade. Well, perhaps to a certain extent;
+not much. Most of the places he traded with were unknown not only to
+geography but also to the traders' special lore which is transmitted by
+word of mouth, without ostentation, and forms the stock of mysterious
+local knowledge. It was hinted also that Morrison had a wife in each and
+every one of them, but the majority of us repulsed these innuendoes
+with indignation. He was a true humanitarian and rather ascetic than
+otherwise.
+
+When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street,
+his eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the hopeless
+aspect of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads trudging from
+workhouse to workhouse. Being hailed on the street he looked up with a
+wild worried expression. He was really in trouble. He had come the week
+before into Delli and the Portuguese authorities, on some pretence
+of irregularity in his papers, had inflicted a fine upon him and had
+arrested his brig.
+
+Morrison never had any spare cash in hand. With his system of trading
+it would have been strange if he had; and all these debts entered in
+the pocketbook weren't good enough to raise a millrei on--let alone a
+shilling. The Portuguese officials begged him not to distress himself.
+They gave him a week's grace, and then proposed to sell the brig at
+auction. This meant ruin for Morrison; and when Heyst hailed him across
+the street in his usual courtly tone, the week was nearly out.
+
+Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner of a
+prince addressing another prince on a private occasion:
+
+"What an unexpected pleasure. Would you have any objection to drink
+something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there? The sun is
+really too strong to talk in the street."
+
+The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel which
+he would have distained to enter at any other time. He was distracted.
+He did not know what he was doing. You could have led him over the edge
+of a precipice just as easily as into that wine-shop. He sat down like
+an automaton. He was speechless, but he saw a glass full of rough red
+wine before him, and emptied it. Heyst meantime, politely watchful, had
+taken a seat opposite.
+
+"You are in for a bout of fever, I fear," he said sympathetically.
+
+Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.
+
+"Fever!" he cried. "Give me fever. Give me plague. They are diseases.
+One gets over them. But I am being murdered. I am being murdered by the
+Portuguese. The gang here downed me at last among them. I am to have my
+throat cut the day after tomorrow."
+
+In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a
+slight motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a
+drawing-room. Morrison's despairing reserve had broken down. He had been
+wandering with a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud hovels,
+silent, with no soul to turn to in his distress, and positively
+maddened by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled on a white man,
+figuratively and actually white--for Morrison refused to accept the
+racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials. He let himself go for the
+mere relief of violent speech, his elbows planted on the table, his
+eyes blood-shot, his voice nearly gone, the brim of his round pith hat
+shading an unshaven, livid face. His white clothes, which he had not
+taken off for three days, were dingy. He had already gone to the bad,
+past redemption. The sight was shocking to Heyst; but he let nothing
+of it appear in his bearing, concealing his impression under that
+consummate good-society manner of his. Polite attention, what's due from
+one gentleman listening to another, was what he showed; and, as usual,
+it was catching; so that Morrison pulled himself together and finished
+his narrative in a conversational tone, with a man-of-the-world air.
+
+"It's a villainous plot. Unluckily, one is helpless. That scoundrel
+Cousinho--Andreas, you know--has been coveting the brig for years.
+Naturally, I would never sell. She is not only my livelihood; she's my
+life. So he has hatched this pretty little plot with the chief of the
+customs. The sale, of course, will be a farce. There's no one here to
+bid. He will get the brig for a song--no, not even that--a line of a
+song. You have been some years now in the islands, Heyst. You know us
+all; you have seen how we live. Now you shall have the opportunity
+to see how some of us end; for it is the end, for me. I can't deceive
+myself any longer. You see it--don't you?"
+
+Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping strain
+on his recovered self-possession. Heyst was beginning to say that
+he "could very well see all the bearings of this unfortunate--" when
+Morrison interrupted him jerkily.
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know why I have been telling you all this. I
+suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my
+trouble to myself. Words can't do it justice; but since I've told you so
+much I may as well tell you more. Listen. This morning on board, in my
+cabin I went down on my knees and prayed for help. I went down on my
+knees!"
+
+"You are a believer, Morrison?" asked Heyst with a distinct note of
+respect.
+
+"Surely I am not an infidel."
+
+Morrison was swiftly reproachful in his answer, and there came a pause,
+Morrison perhaps interrogating his conscience, and Heyst preserving a
+mien of unperturbed, polite interest.
+
+"I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying--well,
+women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant.
+I don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his
+silly troubles. It seems such cheek. Anyhow, this morning I--I have
+never done any harm to any God's creature knowingly--I prayed. A sudden
+impulse--I went flop on my knees; so you may judge--"
+
+They were gazing earnestly into each other's eyes. Poor Morrison added,
+as a discouraging afterthought:
+
+"Only this is such a God-forsaken spot."
+
+Heyst inquired with a delicate intonation whether he might know the
+amount for which the brig was seized.
+
+Morrison suppressed an oath, and named curtly a sum which was in itself
+so insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have exclaimed
+at it. And even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity out of his politely
+modulated voice as he asked if it was a fact that Morrison had not that
+amount in hand.
+
+Morrison hadn't. He had only a little English gold, a few sovereigns, on
+board. He had left all his spare cash with the Tesmans, in Samarang, to
+meet certain bills which would fall due while he was away on his cruise.
+Anyhow, that money would not have been any more good to him than if it
+had been in the innermost depths of the infernal regions. He said all
+this brusquely. He looked with sudden disfavour at that noble forehead,
+at those great martial moustaches, at the tired eyes of the man sitting
+opposite him. Who the devil was he? What was he, Morrison, doing there,
+talking like this? Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us
+trading in the Archipelago did. Had the Swede suddenly risen and hit
+him on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than when this
+stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a little bow across the
+table:
+
+"Oh! If that's the case I would be very happy if you'd allow me to be of
+use!"
+
+Morrison didn't understand. This was one of those things that don't
+happen--unheard of things. He had no real inkling of what it meant, till
+Heyst said definitely:
+
+"I can lend you the amount."
+
+"You have the money?" whispered Morrison. "Do you mean here, in your
+pocket?"
+
+"Yes, on me. Glad to be of use."
+
+Morrison, staring open-mouthed, groped over his shoulder for the cord of
+the eyeglass hanging down his back. When he found it, he stuck it in his
+eye hastily. It was as if he expected Heyst's usual white suit of the
+tropics to change into a shining garment, flowing down to his toes,
+and a pair of great dazzling wings to sprout out on the Swede's
+shoulders--and didn't want to miss a single detail of the
+transformation. But if Heyst was an angel from on high, sent in answer
+to prayer, he did not betray his heavenly origin by outward signs.
+So, instead of going on his knees, as he felt inclined to do, Morrison
+stretched out his hand, which Heyst grasped with formal alacrity and a
+polite murmur in which "Trifle--delighted--of service," could just be
+distinguished.
+
+"Miracles do happen," thought the awestruck Morrison. To him, as to
+all of us in the Islands, this wandering Heyst, who didn't toil or spin
+visibly, seemed the very last person to be the agent of Providence in
+an affair concerned with money. The fact of his turning up in Timor or
+anywhere else was no more wonderful than the settling of a sparrow on
+one's window-sill at any given moment. But that he should carry a sum of
+money in his pocket seemed somehow inconceivable.
+
+So inconceivable that as they were trudging together through the sand
+of the roadway to the custom-house--another mud hovel--to pay the
+fine, Morrison broke into a cold sweat, stopped short, and exclaimed in
+faltering accents:
+
+"I say! You aren't joking, Heyst?"
+
+"Joking!" Heyst's blue eyes went hard as he turned them on the
+discomposed Morrison. "In what way, may I ask?" he continued with
+austere politeness.
+
+Morrison was abashed.
+
+"Forgive me, Heyst. You must have been sent by God in answer to my
+prayer. But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with worry;
+and it suddenly struck me: 'What if it's the Devil who has sent him?'"
+
+"I have no connection with the supernatural," said Heyst graciously,
+moving on. "Nobody has sent me. I just happened along."
+
+"I know better," contradicted Morrison. "I may be unworthy, but I have
+been heard. I know it. I feel it. For why should you offer--"
+
+Heyst inclined his head, as from respect for a conviction in which he
+could not share. But he stuck to his point by muttering that in the
+presence of an odious fact like this, it was natural--
+
+Later in the day, the fine paid, and the two of them on board the brig,
+from which the guard had been removed, Morrison who, besides, being a
+gentleman was also an honest fellow began to talk about repayment. He
+knew very well his inability to lay by any sum of money. It was partly
+the fault of circumstances and partly of his temperament; and it would
+have been very difficult to apportion the responsibility between the
+two. Even Morrison himself could not say, while confessing to the fact.
+With a worried air he ascribed it to fatality:
+
+"I don't know how it is that I've never been able to save. It's some
+sort of curse. There's always a bill or two to meet."
+
+He plunged his hand into his pocket for the famous notebook so well
+known in the islands, the fetish of his hopes, and fluttered the pages
+feverishly.
+
+"And yet--look," he went on. "There it is--more than five thousand
+dollars owing. Surely that's something."
+
+He ceased suddenly. Heyst, who had been all the time trying to look
+as unconcerned as he could, made reassuring noises in his throat.
+But Morrison was not only honest. He was honourable, too; and on this
+stressful day, before this amazing emissary of Providence and in the
+revulsion of his feelings, he made his great renunciation. He cast off
+the abiding illusion of his existence.
+
+"No. No. They are not good. I'll never be able to squeeze them. Never.
+I've been saying for years I would, but I give it up. I never really
+believed I could. Don't reckon on that, Heyst. I have robbed you."
+
+Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and remained
+in that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him soothingly with the
+utmost courtesy. The Swede was as much distressed as Morrison; for he
+understood the other's feelings perfectly. No decent feeling was ever
+scorned by Heyst. But he was incapable of outward cordiality of manner,
+and he felt acutely his defect. Consummate politeness is not the right
+tonic for an emotional collapse. They must have had, both of them, a
+fairly painful time of it in the cabin of the brig. In the end Morrison,
+casting desperately for an idea in the blackness of his despondency,
+hit upon the notion of inviting Heyst to travel with him in his brig and
+have a share in his trading ventures up to the amount of his loan.
+
+It is characteristic of Heyst's unattached, floating existence that he
+was in a position to accept this proposal. There is no reason to think
+that he wanted particularly just then to go poking aboard the brig into
+all the holes and corners of the Archipelago where Morrison picked up
+most of his trade. Far from it; but he would have consented to almost
+any arrangement in order to put an end to the harrowing scene in the
+cabin. There was at once a great transformation act: Morrison raising
+his diminished head, and sticking the glass in his eye to look
+affectionately at Heyst, a bottle being uncorked, and so on. It was
+agreed that nothing should be said to anyone of this transaction.
+Morrison, you understand, was not proud of the episode, and he was
+afraid of being unmercifully chaffed.
+
+"An old bird like me! To let myself be trapped by those damned
+Portuguese rascals! I should never hear the last of it. We must keep it
+dark."
+
+From quite other motives, among which his native delicacy was the
+principal, Heyst was even more anxious to bind himself to silence. A
+gentleman would naturally shrink from the part of heavenly messenger
+that Morrison would force upon him. It made Heyst uncomfortable, as it
+was. And perhaps he did not care that it should be known that he had
+some means, whatever they might have been--sufficient, at any rate, to
+enable him to lend money to people. These two had a duet down there,
+like conspirators in a comic opera, of "Sh--ssh, shssh! Secrecy!
+Secrecy!" It must have been funny, because they were very serious about
+it.
+
+And for a time the conspiracy was successful in so far that we all
+concluded that Heyst was boarding with the good-natured--some said:
+sponging on the imbecile--Morrison, in his brig. But you know how it
+is with all such mysteries. There is always a leak somewhere. Morrison
+himself, not a perfect vessel by any means, was bursting with gratitude,
+and under the stress he must have let out something vague--enough to
+give the island gossip a chance. And you know how kindly the world is
+in its comments on what it does not understand. A rumour sprang out that
+Heyst, having obtained some mysterious hold on Morrison, had fastened
+himself on him and was sucking him dry. Those who had traced these
+mutters back to their origin were very careful not to believe them. The
+originator, it seems, was a certain Schomberg, a big, manly, bearded
+creature of the Teutonic persuasion, with an ungovernable tongue which
+surely must have worked on a pivot. Whether he was a Lieutenant of the
+Reserve, as he declared, I don't know. Out there he was by profession a
+hotel-keeper, first in Bangkok, then somewhere else, and ultimately in
+Sourabaya. He dragged after him up and down that section of the tropical
+belt a silent, frightened, little woman with long ringlets, who smiled
+at one stupidly, showing a blue tooth. I don't know why so many of us
+patronized his various establishments. He was a noxious ass, and he
+satisfied his lust for silly gossip at the cost of his customers. It
+was he who, one evening, as Morrison and Heyst went past the hotel--they
+were not his regular patrons--whispered mysteriously to the mixed
+company assembled on the veranda:
+
+"The spider and the fly just gone by, gentlemen." Then, very important
+and confidential, his thick paw at the side of his mouth: "We are among
+ourselves; well, gentlemen, all I can say is, don't you ever get mixed
+up with that Swede. Don't you ever get caught in his web."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+Human nature being what it is, having a silly side to it as well as
+a mean side, there were not a few who pretended to be indignant on no
+better authority than a general propensity to believe every evil report;
+and a good many others who found it simply funny to call Heyst the
+Spider--behind his back, of course. He was as serenely unconscious of
+this as of his several other nicknames. But soon people found other
+things to say of Heyst; not long afterwards he came very much to the
+fore in larger affairs. He blossomed out into something definite. He
+filled the public eye as the manager on the spot of the Tropical Belt
+Coal Company with offices in London and Amsterdam, and other things
+about it that sounded and looked grandiose. The offices in the two
+capitals may have consisted--and probably did--of one room in each;
+but at that distance, out East there, all this had an air. We were more
+puzzled than dazzled, it is true; but even the most sober-minded among
+us began to think that there was something in it. The Tesmans appointed
+agents, a contract for government mail-boats secured, the era of steam
+beginning for the islands--a great stride forward--Heyst's stride!
+
+And all this sprang from the meeting of the cornered Morrison and of the
+wandering Heyst, which may or may not have been the direct outcome of a
+prayer. Morrison was not an imbecile, but he seemed to have got himself
+into a state of remarkable haziness as to his exact position towards
+Heyst. For, if Heyst had been sent with money in his pocket by a direct
+decree of the Almighty in answer to Morrison's prayer then there was no
+reason for special gratitude, since obviously he could not help himself.
+But Morrison believed both, in the efficacy of prayer and in the
+infinite goodness of Heyst. He thanked God with awed sincerity for his
+mercy, and could not thank Heyst enough for the service rendered as
+between man and man. In this (highly creditable) tangle of strong
+feelings Morrison's gratitude insisted on Heyst's partnership in the
+great discovery. Ultimately we heard that Morrison had gone home through
+the Suez Canal in order to push the magnificent coal idea personally
+in London. He parted from his brig and disappeared from our ken; but
+we heard that he had written a letter or letters to Heyst, saying that
+London was cold and gloomy; that he did not like either the men or
+things, that he was "as lonely as a crow in a strange country." In
+truth, he pined after the Capricorn--I don't mean only the tropic; I
+mean the ship too. Finally he went into Dorsetshire to see his people,
+caught a bad cold, and died with extraordinary precipitation in the
+bosom of his appalled family. Whether his exertions in the City of
+London had enfeebled his vitality I don't know; but I believe it was
+this visit which put life into the coal idea. Be it as it may, the
+Tropical Belt Coal Company was born very shortly after Morrison,
+the victim of gratitude and his native climate, had gone to join his
+forefathers in a Dorsetshire churchyard.
+
+Heyst was immensely shocked. He got the news in the Moluccas through the
+Tesmans, and then disappeared for a time. It appears that he stayed with
+a Dutch government doctor in Amboyna, a friend of his who looked after
+him for a bit in his bungalow. He became visible again rather suddenly,
+his eyes sunk in his head, and with a sort of guarded attitude, as if
+afraid someone would reproach him with the death of Morrison.
+
+Naive Heyst! As if anybody would . . . Nobody amongst us had any
+interest in men who went home. They were all right; they did not count
+any more. Going to Europe was nearly as final as going to Heaven. It
+removed a man from the world of hazard and adventure.
+
+As a matter of fact, many of us did not hear of this death till months
+afterwards--from Schomberg, who disliked Heyst gratuitously and made up
+a piece of sinister whispered gossip:
+
+"That's what comes of having anything to do with that fellow. He
+squeezes you dry like a lemon, then chucks you out--sends you home to
+die. Take warning by Morrison!"
+
+Of course, we laughed at the innkeeper's suggestions of black mystery.
+Several of us heard that Heyst was prepared to go to Europe himself,
+to push on his coal enterprise personally; but he never went. It wasn't
+necessary. The company was formed without him, and his nomination of
+manager in the tropics came out to him by post.
+
+From the first he had selected Samburan, or Round Island, for the
+central station. Some copies of the prospectus issued in Europe, having
+found their way out East, were passed from hand to hand. We greatly
+admired the map which accompanied them for the edification of the
+shareholders. On it Samburan was represented as the central spot of the
+Eastern Hemisphere with its name engraved in enormous capitals. Heavy
+lines radiated from it in all directions through the tropics, figuring a
+mysterious and effective star--lines of influence or lines of distance,
+or something of that sort. Company promoters have an imagination of
+their own. There's no more romantic temperament on earth than the
+temperament of a company promoter. Engineers came out, coolies were
+imported, bungalows were put up on Samburan, a gallery driven into the
+hillside, and actually some coal got out.
+
+These manifestations shook the soberest minds. For a time everybody in
+the islands was talking of the Tropical Belt Coal, and even those who
+smiled quietly to themselves were only hiding their uneasiness. Oh, yes;
+it had come, and anybody could see what would be the consequences--the
+end of the individual trader, smothered under a great invasion of
+steamers. We could not afford to buy steamers. Not we. And Heyst was the
+manager.
+
+"You know, Heyst, enchanted Heyst."
+
+"Oh, come! He has been no better than a loafer around here as far back
+as any of us can remember."
+
+"Yes, he said he was looking for facts. Well, he's got hold of one that
+will do for all of us," commented a bitter voice.
+
+"That's what they call development--and be hanged to it!" muttered
+another.
+
+Never was Heyst talked about so much in the tropical belt before.
+
+"Isn't he a Swedish baron or something?"
+
+"He, a baron? Get along with you!"
+
+For my part I haven't the slightest doubt that he was. While he was
+still drifting amongst the islands, enigmatical and disregarded like an
+insignificant ghost, he told me so himself on a certain occasion. It
+was a long time before he materialized in this alarming way into the
+destroyer of our little industry--Heyst the Enemy.
+
+It became the fashion with a good many to speak of Heyst as the Enemy.
+He was very concrete, very visible now. He was rushing all over the
+Archipelago, jumping in and out of local mail-packets as if they had
+been tram-cars, here, there, and everywhere--organizing with all his
+might. This was no mooning about. This was business. And this sudden
+display of purposeful energy shook the incredulity of the most
+sceptical more than any scientific demonstration of the value of these
+coal-outcrops could have done. It was impressive. Schomberg was the
+only one who resisted the infection. Big, manly in a portly style,
+and profusely bearded, with a glass of beer in his thick paw, he would
+approach some table where the topic of the hour was being discussed,
+would listen for a moment, and then come out with his invariable
+declaration:
+
+"All this is very well, gentlemen; but he can't throw any of his
+coal-dust in my eyes. There's nothing in it. Why, there can't be
+anything in it. A fellow like that for manager? Phoo!"
+
+Was it the clairvoyance of imbecile hatred, or mere stupid tenacity of
+opinion, which ends sometimes by scoring against the world in a most
+astonishing manner? Most of us can remember instances of triumphant
+folly; and that ass Schomberg triumphed. The T.B.C. Company went into
+liquidation, as I began by telling you. The Tesmans washed their hands
+of it. The Government cancelled those famous contracts, the talk died
+out, and presently it was remarked here and there that Heyst had faded
+completely away. He had become invisible, as in those early days when
+he used to make a bolt clear out of sight in his attempts to break away
+from the enchantment of "these isles," either in the direction of New
+Guinea or in the direction of Saigon--to cannibals or to cafes. The
+enchanted Heyst! Had he at last broken the spell? Had he died? We were
+too indifferent to wonder overmuch. You see we had on the whole liked
+him well enough. And liking is not sufficient to keep going the interest
+one takes in a human being. With hatred, apparently, it is otherwise.
+Schomberg couldn't forget Heyst. The keen, manly Teutonic creature was a
+good hater. A fool often is.
+
+"Good evening, gentlemen. Have you got everything you want? So! Good!
+You see? What was I always telling you? Aha! There was nothing in it. I
+knew it. But what I would like to know is what became of that--Swede."
+
+He put a stress on the word Swede as if it meant scoundrel. He detested
+Scandinavians generally. Why? Goodness only knows. A fool like that is
+unfathomable. He continued:
+
+"It's five months or more since I have spoken to anybody who has seen
+him."
+
+As I have said, we were not much interested; but Schomberg, of course,
+could not understand that. He was grotesquely dense. Whenever three
+people came together in his hotel, he took good care that Heyst should
+be with them.
+
+"I hope the fellow did not go and drown himself," he would add with a
+comical earnestness that ought to have made us shudder; only our crowd
+was superficial, and did not apprehend the psychology of this pious
+hope.
+
+"Why? Heyst isn't in debt to you for drinks is he?" somebody asked him
+once with shallow scorn.
+
+"Drinks! Oh, dear no!"
+
+The innkeeper was not mercenary. Teutonic temperament seldom is. But he
+put on a sinister expression to tell us that Heyst had not paid perhaps
+three visits altogether to his "establishment." This was Heyst's crime,
+for which Schomberg wished him nothing less than a long and tormented
+existence. Observe the Teutonic sense of proportion and nice forgiving
+temper.
+
+At last, one afternoon, Schomberg was seen approaching a group of his
+customers. He was obviously in high glee. He squared his manly chest
+with great importance.
+
+"Gentlemen, I have news of him. Who? why, that Swede. He is still
+on Samburan. He's never been away from it. The company is gone,
+the engineers are gone, the clerks are gone, the coolies are gone,
+everything's gone; but there he sticks. Captain Davidson, coming by from
+the westward, saw him with his own eyes. Something white on the wharf,
+so he steamed in and went ashore in a small boat. Heyst, right enough.
+Put a book into his pocket, always very polite. Been strolling on
+the wharf and reading. 'I remain in possession here,' he told Captain
+Davidson. What I want to know is what he gets to eat there. A piece of
+dried fish now and then--what? That's coming down pretty low for a man
+who turned up his nose at my table d'hote!"
+
+He winked with immense malice. A bell started ringing, and he led the
+way to the dining-room as if into a temple, very grave, with the air
+of a benefactor of mankind. His ambition was to feed it at a profitable
+price, and his delight was to talk of it behind its back. It was very
+characteristic of him to gloat over the idea of Heyst having nothing
+decent to eat.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+A few of us who were sufficiently interested went to Davidson for
+details. These were not many. He told us that he passed to the north of
+Samburan on purpose to see what was going on. At first, it looked as if
+that side of the island had been altogether abandoned. This was what he
+expected. Presently, above the dense mass of vegetation that Samburan
+presents to view, he saw the head of the flagstaff without a flag. Then,
+while steaming across the slight indentation which for a time was known
+officially as Black Diamond Bay, he made out with his glass the white
+figure on the coaling-wharf. It could be no one but Heyst.
+
+"I thought for certain he wanted to be taken off, so I steamed in. He
+made no signs. However, I lowered a boat. I could not see another living
+being anywhere. Yes. He had a book in his hand. He looked exactly as we
+have always seen him--very neat, white shoes, cork helmet. He explained
+to me that he had always had a taste for solitude. It was the first I
+ever heard of it, I told him. He only smiled. What could I say? He isn't
+the sort of man one can speak familiarly to. There's something in him.
+One doesn't care to.
+
+"'But what's the object? Are you thinking of keeping possession of the
+mine?' I asked him.
+
+"'Something of the sort,' he says. 'I am keeping hold.'
+
+"'But all this is as dead as Julius Caesar,' I cried. 'In fact, you have
+nothing worth holding on to, Heyst.'
+
+"'Oh, I am done with facts,' says he, putting his hand to his helmet
+sharply with one of his short bows."
+
+Thus dismissed, Davidson went on board his ship, swung her out, and as
+he was steaming away he watched from the bridge Heyst walking shoreward
+along the wharf. He marched into the long grass and vanished--all but
+the top of his white cork helmet, which seemed to swim in a green sea.
+Then that too disappeared, as if it had sunk into the living depths of
+the tropical vegetation, which is more jealous of men's conquests than
+the ocean, and which was about to close over the last vestiges of the
+liquidated Tropical Belt Coal Company--A. Heyst, manager in the East.
+
+Davidson, a good, simple fellow in his way, was strangely affected. It
+is to be noted that he knew very little of Heyst. He was one of those
+whom Heyst's finished courtesy of attitude and intonation most strongly
+disconcerted. He himself was a fellow of fine feeling, I think, though
+of course he had no more polish than the rest of us. We were naturally
+a hail-fellow-well-met crowd, with standards of our own--no worse, I
+daresay, than other people's; but polish was not one of them. Davidson's
+fineness was real enough to alter the course of the steamer he
+commanded. Instead of passing to the south of Samburan, he made it his
+practice to take the passage along the north shore, within about a mile
+of the wharf.
+
+"He can see us if he likes to see us," remarked Davidson. Then he had an
+afterthought: "I say! I hope he won't think I am intruding, eh?"
+
+We reassured him on the point of correct behaviour. The sea is open to
+all.
+
+This slight deviation added some ten miles to Davidson's round trip, but
+as that was sixteen hundred miles it did not matter much.
+
+"I have told my owner of it," said the conscientious commander of the
+Sissie.
+
+His owner had a face like an ancient lemon. He was small and
+wizened--which was strange, because generally a Chinaman, as he grows in
+prosperity, puts on inches of girth and stature. To serve a Chinese firm
+is not so bad. Once they become convinced you deal straight by them,
+their confidence becomes unlimited. You can do no wrong. So Davidson's
+old Chinaman squeaked hurriedly:
+
+"All right, all right, all right. You do what you like, captain--"
+
+And there was an end of the matter; not altogether, though. From time to
+time the Chinaman used to ask Davidson about the white man. He was still
+there, eh?
+
+"I never see him," Davidson had to confess to his owner, who would peer
+at him silently through round, horn-rimmed spectacles, several sizes too
+large for his little old face. "I never see him."
+
+To me, on occasions he would say:
+
+"I haven't a doubt he's there. He hides. It's very unpleasant." Davidson
+was a little vexed with Heyst. "Funny thing," he went on. "Of all the
+people I speak to, nobody ever asks after him but that Chinaman of
+mine--and Schomberg," he added after a while.
+
+Yes, Schomberg, of course. He was asking everybody about everything, and
+arranging the information into the most scandalous shape his imagination
+could invent. From time to time he would step up, his blinking,
+cushioned eyes, his thick lips, his very chestnut beard, looking full of
+malice.
+
+"Evening, gentlemen. Have you got all you want? So! Good! Well, I am
+told the jungle has choked the very sheds in Black Diamond Bay. Fact.
+He's a hermit in the wilderness now. But what can this manager get to
+eat there? It beats me."
+
+Sometimes a stranger would inquire with natural curiosity:
+
+"Who? What manager?"
+
+"Oh, a certain Swede,"--with a sinister emphasis, as if he were saying
+"a certain brigand." "Well known here. He's turned hermit from shame.
+That's what the devil does when he's found out."
+
+Hermit. This was the latest of the more or less witty labels applied
+to Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of the tropical
+belt, where the inane clacking of Schomberg's tongue vexed our ears.
+
+But apparently Heyst was not a hermit by temperament. The sight of his
+land was not invincibly odious to him. We must believe this, since
+for some reason or other he did come out from his retreat for a while.
+Perhaps it was only to see whether there were any letters for him at the
+Tesmans. I don't know. No one knows. But this reappearance shows that
+his detachment from the world was not complete. And incompleteness of
+any sort leads to trouble. Axel Heyst ought not to have cared for his
+letters--or whatever it was that brought him out after something more
+than a year and a half in Samburan. But it was of no use. He had not the
+hermit's vocation! That was the trouble, it seems.
+
+Be this as it may, he suddenly reappeared in the world, broad chest,
+bald forehead, long moustaches, polite manner, and all--the complete
+Heyst, even to the kindly sunken eyes on which there still rested the
+shadow of Morrison's death. Naturally, it was Davidson who had given him
+a lift out of his forsaken island. There were no other opportunities,
+unless some native craft were passing by--a very remote and
+unsatisfactory chance to wait for. Yes, he came out with Davidson, to
+whom he volunteered the statement that it was only for a short time--a
+few days, no more. He meant to go back to Samburan.
+
+Davidson expressing his horror and incredulity of such foolishness,
+Heyst explained that when the company came into being he had his few
+belongings sent out from Europe.
+
+To Davidson, as to any of us, the idea of Heyst, the wandering drifting,
+unattached Heyst, having any belongings of the sort that can furnish a
+house was startlingly novel. It was grotesquely fantastic. It was like a
+bird owning real property.
+
+"Belongings? Do you mean chairs and tables?" Davidson asked with
+unconcealed astonishment.
+
+Heyst did mean that. "My poor father died in London. It has been all
+stored there ever since," he explained.
+
+"For all these years?" exclaimed Davidson, thinking how long we all had
+known Heyst flitting from tree to tree in a wilderness.
+
+"Even longer," said Heyst, who had understood very well.
+
+This seemed to imply that he had been wandering before he came under our
+observation. In what regions? And what early age? Mystery. Perhaps he
+was a bird that had never had a nest.
+
+"I left school early," he remarked once to Davidson, on the passage. "It
+was in England. A very good school. I was not a shining success there."
+
+The confessions of Heyst. Not one of us--with the probable exception of
+Morrison, who was dead--had ever heard so much of his history. It
+looks as if the experience of hermit life had the power to loosen one's
+tongue, doesn't it?
+
+During that memorable passage, in the Sissie, which took about two days,
+he volunteered other hints--for you could not call it information--about
+his history. And Davidson was interested. He was interested not because
+the hints were exciting but because of that innate curiosity about our
+fellows which is a trait of human nature. Davidson's existence, too,
+running the Sissie along the Java Sea and back again, was distinctly
+monotonous and, in a sense, lonely. He never had any sort of company on
+board. Native deck-passengers in plenty, of course, but never a white
+man, so the presence of Heyst for two days must have been a godsend.
+Davidson was telling us all about it afterwards. Heyst said that his
+father had written a lot of books. He was a philosopher.
+
+"Seems to me he must have been something of a crank, too," was
+Davidson's comment. "Apparently he had quarrelled with his people in
+Sweden. Just the sort of father you would expect Heyst to have. Isn't
+he a bit of a crank himself? He told me that directly his father died he
+lit out into the wide world on his own, and had been on the move till he
+fetched up against this famous coal business. Fits the son of the father
+somehow, don't you think?"
+
+For the rest, Heyst was as polite as ever. He offered to pay for his
+passage; but when Davidson refused to hear of it he seized him heartily
+by the hand, gave one of his courtly bows, and declared that he was
+touched by his friendly proceedings.
+
+"I am not alluding to this trifling amount which you decline to take,"
+he went on, giving a shake to Davidson's hand. "But I am touched by your
+humanity." Another shake. "Believe me, I am profoundly aware of having
+been an object of it." Final shake of the hand. All this meant that
+Heyst understood in a proper sense the little Sissie's periodic
+appearance in sight of his hermitage.
+
+"He's a genuine gentleman," Davidson said to us. "I was really sorry
+when he went ashore."
+
+We asked him where he had left Heyst.
+
+"Why, in Sourabaya--where else?"
+
+The Tesmans had their principal counting-house in Sourabaya. There had
+long existed a connection between Heyst and the Tesmans. The incongruity
+of a hermit having agents did not strike us, nor yet the absurdity of a
+forgotten cast-off, derelict manager of a wrecked, collapsed, vanished
+enterprise, having business to attend to. We said Sourabaya, of course,
+and took it for granted that he would stay with one of the Tesmans.
+One of us even wondered what sort of reception he would get; for it was
+known that Julius Tesman was unreasonably bitter about the Tropical
+Belt Coal fiasco. But Davidson set us right. It was nothing of the
+kind. Heyst went to stay in Schomberg's hotel, going ashore in the hotel
+launch. Not that Schomberg would think of sending his launch alongside
+a mere trader like the Sissie. But she had been meeting a coasting
+mail-packet, and had been signalled to. Schomberg himself was steering
+her.
+
+"You should have seen Schomberg's eyes bulge out when Heyst jumped in
+with an ancient brown leather bag!" said Davidson. "He pretended not
+to know who it was--at first, anyway. I didn't go ashore with them. We
+didn't stay more than a couple of hours altogether. Landed two thousand
+coconuts and cleared out. I have agreed to pick him up again on my next
+trip in twenty days' time."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+Davidson happened to be two days late on his return trip; no great
+matter, certainly, but he made a point of going ashore at once, during
+the hottest hour of the afternoon, to look for Heyst. Schomberg's hotel
+stood back in an extensive enclosure containing a garden, some large
+trees, and, under their spreading boughs, a detached "hall available
+for concerts and other performances," as Schomberg worded it in his
+advertisements. Torn, and fluttering bills, intimating in heavy red
+capitals CONCERTS EVERY NIGHT, were stuck on the brick pillars on each
+side of the gateway.
+
+The walk had been long and confoundedly sunny. Davidson stood wiping his
+wet neck and face on what Schomberg called "the piazza." Several doors
+opened on to it, but all the screens were down. Not a soul was in sight,
+not even a China boy--nothing but a lot of painted iron chairs and
+tables. Solitude, shade, and gloomy silence--and a faint, treacherous
+breeze which came from under the trees and quite unexpectedly caused the
+melting Davidson to shiver slightly--the little shiver of the tropics
+which in Sourabaya, especially, often means fever and the hospital to
+the incautious white man.
+
+The prudent Davidson sought shelter in the nearest darkened room. In the
+artificial dusk, beyond the levels of shrouded billiard-tables, a white
+form heaved up from two chairs on which it had been extended. The middle
+of the day, table d'hote tiffin once over, was Schomberg's easy time. He
+lounged out, portly, deliberate, on the defensive, the great fair beard
+like a cuirass over his manly chest. He did not like Davidson, never a
+very faithful client of his. He hit a bell on one of the tables as he
+went by, and asked in a distant, Officer-in-Reserve manner:
+
+"You desire?"
+
+The good Davidson, still sponging his wet neck, declared with simplicity
+that he had come to fetch away Heyst, as agreed.
+
+"Not here!"
+
+A Chinaman appeared in response to the bell. Schomberg turned to him
+very severely:
+
+"Take the gentleman's order."
+
+Davidson had to be going. Couldn't wait--only begged that Heyst should
+be informed that the Sissie would leave at midnight.
+
+"Not--here, I am telling you!"
+
+Davidson slapped his thigh in concern.
+
+"Dear me! Hospital, I suppose." A natural enough surmise in a very
+feverish locality.
+
+The Lieutenant of the Reserve only pursed up his mouth and raised his
+eyebrows without looking at him. It might have meant anything, but
+Davidson dismissed the hospital idea with confidence. However, he had to
+get hold of Heyst between this and midnight:
+
+"He has been staying here?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, he was staying here."
+
+"Can you tell me where he is now?" Davidson went on placidly. Within
+himself he was beginning to grow anxious, having developed the affection
+of a self-appointed protector towards Heyst. The answer he got was:
+
+"Can't tell. It's none of my business," accompanied by majestic
+oscillations of the hotel-keeper's head, hinting at some awful mystery.
+
+Davidson was placidity itself. It was his nature. He did not betray his
+sentiments, which were not favourable to Schomberg.
+
+"I am sure to find out at the Tesmans' office," he thought. But it was
+a very hot hour, and if Heyst was down at the port he would have learned
+already that the Sissie was in. It was even possible that Heyst had
+already gone on board, where he could enjoy a coolness denied to the
+town. Davidson, being stout, was much preoccupied with coolness and
+inclined to immobility. He lingered awhile, as if irresolute. Schomberg,
+at the door, looking out, affected perfect indifference. He could not
+keep it up, though. Suddenly he turned inward and asked with brusque
+rage:
+
+"You wanted to see him?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Davidson. "We agreed to meet--"
+
+"Don't you bother. He doesn't care about that now."
+
+"Doesn't he?"
+
+"Well, you can judge for yourself. He isn't here, is he? You take my
+word for it. Don't you bother about him. I am advising you as a friend."
+
+"Thank you," said, Davidson, inwardly startled at the savage tone. "I
+think I will sit down for a moment and have a drink, after all."
+
+This was not what Schomberg had expected to hear. He called brutally:
+
+"Boy!"
+
+The Chinaman approached, and after referring him to the white man by a
+nod the hotel-keeper departed, muttering to himself. Davidson heard him
+gnash his teeth as he went.
+
+Davidson sat alone with the billiard-tables as if there had been not a
+soul staying in the hotel. His placidity was so genuine that he was not
+unduly, fretting himself over the absence of Heyst, or the mysterious
+manners Schomberg had treated him to. He was considering these things in
+his own fairly shrewd way. Something had happened; and he was loath to
+go away to investigate, being restrained by a presentiment that somehow
+enlightenment would come to him there. A poster of CONCERTS EVERY
+EVENING, like those on the gate, but in a good state of preservation,
+hung on the wall fronting him. He looked at it idly and was struck by
+the fact--then not so very common--that it was a ladies' orchestra;
+"Zangiacomo's eastern tour--eighteen performers." The poster stated
+that they had had the honour of playing their select repertoire before
+various colonial excellencies, also before pashas, sheiks, chiefs, H. H.
+the Sultan of Mascate, etc., etc.
+
+Davidson felt sorry for the eighteen lady-performers. He knew what that
+sort of life was like, the sordid conditions and brutal incidents of
+such tours led by such Zangiacomos who often were anything but musicians
+by profession. While he was staring at the poster, a door somewhere at
+his back opened, and a woman came in who was looked upon as Schomberg's
+wife, no doubt with truth. As somebody remarked cynically once, she was
+too unattractive to be anything else. The opinion that he treated her
+abominably was based on her frightened expression. Davidson lifted his
+hat to her. Mrs. Schomberg gave him an inclination of her sallow head
+and incontinently sat down behind a sort of raised counter, facing the
+door, with a mirror and rows of bottles at her back. Her hair was very
+elaborately done with two ringlets on the left side of her scraggy neck;
+her dress was of silk, and she had come on duty for the afternoon. For
+some reason or other Schomberg exacted this from her, though she added
+nothing to the fascinations of the place. She sat there in the smoke and
+noise, like an enthroned idol, smiling stupidly over the billiards from
+time to time, speaking to no one, and no one speaking to her. Schomberg
+himself took no more interest in her than may be implied in a sudden
+and totally unmotived scowl. Otherwise the very Chinamen ignored her
+existence.
+
+She had interrupted Davidson in his reflections. Being alone with her,
+her silence and open-eyed immobility made him uncomfortable. He was
+easily sorry for people. It seemed rude not to take any notice of her.
+He said, in allusion to the poster:
+
+"Are you having these people in the house?"
+
+She was so unused to being addressed by customers that at the sound of
+his voice she jumped in her seat. Davidson was telling us afterwards
+that she jumped exactly like a figure made of wood, without losing her
+rigid immobility. She did not even move her eyes; but she answered him
+freely, though her very lips seemed made of wood.
+
+"They stayed here over a month. They are gone now. They played every
+evening."
+
+"Pretty good, were they?"
+
+To this she said nothing; and as she kept on staring fixedly in front
+of her, her silence disconcerted Davidson. It looked as if she had not
+heard him--which was impossible. Perhaps she drew the line of speech
+at the expression of opinions. Schomberg might have trained her, for
+domestic reasons, to keep them to herself. But Davidson felt in honour
+obliged to converse; so he said, putting his own interpretation on this
+surprising silence:
+
+"I see--not much account. Such bands hardly ever are. An Italian lot,
+Mrs. Schomberg, to judge by the name of the boss?"
+
+She shook her head negatively.
+
+"No. He is a German really; only he dyes his hair and beard black for
+business. Zangiacomo is his business name."
+
+"That's a curious fact," said Davidson. His head being full of Heyst, it
+occurred to him that she might be aware of other facts. This was a very
+amazing discovery to anyone who looked at Mrs. Schomberg. Nobody had
+ever suspected her of having a mind. I mean even a little of it, I mean
+any at all. One was inclined to think of her as an It--an automaton, a
+very plain dummy, with an arrangement for bowing the head at times
+and smiling stupidly now and then. Davidson viewed her profile with a
+flattened nose, a hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye.
+He asked himself: Did that speak just now? Will it speak again? It was
+as exciting, for the mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with a
+mechanism. A smile played about the fat features of Davidson; the smile
+of a man making an amusing experiment. He spoke again to her:
+
+"But the other members of that orchestra were real Italians, were they
+not?"
+
+Of course, he didn't care. He wanted to see whether the mechanism would
+work again. It did. It said they were not. They were of all sorts,
+apparently. It paused, with the one goggle eye immovably gazing down
+the whole length of the room and through the door opening on to the
+"piazza." It paused, then went on in the same low pitch:
+
+"There was even one English girl."
+
+"Poor devil!"--said Davidson, "I suppose these women are not much better
+than slaves really. Was that fellow with the dyed beard decent in his
+way?"
+
+The mechanism remained silent. The sympathetic soul of Davidson drew its
+own conclusions.
+
+"Beastly life for these women!" he said. "When you say an English girl,
+Mrs. Schomberg, do you really mean a young girl? Some of these orchestra
+girls are no chicks."
+
+"Young enough," came the low voice out of Mrs. Schomberg's unmoved
+physiognomy.
+
+Davidson, encouraged, remarked that he was sorry for her. He was easily
+sorry for people.
+
+"Where did they go to from here?" he asked.
+
+"She did not go with them. She ran away."
+
+This was the pronouncement Davidson obtained next. It introduced a new
+sort of interest.
+
+"Well! Well!" he exclaimed placidly; and then, with the air of a man who
+knows life: "Who with?" he inquired with assurance.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg's immobility gave her an appearance of listening
+intently. Perhaps she was really listening; but Schomberg must have been
+finishing his sleep in some distant part of the house. The silence was
+profound, and lasted long enough to become startling. Then, enthroned
+above Davidson, she whispered at last:
+
+"That friend of yours."
+
+"Oh, you know I am here looking for a friend," said Davidson hopefully.
+"Won't you tell me--"
+
+"I've told you"
+
+"Eh?"
+
+A mist seemed to roll away from before Davidson's eyes, disclosing
+something he could not believe.
+
+"You can't mean it!" he cried. "He's not the man for it." But the last
+words came out in a faint voice. Mrs. Schomberg never moved her head the
+least bit. Davidson, after the shock which made him sit up, went slack
+all over.
+
+"Heyst! Such a perfect gentleman!" he exclaimed weakly.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg did not seem to have heard him. This startling fact did
+not tally somehow with the idea Davidson had of Heyst. He never talked
+of women, he never seemed to think of them, or to remember that they
+existed; and then all at once--like this! Running off with a casual
+orchestra girl!
+
+"You might have knocked me down with a feather," Davidson told us some
+time afterwards.
+
+By then he was taking an indulgent view of both the parties to that
+amazing transaction. First of all, on reflection, he was by no means
+certain that it prevented Heyst from being a perfect gentleman, as
+before. He confronted our open grins or quiet smiles with a serious
+round face. Heyst had taken the girl away to Samburan; and that was
+no joking matter. The loneliness, the ruins of the spot, had impressed
+Davidson's simple soul. They were incompatible with the frivolous
+comments of people who had not seen it. That black jetty, sticking out
+of the jungle into the empty sea; these roof-ridges of deserted houses
+peeping dismally above the long grass! Ough! The gigantic and funereal
+blackboard sign of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, still emerging from a
+wild growth of bushes like an inscription stuck above a grave figured by
+the tall heap of unsold coal at the shore end of the wharf, added to the
+general desolation.
+
+Thus was the sensitive Davidson. The girl must have been miserable
+indeed to follow such a strange man to such a spot. Heyst had, no doubt,
+told her the truth. He was a gentleman. But no words could do justice to
+the conditions of life on Samburan. A desert island was nothing to it.
+Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert island--why, you could not
+help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-playing girl out of an ambulant
+ladies' orchestra to remain content there for a day, for one single day,
+was inconceivable. She would be frightened at the first sight of it. She
+would scream.
+
+The capacity for sympathy in these stout, placid men! Davidson was
+stirred to the depths; and it was easy to see that it was about Heyst
+that he was concerned. We asked him if he had passed that way lately.
+
+"Oh, yes. I always do--about half a mile off."
+
+"Seen anybody about?"
+
+"No, not a soul. Not a shadow."
+
+"Did you blow your whistle?"
+
+"Blow the whistle? You think I would do such a thing?"
+
+He rejected the mere possibility of such an unwarrantable intrusion.
+Wonderfully delicate fellow, Davidson!
+
+"Well, but how do you know that they are there?" he was naturally asked.
+
+Heyst had entrusted Mrs. Schomberg with a message for Davidson--a few
+lines in pencil on a scrap of crumpled paper. It was to the effect: that
+an unforeseen necessity was driving him away before the appointed time.
+He begged Davidson's indulgence for the apparent discourtesy. The woman
+of the house--meaning Mrs. Schomberg--would give him the facts, though
+unable to explain them, of course.
+
+"What was there to explain?" wondered Davidson dubiously.
+
+"He took a fancy to that fiddle-playing girl, and--"
+
+"And she to him, apparently," I suggested.
+
+"Wonderfully quick work," reflected Davidson. "What do you think will
+come of it?"
+
+"Repentance, I should say. But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg has been
+selected for a confidante?"
+
+For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that
+woman whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the two
+billiard-tables--without expression, without movement, without voice,
+without sight.
+
+"Why, she helped the girl to bolt," said Davidson turning at me his
+innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which
+this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow which
+sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling. It looked
+as though he would never get over it.
+
+"Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst's note, twisted like a pipe-light, into my
+lap while I sat there unsuspecting," Davidson went on. "Directly I had
+recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth she had to do with it
+that Heyst should leave it with her. And then, behaving like a painted
+image rather than a live woman, she whispered, just loud enough for me
+to hear:
+
+"I helped them. I got her things together, tied them up in my own shawl,
+and threw them into the compound out of a back window. I did it."
+
+"That woman that you would say hadn't the pluck to lift her little
+finger!" marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice. "What
+do you think of that?"
+
+I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve. She was
+too lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion. It was impossible
+to think that Heyst had bribed her. Whatever means he had, he had
+not the means to do that. Or could it be that she was moved by
+that disinterested passion for delivering a woman to a man which in
+respectable spheres is called matchmaking?--a highly irregular example
+of it!
+
+"It must have been a very small bundle," remarked Davidson further.
+
+"I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive," I said.
+
+"I don't know. She was miserable. I don't suppose it was more than
+a little linen and a couple of those white frocks they wear on the
+platform."
+
+Davidson pursued his own train of thought. He supposed that such a thing
+had never been heard of in the history of the tropics. For where could
+you find anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra? No doubt fellows
+here and there took a fancy to some pretty one--but it was not for
+running away with her. Oh dear no! It needed a lunatic like Heyst.
+
+"Only think what it means," wheezed Davidson, imaginative under his
+invincible placidity. "Just only try to think! Brooding alone on
+Samburan has upset his brain. He never stopped to consider, or he
+couldn't have done it. No sane man . . . How is a thing like that to go
+on? What's he going to do with her in the end? It's madness."
+
+"You say that he's mad. Schomberg tells us that he must be starving on
+his island; so he may end yet by eating her," I suggested.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told us.
+Indeed, the wonder was that they had been left alone so long. The
+drowsy afternoon was slipping by. Footsteps and voices resounded on the
+veranda--I beg pardon, the piazza; the scraping of chairs, the ping of
+a smitten bell. Customers were turning up. Mrs. Schomberg was begging
+Davidson hurriedly, but without looking at him, to say nothing to
+anyone, when on a half-uttered word her nervous whisper was cut short.
+Through a small inner door Schomberg came in, his hair brushed, his
+beard combed neatly, but his eyelids still heavy from his nap. He looked
+with suspicion at Davidson, and even glanced at his wife; but he was
+baffled by the natural placidity of the one and the acquired habit of
+immobility in the other.
+
+"Have you sent out the drinks?" he asked surlily.
+
+She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared with
+a loaded tray, on his way out. Schomberg went to the door and greeted
+the customers outside, but did not join them. He remained blocking
+half the doorway, with his back to the room, and was still there when
+Davidson, after sitting still for a while, rose to go. At the noise
+he made Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his hat to Mrs.
+Schomberg and receive her wooden bow accompanied by a stupid grin, and
+then looked away. He was loftily dignified. Davidson stopped at the
+door, deep in his simplicity.
+
+"I am sorry you won't tell me anything about my friend's absence," he
+said. "My friend Heyst, you know. I suppose the only course for me now
+is to make inquiries down at the port. I shall hear something there, I
+don't doubt."
+
+"Make inquiries of the devil!" replied Schomberg in a hoarse mutter.
+
+Davidson's purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been mainly to
+make Mrs. Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain have heard
+something more of Heyst's exploit from another point of view. It was
+a shrewd try. It was successful in a rather startling way, because the
+hotel-keeper's point of view was horribly abusive. All of a sudden, in
+the same hoarse sinister tone, he proceeded to call Heyst many names, of
+which "pig-dog" was not the worst, with such vehemence that he actually
+choked himself. Profiting from the pause, Davidson, whose temperament
+could withstand worse shocks, remonstrated in an undertone:
+
+"It's unreasonable to get so angry as that. Even if he had run off with
+your cash-box--"
+
+The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close to
+Davidson's.
+
+"My cash-box! My--he--look here, Captain Davidson! He ran off with a
+girl. What do I care for the girl? The girl is nothing to me."
+
+He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start. That's what the
+girl was; and he reiterated the assertion that she was nothing to him.
+What he was concerned for was the good name of his house. Wherever he
+had been established, he had always had "artist parties" staying in his
+house. One recommended him to the others; but what would happen now,
+when it got about that leaders ran the risk in his house--his house--of
+losing members of their troupe? And just now, when he had spent seven
+hundred and thirty-four guilders in building a concert-hall in his
+compound. Was that a thing to do in a respectable hotel? The cheek, the
+indecency, the impudence, the atrocity! Vagabond, impostor, swindler,
+ruffian, schwein-hund!
+
+He had seized Davidson by a button of his coat, detaining him in
+the doorway, and exactly in the line of Mrs. Schomberg's stony gaze.
+Davidson stole a glance in that direction and thought of making some
+sort of reassuring sign to her, but she looked so bereft of senses, and
+almost of life, perched up there, that it seemed not worth while.
+He disengaged his button with firm placidity. Thereupon, with a last
+stifled curse, Schomberg vanished somewhere within, to try and compose
+his spirits in solitude. Davidson stepped out on the veranda. The party
+of customers there had become aware of the explosive interlude in the
+doorway. Davidson knew one of these men, and nodded to him in passing;
+but his acquaintance called out:
+
+"Isn't he in a filthy temper? He's been like that ever since."
+
+The speaker laughed aloud, while all the others sat smiling. Davidson
+stopped.
+
+"Yes, rather." His feelings were, he told us, those of bewildered
+resignation; but of course that was no more visible to the others than
+the emotions of a turtle when it withdraws into its shell.
+
+"It seems unreasonable," he murmured thoughtfully.
+
+"Oh, but they had a scrap!" the other said.
+
+"What do you mean? Was there a fight!--a fight with Heyst?" asked
+Davidson, much perturbed, if somewhat incredulous.
+
+"Heyst? No, these two--the bandmaster, the fellow who's taking these
+women about and our Schomberg. Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in the
+morning, and went for our worthy friend. I tell you, they were rolling
+on the floor together on this very veranda, after chasing each other all
+over the house, doors slamming, women screaming, seventeen of them, in
+the dining-room; Chinamen up the trees. Hey, John? You climb tree to see
+the fight, eh?"
+
+The boy, almond-eyed and impassive, emitted a scornful grunt, finished
+wiping the table, and withdrew.
+
+"That's what it was--a real, go-as-you-please scrap. And Zangiacomo
+began it. Oh, here's Schomberg. Say, Schomberg, didn't he fly at you,
+when the girl was missed, because it was you who insisted that the
+artists should go about the audience during the interval?"
+
+Schomberg had reappeared in the doorway. He advanced. His bearing
+was stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded, and he
+controlled his voice with apparent effort.
+
+"Certainly. That was only business. I quoted him special terms and
+all for your sake, gentlemen. I was thinking of my regular customers.
+There's nothing to do in the evenings in this town. I think, gentlemen,
+you were all pleased at the opportunity of hearing a little good music;
+and where's the harm of offering a grenadine, or what not, to a lady
+artist? But that fellow--that Swede--he got round the girl. He got round
+all the people out here. I've been watching him for years. You remember
+how he got round Morrison."
+
+He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off. The
+customers at the table exchanged glances silently. Davidson's attitude
+was that of a spectator. Schomberg's moody pacing of the billiard-room
+could be heard on the veranda.
+
+"And the funniest part is," resumed the man who had been speaking
+before--an English clerk in a Dutch house--"the funniest part is that
+before nine o'clock that same morning those two were driving together
+in a gharry down to the port, to look for Heyst and the girl. I saw them
+rushing around making inquiries. I don't know what they would have
+done to the girl, but they seemed quite ready to fall upon your Heyst,
+Davidson, and kill him on the quay."
+
+He had never, he said, seen anything so queer. Those two investigators
+working feverishly to the same end were glaring at each other with
+surprising ferocity. In hatred and mistrust they entered a steam-launch,
+and went flying from ship to ship all over the harbour, causing no end
+of sensation. The captains of vessels, coming on shore later in the day,
+brought tales of a strange invasion, and wanted to know who were the two
+offensive lunatics in a steam-launch, apparently after a man and a girl,
+and telling a story of which one could make neither head nor tail. Their
+reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the
+point of the mate of an American ship bundling them out over the rail
+with unseemly precipitation.
+
+Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone in
+the night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the eastward.
+This was known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom Heyst hired
+for the purpose at three o'clock in the morning. The Tesman schooner had
+sailed at daylight with the usual land breeze, and was probably still in
+sight in the offing at the time. However, the two pursuers after their
+experience with the American mate, made for the shore. On landing, they
+had another violent row in the German language. But there was no second
+fight; and finally, with looks of fierce animosity, they got together
+into a gharry--obviously with the frugal view of sharing expenses--and
+drove away, leaving an astonished little crowd of Europeans and natives
+on the quay.
+
+After hearing this wondrous tale, Davidson went away from the hotel
+veranda, which was filling with Schomberg's regular customers. Heyst's
+escapade was the general topic of conversation. Never before had that
+unaccountable individual been the cause of so much gossip, he judged.
+No! Not even in the beginnings of the Tropical Belt Coal Company when
+becoming for a moment a public character was he the object of a silly
+criticism and unintelligent envy for every vagabond and adventurer in
+the islands. Davidson concluded that people liked to discuss that sort
+of scandal better than any other.
+
+I asked him if he believed that this was such a great scandal after all.
+
+"Heavens, no!" said that excellent man who, himself, was incapable of
+any impropriety of conduct. "But it isn't a thing I would have done
+myself; I mean even if I had not been married."
+
+There was no implied condemnation in the statement; rather something
+like regret. Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its essence
+the rescue of a distressed human being. Not that we were two romantics,
+tingeing the world to the hue of our temperament, but that both of us
+had been acute enough to discover a long time ago that Heyst was.
+
+"I shouldn't have had the pluck," he continued. "I see a thing all
+round, as it were; but Heyst doesn't, or else he would have been scared.
+You don't take a woman into a desert jungle without being made sorry for
+it sooner or later, in one way or another; and Heyst being a gentleman
+only makes it worse."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened that
+I did not meet Davidson again for some three months. When we did come
+together, almost the first thing he said to me was:
+
+"I've seen him."
+
+Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty,
+that he had not intruded. He was called in. Otherwise he would not have
+dreamed of breaking in upon Heyst's privacy.
+
+"I am certain you wouldn't," I assured him, concealing my amusement at
+his wonderful delicacy. He was the most delicate man that ever took a
+small steamer to and fro among the islands. But his humanity, which was
+not less strong and praiseworthy, had induced him to take his
+steamer past Samburan wharf (at an average distance of a mile) every
+twenty-three days--exactly. Davidson was delicate, humane, and regular.
+
+"Heyst called you in?" I asked, interested.
+
+Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date.
+Davidson was examining the shore through his glasses with his unwearied
+and punctual humanity as he steamed past Samburan.
+
+I saw a man in white. It could only have been Heyst. He had fastened
+some sort of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was waving it at the
+end of the old wharf.
+
+Davidson didn't like to take his steamer alongside--for fear of being
+indiscreet, I suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped his
+engines, and lowered a boat. He went himself in that boat, which was
+manned, of course, by his Malay seamen.
+
+Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his
+signalling-pole; and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down engaged
+busily in unfastening the flag from it.
+
+"Was there anything wrong?" I inquired, Davidson having paused in his
+narrative and my curiosity being naturally aroused. You must remember
+that Heyst as the Archipelago knew him was not--what shall I say--was
+not a signalling sort of man.
+
+"The very words that came out of my mouth," said Davidson, "before I
+laid the boat against the piles. I could not help it!"
+
+Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag
+thing, which struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.
+
+"No, nothing wrong," he cried. His white teeth flashed agreeably below
+the coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.
+
+I don't know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which prevented
+Davidson from clambering upon the wharf. He stood up in the boat,
+and, above him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles, thanking him and
+apologizing for the liberty, exactly in his usual manner. Davidson had
+expected some change in the man, but there was none. Nothing in him
+betrayed the momentous fact that within that jungle there was a girl, a
+performer in a ladies' orchestra, whom he had carried straight off the
+concert platform into the wilderness. He was not ashamed or defiant
+or abashed about it. He might have been a shade confidential when
+addressing Davidson. And his words were enigmatical.
+
+"I took this course of signalling to you," he said to Davidson, "because
+to preserve appearances might be of the utmost importance. Not to me, of
+course. I don't care what people may say, and of course no one can hurt
+me. I suppose I have done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed
+myself to be tempted into action. It seemed innocent enough, but all
+action is bound to be harmful. It is devilish. That is why this world
+is evil upon the whole. But I have done with it! I shall never lift a
+little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation
+of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us
+whether we want it or not; but now I, have done with observation, too."
+
+Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms alongside
+an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush. He had
+never heard anybody speak like this before; certainly not Heyst, whose
+conversation was concise, polite, with a faint ring of playfulness in
+the cultivated tones of his voice.
+
+"He's gone mad," Davidson thought to himself.
+
+But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged
+to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy. It was truly most unusual
+talk. Then he remembered--in his surprise he had lost sight of it--that
+Heyst now had a girl there. This bizarre discourse was probably the
+effect of the girl. Davidson shook off the absurd feeling, and asked,
+wishing to make clear his friendliness, and not knowing what else to
+say:
+
+"You haven't run short of stores or anything like that?"
+
+Heyst smiled and shook his head:
+
+"No, no. Nothing of the kind. We are fairly well off here. Thanks, all
+the same. If I have taken the liberty to detain you, it is not from any
+uneasiness for myself and my--companion. The person I was thinking of
+when I made up my mind to invoke your assistance is Mrs. Schomberg."
+
+"I have talked with her," interjected Davidson.
+
+"Oh! You? Yes, I hoped she would find means to--"
+
+"But she didn't tell me much," interrupted Davidson, who was not averse
+from hearing something--he hardly knew what.
+
+"H'm--Yes. But that note of mine? Yes? She found an opportunity to give
+it to you? That's good, very good. She's more resourceful than one would
+give her credit for."
+
+"Women often are--" remarked Davidson. The strangeness from which he had
+suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried off a girl, wore
+off as the minutes went by. "There's a lot of unexpectedness about
+women," he generalized with a didactic aim which seemed to miss its
+mark; for the next thing Heyst said was:
+
+"This is Mrs. Schomberg's shawl." He touched the stuff hanging over
+his arm. "An Indian thing, I believe," he added, glancing at his arm
+sideways.
+
+"It isn't of particular value," said Davidson truthfully.
+
+"Very likely. The point is that it belongs to Schomberg's wife. That
+Schomberg seems to be an unconscionable ruffian--don't you think so?"
+
+Davidson smiled faintly.
+
+"We out here have got used to him," he said, as if excusing a universal
+and guilty toleration of a manifest nuisance. "I'd hardly call him that.
+I only know him as a hotel-keeper."
+
+"I never knew him even as that--not till this time, when you were so
+obliging as to take me to Sourabaya, I went to stay there from economy.
+The Netherlands House is very expensive, and they expect you to bring
+your own servant with you. It's a nuisance."
+
+"Of course, of course," protested Davidson hastily.
+
+After a short silence Heyst returned to the matter of the shawl. He
+wanted to send it back to Mrs. Schomberg. He said that it might be very
+awkward for her if she were unable, if asked, to produce it. This had
+given him, Heyst, much uneasiness. She was terrified of Schomberg.
+Apparently she had reason to be.
+
+Davidson had remarked that, too. Which did not prevent her, he pointed
+out, from making a fool of him, in a way, for the sake of a stranger.
+
+"Oh! You know!" said Heyst. "Yes, she helped me--us."
+
+"She told me so. I had quite a talk with her," Davidson informed him.
+"Fancy anyone having a talk with Mrs. Schomberg! If I were to tell the
+fellows they wouldn't believe me. How did you get round her, Heyst?
+How did you think of it? Why, she looks too stupid to understand human
+speech and too scared to shoo a chicken away. Oh, the women, the women!
+You don't know what there may be in the quietest of them."
+
+"She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life," said
+Heyst. "It's a very respectable task."
+
+"Is that it? I had some idea it was that," confessed Davidson.
+
+He then imparted to Heyst the story of the violent proceedings following
+on the discovery of his flight. Heyst's polite attention to the tale
+took on a sombre cast; but he manifested no surprise, and offered no
+comment. When Davidson had finished he handed down the shawl into
+the boat, and Davidson promised to do his best to return it to Mrs.
+Schomberg in some secret fashion. Heyst expressed his thanks in a few
+simple words, set off by his manner of finished courtesy. Davidson
+prepared to depart. They were not looking at each other. Suddenly Heyst
+spoke:
+
+"You understand that this was a case of odious persecution, don't you? I
+became aware of it and--"
+
+It was a view which the sympathetic Davidson was capable of
+appreciating.
+
+"I am not surprised to hear it," he said placidly. "Odious enough, I
+dare say. And you, of course--not being a married man--were free to step
+in. Ah, well!"
+
+He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines in
+his hands when Heyst observed abruptly:
+
+"The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I
+think that here we can safely defy the fates."
+
+When relating all this to me, Davidson's only comment was:
+
+"Funny notion of defying the fates--to take a woman in tow!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+Some considerable time afterwards--we did not meet very often--I asked
+Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he had
+tackled his mission in a direct way, and had found it easy enough. At
+the very first call he made in Samarang he rolled the shawl as tightly
+as he could into the smallest possible brown-paper parcel, which he
+carried ashore with him. His business in the town being transacted,
+he got into a gharry with the parcel and drove to the hotel. With his
+precious experience, he timed his arrival accurately for the hour of
+Schomberg's siesta. Finding the place empty as on the former occasion,
+he marched into the billiard-room, took a seat at the back, near the
+sort of dais which Mrs. Schomberg would in due course come to occupy,
+and broke the slumbering silence of the house by thumping a bell
+vigorously. Of course a Chinaman appeared promptly. Davidson ordered a
+drink and sat tight.
+
+"I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if necessary,"
+he said--Davidson's a very abstemious man--"rather than take that parcel
+out of the house again. Couldn't leave it in a corner without letting
+the woman know it was there. It might have turned out worse for her than
+not bringing the thing back at all."
+
+And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing two
+or three iced drinks which he did not want. Presently, as he hoped it
+would happen, Mrs. Schomberg came in, silk dress, long neck, ringlets,
+scared eyes, and silly grin--all complete. Probably that lazy beast had
+sent her out to see who was the thirsty customer waking up the echoes of
+the house at this quiet hour. Bow, nod--and she clambered up to her post
+behind the raised counter, looking so helpless, so inane, as she sat
+there, that if it hadn't been for the parcel, Davidson declared, he
+would have thought he had merely dreamed all that had passed between
+them. He ordered another drink, to get the Chinaman out of the room, and
+then seized the parcel, which was reposing on a chair near him, and
+with no more than a mutter--"this is something of yours"--he rammed it
+swiftly into a recess in the counter, at her feet. There! The rest
+was her affair. And just in time, too. Schomberg turned up, yawning
+affectedly, almost before Davidson had regained his seat. He cast about
+suspicious and irate glances. An invincible placidity of expression
+helped Davidson wonderfully at the moment, and the other, of course,
+could have no grounds for the slightest suspicion of any sort of
+understanding between his wife and this customer.
+
+As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss. Davidson was lost in
+admiration. He believed, now, that the woman had been putting it on
+for years. She never even winked. It was immense! The insight he had
+obtained almost frightened him; he couldn't get over his wonder at
+knowing more of the real Mrs. Schomberg than anybody in the Islands,
+including Schomberg himself. She was a miracle of dissimulation. No
+wonder Heyst got the girl away from under two men's noses, if he had her
+to help with the job!
+
+The greatest wonder, after all, was Heyst getting mixed up with
+petticoats. The fellow's life had been open to us for years and nothing
+could have been more detached from feminine associations. Except that he
+stood drinks to people on suitable occasions, like any other man, this
+observer of facts seemed to have no connection with earthly affairs and
+passions. The very courtesy of his manner, the flavour of playfulness in
+the voice set him apart. He was like a feather floating lightly in
+the workaday atmosphere which was the breath of our nostrils. For this
+reason whenever this looker-on took contact with things he attracted
+attention. First, it was the Morrison partnership of mystery, then
+came the great sensation of the Tropical Belt Coal where indeed varied
+interests were involved: a real business matter. And then came this
+elopement, this incongruous phenomenon of self-assertion, the greatest
+wonder of all, astonishing and amusing.
+
+Davidson admitted to me that, the hubbub was subsiding; and the affair
+would have been already forgotten, perhaps, if that ass Schomberg
+had not kept on gnashing his teeth publicly about it. It was really
+provoking that Davidson should not be able to give one some idea of the
+girl. Was she pretty? He didn't know. He had stayed the whole afternoon
+in Schomberg's hotel, mainly for the purpose of finding out something
+about her. But the story was growing stale. The parties at the tables on
+the veranda had other, fresher, events to talk about and Davidson shrank
+from making direct inquiries. He sat placidly there, content to be
+disregarded and hoping for some chance word to turn up. I shouldn't
+wonder if the good fellow hadn't been dozing. It's difficult to give you
+an adequate idea of Davidson's placidity.
+
+Presently Schomberg, wandering about, joined a party that had taken the
+table next to Davidson's.
+
+"A man like that Swede, gentlemen, is a public danger," he began. "I
+remember him for years. I won't say anything of his spying--well, he
+used to say himself he was looking for out-of-the-way facts and what is
+that if not spying? He was spying into everybody's business. He got hold
+of Captain Morrison, squeezed him dry, like you would an orange, and
+scared him off to Europe to die there. Everybody knows that Captain
+Morrison had a weak chest. Robbed first and murdered afterwards! I don't
+mince words--not I. Next he gets up that swindle of the Belt Coal. You
+know all about it. And now, after lining his pockets with other people's
+money, he kidnaps a white girl belonging to an orchestra which is
+performing in my public room for the benefit of my patrons, and goes
+off to live like a prince on that island, where nobody can get at him. A
+damn silly girl . . . It's disgusting--tfui!"
+
+He spat. He choked with rage--for he saw visions, no doubt. He jumped up
+from his chair, and went away to flee from them--perhaps. He went into
+the room where Mrs. Schomberg sat. Her aspect could not have been very
+soothing to the sort of torment from which he was suffering.
+
+Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst. His proceeding was to
+enter into conversation with one and another, casually, and showing no
+particular knowledge of the affair, in order to discover something about
+the girl. Was she anything out of the way? Was she pretty? She couldn't
+have been markedly so. She had not attracted special notice. She was
+young--on that everybody agreed. The English clerk of Tesmans remembered
+that she had a sallow face. He was respectable and highly proper. He
+was not the sort to associate with such people. Most of these women were
+fairly battered specimens. Schomberg had them housed in what he called
+the Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending and
+washing their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out to dry
+between the trees, like a lot of washerwomen. They looked very much
+like middle-aged washerwomen on the platform, too. But the girl had
+been living in the main building along with the boss, the director, the
+fellow with the black beard, and a hard-bitten, oldish woman who took
+the piano and was understood to be the fellow's wife.
+
+This was not a very satisfactory result. Davidson stayed on, and even
+joined the table d'hote dinner, without gleaning any more information.
+He was resigned.
+
+"I suppose," he wheezed placidly, "I am bound to see her some day."
+
+He meant to take the Samburan channel every trip, as before of course.
+
+"Yes," I said. "No doubt you will. Some day Heyst will be signalling to
+you again; and I wonder what it will be for."
+
+Davidson made no reply. He had his own ideas about that, and his silence
+concealed a good deal of thought. We spoke no more of Heyst's girl.
+Before we separated, he gave me a piece of unrelated observation.
+
+"It's funny," he said, "but I fancy there's some gambling going on
+in the evening at Schomberg's place, on the quiet. I've noticed men
+strolling away in twos and threes towards that hall where the orchestra
+used to play. The windows must be specially well shuttered, because I
+could not spy the smallest gleam of light from that direction; but I
+can't believe that those beggars would go in there only to sit and think
+of their sins in the dark."
+
+"That's strange. It's incredible that Schomberg should risk that sort of
+thing," I said.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+As we know, Heyst had gone to stay in Schomberg's hotel in complete
+ignorance that his person was odious to that worthy. When he arrived,
+Zangiacomo's Ladies' Orchestra had been established there for some time.
+
+The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost
+corner of the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had something
+to do with money. He transacted it quickly, and then found himself with
+nothing to do while he awaited Davidson, who was to take him back to his
+solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst meant to go. He whom we used
+to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was suffering from thorough
+disenchantment. Not with the islands, however. The Archipelago has a
+lasting fascination. It is not easy to shake off the spell of island
+life. Heyst was disenchanted with life as a whole. His scornful
+temperament, beguiled into action, suffered from failure in a subtle way
+unknown to men accustomed to grapple with the realities of common human
+enterprise. It was like the gnawing pain of useless apostasy, a sort of
+shame before his own betrayed nature; and in addition, he also suffered
+from plain, downright remorse. He deemed himself guilty of Morrison's
+death. A rather absurd feeling, since no one could possibly have
+foreseen the horrors of the cold, wet summer lying in wait for poor
+Morrison at home.
+
+It was not in Heyst's character to turn morose; but his mental state was
+not compatible with a sociable mood. He spent his evenings sitting
+apart on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. The lamentations of string
+instruments issued from the building in the hotel compound, the
+approaches to which were decorated with Japanese paper lanterns strung
+up between the trunks of several big trees. Scraps of tunes more or
+less plaintive reached his ears. They pursued him even into his bedroom,
+which opened into an upstairs veranda. The fragmentary and rasping
+character of these sounds made their intrusion inexpressibly tedious in
+the long run. Like most dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear
+the music of the spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had
+a taste for silence which he had been able to gratify for years. The
+islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark
+garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea
+without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of
+smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are
+soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell.
+
+Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early
+days. For him, however, that was broken. He was no longer enchanted,
+though he was still a captive of the islands. He had no intention to
+leave them ever. Where could he have gone to, after all these years?
+Not a single soul belonging to him lived anywhere on earth. Of this
+fact--not such a remote one, after all--he had only lately become aware;
+for it is failure that makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his
+resources. And though he had made up his mind to retire from the world
+in hermit fashion, yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of
+loneliness which had come to him in the hour of renunciation. It hurt
+him. Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that
+lacerate our intelligence and our feelings.
+
+Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye.
+Towards the unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
+lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour. Nudging certain of his customers
+with his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs "that Swede" was
+giving himself.
+
+"I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house. This place
+isn't good enough for him. I wish to goodness he had gone somewhere else
+to show off his superiority. Here I have got up this series of concerts
+for you gentlemen, just to make things a little brighter generally; and
+do you think he'll condescend to step in and listen to a piece or two of
+an evening? Not he. I know him of old. There he sits at the dark end of
+the piazza, all the evening long--planning some new swindle, no doubt.
+For two-pence I would ask him to go and look for quarters somewhere
+else; only one doesn't like to treat a white man like that out in the
+tropics. I don't know how long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet
+a trifle that he'll never work himself up to the point of spending the
+fifty cents of entrance money for the sake of a little good music."
+
+Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost. One evening
+Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped
+snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress
+as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net. He descended among
+the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out parts of
+their great rugged trunks, here and there, in the great mass of darkness
+under the lofty foliage. More lanterns, of the shape of cylindrical
+concertinas, hanging in a row from a slack string, decorated the doorway
+of what Schomberg called grandiloquently "my concert-hall." In his
+desperate mood Heyst ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain, and
+went in.
+
+The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported
+pine boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning. An
+instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing, scraping,
+squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano, operated upon
+by a bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered nostrils, rained hard notes
+like hail through the tempest of fiddles. The small platform was filled
+with white muslin dresses and crimson sashes slanting from shoulders
+provided with bare arms, which sawed away without respite. Zangiacomo
+conducted. He wore a white mess-jacket, a black dress waistcoat, and
+white trousers. His longish, tousled hair and his great beard were
+purple-black. He was horrible. The heat was terrific. There were perhaps
+thirty people having drinks at several little tables. Heyst, quite
+overcome by the volume of noise, dropped into a chair. In the quick time
+of that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the
+movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces,
+the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of
+brutality--something cruel, sensual and repulsive.
+
+"This is awful!" Heyst murmured to himself.
+
+But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not
+flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He
+remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have
+been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and,
+so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition
+of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply
+murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if
+witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it
+seemed marvellous to see the people sitting so quietly on their
+chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs
+of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural
+spectacle of their indifference.
+
+When the piece of music came to an end the relief was so great that he
+felt slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his feet.
+When he raised his eyes, the audience, most perversely, was exhibiting
+signs of animation and interest in their faces, and the women in white
+muslin dresses were coming down in pairs from the platform into the body
+of Schomberg's "concert-hall." They dispersed themselves all over the
+place. The male creature with the hooked nose and purple-black beard
+disappeared somewhere. This was the interval during which, as the astute
+Schomberg had stipulated, the members of the orchestra were encouraged
+to favour the members of the audience with their company--that is, such
+members as seemed inclined to fraternize with the arts in a familiar and
+generous manner; the symbol of familiarity and generosity consisting in
+offers of refreshment.
+
+The procedure struck Heyst as highly incorrect. However, the impropriety
+of Schomberg's ingenious scheme was defeated by the circumstance that
+most of the women were no longer young, and that none of them had ever
+been beautiful. Their more or less worn cheeks were slightly rouged, but
+apart from that fact, which might have been simply a matter of routine,
+they did not seem to take the success of the scheme unduly to heart.
+The impulse to fraternize with the arts being obviously weak in the
+audience, some of the musicians sat down listlessly at unoccupied
+tables, while others went on perambulating the central passage: arm in
+arm, glad enough, no doubt, to stretch their legs while resting their
+arms. Their crimson sashes gave a factitious touch of gaiety to the
+smoky atmosphere of the concert-hall; and Heyst felt a sudden pity for
+these beings, exploited, hopeless, devoid of charm and grace, whose fate
+of cheerless dependence invested their coarse and joyless features with
+a touch of pathos.
+
+Heyst was temperamentally sympathetic. To have them passing and
+repassing close to his little table was painful to him. He was preparing
+to rise and go out when he noticed that two white muslin dresses and
+crimson sashes had not yet left the platform. One of these dresses
+concealed the raw-boned frame of the woman with the bad-tempered curve
+to her nostrils. She was no less a personage than Mrs. Zangiacomo. She
+had left the piano, and, with her back to the hall, was preparing the
+parts for the second half of the concert, with a brusque, impatient
+action of her ugly elbow. This task done, she turned, and, perceiving
+the other white muslin dress motionless on a chair in the second row,
+she strode towards it between the music-stands with an aggressive and
+masterful gait. On the lap of that dress there lay, unclasped and idle,
+a pair of small hands, not very white, attached to well-formed arms.
+The next detail Heyst was led to observe was the arrangement of the
+hair--two thick, brown tresses rolled round an attractively shaped head.
+
+"A girl, by Jove!" he exclaimed mentally.
+
+It was evident that she was a girl. It was evident in the outline of the
+shoulders, in the slender white bust springing up, barred slantwise by
+the crimson sash, from the bell-shaped spread of muslin skirt hiding the
+chair on which she sat averted a little from the body of the hall. Her
+feet, in low white shoes, were crossed prettily.
+
+She had captured Heyst's awakened faculty of observation; he had
+the sensation of a new experience. That was because his faculty of
+observation had never before been captured by any feminine creature in
+that marked and exclusive fashion. He looked at her anxiously, as no man
+ever looks at another man; and he positively forgot where he was. He had
+lost touch with his surroundings. The big woman, advancing, concealed
+the girl from his sight for a moment. She bent over the seated youthful
+figure, in passing it very close, as if to drop a word into its ear.
+Her lips did certainly move. But what sort of word could it have been
+to make the girl jump up so swiftly? Heyst, at his table, was surprised
+into a sympathetic start. He glanced quickly round. Nobody was looking
+towards the platform; and when his eyes swept back there again, the
+girl, with the big woman treading at her heels, was coming down the
+three steps from the platform to the floor of the hall. There she
+paused, stumbled one pace forward, and stood still again, while
+the other--the escort, the dragoon, the coarse big woman of the
+piano--passed her roughly, and, marching truculently down the centre
+aisle between the chairs and tables, went out to rejoin the hook-nosed
+Zangiacomo somewhere outside. During her extraordinary transit, as if
+everything in the hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes met
+the upward glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl.
+She had not moved. Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.
+
+Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips. Then he
+got up. It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made him
+cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the island of
+Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him then, a man in
+trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.
+
+It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it. He was not
+thinking of Morrison then. It may be said that, for the first time
+since the final abandonment of the Samburan coal mine, he had completely
+forgotten the late Morrison. It is true that to a certain extent he
+had forgotten also where he was. Thus, unchecked by any sort of self
+consciousness, Heyst walked up the central passage.
+
+Several of the women, by this time, had found anchorage here and there
+among the occupied tables. They talked to the men, leaning on their
+elbows, and suggesting funnily--if it hadn't been for the crimson
+sashes--in their white dresses an assembly of middle-aged brides
+with free and easy manners and hoarse voices. The murmuring noise
+of conversations carried on with some spirit filled Schomberg's
+concert-room. Nobody remarked Heyst's movements; for indeed he was not
+the only man on his legs there. He had been confronting the girl for
+some time before she became aware of his presence. She was looking down,
+very still, without colour, without glances, without voice, without
+movement. It was only when Heyst addressed her in his courteous tone
+that she raised her eyes.
+
+"Excuse me," he said in English, "but that horrible female has done
+something to you. She has pinched you, hasn't she? I am sure she pinched
+you just now, when she stood by your chair."
+
+The girl received this overture with the wide, motionless stare of
+profound astonishment. Heyst, vexed with himself, suspected that she did
+not understand what he said. One could not tell what nationality these
+women were, except that they were of all sorts. But she was astonished
+almost more by the near presence of the man himself, by his largely
+bald head, by the white brow, the sunburnt cheeks, the long, horizontal
+moustaches of crinkly bronze hair, by the kindly expression of the man's
+blue eyes looking into her own. He saw the stony amazement in hers
+give way to a momentary alarm, which was succeeded by an expression of
+resignation.
+
+"I am sure she pinched your arm most cruelly," he murmured, rather
+disconcerted now at what he had done.
+
+It was a great comfort to hear her say:
+
+"It wouldn't have been the first time. And suppose she did--what are you
+going to do about it?"
+
+"I don't know," he said with a faint, remote playfulness in his tone
+which had not been heard in it lately, and which seemed to catch her
+ear pleasantly. "I am grieved to say that I don't know. But can I do
+anything? What would you wish me to do? Pray command me."
+
+Again, the greatest astonishment became visible in her face; for she now
+perceived how different he was from the other men in the room. He was as
+different from them as she was different from the other members of the
+ladies' orchestra.
+
+"Command you?" she breathed, after a time, in a bewildered tone. "Who
+are you?" she asked a little louder.
+
+"I am staying in this hotel for a few days. I just dropped in casually
+here. This outrage--"
+
+"Don't you try to interfere," she said so earnestly that Heyst asked, in
+his faintly playful tone:
+
+"Is it your wish that I should leave you?"
+
+"I haven't said that," the girl answered. "She pinched me because I
+didn't get down here quick enough--"
+
+"I can't tell you how indignant I am--" said Heyst. "But since you are
+down here now," he went on, with the ease of a man of the world speaking
+to a young lady in a drawing-room, "hadn't we better sit down?"
+
+She obeyed his inviting gesture, and they sat down on the nearest
+chairs. They looked at each other across a little round table with a
+surprised, open gaze, self-consciousness growing on them so slowly that
+it was a long time before they averted their eyes; and very soon they
+met again, temporarily, only to rebound, as it were. At last they
+steadied in contact, but by that time, say some fifteen minutes from the
+moment when they sat down, the "interval" came to an end.
+
+So much for their eyes. As to the conversation, it had been perfectly
+insignificant because naturally they had nothing to say to each other.
+Heyst had been interested by the girl's physiognomy. Its expression was
+neither simple nor yet very clear. It was not distinguished--that could
+not be expected--but the features had more fineness than those of any
+other feminine countenance he had ever had the opportunity to observe so
+closely. There was in it something indefinably audacious and infinitely
+miserable--because the temperament and the existence of that girl were
+reflected in it. But her voice! It seduced Heyst by its amazing quality.
+It was a voice fit to utter the most exquisite things, a voice which
+would have made silly chatter supportable and the roughest talk
+fascinating. Heyst drank in its charm as one listens to the tone of some
+instrument without heeding the tune.
+
+"Do you sing as well as play?" he asked her abruptly.
+
+"Never sang a note in my life," she said, obviously surprised by the
+irrelevant question; for they had not been discoursing of sweet sounds.
+She was clearly unaware of her voice. "I don't remember that I ever had
+much reason to sing since I was little," she added.
+
+That inelegant phrase, by the mere vibrating, warm nobility of the
+sound, found its way into Heyst's heart. His mind, cool, alert, watched
+it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of
+the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our
+unexpressed longings lie.
+
+"You are English, of course?" he said.
+
+"What do you think?" she answered in the most charming accents. Then, as
+if thinking that it was her turn to place a question: "Why do you always
+smile when you speak?"
+
+It was enough to make anyone look grave, but her good faith was so
+evident that Heyst recovered himself at once.
+
+"It's my unfortunate manner--" he said with his delicate, polished
+playfulness. "Is is very objectionable to you?"
+
+She was very serious.
+
+"No. I only noticed it. I haven't come across so many pleasant people as
+all that, in my life."
+
+"It's certain that this woman who plays the piano is infinitely more
+disagreeable than any cannibal I have ever had to do with."
+
+"I believe you!" She shuddered. "How did you come to have anything to do
+with cannibals?"
+
+"It would be too long a tale," said Heyst with a faint smile. Heyst's
+smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his great
+moustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as comfortable as a
+shy bird in its native thicket. "Much too long. How did you get amongst
+this lot here?"
+
+"Bad luck," she answered briefly.
+
+"No doubt, no doubt," Heyst assented with slight nods. Then, still
+indignant at the pinch which he had divined rather than actually seen
+inflicted: "I say, couldn't you defend yourself somehow?"
+
+She had risen already. The ladies of the orchestra were slowly regaining
+their places. Some were already seated, idle stony-eyed, before the
+music-stands. Heyst was standing up, too.
+
+"They are too many for me," she said.
+
+These few words came out of the common experience of mankind; yet by
+virtue of her voice, they thrilled Heyst like a revelation. His feelings
+were in a state of confusion, but his mind was clear.
+
+"That's bad. But it isn't actual ill-usage that this girl is complaining
+of," he thought lucidly after she left him.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+That was how it began. How it was that it ended, as we know it did end,
+is not so easy to state precisely. It is very clear that Heyst was not
+indifferent, I won't say to the girl, but to the girl's fate. He was
+the same man who had plunged after the submerged Morrison whom he
+hardly knew otherwise than by sight and through the usual gossip of the
+islands. But this was another sort of plunge altogether, and likely to
+lead to a very different kind of partnership.
+
+Did he reflect at all? Probably. He was sufficiently reflective. But
+if he did, it was with insufficient knowledge. For there is no evidence
+that he paused at any time between the date of that evening and the
+morning of the flight. Truth to say, Heyst was not one of those men
+who pause much. Those dreamy spectators of the world's agitation are
+terrible once the desire to act gets hold of them. They lower their
+heads and charge a wall with an amazing serenity which nothing but an
+indisciplined imagination can give.
+
+He was not a fool. I suppose he knew--or at least he felt--where this
+was leading him. But his complete inexperience gave him the necessary
+audacity. The girl's voice was charming when she spoke to him of her
+miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of unconscious cynicism
+inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of poverty. And whether
+because he was humane or because her voice included all the modulations
+of pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in its compass, it was not disgust
+that the tale awakened in him, but the sense of an immense sadness.
+
+On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of the
+concert, the girl told Heyst about herself. She was almost a child
+of the streets. Her father was a musician in the orchestras of small
+theatres. Her mother ran away from him while she was little, and the
+landladies of various poor lodging-houses had attended casually to her
+abandoned childhood. It was never positive starvation and absolute rags,
+but it was the hopeless grip of poverty all the time. It was her father
+who taught her to play the violin. It seemed that he used to get drunk
+sometimes, but without pleasure, and only because he was unable to
+forget his fugitive wife. After he had a paralytic stroke, falling
+over with a crash in the well of a music-hall orchestra during the
+performance, she had joined the Zangiacomo company. He was now in a home
+for incurables.
+
+"And I am here," she finished, "with no one to care if I make a hole in
+the water the next chance I get or not."
+
+Heyst told her that he thought she could do a little better than that,
+if it was only a question of getting out of the world. She looked at him
+with special attention, and with a puzzled expression which gave to her
+face an air of innocence.
+
+This was during one of the "intervals" between the two parts of the
+concert. She had come down that time without being incited thereto by a
+pinch from the awful Zangiacomo woman. It is difficult to suppose that
+she was seduced by the uncovered intellectual forehead and the long
+reddish moustaches of her new friend. New is not the right word. She had
+never had a friend before; and the sensation of this friendliness going
+out to her was exciting by its novelty alone. Besides, any man who did
+not resemble Schomberg appeared for that very reason attractive. She was
+afraid of the hotel-keeper, who, in the daytime, taking advantage of the
+fact that she lived in the hotel itself, and not in the Pavilion with
+the other "artists" prowled round her, mute, hungry, portentous behind
+his great beard, or else assailed her in quiet corners and empty
+passages with deep, mysterious murmurs from behind, which, not
+withstanding their clear import, sounded horribly insane somehow.
+
+The contrast of Heyst's quiet, polished manner gave her special delight
+and filled her with admiration. She had never seen anything like that
+before. If she had, perhaps, known kindness in her life, she had never
+met the forms of simple courtesy. She was interested by it as a very
+novel experience, not very intelligible, but distinctly pleasurable.
+
+"I tell you they are too many for me," she repeated, sometimes
+recklessly, but more often shaking her head with ominous dejection.
+
+She had, of course, no money at all. The quantities of "black men" all
+about frightened her. She really had no definite idea where she was on
+the surface of the globe. The orchestra was generally taken from the
+steamer to some hotel, and kept shut up there till it was time to go on
+board another steamer. She could not remember the names she heard.
+
+"How do you call this place again?" she used to ask Heyst.
+
+"Sourabaya," he would say distinctly, and would watch the discouragement
+at the outlandish sound coming into her eyes, which were fastened on his
+face.
+
+He could not defend himself from compassion. He suggested that she might
+go to the consul, but it was his conscience that dictated this advice,
+not his conviction. She had never heard of the animal or of its uses. A
+consul! What was it? Who was he? What could he do? And when she learned
+that perhaps he could be induced to send her home, her head dropped on
+her breast.
+
+"What am I to do when I get there?" she murmured with an intonation so
+just, with an accent so penetrating--the charm of her voice did not fail
+her even in whispering--that Heyst seemed to see the illusion of human
+fellowship on earth vanish before the naked truth of her existence, and
+leave them both face to face in a moral desert as arid as the sands of
+Sahara, without restful shade, without refreshing water.
+
+She leaned slightly over the little table, the same little table at
+which they had sat when they first met each other; and with no other
+memories but of the stones in the streets her childhood had known, in
+the distress of the incoherent, confused, rudimentary impressions of her
+travels inspiring her with a vague terror of the world she said rapidly,
+as one speaks in desperation:
+
+"You do something! You are a gentleman. It wasn't I who spoke to you
+first, was it? I didn't begin, did I? It was you who came along and
+spoke to me when I was standing over there. What did you want to speak
+to me for? I don't care what it is, but you must do something."
+
+Her attitude was fierce and entreating at the same time--clamorous, in
+fact though her voice had hardly risen above a breath. It was clamorous
+enough to be noticed. Heyst, on purpose, laughed aloud. She nearly
+choked with indignation at this brutal heartlessness.
+
+"What did you mean, then, by saying 'command me!'?" she almost hissed.
+
+Something hard in his mirthless stare, and a quiet final "All right,"
+steadied her.
+
+"I am not rich enough to buy you out," he went on, speaking with an
+extraordinary detached grin, "even if it were to be done; but I can
+always steal you."
+
+She looked at him profoundly, as though these words had a hidden and
+very complicated meaning.
+
+"Get away now," he said rapidly, "and try to smile as you go."
+
+She obeyed with unexpected readiness; and as she had a set of very good
+white teeth, the effect of the mechanical, ordered smile was joyous,
+radiant. It astonished Heyst. No wonder, it flashed through his mind,
+women can deceive men so completely. The faculty was inherent in them;
+they seemed to be created with a special aptitude. Here was a smile
+the origin of which was well known to him; and yet it had conveyed a
+sensation of warmth, had given him a sort of ardour to live which was
+very new to his experience.
+
+By this time she was gone from the table, and had joined the other
+"ladies of the orchestra." They trooped towards the platform, driven in
+truculently by the haughty mate of Zangiacomo, who looked as though
+she were restraining herself with difficulty from punching their backs.
+Zangiacomo followed, with his great, pendulous dyed beard and short
+mess-jacket, with an aspect of hang-dog concentration imparted by his
+drooping head and the uneasiness of his eyes, which were set very close
+together. He climbed the steps last of all, turned about, displaying
+his purple beard to the hall, and tapped with his bow. Heyst winced in
+anticipation of the horrible racket. It burst out immediately unabashed
+and awful. At the end of the platform the woman at the piano, presenting
+her cruel profile, her head tilted back, banged the keys without looking
+at the music.
+
+Heyst could not stand the uproar for more than a minute. He went out,
+his brain racked by the rhythm of some more or less Hungarian dance
+music. The forests inhabited by the New Guinea cannibals where he had
+encountered the most exciting of his earlier futile adventures were
+silent. And this adventure, not in its execution, perhaps, but in its
+nature, required even more nerve than anything he had faced before.
+Walking among the paper lanterns suspended to trees he remembered with
+regret the gloom and the dead stillness of the forests at the back of
+Geelvink Bay, perhaps the wildest, the unsafest, the most deadly spot
+on earth from which the sea can be seen. Oppressed by his thoughts,
+he sought the obscurity and peace of his bedroom; but they were not
+complete. The distant sounds of the concert reached his ear, faint
+indeed, but still disturbing. Neither did he feel very safe in there;
+for that sentiment depends not on extraneous circumstances but on our
+inward conviction. He did not attempt to go to sleep; he did not even
+unbutton the top button of his tunic. He sat in a chair and mused.
+Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly
+and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering
+optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions,
+of an ever-expected happiness. But now he was troubled; a light veil
+seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening of a tenderness,
+indistinct and confused as yet, towards an unknown woman.
+
+Gradually silence, a real silence, had established itself round him. The
+concert was over; the audience had gone; the concert-hall was dark; and
+even the Pavilion, where the ladies' orchestra slept after its noisy
+labours, showed not a gleam of light. Heyst suddenly felt restless in
+all his limbs, as this reaction from the long immobility would not be
+denied, he humoured it by passing quietly along the back veranda and out
+into the grounds at the side of the house, into the black shadows under
+the trees, where the extinguished paper lanterns were gently swinging
+their globes like withered fruit.
+
+He paced there to and fro for a long time, a calm, meditative ghost in
+his white drill-suit, revolving in his head thoughts absolutely novel,
+disquieting, and seductive; accustoming his mind to the contemplation
+of his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily it should appear
+praiseworthy and wise. For the use of reason is to justify the obscure
+desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices, and
+follies, and also our fears.
+
+He felt that he had engaged himself by a rash promise to an action big
+with incalculable consequences. And then he asked himself if the girl
+had understood what he meant. Who could tell? He was assailed by all
+sorts of doubts. Raising his head, he perceived something white flitting
+between the trees. It vanished almost at once; but there could be no
+mistake. He was vexed at being detected roaming like this in the middle
+of the night. Who could that be? It never occurred to him that perhaps
+the girl, too, would not be able to sleep. He advanced prudently. Then
+he saw the white, phantom-like apparition again; and the next moment
+all his doubts as to the state of her mind were laid at rest, because he
+felt her clinging to him after the manner of supplicants all the world
+over. Her whispers were so incoherent that he could not understand
+anything; but this did not prevent him from being profoundly moved. He
+had no illusions about her; but his sceptical mind was dominated by the
+fulness of his heart.
+
+"Calm yourself, calm yourself," he murmured in her ear, returning her
+clasp at first mechanically, and afterwards with a growing appreciation
+of her distressed humanity. The heaving of her breast and the trembling
+of all her limbs, in the closeness of his embrace, seemed to enter his
+body, to infect his very heart. While she was growing quieter in his
+arms, he was becoming more agitated, as if there were only a fixed
+quantity of violent emotion on this earth. The very night seemed
+more dumb, more still, and the immobility of the vague, black shapes,
+surrounding him more perfect.
+
+"It will be all right," he tried to reassure her, with a tone of
+conviction, speaking into her ear, and of necessity clasping her more
+closely than before.
+
+Either the words or the action had a very good effect. He heard a light
+sigh of relief. She spoke with a calmed ardour.
+
+"Oh, I knew it would be all right from the first time you spoke to me!
+Yes, indeed, I knew directly you came up to me that evening. I knew it
+would be all right, if you only cared to make it so; but of course I
+could not tell if you meant it. 'Command me,' you said. Funny thing for
+a man like you to say. Did you really mean it? You weren't making fun of
+me?"
+
+He protested that he had been a serious person all his life.
+
+"I believe you," she said ardently. He was touched by this declaration.
+"It's the way you have of speaking as if you were amused with people,"
+she went on. "But I wasn't deceived. I could see you were angry with
+that beast of a woman. And you are clever. You spotted something at
+once. You saw it in my face, eh? It isn't a bad face--say? You'll never
+be sorry. Listen--I'm not twenty yet. It's the truth, and I can't be so
+bad looking, or else--I will tell you straight that I have been worried
+and pestered by fellows like this before. I don't know what comes to
+them--"
+
+She was speaking hurriedly. She choked, and then exclaimed, with an
+accent of despair:
+
+"What is it? What's the matter?"
+
+Heyst had removed his arms from her suddenly, and had recoiled a little.
+"Is it my fault? I didn't even look at them, I tell you straight. Never!
+Have I looked at you? Tell me. It was you that began it."
+
+In truth, Heyst had shrunk from the idea of competition with fellows
+unknown, with Schomberg the hotel-keeper. The vaporous white figure
+before him swayed pitifully in the darkness. He felt ashamed of his
+fastidiousness.
+
+"I am afraid we have been detected," he murmured. "I think I saw
+somebody on the path between the house and the bushes behind you."
+
+He had seen no one. It was a compassionate lie, if there ever was one.
+His compassion was as genuine as his shrinking had been, and in his
+judgement more honourable.
+
+She didn't turn her head. She was obviously relieved.
+
+"Would it be that brute?" she breathed out, meaning Schomberg, of
+course. "He's getting too forward with me now. What can you expect? Only
+this evening, after supper, he--but I slipped away. You don't mind him,
+do you? Why, I could face him myself now that I know you care for me.
+A girl can always put up a fight. You believe me? Only it isn't easy to
+stand up for yourself when you feel there's nothing and nobody at your
+back. There's nothing so lonely in the world as a girl who has got to
+look after herself. When I left poor dad in that home--it was in the
+country, near a village--I came out of the gates with seven shillings
+and threepence in my old purse, and my railway ticket. I tramped a mile,
+and got into a train--"
+
+She broke off, and was silent for a moment.
+
+"Don't you throw me over now," she went on. "If you did, what should
+I do? I should have to live, to be sure, because I'd be afraid to kill
+myself, but you would have done a thousand times worse than killing a
+body. You told me you had been always alone, you had never had a dog
+even. Well, then, I won't be in anybody's way if I live with you--not
+even a dog's. And what else did you mean when you came up and looked at
+me so close?"
+
+"Close? Did I?" he murmured unstirring before her in the profound
+darkness. "So close as that?"
+
+She had an outbreak of anger and despair in subdued tones.
+
+"Have you forgotten, then? What did you expect to find? I know what sort
+of girl I am; but all the same I am not the sort that men turn their
+backs on--and you ought to know it, unless you aren't made like the
+others. Oh, forgive me! You aren't like the others; you are like no one
+in the world I ever spoke to. Don't you care for me? Don't you see--?"
+
+What he saw was that, white and spectral, she was putting out her arms
+to him out of the black shadows like an appealing ghost. He took her
+hands, and was affected, almost surprised, to find them so warm, so
+real, so firm, so living in his grasp. He drew her to him, and she
+dropped her head on his shoulder with a deep-sigh.
+
+"I am dead tired," she whispered plaintively.
+
+He put his arms around her, and only by the convulsive movements of her
+body became aware that she was sobbing without a sound. Sustaining her,
+he lost himself in the profound silence of the night. After a while she
+became still, and cried quietly. Then, suddenly, as if waking up, she
+asked:
+
+"You haven't seen any more of that somebody you thought was spying
+about?"
+
+He started at her quick, sharp whisper, and answered that very likely he
+had been mistaken.
+
+"If it was anybody at all," she reflected aloud, "it wouldn't have been
+anyone but that hotel woman--the landlord's wife."
+
+"Mrs. Schomberg," Heyst said, surprised.
+
+"Yes. Another one that can't sleep o' nights. Why? Don't you see why?
+Because, of course, she sees what's going on. That beast doesn't even
+try to keep it from her. If she had only the least bit of spirit! She
+knows how I feel, too, only she's too frightened even to look him in the
+face, let alone open her mouth. He would tell her to go hang herself."
+
+For some time Heyst said nothing. A public, active contest with the
+hotel-keeper was not to be thought of. The idea was horrible. Whispering
+gently to the girl, he tried to explain to her that as things stood, an
+open withdrawal from the company would be probably opposed. She listened
+to his explanation anxiously, from time to time pressing the hand she
+had sought and got hold of in the dark.
+
+"As I told you, I am not rich enough to buy you out so I shall steal you
+as soon as I can arrange some means of getting away from here. Meantime
+it would be fatal to be seen together at night. We mustn't give
+ourselves away. We had better part at once. I think I was mistaken just
+now; but if, as you say, that poor Mrs. Schomberg can't sleep of nights,
+we must be more careful. She would tell the fellow."
+
+The girl had disengaged herself from his loose hold while he talked, and
+now stood free of him, but still clasping his hand firmly.
+
+"Oh, no," she said with perfect assurance. "I tell you she daren't open
+her mouth to him. And she isn't as silly as she looks. She wouldn't give
+us away. She knows a trick worth two of that. She'll help--that's what
+she'll do, if she dares do anything at all."
+
+"You seem to have a very clear view of the situation," said Heyst, and
+received a warm, lingering kiss for this commendation.
+
+He discovered that to part from her was not such an easy matter as he
+had supposed it would be.
+
+"Upon my word," he said before they separated, "I don't even know your
+name."
+
+"Don't you? They call me Alma. I don't know why. Silly name! Magdalen
+too. It doesn't matter; you can call me by whatever name you choose.
+Yes, you give me a name. Think of one you would like the sound
+of--something quite new. How I should like to forget everything that has
+gone before, as one forgets a dream that's done with, fright and all! I
+would try."
+
+"Would you really?" he asked in a murmur. "But that's not forbidden. I
+understand that women easily forget whatever in their past diminishes
+them in their eyes."
+
+"It's your eyes that I was thinking of, for I'm sure I've never wished
+to forget anything till you came up to me that night and looked me
+through and through. I know I'm not much account; but I know how to
+stand by a man. I stood by father ever since I could understand. He
+wasn't a bad chap. Now that I can't be of any use to him, I would just
+as soon forget all that and make a fresh start. But these aren't things
+that I could talk to you about. What could I ever talk to you about?"
+
+"Don't let it trouble you," Heyst said. "Your voice is enough. I am in
+love with it, whatever it says."
+
+She remained silent for a while, as if rendered breathless by this quiet
+statement.
+
+"Oh! I wanted to ask you--"
+
+He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected the
+question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation she went
+on:
+
+"Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-room
+there--you remember?"
+
+"I thought we were being observed. A smile is the best of masks.
+Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some Dutch
+clerks from the town. No doubt he was watching us--watching you, at
+least. That's why I asked you to smile."
+
+"Ah, that's why. It never came into my head!"
+
+"And you did it very well, too--very readily, as if you had understood
+my intention."
+
+"Readily!" she repeated. "Oh, I was ready enough to smile then. That's
+the truth. It was the first time for years I may say that I felt
+disposed to smile. I've not had many chances to smile in my life, I can
+tell you; especially of late."
+
+"But you do it most charmingly--in a perfectly fascinating way."
+
+He paused. She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of
+extreme delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.
+
+"It astonished me," he added. "It went as straight to my heart as though
+you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling me. I felt as if I had never
+seen a smile before in my life. I thought of it after I left you. It
+made me restless."
+
+"It did all that?" came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and incredulous.
+
+"If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come out
+here tonight," he said, with his playful earnestness of tone. "It was
+your triumph."
+
+He felt her lips touch his lightly, and the next moment she was gone.
+Her white dress gleamed in the distance, and then the opaque darkness of
+the house seemed to swallow it. Heyst waited a little before he went the
+same way, round the corner, up the steps of the veranda, and into his
+room, where he lay down at last--not to sleep, but to go over in his
+mind all that had been said at their meeting.
+
+"It's exactly true about that smile," he thought. There he had spoken
+the truth to her; and about her voice, too. For the rest--what must be
+must be.
+
+A great wave of heat passed over him. He turned on his back, flung his
+arms crosswise on the broad, hard bed, and lay still, open-eyed under
+the mosquito net, till daylight entered his room, brightened swiftly,
+and turned to unfailing sunlight. He got up then, went to a small
+looking-glass hanging on the wall, and stared at himself steadily. It
+was not a new-born vanity which induced this long survey. He felt
+so strange that he could not resist the suspicion of his personal
+appearance having changed during the night. What he saw in the glass,
+however, was the man he knew before. It was almost a disappointment--a
+belittling of his recent experience. And then he smiled at his
+naiveness; for, being over five and thirty years of age, he ought to
+have known that in most cases the body is the unalterable mask of the
+soul, which even death itself changes but little, till it is put out of
+sight where no changes matter any more, either to our friends or to our
+enemies.
+
+Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies. It was the very
+essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by
+hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by a system
+of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller
+amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of
+passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care
+in the world--invulnerable because elusive.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and
+unapproachable, and in return was generally considered a "queer chap."
+He had started off on these travels of his after the death of his
+father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his
+country and angry with all the world, which had instinctively rejected
+his wisdom.
+
+Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst
+had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the
+humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty
+years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the
+most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of
+disillusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness,
+for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst
+had never known, but he kept his father's pale, distinguished face
+in affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue
+dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three
+years, after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with
+the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at
+the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral
+and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.
+
+Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age
+were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young
+man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning
+of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great
+achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the
+pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis had blown away from the
+son.
+
+"I'll drift," Heyst had said to himself deliberately.
+
+He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally. He meant
+to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf
+drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable trees of a forest
+glade; to drift without ever catching on to anything.
+
+"This shall be my defence against life," he had said to himself with a
+sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his father there was no
+other worthy alternative.
+
+He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others
+do through drink, from vice, from some weakness of character--with
+deliberation, as others do in despair. This, stripped of its facts, had
+been Heyst's life up to that disturbing night. Next day, when he saw the
+girl called Alma, she managed to give him a glance of frank tenderness,
+quick as lightning and leaving a profound impression, a secret touch on
+the heart. It was in the grounds of the hotel, about tiffin time, while
+the Ladies of the orchestra were strolling back to their pavilion after
+rehearsal, or practice, or whatever they called their morning musical
+exercises in the hall. Heyst, returning from the town, where he had
+discovered that there would be difficulties in the way of getting away
+at once, was crossing the compound, disappointed and worried. He had
+walked almost unwittingly into the straggling group of Zangiacomo's
+performers. It was a shock to him, on coming out of his brown study, to
+find the girl so near to him, as if one waking suddenly should see the
+figure of his dream turned into flesh and blood. She did not raise her
+shapely head, but her glance was no dream thing. It was real, the most
+real impression of his detached existence--so far.
+
+Heyst had not acknowledged it in any way, though it seemed to him
+impossible that its effect on him should not be visible to anyone who
+happened to be looking on. And there were several men on the
+veranda, steady customers of Schomberg's table d'hote, gazing in his
+direction--at the ladies of the orchestra, in fact. Heyst's dread arose,
+not out of shame or timidity, but from his fastidiousness. On getting
+amongst them, however, he noticed no signs of interest or astonishment
+in their faces, any more than if they had been blind men. Even Schomberg
+himself, who had to make way for him at the top of the stairs, was
+completely unperturbed, and continued the conversation he was carrying
+on with a client.
+
+Schomberg, indeed, had observed "that Swede" talking with the girl in
+the intervals. A crony of his had nudged him; and he had thought that it
+was so much the better; the silly fellow would keep everybody else off.
+He was rather pleased than otherwise and watched them out of the corner
+of his eye with a malicious enjoyment of the situation--a sort of
+Satanic glee. For he had little doubt of his personal fascination, and
+still less of his power to get hold of the girl, who seemed too ignorant
+to know how to help herself, and who was worse than friendless, since
+she had for some reason incurred the animosity of Mrs. Zangiacomo, a
+woman with no conscience. The aversion she showed him as far as she
+dared (for it is not always safe for the helpless to display the
+delicacy of their sentiments), Schomberg pardoned on the score of
+feminine conventional silliness. He had told Alma, as an argument, that
+she was a clever enough girl to see that she could do no better than to
+put her trust in a man of substance, in the prime of life, who knew
+his way about. But for the excited trembling of his voice, and the
+extraordinary way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of his
+crimson, hirsute countenance, such speeches had every character of calm,
+unselfish advice--which, after the manner of lovers, passed easily into
+sanguine plans for the future.
+
+"We'll soon get rid of the old woman," he whispered to her hurriedly,
+with panting ferocity. "Hang her! I've never cared for her. The climate
+don't suit her; I shall tell her to go to her people in Europe. She will
+have to go, too! I will see to it. Eins, zwei, march! And then we shall
+sell this hotel and start another somewhere else."
+
+He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it
+was true. Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in
+defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister
+valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. Her shrinking form, her
+downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at the end of an
+empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to the overpowering
+force of his will, the recognition of his personal fascinations. For
+every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and
+the human race come to an end.
+
+It's easy to imagine Schomberg's humiliation, his shocked fury, when
+he discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks, his
+prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched from under
+his nose by "that Swede," apparently without any trouble worth speaking
+of. He refused to believe the fact. He would have it, at first, that
+the Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable reason, had played him a scurvy
+trick, but when no further doubt was possible, he changed his view of
+Heyst. The despised Swede became for Schomberg the deepest, the most
+dangerous, the most hateful of scoundrels. He could not believe that the
+creature he had coveted with so much force and with so little effect,
+was in reality tender, docile to her impulse, and had almost offered
+herself to Heyst without a sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and
+from a profound need of placing her trust where her woman's instinct
+guided her ignorance. Nothing would serve Schomberg but that she must
+have been circumvented by some occult exercise of force or craft, by the
+laying of some subtle trap. His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly at
+the means "that Swede" had employed to seduce her away from a man
+like him--Schomberg--as though those means were bound to have been
+extraordinary, unheard of, inconceivable. He slapped his forehead openly
+before his customers; he would sit brooding in silence or else would
+burst out unexpectedly declaiming against Heyst without measure,
+discretion, or prudence, with swollen features and an affectation of
+outraged virtue which could not have deceived the most childlike of
+moralists for a moment--and greatly amused his audience.
+
+It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of Heyst,
+while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel. It was, in a
+manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo concerts had ever
+been--intervals and all. There was never any difficulty in starting the
+performer off. Anybody could do it, by almost any distant allusion.
+As likely as not he would start his endless denunciations in the very
+billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg sat enthroned as usual, swallowing
+her sobs, concealing her tortures of abject humiliation and terror under
+her stupid, set, everlasting grin, which, having been provided for her
+by nature, was an excellent mask, in as much as nothing--not even death
+itself, perhaps--could tear it away.
+
+But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its
+physiognomy. So, after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward calm,
+as if his indignation had dried up within him. And it was time. He was
+becoming a bore with his inability to talk of anything else but Heyst's
+unfitness to be at large, Heyst's wickedness, his wiles, his astuteness,
+and his criminality. Schomberg no longer pretended to despise him. He
+could not have done it. After what had happened he could not pretend,
+even to himself. But his bottled-up indignation was fermenting
+venomously. At the time of his immoderate loquacity one of his
+customers, an elderly man, had remarked one evening:
+
+"If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy."
+
+And this belief was less than half wrong. Schomberg had Heyst on the
+brain. Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which had
+never been so unpromising since he came out East directly after the
+Franco-Prussian War, he referred to some subtly noxious influence of
+Heyst. It seemed to him that he could never be himself again till he had
+got even with that artful Swede. He was ready to swear that Heyst had
+ruined his life. The girl so unfairly, craftily, basely decoyed away
+would have inspired him to success in a new start. Obviously Mrs.
+Schomberg, whom he terrified by savagely silent moods combined with
+underhand, poisoned glances, could give him no inspiration. He had grown
+generally neglectful, but with a partiality for reckless expedients, as
+if he did not care when and how his career as a hotel-keeper was to be
+brought to an end. This demoralized state accounted for what Davidson
+had observed on his last visit to the Schomberg establishment, some two
+months after Heyst's secret departure with the girl to the solitude of
+Samburan.
+
+The Schomberg of a few years ago--the Schomberg of the Bangkok days,
+for instance, when he started the first of his famed table d'hote
+dinners--would never have risked anything of the sort. His genius ran to
+catering, "white man for white men" and to the inventing, elaborating,
+and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction and impudent
+delight. But now his mind was perverted by the pangs of wounded vanity
+and of thwarted passion. In this state of moral weakness Schomberg
+allowed himself to be corrupted.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+The business was done by a guest who arrived one fine morning by
+mail-boat--immediately from Celebes, having boarded her in Macassar,
+but generally, Schomberg understood, from up China Sea way; a wanderer
+clearly, even as Heyst was, but not alone and of quite another kind.
+
+Schomberg, looking up from the stern-sheets of his steam-launch, which
+he used for boarding passenger ships on arrival, discovered a dark
+sunken stare plunging down on him over the rail of the first-class part
+of the deck. He was no great judge of physiognomy. Human beings, for
+him, were either the objects of scandalous gossip or else recipients of
+narrow strips of paper, with proper bill-heads stating the name of his
+hotel--"W. Schomberg, proprietor, accounts settled weekly."
+
+So in the clean-shaven, extremely thin face hanging over the mail-boat's
+rail Schomberg saw only the face of a possible "account." The
+steam-launches of other hotels were also alongside, but he obtained the
+preference.
+
+"You are Mr. Schomberg, aren't you?" the face asked quite unexpectedly.
+
+"I am at your service," he answered from below; for business is
+business, and its forms and formulas must be observed, even if one's
+manly bosom is tortured by that dull rage which succeeds the fury of
+baffled passion, like the glow of embers after a fierce blaze.
+
+Presently the possessor of the handsome but emaciated face was seated
+beside Schomberg in the stern-sheets of the launch. His body was long
+and loose-jointed, his slender fingers, intertwined, clasped the leg
+resting on the knee, as he lolled back in a careless yet tense attitude.
+On the other side of Schomberg sat another passenger, who was introduced
+by the clean-shaven man as--
+
+"My secretary. He must have the room next to mine."
+
+"We can manage that easily for you."
+
+Schomberg steered with dignity, staring straight ahead, but very much
+interested by these two promising "accounts." Their belongings, a couple
+of large leather trunks browned by age and a few smaller packages,
+were piled up in the bows. A third individual--a nondescript, hairy
+creature--had modestly made his way forward and had perched himself on
+the luggage. The lower part of his physiognomy was over-developed;
+his narrow and low forehead, unintelligently furrowed by horizontal
+wrinkles, surmounted wildly hirsute cheeks and a flat nose with wide,
+baboon-like nostrils. There was something equivocal in the appearance of
+his shaggy, hair-smothered humanity. He, too, seemed to be a follower of
+the clean-shaven man, and apparently had travelled on deck with native
+passengers, sleeping under the awnings. His broad, squat frame denoted
+great strength. Grasping the gunwales of the launch, he displayed a
+pair of remarkably long arms, terminating in thick, brown hairy paws of
+simian aspect.
+
+"What shall we do with the fellow of mine?" the chief of the party asked
+Schomberg. "There must be a boarding-house somewhere near the port--some
+grog-shop where they could let him have a mat to sleep on?"
+
+Schomberg said there was a place kept by a Portuguese half-caste.
+
+"A servant of yours?" he asked.
+
+"Well, he hangs on to me. He is an alligator-hunter. I picked him up in
+Colombia, you know. Ever been in Colombia?"
+
+"No," said Schomberg, very much surprised. "An alligator-hunter? Funny
+trade! Are you coming from Colombia, then?"
+
+"Yes, but I have been coming for a long time. I come from a good many
+places. I am travelling west, you see."
+
+"For sport, perhaps?" suggested Schomberg.
+
+"Yes. Sort of sport. What do you say to chasing the sun?"
+
+"I see--a gentleman at large," said Schomberg, watching a sailing canoe
+about to cross his bow, and ready to clear it by a touch of the helm.
+
+The other passenger made himself heard suddenly.
+
+"Hang these native craft! They always get in the way."
+
+He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a harsh
+voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a thin,
+dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of a rigid
+nose. Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing secretarial
+about him. Both he and his long, lank principal wore the usual white
+suit of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white shoes--all correct.
+The hairy nondescript creature perched on their luggage in the bow had a
+check shirt and blue dungaree trousers. He gazed in their direction from
+forward in an expectant, trained-animal manner.
+
+"You spoke to me first," said Schomberg in his manly tones. "You were
+acquainted with my name. Where did you hear of me, gentlemen, may I
+ask?"
+
+"In Manila," answered the gentleman at large, readily. "From a man with
+whom I had a game of cards one evening in the Hotel Castille."
+
+"What man? I've no friends in Manila that I know of," wondered Schomberg
+with a severe frown.
+
+"I can't tell you his name. I've clean forgotten it; but don't you
+worry. He was anything but a friend of yours. He called you all the
+names he could think of. He said you set a lot of scandal going about
+him once, somewhere--in Bangkok, I think. Yes, that's it. You were
+running a table d'hote in Bangkok at one time, weren't you?"
+
+Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only throw
+out his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve
+manner. A table d'hote? Yes, certainly. He always--for the sake of white
+men. And here in this place, too? Yes, in this place, too.
+
+"That's all right, then." The stranger turned his black, cavernous,
+mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg, who sat gripping
+the brass tiller in a sweating palm. "Many people in the evening at your
+place?"
+
+Schomberg had recovered somewhat.
+
+"Twenty covers or so, take one day with another," he answered feelingly,
+as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive. "Ought to be more,
+if only people would see that it's for their own good. Precious little
+profit I get out of it. You are partial to tables d'hote, gentlemen?"
+
+The new guest made answer that he liked a hotel where one could find
+some local people in the evening. It was infernally dull otherwise. The
+secretary, in sign of approval, emitted a grunt of astonishing ferocity,
+as if proposing to himself to eat the local people. All this sounded
+like a longish stay, thought Schomberg, satisfied under his grave air;
+till, remembering the girl snatched away from him by the last guest who
+had made a prolonged stay in his hotel, he ground his teeth so audibly
+that the other two looked at him in wonder. The momentary convulsion
+of his florid physiognomy seemed to strike them dumb. They exchanged a
+quick glance. Presently the clean-shaven man fired out another question
+in his curt, unceremonious manner:
+
+"You have no women in your hotel, eh?"
+
+"Women!" Schomberg exclaimed indignantly, but also as if a little
+frightened. "What on earth do you mean by women? What women? There's
+Mrs. Schomberg, of course," he added, suddenly appeased, with lofty
+indifference.
+
+"If she knows how to keep her place, then it will do. I can't stand
+women near me. They give me the horrors," declared the other. "They are
+a perfect curse!"
+
+During this outburst the secretary wore a savage grin. The chief guest
+closed his sunken eyes, as if exhausted, and leaned the back of his head
+against the stanchion of the awning. In this pose, his long, feminine
+eyelashes were very noticeable, and his regular features, sharp line of
+the jaw, and well-cut chin were brought into prominence, giving him a
+used-up, weary, depraved distinction. He did not open his eyes till
+the steam-launch touched the quay. Then he and the other man got ashore
+quickly, entered a carriage, and drove away to the hotel, leaving
+Schomberg to look after their luggage and take care of their strange
+companion. The latter, looking more like a performing bear abandoned by
+his show men than a human being, followed all Schomberg's movements step
+by step, close behind his back, muttering to himself in a language
+that sounded like some sort of uncouth Spanish. The hotel-keeper felt
+uncomfortable till at last he got rid of him at an obscure den where
+a very clean, portly Portuguese half-caste, standing serenely in the
+doorway, seemed to understand exactly how to deal with clients of every
+kind. He took from the creature the strapped bundle it had been hugging
+closely through all its peregrinations in that strange town, and cut
+short Schomberg's attempts at explanation by a most confident--
+
+"I comprehend very well, sir."
+
+"It's more than I do," thought Schomberg, going away thankful at being
+relieved of the alligator-hunter's company. He wondered what these
+fellows were, without being able to form a guess of sufficient
+probability. Their names he learned that very day by direct inquiry "to
+enter in my books," he explained in his formal military manner, chest
+thrown out, beard very much in evidence.
+
+The shaven man, sprawling in a long chair, with his air of withered
+youth, raised his eyes languidly.
+
+"My name? Oh, plain Mr. Jones--put that down--a gentleman at large. And
+this is Ricardo." The pock-marked man, lying prostrate in another long
+chair, made a grimace, as if something had tickled the end of his nose,
+but did not come out of his supineness. "Martin Ricardo, secretary. You
+don't want any more of our history, do you? Eh, what? Occupation? Put
+down, well--tourists. We've been called harder names before now; it
+won't hurt our feelings. And that fellow of mine--where did you tuck him
+away? Oh, he will be all right. When he wants anything he'll take it.
+He's Peter. Citizen of Colombia. Peter, Pedro--I don't know that he ever
+had any other name. Pedro, alligator hunter. Oh, yes--I'll pay his board
+with the half-caste. Can't help myself. He's so confoundedly devoted to
+me that if I were to give him the sack he would fly at my throat. Shall
+I tell you how I killed his brother in the wilds of Colombia? Well,
+perhaps some other time--it's a rather long story. What I shall always
+regret is that I didn't kill him, too. I could have done it without any
+extra trouble then; now it's too late. Great nuisance; but he's useful
+sometimes. I hope you are not going to put all this in your book?"
+
+The offhand, hard manner and the contemptuous tone of "plain Mr. Jones"
+disconcerted Schomberg utterly. He had never been spoken to like this
+in his life. He shook his head in silence and withdrew, not exactly
+scared--though he was in reality of a timid disposition under his manly
+exterior--but distinctly mystified and impressed.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which
+filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned
+towards his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:
+
+"I must get rid of these two. It won't do!"
+
+Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first; but she
+had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself. Sitting
+in her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was careful not
+to make a sound, knowing from experience that her very assent would be
+resented. With her eyes she followed the figure of Schomberg, clad in
+his sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about the room.
+
+He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in
+her night attire, looked the most unattractive object in
+existence--miserable, insignificant, faded, crushed, old. And the
+contrast with the feminine form he had ever in his mind's eye made his
+wife's appearance painful to his aesthetic sense.
+
+Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of screwing
+his courage up to the sticking point.
+
+"Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into his
+bedroom, and tell him to be off--him and that secretary of his--early in
+the morning. I don't mind a round game of cards, but to make a decoy of
+my table d'hote--my blood boils! He came here because some lying rascal
+in Manila told him I kept a table d'hote."
+
+He said these things, not for Mrs. Schomberg's information, but simply
+thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point where it would
+give him courage enough to face "plain Mr. Jones."
+
+"Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper," he went on. "I have a good
+mind to--"
+
+He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so unlike
+the picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though his eyes
+strayed about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features awakened in
+the miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing for years a fear
+for his precious carcass, since the poor creature had nothing else but
+that to hold on to in the world. She knew him well; but she did not know
+him altogether. The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man
+whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage. And,
+timid in her corner, she ventured to say pressingly:
+
+"Be careful, Wilhelm! Remember the knives and revolvers in their
+trunks."
+
+In guise of thanks for that anxious reminder, he swore horribly in
+the direction of her shrinking person. In her scanty nightdress, and
+barefooted, she recalled a mediaeval penitent being reproved for her
+sins in blasphemous terms. Those lethal weapons were always present to
+Schomberg's mind. Personally, he had never seen them. His part, ten
+days after his guests' arrival, had been to lounge in manly, careless
+attitudes on the veranda--keeping watch--while Mrs. Schomberg, provided
+with a bunch of assorted keys, her discoloured teeth chattering and her
+globular eyes absolutely idiotic with fright, was "going through" the
+luggage of these strange clients. Her terrible Wilhelm had insisted on
+it.
+
+"I'll be on the look-out, I tell you," he said. "I shall give you a
+whistle when I see them coming back. You couldn't whistle. And if he
+were to catch you at it, and chuck you out by the scruff of the neck, it
+wouldn't hurt you much; but he won't touch a woman. Not he! He has told
+me so. Affected beast. I must find out something about their little
+game, and so there's an end of it. Go in! Go now! Quick march!"
+
+It had been an awful job; but she did go in, because she was much more
+afraid of Schomberg than of any possible consequences of the act. Her
+greatest concern was lest no key of the bunch he had provided her with
+should fit the locks. It would have been such a disappointment for
+Wilhelm. However, the trunks, she found, had been left open; but her
+investigation did not last long. She was frightened of firearms, and
+generally of all weapons, not from personal cowardice, but as some women
+are, almost superstitiously, from an abstract horror of violence and
+murder. She was out again on the veranda long before Wilhelm had any
+occasion for a warning whistle. The instinctive, motiveless fear being
+the most difficult to overcome, nothing could induce her to return to
+her investigations, neither threatening growls nor ferocious hisses, nor
+yet a poke or two in the ribs.
+
+"Stupid female!" muttered the hotel-keeper, perturbed by the notion
+of that armoury in one of his bedrooms. This was from no abstract
+sentiment, with him it was constitutional. "Get out of my sight," he
+snarled. "Go and dress yourself for the table d'hote."
+
+Left to himself, Schomberg had meditated. What the devil did this mean?
+His thinking processes were sluggish and spasmodic; but suddenly the
+truth came to him.
+
+"By heavens, they are desperadoes!" he thought.
+
+Just then he beheld "plain Mr. Jones" and his secretary with the
+ambiguous name of Ricardo entering the grounds of the hotel. They had
+been down to the port on some business, and now were returning; Mr.
+Jones lank, spare, opening his long legs with angular regularity like
+a pair of compasses, the other stepping out briskly by his side.
+Conviction entered Schomberg's heart. They were two desperadoes--no
+doubt about it. But as the funk which he experienced was merely
+a general sensation, he managed to put on his most severe
+Officer-of-the-Reserve manner, long before they had closed with him.
+
+"Good morning, gentlemen."
+
+Being answered with derisive civility, he became confirmed in his sudden
+conviction of their desperate character. The way Mr. Jones turned his
+hollow eyes on one, like an incurious spectre, and the way the other,
+when addressed, suddenly retracted his lips and exhibited his teeth
+without looking round--here was evidence enough to settle that point.
+Desperadoes! They passed through the billiard-room, inscrutably
+mysterious, to the back of the house, to join their violated trunks.
+
+"Tiffin bell will ring in five minutes, gentlemen." Schomberg called
+after them, exaggerating the deep manliness of his tone.
+
+He had managed to upset himself very much. He expected to see them come
+back infuriated and begin to bully him with an odious lack of restraint.
+Desperadoes! However they didn't; they had not noticed anything unusual
+about their trunks and Schomberg recovered his composure and said
+to himself that he must get rid of this deadly incubus as soon as
+practicable. They couldn't possibly want to stay very long; this was not
+the town--the colony--for desperate characters. He shrank from action.
+He dreaded any kind of disturbance--"fracas" he called it--in his hotel.
+Such things were not good for business. Of course, sometimes one had to
+have a "fracas;" but it had been a comparatively trifling task to seize
+the frail Zangiacomo--whose bones were no larger than a chicken's--round
+the ribs, lift him up bodily, dash him to the ground, and fall on
+him. It had been easy. The wretched, hook-nosed creature lay without
+movement, buried under its purple beard.
+
+Suddenly, remembering the occasion of that "fracas," Schomberg groaned
+with the pain as of a hot coal under his breastbone, and gave himself up
+to desolation. Ah, if he only had that girl with him he would have been
+masterful and resolute and fearless--fight twenty desperadoes--care
+for nobody on earth! Whereas the possession of Mrs. Schomberg was no
+incitement to a display of manly virtues. Instead of caring for no one,
+he felt that he cared for nothing. Life was a hollow sham; he wasn't
+going to risk a shot through his lungs or his liver in order to preserve
+its integrity. It had no savour--damn it!
+
+In his state of moral decomposition, Schomberg, master as he was of the
+art of hotel-keeping, and careful of giving no occasion for criticism
+to the powers regulating that branch of human activity, let things take
+their course; though he saw very well where that course was tending.
+It began first with a game or two after dinner--for the drinks,
+apparently--with some lingering customer, at one of the little tables
+ranged against the walls of the billiard-room. Schomberg detected the
+meaning of it at once. "That's what it was! This was what they were!"
+And, moving about restlessly (at that time his morose silent period had
+set in), he cast sidelong looks at the game; but he said nothing. It was
+not worth while having a row with men who were so overbearing. Even when
+money appeared in connection with these postprandial games, into which
+more and more people were being drawn, he still refrained from raising
+the question; he was reluctant to draw unduly the attention of "plain
+Mr. Jones" and of the equivocal Ricardo, to his person. One evening,
+however, after the public rooms of the hotel had become empty, Schomberg
+made an attempt to grapple with the problem in an indirect way.
+
+In a distant corner the tired China boy dozed on his heels, his back
+against the wall. Mrs. Schomberg had disappeared, as usual, between ten
+and eleven. Schomberg walked about slowly in and out of the room and
+the veranda, thoughtful, waiting for his two guests to go to bed. Then
+suddenly he approached them, militarily, his chest thrown out, his voice
+curt and soldierly.
+
+"Hot night, gentlemen."
+
+Mr Jones, lolling back idly in a chair, looked up. Ricardo, as idle, but
+more upright, made no sign.
+
+"Won't you have a drink with me before retiring?" went on Schomberg,
+sitting down by the little table.
+
+"By all means," said Mr. Jones lazily.
+
+Ricardo showed his teeth in a strange, quick grin. Schomberg felt
+painfully how difficult it was to get in touch with these men, both
+so quiet, so deliberate, so menacingly unceremonious. He ordered the
+Chinaman to bring in the drinks. His purpose was to discover how long
+these guests intended to stay. Ricardo displayed no conversational vein,
+but Mr. Jones appeared communicative enough. His voice somehow matched
+his sunken eyes. It was hollow without being in the least mournful;
+it sounded distant, uninterested, as though he were speaking from the
+bottom of a well. Schomberg learned that he would have the privilege of
+lodging and boarding these gentlemen for at least a month more. He could
+not conceal his discomfiture at this piece of news.
+
+"What's the matter? Don't you like to have people in your house?" asked
+plain Mr. Jones languidly. "I should have thought the owner of a hotel
+would be pleased."
+
+He lifted his delicate and beautifully pencilled eyebrows. Schomberg
+muttered something about the locality being dull and uninteresting to
+travellers--nothing going on--too quiet altogether, but he only provoked
+the declaration that quiet had its charm sometimes, and even dullness
+was welcome as a change.
+
+"We haven't had time to be dull for the last three years," added plain
+Mr. Jones, his eyes fixed darkly on Schomberg whom he further more
+invited to have another drink, this time with him, and not to worry
+himself about things he did not understand; and especially not to be
+inhospitable--which in a hotel-keeper is highly unprofessional.
+
+"I don't understand," grumbled Schomberg. "Oh, yes, I understand
+perfectly well. I--"
+
+"You are frightened," interrupted Mr. Jones. "What is the matter?"
+
+"I don't want any scandal in my place. That's what's the matter."
+
+Schomberg tried to face the situation bravely, but that steady, black
+stare affected him. And when he glanced aside uncomfortably, he met
+Ricardo's grin uncovering a lot of teeth, though the man seemed absorbed
+in his thoughts all the time.
+
+"And, moreover," went on Mr. Jones in that distant tone of his, "you
+can't help yourself. Here we are and here we stay. Would you try to
+put us out? I dare say you could do it; but you couldn't do it without
+getting hurt--very badly hurt. We can promise him that, can't we,
+Martin?"
+
+The secretary retracted his lips and looked up sharply at Schomberg, as
+if only too anxious to leap upon him with teeth and claws.
+
+Schomberg managed to produce a deep laugh.
+
+"Ha! Ha! Ha!"
+
+Mr Jones closed his eyes wearily, as if the light hurt them, and looked
+remarkably like a corpse for a moment. This was bad enough; but when he
+opened them again, it was almost a worse trial for Schomberg's nerves.
+The spectral intensity of that glance, fixed on the hotel-keeper (and
+this was most frightful) without any definite expression, seemed to
+dissolve the last grain of resolution in his character.
+
+"You don't think, by any chance, that you have to do with ordinary
+people, do you?" inquired Mr. Jones, in his lifeless manner, which
+seemed to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave.
+
+"He's a gentleman," testified Martin Ricardo with a sudden snap of the
+lips, after which his moustaches stirred by themselves in an odd, feline
+manner.
+
+"Oh, I wasn't thinking of that," said plain Mr. Jones, while Schomberg,
+dumb and planted heavily in his chair looked from one to the other,
+leaning forward a little. "Of course I am that; but Ricardo attaches
+too much importance to a social advantage. What I mean, for instance, is
+that he, quiet and inoffensive as you see him sitting here, would think
+nothing of setting fire to this house of entertainment of yours. It
+would blaze like a box of matches. Think of that! It wouldn't advance
+your affairs much, would it?--whatever happened to us."
+
+"Come, come gentlemen," remonstrated Schomberg, in a murmur. "This is
+very wild talk!"
+
+"And you have been used to deal with tame people, haven't you? But we
+aren't tame. We once kept a whole angry town at bay for two days, and
+then we got away with our plunder. It was in Venezuela. Ask Martin
+here--he can tell you."
+
+Instinctively Schomberg looked at Ricardo, who only passed the tip of
+his tongue over his lips with an uncanny sort of gusto, but did not
+offer to begin.
+
+"Well, perhaps it would be a rather long story," Mr. Jones conceded
+after a short silence.
+
+"I have no desire to hear it, I am sure," said Schomberg. "This isn't
+Venezuela. You wouldn't get away from here like that. But all this is
+silly talk of the worst sort. Do you mean to say you would make deadly
+trouble for the sake of a few guilders that you and that other"--eyeing
+Ricardo suspiciously, as one would look at a strange animal--"gentleman
+can win of an evening? Isn't as if my customers were a lot of rich men
+with pockets full of cash. I wonder you take so much trouble and risk
+for so little money."
+
+Schomberg's argument was met by Mr. Jones's statement that one must do
+something to kill time. Killing time was not forbidden. For the rest,
+being in a communicative mood, Mr. Jones said languidly and in a voice
+indifferent, as if issuing from a tomb, that he depended on himself, as
+if the world were still one great, wild jungle without law. Martin was
+something like that, too--for reasons of his own.
+
+All these statements Ricardo confirmed by short, inhuman grins.
+Schomberg lowered his eyes, for the sight of these two men intimidated
+him; but he was losing patience.
+
+"Of course, I could see at once that you were two desperate
+characters--something like what you say. But what would you think if
+I told you that I am pretty near as desperate as you two gentlemen?
+'Here's that Schomberg has an easy time running his hotel,' people
+think; and yet it seems to me I would just as soon let you rip me open
+and burn the whole show as not. There!"
+
+A low whistle was heard. It came from Ricardo, and was derisive.
+Schomberg, breathing heavily, looked on the floor. He was really
+desperate. Mr. Jones remained languidly sceptical.
+
+"Tut, tut! You have a tolerable business. You are perfectly tame; you--"
+He paused, then added in a tone of disgust: "You have a wife."
+
+Schomberg tapped the floor angrily with his foot and uttered an
+indistinct, laughing curse.
+
+"What do you mean by flinging that damned trouble at my head?" he cried.
+"I wish you would carry her off with you some where to the devil! I
+wouldn't run after you."
+
+The unexpected outburst affected Mr. Jones strangely. He had a horrified
+recoil, chair and all, as if Schomberg had thrust a wriggling viper in
+his face.
+
+"What's this infernal nonsense?" he muttered thickly. "What do you mean?
+How dare you?"
+
+Ricardo chuckled audibly.
+
+"I tell you I am desperate," Schomberg repeated. "I am as desperate as
+any man ever was. I don't care a hang what happens to me!"
+
+"Well, then"--Mr. Jones began to speak with a quietly threatening
+effect, as if the common words of daily use had some other deadly
+meaning to his mind--"well, then, why should you make yourself
+ridiculously disagreeable to us? If you don't care, as you say, you
+might just as well let us have the key of that music-shed of yours for
+a quiet game; a modest bank--a dozen candles or so. It would be greatly
+appreciated by your clients, as far as I can judge from the way they
+betted on a game of ecarte I had with that fair, baby-faced man--what's
+his name? They just yearn for a modest bank. And I am afraid Martin here
+would take it badly if you objected; but of course you won't. Think of
+the calls for drinks!"
+
+Schomberg, raising his eyes, at last met the gleams in two dark caverns
+under Mr. Jones's devilish eyebrows, directed upon him impenetrably. He
+shuddered as if horrors worse than murder had been lurking there, and
+said, nodding towards Ricardo:
+
+"I dare say he wouldn't think twice about sticking me, if he had you at
+his back! I wish I had sunk my launch, and gone to the bottom myself
+in her, before I boarded the steamer you came by. Ah, well, I've been
+already living in hell for weeks, so you don't make much difference.
+I'll let you have the concert-room--and hang the consequences. But
+what about the boy on late duty? If he sees the cards and actual money
+passing, he will be sure to blab, and it will be all over the town in no
+time."
+
+A ghastly smile stirred the lips of Mr. Jones.
+
+"Ah, I see you want to make a success of it. Very good. That's the way
+to get on. Don't let it disturb you. You chase all the Chinamen to bed
+early, and we'll get Pedro here every evening. He isn't the conventional
+waiter's cut, but he will do to run to and fro with the tray, while
+you sit here from nine to eleven serving out drinks and gathering the
+money."
+
+"There will be three of them now," thought the unlucky Schomberg.
+
+But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if
+a murderous one. There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny, no
+suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man, or of an
+insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones and
+a subtle power of terror. Pedro with his fangs, his tangled beard, and
+queer stare of his little bear's eyes was, by comparison, delightfully
+natural. Besides, Schomberg could no longer help himself.
+
+"That will do very well," he asserted mournfully. "But if you gentlemen,
+if you had turned up here only three months ago--ay, less than three
+months ago--you would have found somebody very different from what I am
+now to talk to you. It's true. What do you think of that?"
+
+"I scarcely know what to think. I should think it was a lie. You were
+probably as tame three months ago as you are now. You were born tame,
+like most people in the world."
+
+Mr Jones got up spectrally, and Ricardo imitated him with a snarl and a
+stretch. Schomberg, in a brown study, went on, as if to himself:
+
+"There has been an orchestra here--eighteen women."
+
+Mr Jones let out an exclamation of dismay, and looked about as if the
+walls around him and the whole house had been infected with plague. Then
+he became very angry, and swore violently at Schomberg for daring to
+bring up such subjects. The hotel-keeper was too much surprised to get
+up. He gazed from his chair at Mr. Jones's anger, which had nothing
+spectral in it but was not the more comprehensible for that.
+
+"What's the matter?" he stammered out. "What subject? Didn't you hear me
+say it was an orchestra? There's nothing wrong in that. Well, there was
+a girl amongst them--" Schomberg's eyes went stony; he clasped his hands
+in front of his breast with such force that his knuckles came out white.
+"Such a girl! Tame, am I? I would have kicked everything to pieces about
+me for her. And she, of course . . . I am in the prime of life . . .
+then a fellow bewitched her--a vagabond, a false, lying, swindling,
+underhand, stick-at-nothing brute. Ah!"
+
+His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out his
+arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury. The other
+two looked at his shaking back--the attenuated Mr. Jones with mingled
+scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of a cat which
+sees a piece of fish in the pantry out of reach. Schomberg flung himself
+backwards. He was dry-eyed, but he gulped as if swallowing sobs.
+
+"No wonder you can do with me what you like. You have no idea--just let
+me tell you of my trouble--"
+
+"I don't want to know anything of your beastly trouble," said Mr. Jones,
+in his most lifelessly positive voice.
+
+He stretched forth an arresting hand, and, as Schomberg remained
+open-mouthed, he walked out of the billiard-room in all the uncanniness
+of his thin shanks. Ricardo followed at his leader's heels; but he
+showed his teeth to Schomberg over his shoulder.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+From that evening dated those mysterious but significant phenomena in
+Schomberg's establishment which attracted Captain Davidson's casual
+notice when he dropped in, placid yet astute, in order to return
+Mrs. Schomberg's Indian shawl. And strangely enough, they lasted
+some considerable time. It argued either honesty and bad luck or
+extraordinary restraint on the part of "plain Mr. Jones and Co." in
+their discreet operations with cards.
+
+It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg's
+concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled up
+on and about the musicians' platform, and lighted at the other by two
+dozen candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with green
+cloth. In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned into a banker,
+faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned into a croupier.
+By contrast, the other faces round that table, anything between twenty
+and thirty, must have looked like collected samples of intensely
+artless, helpless humanity--pathetic in their innocent watch for the
+small turns of luck which indeed might have been serious enough for
+them. They had no notice to spare for the hairy Pedro, carrying a tray
+with the clumsiness of a creature caught in the woods and taught to walk
+on its hind legs.
+
+As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way. He remained in the
+billiard-room, serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an air
+of not seeing the growling monster, of not knowing where the drinks
+went, of ignoring that there was such a thing as a music-room over there
+under the trees within fifty yards of the hotel. He submitted himself
+to the situation with a low-spirited stoicism compounded of fear and
+resignation. Directly the party had broken up, (he could see dark
+shapes of the men drifting singly and in knots through the gate of
+the compound), he would withdraw out of sight behind a door not quite
+closed, in order to avoid meeting his two extraordinary guests; but he
+would watch through the crack their contrasted forms pass through the
+billiard-room and disappear on their way to bed. Then he would hear
+doors being slammed upstairs; and a profound silence would fall upon the
+whole house, upon his hotel appropriated, haunted by those insolently
+outspoken men provided with a whole armoury of weapons in their trunks.
+A profound silence. Schomberg sometimes could not resist the notion that
+he must be dreaming. Shuddering, he would pull himself together,
+and creep out, with movements strangely inappropriate to the
+Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve bearing by which he tried to keep up his
+self-respect before the world.
+
+A great loneliness oppressed him. One after another he would extinguish
+the lamps, and move softly towards his bedroom, where Mrs. Schomberg
+waited for him--no fit companion for a man of his ability and "in the
+prime of life." But that life, alas, was blighted. He felt it; and never
+with such force as when on opening the door he perceived that woman
+sitting patiently in a chair, her toes peeping out under the edge of her
+night-dress, an amazingly small amount of hair on her head drooping
+on the long stalk of scraggy neck, with that everlasting scared grin
+showing a blue tooth and meaning nothing--not even real fear. For she
+was used to him.
+
+Sometimes he was tempted to screw the head off the stalk. He imagined
+himself doing it--with one hand, a twisting movement. Not seriously, of
+course. Just a simple indulgence for his exasperated feelings. He wasn't
+capable of murder. He was certain of that. And, remembering suddenly the
+plain speeches of Mr. Jones, he would think: "I suppose I am too tame
+for that"--quite unaware that he had murdered the poor woman morally
+years ago. He was too unintelligent to have the notion of such a crime.
+Her bodily presence was bitterly offensive, because of its contrast with
+a very different feminine image. And it was no use getting rid of her.
+She was a habit of years, and there would be nothing to put in her
+place. At any rate, he could talk to that idiot half the night if he
+chose.
+
+That night he had been vapouring before her as to his intention to face
+his two guests and, instead of that inspiration he needed, had merely
+received the usual warning: "Be careful, Wilhelm." He did not want to be
+told to be careful by an imbecile female. What he needed was a pair of
+woman's arms which, flung round his neck, would brace him up for the
+encounter. Inspire him, he called it to himself.
+
+He lay awake a long time; and his slumbers, when they came, were
+unsatisfactory and short. The morning light had no joy for his eyes.
+He listened dismally to the movements in the house. The Chinamen were
+unlocking and flinging wide the doors of the public rooms which opened
+on the veranda. Horrors! Another poisoned day to get through somehow!
+The recollection of his resolve made him feel actually sick for a
+moment. First of all the lordly, abandoned attitudes of Mr. Jones
+disconcerted him. Then there was his contemptuous silence. Mr. Jones
+never addressed himself to Schomberg with any general remarks, never
+opened his lips to him unless to say "Good morning"--two simple words
+which, uttered by that man, seemed a mockery of a threatening character.
+And, lastly, it was not a frank physical fear he inspired--for as to
+that, even a cornered rat will fight--but a superstitious shrinking awe,
+something like an invincible repugnance to seek speech with a wicked
+ghost. That it was a daylight ghost surprisingly angular in his
+attitudes, and for the most part spread out on three chairs, did
+not make it any easier. Daylight only made him a more weird, a more
+disturbing and unlawful apparition. Strangely enough in the evening when
+he came out of his mute supineness, this unearthly side of him was less
+obtrusive. At the gaming-table, when actually handling the cards, it was
+probably sunk quite out of sight; but Schomberg, having made up his mind
+in ostrich-like fashion to ignore what was going on, never entered the
+desecrated music-room. He had never seen Mr. Jones in the exercise of
+his vocation--or perhaps it was only his trade.
+
+"I will speak to him tonight," Schomberg said to himself, while he drank
+his morning tea, in pyjamas, on the veranda, before the rising sun had
+topped the trees of the compound, and while the undried dew still
+lay silvery on the grass, sparkled on the blossoms of the central
+flower-bed, and darkened the yellow gravel of the drive. "That's what
+I'll do. I won't keep out of sight tonight. I shall come out and catch
+him as he goes to bed carrying the cash-box."
+
+After all, what was the fellow but a common desperado? Murderous? Oh,
+yes; murderous enough, perhaps--and the muscles of Schomberg's stomach
+had a quivering contraction under his airy attire. But even a common
+desperado would think twice or, more likely, a hundred times, before
+openly murdering an inoffensive citizen in a civilized, European-ruled
+town. He jerked his shoulders. Of course! He shuddered again, and
+paddled back to his room to dress himself. His mind was made up, and he
+would think no more about it; but still he had his doubts. They grew and
+unfolded themselves with the progress of the day, as some plants do. At
+times they made him perspire more than usual, and they did away with
+the possibility of his afternoon siesta. After turning over on his couch
+more than a dozen times, he gave up this mockery of repose, got up, and
+went downstairs.
+
+It was between three and four o'clock, the hour of profound peace. The
+very flowers seemed to doze on their stalks set with sleepy leaves. Not
+even the air stirred, for the sea-breeze was not due till later. The
+servants were out of sight, catching naps in the shade somewhere behind
+the house. Mrs. Schomberg in a dim up-stair room with closed jalousies,
+was elaborating those two long pendant ringlets which were such a
+feature of her hairdressing for her afternoon duties. At that time no
+customers ever troubled the repose of the establishment. Wandering about
+his premises in profound solitude, Schomberg recoiled at the door of the
+billiard-room, as if he had seen a snake in his path. All alone with the
+billiards, the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs, Mr.
+Secretary Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning rapidity
+something that looked like tricks with his own personal pack of cards,
+which he always carried about in his pocket. Schomberg would have backed
+out quietly if Ricardo had not turned his head. Having been seen, the
+hotel-keeper elected to walk in as the lesser risk of the two. The
+consciousness of his inwardly abject attitude towards these men caused
+him always to throw his chest out and assume a severe expression.
+Ricardo watched his approach, clasping the pack of cards in both hands.
+
+"You want something, perhaps?" suggested Schomberg in his
+lieutenant-of-the-Reserve voice.
+
+Ricardo shook his head in silence and looked expectant. With him
+Schomberg exchanged at least twenty words every day. He was infinitely
+more communicative than his patron. At times he looked very much like
+an ordinary human being of his class; and he seemed to be in an amiable
+mood at that moment. Suddenly spreading some ten cards face downward in
+the form of a fan, he thrust them towards Schomberg.
+
+"Come, man, take one quick!"
+
+Schomberg was so surprised that he took one hurriedly, after a very
+perceptible start. The eyes of Martin Ricardo gleamed phosphorescent
+in the half-light of the room screened from the heat and glare of the
+tropics.
+
+"That's the king of hearts you've got," he chuckled, showing his teeth
+in a quick flash.
+
+Schomberg, after looking at the card, admitted that it was, and laid it
+down on the table.
+
+"I can make you take any card I like nine times out of ten," exulted the
+secretary, with a strange curl of his lips and a green flicker in his
+raised eyes.
+
+Schomberg looked down at him dumbly. For a few seconds neither of them
+stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his fingers,
+let the whole pack fall on the table. Schomberg sat down. He sat down
+because of the faintness in his legs, and for no other reason. His mouth
+was dry. Having sat down, he felt that he must speak. He squared his
+shoulders in parade style.
+
+"You are pretty good at that sort of thing," he said.
+
+"Practice makes perfect," replied the secretary.
+
+His precarious amiability made it impossible for Schomberg to get away.
+Thus, from his very timidity, the hotel-keeper found himself engaged
+in a conversation the thought of which filled him with apprehension. It
+must be said, in justice to Schomberg, that he concealed his funk very
+creditably. The habit of throwing out his chest and speaking in a severe
+voice stood him in good stead. With him, too, practice made perfect; and
+he would probably have kept it up to the end, to the very last moment,
+to the ultimate instant of breaking strain which would leave him
+grovelling on the floor. To add to his secret trouble, he was at a loss
+what to say. He found nothing else but the remark:
+
+"I suppose you are fond of cards."
+
+"What would you expect?" asked Ricardo in a simple, philosophical tone.
+"It is likely I should not be?" Then, with sudden fire: "Fond of cards?
+Ay, passionately!"
+
+The effect of this outburst was augmented by the quiet lowering of the
+eyelids, by a reserved pause as though this had been a confession of
+another kind of love. Schomberg cudgelled his brains for a new topic,
+but he could not find one. His usual scandalous gossip would not serve
+this turn. That desperado did not know anyone anywhere within a thousand
+miles. Schomberg was almost compelled to keep to the subject.
+
+"I suppose you've always been so--from your early youth."
+
+Ricardo's eyes remained cast down. His fingers toyed absently with the
+pack on the table.
+
+"I don't know that it was so early. I first got in the way of it playing
+for tobacco--in forecastles of ships, you know--common sailor games. We
+used to spend whole watches below at it, round a chest, under a
+slush lamp. We would hardly spare the time to get a bite of salt
+horse--neither eat nor sleep. We could hardly stand when the watches
+were mustered on deck. Talk of gambling!" He dropped the reminiscent
+tone to add the information, "I was bred to the sea from a boy, you
+know."
+
+Schomberg had fallen into a reverie, but without losing the sense of
+impending calamity. The next words he heard were:
+
+"I got on all right at sea, too. Worked up to be mate. I was mate of a
+schooner--a yacht, you might call her--a special good berth too, in the
+Gulf of Mexico, a soft job that you don't run across more than once in a
+lifetime. Yes, I was mate of her when I left the sea to follow him."
+
+Ricardo tossed up his chin to indicate the room above; from which
+Schomberg, his wits painfully aroused by this reminder of Mr. Jones's
+existence, concluded that the latter had withdrawn into his bedroom.
+Ricardo, observing him from under lowered eyelids, went on:
+
+"It so happened that we were shipmates."
+
+"Mr Jones, you mean? Is he a sailor too?"
+
+Ricardo raised his eyelids at that.
+
+"He's no more Mr. Jones than you are," he said with obvious pride. "He a
+sailor! That just shows your ignorance. But there! A foreigner can't be
+expected to know any better. I am an Englishman, and I know a gentleman
+at sight. I should know one drunk, in the gutter, in jail, under the
+gallows. There's a something--it isn't exactly the appearance, it's
+a--no use me trying to tell you. You ain't an Englishman, and if you
+were, you wouldn't need to be told."
+
+An unsuspected stream of loquacity had broken its dam somewhere deep
+within the man, had diluted his fiery blood and softened his pitiless
+fibre. Schomberg experienced mingled relief and apprehension, as if
+suddenly an enormous savage cat had begun to wind itself about his legs
+in inexplicable friendliness. No prudent man under such circumstances
+would dare to stir. Schomberg didn't stir. Ricardo assumed an easy
+attitude, with an elbow on the table. Schomberg squared his shoulders
+afresh.
+
+"I was employed, in that there yacht--schooner, whatever you call it--by
+ten gentlemen at once. That surprises you, eh? Yes, yes, ten. Leastwise
+there were nine of them gents good enough in their way, and one
+downright gentleman, and that was . . ."
+
+Ricardo gave another upward jerk of his chin as much as to say: He! The
+only one.
+
+"And no mistake," he went on. "I spotted him from the first day. How?
+Why? Ay, you may ask. Hadn't seen that many gentlemen in my life. Well,
+somehow I did. If you were an Englishman, you would--"
+
+"What was your yacht?" Schomberg interrupted as impatiently as he dared;
+for this harping on nationality jarred on his already tried nerves.
+"What was the game?"
+
+"You have a headpiece on you! Game! 'Xactly. That's what it was--the
+sort of silliness gentlemen will get up among themselves to play at
+adventure. A treasure-hunting expedition. Each of them put down so much
+money, you understand, to buy the schooner. Their agent in the city
+engaged me and the skipper. The greatest secrecy and all that. I reckon
+he had a twinkle in his eye all the time--and no mistake. But that
+wasn't our business. Let them bust their money as they like. The pity of
+it was that so little of it came our way. Just fair pay and no more. And
+damn any pay, much or little, anyhow--that's what I say!"
+
+He blinked his eyes greenishly in the dim light. The heat seemed to
+have stilled everything in the world but his voice. He swore at large,
+abundantly, in snarling undertones, it was impossible to say why, then
+calmed down as inexplicably, and went on, as a sailor yarns.
+
+"At first there were only nine of them adventurous sparks, then, just a
+day or two before the sailing date, he turned up. Heard of it somehow,
+somewhere--I would say from some woman, if I didn't know him as I do. He
+would give any woman a ten-mile berth. He can't stand them. Or maybe in
+a flash bar. Or maybe in one of them grand clubs in Pall Mall. Anyway,
+the agent netted him in all right--cash down, and only about four and
+twenty hours for him to get ready; but he didn't miss his ship. Not he!
+You might have called it a pier-head jump--for a gentleman. I saw him
+come along. Know the West India Docks, eh?"
+
+Schomberg did not know the West India Docks. Ricardo looked at him
+pensively for a while, and then continued, as if such ignorance had to
+be disregarded.
+
+"Our tug was already alongside. Two loafers were carrying his dunnage
+behind him. I told the dockman at our moorings to keep all fast for a
+minute. The gangway was down already; but he made nothing of it. Up he
+jumps, one leap, swings his long legs over the rail, and there he is
+on board. They pass up his swell dunnage, and he puts his hand in his
+trousers pocket and throws all his small change on the wharf for them
+chaps to pick up. They were still promenading that wharf on all fours
+when we cast off. It was only then that he looked at me--quietly, you
+know; in a slow way. He wasn't so thin then as he is now; but I noticed
+he wasn't so young as he looked--not by a long chalk. He seemed to touch
+me inside somewhere. I went away pretty quick from there; I was wanted
+forward anyhow. I wasn't frightened. What should I be frightened for? I
+only felt touched--on the very spot. But Jee-miny, if anybody had told
+me we should be partners before the year was out--well, I would have--"
+
+He swore a variety of strange oaths, some common, others quaintly
+horrible to Schomberg's ears, and all mere innocent exclamations of
+wonder at the shifts and changes of human fortune. Schomberg moved
+slightly in his chair. But the admirer and partner of "plain Mr. Jones"
+seemed to have forgotten Schomberg's existence for the moment. The
+stream of ingenuous blasphemy--some of it in bad Spanish--had run dry,
+and Martin Ricardo, connoisseur in gentlemen, sat dumb with a stony gaze
+as if still marvelling inwardly at the amazing elections, conjunctions,
+and associations of events which influence man's pilgrimage on this
+earth.
+
+At last Schomberg spoke tentatively:
+
+"And so the--the gentleman, up there, talked you over into leaving a
+good berth?"
+
+Ricardo started.
+
+"Talked me over! Didn't need to talk me over. Just beckoned to me, and
+that was enough. By that time we were in the Gulf of Mexico. One night
+we were lying at anchor, close to a dry sandbank--to this day I am not
+sure where it was--off the Colombian coast or thereabouts. We were
+to start digging the next morning, and all hands had turned in early,
+expecting a hard day with the shovels. Up he comes, and in his quiet,
+tired way of speaking--you can tell a gentleman by that as much as by
+anything else almost--up he comes behind me and says, just like that
+into my ear, in a manner: 'Well, what do you think of our treasure hunt
+now?'
+
+"I didn't even turn my head; 'xactly as I stood, I remained, and I spoke
+no louder than himself:
+
+"'If you want to know, sir, it's nothing but just damned tom-foolery.'
+
+"We had, of course, been having short talks together at one time or
+another during the passage. I dare say he had read me like a book. There
+ain't much to me, except that I have never been tame, even when walking
+the pavement and cracking jokes and standing drinks to chums--ay, and to
+strangers, too. I would watch them lifting their elbows at my expense,
+or splitting their side at my fun--I can be funny when I like, you bet!"
+
+A pause for self-complacent contemplation of his own fun and generosity
+checked the flow of Ricardo's speech. Schomberg was concerned to keep
+within bounds the enlargement of his eyes, which he seemed to feel
+growing bigger in his head.
+
+"Yes, yes," he whispered hastily.
+
+"I would watch them and think: 'You boys don't know who I am. If you
+did--!' With girls, too. Once I was courting a girl. I used to kiss her
+behind the ear and say to myself: 'If you only knew who's kissing you,
+my dear, you would scream and bolt!' Ha! ha! Not that I wanted to
+do them any harm; but I felt the power in myself. Now, here we sit,
+friendly like, and that's all right. You aren't in my way. But I am not
+friendly to you. I just don't care. Some men do say that; but I really
+don't. You are no more to me one way or another than that fly there.
+Just so. I'd squash you or leave you alone. I don't care what I do."
+
+If real force of character consists in overcoming our sudden weaknesses,
+Schomberg displayed plenty of that quality. At the mention of the fly,
+he re-enforced the severe dignity of his attitude as one inflates a
+collapsing toy balloon with a great effort of breath. The easy-going,
+relaxed attitude of Ricardo was really appalling.
+
+"That's so," he went on. "I am that sort of fellow. You wouldn't think
+it, would you? No. You have to be told. So I am telling you, and I dare
+say you only half believe it. But you can't say to yourself that I am
+drunk, stare at me as you may. I haven't had anything stronger than a
+glass of iced water all day. Takes a real gentleman to see through a
+fellow. Oh, yes--he spotted me. I told you we had a few talks at sea
+about one thing or another. And I used to watch him down the skylight,
+playing cards in the cuddy with the others. They had to pass the time
+away somehow. By the same token he caught me at it once, and it was then
+that I told him I was fond of cards--and generally lucky in gambling,
+too. Yes, he had sized me up. Why not? A gentleman's just like any other
+man--and something more."
+
+It flashed through Schomberg's mind: that these two were indeed well
+matched in their enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in different
+disguises.
+
+"Says he to me"--Ricardo started again in a gossiping manner--'I'm
+packed up. It's about time to go, Martin.'
+
+"It was the first time he called me Martin. Says I:
+
+"'Is that it, sir?'
+
+"'You didn't think I was after that sort of treasure, did you? I wanted
+to clear out from home quietly. It's a pretty expensive way of getting a
+passage across, but it has served my turn.'
+
+"I let him know very soon that I was game for anything, from pitch and
+toss to wilful murder, in his company.
+
+"'Wilful murder?' says he in his quiet way. 'What the deuce is that?
+What are you talking about? People do get killed sometimes when they get
+in one's way, but that's self-defence--you understand?'
+
+"I told him I did. And then I said I would run below for a minute, to
+ram a few of my things into a sailor's bag I had. I've never cared for
+a lot of dunnage; I believed in going about flying light when I was at
+sea. I came back and found him strolling up and down the deck, as if
+he were taking a breath of fresh air before turning in, like any other
+evening.
+
+"'Ready?'
+
+"'Yes, sir.'
+
+"He didn't even look at me. We had had a boat in the water astern ever
+since we came to anchor in the afternoon. He throws the stump of his
+cigar overboard.
+
+"'Can you get the captain out on deck?' he asks.
+
+"That was the last thing in the world I should have thought of doing. I
+lost my tongue for a moment.
+
+"'I can try,' says I.
+
+"'Well, then, I am going below. You get him up and keep him with you
+till I come back on deck. Mind! Don't let him go below till I return.'
+
+"I could not help asking why he told me to rouse a sleeping man, when
+we wanted everybody on board to sleep sweetly till we got clear of the
+schooner. He laughs a little and says that I didn't see all the bearings
+of this business.
+
+"'Mind,' he says, 'don't let him leave you till you see me come up
+again.' He puts his eyes close to mine. 'Keep him with you at all
+costs.'
+
+"'And that means?' says I.
+
+"'All costs to him--by every possible or impossible means. I don't want
+to be interrupted in my business down below. He would give me lots
+of trouble. I take you with me to save myself trouble in various
+circumstances; and you've got to enter on your work right away.'
+
+"'Just so, sir,' says I; and he slips down the companion.
+
+"With a gentleman you know at once where you are; but it was a ticklish
+job. The skipper was nothing to me one way or another, any more than you
+are at this moment, Mr. Schomberg. You may light your cigar or blow your
+brains out this minute, and I don't care a hang which you do, both or
+neither. To bring the skipper up was easy enough. I had only to stamp on
+the deck a few times over his head. I stamped hard. But how to keep him
+up when he got there?
+
+"'Anything the matter; Mr. Ricardo?' I heard his voice behind me.
+
+"There he was, and I hadn't thought of anything to say to him; so I
+didn't turn round. The moonlight was brighter than many a day I could
+remember in the North Sea.
+
+"'Why did you call me? What are you staring at out there, Mr. Ricardo?'
+
+"He was deceived by my keeping my back to him. I wasn't staring at
+anything, but his mistake gave me a notion.
+
+"'I am staring at something that looks like a canoe over there,' I said
+very slowly.
+
+"The skipper got concerned at once. It wasn't any danger from the
+inhabitants, whoever they were.
+
+"'Oh, hang it!' says he. 'That's very unfortunate.' He had hoped that
+the schooner being on the coast would not get known so very soon.
+'Dashed awkward, with the business we've got in hand, to have a lot of
+niggers watching operations. But are you certain this is a canoe?'
+
+"'It may be a drift-log,' I said; 'but I thought you had better have a
+look with your own eyes. You may make it out better than I can.'
+
+"His eyes weren't anything as good as mine. But he says:
+
+"'Certainly. Certainly. You did quite right.'
+
+"And it's a fact I had seen some drift-logs at sunset. I saw what they
+were then and didn't trouble my head about them, forgot all about it
+till that very moment. Nothing strange in seeing drift-logs off a coast
+like that; and I'm hanged if the skipper didn't make one out in the
+wake of the moon. Strange what a little thing a man's life hangs on
+sometimes--a single word! Here you are, sitting unsuspicious before me,
+and you may let out something unbeknown to you that would settle your
+hash. Not that I have any ill-feeling. I have no feelings. If the
+skipper had said, 'O, bosh!' and had turned his back on me, he would not
+have gone three steps towards his bed; but he stood there and stared.
+And now the job was to get him off the deck when he was no longer wanted
+there.
+
+"'We are just trying to make out if that object there is a canoe or a
+log,' says he to Mr. Jones.
+
+"Mr Jones had come up, lounging as carelessly as when he went below.
+While the skipper was jawing about boats and drifting logs. I asked by
+signs, from behind, if I hadn't better knock him on the head and drop
+him quietly overboard. The night was slipping by, and we had to go. It
+couldn't be put off till next night no more. No. No more. And do you
+know why?"
+
+Schomberg made a slight negative sign with his head. This direct appeal
+annoyed him, jarred on the induced quietude of a great talker forced
+into the part of a listener and sunk in it as a man sinks into slumber.
+Mr. Ricardo struck a note of scorn.
+
+"Don't know why? Can't you guess? No? Because the boss had got hold of
+the skipper's cash-box by then. See?"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+ "A common thief!"
+
+Schomberg bit his tongue just too late, and woke up completely as he saw
+Ricardo retract his lips in a cat-like grin; but the companion of "plain
+Mr. Jones" didn't alter his comfortable, gossiping attitude.
+
+"Garn! What if he did want to see his money back, like any tame
+shopkeeper, hash-seller, gin-slinger, or ink-spewer does? Fancy a mud
+turtle like you trying to pass an opinion on a gentleman! A gentleman
+isn't to be sized up so easily. Even I ain't up to it sometimes. For
+instance, that night, all he did was to waggle his finger at me. The
+skipper stops his silly chatter, surprised.
+
+"'Eh? What's the matter?' asks he.
+
+"The matter! It was his reprieve--that's what was the matter.
+
+"'O, nothing, nothing,' says my gentleman. 'You are perfectly right. A
+log--nothing but a log.'
+
+"Ha, ha! Reprieve, I call it, because if the skipper had gone on with
+his silly argument much longer he would have had to be knocked out
+of the way. I could hardly hold myself in on account of the precious
+minutes. However, his guardian angel put it into his head to shut up and
+go back to his bed. I was ramping mad about the lost time."
+
+"'Why didn't you let me give him one on his silly coconut sir?' I asks.
+
+"'No ferocity, no ferocity,' he says, raising his finger at me as calm
+as you please.
+
+"You can't tell how a gentleman takes that sort of thing. They don't
+lose their temper. It's bad form. You'll never see him lose his
+temper--not for anybody to see anyhow. Ferocity ain't good form,
+either--that much I've learned by this time, and more, too. I've had
+that schooling that you couldn't tell by my face if I meant to rip you
+up the next minute--as of course I could do in less than a jiffy. I have
+a knife up the leg of my trousers."
+
+"You haven't!" exclaimed Schomberg incredulously.
+
+Mr Ricardo was as quick as lightning in changing his lounging, idle
+attitude for a stooping position, and exhibiting the weapon with one
+jerk at the left leg of his trousers. Schomberg had just a view of it,
+strapped to a very hairy limb, when Mr. Ricardo, jumping up, stamped his
+foot to get the trouser-leg down, and resumed his careless pose with one
+elbow on the table.
+
+"It's a more handy way to carry a tool than you would think," he went
+on, gazing abstractedly into Schomberg's wide-open eyes. "Suppose some
+little difference comes up during a game. Well, you stoop to pick up a
+dropped card, and when you come up--there you are ready to strike, or
+with the thing up you sleeve ready to throw. Or you just dodge under the
+table when there's some shooting coming. You wouldn't believe the damage
+a fellow with a knife under the table can do to ill-conditioned skunks
+that want to raise trouble, before they begin to understand what the
+screaming's about, and make a bolt--those that can, that is."
+
+The roses of Schomberg's cheek at the root of his chestnut beard faded
+perceptibly. Ricardo chuckled faintly.
+
+"But no ferocity--no ferocity! A gentleman knows. What's the good of
+getting yourself into a state? And no shirking necessity, either. No
+gentleman ever shirks. What I learn I don't forget. Why! We gambled
+on the plains, with a damn lot of cattlemen in ranches; played fair,
+mind--and then had to fight for our winnings afterwards as often as not.
+We've gambled on the hills and in the valleys and on the sea-shore, and
+out of sight of land--mostly fair. Generally it's good enough. We began
+in Nicaragua first, after we left that schooner and her fool errand.
+There were one hundred and twenty-seven sovereigns and some Mexican
+dollars in that skipper's cash-box. Hardly enough to knock a man on the
+head for from behind, I must confess; but that the skipper had a narrow
+escape the governor himself could not deny afterwards.
+
+"'Do you want me to understand, sir, that you mind there being one life
+more or less on this earth?' I asked him, a few hours after we got away.
+
+"'Certainly not,' says he.
+
+"'Well, then, why did you stop me?'
+
+"'There's a proper way of doing things. You'll have to learn to be
+correct. There's also unnecessary exertion. That must be avoided,
+too--if only for the look of the thing.' A gentleman's way of putting
+things to you--and no mistake!
+
+"At sunrise we got into a creek, to lie hidden in case the treasure hunt
+party had a mind to take a spell hunting for us. And dash me if they
+didn't! We saw the schooner away out, running to leeward, with ten pairs
+of binoculars sweeping the sea, no doubt on all sides. I advised the
+governor to give her time to beat back again before we made a start. So
+we stayed up that creek something like ten days, as snug as can be. On
+the seventh day we had to kill a man, though--the brother of this Pedro
+here. They were alligator-hunters, right enough. We got our lodgings in
+their hut. Neither the boss nor I could habla Espanol--speak Spanish,
+you know--much then. Dry bank, nice shade, jolly hammocks, fresh fish,
+good game, everything lovely. The governor chucked them a few dollars to
+begin with; but it was like boarding with a pair of savage apes, anyhow.
+By and by we noticed them talking a lot together. They had twigged
+the cash-box, and the leather portmanteaus, and my bag--a jolly lot of
+plunder to look at. They must have been saying to each other:
+
+"'No one's ever likely to come looking for these two fellows, who seem
+to have fallen from the moon. Let's cut their throats.'
+
+"Why, of course! Clear as daylight. I didn't need to spy one of them
+sharpening a devilish long knife behind some bushes, while glancing
+right and left with his wild eyes, to know what was in the wind. Pedro
+was standing by, trying the edge of another long knife. They thought we
+were away on our lookout at the mouth of the river, as was usual with us
+during the day. Not that we expected to see much of the schooner, but
+it was just as well to make certain, if possible; and then it was cooler
+out of the woods, in the breeze. Well, the governor was there right
+enough, lying comfortable on a rug, where he could watch the offing, but
+I had gone back to the hut to get a chew of tobacco out of my bag. I had
+not broken myself of the habit then, and I couldn't be happy unless I
+had a lump as big as a baby's fist in my cheek."
+
+At the cannibalistic comparison, Schomberg muttered a faint, sickly
+"don't." Ricardo hitched himself up in his seat and glanced down his
+outstretched legs complacently.
+
+"I am tolerably light on my feet, as a general thing," he went on. "Dash
+me if I don't think I could drop a pinch of salt on a sparrow's tail,
+if I tried. Anyhow, they didn't hear me. I watched them two brown, hairy
+brutes not ten yards off. All they had on was white linen drawers rolled
+up on their thighs. Not a word they said to each other. Antonio was
+down on his thick hams, busy rubbing a knife on a flat stone; Pedro was
+leaning against a small tree and passing his thumb along the edge of his
+blade. I got away quieter than a mouse, you bet."
+
+"I didn't say anything to the boss then. He was leaning on his elbow
+on his rug, and didn't seem to want to be spoken to. He's like
+that--sometimes that familiar you might think he would eat out of your
+hand, and at others he would snub you sharper than a devil--but always
+quiet. Perfect gentleman, I tell you. I didn't bother him, then; but
+I wasn't likely to forget them two fellows, so businesslike with their
+knives. At that time we had only one revolver between us two--the
+governor's six-shooter, but loaded only in five chambers; and we had no
+more cartridges. He had left the box behind in a drawer in his cabin.
+Awkward! I had nothing but an old clasp-knife--no good at all for
+anything serious.
+
+"In the evening we four sat round a bit of fire outside the
+sleeping-shed, eating broiled fish off plantain leaves, with roast yams
+for bread--the usual thing. The governor and I were on one side, and
+these two beauties cross-legged on the other, grunting a word or two
+to each other, now and then, hardly human speech at all, and their eyes
+down, fast on the ground. For the last three days we couldn't get them
+to look us in the face. Presently I began to talk to the boss quietly,
+just as I am talking to you now, careless like, and I told him all I had
+observed. He goes on picking up pieces of fish and putting them into his
+mouth as calm as anything. It's a pleasure to have anything to do with a
+gentleman. Never looked across at them once.
+
+"'And now,' says I, yawning on purpose, 'we've got to stand watch at
+night, turn about, and keep our eyes skinned all day, too, and mind we
+don't get jumped upon suddenly.'
+
+"'It's perfectly intolerable,' says the governor. 'And you with no
+weapon of any sort!'
+
+"'I mean to stick pretty close to you, sir, from this on, if you don't
+mind,' says I.
+
+"He just nods the least bit, wipes his fingers on the plantain leaf,
+puts his hand behind his back, as if to help himself to rise from the
+ground, snatches his revolver from under his jacket and plugs a bullet
+plumb centre into Mr. Antonio's chest. See what it is to have to do with
+a gentleman. No confounded fuss, and things done out of hand. But he
+might have tipped me a wink or something. I nearly jumped out of my
+skin. Scared ain't in it! I didn't even know who had fired. Everything
+had been so still just before that the bang of the shot seemed
+the loudest noise I had ever heard. The honourable Antonio pitches
+forward--they always do, towards the shot; you must have noticed that
+yourself--yes, he pitches forward on to the embers, and all that lot of
+hair on his face and head flashes up like a pinch of gunpowder. Greasy,
+I expect; always scraping the fat off them alligators' hides--"
+
+"Look here," exclaimed Schomberg violently, as if trying to burst some
+invisible bonds, "do you mean to say that all this happened?"
+
+"No," said Ricardo coolly. "I am making it all up as I go along, just to
+help you through the hottest part of the afternoon. So down he pitches
+his nose on the red embers, and up jumps our handsome Pedro and I at the
+same time, like two Jacks-in-the-box. He starts to bolt away, with his
+head over his shoulder, and I, hardly knowing what I was doing, spring
+on his back. I had the sense to get my hands round his neck at once, and
+it's about all I could do to lock my fingers tight under his jaw. You
+saw the beauty's neck, didn't you? Hard as iron, too. Down we both went.
+Seeing this the governor puts his revolver in his pocket.
+
+"'Tie his legs together, sir,' I yell. 'I'm trying to strangle him.'
+
+"There was a lot of their fibre-lines lying about. I gave him a last
+squeeze and then got up.
+
+"'I might have shot you,' says the governor, quite concerned.
+
+"'But you are glad to have saved a cartridge, sir,' I tell him.
+
+"My jump did save it. It wouldn't have done to let him get away in
+the dark like that, and have the beauty dodging around in the bushes,
+perhaps, with the rusty flint-lock gun they had. The governor owned up
+that the jump was the correct thing.
+
+"'But he isn't dead,' says he, bending over him.
+
+"Might as well hope to strangle an ox. We made haste to tie his elbows
+back, and then, before he came to himself, we dragged him to a small
+tree, sat him up, and bound him to it, not by the waist but by the
+neck--some twenty turns of small line round his throat and the trunk,
+finished off with a reef-knot under his ear. Next thing we did was to
+attend to the honourable Antonio, who was making a great smell frizzling
+his face on the red coals. We pushed and rolled him into the creek, and
+left the rest to the alligators.
+
+"I was tired. That little scrap took it out of me something awful. The
+governor hadn't turned a hair. That's where a gentleman has the pull
+of you. He don't get excited. No gentleman does--or hardly ever. I fell
+asleep all of a sudden and left him smoking by the fire I had made
+up, his railway rug round his legs, as calm as if he were sitting in a
+first-class carriage. We hardly spoke ten words to each other after
+it was over, and from that day to this we have never talked of the
+business. I wouldn't have known he remembered it if he hadn't alluded to
+it when talking with you the other day--you know, with regard to Pedro."
+
+"It surprised you, didn't it? That's why I am giving you this yarn of
+how he came to be with us, like a sort of dog--dashed sight more useful,
+though. You know how he can trot around with trays? Well, he could bring
+down an ox with his fist, at a word from the boss, just as cleverly. And
+fond of the governor! Oh, my word! More than any dog is of any man."
+
+Schomberg squared his chest.
+
+"Oh, and that's one of the things I wanted to mention to Mr. Jones," he
+said. "It's unpleasant to have that fellow round the house so early. He
+sits on the stairs at the back for hours before he is needed here, and
+frightens people so that the service suffers. The Chinamen--"
+
+Ricardo nodded and raised his hand.
+
+"When I first saw him he was fit to frighten a grizzly bear, let alone
+a Chinaman. He's become civilized now to what he once was. Well, that
+morning, first thing on opening my eyes, I saw him sitting there, tied
+up by the neck to the tree. He was blinking. We spent the day watching
+the sea, and we actually made out the schooner working to windward,
+which showed that she had given us up. Good! When the sun rose again, I
+took a squint at our Pedro. He wasn't blinking. He was rolling his eyes,
+all white one minute and black the next, and his tongue was hanging out
+a yard. Being tied up short by the neck like this would daunt the arch
+devil himself--in time--in time, mind! I don't know but that even a
+real gentleman would find it difficult to keep a stiff lip to the end.
+Presently we went to work getting our boat ready. I was busying myself
+setting up the mast, when the governor passes the remark:
+
+"'I think he wants to say something.'
+
+"I had heard a sort of croaking going on for some time, only I wouldn't
+take any notice; but then I got out of the boat and went up to him, with
+some water. His eyes were red--red and black and half out of his
+head. He drank all the water I gave him, but he hadn't much to say for
+himself. I walked back to the governor.
+
+"'He asks for a bullet in his head before we go,' I said. I wasn't at
+all pleased.
+
+"'Oh, that's out of the question altogether,' says the governor.
+
+"He was right there. Only four shots left, and ninety miles of wild
+coast to put behind us before coming to the first place where you could
+expect to buy revolver cartridges.
+
+"'Anyhow,' I tells him, 'he wants to be killed some way or other, as a
+favour.'
+
+"And then I go on setting up the boat's mast. I didn't care much for the
+notion of butchering a man bound hand and foot and fastened by the neck
+besides. I had a knife then--the honourable Antonio's knife; and that
+knife is this knife.
+
+"Ricardo gave his leg a resounding slap.
+
+"First spoil in my new life," he went on with harsh joviality. "The
+dodge of carrying it down there I learned later. I carried it stuck in
+my belt that day. No, I hadn't much stomach for the job; but when you
+work with a gentleman of the real right sort you may depend on your
+feelings being seen through your skin. Says the governor suddenly:
+
+"'It may even be looked upon as his right'--you hear a gentleman
+speaking there?--'but what do you think of taking him with us in the
+boat?'
+
+"And the governor starts arguing that the beggar would be useful in
+working our way along the coast. We could get rid of him before coming
+to the first place that was a little civilized. I didn't want much
+talking over. Out I scrambled from the boat.
+
+"'Ay, but will he be manageable, sir?'
+
+"'Oh, yes. He's daunted. Go on, cut him loose--I take the
+responsibility.'
+
+"'Right you are, sir.'
+
+"He sees me come along smartly with his brother's knife in my hand--I
+wasn't thinking how it looked from his side of the fence, you know--and
+jiminy, it nearly killed him! He stared like a crazed bullock and began
+to sweat and twitch all over, something amazing. I was so surprised,
+that I stopped to look at him. The drops were pouring over his eyebrows,
+down his beard, off his nose--and he gurgled. Then it struck me that he
+couldn't see what was in my mind. By favour or by right he didn't like
+to die when it came to it; not in that way, anyhow. When I stepped round
+to get at the lashing, he let out a sort of soft bellow. Thought I was
+going to stick him from behind, I guess. I cut all the turns with one
+slash, and he went over on his side, flop, and started kicking with his
+tied legs. Laugh! I don't know what there was so funny about it, but I
+fairly shouted. What between my laughing and his wriggling, I had a job
+in cutting him free. As soon as he could feel his limbs he makes for the
+bank, where the governor was standing, crawls up to him on his hands and
+knees, and embraces his legs. Gratitude, eh? You could see that being
+allowed to live suited that chap down to the ground. The governor gets
+his legs away from him gently and just mutters to me:
+
+"'Let's be off. Get him into the boat.'
+
+"It was not difficult," continued Ricardo, after eyeing Schomberg
+fixedly for a moment. "He was ready enough to get into the boat,
+and--here he is. He would let himself be chopped into small pieces--with
+a smile, mind; with a smile!--for the governor. I don't know about him
+doing that much for me; but pretty near, pretty near. I did the tying up
+and the untying, but he could see who was the boss. And then he knows a
+gentleman. A dog knows a gentleman--any dog. It's only some foreigners
+that don't know; and nothing can teach them, either."
+
+"And you mean to say," asked Schomberg, disregarding what might have
+been annoying for himself in the emphasis of the final remark, "you mean
+to say that you left steady employment at good wages for a life like
+this?"
+
+"There!" began Ricardo quietly. "That's just what a man like you would
+say. You are that tame! I follow a gentleman. That ain't the same thing
+as to serve an employer. They give you wages as they'd fling a bone to
+a dog, and they expect you to be grateful. It's worse than slavery. You
+don't expect a slave that's bought for money to be grateful. And if you
+sell your work--what is it but selling your own self? You've got so many
+days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me
+enough for my life? Ay! But they throw at you your week's money and
+expect you to say 'thank you' before you pick it up."
+
+He mumbled some curses, directed at employers generally, as it seemed,
+then blazed out:
+
+"Work be damned! I ain't a dog walking on its hind legs for a bone; I am
+a man who's following a gentleman. There's a difference which you will
+never understand, Mr. Tame Schomberg."
+
+He yawned slightly. Schomberg, preserving a military stiffness
+reinforced by a slight frown, had allowed his thoughts to stray away.
+They were busy detailing the image of a young girl--absent--gone--stolen
+from him. He became enraged. There was that rascal looking at him
+insolently. If the girl had not been shamefully decoyed away from him,
+he would not have allowed anyone to look at him insolently. He would
+have made nothing of hitting that rogue between the eyes. Afterwards he
+would have kicked the other without hesitation. He saw himself doing it;
+and in sympathy with this glorious vision Schomberg's right foot, and
+arm moved convulsively.
+
+At this moment he came out of his sudden reverie to note with alarm the
+wide-awake curiosity of Mr. Ricardo's stare.
+
+"And so you go like this about the world, gambling," he remarked
+inanely, to cover his confusion. But Ricardo's stare did not change its
+character, and he continued vaguely:
+
+"Here and there and everywhere." He pulled himself together, squared his
+shoulders. "Isn't it very precarious?" he said firmly.
+
+The word precarious--seemed to be effective, because Ricardo's eyes lost
+their dangerously interested expression.
+
+"No, not so bad," Ricardo said, with indifference. "It's my opinion that
+men will gamble as long as they have anything to put on a card. Gamble?
+That's nature. What's life itself? You never know what may turn up. The
+worst of it is that you never can tell exactly what sort of cards you
+are holding yourself. What's trumps?--that is the question. See? Any man
+will gamble if only he's given a chance, for anything or everything. You
+too--"
+
+"I haven't touched a card now for twenty years," said Schomberg in an
+austere tone.
+
+"Well, if you got your living that way you would be no worse than you
+are now, selling drinks to people--beastly beer and spirits, rotten
+stuff fit to make an old he-goat yell if you poured it down its throat.
+Pooh! I can't stand the confounded liquor. Never could. A whiff of neat
+brandy in a glass makes me feel sick. Always did. If everybody was like
+me, liquor would be going a-begging. You think it's funny in a man,
+don't you?"
+
+Schomberg made a vague gesture of toleration. Ricardo hitched up his
+chair and settled his elbow afresh on the table.
+
+"French siros I must say I do like. Saigon's the place for them. I see
+you have siros in the bar. Hang me if I ain't getting dry, conversing
+like this with you. Come, Mr. Schomberg, be hospitable, as the governor
+says."
+
+Schomberg rose and walked with dignity to the counter. His footsteps
+echoed loudly on the floor of polished boards. He took down a bottle,
+labelled "Sirop de Groseille." The little sounds he made, the clink of
+glass, the gurgling of the liquid, the pop of the soda-water cork had
+a preternatural sharpness. He came back carrying a pink and glistening
+tumbler. Mr. Ricardo had followed his movements with oblique, coyly
+expectant yellow eyes, like a cat watching the preparation of a saucer
+of milk, and the satisfied sound after he had drunk might have been a
+slightly modified form of purring, very soft and deep in his throat. It
+affected Schomberg unpleasantly as another example of something inhuman
+in those men wherein lay the difficulty of dealing with them. A
+spectre, a cat, an ape--there was a pretty association for a mere man to
+remonstrate with, he reflected with an inward shudder; for Schomberg had
+been overpowered, as it were, by his imagination, and his reason could
+not react against that fanciful view of his guests. And it was not only
+their appearance. The morals of Mr. Ricardo seemed to him to be pretty
+much the morals of a cat. Too much. What sort of argument could a mere
+man offer to a . . . or to a spectre, either! What the morals of a
+spectre could be, Schomberg had no idea. Something dreadful, no
+doubt. Compassion certainly had no place in them. As to the ape--well,
+everybody knew what an ape was. It had no morals. Nothing could be more
+hopeless.
+
+Outwardly, however, having picked up the cigar which he had laid aside
+to get the drink, with his thick fingers, one of them ornamented by a
+gold ring, Schomberg smoked with moody composure. Facing him, Ricardo
+blinked slowly for a time, then closed his eyes altogether, with the
+placidity of the domestic cat dozing on the hearth-rug. In another
+moment he opened them very wide, and seemed surprised to see Schomberg
+there.
+
+"You're having a very slack time today, aren't you?" he observed. "But
+then this whole town is confoundedly slack, anyhow; and I've never faced
+such a slack party at a table before. Come eleven o'clock, they begin to
+talk of breaking up. What's the matter with them? Want to go to bed so
+early, or what?"
+
+"I reckon you don't lose a fortune by their wanting to go to bed," said
+Schomberg, with sombre sarcasm.
+
+"No," admitted Ricardo, with a grin that stretched his thin mouth from
+ear to ear, giving a sudden glimpse of his white teeth. "Only, you see,
+when I once start, I would play for nuts, for parched peas, for any
+rubbish. I would play them for their souls. But these Dutchmen aren't
+any good. They never seem to get warmed up properly, win or lose. I've
+tried them both ways, too. Hang them for a beggarly, bloodless lot of
+animated cucumbers!"
+
+"And if anything out of the way was to happen, they would be just
+as cool in locking you and your gentleman up," Schomberg snarled
+unpleasantly.
+
+"Indeed!" said Ricardo slowly, taking Schomberg's measure with his eyes.
+"And what about you?"
+
+"You talk mighty big," burst out the hotel-keeper. "You talk of ranging
+all over the world, and doing great things, and taking fortune by the
+scruff of the neck, but here you stick at this miserable business!"
+
+"It isn't much of a lay--that's a fact," admitted Ricardo unexpectedly.
+
+Schomberg was red in the face with audacity.
+
+"I call it paltry," he spluttered.
+
+"That's how it looks. Can't call it anything else." Ricardo seemed to
+be in an accommodating mood. "I should be ashamed of it myself, only you
+see the governor is subject to fits--"
+
+"Fits!" Schomberg cried out, but in a low tone. "You don't say so!" He
+exulted inwardly, as if this disclosure had in some way diminished the
+difficulty of the situation. "Fits! That's a serious thing, isn't it?
+You ought to take him to the civil hospital--a lovely place."
+
+Ricardo nodded slightly, with a faint grin.
+
+"Serious enough. Regular fits of laziness, I call them. Now and then
+he lays down on me like this, and there's no moving him. If you think I
+like it, you're a long way out. Generally speaking, I can talk him over.
+I know how to deal with a gentleman. I am no daily-bread slave. But when
+he has said, 'Martin, I am bored,' then look out! There's nothing to do
+but to shut up, confound it!"
+
+Schomberg, very much cast down, had listened open-mouthed.
+
+"What's the cause of it?" he asked. "Why is he like this? I don't
+understand."
+
+"I think I do," said Ricardo. "A gentleman, you know, is not such a
+simple person as you or I; and not so easy to manage, either. If only I
+had something to lever him out with!"
+
+"What do you mean, to lever him out with?" muttered Schomberg
+hopelessly.
+
+Ricardo was impatient with this denseness.
+
+"Don't you understand English? Look here! I couldn't make this
+billiard table move an inch if I talked to it from now till the end of
+days--could I? Well, the governor is like that, too, when the fits are
+on him. He's bored. Nothing's worthwhile, nothing's good enough, that's
+mere sense. But if I saw a capstan bar lying about here, I would soon
+manage to shift that billiard table of yours a good many inches. And
+that's all there is to it."
+
+He rose noiselessly, stretched himself, supple and stealthy, with
+curious sideways movements of his head and unexpected elongations of his
+thick body, glanced out of the corners of his eyes in the direction of
+the door, and finally leaned back against the table, folding his arms on
+his breast comfortably, in a completely human attitude.
+
+"That's another thing you can tell a gentleman by--his freakishness.
+A gentleman ain't accountable to nobody, any more than a tramp on the
+roads. He ain't got to keep time. The governor got like this once in a
+one-horse Mexican pueblo on the uplands, away from everywhere. He lay
+all day long in a dark room--"
+
+"Drunk?" This word escaped Schomberg by inadvertence at which he became
+frightened. But the devoted secretary seemed to find it natural.
+
+"No, that never comes on together with this kind of fit. He just lay
+there full length on a mat, while a ragged, bare-legged boy that he had
+picked up in the street sat in the patio, between two oleanders near the
+open door of his room, strumming on a guitar and singing tristes to him
+from morning to night. You know tristes--twang, twang, twang, aouh, hoo!
+Chroo, yah!"
+
+Schomberg uplifted his hands in distress. This tribute seemed to flatter
+Ricardo. His mouth twitched grimly.
+
+"Like that--enough to give colic to an ostrich, eh? Awful. Well, there
+was a cook there who loved me--an old fat, Negro woman with spectacles.
+I used to hide in the kitchen and turn her to, to make me dulces--sweet
+things, you know, mostly eggs and sugar--to pass the time away. I am
+like a kid for sweet things. And, by the way, why don't you ever have
+a pudding at your tablydott, Mr. Schomberg? Nothing but fruit, morning,
+noon, and night. Sickening! What do you think a fellow is--a wasp?"
+
+Schomberg disregarded the injured tone.
+
+"And how long did that fit, as you call it, last?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"Weeks, months, years, centuries, it seemed to me," returned Mr. Ricardo
+with feeling. "Of an evening the governor would stroll out into the sala
+and fritter his life away playing cards with the juez of the place--a
+little Dago with a pair of black whiskers--ekarty, you know, a
+quick French game, for small change. And the comandante, a one-eyed,
+half-Indian, flat-nosed ruffian, and I, we had to stand around and bet
+on their hands. It was awful!"
+
+"Awful," echoed Schomberg, in a Teutonic throaty tone of despair. "Look
+here, I need your rooms."
+
+"To be sure. I have been thinking that for some time past," said Ricardo
+indifferently.
+
+"I was mad when I listened to you. This must end!"
+
+"I think you are mad yet," said Ricardo, not even unfolding his arms or
+shifting his attitude an inch. He lowered his voice to add: "And if
+I thought you had been to the police, I would tell Pedro to catch
+you round the waist and break your fat neck by jerking your head
+backward--snap! I saw him do it to a big buck nigger who was flourishing
+a razor in front of the governor. It can be done. You hear a low crack,
+that's all--and the man drops down like a limp rag."
+
+Not even Ricardo's head, slightly inclined on the left shoulder, had
+moved; but when he ceased the greenish irises which had been staring out
+of doors glided into the corners of his eyes nearest to Schomberg and
+stayed there with a coyly voluptuous expression.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+Schomberg felt desperation, that lamentable substitute for courage,
+ooze out of him. It was not so much the threat of death as the weirdly
+circumstantial manner of its declaration which affected him. A mere
+"I'll murder you," however ferocious in tone, and earnest, in purpose,
+he could have faced; but before this novel mode of speech and procedure,
+his imagination being very sensitive to the unusual, he collapsed as if
+indeed his moral neck had been broken--snap!
+
+"Go to the police? Of course not. Never dreamed of it. Too late now.
+I've let myself be mixed up in this. You got my consent while I wasn't
+myself. I explained it to you at the time."
+
+Ricardo's eye glided gently off Schomberg to stare far away.
+
+"Ay! Some trouble with a girl. But that's nothing to us."
+
+"Naturally. What I say is, what's the good of all that savage talk to
+me?" A bright argument occurred to him. "It's out of proportion; for
+even if I were fool enough to go to the police now, there's nothing
+serious to complain about. It would only mean deportation for you. They
+would put you on board the first west-bound steamer to Singapore." He
+had become animated. "Out of this to the devil," he added between his
+teeth for his own private satisfaction.
+
+Ricardo made no comment, and gave no sign of having heard a single word.
+This discouraged Schomberg, who had looked up hopefully.
+
+"Why do you want to stick here?" he cried. "It can't pay you people
+to fool around like this. Didn't you worry just now about moving your
+governor? Well, the police would move him for you; and from Singapore
+you can go on to the east coast of Africa."
+
+"I'll be hanged if the fellow isn't up to that silly trick!" was
+Ricardo's comment, spoken in an ominous tone which recalled Schomberg to
+the realities of his position.
+
+"No! No!" he protested. "It's a manner of speaking. Of course I
+wouldn't."
+
+"I think that trouble about the girl has really muddled your brains,
+Mr. Schomberg. Believe me, you had better part friends with us; for,
+deportation or no deportation, you'll be seeing one of us turning up
+before long to pay you off for any nasty dodge you may be hatching in
+that fat head of yours."
+
+"Gott im Himmel!" groaned Schomberg. "Will nothing move him out? Will
+he stop here immer--I mean always? Suppose I were to make it worth your
+while, couldn't you--"
+
+"No," Ricardo interrupted. "I couldn't, unless I had something to lever
+him out with. I've told you that before."
+
+"An inducement?" muttered Schomberg.
+
+"Ay. The east coast of Africa isn't good enough. He told me the other
+day that it will have to wait till he is ready for it; and he may not be
+ready for a long time, because the east coast can't run away, and no one
+is likely to run off with it."
+
+These remarks, whether considered as truisms or as depicting Mr.
+Jones's mental state, were distinctly discouraging to the long-suffering
+Schomberg; but there is truth in the well-known saying that places
+the darkest hour before the dawn. The sound of words, apart from the
+context, has its power; and these two words, 'run off,' had a special
+affinity to the hotel-keeper's, haunting idea. It was always present
+in his brain, and now it came forward evoked by a purely fortuitous
+expression. No, nobody could run off with a continent; but Heyst had run
+off with the girl!
+
+Ricardo could have had no conception of the cause of Schomberg's changed
+expression. Yet it was noticeable enough to interest him so much that
+he stopped the careless swinging of his leg and said, looking at the
+hotel-keeper:
+
+"There's not much use arguing against that sort of talk--is there?"
+
+Schomberg was not listening.
+
+"I could put you on another track," he said slowly, and stopped, as if
+suddenly choked by an unholy emotion of intense eagerness combined with
+fear of failure. Ricardo waited, attentive, yet not without a certain
+contempt.
+
+"On the track of a man!" Schomberg uttered convulsively, and paused
+again, consulting his rage and his conscience.
+
+"The man in the moon, eh?" suggested Ricardo, in a jeering murmur.
+
+Schomberg shook his head.
+
+"It would be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the
+moon. You go and try. It isn't so very far."
+
+He reflected. These men were thieves and murderers as well as gamblers.
+Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly complete. But he
+preferred not to think of it in detail. He put it to himself summarily
+that he would be paying Heyst out and would, at the same time, relieve
+himself of these men's oppression. He had only to let loose his natural
+gift for talking scandalously about his fellow creatures. And in this
+case his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love,
+has an eloquence of its own. With the utmost ease he portrayed for
+Ricardo, now seriously attentive, a Heyst fattened by years of private
+and public rapines, the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many
+shareholders, a wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep
+purposes and simple wiles, of mystery and futility. In this exercise of
+his natural function Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his
+face, loquacious, florid, eager, his manliness set off by the military
+bearing.
+
+"That's the exact story. He was seen hanging about this part of the
+world for years, spying into everybody's business: but I am the only
+one who has seen through him from the first--contemptible, double-faced,
+stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow."
+
+"Dangerous, is he?"
+
+Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo's voice.
+
+"Well, you know what I mean," he said uneasily. "A lying, circumventing,
+soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal. Nothing open about him."
+
+Mr Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the room in
+an oblique, noiseless manner. He flashed a grin at Schomberg in passing,
+and a snarling:
+
+"Ah! H'm!"
+
+"Well, what more dangerous do you want?" argued Schomberg. "He's in no
+way a fighting man, I believe," he added negligently.
+
+"And you say he has been living alone there?"
+
+"Like the man in the moon," answered Schomberg readily. "There's no
+one that cares a rap what becomes of him. He has been lying low, you
+understand, after bagging all that plunder."
+
+"Plunder, eh? Why didn't he go home with it?" inquired Ricardo.
+
+The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this was
+something worth looking into. And he was pursuing truth in the manner
+of men of sounder morality and purer intentions than his own; that is he
+pursued it in the light of his own experience and prejudices. For facts,
+whatever their origin (and God only knows where they come from), can be
+only tested by our own particular suspicions. Ricardo was suspicious all
+round. Schomberg, such is the tonic of recovered self-esteem, Schomberg
+retorted fearlessly:
+
+"Go home? Why don't you go home? To hear your talk, you must have made
+a pretty considerable pile going round winning people's money. You ought
+to be ready by this time."
+
+Ricardo stopped to look at Schomberg with surprise.
+
+"You think yourself very clever, don't you?" he said.
+
+Schomberg just then was so conscious of being clever that the snarling
+irony left him unmoved. There was positively a smile in his noble
+Teutonic beard, the first smile for weeks. He was in a felicitous vein.
+
+"How do you know that he wasn't thinking of going home? As a matter of
+fact, he was on his way home."
+
+"And how do I know that you are not amusing yourself by spinning out
+a blamed fairy tale?" interrupted Ricardo roughly. "I wonder at myself
+listening to the silly rot!"
+
+Schomberg received this turn of temper unmoved. He did not require to be
+very subtly observant to notice that he had managed to arouse some sort
+of feeling, perhaps of greed, in Ricardo's breast.
+
+"You won't believe me? Well! You can ask anybody that comes here if
+that--that Swede hadn't got as far as this house on his way home. Why
+should he turn up here if not for that? You ask anybody."
+
+"Ask, indeed!" returned the other. "Catch me asking at large about a man
+I mean to drop on! Such jobs must be done on the quiet--or not at all."
+
+The peculiar intonation of the last phrase touched the nape of
+Schomberg's neck with a chill. He cleared his throat slightly and looked
+away as though he had heard something indelicate. Then, with a jump as
+it were:
+
+"Of course he didn't tell me. Is it likely? But haven't I got eyes?
+Haven't I got my common sense to tell me? I can see through people. By
+the same token, he called on the Tesmans. Why did he call on the Tesmans
+two days running, eh? You don't know? You can't tell?"
+
+He waited complacently till Ricardo had finished swearing quite openly
+at him for a confounded chatterer, and then went on:
+
+"A fellow doesn't go to a counting-house in business hours for a chat
+about the weather, two days running. Then why? To close his account with
+them one day, and to get his money out the next! Clear, what?"
+
+Ricardo, with his trick of looking one way and moving another approached
+Schomberg slowly.
+
+"To get his money?" he purred.
+
+"Gewiss," snapped Schomberg with impatient superiority. "What else? That
+is, only the money he had with the Tesmans. What he has buried or put
+away on the island, devil only knows. When you think of the lot of hard
+cash that passed through that man's hands, for wages and stores and all
+that--and he's just a cunning thief, I tell you." Ricardo's hard stare
+discomposed the hotel-keeper, and he added in an embarrassed tone: "I
+mean a common, sneaking thief--no account at all. And he calls himself a
+Swedish baron, too! Tfui!"
+
+"He's a baron, is he? That foreign nobility ain't much," commented Mr.
+Ricardo seriously. "And then what? He hung about here!"
+
+"Yes, he hung about," said Schomberg, making a wry mouth. "He--hung
+about. That's it. Hung--"
+
+His voice died out. Curiosity was depicted in Ricardo's countenance.
+
+"Just like that; for nothing? And then turned about and went back to
+that island again?"
+
+"And went back to that island again," Schomberg echoed lifelessly,
+fixing his gaze on the floor.
+
+"What's the matter with you?" asked Ricardo with genuine surprise. "What
+is it?"
+
+Schomberg, without looking up, made an impatient gesture. His face was
+crimson, and he kept it lowered. Ricardo went back to the point.
+
+"Well, but how do you account for it? What was his reason? What did he
+go back to the island for?"
+
+"Honeymoon!" spat out Schomberg viciously.
+
+Perfectly still, his eyes downcast, he suddenly, with no preliminary
+stir, hit the table with his fist a blow which caused the utterly
+unprepared Ricardo to leap aside. And only then did Schomberg look up
+with a dull, resentful expression.
+
+Ricardo stared hard for a moment, spun on his heel, walked to the end
+of the room, came back smartly, and muttered a profound "Ay! Ay!" above
+Schomberg's rigid head. That the hotel-keeper was capable of a
+great moral effort was proved by a gradual return of his severe,
+Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner.
+
+"Ay, ay!" repeated Ricardo more deliberately than before, and as if
+after a further survey of the circumstances, "I wish I hadn't asked you,
+or that you had told me a lie. It don't suit me to know that there's a
+woman mixed up in this affair. What's she like? It's the girl you--"
+
+"Leave off!" muttered Schomberg, utterly pitiful behind his stiff
+military front.
+
+"Ay, ay!" Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more and more
+enlightened and perplexed. "Can't bear to talk about it--so bad as that?
+And yet I would bet she isn't a miracle to look at."
+
+Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn't know, as if he didn't care.
+Then he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.
+
+"Swedish baron--h'm!" Ricardo continued meditatively. "I believe the
+governor would think that business worth looking up, quite, if I put it
+to him properly. The governor likes a duel, if you will call it so; but
+I don't know a man that can stand up to him on the square. Have you ever
+seen a cat play with a mouse? It's a pretty sight!"
+
+Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression,
+looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the alarm
+of a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession of his
+breast.
+
+"There are no lies between you and me," he said, more steadily than he
+thought he could speak.
+
+"What's the good now? He funks women. In that Mexican pueblo where we
+lay grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak, I used to go to dances of
+an evening. The girls there would ask me if the English caballero in
+the posada was a monk in disguise, or if he had taken a vow to the
+sancissima madre not to speak to a woman, or whether--You can imagine
+what fairly free-spoken girls will ask when they come to the point of
+not caring what they say; and it used to vex me. Yes, the governor funks
+facing women."
+
+"One woman?" interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.
+
+"One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred, for that
+matter. In a place that's full of women you needn't look at them unless
+you like; but if you go into a room where there is only one woman, young
+or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her. And, unless you are
+after her, then--the governor is right enough--she's in the way."
+
+"Why notice them?" muttered Schomberg. "What can they do?"
+
+"Make a noise, if nothing else," opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the
+distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed, nothing
+is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty and
+absorbing card game. "Noise, noise, my friend," he went on forcibly;
+"confounded screeching about something or other, and I like it no more
+than the governor does. But with the governor there's something else
+besides. He can't stand them at all."
+
+He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no
+philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment
+without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little
+fetishism, he emitted his own conclusion, which surely could not go to
+the root of the matter.
+
+"I'm hanged if I don't think they are to him what liquor is to me.
+Brandy--pah!"
+
+He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder. Schomberg
+listened to him in wonder. It looked as if the very scoundrelism, of
+that--that Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity standing
+between the thief and the retribution.
+
+"That's so, old buck." Ricardo broke the silence after contemplating
+Schomberg's mute dejection with a sort of sympathy. "I don't think this
+trick will work."
+
+"But that's silly," whispered the man deprived of the vengeance which he
+had seemed already to hold in his hand, by a mysterious and exasperating
+idiosyncrasy.
+
+"Don't you set yourself to judge a gentleman." Ricardo without anger
+administered a moody rebuke. "Even I can't understand the governor
+thoroughly. And I am an Englishman and his follower. No, I don't think I
+care to put it before him, sick as I am of staying here."
+
+Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of seeing
+him stay. Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of Heyst as
+created by his own power of false inferences, of his hate, of his love
+of scandal, that he could not contain a stifled cry of conviction
+as sincere as most of our convictions, the disguised servants of our
+passions, can appear at a supreme moment.
+
+"It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand pounds,
+or two or three times as much, for all I know. No trouble, no--"
+
+"The petticoat's the trouble," Ricardo struck in.
+
+He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which an
+observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such as a
+wild animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might betray.
+Schomberg saw nothing. It would probably have cheered his drooping
+spirits; but in a general way he preferred not to look at Ricardo.
+Ricardo, however, with one of his slanting, gliding, restless glances,
+observed the bitter smile on Schomberg's bearded lips--the unmistakable
+smile of ruined hopes.
+
+"You are a pretty unforgiving sort of chap," he said, stopping for a
+moment with an air of interest. "Hang me if I ever saw anybody look so
+disappointed! I bet you would send black plague to that island if you
+only knew how--eh, what? Plague too good for them? Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+He bent down to stare at Schomberg who sat unstirring with stony eyes
+and set features, and apparently deaf to the rasping derision of that
+laughter so close to his red fleshy ear.
+
+"Black plague too good for them, ha, ha!" Ricardo pressed the point on
+the tormented hotel-keeper. Schomberg kept his eyes down obstinately.
+
+"I don't wish any harm to the girl--" he muttered.
+
+"But did she bolt from you? A fair bilk? Come!"
+
+"Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her--what he
+promised her, how he frightened her. She couldn't have cared for him,
+I know." Schomberg's vanity clung to the belief in some atrocious,
+extraordinary means of seduction employed by Heyst. "Look how he
+bewitched that poor Morrison," he murmured.
+
+"Ah, Morrison--got all his money, what?"
+
+"Yes--and his life."
+
+"Terrible fellow, that Swedish baron! How is one to get at him?"
+
+Schomberg exploded.
+
+"Three against one! Are you shy? Do you want me to give you a letter of
+introduction?"
+
+"You ought to look at yourself in a glass," Ricardo said quietly. "Dash
+me if you don't get a stroke of some kind presently. And this is the
+fellow who says women can do nothing! That one will do for you, unless
+you manage to forget her."
+
+"I wish I could," Schomberg admitted earnestly. "And it's all the doing
+of that Swede. I don't get enough sleep, Mr. Ricardo. And then, to
+finish me off, you gentlemen turn up . . . as if I hadn't enough worry."
+
+"That's done you good," suggested the secretary with ironic seriousness.
+"Takes your mind off that silly trouble. At your age too."
+
+He checked himself, as if in pity, and changing his tone:
+
+"I would really like to oblige you while doing a stroke of business at
+the same time."
+
+"A good stroke," insisted Schomberg, as if it were mechanically. In his
+simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered his
+head. An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with Schomberg
+ideas were rare and therefore tenacious. "Minted gold," he murmured with
+a sort of anguish.
+
+Such an expressive combination of words was not without effect upon
+Ricardo. Both these men were amenable to the influence of verbal
+suggestions. The secretary of "plain Mr. Jones" sighed and murmured.
+
+"Yes. But how is one to get at it?"
+
+"Being three to one," said Schomberg, "I suppose you could get it for
+the asking."
+
+"One would think the fellow lived next door," Ricardo growled
+impatiently. "Hang it all, can't you understand a plain question? I have
+asked you the way."
+
+Schomberg seemed to revive.
+
+"The way?"
+
+The torpor of deceived hopes underlying his superficial changes of mood
+had been pricked by these words which seemed pointed with purpose.
+
+"The way is over the water, of course," said the hotel-keeper. "For
+people like you, three days in a good, big boat is nothing. It's no more
+than a little outing, a bit of a change. At this season the Java Sea
+is a pond. I have an excellent, safe boat--a ship's life-boat--carry
+thirty, let alone three, and a child could handle her. You wouldn't get
+a wet face at this time of the year. You might call it a pleasure-trip."
+
+"And yet, having this boat, you didn't go after her yourself--or after
+him? Well, you are a fine fellow for a disappointed lover."
+
+Schomberg gave a start at the suggestion.
+
+"I am not three men," he said sulkily, as the shortest answer of the
+several he could have given.
+
+"Oh, I know your sort," Ricardo let fall negligently. "You are like most
+people--or perhaps just a little more peaceable than the rest of the
+buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten show. Well, well,
+you respectable citizen," he went on, "let us go thoroughly into the
+matter."
+
+When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones's henchman was
+ready to discuss, in his own words, "this boat of yours, with courses
+and distances," and such concrete matters of no good augury to that
+villainous Swede, he recovered his soldierly bearing, squared his
+shoulders, and asked in his military manner:
+
+"You wish, then, to proceed with the business?"
+
+Ricardo nodded. He had a great mind to, he said. A gentleman had to be
+humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too, on occasions,
+for his own good. And it was the business of the right sort of
+"follower" to know the proper time and the proper methods of that
+delicate part of his duty. Having exposed this theory Ricardo proceeded
+to the application.
+
+"I've never actually lied to him," he said, "and I ain't going to now.
+I shall just say nothing about the girl. He will have to get over the
+shock the best he can. Hang it all! Too much humouring won't do here."
+
+"Funny thing," Schomberg observed crisply.
+
+"Is it? Ay, you wouldn't mind taking a woman by the throat in some dark
+corner and nobody by, I bet!"
+
+Ricardo's dreadful, vicious, cat-like readiness to get his claws out at
+any moment startled Schomberg as usual. But it was provoking too.
+
+"And you?" he defended himself. "Don't you want me to believe you are up
+to anything?"
+
+"I, my boy? Oh, yes. I am not that gentleman; neither are you. Take 'em
+by the throat or chuck 'em under the chin is all one to me--almost,"
+affirmed Ricardo, with something obscurely ironical in his complacency.
+"Now, as to this business. A three days' jaunt in a good boat isn't a
+thing to frighten people like us. You are right, so far; but there are
+other details."
+
+Schomberg was ready enough to enter into details. He explained that he
+had a small plantation, with a fairly habitable hut on it, on Madura. He
+proposed that his guest should start from town in his boat, as if going
+for an excursion to that rural spot. The custom-house people on the quay
+were used to see his boat go off on such trips.
+
+From Madura, after some repose and on a convenient day, Mr. Jones
+and party would make the real start. It would all be plain sailing.
+Schomberg undertook to provision the boat. The greatest hardship the
+voyagers need apprehend would be a mild shower of rain. At that season
+of the year there were no serious thunderstorms.
+
+Schomberg's heart began to thump as he saw himself nearing his
+vengeance. His speech was thick but persuasive.
+
+"No risk at all--none whatever."
+
+Ricardo dismissed these assurances of safety with an impatient gesture.
+He was thinking of other risks.
+
+"The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted at sea,
+and that may bring awkwardness later on. A ship's boat with three white
+men in her, knocking about out of sight of land, is bound to make talk.
+Are we likely to be seen on our way?"
+
+"No, unless by native craft," said Schomberg.
+
+Ricardo nodded, satisfied. Both these white men looked on native life as
+a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could
+walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its
+incomprehensible aims and needs. No. Native craft did not count, of
+course. It was an empty, solitary part of the sea, Schomberg expounded
+further. Only the Ternate mail-boat crossed that region about the eighth
+of every month, regularly--nowhere near the island though. Rigid, his
+voice hoarse, his heart thumping, his mind concentrated on the success
+of his plan, the hotel-keeper multiplied words, as if to keep as many
+of them as possible between himself and the murderous aspect of his
+purpose.
+
+"So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on the
+eighth--always best to make a start at night, with a land breeze--it's a
+hundred to one--What am I saying?--it's a thousand to one that no
+human eye will see you on the passage. All you've got to do is keep her
+heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps not quite so long.
+There will always be draft enough to keep a boat moving; you may reckon
+on that; and then--"
+
+The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with eagerness,
+with impatience, and with something like apprehension, the true nature
+of which was not clear to him. And he did not want to investigate it.
+Ricardo regarded him steadily, with those dry eyes of his shining more
+like polished stones than living tissue.
+
+"And then what?" he asked.
+
+"And then--why, you will astonish der herr baron--ha, ha!"
+
+Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in a
+hoarse bass.
+
+"And you believe he has all that plunder by him?" asked Ricardo, rather
+perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely probable when
+looked at all round by his acute mind.
+
+Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.
+
+"How can it be otherwise? He was going home, he was on his way, in this
+hotel. Ask people. Was it likely he would leave it behind him?"
+
+Ricardo was thoughtful. Then, suddenly raising his head, he remarked:
+
+"Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh? That's not much of a sailing
+direction. I've heard of a port being missed before on better
+information. Can't you say what sort of landfall a fellow may expect?
+But I suppose you have never seen that island yourself?"
+
+Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a
+man congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an
+unsavoury experience. No, certainly not. He had never had any business
+to call there. But what of that? He could give Mr. Ricardo as good a
+sea-mark as anybody need wish for. He laughed nervously. Miss it! He
+defied anyone that came within forty miles of it to miss the retreat of
+that villainous Swede.
+
+"What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at
+night? There's a volcano in full blast near that island--enough to guide
+almost a blind man. What more do you want? An active volcano to steer
+by?"
+
+These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared.
+The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs. Schomberg,
+dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room.
+She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her
+place, where she sat down to stare straight before her, as usual.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial
+enterprise. The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal
+Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where
+prying eyes--if any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or
+in sorrow--could have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine
+enterprise.
+
+Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass of
+two wet seasons' growth. The silence of his surroundings, broken only by
+such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain through the
+foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing the leaves of
+the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the shore, favoured
+rather than hindered his solitary meditation.
+
+A meditation is always--in a white man, at least--more or less an
+interrogative exercise. Heyst meditated in simple terms on the mystery
+of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest reflection:
+
+"There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all."
+
+He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that this
+primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed. The oldest voice in the
+world is just the one that never ceases to speak. If anybody could have
+silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst's father, with
+his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but apparently he
+could not. There was in the son a lot of that first ancestor who,
+as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from the celestial mould,
+started inspecting and naming the animals of that paradise which he was
+so soon to lose.
+
+Action--the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth! The
+barbed hook, baited with the illusions of progress, to bring out of the
+lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!
+
+"And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the silliest
+fish of them all." Heyst said to himself.
+
+He suffered. He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought to
+have been a masterpiece of aloofness. He remembered always his last
+evening with his father. He remembered the thin features, the great mass
+of white hair, and the ivory complexion. A five-branched candlestick
+stood on a little table by the side of the easy chair. They had been
+talking a long time. The noises of the street had died out one by one,
+till at last, in the moonlight, the London houses began to look like the
+tombs of an unvisited, unhonoured, cemetery of hopes.
+
+He had listened. Then, after a silence, he had asked--for he was really
+young then:
+
+"Is there no guidance?"
+
+His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the moon
+swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town.
+
+"You still believe in something, then?" he said in a clear voice,
+which had been growing feeble of late. "You believe in flesh and blood,
+perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too.
+But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate
+that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least
+difficult--always remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as
+pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself."
+
+"What is one to do, then?" sighed the young man, regarding his father,
+rigid in the high-backed chair.
+
+"Look on--make no sound," were the last words of the man who had spent
+his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which filled heaven
+and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding.
+
+That very night he died in his bed, so quietly that they found him
+in his usual attitude of sleep, lying on his side, one hand under his
+cheek, and his knees slightly bent. He had not even straightened his
+legs.
+
+His son buried the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of beliefs.
+He observed that the death of that bitter contemner of life did not
+trouble the flow of life's stream, where men and women go by thick as
+dust, revolving and jostling one another like figures cut out of cork
+and weighted with lead just sufficiently to keep them in their proudly
+upright posture.
+
+After the funeral, Heyst sat alone, in the dusk, and his meditation took
+the form of a definite vision of the stream, of the fatuously jostling,
+nodding, spinning figures hurried irresistibly along, and giving no sign
+of being aware that the voice on the bank had been suddenly silenced .
+. . Yes. A few obituary notices generally insignificant and some grossly
+abusive. The son had read them all with mournful detachment.
+
+"This is the hate and rage of their fear," he thought to himself, "and
+also of wounded vanity. They shriek their little shriek as they fly
+past. I suppose I ought to hate him too . . ."
+
+He became aware of his eyes being wet. It was not that the man was his
+father. For him it was purely a matter of hearsay which could not in
+itself cause this emotion. No! It was because he had looked at him so
+long that he missed him so much. The dead man had kept him on the bank
+by his side. And now Heyst felt acutely that he was alone on the bank of
+the stream. In his pride he determined not to enter it.
+
+A few slow tears rolled down his face. The rooms, filling with shadows,
+seemed haunted by a melancholy, uneasy presence which could not express
+itself. The young man got up with a strange sense of making way for
+something impalpable that claimed possession, went out of the house, and
+locked the door. A fortnight later he started on his travels--to "look
+on and never make a sound."
+
+The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain
+quantity of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and
+pictures, which might have complained of heartless desertion after many
+years of faithful service; for there is a soul in things. Heyst, our
+Heyst, had often thought of them, reproachful and mute, shrouded and
+locked up in those rooms, far away in London with the sounds of the
+street reaching them faintly, and sometimes a little sunshine, when
+the blinds were pulled up and the windows opened from time to time in
+pursuance of his original instructions and later reminders. It seemed
+as if in his conception of a world not worth touching, and perhaps not
+substantial enough to grasp, these objects familiar to his childhood and
+his youth, and associated with the memory of an old man, were the only
+realities, something having an absolute existence. He would never have
+them sold, or even moved from the places they occupied when he looked
+upon them last. When he was advised from London that his lease had
+expired, and that the house, with some others as like it as two peas,
+was to be demolished, he was surprisingly distressed.
+
+He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. Already
+the Tropical Belt Coal Company was in existence. He sent instructions
+to have some of the things sent out to him at Samburan, just as any
+ordinary, credulous person would have done. They came, torn out from
+their long repose--a lot of books, some chairs and tables, his father's
+portrait in oils, which surprised Heyst by its air of youth, because he
+remembered his father as a much older man; a lot of small objects, such
+as candlesticks, inkstands, and statuettes from his father's study,
+which surprised him because they looked so old and so much worn.
+
+The manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, unpacking them on the
+veranda in the shade besieged by a fierce sunshine, must have felt like
+a remorseful apostate before these relics. He handled them tenderly;
+and it was perhaps their presence there which attached him to the island
+when he woke up to the failure of his apostasy. Whatever the decisive
+reason, Heyst had remained where another would have been glad to be off.
+The excellent Davidson had discovered the fact without discovering the
+reason, and took a humane interest in Heyst's strange existence, while
+at the same time his native delicacy kept him from intruding on the
+other's whim of solitude. He could not possibly guess that Heyst, alone
+on the island, felt neither more nor less lonely than in any other
+place, desert or populous. Davidson's concern was, if one may express it
+so, the danger of spiritual starvation; but this was a spirit which had
+renounced all outside nourishment, and was sustaining itself proudly on
+its own contempt of the usual coarse ailments which life offers to the
+common appetites of men.
+
+Neither was Heyst's body in danger of starvation, as Schomberg had so
+confidently asserted. At the beginning of the company's operations the
+island had been provisioned in a manner which had outlasted the need.
+Heyst did not need to fear hunger; and his very loneliness had not been
+without some alleviation. Of the crowd of imported Chinese labourers,
+one at least had remained in Samburan, solitary and strange, like a
+swallow left behind at the migrating season of his tribe.
+
+Wang was not a common coolie. He had been a servant to white men before.
+The agreement between him and Heyst consisted in the exchange of a few
+words on the day when the last batch of the mine coolies was leaving
+Samburan. Heyst, leaning over the balustrade of the veranda, was looking
+on, as calm in appearance as though he had never departed from the
+doctrine that this world, for the wise, is nothing but an amusing
+spectacle. Wang came round the house, and standing below, raised up his
+yellow, thin face.
+
+"All finished?" he asked. Heyst nodded slightly from above, glancing
+towards the jetty. A crowd of blue-clad figures with yellow faces and
+calves was being hustled down into the boats of the chartered steamer
+lying well out, like a painted ship on a painted sea; painted in crude
+colours, without shadows, without feeling, with brutal precision.
+
+"You had better hurry up if you don't want to be left behind."
+
+But the Chinaman did not move.
+
+"We stop," he declared. Heyst looked down at him for the first time.
+
+"You want to stop here?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What were you? What was your work here?"
+
+"Mess-loom boy."
+
+"Do you want to stay with me here as my boy?" inquired Heyst, surprised.
+
+The Chinaman unexpectedly put on a deprecatory expression, and said,
+after a marked pause:
+
+"Can do."
+
+"You needn't," said Heyst, "unless you like. I propose to stay on
+here--it may be for a very long time. I have no power to make you go if
+you wish to remain, but I don't see why you should."
+
+"Catchee one piecee wife," remarked Wang unemotionally, and marched off,
+turning his back on the wharf and the great world beyond, represented by
+the steamer waiting for her boats.
+
+Heyst learned presently that Wang had persuaded one of the women of
+Alfuro village, on the west shore of the island, beyond the central
+ridge, to come over to live with him in a remote part of the company's
+clearing. It was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros, having been
+frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had blocked the path over
+the ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept strictly on their own
+side. The coolies, as a body, mistrusting the manifest mildness of these
+harmless fisher-folk, had kept to their lines, without attempting to
+cross the island. Wang was the brilliant exception. He must have been
+uncommonly fascinating, in a way that was not apparent to Heyst, or else
+uncommonly persuasive. The woman's services to Heyst were limited to
+the fact that she had anchored Wang to the spot by her charms, which
+remained unknown to the white man, because she never came near the
+houses. The couple lived at the edge of the forest, and she could
+sometimes be seen gazing towards the bungalow shading her eyes with her
+hand. Even from a distance she appeared to be a shy, wild creature,
+and Heyst, anxious not to try her primitive nerves unduly, scrupulously
+avoided that side of the clearing in his strolls.
+
+The day--or rather the first night--after his hermit life began, he was
+aware of vague sounds of revelry in that direction. Emboldened by the
+departure of the invading strangers, some Alfuros, the woman's friends
+and relations, had ventured over the ridge to attend something in the
+nature of a wedding feast. Wang had invited them. But this was the only
+occasion when any sound louder than the buzzing of insects had troubled
+the profound silence of the clearing. The natives were never invited
+again. Wang not only knew how to live according to conventional
+proprieties, but had strong personal views as to the manner of arranging
+his domestic existence. After a time Heyst perceived that Wang had
+annexed all the keys. Any keys left lying about vanished after Wang had
+passed that way. Subsequently some of them--those that did not belong
+to the store-rooms and the empty bungalows, and could not be regarded
+as the common property of this community of two--were returned to Heyst,
+tied in a bunch with a piece of string. He found them one morning
+lying by the side of his plate. He had not been inconvenienced by their
+absence, because he never locked up anything in the way of drawers and
+boxes. Heyst said nothing. Wang also said nothing. Perhaps he had always
+been a taciturn man; perhaps he was influenced by the genius of the
+locality, which was certainly that of silence. Till Heyst and Morrison
+had landed in Black Diamond Bay, and named it, that side of Samburan had
+hardly ever heard the sound of human speech. It was easy to be taciturn
+with Heyst, who had plunged himself into an abyss of meditation over
+books, and remained in it till the shadow of Wang falling across the
+page, and the sound of a rough, low voice uttering the Malay word
+"makan," would force him to climb out to a meal.
+
+Wang in his native province in China might have been an aggressively,
+sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in
+a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to
+except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per
+day. And he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he
+suffered he made up for it with the Alfuro woman. He always went back to
+her at the first fall of dusk, vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at
+this hour, like a sort of topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a
+white jacket and a pigtail. Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling
+passion, he could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between
+the mighty stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe. After a
+time, he discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the empty
+store-rooms, and it is to be supposed that he got on famously; but
+nothing of it could be seen, because he went to the trouble of pulling
+to pieces one of the company's sheds in order to get materials for
+making a high and very close fence round his patch, as if the growing
+of vegetables were a patented process, or an awful and holy mystery
+entrusted to the keeping of his race.
+
+Heyst, following from a distance the progress of Wang's gardening and of
+these precautions--there was nothing else to look at--was amused at
+the thought that he, in his own person, represented the market for
+its produce. The Chinaman had found several packets of seeds in the
+store-rooms, and had surrendered to an irresistible impulse to put them
+into the ground. He would make his master pay for the vegetables which
+he was raising to satisfy his instinct. And, looking silently at the
+silent Wang going about his work in the bungalow in his unhasty,
+steady way; Heyst envied the Chinaman's obedience to his instincts, the
+powerful simplicity of purpose which made his existence appear almost
+automatic in the mysterious precision of its facts.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+During his master's absence at Sourabaya, Wang had busied himself with
+the ground immediately in front of the principal bungalow. Emerging
+from the fringe of grass growing across the shore end of the coal-jetty,
+Heyst beheld a broad, clear space, black and level, with only one or two
+clumps of charred twigs, where the flame had swept from the front of his
+house to the nearest trees of the forest.
+
+"You took the risk of firing the grass?" Heyst asked.
+
+Wang nodded. Hanging on the arm of the white man before whom he stood
+was the girl called Alma; but neither from the Chinaman's eyes nor from
+his expression could anyone have guessed that he was in the slightest
+degree aware of the fact.
+
+"He has been tidying the place in his labour-saving way," explained
+Heyst, without looking at the girl, whose hand rested on his forearm.
+"He's the whole establishment, you see. I told you I hadn't even a dog
+to keep me company here."
+
+Wang had marched off towards the wharf.
+
+"He's like those waiters in that place," she said. That place was
+Schomberg's hotel.
+
+"One Chinaman looks very much like another," Heyst remarked. "We shall
+find it useful to have him here. This is the house."
+
+They faced, at some distance, the six shallow steps leading up to the
+veranda. The girl had abandoned Heyst's arm.
+
+"This is the house," he repeated.
+
+She did not offer to budge away from his side, but stood staring fixedly
+at the steps, as if they had been something unique and impracticable. He
+waited a little, but she did not move.
+
+"Don't you want to go in?" he asked, without turning his head to look at
+her. "The sun's too heavy to stand about here." He tried to overcome
+a sort of fear, a sort of impatient faintness, and his voice sounded
+rough. "You had better go in," he concluded.
+
+They both moved then, but at the foot of the stairs Heyst stopped, while
+the girl went on rapidly, as if nothing could stop her now. She crossed
+the veranda swiftly, and entered the twilight of the big central room
+opening upon it, and then the deeper twilight of the room beyond. She
+stood still in the dusk, in which her dazzled eyes could scarcely make
+out the forms of objects, and sighed a sigh of relief. The impression
+of the sunlight, of sea and sky, remained with her like a memory of a
+painful trial gone through--done with at last!
+
+Meanwhile Heyst had walked back slowly towards the jetty; but he did not
+get so far as that. The practical and automatic Wang had got hold of
+one of the little trucks that had been used for running baskets of coal
+alongside ships. He appeared pushing it before him, loaded lightly with
+Heyst's bag and the bundle of the girl's belongings, wrapped in Mrs.
+Schomberg's shawl. Heyst turned about and walked by the side of the
+rusty rails on which the truck ran. Opposite the house Wang stopped,
+lifted the bag to his shoulder, balanced it carefully, and then took the
+bundle in his hand.
+
+"Leave those things on the table in the big room--understand?"
+
+"Me savee," grunted Wang, moving off.
+
+Heyst watched the Chinaman disappear from the veranda. It was not till
+he had seen Wang come out that he himself entered the twilight of the
+big room. By that time Wang was out of sight at the back of the house,
+but by no means out of hearing. The Chinaman could hear the voice of
+him who, when there were many people there, was generally referred to
+as "Number One." Wang was not able to understand the words, but the tone
+interested him.
+
+"Where are you?" cried Number One.
+
+Then Wang heard, much more faint, a voice he had never heard before--a
+novel impression which he acknowledged by cocking his head slightly to
+one side.
+
+"I am here--out of the sun."
+
+The new voice sounded remote and uncertain. Wang heard nothing more,
+though he waited for some time, very still, the top of his shaven poll
+exactly level with the floor of the back veranda. His face meanwhile
+preserved an inscrutable immobility. Suddenly he stooped to pick up
+the lid of a deal candle-box which was lying on the ground by his foot.
+Breaking it up with his fingers, he directed his steps towards the
+cook-shed, where, squatting on his heels, he proceeded to kindle a small
+fire under a very sooty kettle, possibly to make tea. Wang had some
+knowledge of the more superficial rites and ceremonies of white men's
+existence, otherwise so enigmatically remote to his mind, and containing
+unexpected possibilities of good and evil, which had to be watched for
+with prudence and care.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+That morning, as on all the others of the full tale of mornings since
+his return with the girl to Samburan, Heyst came out on the veranda and
+spread his elbows on the railing, in an easy attitude of proprietorship.
+The bulk of the central ridge of the island cut off the bungalow from
+sunrises, whether glorious or cloudy, angry or serene. The dwellers
+therein were debarred from reading early the fortune of the new-born
+day. It sprang upon them in its fulness with a swift retreat of the
+great shadow when the sun, clearing the ridge, looked down, hot and dry,
+with a devouring glare like the eye of an enemy. But Heyst, once the
+Number One of this locality, while it was comparatively teeming with
+mankind, appreciated the prolongation of early coolness, the subdued,
+lingering half-light, the faint ghost of the departed night, the
+fragrance of its dewy, dark soul captured for a moment longer between
+the great glow of the sky and the intense blaze of the uncovered sea.
+
+It was naturally difficult for Heyst to keep his mind from dwelling on
+the nature and consequences of this, his latest departure from the part
+of an unconcerned spectator. Yet he had retained enough of his wrecked
+philosophy to prevent him from asking himself consciously how it would
+end. But at the same time he could not help being temperamentally, from
+long habit and from set purpose, a spectator still, perhaps a little
+less naive but (as he discovered with some surprise) not much more far
+sighted than the common run of men. Like the rest of us who act, all he
+could say to himself, with a somewhat affected grimness, was:
+
+"We shall see!"
+
+This mood of grim doubt intruded on him only when he was alone. There
+were not many such moments in his day now; and he did not like them when
+they came. On this morning he had no time to grow uneasy. Alma came out
+to join him long before the sun, rising above the Samburan ridge, swept
+the cool shadow of the early morning and the remnant of the night's
+coolness clear off the roof under which they had dwelt for more than
+three months already. She came out as on other mornings. He had heard
+her light footsteps in the big room--the room where he had unpacked the
+cases from London; the room now lined with the backs of books halfway up
+on its three sides. Above the cases the fine matting met the ceiling of
+tightly stretched white calico. In the dusk and coolness nothing gleamed
+except the gilt frame of the portrait of Heyst's father, signed by a
+famous painter, lonely in the middle of a wall.
+
+Heyst did not turn round.
+
+"Do you know what I was thinking of?" he asked.
+
+"No," she said. Her tone betrayed always a shade of anxiety, as though
+she were never certain how a conversation with him would end. She leaned
+on the guard-rail by his side.
+
+"No," she repeated. "What was it?" She waited. Then, rather with
+reluctance than shyness, she asked:
+
+"Were you thinking of me?"
+
+"I was wondering when you would come out," said Heyst, still without
+looking at the girl--to whom, after several experimental essays in
+combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given the name of
+Lena.
+
+She remarked after a pause:
+
+"I was not very far from you."
+
+"Apparently you were not near enough for me."
+
+"You could have called if you wanted me," she said. "And I wasn't so
+long doing my hair."
+
+"Apparently it was too long for me."
+
+"Well, you were thinking of me, anyhow. I am glad of it. Do you know,
+it seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking of me I
+shouldn't be in the world at all!"
+
+He turned round and looked at her. She often said things which surprised
+him. A vague smile faded away on her lips before his scrutiny.
+
+"What is it?" he asked. "Is it a reproach?"
+
+"A reproach! Why, how could it be?" she defended herself.
+
+"Well, what did it mean?" he insisted.
+
+"What I said--just what I said. Why aren't you fair?"
+
+"Ah, this is at least a reproach!"
+
+She coloured to the roots of her hair.
+
+"It looks as if you were trying to make out that I am disagreeable," she
+murmured. "Am I? You will make me afraid to open my mouth presently. I
+shall end by believing I am no good."
+
+Her head drooped a little. He looked at her smooth, low brow, the
+faintly coloured cheeks, and the red lips parted slightly, with the
+gleam of her teeth within.
+
+"And then I won't be any good," she added with conviction. "That I
+won't! I can only be what you think I am."
+
+He made a slight movement. She put her hand on his arm, without raising
+her head, and went on, her voice animated in the stillness of her body:
+
+"It is so. It couldn't be any other way with a girl like me and a man
+like you. Here we are, we two alone, and I can't even tell where we
+are."
+
+"A very well-known spot of the globe," Heyst uttered gently. "There
+must have been at least fifty thousand circulars issued at the time--a
+hundred and fifty thousand, more likely. My friend was looking after
+that, and his ideas were large and his belief very strong. Of us two it
+was he who had the faith. A hundred and fifty thousand, certainly."
+
+"What is it you mean?" she asked in a low tone.
+
+"What should I find fault with you for?" Heyst went on. "For being
+amiable, good, gracious--and pretty?"
+
+A silence fell. Then she said:
+
+"It's all right that you should think that of me. There's no one here to
+think anything of us, good or bad."
+
+The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she uttered.
+The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave him, he was
+aware, was more physical than moral. Every time she spoke to him she
+seemed to abandon to him something of herself--something excessively
+subtle and inexpressible, to which he was infinitely sensible, which he
+would have missed horribly if she were to go away. While he was looking
+into her eyes she raised her bare forearm, out of the short sleeve, and
+held it in the air till he noticed it and hastened to pose his great
+bronze moustaches on the whiteness of the skin. Then they went in.
+
+Wang immediately appeared in front, and, squatting on his heels, began
+to potter mysteriously about some plants at the foot of the veranda.
+When Heyst and the girl came out again, the Chinaman had gone in his
+peculiar manner, which suggested vanishing out of existence rather than
+out of sight, a process of evaporation rather than of movement. They
+descended the steps, looking at each other, and started off smartly
+across the cleared ground; but they were not ten yards away when,
+without perceptible stir or sound, Wang materialized inside the empty
+room. The Chinaman stood still with roaming eyes, examining the walls as
+if for signs, for inscriptions; exploring the floor as if for pitfalls,
+for dropped coins. Then he cocked his head slightly at the profile of
+Heyst's father, pen in hand above a white sheet of paper on a crimson
+tablecloth; and, moving forward noiselessly, began to clear away the
+breakfast things.
+
+Though he proceeded without haste, the unerring precision of his
+movements, the absolute soundlessness of the operation, gave it
+something of the quality of a conjuring trick. And, the trick having
+been performed, Wang vanished from the scene, to materialize presently
+in front of the house. He materialized walking away from it, with no
+visible or guessable intention; but at the end of some ten paces he
+stopped, made a half turn, and put his hand up to shade his eyes. The
+sun had topped the grey ridge of Samburan. The great morning shadow was
+gone; and far away in the devouring sunshine Wang was in time to see
+Number One and the woman, two remote white specks against the sombre
+line of the forest. In a moment they vanished. With the smallest display
+of action, Wang also vanished from the sunlight of the clearing.
+
+Heyst and Lena entered the shade of the forest path which crossed the
+island, and which, near its highest point had been blocked by felled
+trees. But their intention was not to go so far. After keeping to the
+path for some distance, they left it at a point where the forest was
+bare of undergrowth, and the trees, festooned with creepers, stood clear
+of one another in the gloom of their own making. Here and there great
+splashes of light lay on the ground. They moved, silent in the great
+stillness, breathing the calmness, the infinite isolation, the repose of
+a slumber without dreams. They emerged at the upper limit of vegetation,
+among some rocks; and in a depression of the sharp slope, like a small
+platform, they turned about and looked from on high over the sea,
+lonely, its colour effaced by sunshine, its horizon a heat mist, a mere
+unsubstantial shimmer in the pale and blinding infinity overhung by the
+darker blaze of the sky.
+
+"It makes my head swim," the girl murmured, shutting her eyes and
+putting her hand on his shoulder.
+
+Heyst, gazing fixedly to the southward, exclaimed:
+
+"Sail ho!"
+
+A moment of silence ensued.
+
+"It must be very far away," he went on. "I don't think you could see it.
+Some native craft making for the Moluccas, probably. Come, we mustn't
+stay here."
+
+With his arm round her waist, he led her down a little distance, and
+they settled themselves in the shade; she, seated on the ground, he a
+little lower, reclining at her feet.
+
+"You don't like to look at the sea from up there?" he said after a time.
+
+She shook her head. That empty space was to her the abomination of
+desolation. But she only said again:
+
+"It makes my head swim."
+
+"Too big?" he inquired.
+
+"Too lonely. It makes my heart sink, too," she added in a low voice, as
+if confessing a secret.
+
+"I'm afraid," said Heyst, "that you would be justified in reproaching me
+for these sensations. But what would you have?"
+
+His tone was playful, but his eyes, directed at her face, were serious.
+She protested.
+
+"I am not feeling lonely with you--not a bit. It is only when we come up
+to that place, and I look at all that water and all that light--"
+
+"We will never come here again, then," he interrupted her.
+
+She remained silent for a while, returning his gaze till he removed it.
+
+"It seems as if everything that there is had gone under," she said.
+
+"Reminds you of the story of the deluge," muttered the man, stretched at
+her feet and looking at them. "Are you frightened at it?"
+
+"I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone. When I say, I,
+of course I mean we."
+
+"Do you?" . . . Heyst remained silent for a while. "The vision of a
+world destroyed," he mused aloud. "Would you be sorry for it?"
+
+"I should be sorry for the happy people in it," she said simply.
+
+His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he seemed
+to detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a glimpse of the
+sun through the clouds.
+
+"I should have thought it's they specially who ought to have been
+congratulated. Don't you?"
+
+"Oh, yes--I understand what you mean; but there were forty days before
+it was all over."
+
+"You seem to be in possession of all the details."
+
+Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in silence.
+She was not looking at him.
+
+"Sunday school," she murmured. "I went regularly from the time I
+was eight till I was thirteen. We lodged in the north of London, off
+Kingsland Road. It wasn't a bad time. Father was earning good money
+then. The woman of the house used to pack me off in the afternoon with
+her own girls. She was a good woman. Her husband was in the post office.
+Sorter or something. Such a quiet man. He used to go off after supper
+for night-duty, sometimes. Then one day they had a row, and broke up the
+home. I remember I cried when we had to pack up all of a sudden and go
+into other lodgings. I never knew what it was, though--"
+
+"The deluge," muttered Heyst absently.
+
+He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the first
+moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had come
+together. The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of
+audacity and sadness, would have given interest to the most inane
+chatter. But she was no chatterer. She was rather silent, with a
+capacity for immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the
+concert platform between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her
+hands reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey,
+unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable
+reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force--or
+simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of
+complete surrender.
+
+During a long pause she did not look at him. Then suddenly, as if
+the word "deluge" had stuck in her mind, she asked, looking up at the
+cloudless sky:
+
+"Does it ever rain here?"
+
+"There is a season when it rains almost every day," said Heyst,
+surprised. "There are also thunderstorms. We once had a 'mud-shower.'"
+
+"Mud-shower?"
+
+"Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes. He sometimes clears his
+red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at the
+same time. It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally well
+behaved--just smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first showed
+you the smudge in the sky from the schooner's deck. He's a good-natured,
+lazy fellow of a volcano."
+
+"I saw a mountain smoking like that before," she said, staring at the
+slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front of her. "It wasn't
+very long after we left England--some few days, though. I was so ill at
+first that I lost count of days. A smoking mountain--I can't think how
+they called it."
+
+"Vesuvius, perhaps," suggested Heyst.
+
+"That's the name."
+
+"I saw it, too, years, ages ago," said Heyst.
+
+"On your way here?"
+
+"No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of the world. I
+was yet a boy."
+
+She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover some
+trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the hair
+thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches. Heyst stood the frank
+examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect these
+veiled grey eyes produced--whether on his heart or on his nerves,
+whether sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he was unable to
+say.
+
+"Well, princess of Samburan," he said at last, "have I found favour in
+your sight?"
+
+She seemed to wake up, and shook her head.
+
+"I was thinking," she murmured very low.
+
+"Thought, action--so many snares! If you begin to think you will be
+unhappy."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of myself!" she declared with a simplicity which took
+Heyst aback somewhat.
+
+"On the lips of a moralist this would sound like a rebuke," he said,
+half seriously; "but I won't suspect you of being one. Moralists and I
+haven't been friends for many years."
+
+She had listened with an air of attention.
+
+"I understood you had no friends," she said. "I am pleased that there's
+nobody to find fault with you for what you have done. I like to think
+that I am in no one's way."
+
+Heyst would have said something, but she did not give him time.
+Unconscious of the movement he made she went on:
+
+"What I was thinking to myself was, why are you here?"
+
+Heyst let himself sink on his elbow again.
+
+"If by 'you' you mean 'we'--well, you know why we are here."
+
+She bent her gaze down at him.
+
+"No, it isn't that. I meant before--all that time before you came across
+me and guessed at once that I was in trouble, with no one to turn to.
+And you know it was desperate trouble too."
+
+Her voice fell on the last words, as if she would end there; but there
+was something so expectant in Heyst's attitude as he sat at her feet,
+looking up at her steadily, that she continued, after drawing a short,
+quick breath:
+
+"It was, really. I told you I had been worried before by bad fellows.
+It made me unhappy, disturbed--angry, too. But oh, how I hated, hated,
+hated that man!"
+
+"That man" was the florid Schomberg with the military bearing,
+benefactor of white men ('decent food to eat in decent company')--mature
+victim of belated passion. The girl shuddered. The characteristic
+harmoniousness of her face became, as it were, decomposed for an
+instant. Heyst was startled.
+
+"Why think of it now?" he cried.
+
+"It's because I was cornered that time. It wasn't as before. It was
+worse, ever so much. I wished I could die of my fright--and yet it's
+only now that I begin to understand what a horror it might have been.
+Yes, only now, since we--"
+
+Heyst stirred a little.
+
+"Came here," he finished.
+
+Her tenseness relaxed, her flushed face went gradually back to its
+normal tint.
+
+"Yes," she said indifferently, but at the same time she gave him a
+stealthy glance of passionate appreciation; and then her face took on a
+melancholy cast, her whole figure drooped imperceptibly.
+
+"But you were coming back here anyhow?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. I was only waiting for Davidson. Yes, I was coming back here, to
+these ruins--to Wang, who perhaps did not expect to see me again. It's
+impossible to guess at the way that Chinaman draws his conclusions, and
+how he looks upon one."
+
+"Don't talk about him. He makes me feel uncomfortable. Talk about
+yourself!"
+
+"About myself? I see you are still busy with the mystery of my existence
+here; but it isn't at all mysterious. Primarily the man with the quill
+pen in his hand in that picture you so often look at is responsible for
+my existence. He is also responsible for what my existence is, or
+rather has been. He was a great man in his way. I don't know much of his
+history. I suppose he began like other people; took fine words for good,
+ringing coin and noble ideals for valuable banknotes. He was a great
+master of both, himself, by the way. Later he discovered--how am I to
+explain it to you? Suppose the world were a factory and all mankind
+workmen in it. Well, he discovered that the wages were not good enough.
+That they were paid in counterfeit money."
+
+"I see!" the girl said slowly.
+
+"Do you?"
+
+Heyst, who had been speaking as if to himself, looked up curiously.
+
+"It wasn't a new discovery, but he brought his capacity for scorn to
+bear on it. It was immense. It ought to have withered this globe. I
+don't know how many minds he convinced. But my mind was very young then,
+and youth I suppose can be easily seduced--even by a negation. He was
+very ruthless, and yet he was not without pity. He dominated me without
+difficulty. A heartless man could not have done so. Even to fools he was
+not utterly merciless. He could be indignant, but he was too great for
+flouts and jeers. What he said was not meant for the crowd; it could not
+be; and I was flattered to find myself among the elect. They read his
+books, but I have heard his living word. It was irresistible. It was
+as if that mind were taking me into its confidence, giving me a special
+insight into its mastery of despair. Mistake, no doubt. There is
+something of my father in every man who lives long enough. But they
+don't say anything. They can't. They wouldn't know how, or perhaps,
+they wouldn't speak if they could. Man on this earth is an unforeseen
+accident which does not stand close investigation. However, that
+particular man died as quietly as a child goes to sleep. But, after
+listening to him, I could not take my soul down into the street to fight
+there. I started off to wander about, an independent spectator--if that
+is possible."
+
+For a long time the girl's grey eyes had been watching his face. She
+discovered that, addressing her, he was really talking to himself. Heyst
+looked up, caught sight of her as it were, and caught himself up, with a
+low laugh and a change of tone.
+
+"All this does not tell you why I ever came here. Why, indeed? It's like
+prying into inscrutable mysteries which are not worth scrutinizing. A
+man drifts. The most successful men have drifted into their successes.
+I don't want to tell you that this is a success. You wouldn't believe
+me if I did. It isn't; neither is it the ruinous failure it looks. It
+proves nothing, unless perhaps some hidden weakness in my character--and
+even that is not certain."
+
+He looked fixedly at her, and with such grave eyes that she felt obliged
+to smile faintly at him, since she did not understand what he meant. Her
+smile was reflected, still fainter, on his lips.
+
+"This does not advance you much in your inquiry," he went on. "And in
+truth your question is unanswerable; but facts have a certain positive
+value, and I will tell you a fact. One day I met a cornered man. I use
+the word because it expresses the man's situation exactly, and because
+you just used it yourself. You know what that means?"
+
+"What do you say?" she whispered, astounded. "A man!"
+
+Heyst laughed at her wondering eyes.
+
+"No! No! I mean in his own way."
+
+"I knew very well it couldn't be anything like that," she observed under
+her breath.
+
+"I won't bother you with the story. It was a custom-house affair,
+strange as it may sound to you. He would have preferred to be killed
+outright--that is, to have his soul dispatched to another world, rather
+than to be robbed of his substance, his very insignificant substance, in
+this. I saw that he believed in another world because, being cornered,
+as I have told you, he went down on his knees and prayed. What do you
+think of that?"
+
+Heyst paused. She looked at him earnestly.
+
+"You didn't make fun of him for that?" she said.
+
+Heyst made a brusque movement of protest
+
+"My dear girl, I am not a ruffian," he cried. Then, returning to his
+usual tone: "I didn't even have to conceal a smile. Somehow it didn't
+look a smiling matter. No, it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he
+was so representative of all the past victims of the Great Joke. But it
+is by folly alone that the world moves, and so it is a respectable thing
+upon the whole. And besides, he was what one would call a good man. I
+don't mean especially because he had offered up a prayer. No! He was
+really a decent fellow, he was quite unfitted for this world, he was a
+failure, a good man cornered--a sight for the gods; for no decent mortal
+cares to look at that sort." A thought seemed to occur to him. He turned
+his face to the girl. "And you, who have been cornered too--did you
+think of offering a prayer?"
+
+Neither her eyes nor a single one of her features moved the least bit.
+She only let fall the words:
+
+"I am not what they call a good girl."
+
+"That sounds evasive," said Heyst after a short silence. "Well, the good
+fellow did pray and after he had confessed to it I was struck by the
+comicality of the situation. No, don't misunderstand me--I am not
+alluding to his act, of course. And even the idea of Eternity, Infinity,
+Omnipotence, being called upon to defeat the conspiracy of two miserable
+Portuguese half-castes did not move my mirth. From the point of view of
+the supplicant, the danger to be conjured was something like the end
+of the world, or worse. No! What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel
+Heyst, the most detached of creatures in this earthly captivity, the
+veriest tramp on this earth, an indifferent stroller going through the
+world's bustle--that I should have been there to step into the situation
+of an agent of Providence. I, a man of universal scorn and unbelief. . .
+."
+
+"You are putting it on," she interrupted in her seductive voice, with a
+coaxing intonation.
+
+"No. I am not like that, born or fashioned, or both. I am not for
+nothing the son of my father, of that man in the painting. I am he, all
+but the genius. And there is even less in me than I make out, because
+the very scorn is falling away from me year after year. I have never
+been so amused as by that episode in which I was suddenly called to act
+such an incredible part. For a moment I enjoyed it greatly. It got him
+out of his corner, you know."
+
+"You saved a man for fun--is that what you mean? Just for fun?"
+
+"Why this tone of suspicion?" remonstrated Heyst. "I suppose the sight
+of this particular distress was disagreeable to me. What you call fun
+came afterwards, when it dawned on me that I was for him a walking,
+breathing, incarnate proof of the efficacy of prayer. I was a little
+fascinated by it--and then, could I have argued with him? You don't
+argue against such evidence, and besides it would have looked as if
+I had wanted to claim all the merit. Already his gratitude was simply
+frightful. Funny position, wasn't it? The boredom came later, when we
+lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of inadvertence,
+created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don't know. One
+gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that
+friendship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a
+tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul."
+
+Heyst's tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which seasoned
+all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of his thoughts.
+The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose
+presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to
+live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater
+sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her
+head in both her hands.
+
+"Are you tired of sitting here?" Heyst asked.
+
+An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the answer
+she made.
+
+"Why are you looking so serious?" he pursued, and immediately thought
+that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more bearable than
+constant gaiety. "However, this expression suits you exceedingly," he
+added, not diplomatically, but because, by the tendency of his taste,
+it was a true statement. "And as long as I can be certain that it is not
+boredom which gives you this severe air, I am willing to sit here and
+look at you till you are ready to go."
+
+And this was true. He was still under the fresh sortilege of their
+common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his
+possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has ceased
+to be masculine. Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on him,
+then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot of the
+straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly withdrawing
+their shade. The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless head.
+She would not look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying herself.
+She felt in her innermost depths an irresistible desire to give herself
+up to him more completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice. This was
+something of which he did not seem to have an idea. He was a strange
+being without needs. She felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept
+silent, she said uneasily--for she didn't know what his silences might
+mean:
+
+"And so you lived with that friend--that good man?"
+
+"Excellent fellow," Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did not
+expect. "But it was a weakness on my part. I really didn't want to, only
+he wouldn't let me off, and I couldn't explain. He was the sort of man
+to whom you can't explain anything. He was extremely sensitive, and it
+would have been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings
+by the sort of plain speaking that would have been necessary. His
+mind was like a white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six
+straw-bottomed chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them
+in various combinations. But they were always the same chairs. He was
+extremely easy to live with; but then he got hold of this coal idea--or,
+rather, the idea got hold of him, it entered into that scantily
+furnished chamber of which I have just spoken, and sat on all the
+chairs. There was no dislodging it, you know! It was going to make his
+fortune, my fortune, everybody's fortune. In past years, in moments of
+doubt that will come to a man determined to remain free from absurdities
+of existence, I often asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what way
+would life try to get hold of me? And this was the way. He got it into
+his head that he could do nothing without me. And was I now, he asked
+me, to spurn and ruin him? Well, one morning--I wonder if he had gone
+down on his knees to pray that night!--one morning I gave in."
+
+Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away from
+him with a nervous gesture.
+
+"I gave in," he repeated.
+
+Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl noticed
+the strong feeling on his face with that intense interest which his
+person awakened in her mind and in her heart. But it soon passed away,
+leaving only a moody expression.
+
+"It's difficult to resist where nothing matters," he observed. "And
+perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me
+to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so well
+thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish
+like the veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe that I was actually
+respected for a time. I was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be
+loyal to the man. I have been, from first to last, completely, utterly
+loyal to the best of my ability. I thought he understood something about
+coal. And if I had been aware that he knew nothing of it, as in fact he
+didn't, well--I don't know what I could have done to stop him. In one
+way or another I should have had to be loyal. Truth, work, ambition,
+love itself, may be only counters in the lamentable or despicable game
+of life, but when one takes a hand one must play the game. No, the shade
+of Morrison needn't haunt me. What's the matter? I say, Lena, why are
+you staring like that? Do you feel ill?"
+
+Heyst made as if to get on his feet. The girl extended her arm to arrest
+him, and he remained staring in a sitting posture, propped on one arm,
+observing her indefinable expression of anxiety, as if she were unable
+to draw breath.
+
+"What has come to you?" he insisted, feeling strangely unwilling to
+move, to touch her.
+
+"Nothing!" She swallowed painfully. "Of course it can't be. What name
+did you say? I didn't hear it properly."
+
+"Name?" repeated Heyst dazedly. "I only mentioned Morrison. It's the
+name of that man of whom I've been speaking. What of it?"
+
+"And you mean to say that he was your friend?"
+
+"You have heard enough to judge for yourself. You know as much of our
+connection as I know myself. The people in this part of the world
+went by appearances, and called us friends, as far as I can remember.
+Appearances--what more, what better can you ask for? In fact you can't
+have better. You can't have anything else."
+
+"You are trying to confuse me with your talk," she cried. "You can't
+make fun of this."
+
+"Can't? Well, no I can't. It's a pity. Perhaps it would have been the
+best way," said Heyst, in a tone which for him could be called gloomy.
+"Unless one could forget the silly business altogether." His faint
+playfulness of manner and speech returned, like a habit one has schooled
+oneself into, even before his forehead had cleared completely. "But why
+are you looking so hard at me? Oh, I don't object, and I shall try not
+to flinch. Your eyes--"
+
+He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had forgotten
+all about the late Morrison at that moment.
+
+"No," he exclaimed suddenly. "What an impenetrable girl you are Lena,
+with those grey eyes of yours! Windows of the soul, as some poet has
+said. The fellow must have been a glazier by vocation. Well, nature has
+provided excellently for the shyness of your soul."
+
+When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of her
+breath. He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he thought he knew
+so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:
+
+"And that partner of yours is dead?"
+
+"Morrison? Oh, yes, as I've told you, he--"
+
+"You never told me."
+
+"Didn't I? I thought I did; or, rather, I thought you must know. It
+seems impossible that anybody with whom I speak should not know that
+Morrison is dead."
+
+She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like an
+expression of horror on her face.
+
+"Morrison!" she whispered in an appalled tone. "Morrison!" Her head
+drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her voice
+that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the syllables
+of that unromantic name. A thought flashed through his head--could she
+have known Morrison? But the mere difference of their origins made it
+wildly improbable.
+
+"This is very extraordinary!" he said. "Have you ever heard the name
+before?"
+
+Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as if she
+could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him. She was biting
+her lower lip.
+
+"Did you ever know anybody of that name?" he asked.
+
+The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke,
+jerkily, as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear. She had heard
+of that very man, she told Heyst.
+
+"Impossible!" he said positively. "You are mistaken. You couldn't have
+heard of him, it's--"
+
+He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was perfectly
+useless; that one doesn't argue against thin air.
+
+"But I did hear of him; only I didn't know then, I couldn't guess, that
+it was your partner they were talking about."
+
+"Talking about my partner?" repeated Heyst slowly.
+
+"No." Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as full of incredulity, as
+his. "No. They were talking of you really; only I didn't know it."
+
+"Who were they?" Heyst raised his voice. "Who was talking of me? Talking
+where?"
+
+With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining
+position; at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on a
+level.
+
+"Why, in that town, in that hotel. Where else could it have been?" she
+said.
+
+The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst's simplified
+conception of himself. For a moment he was as much surprised as if he
+had believed himself to be a mere gliding shadow among men. Besides,
+he had in him a half-unconscious notion that he was above the level of
+island gossip.
+
+"But you said first that it was of Morrison they talked," he remarked to
+the girl, sinking on his heels, and no longer much interested. "Strange
+that you should have the opportunity to hear any talk at all! I was
+rather under the impression that you never saw anybody belonging to the
+town except from the platform."
+
+"You forget that I was not living with the other girls," she said.
+"After meals they used to go back to the Pavilion, but I had to stay in
+the hotel and do my sewing, or what not, in the room where they talked."
+
+"I didn't think of that. By the by, you never told me who they were."
+
+"Why, that horrible red-faced beast," she said, with all the energy of
+disgust which the mere thought of the hotel-keeper provoked in her.
+
+"Oh, Schomberg!" Heyst murmured carelessly.
+
+"He talked to the boss--to Zangiacomo, I mean. I had to sit there. That
+devil-woman sometimes wouldn't let me go away. I mean Mrs. Zangiacomo."
+
+"I guessed," murmured Heyst. "She liked to torment you in a variety
+of ways. But it is really strange that the hotel-keeper should talk of
+Morrison to Zangiacomo. As far as I can remember he saw very little of
+Morrison professionally. He knew many others much better."
+
+The girl shuddered slightly.
+
+"That was the only name I ever overheard. I would get as far away from
+them as I could, to the other end of the room, but when that beast
+started shouting I could not help hearing. I wish I had never heard
+anything. If I had got up and gone out of the room I don't suppose the
+woman would have killed me for it; but she would have rowed me in a
+nasty way. She would have threatened me and called me names. That sort,
+when they know you are helpless, there's nothing to stop them. I don't
+know how it is, but bad people, real bad people that you can see are
+bad, they get over me somehow. It's the way they set about downing one.
+I am afraid of wickedness."
+
+Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face. He encouraged her,
+profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.
+
+"I quite understand. You needn't apologize for your great delicacy in
+the perception of inhuman evil. I am a little like you."
+
+"I am not very plucky," she said.
+
+"Well! I don't know myself what I would do, what countenance I would
+have before a creature which would strike me as being evil incarnate.
+Don't you be ashamed!"
+
+She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid expression
+on her face, and murmured:
+
+"You don't seem to want to know what he was saying."
+
+"About poor Morrison? It couldn't have been anything bad, for the poor
+fellow was innocence itself. And then, you know, he is dead, and nothing
+can possibly matter to him now."
+
+"But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!" she cried.
+
+"He was saying that Morrison's partner first got all there was to get
+out of him, and then, and then--well, as good as murdered him--sent him
+out to die somewhere!"
+
+"You believe that of me?" said Heyst, after a moment of perfect silence.
+
+"I didn't know it had anything to do with you. Schomberg was talking
+of some Swede. How was I to know? It was only when you began telling me
+about how you came here--"
+
+"And now you have my version." Heyst forced himself to speak quietly.
+"So that's how the business looked from outside!" he muttered.
+
+"I remember him saying that everybody in these parts knew the story,"
+the girl added breathlessly.
+
+"Strange that it should hurt me!" mused Heyst to himself; "yet it does.
+I seem to be as much of a fool as those everybodies who know the story
+and no doubt believe it. Can you remember any more?" he addressed the
+girl in a grimly polite tone. "I've often heard of the moral advantages
+of seeing oneself as others see one. Let us investigate further. Can't
+you recall something else that everybody knows?"
+
+"Oh! Don't laugh!" she cried.
+
+"Did I laugh? I assure you I was not aware of it. I won't ask you
+whether you believe the hotel-keeper's version. Surely you must know the
+value of human judgement!"
+
+She unclasped her hands, moved them slightly, and twined her fingers as
+before. Protest? Assent? Was there to be nothing more? He was relieved
+when she spoke in that warm and wonderful voice which in itself
+comforted and fascinated one's heart, which made her lovable.
+
+"I heard this before you and I ever spoke to each other. It went out of
+my memory afterwards. Everything went out of my memory then; and I was
+glad of it. It was a fresh start for me, with you--and you know it. I
+wish I had forgotten who I was--that would have been best; and I very
+nearly did forget."
+
+He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words. She seemed to
+be talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious terms of
+special significance. He thought that if she only could talk to him
+in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the sheer
+beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling.
+
+"But," she went on, "the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when you
+mentioned it--"
+
+"It broke the spell," muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if he
+had been deceived in some hope.
+
+The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still
+eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with
+a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before,
+because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the
+abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm. What if he should
+grow weary of the burden?
+
+"And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!"
+
+Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her
+steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise. It was a purely
+mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor puzzled. In
+fact, she could understand him better then than at any moment since she
+first set eyes on him.
+
+He laughed scornfully.
+
+"What am I thinking of?" he cried. "As if it could matter to me what
+anybody had ever said or believed, from the beginning of the world till
+the crack of doom!"
+
+"I never heard you laugh till today," she observed. "This is the second
+time!"
+
+He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.
+
+"That's because, when one's heart has been broken into in the way you
+have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to enter--shame,
+anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears--stupid laughter, too. I wonder
+what interpretation you are putting on it?"
+
+"It wasn't gay, certainly," she said. "But why are you angry with me?
+Are you sorry you took me away from those beasts? I told you who I was.
+You could see it."
+
+"Heavens!" he muttered. He had regained his command of himself. "I
+assure you I could see much more than you could tell me. I could see
+quite a lot that you don't even suspect yet, but you can't be seen quite
+through."
+
+He sank to the ground by her side and took her hand. She asked gently:
+
+"What more do you want from me?"
+
+He made no sound for a time.
+
+"The impossible, I suppose," he said very low, as one makes a
+confidence, and pressing the hand he grasped.
+
+It did not return the pressure. He shook his head as if to drive away
+the thought of this, and added in a louder, light tone:
+
+"Nothing less. And it isn't because I think little of what I've got
+already. Oh, no! It is because I think so much of this possession of
+mine that I can't have it complete enough. I know it's unreasonable. You
+can't hold back anything--now."
+
+"Indeed I couldn't," she whispered, letting her hand lie passive in his
+tight grasp. "I only wish I could give you something more, or better, or
+whatever it is you want."
+
+He was touched by the sincere accent of these simple words.
+
+"I tell you what you can do--you can tell me whether you would have gone
+with me like this if you had known of whom that abominable idiot of a
+hotel-keeper was speaking. A murderer--no less!"
+
+"But I didn't know you at all then," she cried. "And I had the sense to
+understand what he was saying. It wasn't murder, really. I never thought
+it was."
+
+"What made him invent such an atrocity?" Heyst exclaimed. "He seems
+a stupid animal. He is stupid. How did he manage to hatch that pretty
+tale? Have I a particularly vile countenance? Is black selfishness
+written all over my face? Or is that sort of thing so universally human
+that it might be said of anybody?"
+
+"It wasn't murder," she insisted earnestly.
+
+"I know. I understand. It was worse. As to killing a man, which would be
+a comparatively decent thing to do, well--I have never done that."
+
+"Why should you do it?" she asked in a frightened voice.
+
+"My dear girl, you don't know the sort of life I have been leading in
+unexplored countries, in the wilds; it's difficult to give you an idea.
+There are men who haven't been in such tight places as I have found
+myself in who have had to--to shed blood, as the saying is. Even the
+wilds hold prizes which tempt some people; but I had no schemes, no
+plans--and not even great firmness of mind to make me unduly obstinate.
+I was simply moving on, while the others, perhaps, were going somewhere.
+An indifference as to roads and purposes makes one meeker, as it were.
+And I may say truly, too, that I never did care, I won't say for life--I
+had scorned what people call by that name from the first--but for being
+alive. I don't know if that is what men call courage, but I doubt it
+very much."
+
+"You! You have no courage?" she protested.
+
+"I really don't know. Not the sort that always itches for a weapon, for
+I have never been anxious to use one in the quarrels that a man gets
+into in the most innocent way sometimes. The differences for which
+men murder each other are, like everything else they do, the most
+contemptible, the most pitiful things to look back upon. No, I've never
+killed a man or loved a woman--not even in my thoughts, not even in my
+dreams."
+
+He raised her hand to his lips, and let them rest on it for a space,
+during which she moved a little closer to him. After the lingering kiss
+he did not relinquish his hold.
+
+"To slay, to love--the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I
+have no experience of either. You must forgive me anything that may have
+appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive in my speeches,
+untimely in my silences."
+
+He moved uneasily, a little disappointed by her attitude, but indulgent
+to it, and feeling, in this moment of perfect quietness, that in holding
+her surrendered hand he had found a closer communion than they had ever
+achieved before. But even then there still lingered in him a sense of
+incompleteness not altogether overcome--which, it seemed, nothing ever
+would overcome--the fatal imperfection of all the gifts of life, which
+makes of them a delusion and a snare.
+
+All of a sudden he squeezed her hand angrily. His delicately playful
+equanimity, the product of kindness and scorn, had perished with the
+loss of his bitter liberty.
+
+"Not murder, you say! I should think not. But when you led me to talk
+just now, when the name turned up, when you understood that it was of me
+that these things had been said, you showed a strange emotion. I could
+see it."
+
+"I was a bit startled," she said.
+
+"At the baseness of my conduct?" he asked.
+
+"I wouldn't judge you, not for anything."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is." With her
+other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one movement the
+earth and the heaven. "I wouldn't do such a thing."
+
+Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:
+
+"I! I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!" he cried. "I, who could
+not bear to hurt his feelings. I, who respected his very madness! Yes,
+this madness, the wreck of which you can see lying about the jetty of
+Diamond Bay. What else could I do? He insisted on regarding me as his
+saviour; he was always restraining the eternal obligation on the tip of
+his tongue, till I was burning with shame at his gratitude. What could I
+do? He was going to repay me with this infernal coal, and I had to join
+him as one joins a child's game in a nursery. One would no more have
+thought of humiliating him than one would think of humiliating a child.
+What's the use of talking of all this! Of course, the people here
+could not understand the truth of our relation to each other. But what
+business of theirs was it? Kill old Morrison! Well, it is less criminal,
+less base--I am not saying it is less difficult--to kill a man than to
+cheat him in that way. You understand that?"
+
+She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction. His
+eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.
+
+"But it was neither one nor the other," he went on. "Then, why your
+emotion? All you confess is that you wouldn't judge me."
+
+She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing of
+her wonder could be read.
+
+"I said I couldn't," she whispered.
+
+"But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!" the playfulness
+of tone hardly concealed his irritation. "What power there must be in
+words, only imperfectly heard--for you did not listen with particular
+care, did you? What were they? What evil effort of invention drove them
+into that idiot's mouth out of his lying throat? If you were to try to
+remember, they would perhaps convince me, too."
+
+"I didn't listen," she protested. "What was it to me what they said of
+anybody? He was saying that there never were such loving friends to
+look at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him and got
+thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home and die."
+
+Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in these
+quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice. She ceased
+abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally weary, sick
+at heart.
+
+"Of course, why shouldn't you get tired of that or any other--company?
+You aren't like anyone else, and--and the thought of it made me unhappy
+suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe anything bad of you. I--"
+
+A brusque movement of his arm, flinging her hand away, stopped her
+short. Heyst had again lost control of himself. He would have shouted,
+if shouting had been in his character.
+
+"No, this earth must be the appointed hatching planet of calumny enough
+to furnish the whole universe. I feel a disgust at my own person, as if
+I had tumbled into some filthy hole. Pah! And you--all you can say is
+that you won't judge me; that you--"
+
+She raised her head at this attack, though indeed he had not turned to
+her.
+
+"I don't believe anything bad of you," she repeated. "I couldn't."
+
+He made a gesture as if to say:
+
+"That's sufficient."
+
+In his soul and in his body he experienced a nervous reaction from
+tenderness. All at once, without transition, he detested her. But only
+for a moment. He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she
+had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of
+individuality which excites--and escapes.
+
+He jumped up and began to walk to and fro. Presently his hidden fury
+fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind
+emptiness, desolation, regret. His resentment was not against the girl,
+but against life itself--that commonest of snares, in which he felt
+himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled by the
+lucidity of his mind.
+
+He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side.
+Before she could make a movement or even turn her head his way, he took
+her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness
+of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another
+appeal to his tenderness--a new seduction. The girl glanced round,
+moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed
+imperiously to him to leave her alone--a command which Heyst did not
+obey.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst scrambled quickly to
+his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had rolled a little
+way off. Meanwhile she busied herself in doing up her hair, plaited on
+the top of her head in two heavy, dark tresses, which had come loose. He
+tendered her the helmet in silence, and waited as if unwilling to hear
+the sound of his own voice.
+
+"We had better go down now," he suggested in a low tone.
+
+He extended his hand to help her up. He had the intention to smile,
+but abandoned it at the nearer sight of her still face, in which was
+depicted the infinite lassitude of her soul. On their way to regain the
+forest path they had to pass through the spot from which the view of
+the sea could be obtained. The flaming abyss of emptiness, the liquid,
+undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light, made her long for
+the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an austere spell; for the
+velvety dark sky and the mysterious great shadow of the sea, conveying
+peace to the day-weary heart. She put her hand to her eyes. Behind her
+back Heyst spoke gently.
+
+"Let us get on, Lena."
+
+She walked ahead in silence. Heyst remarked that they had never been
+out before during the hottest hours. It would do her no good, he feared.
+This solicitude pleased and soothed her. She felt more and more like
+herself--a poor London girl playing in an orchestra, and snatched out
+from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a miserable existence,
+by a man like whom there was not, there could not be, another in this
+world. She felt this with elation, with uneasiness, with an intimate
+pride--and with a peculiar sinking of the heart.
+
+"I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat," she said
+decisively.
+
+"Yes, but I don't forget that you're not a tropical bird."
+
+"You weren't born in these parts, either," she returned.
+
+"No, and perhaps I haven't even your physique. I am a transplanted
+being. Transplanted! I ought to call myself uprooted--an unnatural state
+of existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything."
+
+She looked back at him and received a smile. He told her to keep in the
+shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full of heat
+if free from glare. Now and then they had glimpses of the company's old
+clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps of trees stood
+charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister. They crossed the open
+in a direct line for the bungalow. On the veranda they fancied they had
+a glimpse of the vanishing Wang, though the girl was not at all sure
+that she had seen anything move. Heyst had no doubts.
+
+"Wang has been looking out for us. We are late."
+
+"Was he? I thought I saw something white for a moment, and then I did
+not see it any more."
+
+"That's it--he vanishes. It's a very remarkable gift in that Chinaman."
+
+"Are they all like that?" she asked with naive curiosity and uneasiness.
+
+"Not in such perfection," said Heyst, amused.
+
+He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk. The drops
+of perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool, white petal
+of a flower. He looked at her figure of grace and strength, solid and
+supple, with an ever-growing appreciation.
+
+"Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then Mr. Wang
+will give us something to eat," he said.
+
+They had found the table laid. When they came together again and sat
+down to it, Wang materialized without a sound, unheard, uncalled, and
+did his office. Which being accomplished, at a given moment he was not.
+
+A great silence brooded over Samburan--the silence of the great heat
+that seems pregnant with fatal issues, like the silence of ardent
+thought. Heyst remained alone in the big room. The girl seeing him
+take up a book, had retreated to her chamber. Heyst sat down under
+his father's portrait; and the abominable calumny crept back into his
+recollection. The taste of it came on his lips, nauseating and corrosive
+like some kinds of poison. He was tempted to spit on the floor, naively,
+in sheer unsophisticated disgust of the physical sensation. He shook his
+head, surprised at himself. He was not used to receive his intellectual
+impressions in that way--reflected in movements of carnal emotion. He
+stirred impatiently in his chair, and raised the book to his eyes with
+both hands. It was one of his father's. He opened it haphazard, and
+his eyes fell on the middle of the page. The elder Heyst had written of
+everything in many books--of space and of time, of animals and of stars;
+analysing ideas and actions, the laughter and the frowns of men, and the
+grimaces of their agony. The son read, shrinking into himself, composing
+his face as if under the author's eye, with a vivid consciousness of
+the portrait on his right hand, a little above his head; a wonderful
+presence in its heavy frame on the flimsy wall of mats, looking exiled
+and at home, out of place and masterful, in the painted immobility of
+profile.
+
+And Heyst, the son, read:
+
+Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love--the
+most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.
+
+He turned the pages of the little volume, "Storm and Dust," glancing
+here and there at the broken text of reflections, maxims, short phrases,
+enigmatical sometimes and sometimes eloquent. It seemed to him that he
+was hearing his father's voice, speaking and ceasing to speak again.
+Startled at first, he ended by finding a charm in the illusion. He
+abandoned himself to the half-belief that something of his father dwelt
+yet on earth--a ghostly voice, audible to the ear of his own flesh and
+blood. With what strange serenity, mingled with terrors, had that man
+considered the universal nothingness! He had plunged into it headlong,
+perhaps to render death, the answer that faced one at every inquiry,
+more supportable.
+
+Heyst stirred, and the ghostly voice ceased; but his eyes followed the
+words on the last page of the book:
+
+Men of tormented conscience, or of a criminal imagination, are aware of
+much that minds of a peaceful, resigned cast do not even suspect. It is
+not poets alone who dare descend into the abyss of infernal regions, or
+even who dream of such a descent. The most inexpressive of human beings
+must have said to himself, at one time or another: "Anything but this!"
+. . .
+
+We all have our instants of clairvoyance. They are not very helpful.
+The character of the scheme does not permit that or anything else to
+be helpful. Properly speaking its character, judged by the standards
+established by its victims, is infamous. It excuses every violence of
+protest and at the same time never fails to crush it, just as it
+crushes the blindest assent. The so-called wickedness must be, like the
+so-called virtue, its own reward--to be anything at all . . .
+
+Clairvoyance or no clairvoyance, men love their captivity. To the
+unknown force of negation they prefer the miserably tumbled bed of their
+servitude. Man alone can give one the disgust of pity; yet I find it
+easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its wickedness.
+
+These were the last words. Heyst lowered the book to his knees. Lena's
+voice spoke above his drooping head:
+
+"You sit there as if you were unhappy."
+
+"I thought you were asleep," he said.
+
+"I was lying down right enough, but I never closed my eyes."
+
+"The rest would have done you good after our walk. Didn't you try?"
+
+"I was lying down, I tell you, but sleep I couldn't."
+
+"And you made no sound! What want of sincerity. Or did you want to be
+alone for a time?"
+
+"I--alone?" she murmured.
+
+He noticed her eyeing the book, and got up to put it back in the
+bookcase. When he turned round, he saw that she had dropped into the
+chair--it was the one she always used--and looked as if her strength had
+suddenly gone from her, leaving her only her youth, which seemed very
+pathetic, very much at his mercy. He moved quickly towards the chair.
+
+"Tired, are you? It's my fault, taking you up so high and keeping you
+out so long. Such a windless day, too!"
+
+She watched his concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him,
+but as unreadable as ever. He avoided looking into them for that very
+reason. He forgot himself in the contemplation of those passive arms, of
+these defenceless lips, and--yes, one had to go back to them--of these
+wide-open eyes. Something wild in their grey stare made him think of
+sea-birds in the cold murkiness of high latitudes. He started when she
+spoke, all the charm of physical intimacy revealed suddenly in that
+voice.
+
+"You should try to love me!" she said.
+
+He made a movement of astonishment.
+
+"Try," he muttered. "But it seems to me--" He broke off, saying to
+himself that if he loved her, he had never told her so in so many words.
+Simple words! They died on his lips. "What makes you say that?" he
+asked.
+
+She lowered her eyelids and turned her head a little.
+
+"I have done nothing," she said in a low voice. "It's you who have been
+good, helpful, and tender to me. Perhaps you love me for that--just
+for that; or perhaps you love me for company, and because--well! But
+sometimes it seems to me that you can never love me for myself, only
+for myself, as people do love each other when it is to be for ever."
+Her head drooped. "Forever," she breathed out again; then, still more
+faintly, she added an entreating: "Do try!"
+
+These last words went straight to his heart--the sound of them more than
+the sense. He did not know what to say, either from want of practice in
+dealing with women or simply from his innate honesty of thought. All
+his defences were broken now. Life had him fairly by the throat. But he
+managed a smile, though she was not looking at him; yes, he did manage
+it--the well-known Heyst smile of playful courtesy, so familiar to all
+sorts and conditions of men in the islands.
+
+"My dear Lena," he said, "it looks as if you were trying to pick a very
+unnecessary quarrel with me--of all people!"
+
+She made no movement. With his elbows spread out he was twisting the
+ends of his long moustaches, very masculine and perplexed, enveloped in
+the atmosphere of femininity as in a cloud, suspecting pitfalls, and as
+if afraid to move.
+
+"I must admit, though," he added, "that there is no one else; and I
+suppose a certain amount of quarrelling is necessary for existence in
+this world."
+
+That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a
+script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious, like
+any writing to the illiterate. As far as women went he was altogether
+uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which is fostered in
+the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of the heart fitting
+it for the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much
+on antagonism as on attraction. His mental attitude was that of a man
+looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable to
+decipher, but which may be big with some revelation. He didn't know what
+to say. All he found to add was:
+
+"I don't even understand what I have done or left undone to distress you
+like this."
+
+He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense of the
+imperfections of their relations--a sense which made him desire her
+constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand, and which, when
+she was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and illusory, a
+promise that could not be embraced and held.
+
+"No! I don't see clearly what you mean. Is your mind turned towards the
+future?" he interpellated her with marked playfulness, because he
+was ashamed to let such a word pass his lips. But all his cherished
+negations were falling off him one by one.
+
+"Because if it is so there is nothing easier than to dismiss it. In our
+future, as in what people call the other life, there is nothing to be
+frightened of."
+
+She raised her eyes to him; and if nature had formed them to express
+anything else but blank candour he would have learned how terrified
+she was by his talk and the fact that her sinking heart loved him more
+desperately than ever. He smiled at her.
+
+"Dismiss all thought of it," he insisted. "Surely you don't suspect
+after what I have heard from you, that I am anxious to return to
+mankind. I! I! murder my poor Morrison! It's possible that I may be
+really capable of that which they say I have done. The point is that I
+haven't done it. But it is an unpleasant subject to me. I ought to be
+ashamed to confess it--but it is! Let us forget it. There's that in you,
+Lena, which can console me for worse things, for uglier passages. And if
+we forget, there are no voices here to remind us."
+
+She had raised her head before he paused.
+
+"Nothing can break in on us here," he went on and, as if there had been
+an appeal or a provocation in her upward glance, he bent down and took
+her under the arms, raising her straight out of the chair into a sudden
+and close embrace. Her alacrity to respond, which made her seem as light
+as a feather, warmed his heart at that moment more than closer caresses
+had done before. He had not expected that ready impulse towards himself
+which had been dormant in her passive attitude. He had just felt the
+clasp of her arms round his neck, when, with a slight exclamation--"He's
+here!"--she disengaged herself and bolted, away into her room.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+Heyst was astounded. Looking all round, as if to take the whole room
+to witness of this outrage, he became aware of Wang materialized in the
+doorway. The intrusion was as surprising as anything could be, in view
+of the strict regularity with which Wang made himself visible. Heyst
+was tempted to laugh at first. This practical comment on his affirmation
+that nothing could break in on them relieved the strain of his feelings.
+He was a little vexed, too. The Chinaman preserved a profound silence.
+
+"What do you want?" asked Heyst sternly.
+
+"Boat out there," said the Chinaman.
+
+"Where? What do you mean? Boat adrift in the straits?"
+
+Some subtle change in Wang's bearing suggested his being out of breath;
+but he did not pant, and his voice was steady.
+
+"No--row."
+
+It was Heyst now who was startled and raised his voice.
+
+"Malay man, eh?"
+
+Wang made a slight negative movement with his head.
+
+"Do you hear, Lena?" Heyst called out. "Wang says there is a boat in
+sight--somewhere near apparently. Where's that boat Wang?"
+
+"Round the point," said Wang, leaping into Malay unexpectedly, and in a
+loud voice. "White men three."
+
+"So close as that?" exclaimed Heyst, moving out on the veranda followed
+by Wang. "White men? Impossible!"
+
+Over the clearing the shadows were already lengthening. The sun
+hung low; a ruddy glare lay on the burnt black patch in front of
+the bungalow, and slanted on the ground between the straight, tall,
+mast-like trees soaring a hundred feet or more without a branch. The
+growth of bushes cut off all view of the jetty from the veranda. Far
+away to the right Wang's hut, or rather its dark roof of mats, could
+be seen above the bamboo fence which insured the privacy of the Alfuro
+woman. The Chinaman looked that way swiftly. Heyst paused, and then
+stepped back a pace into the room.
+
+"White men, Lena, apparently. What are you doing?"
+
+"I am just bathing my eyes a little," the girl's voice said from the
+inner room.
+
+"Oh, yes; all right!"
+
+"Do you want me?"
+
+"No. You had better--I am going down to the jetty. Yes, you had better
+stay in. What an extraordinary thing!"
+
+It was so extraordinary that nobody could possibly appreciate
+how extraordinary it was but himself. His mind was full of mere
+exclamations, while his feet were carrying him in the direction of the
+jetty. He followed the line of the rails, escorted by Wang.
+
+"Where were you when you first saw the boat?" he asked over his
+shoulder.
+
+Wang explained in Malay that he had gone to the shore end of the wharf,
+to get a few lumps of coal from the big heap, when, happening to raise
+his eyes from the ground, he saw the boat--a white man boat, not a
+canoe. He had good eyes. He had seen the boat, with the men at the oars;
+and here Wang made a particular gesture over his eyes, as if his vision
+had received a blow. He had turned at once and run to the house to
+report.
+
+"No mistake, eh?" said Heyst, moving on. At the very outer edge of the
+belt he stopped short. Wang halted behind him on the path, till the
+voice of Number One called him sharply forward into the open. He obeyed.
+
+"Where's that boat?" asked Heyst forcibly. "I say--where is it?"
+
+Nothing whatever was to be seen between the point and the jetty. The
+stretch of Diamond Bay was like a piece of purple shadow, lustrous and
+empty, while beyond the land, the open sea lay blue and opaque under the
+sun. Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till they met, far off, the
+dark cone of the volcano, with its faint plume of smoke broadening and
+vanishing everlastingly at the top, without altering its shape in the
+glowing transparency of the evening.
+
+"The fellow has been dreaming," he muttered to himself.
+
+He looked hard at the Chinaman. Wang seemed turned into stone. Suddenly,
+as if he had received a shock, he started, flung his arm out with a
+pointing forefinger, and made guttural noises to the effect that there,
+there, there, he had seen a boat.
+
+It was very uncanny. Heyst thought of some strange hallucination.
+Unlikely enough; but that a boat with three men in it should have sunk
+between the point and the jetty, suddenly, like a stone, without leaving
+as much on the surface as a floating oar, was still more unlikely. The
+theory of a phantom boat would have been more credible than that.
+
+"Confound it!" he muttered to himself.
+
+He was unpleasantly affected by this mystery; but now a simple
+explanation occurred to him. He stepped hastily out on the wharf. The
+boat, if it had existed and had retreated, could perhaps be seen from
+the far end of the long jetty.
+
+Nothing was to be seen. Heyst let his eyes roam idly over the sea. He
+was so absorbed in his perplexity that a hollow sound, as of somebody
+tumbling about in a boat, with a clatter of oars and spars, failed to
+make him move for a moment. When his mind seized its meaning, he had
+no difficulty in locating the sound. It had come from below--under the
+jetty!
+
+He ran back for a dozen yards or so, and then looked over. His sight
+plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the greater part
+of which was hidden from him by the planking of the jetty. His eyes
+fell on the thin back of a man doubled up over the tiller in a queer,
+uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow. Another man, more directly
+below Heyst, sprawled on his back from gunwale to gunwale, half off
+the after thwart, his head lower than his feet. This second man glared
+wildly upward, and struggled to raise himself, but to all appearance was
+much too drunk to succeed. The visible part of the boat contained also
+a flat, leather trunk, on which the first man's long legs were tucked
+up nervelessly. A large earthenware jug, with its wide mouth uncorked,
+rolled out on the bottom-boards from under the sprawling man.
+
+Heyst had never been so much astonished in his life. He stared dumbly at
+the strange boat's crew. From the first he was positive that these
+men were not sailors. They wore the white drill-suit of tropical
+civilization; but their apparition in a boat Heyst could not connect
+with anything plausible. The civilization of the tropics could have
+had nothing to do with it. It was more like those myths, current in
+Polynesia, of amazing strangers, who arrive at an island, gods or
+demons, bringing good or evil to the innocence of the inhabitants--gifts
+of unknown things, words never heard before.
+
+Heyst noticed a cork helmet floating alongside the boat, evidently
+fallen from the head of the man doubled over the tiller, who displayed
+a dark, bony poll. An oar, too, had been knocked overboard, probably
+by the sprawling man, who was still struggling, between the thwarts.
+By this time Heyst regarded the visitation no longer with surprise, but
+with the sustained attention demanded by a difficult problem. With one
+foot poised on the string-piece, and leaning on his raised knee, he
+was taking in everything. The sprawling man rolled off the thwart,
+collapsed, and, most unexpectedly, got on his feet. He swayed dizzily,
+spreading his arms out and uttered faintly a hoarse, dreamy "Hallo!" His
+upturned face was swollen, red, peeling all over the nose and cheeks.
+His stare was irrational. Heyst perceived stains of dried blood all over
+the front of his dirty white coat, and also on one sleeve.
+
+"What's the matter? Are you wounded?"
+
+The other glanced down, reeled--one of his feet was inside a large pith
+hat--and, recovering himself, let out a dismal, grating sound in the
+manner of a grim laugh.
+
+"Blood--not mine. Thirst's the matter. Exhausted's the matter. Done up.
+Drink, man! Give us water!"
+
+Thirst was in the very tone of his words, alternating a broken croak and
+a faint, throaty rustle which just reached Heyst's ears. The man in the
+boat raised his hands to be helped up on the jetty, whispering:
+
+"I tried. I am too weak. I tumbled down."
+
+Wang was coming along the jetty slowly, with intent, straining eyes.
+
+"Run back and bring a crowbar here. There's one lying by the coal-heap,"
+Heyst shouted to him.
+
+The man standing in the boat sat down on the thwart behind him. A
+horrible coughing laugh came through his swollen lips.
+
+"Crowbar? What's that for?" he mumbled, and his head dropped on his
+chest mournfully.
+
+Meantime, Heyst, as if he had forgotten the boat, started kicking hard
+at a large brass tap projecting above the planks. To accommodate ships
+that came for coal and happened to need water as well, a stream had
+been tapped in the interior and an iron pipe led along the jetty. It
+terminated with a curved end almost exactly where the strangers' boat
+had been driven between the piles; but the tap was set fast.
+
+"Hurry up!" Heyst yelled to the Chinaman, who was running with the
+crowbar in his hand.
+
+Heyst snatched it from him and, obtaining a leverage against the
+string-piece, wrung the stiff tap round with a mighty jerk. "I hope that
+pipe hasn't got choked!" he muttered to himself anxiously.
+
+It hadn't; but it did not yield a strong gush. The sound of a thin
+stream, partly breaking on the gunwale of the boat and partly
+splashing alongside, became at once audible. It was greeted by a cry of
+inarticulate and savage joy. Heyst knelt on the string-piece and peered
+down. The man who had spoken was already holding his open mouth under
+the bright trickle. Water ran over his eyelids and over his nose,
+gurgled down his throat, flowed over his chin. Then some obstruction in
+the pipe gave way, and a sudden thick jet broke on his face. In a moment
+his shoulders were soaked, the front of his coat inundated; he streamed
+and dripped; water ran into his pockets, down his legs, into his shoes;
+but he had clutched the end of the pipe, and, hanging on with both
+hands, swallowed, spluttered, choked, snorted with the noises of a
+swimmer. Suddenly a curious dull roar reached Heyst's ears. Something
+hairy and black flew from under the jetty. A dishevelled head, coming on
+like a cannonball, took the man at the pipe in flank, with enough force
+to tear his grip loose and fling him headlong into the stern-sheets. He
+fell upon the folded legs of the man at the tiller, who, roused by the
+commotion in the boat, was sitting up, silent, rigid, and very much like
+a corpse. His eyes were but two black patches, and his teeth glistened
+with a death's head grin between his retracted lips, no thicker than
+blackish parchment glued over the gums.
+
+From him Heyst's eyes wandered to the creature who had replaced the
+first man at the end of the water-pipe. Enormous brown paws clutched it
+savagely; the wild, big head hung back, and in a face covered with a wet
+mass of hair there gaped crookedly a wide mouth full of fangs. The water
+filled it, welled up in hoarse coughs, ran down on each side of the jaws
+and down the hairy throat, soaked the black pelt of the enormous chest,
+naked under a torn check shirt, heaving convulsively with a play of
+massive muscles carved in red mahogany.
+
+As soon as the first man had recovered the breath knocked out of him
+by the irresistible charge, a scream of mad cursing issued from the
+stern-sheets. With a rigid, angular crooking of the elbow, the man at
+the tiller put his hand back to his hip.
+
+"Don't shoot him, sir!" yelled the first man. "Wait! Let me have that
+tiller. I will teach him to shove himself in front of a caballero!"
+
+Martin Ricardo flourished the heavy piece of wood, leaped forward with
+astonishing vigour, and brought it down on Pedro's head with a crash
+that resounded all over the quiet sweep of Black Diamond Bay. A crimson
+patch appeared on the matted hair, red veins appeared in the water
+flowing all over his face, and it dripped in rosy drops off his head.
+But the man hung on. Not till a second furious blow descended did the
+hairy paws let go their grip and the squirming body sink limply. Before
+it could touch the bottom-boards, a tremendous kick in the ribs from
+Ricardo's foot shifted it forward out of sight, whence came the noise of
+a heavy thud, a clatter of spars, and a pitiful grunt. Ricardo stooped
+to look under the jetty.
+
+"Aha, dog! This will teach you to keep back where you belong, you
+murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you! You infidel, you robber
+of churches! Next time I will rip you open from neck to heel, you
+carrion-eater! Esclavo!"
+
+He backed a little and straightened himself up.
+
+"I don't mean it really," he remarked to Heyst, whose steady eyes met
+his from above. He ran aft briskly.
+
+"Come along, sir. It's your turn. I oughtn't to have drunk first. 'S
+truth, I forgot myself! A gentleman like you will overlook that, I
+know." As he made these apologies, Ricardo extended his hand. "Let me
+steady you, sir."
+
+Slowly Mr. Jones unfolded himself in all his slenderness, rocked,
+staggered, and caught Ricardo's shoulder. His henchman assisted him
+to the pipe, which went on gushing a clear stream of water, sparkling
+exceedingly against the black piles and the gloom under the jetty.
+
+"Catch hold, sir," Ricardo advised solicitously. "All right?"
+
+He stepped back, and, while Mr. Jones revelled in the abundance of
+water, he addressed himself to Heyst with a sort of justificatory
+speech, the tone of which, reflecting his feelings, partook of purring
+and spitting. They had been thirty hours tugging at the oars, he
+explained, and they had been more than forty hours without water, except
+that the night before they had licked the dew off the gunwales.
+
+Ricardo did not explain to Heyst how it happened. At that precise moment
+he had no explanation ready for the man on the wharf, who, he guessed,
+must be wondering much more at the presence of his visitors than at
+their plight.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+The explanation lay in the two simple facts that the light winds and
+strong currents of the Java Sea had drifted the boat about until they
+partly lost their bearings; and that by some extra-ordinary mistake
+one of the two jars put into the boat by Schomberg's man contained salt
+water. Ricardo tried to put some pathos into his tones. Pulling for
+thirty hours with eighteen-foot oars! And the sun! Ricardo relieved
+his feelings by cursing the sun. They had felt their hearts and lungs
+shrivel within them. And then, as if all that hadn't been trouble
+enough, he complained bitterly, he had had to waste his fainting
+strength in beating their servant about the head with a stretcher. The
+fool had wanted to drink sea water, and wouldn't listen to reason.
+There was no stopping him otherwise. It was better to beat him into
+insensibility than to have him go crazy in the boat, and to be obliged
+to shoot him. The preventive, administered with enough force to brain
+an elephant, boasted Ricardo, had to be applied on two occasions--the
+second time all but in sight of the jetty.
+
+"You have seen the beauty," Ricardo went on expansively, hiding his lack
+of some sort of probable story under this loquacity. "I had to hammer
+him away from the spout. Opened afresh all the old broken spots on his
+head. You saw how hard I had to hit. He has no restraint, no restraint
+at all. If it wasn't that he can be made useful in one way or another, I
+would just as soon have let the governor shoot him."
+
+He smiled up at Heyst in his peculiar lip-retracting manner, and added
+by way of afterthought:
+
+"That's what will happen to him in the end, if he doesn't learn to
+restrain himself. But I've taught him to mind his manners for a while,
+anyhow!"
+
+And again he addressed his quick grin up to the man on the wharf. His
+round eyes had never left Heyst's face ever since he began to deliver
+his account of the voyage.
+
+"So that's how he looks!" Ricardo was saying to himself.
+
+He had not expected Heyst to be like this. He had formed for himself
+a conception containing the helpful suggestion of a vulnerable point.
+These solitary men were often tipplers. But no!--this was not a drinking
+man's face; nor could he detect the weakness of alarm, or even the
+weakness of surprise, on these features, in those steady eyes.
+
+"We were too far gone to climb out," Ricardo went on. "I heard you
+walking along though. I thought I shouted; I tried to. You didn't hear
+me shout?"
+
+Heyst made an almost imperceptible negative sign, which the greedy eyes
+of Ricardo--greedy for all signs--did not miss.
+
+"Throat too parched. We didn't even care to whisper to each other
+lately. Thirst chokes one. We might have died there under this wharf
+before you found us."
+
+"I couldn't think where you had gone to." Heyst was heard at last,
+addressing directly the newcomers from the sea. "You were seen as soon
+as you cleared that point."
+
+"We were seen, eh?" grunted Mr. Ricardo. "We pulled like
+machines--daren't stop. The governor sat at the tiller, but he couldn't
+speak to us. She drove in between the piles till she hit something, and
+we all tumbled off the thwarts as if we had been drunk. Drunk--ha,
+ha! Too dry, by George! We fetched in here with the very last of our
+strength, and no mistake. Another mile would have done for us. When I
+heard your footsteps, above, I tried to get up, and I fell down."
+
+"That was the first sound I heard," said Heyst.
+
+Mr Jones, the front of his soiled white tunic soaked and plastered
+against his breast-bone, staggered away from the water-pipe. Steadying
+himself on Ricardo's shoulder, he drew a long breath, raised his
+dripping head, and produced a smile of ghastly amiability, which was
+lost upon the thoughtful Heyst. Behind his back the sun, touching the
+water, was like a disc of iron cooled to a dull red glow, ready to start
+rolling round the circular steel plate of the sea, which, under the
+darkening sky, looked more solid than the high ridge of Samburan; more
+solid than the point, whose long outlined slope melted into its own
+unfathomable shadow blurring the dim sheen on the bay. The forceful
+stream from the pipe broke like shattered glass on the boat's gunwale.
+Its loud, fitful, and persistent splashing revealed the depths of the
+world's silence.
+
+"Great notion, to lead the water out here," pronounced Ricardo
+appreciatively.
+
+Water was life. He felt now as if he could run a mile, scale a ten-foot
+wall, sing a song. Only a few minutes ago he was next door to a corpse,
+done up, unable to stand, to lift a hand; unable to groan. A drop of
+water had done that miracle.
+
+"Didn't you feel life itself running and soaking into you, sir?" he
+asked his principal, with deferential but forced vivacity.
+
+Without a word, Mr. Jones stepped off the thwart and sat down in the
+stern-sheets.
+
+"Isn't that man of yours bleeding to death in the bows under there?"
+inquired Heyst.
+
+Ricardo ceased his ecstasies over the life-giving water and answered in
+a tone of innocence:
+
+"He? You may call him a man, but his hide is a jolly sight tougher than
+the toughest alligator he ever skinned in the good old days. You don't
+know how much he can stand: I do. We have tried him a long time ago.
+Ola, there! Pedro! Pedro!" he yelled, with a force of lung testifying to
+the regenerative virtues of water.
+
+A weak "Senor?" came from under the wharf.
+
+"What did I tell you?" said Ricardo triumphantly. "Nothing can hurt him.
+He's all right. But, I say, the boat's getting swamped. Can't you turn
+this water off before you sink her under us? She's half full already."
+
+At a sign from Heyst, Wang hammered at the brass tap on the wharf, then
+stood behind Number One, crowbar in hand, motionless as before. Ricardo
+was perhaps not so certain of Pedro's toughness as he affirmed; for he
+stooped, peering under the wharf, then moved forward out of sight. The
+gush of water ceasing suddenly, made a silence which became complete
+when the after-trickle stopped. Afar, the sun was reduced to a red
+spark, glowing very low in the breathless immensity of twilight. Purple
+gleams lingered on the water all round the boat. The spectral figure in
+the stern-sheets spoke in a languid tone:
+
+"That--er--companion--er--secretary of mine is a queer chap. I am afraid
+we aren't presenting ourselves in a very favourable light."
+
+Heyst listened. It was the conventional voice of an educated man,
+only strangely lifeless. But more strange yet was this concern for
+appearances, expressed, he did not know, whether in jest or in earnest.
+Earnestness was hardly to be supposed under the circumstances, and no
+one had ever jested in such dead tones. It was something which could not
+be answered, and Heyst said nothing. The other went on:
+
+"Travelling as I do, I find a man of his sort extremely useful. He has
+his little weaknesses, no doubt."
+
+"Indeed!" Heyst was provoked into speaking. "Weakness of the arm is not
+one of them; neither is an exaggerated humanity, as far as I can judge."
+
+"Defects of temper," explained Mr. Jones from the stern-sheets.
+
+The subject of this dialogue, coming out just then from under the
+wharf into the visible part of the boat, made himself heard in his own
+defence, in a voice full of life, and with nothing languid in his manner
+on the contrary, it was brisk, almost jocose. He begged pardon for
+contradicting. He was never out of temper with "our Pedro." The
+fellow was a Dago of immense strength and of no sense whatever. This
+combination made him dangerous, and he had to be treated accordingly, in
+a manner which he could understand. Reasoning was beyond him.
+
+"And so"--Ricardo addressed Heyst with animation--"you mustn't be
+surprised if--"
+
+"I assure you," Heyst interrupted, "that my wonder at your arrival
+in your boat here is so great that it leaves no room for minor
+astonishments. But hadn't you better land?"
+
+"That's the talk, sir!" Ricardo began to bustle about the boat, talking
+all the time. Finding himself unable to "size up" this man, he was
+inclined to credit him with extraordinary powers of penetration, which,
+it seemed to him, would be favoured by silence. Also, he feared some
+pointblank question. He had no ready-made story to tell. He and his
+patron had put off considering that rather important detail too
+long. For the last two days, the horrors of thirst, coming on them
+unexpectedly, had prevented consultation. They had had to pull for
+dear life. But the man on the wharf, were he in league with the devil
+himself, would pay for all their sufferings, thought Ricardo with an
+unholy joy.
+
+Meantime, splashing in the water which covered the bottom-boards,
+Ricardo congratulated himself aloud on the luggage being out of the way
+of the wet. He had piled it up forward. He had roughly tied up Pedro's
+head. Pedro had nothing to grumble about. On the contrary, he ought to
+be mighty thankful to him, Ricardo, for being alive at all.
+
+"Well, now, let me give you a leg up, sir," he said cheerily to
+his motionless principal in the stern-sheets. "All our troubles are
+over--for a time, anyhow. Ain't it luck to find a white man on this
+island? I would have just as soon expected to meet an angel from
+heaven--eh, Mr. Jones? Now then--ready, sir? one, two, three, up you
+go!"
+
+Helped from below by Ricardo, and from above by the man more unexpected
+than an angel, Mr. Jones scrambled up and stood on the wharf by the side
+of Heyst. He swayed like a reed. The night descending on Samburan turned
+into dense shadow the point of land and the wharf itself, and gave a
+dark solidity to the unshimmering water extending to the last faint
+trace of light away to the west. Heyst stared at the guests whom the
+renounced world had sent him thus at the end of the day. The only other
+vestige of light left on earth lurked in the hollows of the thin man's
+eyes. They gleamed, mobile and languidly evasive. The eyelids fluttered.
+
+"You are feeling weak," said Heyst.
+
+"For the moment, a little," confessed the other.
+
+With loud panting, Ricardo scrambled on his hands and knees upon the
+wharf, energetic and unaided. He rose up at Heyst's elbow and stamped
+his foot on the planks, with a sharp, provocative, double beat, such
+as is heard sometimes in fencing-schools before the adversaries engage
+their foils. Not that the renegade seaman Ricardo knew anything of
+fencing. What he called "shooting-irons," were his weapons, or the still
+less aristocratic knife, such as was even then ingeniously strapped
+to his leg. He thought of it, at that moment. A swift stooping motion,
+then, on the recovery, a ripping blow, a shove off the wharf, and no
+noise except a splash in the water that would scarcely disturb the
+silence. Heyst would have no time for a cry. It would be quick and neat,
+and immensely in accord with Ricardo's humour. But he repressed this
+gust of savagery. The job was not such a simple one. This piece had to
+be played to another tune, and in much slower time. He returned to his
+note of talkative simplicity.
+
+"Ay; and I too don't feel as strong as I thought I was when the first
+drink set me up. Great wonder-worker water is! And to get it right here
+on the spot! It was heaven--hey, sir?"
+
+Mr Jones, being directly addressed, took up his part in the concerted
+piece:
+
+"Really, when I saw a wharf on what might have been an uninhabited
+island, I couldn't believe my eyes. I doubted its existence. I thought
+it was a delusion till the boat actually drove between the piles, as you
+see her lying now."
+
+While he was speaking faintly, in a voice which did not seem to belong
+to the earth, his henchman, in extremely loud and terrestrial accents,
+was fussing about their belongings in the boat, addressing himself to
+Pedro:
+
+"Come, now--pass up the dunnage there! Move, yourself, hombre, or I'll
+have to get down again and give you a tap on those bandages of yours,
+you growling bear, you!"
+
+"Ah! You didn't believe in the reality of the wharf?" Heyst was saying
+to Mr. Jones.
+
+"You ought to kiss my hands!"
+
+Ricardo caught hold of an ancient Gladstone bag and swung it on the
+wharf with a thump.
+
+"Yes! You ought to burn a candle before me as they do before the saints
+in your country. No saint has ever done so much for you as I have, you
+ungrateful vagabond. Now then! Up you get!"
+
+Helped by the talkative Ricardo, Pedro scrambled up on the wharf, where
+he remained for some time on all fours, swinging to and fro his shaggy
+head tied up in white rags. Then he got up clumsily, like a bulky animal
+in the dusk, balancing itself on its hind legs.
+
+Mr Jones began to explain languidly to Heyst that they were in a pretty
+bad state that morning, when they caught sight of the smoke of the
+volcano. It nerved them to make an effort for their lives. Soon
+afterwards they made out the island.
+
+"I had just wits enough left in my baked brain to alter the direction
+of the boat," the ghostly voice went on. "As to finding assistance,
+a wharf, a white man--nobody would have dreamed of it. Simply
+preposterous!"
+
+"That's what I thought when my Chinaman came and told me he had seen a
+boat with white men pulling up," said Heyst.
+
+"Most extraordinary luck," interjected Ricardo, standing by anxiously
+attentive to every word. "Seems a dream," he added. "A lovely dream!"
+
+A silence fell on that group of three, as if everyone had become afraid
+to speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis. Pedro on one side
+of them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful spectators. A few
+stars had come out pursuing the ebbing twilight. A light draught of air
+tepid enough in the thickening twilight after the scorching day, struck
+a chill into Mr. Jones in his soaked clothes.
+
+"I may infer, then, that there is a settlement of white people here?" he
+murmured, shivering visibly.
+
+Heyst roused himself.
+
+"Oh, abandoned, abandoned. I am alone here--practically alone; but
+several empty houses are still standing. No lack of accommodation. We
+may just as well--here, Wang, go back to the shore and run the trolley
+out here."
+
+The last words having been spoken in Malay, he explained courteously
+that he had given directions for the transport of the luggage. Wang had
+melted into the night--in his soundless manner.
+
+"My word! Rails laid down and all," exclaimed Ricardo softly, in a tone
+of admiration. "Well, I never!"
+
+"We were working a coal-mine here," said the late manager of the
+Tropical Belt Coal Company. "These are only the ghosts of things that
+have been."
+
+Mr Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint puff
+of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays on the
+dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the grave of the
+sun.
+
+"We might be moving on," proposed Heyst. "My Chinaman and
+that--ah--ungrateful servant of yours, with the broken head, can load
+the things and come along after us."
+
+The suggestion was accepted without words. Moving towards the shore,
+the three men met the trolley, a mere metallic rustle which whisked past
+them, the shadowy Wang running noiselessly behind. Only the sound of
+their footsteps accompanied them. It was a long time since so many
+footsteps had rung together on that jetty. Before they stepped on to the
+path trodden through the grass, Heyst said:
+
+"I am prevented from offering you a share of my own quarters." The
+distant courtliness of this beginning arrested the other two suddenly,
+as if amazed by some manifest incongruity. "I should regret it more,"
+he went on, "if I were not in a position to give you the choice of those
+empty bungalows for a temporary home."
+
+He turned round and plunged into the narrow track, the two others
+following in single file.
+
+"Queer start!" Ricardo took the opportunity for whispering, as he fell
+behind Mr. Jones, who swayed in the gloom, enclosed by the stalks of
+tropical grass, almost as slender as a stalk of grass himself.
+
+In this order they emerged into the open space kept clear of vegetation
+by Wang's judicious system of periodic firing. The shapes of buildings,
+unlighted, high-roofed, looked mysteriously extensive and featureless
+against the increasing glitter of the stars. Heyst was pleased at
+the absence of light in his bungalow. It looked as uninhabited as
+the others. He continued to lead the way, inclining to the right. His
+equable voice was heard:
+
+"This one would be the best. It was our counting-house. There is some
+furniture in it yet. I am pretty certain that you'll find a couple of
+camp bedsteads in one of the rooms."
+
+The high-pitched roof of the bungalow towered up very close, eclipsing
+the sky.
+
+"Here we are. Three steps. As you see, there's a wide veranda. Sorry to
+keep you waiting for a moment; the door is locked, I think."
+
+He was heard trying it. Then he leaned against the rail, saying:
+
+"Wang will get the keys."
+
+The others waited, two vague shapes nearly mingled together in the
+darkness of the veranda, from which issued a sudden chattering of Mr.
+Jones's teeth, directly suppressed, and a slight shuffle of Ricardo's
+feet. Their guide and host, his back against the rail, seemed to have
+forgotten their existence. Suddenly he moved, and murmured:
+
+"Ah, here's the trolley."
+
+Then he raised his voice in Malay, and was answered, "Ya tuan," from an
+indistinct group that could be made out in the direction of the track.
+
+"I have sent Wang for the key and a light," he said, in a voice
+that came out without any particular direction--a peculiarity which
+disconcerted Ricardo.
+
+Wang did not tarry long on his mission. Very soon from the distant
+recesses of obscurity appeared the swinging lantern he carried. It cast
+a fugitive ray on the arrested trolley with the uncouth figure of the
+wild Pedro drooping over the load; then it moved towards the bungalow
+and ascended the stairs. After working at the stiff lock, Wang applied
+his shoulder to the door. It came open with explosive suddenness, as if
+in a passion at being thus disturbed after two years' repose. From the
+dark slope of a tall stand-up writing-desk a forgotten, solitary sheet
+of paper flew up and settled gracefully on the floor.
+
+Wang and Pedro came and went through the offended door, bringing the
+things off the trolley, one flitting swiftly in and out, the other
+staggering heavily. Later, directed by a few quiet words from Number
+One, Wang made several journeys with the lantern to the store-rooms,
+bringing in blankets, provisions in tins, coffee, sugar, and a packet of
+candles. He lighted one, and stuck it on the ledge of the stand-up desk.
+Meantime Pedro, being introduced to some kindling-wood and a bundle of
+dry sticks, had busied himself outside in lighting a fire, on which he
+placed a ready-filled kettle handed to him by Wang impassively, at arm's
+length, as if across a chasm. Having received the thanks of his guests,
+Heyst wished them goodnight and withdrew, leaving them to their repose.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+Heyst walked away slowly. There was still no light in his bungalow, and
+he thought that perhaps it was just as well. By this time he was much
+less perturbed. Wang had preceded him with the lantern, as if in a hurry
+to get away from the two white men and their hairy attendant. The light
+was not dancing along any more; it was standing perfectly still by the
+steps of the veranda.
+
+Heyst, glancing back casually, saw behind him still another light--the
+light of the strangers' open fire. A black, uncouth form, stooping over
+it monstrously, staggered away into the outlying shadows. The kettle had
+boiled, probably.
+
+With that weird vision of something questionably human impressed upon
+his senses, Heyst moved on a pace or two. What could the people be who
+had such a creature for their familiar attendant? He stopped. The vague
+apprehension, of a distant future, in which he saw Lena unavoidably
+separated from him by profound and subtle differences; the sceptical
+carelessness which had accompanied every one of his attempts at action,
+like a secret reserve of his soul, fell away from him. He no longer
+belonged to himself. There was a call far more imperious and august. He
+came up to the bungalow, and at the very limit of the lantern's light,
+on the top step, he saw her feet and the bottom part of her dress. The
+rest of her person was suggested dimly as high as her waist. She sat
+on a chair, and the gloom of the low eaves descended upon her head and
+shoulders. She didn't stir.
+
+"You haven't gone to sleep here?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no! I was waiting for you--in the dark."
+
+Heyst, on the top step, leaned against a wooden pillar, after moving the
+lantern to one side.
+
+"I have been thinking that it is just as well you had no light. But
+wasn't it dull for you to sit in the dark?"
+
+"I don't need a light to think of you." Her charming voice gave a value
+to this banal answer, which had also the merit of truth. Heyst laughed
+a little, and said that he had had a curious experience. She made no
+remark. He tried to figure to himself the outlines of her easy pose.
+A spot of dim light here and there hinted at the unfailing grace of
+attitude which was one of her natural possessions.
+
+She had thought of him, but not in connection with the strangers. She
+had admired him from the first; she had been attracted by his warm
+voice, his gentle eye, but she had felt him too wonderfully difficult to
+know. He had given to life a savour, a movement, a promise mingled with
+menaces, which she had not suspected were to be found in it--or, at any
+rate, not by a girl wedded to misery as she was. She said to herself
+that she must not be irritated because he seemed too self-contained, and
+as if shut up in a world of his own. When he took her in his arms, she
+felt that his embrace had a great and compelling force, that he was
+moved deeply, and that perhaps he would not get tired of her so very
+soon. She thought that he had opened to her the feelings of delicate
+joy, that the very uneasiness he caused her was delicious in its
+sadness, and that she would try to hold him as long as she could--till
+her fainting arms, her sinking soul, could cling to him no more.
+
+"Wang's not here, of course?" Heyst said suddenly. She answered as if in
+her sleep.
+
+"He put this light down here without stopping, and ran."
+
+"Ran, did he? H'm! Well, it's considerably later than his usual time
+to go home to his Alfuro wife; but to be seen running is a sort of
+degradation for Wang, who has mastered the art of vanishing. Do you
+think he was startled out of his perfection by something?"
+
+"Why should he be startled?"
+
+Her voice remained dreamy, a little uncertain.
+
+"I have been startled," Heyst said.
+
+She was not listening to him. The lantern at their feet threw the
+shadows of her face upward. Her eyes glistened, as if frightened and
+attentive, above a lighted chin and a very white throat.
+
+"Upon my word," mused Heyst, "now that I don't see them, I can hardly
+believe that those fellows exist!"
+
+"And what about me?" she asked, so swiftly that he made a movement like
+somebody pounced upon from an ambush. "When you don't see me, do you
+believe that I exist?"
+
+"Exist? Most charmingly! My dear Lena, you don't know your own
+advantages. Why, your voice alone would be enough to make you
+unforgettable!"
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean forgetting in that way. I dare say if I were to
+die you would remember me right enough. And what good would that be to
+anybody? It's while I am alive that I want--"
+
+Heyst stood by her chair, a stalwart figure imperfectly lighted. The
+broad shoulders, the martial face that was like a disguise of his
+disarmed soul, were lost in the gloom above the plane of light in which
+his feet were planted. He suffered from a trouble with which she had
+nothing to do. She had no general conception of the conditions of the
+existence he had offered to her. Drawn into its peculiar stagnation she
+remained unrelated to it because of her ignorance.
+
+For instance, she could never perceive the prodigious improbability of
+the arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it. Perhaps
+she had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst resolved suddenly
+to say nothing more of it. It was not that he shrank from alarming her.
+Not feeling anything definite himself he could not imagine a precise
+effect being produced on her by any amount of explanation. There is a
+quality in events which is apprehended differently by different minds
+or even by the same mind at different times. Any man living at all
+consciously knows that embarrassing truth. Heyst was aware that this
+visit could bode nothing pleasant. In his present soured temper
+towards all mankind he looked upon it as a visitation of a particularly
+offensive kind.
+
+He glanced along the veranda in the direction of the other bungalow. The
+fire of sticks in front of it had gone out. No faint glow of embers, not
+the slightest thread of light in that direction, hinted at the presence
+of strangers. The darker shapes in the obscurity, the dead silence,
+betrayed nothing of that strange intrusion. The peace of Samburan
+asserted itself as on any other night. Everything was as before,
+except--Heyst became aware of it suddenly--that for a whole minute,
+perhaps, with his hand on the back of the girl's chair and within a foot
+of her person, he had lost the sense of her existence, for the first
+time since he had brought her over to share this invincible, this
+undefiled peace. He picked up the lantern, and the act made a silent
+stir all along the veranda. A spoke of shadow swung swiftly across her
+face, and the strong light rested on the immobility of her features, as
+of a woman looking at a vision. Her eyes were still, her lips serious.
+Her dress, open at the neck, stirred slightly to her even breathing.
+
+"We had better go in, Lena," suggested Heyst, very low, as if breaking a
+spell cautiously.
+
+She rose without a word. Heyst followed her indoors. As they passed
+through the living-room, he left the lantern burning on the centre
+table.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+That night the girl woke up, for the first time in her new experience,
+with the sensation of having been abandoned to her own devices. She woke
+up from a painful dream of separation brought about in a way which she
+could not understand, and missed the relief of the waking instant.
+The desolate feeling of being alone persisted. She was really alone.
+A night-light made it plain enough, in the dim, mysterious manner of a
+dream; but this was reality. It startled her exceedingly.
+
+In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway, and raised
+it with a steady hand. The conditions of their life in Samburan would
+have made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her character. This
+was not a movement of curiosity, but of downright alarm--the continued
+distress and fear of the dream. The night could not have been very far
+advanced. The light of the lantern was burning strongly, striping the
+floor and walls of the room with thick black bands. She hardly knew
+whether she expected to see Heyst or not; but she saw him at once,
+standing by the table in his sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway.
+She stepped in noiselessly with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall
+behind her. Something characteristic in Heyst's attitude made her say,
+almost in a whisper:
+
+"You are looking for something."
+
+He could not have heard her before; but he didn't start at the
+unexpected whisper. He only pushed the drawer of the table in and,
+without even looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting her
+presence as if he had been aware of all her movements:
+
+"I say, are you certain that Wang didn't go through this room this
+evening?"
+
+"Wang? When?"
+
+"After leaving the lantern, I mean."
+
+"Oh, no. He ran on. I watched him."
+
+"Or before, perhaps--while I was with these boat people? Do you know?
+Can you tell?"
+
+"I hardly think so. I came out as the sun went down, and sat outside
+till you came back to me."
+
+"He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda."
+
+"I heard nothing in here," she said. "What is the matter?"
+
+"Naturally you wouldn't hear. He can be as quiet as a shadow, when he
+likes. I believe he could steal the pillows from under our heads. He
+might have been here ten minutes ago."
+
+"What woke you up? Was it a noise?"
+
+"Can't say that. Generally one can't tell, but is it likely, Lena? You
+are, I believe, the lighter sleeper of us two. A noise loud enough to
+wake me up would have awakened you, too. I tried to be as quiet as I
+could. What roused you?"
+
+"I don't know--a dream, perhaps. I woke up crying."
+
+"What was the dream?"
+
+Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her direction,
+his round, uncovered head set on a fighter's muscular neck. She left his
+question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.
+
+"What is it you have missed?" she asked in her turn, very grave.
+
+Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses for
+the night. Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity of its
+width, its unshining whiteness. It was a sculptural forehead. He had a
+moment of acute appreciation intruding upon another order of thoughts.
+It was as if there could be no end of his discoveries about that girl,
+at the most incongruous moments.
+
+She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong--one of Heyst's few
+purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made. He had forgotten
+all about it till she came, and then had found it at the bottom of an
+old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days. She had quickly
+learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe twist, as Malay
+village girls do when going down to bathe in a river. Her shoulders and
+arms were bare; one of her tresses, hanging forward, looked almost black
+against the white skin. As she was taller than the average Malay woman,
+the sarong ended a good way above her ankles. She stood poised firmly,
+half-way between the table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her
+bare feet gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor.
+The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of
+her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something
+statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very
+big--Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little
+girl,"--but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform
+dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form
+and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction from a
+heroic size.
+
+She moved forward a step.
+
+"What is it you have missed?" she asked again.
+
+Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of
+darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in a
+path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was his turn
+to ignore a question.
+
+"You woke up in a fright, you say?" he said.
+
+She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's face
+and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise,
+but her expression was serious.
+
+"No," she replied. "It was distress, rather. You see, you weren't there,
+and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream--the
+first I've had, too, since--"
+
+"You don't believe in dreams, do you?" asked Heyst.
+
+"I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what
+dreams mean, for a shilling."
+
+"Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?" inquired Heyst
+jocularly.
+
+"She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!"
+
+Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
+
+"Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking
+world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning
+of."
+
+"You have missed something out of this drawer," she said positively.
+
+"This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them and
+come back to this again, as people do. It's difficult to believe the
+evidence of my own senses; but it isn't there. Now, Lena, are you sure
+that you didn't--"
+
+"I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me."
+
+"Lena!" he cried.
+
+He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he had
+not made. It was what a servant might have said--an inferior open
+to suspicion--or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at being so
+wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being instinctively
+aware of the place he had secretly given her in his thoughts.
+
+"After all," he said to himself, "we are strangers to each other."
+
+And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke calmly:
+
+"I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that the
+Chinaman has been in this room tonight?"
+
+"You suspect him?" she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
+
+"There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude."
+
+"You don't want to tell me what it is?" she inquired, in the equable
+tone in which one takes a fact into account.
+
+Heyst only smiled faintly.
+
+"Nothing very precious, as far as value goes," he replied.
+
+"I thought it might have been money," she said.
+
+"Money!" exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether
+preposterous. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add: "Of
+course, there is some money in the house--there, in that writing-desk,
+the drawer on the left. It's not locked. You can pull it right out.
+There is a recess, and the board at the back pivots: a very simple
+hiding-place, when you know the way to it. I discovered it by accident,
+and I keep our store of sovereigns in there. The treasure, my dear, is
+not big enough to require a cavern."
+
+He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.
+
+"The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in that
+unlocked left drawer. I have no doubt Wang knows what there is in it,
+but he isn't a thief, and that's why I--no, Lena, what I've missed is
+not gold or jewels; and that's what makes the fact interesting--which
+the theft of money cannot be."
+
+She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money. A great
+curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from pressing him
+with questions. She only gave him one of her deep-gleaming smiles.
+
+"It isn't me so it must be Wang. You ought to make him give it back to
+you."
+
+Heyst said nothing to that naive and practical suggestion, for the
+object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.
+
+It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had never
+used in his life. Ever since the London furniture had arrived in
+Samburan, it had been reposing in the drawer of the table. The real
+dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be repelled
+by swords or bullets. On the other hand neither his manner nor his
+appearance looked sufficiently inoffensive to expose him to light-minded
+aggression.
+
+He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer
+in the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly--which was very
+unusual with him. He had found himself sitting up and extremely wide
+awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his side, lying with her
+face away from him, a vague, characteristically feminine form in the dim
+light. She was perfectly still.
+
+At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and the
+sides of the mosquito net were looped up. Heyst swung his feet to the
+floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had become
+aware of his intention to get up.
+
+Why he did this he did not know. He didn't wish to wake her up, and
+the slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very loud to him. He
+turned round apprehensively and waited for her to move, but she did not
+stir. While he looked at her, he had a vision of himself lying there
+too, also fast asleep, and--it occurred to him for the first time in his
+life--very defenceless. This quite novel impression of the dangers of
+slumber made him think suddenly of his revolver. He left the bedroom
+with noiseless footsteps. The lightness of the curtain he had to lift
+as he passed out, and the outer door, wide open on the blackness of
+the veranda--for the roof eaves came down low, shutting out the
+starlight--gave him a sense of having been dangerously exposed, he could
+not have said to what. He pulled the drawer open. Its emptiness cut his
+train of self-communion short. He murmured to the assertive fact:
+
+"Impossible! Somewhere else!"
+
+He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked
+whispers of memory were not encouraging. Foraging in every receptacle
+and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly to the
+conclusion that it was not in that room. Neither was it in the other.
+The whole bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a profuse allowance of
+veranda all round. Heyst stepped out on the veranda.
+
+"It's Wang, beyond a doubt," he thought, staring into the night. "He has
+got hold of it for some reason."
+
+There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materializing
+suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at any moment, and
+toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger was so irremediable
+that it was not worth worrying about, any more than the general
+precariousness of human life. Heyst speculated on this added risk. How
+long had he been at the mercy of a slender yellow finger on the trigger?
+That is, if that was the fellow's reason for purloining the revolver.
+
+"Shoot and inherit," thought Heyst. "Very simple." Yet there was in his
+mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of vegetables
+in the light of a murderer.
+
+"No, it wasn't that. For Wang could have done it any time this last
+twelve months or more--"
+
+Heyst's mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed
+himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at
+that period of his speculation his point of view changed. It struck him
+with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been taken
+only late in the day, or on that very night. Wang, of course. But why?
+So there had been no danger in the past. It was all ahead.
+
+"He has me at his mercy now," thought Heyst, without particular
+excitement.
+
+The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in it: it
+was as if he were considering somebody else's strange predicament. But
+even that sort of interest was dying out when, looking to his left, he
+saw the accustomed shapes of the other bungalows looming in the night,
+and remembered the arrival of the thirsty company in the boat. Wang
+would hardly risk such a crime in the presence of other white men. It
+was a peculiar instance of the "safety in numbers," principle, which
+somehow was not much to Heyst's taste.
+
+He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and
+unsatisfactory thought. He had just made up his mind that he must
+breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind him.
+She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to turn round
+at once under the impression that she might read his trouble in his
+face. Yes, she had taken him by surprise, and for that reason the
+conversation which began was not exactly as he would have conducted it
+if he had been prepared for her pointblank question. He ought to have
+said at once: "I've missed nothing." It was a deplorable thing that he
+should have let it come so far as to have her ask what it was he missed.
+He closed the conversation by saying lightly:
+
+"It's an object of very small value. Don't worry about it--it isn't
+worth while. The best you can do is to go and lie down again, Lena."
+
+Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked: "And you?"
+
+"I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda. I don't feel sleepy for
+the moment."
+
+"Well, don't be long."
+
+He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a frown
+on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
+
+Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the veranda.
+He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the stars how the
+night went on. It was going very slowly. Why it should have irked him he
+did not know, for he had nothing to expect from the dawn; but everything
+round him had become unreasonable, unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying
+him under an obligation, but giving him no line of action. He felt
+contemptuously irritated with the situation. The outer world had broken
+upon him; and he did not know what wrong he had done to bring this on
+himself, any more than he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible
+calumny about his treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget
+this. It had reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect
+confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.
+
+"And she only half disbelieves it," he thought, with hopeless
+humiliation.
+
+This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength
+from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no desire to do
+anything--neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the revolver
+nor to find out from the strangers who they were, and how their
+predicament had come about. He flung his glowing cigar away into the
+night. But Samburan was no longer a solitude wherein he could indulge in
+all his moods. The fiery parabolic path the cast-out stump traced in the
+air was seen from another veranda at a distance of some twenty yards. It
+was noted as a symptom of importance by an observer with his faculties
+greedy for signs, and in a state of alertness tense enough almost to
+hear the grass grow.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+The observer was Martin Ricardo. To him life was not a matter of
+passive renunciation, but of a particularly active warfare. He was
+not mistrustful of it, he was not disgusted with it, still less was he
+inclined to be suspicious of its disenchantments; but he was vividly
+aware that it held many possibilities of failure. Though very far from
+being a pessimist, he was not a man of foolish illusions. He did
+not like failure, not only because of its unpleasant and dangerous
+consequences, but also because of its damaging effect upon his own
+appreciation of Martin Ricardo. And this was a special job, of his own
+contriving, and of considerable novelty. It was not, so to speak, in his
+usual line of business--except, perhaps, from a moral standpoint, about
+which he was not likely to trouble his head. For these reasons Martin
+Ricardo was unable to sleep.
+
+Mr Jones, after repeated shivering fits, and after drinking much hot
+tea, had apparently fallen into deep slumber. He had very peremptorily
+discouraged attempts at conversation on the part of his faithful
+follower. Ricardo listened to his regular breathing. It was all very
+well for the governor. He looked upon it as a sort of sport. A gentleman
+naturally would. But this ticklish and important job had to be pulled
+off at all costs, both for honour and for safety. Ricardo rose quietly,
+and made his way on the veranda. He could not lie still. He wanted to
+go out for air, and he had a feeling that by the force of his eagerness
+even the darkness and the silence could be made to yield something to
+his eyes and ears.
+
+He noted the stars, and stepped back again into the dense darkness.
+He resisted the growing impulse to go out and steal towards the other
+bungalow. It would have been madness to start prowling in the dark on
+unknown ground. And for what end? Unless to relieve the oppression.
+Immobility lay on his limbs like a leaden garment. And yet he was
+unwilling to give up. He persisted in his objectless vigil. The man of
+the island was keeping quiet.
+
+It was at that moment that Ricardo's eyes caught the vanishing red
+trail of light made by the cigar--a startling revelation of the man's
+wakefulness. He could not suppress a low "Hallo!" and began to sidle
+along towards the door, with his shoulders rubbing the wall. For all he
+knew, the man might have been out in front by this time, observing the
+veranda. As a matter of fact, after flinging away the cheroot, Heyst
+had gone indoors with the feeling of a man who gives up an unprofitable
+occupation. But Ricardo fancied he could hear faint footfalls on the
+open ground, and dodged quickly into the room. There he drew breath, and
+meditated for a while. His next step was to feel for the matches on
+the tall desk, and to light the candle. He had to communicate to his
+governor views and reflections of such importance that it was absolutely
+necessary for him to watch their effect on the very countenance of the
+hearer. At first he had thought that these matters could have waited
+till daylight; but Heyst's wakefulness, disclosed in that startling way,
+made him feel suddenly certain that there could be no sleep for him that
+night.
+
+He said as much to his governor. When the little dagger-like flame had
+done its best to dispel the darkness, Mr. Jones was to be seen reposing
+on a camp bedstead, in a distant part of the room. A railway rug
+concealed his spare form up to his very head, which rested on the
+other railway rug rolled up for a pillow. Ricardo plumped himself down
+cross-legged on the floor, very close to the low bedstead; so that Mr.
+Jones--who perhaps had not been so very profoundly asleep--on opening
+his eyes found them conveniently levelled at the face of his secretary.
+
+"Eh? What is it you say? No sleep for you tonight? But why can't you let
+me sleep? Confound your fussiness!"
+
+"Because that there fellow can't sleep--that's why. Dash me if he hasn't
+been doing a think just now! What business has he to think in the middle
+of the night?"
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"He was out, sir--up in the middle of the night. My own eyes saw it."
+
+"But how do you know that he was up to think?" inquired Mr. Jones. "It
+might have been anything--toothache, for instance. And you may have
+dreamed it for all I know. Didn't you try to sleep?"
+
+"No, sir. I didn't even try to go to sleep."
+
+Ricardo informed his patron of his vigil on the veranda, and of the
+revelation which put an end to it. He concluded that a man up with a
+cigar in the middle of the night must be doing a think.
+
+Mr Jones raised himself on his elbow. This sign of interest comforted
+his faithful henchman.
+
+"Seems to me it's time we did a little think ourselves," added Ricardo,
+with more assurance. Long as they had been together the moods of his
+governor were still a source of anxiety to his simple soul.
+
+"You are always making a fuss," remarked Mr. Jones, in a tolerant tone.
+
+"Ay, but not for nothing, am I? You can't say that, sir. Mine may not be
+a gentleman's way of looking round a thing, but it isn't a fool's way,
+either. You've admitted that much yourself at odd times."
+
+Ricardo was growing warmly argumentative. Mr. Jones interrupted him
+without heat.
+
+"You haven't roused me to talk about yourself, I presume?"
+
+"No, sir." Ricardo remained silent for a minute, with the tip of
+his tongue caught between his teeth. "I don't think I could tell you
+anything about myself that you don't know," he continued. There was a
+sort of amused satisfaction in his tone which changed completely as he
+went on. "It's that man, over there, that's got to be talked over. I
+don't like him."
+
+He, failed to observe the flicker of a ghastly smile on his governor's
+lips.
+
+"Don't you?" murmured Mr. Jones, whose face, as he reclined on his
+elbow, was on a level with the top of his follower's head.
+
+"No, sir," said Ricardo emphatically. The candle from the other side of
+the room threw his monstrous black shadow on the wall. "He--I don't know
+how to say it--he isn't hearty-like."
+
+Mr Jones agreed languidly in his own manner:
+
+"He seems to be a very self-possessed man."
+
+"Ay, that's it. Self--" Ricardo choked with indignation. "I would soon
+let out some of his self-possession through a hole between his ribs, if
+this weren't a special job!"
+
+Mr Jones had been making his own reflections, for he asked:
+
+"Do you think he is suspicious?"
+
+"I don't see very well what he can be suspicious of," pondered Ricardo.
+"Yet there he was doing a think. And what could be the object of it?
+What made him get out of his bed in the middle of the night. 'Tain't
+fleas, surely."
+
+"Bad conscience, perhaps," suggested Mr. Jones jocularly.
+
+His faithful secretary suffered from irritation, and did not see the
+joke. In a fretful tone he declared that there was no such thing as
+conscience. There was such a thing as funk; but there was nothing to
+make that fellow funky in any special way. He admitted, however, that
+the man might have been uneasy at the arrival of strangers, because of
+all that plunder of his put away somewhere.
+
+Ricardo glanced here and there, as if he were afraid of being overheard
+by the heavy shadows cast by the dim light all over the room. His
+patron, very quiet, spoke in a calm whisper:
+
+"And perhaps that hotel-keeper has been lying to you about him. He may
+be a very poor devil indeed."
+
+Ricardo shook his head slightly. The Schombergian theory of Heyst had
+become in him a profound conviction, which he had absorbed as naturally
+as a sponge takes up water. His patron's doubts were a wanton denying
+of what was self-evident; but Ricardo's voice remained as before, a soft
+purring with a snarling undertone.
+
+"I am sup-prised at you, sir! It's the very way them tame ones--the
+common 'yporcrits of the world--get on. When it comes to plunder
+drifting under one's very nose, there's not one of them that would keep
+his hands off. And I don't blame them. It's the way they do it that sets
+my back up. Just look at the story of how he got rid of that pal of his!
+Send a man home to croak of a cold on the chest--that's one of your tame
+tricks. And d'you mean to say, sir, that a man that's up to it wouldn't
+bag whatever he could lay his hands in his 'yporcritical way? What was
+all that coal business? Tame citizen dodge; 'yporcrisy--nothing else.
+No, no, sir! The thing is to extract it from him as neatly as possible.
+That's the job; and it isn't so simple as it looks. I reckon you have
+looked at it all round, sir, before you took up the notion of this
+trip."
+
+"No." Mr. Jones was hardly audible, staring far away from his couch. "I
+didn't think about it much. I was bored."
+
+"Ay, that you were--bad. I was feeling pretty desperate that afternoon,
+when that bearded softy of a landlord got talking to me about this
+fellow here. Quite accidentally, it was. Well, sir, here we are after a
+mighty narrow squeak. I feel all limp yet; but never mind--his swag will
+pay for the lot!"
+
+"He's all alone here," remarked Mr. Jones in a hollow murmur.
+
+"Ye-es, in a way. Yes, alone enough. Yes, you may say he is."
+
+"There's that Chinaman, though."
+
+"Ay, there's the Chink," assented Ricardo rather absentmindedly.
+
+He was debating in his mind the advisability of making a clean breast of
+his knowledge of the girl's existence. Finally he concluded he wouldn't.
+The enterprise was difficult enough without complicating it with an
+upset to the sensibilities of the gentleman with whom he had the honour
+of being associated. Let the discovery come of itself, he thought,
+and then he could swear that he had known nothing of that offensive
+presence.
+
+He did not need to lie. He had only to hold his tongue.
+
+"Yes," he muttered reflectively, "there's that Chink, certainly."
+
+At bottom, he felt a certain ambiguous respect for his governor's
+exaggerated dislike of women, as if that horror of feminine presence
+were a sort of depraved morality; but still morality, since he counted
+it as an advantage. It prevented many undesirable complications. He did
+not pretend to understand it. He did not even try to investigate
+this idiosyncrasy of his chief. All he knew was that he himself was
+differently inclined, and that it did not make him any happier or safer.
+He did not know how he would have acted if he had been knocking about
+the world on his own. Luckily he was a subordinate, not a wage-slave but
+a follower--which was a restraint. Yes! The other sort of disposition
+simplified matters in general; it wasn't to be gainsaid. But it was
+clear that it could also complicate them--as in this most important and,
+in Ricardo's view, already sufficiently delicate case. And the worst of
+it was that one could not tell exactly in what precise manner it would
+act.
+
+It was unnatural, he thought somewhat peevishly. How was one to reckon
+up the unnatural? There were no rules for that. The faithful henchman
+of plain Mr. Jones, foreseeing many difficulties of a material order,
+decided to keep the girl out of the governor's knowledge, out of his
+sight, too, for as long a time as it could be managed. That, alas,
+seemed to be at most a matter of a few hours; whereas Ricardo feared
+that to get the affair properly going would take some days. Once well
+started, he was not afraid of his gentleman failing him. As is often the
+case with lawless natures, Ricardo's faith in any given individual was
+of a simple, unquestioning character. For man must have some support in
+life.
+
+Cross-legged, his head drooping a little and perfectly still, he might
+have been meditating in a bonze-like attitude upon the sacred syllable
+"Om." It was a striking illustration of the untruth of appearances, for
+his contempt for the world was of a severely practical kind. There was
+nothing oriental about Ricardo but the amazing quietness of his pose.
+Mr. Jones was also very quiet. He had let his head sink on the rolled-up
+rug, and lay stretched out on his side with his back to the light. In
+that position the shadows gathered in the cavities of his eyes made
+them look perfectly empty. When he spoke, his ghostly voice had only to
+travel a few inches straight into Ricardo's left ear.
+
+"Why don't you say something, now that you've got me awake?"
+
+"I wonder if you were sleeping as sound as you are trying to make out,
+sir," said the unmoved Ricardo.
+
+"I wonder," repeated Mr. Jones. "At any rate, I was resting quietly!"
+
+"Come, sir!" Ricardo's whisper was alarmed. "You don't mean to say
+you're going to be bored?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Quite right!" The secretary was very much relieved. "There's no
+occasion to be, I can tell you, sir," he whispered earnestly. "Anything
+but that! If I didn't say anything for a bit, it ain't because there
+isn't plenty to talk about. Ay, more than enough."
+
+"What's the matter with you?" breathed out his patron. "Are you going to
+turn pessimist?"
+
+"Me turn? No, sir! I ain't of those that turn. You may call me hard
+names, if you like, but you know very well that I ain't a croaker."
+Ricardo changed his tone. "If I said nothing for a while, it was because
+I was meditating over the Chink, sir."
+
+"You were? Waste of time, my Martin. A Chinaman is unfathomable."
+
+Ricardo admitted that this might be so. Anyhow, a Chink was neither
+here nor there, as a general thing, unfathomable as he might be; but a
+Swedish baron wasn't--couldn't be! The woods were full of such barons.
+
+"I don't know that he is so tame," was Mr. Jones's remark, in a
+sepulchral undertone.
+
+"How do you mean, sir? He ain't a rabbit, of course. You couldn't
+hypnotize him, as I saw you do to more than one Dago, and other kinds
+of tame citizens, when it came to the point of holding them down to a
+game."
+
+"Don't you reckon on that," murmured plain Mr. Jones seriously.
+
+"No, sir, I don't, though you have a wonderful power of the eye. It's a
+fact."
+
+"I have a wonderful patience," remarked Mr. Jones dryly.
+
+A dim smile flitted over the lips of the faithful Ricardo who never
+raised his head.
+
+"I don't want to try you too much, sir, but this is like no other job we
+ever turned our minds to."
+
+"Perhaps not. At any rate let us think so."
+
+A weariness with the monotony of life was reflected in the tone of this
+qualified assent. It jarred on the nerves of the sanguine Ricardo.
+
+"Let us think of the way to go to work," he retorted a little
+impatiently. "He's a deep one. Just look at the way he treated that chum
+of his. Did you ever hear of anything so low? And the artfulness of the
+beast--the dirty, tame artfulness!"
+
+"Don't you start moralizing, Martin," said Mr. Jones warningly. "As far
+as I can make out the story that German hotel-keeper told you, it seems
+to show a certain amount of character;--and independence from common
+feelings which is not usual. It's very remarkable, if true."
+
+"Ay, ay! Very remarkable. It's mighty low down, all the same," muttered,
+Ricardo obstinately. "I must say I am glad to think he will be paid off
+for it in a way that'll surprise him!"
+
+The tip of his tongue appeared lively for an instant, as if trying for
+the taste of that ferocious retribution on his compressed lips. For
+Ricardo was sincere in his indignation before the elementary principle
+of loyalty to a chum violated in cold blood, slowly, in a patient
+duplicity of years. There are standards in villainy as in virtue, and
+the act as he pictured it to himself acquired an additional horror
+from the slow pace of that treachery so atrocious and so tame. But
+he understood too the educated judgement of his governor, a gentleman
+looking on all this with the privileged detachment of a cultivated mind,
+of an elevated personality.
+
+"Ay, he's deep--he's artful," he mumbled between his sharp teeth.
+
+"Confound you!" Mr. Jones's calm whisper crept into his ear. "Come to
+the point."
+
+Obedient, the secretary shook off his thoughtfulness. There was a
+similarity of mind between these two--one the outcast of his vices, the
+other inspired by a spirit of scornful defiance, the aggressiveness of
+a beast of prey looking upon all the tame creatures of the earth as its
+natural victim. Both were astute enough, however, and both were aware
+that they had plunged into this adventure without a sufficient scrutiny
+of detail. The figure of a lonely man far from all assistance had
+loomed up largely, fascinating and defenceless in the middle of the sea,
+filling the whole field of their vision. There had not seemed to be any
+need for thinking. As Schomberg had been saying: "Three to one."
+
+But it did not look so simple now in the face of that solitude which was
+like an armour for this man. The feeling voiced by the henchman in his
+own way--"We don't seem much forwarder now we are here" was acknowledged
+by the silence of the patron. It was easy enough to rip a fellow up or
+drill a hole in him, whether he was alone or not, Ricardo reflected in
+low, confidential tones, but--
+
+"He isn't alone," Mr. Jones said faintly, in his attitude of a man
+composed for sleep. "Don't forget that Chinaman." Ricardo started
+slightly.
+
+"Oh, ay--the Chink!"
+
+Ricardo had been on the point of confessing about the girl; but no! He
+wanted his governor to be unperturbed and steady. Vague thoughts,
+which he hardly dared to look in the face, were stirring his brain in
+connection with that girl. She couldn't be much account, he thought. She
+could be frightened. And there were also other possibilities. The Chink,
+however, could be considered openly.
+
+"What I was thinking about it, sir," he went on earnestly, "is
+this--here we've got a man. He's nothing. If he won't be good, he can be
+made quiet. That's easy. But then there's his plunder. He doesn't carry
+it in his pocket."
+
+"I hope not," breathed Mr. Jones.
+
+"Same here. It's too big, we know, but if he were alone, he would not
+feel worried about it overmuch--I mean the safety of the pieces. He
+would just put the lot into any box or drawer that was handy."
+
+"Would he?"
+
+"Yes, sir. He would keep it under his eye, as it were. Why not? It is
+natural. A fellow doesn't put his swag underground, unless there's a
+very good reason for it."
+
+"A very good reason, eh?"
+
+"Yes, sir. What do you think a fellow is--a mole?"
+
+From his experience, Ricardo declared that man was not a burrowing
+beast. Even the misers very seldom buried their hoard, unless for
+exceptional reasons. In the given situation of a man alone on an island,
+the company of a Chink was a very good reason. Drawers would not be
+safe, nor boxes, either, from a prying, slant-eyed Chink. No, sir,
+unless a safe--a proper office safe. But the safe was there in the room.
+
+"Is there a safe in this room? I didn't notice it," whispered Mr. Jones.
+
+That was because the thing was painted white, like the walls of the
+room; and besides, it was tucked away in the shadows of a corner. Mr.
+Jones had been too tired to observe anything on his first coming ashore;
+but Ricardo had very soon spotted the characteristic form. He only
+wished he could believe that the plunder of treachery, duplicity, and
+all the moral abominations of Heyst had been there. But no; the blamed
+thing was open.
+
+"It might have been there at one time or another," he commented
+gloomily, "but it isn't there now."
+
+"The man did not elect to live in this house," remarked Mr. Jones. "And
+by the by, what could he have meant by speaking of circumstances which
+prevented him lodging us in the other bungalow? You remember what he
+said, Martin? Sounded cryptic."
+
+Martin, who remembered and understood the phrase as directly motived by
+the existence of the girl, waited a little before saying:
+
+"Some of his artfulness, sir; and not the worst of it either. That
+manner of his to us, this asking no questions, is some more of his
+artfulness. A man's bound to be curious, and he is; yet he goes on as if
+he didn't care. He does care--or else what was he doing up with a cigar
+in the middle of the night, doing a think? I don't like it."
+
+"He may be outside, observing the light here, and saying the very same
+thing to himself of our own wakefulness," gravely suggested Ricardo's
+governor.
+
+"He may be, sir; but this is too important to be talked over in the
+dark. And the light is all right, it can be accounted for. There's a
+light in this bungalow in the middle of the night because--why, because
+you are not well. Not well, sir--that's what's the matter, and you will
+have to act up to it."
+
+The consideration had suddenly occurred to the faithful henchman, in the
+light of a felicitous expedient to keep his governor and the girl apart
+as long as possible. Mr. Jones received the suggestion without the
+slightest stir, even in the deep sockets of his eyes, where a steady,
+faint gleam was the only thing telling of life and attention in his
+attenuated body. But Ricardo, as soon as he had enunciated his happy
+thought, perceived in it other possibilities more to the point and of
+greater practical advantage.
+
+"With your looks, sir, it will be easy enough," he went on evenly, as
+if no silence had intervened, always respectful, but frank, with
+perfect simplicity of purpose. "All you've got to do is just to lie down
+quietly. I noticed him looking sort of surprised at you on the wharf,
+sir."
+
+At these words, a naive tribute to the aspect of his physique, even more
+suggestive of the grave than of the sick-bed, a fold appeared on that
+side of the governor's face which was exposed to the dim light--a deep,
+shadowy, semicircular fold from the side of the nose to bottom of the
+chin--a silent smile. By a side-glance Ricardo had noted this play of
+features. He smiled, too, appreciative, encouraged.
+
+"And you as hard as nails all the time," he went on. "Hang me if anybody
+would believe you aren't sick, if I were to swear myself black in
+the face! Give us a day or two to look into matters and size up that
+'yporcrit."
+
+Ricardo's eyes remained fixed on his crossed shins. The chief, in his
+lifeless accents, approved.
+
+"Perhaps it would be a good idea."
+
+"The Chink, he's nothing. He can be made quiet any time."
+
+One of Ricardo's hands, reposing palm upwards on his folded legs, made
+a swift thrusting gesture, repeated by the enormous darting shadow of an
+arm very low on the wall. It broke the spell of perfect stillness in
+the room. The secretary eyed moodily the wall from which the shadow had
+gone. Anybody could be made quiet, he pointed out. It was not anything
+that the Chink could do; no, it was the effect that his company must
+have produced on the conduct of the doomed man. A man! What was a man? A
+Swedish baron could be ripped up, or else holed by a shot, as easily as
+any other creature; but that was exactly what was to be avoided, till
+one knew where he had hidden his plunder.
+
+"I shouldn't think it would be some sort of hole in his bungalow,"
+argued Ricardo with real anxiety.
+
+No. A house can be burnt--set on fire accidentally, or on purpose, while
+a man's asleep. Under the house--or in some crack, cranny, or crevice?
+Something told him it wasn't that. The anguish of mental effort
+contracted Ricardo's brow. The skin of his head seemed to move in this
+travail of vain and tormenting suppositions.
+
+"What did you think a fellow is, sir--a baby?" he said, in answer to Mr.
+Jones's objections. "I am trying to find out what I would do myself. He
+wouldn't be likely to be cleverer than I am."
+
+"And what do you know about yourself?"
+
+Mr Jones seemed to watch his follower's perplexities with amusement
+concealed in a death-like composure.
+
+Ricardo disregarded the question. The material vision of the spoil
+absorbed all his faculties. A great vision! He seemed to see it. A few
+small canvas bags tied up with thin cord, their distended rotundity
+showing the inside pressure of the disk-like forms of coins--gold,
+solid, heavy, eminently portable. Perhaps steel cash-boxes with a chased
+design, on the covers; or perhaps a black and brass box with a handle
+on the top, and full of goodness knows what. Bank notes? Why not? The
+fellow had been going home; so it was surely something worth going home
+with.
+
+"And he may have put it anywhere outside--anywhere!" cried Ricardo in a
+deadened voice, "in the forest--"
+
+That was it! A temporary darkness replaced the dim light of the room.
+The darkness of the forest at night and in it the gleam of a lantern, by
+which a figure is digging at the foot of a tree-trunk. As likely as not,
+another figure holding that lantern--ha, feminine! The girl!
+
+The prudent Ricardo stifled a picturesque and profane exclamation,
+partly joy, partly dismay. Had the girl been trusted or mistrusted by
+that man? Whatever it was, it was bound to be wholly! With women there
+could be no half-measures. He could not imagine a fellow half-trusting
+a woman in that intimate relation to himself, and in those particular
+circumstances of conquest and loneliness where no confidences could
+appear dangerous since, apparently, there could be no one she could
+give him away to. Moreover, in nine cases out of ten the woman would be
+trusted. But, trusted or mistrusted, was her presence a favourable or
+unfavourable condition of the problem? That was the question!
+
+The temptation to consult his chief, to talk over the weighty fact, and
+get his opinion on it, was great indeed. Ricardo resisted it; but the
+agony of his solitary mental conflict was extremely sharp. A woman in
+a problem is an incalculable quantity, even if you have something to go
+upon in forming your guess. How much more so when you haven't even once
+caught sight of her.
+
+Swift as were his mental processes, he felt that a longer silence was
+inadvisable. He hastened to speak:
+
+"And do you see us, sir, you and I, with a couple of spades having to
+tackle this whole confounded island?"
+
+He allowed himself a slight movement of the arm. The shadow enlarged it
+into a sweeping gesture.
+
+"This seems rather discouraging, Martin," murmured the unmoved governor.
+
+"We mustn't be discouraged--that's all!" retorted his henchman. "And
+after what we had to go through in that boat too! Why it would be--"
+
+He couldn't find the qualifying words. Very calm, faithful, and yet
+astute, he expressed his new-born hopes darkly.
+
+"Something's sure to turn up to give us a hint; only this job can't be
+rushed. You may depend on me to pick up the least little bit of a hint;
+but you, sir--you've got to play him very gently. For the rest you can
+trust me."
+
+"Yes; but I ask myself what YOU are trusting to."
+
+"Our luck," said the faithful Ricardo. "Don't say a word against that.
+It might spoil the run of it."
+
+"You are a superstitious beggar. No, I won't say anything against it."
+
+"That's right, sir. Don't you even think lightly of it. Luck's not to be
+played with."
+
+"Yes, luck's a delicate thing," assented Mr. Jones in a dreamy whisper.
+
+A short silence ensued, which Ricardo ended in a discreet and tentative
+voice.
+
+"Talking of luck, I suppose he could be made to take a hand with
+you, sir--two-handed picket or ekkarty, you being seedy and keeping
+indoors--just to pass the time. For all we know, he may be one of them
+hot ones once they start--"
+
+"Is it likely?" came coldly from the principal. "Considering what we
+know of his history--say with his partner."
+
+"True, sir. He's a cold-blooded beast; a cold-blooded, inhuman--"
+
+"And I'll tell you another thing that isn't likely. He would not be
+likely to let himself be stripped bare. We haven't to do with a young
+fool that can be led on by chaff or flattery, and in the end simply
+overawed. This is a calculating man."
+
+Ricardo recognized that clearly. What he had in his mind was something
+on a small scale, just to keep the enemy busy while he, Ricardo, had
+time to nose around a bit.
+
+"You could even lose a little money to him, sir," he suggested.
+
+"I could."
+
+Ricardo was thoughtful for a moment.
+
+"He strikes me, too, as the sort of man to start prancing when one
+didn't expect it. What do you think, sir? Is he a man that would prance?
+That is, if something startled him. More likely to prance than to
+run--what?"
+
+The answer came at once, because Mr. Jones understood the peculiar idiom
+of his faithful follower.
+
+"Oh, without doubt! Without doubt!"
+
+"It does me good to hear that you think so. He's a prancing beast,
+and so we mustn't startle him--not till I have located the stuff.
+Afterwards--"
+
+Ricardo paused, sinister in the stillness of his pose. Suddenly he
+got up with a swift movement and gazed down at his chief in moody
+abstraction. Mr. Jones did not stir.
+
+"There's one thing that's worrying me," began Ricardo in a subdued
+voice.
+
+"Only one?" was the faint comment from the motionless body on the
+bedstead.
+
+"I mean more than all the others put together."
+
+"That's grave news."
+
+"Ay, grave enough. It's this--how do you feel in yourself, sir? Are you
+likely to get bored? I know them fits come on you suddenly; but surely
+you can tell--"
+
+"Martin, you are an ass."
+
+The moody face of the secretary brightened up.
+
+"Really, sir? Well, I am quite content to be on these terms--I mean as
+long as you don't get bored. It wouldn't do, sir."
+
+For coolness, Ricardo had thrown open his shirt and rolled up his
+sleeves. He moved stealthily across the room, bare-footed, towards the
+candle, the shadow of his head and shoulders growing bigger behind him
+on the opposite wall, to which the face of plain Mr. Jones was turned.
+With a feline movement, Ricardo glanced over his shoulder at the thin
+back of the spectre reposing on the bed, and then blew out the candle.
+
+"In fact, I am rather amused, Martin," Mr. Jones said in the dark.
+
+He heard the sound of a slapped thigh and the jubilant exclamation of
+his henchman:
+
+"Good! That's the way to talk, sir!"
+
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+Ricardo advanced prudently by short darts from one tree-trunk to
+another, more in the manner of a squirrel than a cat. The sun had
+risen some time before. Already the sparkle of open sea was encroaching
+rapidly on the dark, cool, early-morning blue of Diamond Bay; but the
+deep dusk lingered yet under the mighty pillars of the forest, between
+which the secretary dodged.
+
+He was watching Number One's bungalow with an animal-like patience, if
+with a very human complexity of purpose. This was the second morning
+of such watching. The first one had not been rewarded by success. Well,
+strictly speaking, there was no hurry.
+
+The sun, swinging above the ridge all at once, inundated with light the
+space of burnt grass in front of Ricardo and the face of the bungalow,
+on which his eyes were fixed, leaving only the one dark spot of the
+doorway. To his right, to his left, and behind him, splashes of gold
+appeared in the deep shade of the forest, thinning the gloom under the
+ragged roof of leaves.
+
+This was not a very favourable circumstance for Ricardo's purpose. He
+did not wish to be detected in his patient occupation. For what he was
+watching for was a sight of the girl--that girl! just a glimpse across
+the burnt patch to see what she was like. He had excellent eyes, and
+the distance was not so great. He would be able to distinguish her face
+quite easily if she only came out on the veranda; and she was bound
+to do that sooner or later. He was confident that he could form some
+opinion about her--which, he felt, was very necessary, before venturing
+on some steps to get in touch with her behind that Swedish baron's back.
+His theoretical view of the girl was such that he was quite prepared,
+on the strength of that distant examination, to show himself
+discreetly--perhaps even make a sign. It all depended on his reading of
+the face. She couldn't be much. He knew that sort!
+
+By protruding his head a little he commanded, through the foliage of a
+festooning creeper, a view of the three bungalows. Irregularly disposed
+along a flat curve, over the veranda rail of the farthermost one hung a
+dark rug of a tartan pattern, amazingly conspicuous. Ricardo could see
+the very checks. A brisk fire of sticks was burning on the ground in
+front of the steps, and in the sunlight the thin, fluttering flame had
+paled almost to invisibility--a mere rosy stir under a faint wreath of
+smoke. He could see the white bandage on the head of Pedro bending over
+it, and the wisps of black hair standing up weirdly. He had wound that
+bandage himself, after breaking that shaggy and enormous head. The
+creature balanced it like a load, staggering towards the steps. Ricardo
+could see a small, long-handled saucepan at the end of a great hairy
+paw.
+
+Yes, he could see all that there was to be seen, far and near. Excellent
+eyes! The only thing they could not penetrate was the dark oblong of the
+doorway on the veranda under the low eaves of the bungalow's roof. And
+that was vexing. It was an outrage. Ricardo was easily outraged. Surely
+she would come out presently! Why didn't she? Surely the fellow did not
+tie her up to the bedpost before leaving the house!
+
+Nothing appeared. Ricardo was as still as the leafy cables of creepers
+depending in a convenient curtain from the mighty limb sixty feet above
+his head. His very eyelids were still, and this unblinking watchfulness
+gave him the dreamy air of a cat posed on a hearth-rug contemplating the
+fire. Was he dreaming? There, in plain sight, he had before him a white,
+blouse-like jacket, short blue trousers, a pair of bare yellow calves, a
+pigtail, long and slender--
+
+"The confounded Chink!" he muttered, astounded.
+
+He was not conscious of having looked away; and yet right there, in the
+middle of the picture, without having come round the right-hand corner
+or the left-hand corner of the house, without falling from the sky or
+surging up from the ground, Wang had become visible, large as life,
+and engaged in the young-ladyish occupation of picking flowers. Step
+by step, stooping repeatedly over the flower-beds at the foot of the
+veranda, the startlingly materialized Chinaman passed off the scene in
+a very commonplace manner, by going up the steps and disappearing in the
+darkness of the doorway.
+
+Only then the yellow eyes of Martin Ricardo lost their intent fixity. He
+understood that it was time for him to be moving. That bunch of
+flowers going into the house in the hand of a Chinaman was for the
+breakfast-table. What else could it be for?
+
+"I'll give you flowers!" he muttered threateningly. "You wait!"
+
+Another moment, just for a glance towards the Jones bungalow, whence
+he expected Heyst to issue on his way to that breakfast so offensively
+decorated, and Ricardo began his retreat. His impulse, his desire, was
+for a rush into the open, face to face with the appointed victim, for
+what he called a "ripping up," visualized greedily, and always with
+the swift preliminary stooping movement on his part--the forerunner of
+certain death to his adversary. This was his impulse; and as it was, so
+to speak, constitutional, it was extremely difficult to resist when his
+blood was up. What could be more trying than to have to skulk and dodge
+and restrain oneself, mentally and physically, when one's blood was up?
+Mr. Secretary Ricardo began his retreat from his post of observation
+behind a tree opposite Heyst's bungalow, using great care to remain
+unseen. His proceedings were made easier by the declivity of the ground,
+which sloped sharply down to the water's edge. There, his feet feeling
+the warmth of the island's rocky foundation already heated by the sun,
+through the thin soles of his straw slippers he was, as it were, sunk
+out of sight of the houses. A short scramble of some twenty feet brought
+him up again to the upper level, at the place where the jetty had its
+root in the shore. He leaned his back against one of the lofty uprights
+which still held up the company's signboard above the mound of derelict
+coal. Nobody could have guessed how much his blood was up. To contain
+himself he folded his arms tightly on his breast.
+
+Ricardo was not used to a prolonged effort of self-control. His craft,
+his artfulness, felt themselves always at the mercy of his nature, which
+was truly feral and only held in subjection by the influence of the
+"governor," the prestige of a gentleman. It had its cunning too, but it
+was being almost too severely tried since the feral solution of a growl
+and a spring was forbidden by the problem. Ricardo dared not venture out
+on the cleared ground. He dared not.
+
+"If I meet the beggar," he thought, "I don't know what I mayn't do. I
+daren't trust myself."
+
+What exasperated him just now was his inability to understand
+Heyst. Ricardo was human enough to suffer from the discovery of his
+limitations. No, he couldn't size Heyst up. He could kill him with
+extreme ease--a growl and a spring--but that was forbidden! However, he
+could not remain indefinitely under the funereal blackboard.
+
+"I must make a move," he thought.
+
+He moved on, his head swimming a little with the repressed desire of
+violence, and came out openly in front of the bungalows, as if he had
+just been down to the jetty to look at the boat. The sunshine enveloped
+him, very brilliant, very still, very hot. The three buildings faced
+him. The one with the rug on the balustrade was the most distant; next
+to it was the empty bungalow; the nearest, with the flower-beds at the
+foot of its veranda, contained that bothersome girl, who had managed
+so provokingly to keep herself invisible. That was why Ricardo's eyes
+lingered on that building. The girl would surely be easier to "size up"
+than Heyst. A sight of her, a mere glimpse, would have been something to
+go by, a step nearer to the goal--the first real move, in fact. Ricardo
+saw no other move. And any time she might appear on that veranda!
+
+She did not appear; but, like a concealed magnet, she exercised her
+attraction. As he went on, he deviated towards the bungalow. Though his
+movements were deliberate, his feral instincts had such sway that if he
+had met Heyst walking towards him, he would have had to satisfy his
+need of violence. But he saw nobody. Wang was at the back of the house,
+keeping the coffee hot against Number One's return for breakfast. Even
+the simian Pedro was out of sight, no doubt crouching on the door-step,
+his red little eyes fastened with animal-like devotion on Mr. Jones, who
+was in discourse with Heyst in the other bungalow--the conversation of
+an evil spectre with a disarmed man, watched by an ape.
+
+His will having very little to do with it, Ricardo, darting swift
+glances in all directions, found himself at the steps of the Heyst
+bungalow. Once there, falling under an uncontrollable force of
+attraction, he mounted them with a savage and stealthy action of his
+limbs, and paused for a moment under the eaves to listen to the silence.
+Presently he advanced over the threshold one leg--it seemed to stretch
+itself, like a limb of india-rubber--planted his foot within, brought up
+the other swiftly, and stood inside the room, turning his head from side
+to side. To his eyes, brought in there from the dazzling sunshine, all
+was gloom for a moment. His pupils, like a cat's, dilating swiftly, he
+distinguished an enormous quantity of books. He was amazed; and he was
+put off too. He was vexed in his astonishment. He had meant to note the
+aspect and nature of things, and hoped to draw some useful inference,
+some hint as to the man. But what guess could one make out of a
+multitude of books? He didn't know what to think; and he formulated his
+bewilderment in the mental exclamation:
+
+"What the devil has this fellow been trying to set up here--a school?"
+
+He gave a prolonged stare to the portrait of Heyst's father, that severe
+profile ignoring the vanities of this earth. His eyes gleamed sideways
+at the heavy silver candlesticks--signs of opulence. He prowled as a
+stray cat entering a strange place might have done, for if Ricardo had
+not Wang's miraculous gift of materializing and vanishing, rather than
+coming and going, he could be nearly as noiseless in his less elusive
+movements. He noted the back door standing just ajar; and all the time
+his slightly pointed ears, at the utmost stretch of watchfulness, kept
+in touch with the profound silence outside enveloping the absolute
+stillness of the house.
+
+He had not been in the room two minutes when it occurred to him that he
+must be alone in the bungalow. The woman, most likely, had sneaked out
+and was walking about somewhere in the grounds at the back. She had
+been probably ordered to keep out of sight. Why? Because the fellow
+mistrusted his guests; or was it because he mistrusted her?
+
+Ricardo reflected that from a certain point of view it amounted nearly
+to the same thing. He remembered Schomberg's story. He felt that
+running away with somebody only to get clear of that beastly, tame,
+hotel-keeper's attention was no proof of hopeless infatuation. She could
+be got in touch with.
+
+His moustaches stirred. For some time he had been looking at a closed
+door. He would peep into that other room, and perhaps see something more
+informing than a confounded lot of books. As he crossed over, he thought
+recklessly:
+
+"If the beggar comes in suddenly, and starts to prance, I'll rip him up
+and be done with it!"
+
+He laid his hand on the handle, and felt the door come unlatched. Before
+he pulled it open, he listened again to the silence. He felt it all
+about him, complete, without a flaw.
+
+The necessity of prudence had exasperated his self-restraint. A mood
+of ferocity woke up in him, and, as always at such times, he became
+physically aware of the sheeted knife strapped to his leg. He pulled at
+the door with fierce curiosity. It came open without a squeak of hinge,
+without a rustle, with no sound at all; and he found himself glaring at
+the opaque surface of some rough blue stuff, like serge. A curtain was
+fitted inside, heavy enough and long enough not to stir.
+
+A curtain! This unforeseen veil, baffling his curiosity checked his
+brusqueness. He did not fling it aside with an impatient movement; he
+only looked at it closely, as if its texture had to be examined before
+his hand could touch such stuff. In this interval of hesitation, he
+seemed to detect a flaw in the perfection of the silence, the faintest
+possible rustle, which his ears caught and instantly, in the effort of
+conscious listening, lost again. No! Everything was still inside and
+outside the house, only he had no longer the sense of being alone there.
+
+When he put out his hand towards the motionless folds it was with
+extreme caution, and merely to push the stuff aside a little, advancing
+his head at the same time to peep within. A moment of complete
+immobility ensued. Then, without anything else of him stirring,
+Ricardo's head shrank back on his shoulders, his arm descended slowly to
+his side. There was a woman in there. The very woman! Lighted dimly
+by the reflection of the outer glare, she loomed up strangely big and
+shadowy at the other end of the long, narrow room. With her back to
+the door, she was doing her hair with bare arms uplifted. One of them
+gleamed pearly white; the other detached its perfect form in black
+against the unshuttered, uncurtained square window-hole. She was there,
+her fingers busy with her dark hair, utterly unconscious, exposed and
+defenceless--and tempting.
+
+Ricardo drew back one foot and pressed his elbows close to his sides;
+his chest started heaving convulsively as if he were wrestling or
+running a race; his body began to sway gently back and forth. The
+self-restraint was at an end: his psychology must have its way. The
+instinct for the feral spring could no longer be denied. Ravish or
+kill--it was all one to him, as long as by the act he liberated the
+suffering soul of savagery repressed for so long. After a quick glance
+over his shoulder, which hunters of big game tell us no lion or tiger
+omits to give before charging home, Ricardo charged, head down, straight
+at the curtain. The stuff, tossed up violently by his rush, settled
+itself with a slow, floating descent into vertical folds, motionless,
+without a shudder even, in the still, warm air.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+The clock--which once upon a time had measured the hours of philosophic
+meditation--could not have ticked away more than five seconds when Wang
+materialized within the living-room. His concern primarily was with the
+delayed breakfast, but at once his slanting eyes became immovably fixed
+upon the unstirring curtain. For it was behind it that he had located
+the strange, deadened scuffling sounds which filled the empty room. The
+slanting eyes of his race could not achieve a round, amazed stare, but
+they remained still, dead still, and his impassive yellow face grew all
+at once careworn and lean with the sudden strain of intense, doubtful,
+frightened watchfulness. Contrary impulses swayed his body, rooted to
+the floor-mats. He even went so far as to extend his hand towards the
+curtain. He could not reach it, and he didn't make the necessary step
+forward.
+
+The mysterious struggle was going on with confused thuds of bare feet,
+in a mute wrestling match, no human sound, hiss, groan, murmur, or
+exclamation coming through the curtain. A chair fell over, not with a
+crash but lightly, as if just grazed, and a faint metallic ring of the
+tin bath succeeded. Finally the tense silence, as of two adversaries
+locked in a deadly grip, was ended by the heavy, dull thump of a soft
+body flung against the inner partition of planks. It seemed to shake
+the whole bungalow. By that time, walking backward, his eyes, his
+very throat, strained with fearful excitement, his extended arm still
+pointing at the curtain, Wang had disappeared through the back door.
+Once out in the compound, he bolted round the end of the house. Emerging
+innocently between the two bungalows he lingered and lounged in the
+open, where anybody issuing from any of the dwellings was bound to see
+him--a self-possessed Chinaman idling there, with nothing but perhaps an
+unserved breakfast on his mind.
+
+It was at this time that Wang made up his mind to give up all connection
+with Number One, a man not only disarmed but already half vanquished.
+Till that morning he had had doubts as to his course of action, but this
+overheard scuffle decided the question. Number One was a doomed man--one
+of those beings whom it is unlucky to help. Even as he walked in the
+open with a fine air of unconcern, Wang wondered that no sound of any
+sort was to be heard inside the house. For all he knew, the white woman
+might have been scuffling in there with an evil spirit, which had of
+course killed her. For nothing visible came out of the house he watched
+out of the slanting corner of his eye. The sunshine and the silence
+outside the bungalow reigned undisturbed.
+
+But in the house the silence of the big room would not have struck an
+acute ear as perfect. It was troubled by a stir so faint that it could
+hardly be called a ghost of whispering from behind the curtain.
+
+Ricardo, feeling his throat with tender care, breathed out admiringly:
+
+"You have fingers like steel. Jimminy! You have muscles like a giant!"
+
+Luckily for Lena, Ricardo's onset had been so sudden--she was winding
+her two heavy tresses round her head--that she had no time to lower her
+arms. This, which saved them from being pinned to her sides, gave her a
+better chance to resist. His spring had nearly thrown her down. Luckily,
+again, she was standing so near the wall that, though she was driven
+against it headlong, yet the shock was not heavy enough to knock all the
+breath out of her body. On the contrary, it helped her first instinctive
+attempt to drive her assailant backward.
+
+After the first gasp of a surprise that was really too over-powering for
+a cry, she was never in doubt of the nature of her danger. She defended
+herself in the full, clear knowledge of it, from the force of instinct
+which is the true source of every great display of energy, and with a
+determination which could hardly have been expected from a girl who,
+cornered in a dim corridor by the red-faced, stammering Schomberg, had
+trembled with shame, disgust, and fear; had drooped, terrified, before
+mere words spluttered out odiously by a man who had never in his life
+laid his big paw on her.
+
+This new enemy's attack was simple, straightforward violence. It was not
+the slimy, underhand plotting to deliver her up like a slave, which
+had sickened her heart and had made her feel in her loneliness that her
+oppressors were too many for her. She was no longer alone in the world
+now. She resisted without a moment of faltering, because she was no
+longer deprived of moral support; because she was a human being who
+counted; because she was no longer defending herself for herself alone;
+because of the faith that had been born in her--the faith in the man of
+her destiny, and perhaps in the Heaven which had sent him so wonderfully
+to cross her path.
+
+She had defended herself principally by maintaining a desperate,
+murderous clutch on Ricardo's windpipe, till she felt a sudden
+relaxation of the terrific hug in which he stupidly and ineffectually
+persisted to hold her. Then with a supreme effort of her arms and of
+her suddenly raised knee, she sent him flying against the partition.
+The cedar-wood chest stood in the way, and Ricardo, with a thump which
+boomed hollow through the whole bungalow, fell on it in a sitting
+posture, half strangled, and exhausted not so much by the efforts as by
+the emotions of the struggle.
+
+With the recoil of her exerted strength, she too reeled, staggered back,
+and sat on the edge of the bed. Out of breath, but calm and unabashed,
+she busied herself in readjusting under her arms the brown and yellow
+figured Celebes sarong, the tuck of which had come undone during the
+fight. Then, folding her bare arms tightly on her breast, she leaned
+forward on her crossed legs, determined and without fear.
+
+Ricardo, leaning forward too, his nervous force gone, crestfallen like a
+beast of prey that has missed its spring, met her big grey eyes looking
+at him--wide open, observing, mysterious--from under the dark arches of
+her courageous eyebrows. Their faces were not a foot apart. He ceased
+feeling about his aching throat and dropped the palms of his hands
+heavily on his knees. He was not looking at her bare shoulders, at her
+strong arms; he was looking down at the floor. He had lost one of his
+straw slippers. A chair with a white dress on it had been overturned.
+These, with splashes of water on the floor out of a brusquely misplaced
+sponge-bath, were the only traces of the struggle.
+
+Ricardo swallowed twice consciously, as if to make sure of his throat
+before he spoke again:
+
+"All right. I never meant to hurt you--though I am no joker when it
+comes to it."
+
+He pulled up the leg of his pyjamas to exhibit the strapped knife.
+She glanced at it without moving her head, and murmured with scornful
+bitterness:
+
+"Ah, yes--with that thing stuck in my side. In no other way."
+
+He shook his head with a shamefaced smile.
+
+"Listen! I am quiet now. Straight--I am. I don't need to explain
+why--you know how it is. And I can see, now, this wasn't the way with
+you."
+
+She made no sound. Her still, upward gaze had a patient, mournfulness
+which troubled him like a suggestion of an inconceivable depth. He added
+thoughtfully:
+
+"You are not going to make a noise about this silly try of mine?"
+
+She moved her head the least bit.
+
+"Jee-miny! You are a wonder--" he murmured earnestly, relieved more than
+she could have guessed.
+
+Of course, if she had attempted to run out, he would have stuck the
+knife between her shoulders, to stop her screaming; but all the fat
+would have been in the fire, the business utterly spoiled, and the rage
+of the governor--especially when he learned the cause--boundless. A
+woman that does not make a noise after an attempt of that kind has
+tacitly condoned the offence. Ricardo had no small vanities. But
+clearly, if she would pass it over like this, then he could not be so
+utterly repugnant to her. He felt flattered. And she didn't seem afraid
+of him either. He already felt almost tender towards the girl--that
+plucky, fine girl who had not tried to run screaming from him.
+
+"We shall be friends yet. I don't give you up. Don't think it. Friends
+as friends can be!" he whispered confidently. "Jee-miny! You aren't a
+tame one. Neither am I. You will find that out before long."
+
+He could not know that if she had not run out, it was because that
+morning, under the stress of growing uneasiness at the presence of the
+incomprehensible visitors, Heyst had confessed to her that it was his
+revolver he had been looking for in the night; that it was gone, that he
+was a disarmed, defenceless man. She had hardly comprehended the meaning
+of his confession. Now she understood better what it meant. The effort
+of her self-control, her stillness, impressed Ricardo. Suddenly she
+spoke:
+
+"What are you after?"
+
+He did not raise his eyes. His hands reposing on his knees, his drooping
+head, something reflective in his pose, suggested the weariness of a
+simple soul, the fatigue of a mental rather than physical contest. He
+answered the direct question by a direct statement, as if he were too
+tired to dissemble:
+
+"After the swag."
+
+The word was strange to her. The veiled ardour of her grey gaze from
+under the dark eyebrows never left Ricardo's.
+
+"A swag?" she murmured quietly. "What's that?"
+
+"Why, swag, plunder--what your gentleman has been pinching right and
+left for years--the pieces. Don't you know? This!"
+
+Without looking up, he made the motion of counting money into the
+palm of his hand. She lowered her eyes slightly to observe this bit
+of pantomime, but returned them to his face at once. Then, in a mere
+breath:
+
+"How do you know anything about him?" she asked, concealing her puzzled
+alarm. "What has it got to do with you?"
+
+"Everything," was Ricardo's concise answer, in a low, emphatic whisper.
+He reflected that this girl was really his best hope. Out of the unfaded
+impression of past violence there was growing the sort of sentiment
+which prevents a man from being indifferent to a woman he has once held
+in his arms--if even against her will--and still more so if she has
+pardoned the outrage. It becomes then a sort of bond. He felt positively
+the need to confide in her--a subtle trait of masculinity, this almost
+physical need of trust which can exist side by side with the most brutal
+readiness of suspicion.
+
+"It's a game of grab--see?" he went on, with a new inflection of
+intimacy in his murmur. He was looking straight at her now.
+
+"That fat, tame slug of a gin-slinger, Schomberg, put us up to it."
+
+So strong is the impression of helpless and persecuted misery, that the
+girl who had fought down a savage assault without faltering could not
+completely repress a shudder at the mere sound of the abhorred name.
+
+Ricardo became more rapid and confidential:
+
+"He wants to pay him off--pay both of you, at that; so he told me. He
+was hot after you. He would have given all he had into those hands of
+yours that have nearly strangled me. But you couldn't, eh? Nohow--what?"
+He paused. "So, rather than--you followed a gentleman?"
+
+He noticed a slight movement of her head and spoke quickly.
+
+"Same here--rather than be a wage-slave. Only these foreigners aren't to
+be trusted. You're too good for him. A man that will rob his best
+chum?" She raised her head. He went on, well pleased with his progress,
+whispering hurriedly: "Yes. I know all about him. So you may guess how
+he's likely to treat a woman after a bit!"
+
+He did not know that he was striking terror into her breast now. Still
+the grey eyes remained fixed on him unmovably watchful, as if sleepy
+under the white forehead. She was beginning to understand. His words
+conveyed a definite, dreadful meaning to her mind, which he proceeded to
+enlighten further in a convinced murmur.
+
+"You and I are made to understand each other. Born alike, bred alike, I
+guess. You are not tame. Same here! You have been chucked out into this
+rotten world of 'yporcrits. Same here!"
+
+Her stillness, her appalled stillness, wore to him an air of fascinated
+attention. He asked abruptly:
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+She made an effort to breathe out:
+
+"Where's what?"
+
+His tone expressed excited secrecy.
+
+"The swag--plunder--pieces. It's a game of grab. We must have it; but it
+isn't easy, and so you will have to lend a hand. Come! is it kept in the
+house?"
+
+As often with women, her wits were sharpened by the very terror of the
+glimpsed menace. She shook her head negatively.
+
+"No."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Sure," she said.
+
+"Ay! Thought so. Does your gentleman trust you?"
+
+Again she shook her head.
+
+"Blamed 'yporcrit," he said feelingly, and then reflected: "He's one of
+the tame ones, ain't he?"
+
+"You had better find out for yourself," she said.
+
+"You trust me. I don't want to die before you and I have made friends."
+This was said with a strange air of feline gallantry. Then, tentatively:
+"But he could be brought to trust you, couldn't he?"
+
+"Trust me?" she said, in a tone which bordered on despair, but which he
+mistook for derision.
+
+"Stand in with us," he urged. "Give the chuck to all this blamed
+'yporcrisy. Perhaps, without being trusted, you have managed to find out
+something already, eh?"
+
+"Perhaps I have," she uttered with lips that seemed to her to be
+freezing fast.
+
+Ricardo now looked at her calm face with something like respect. He was
+even a little awed by her stillness, by her economy of words. Womanlike,
+she felt the effect she had produced, the effect of knowing much and of
+keeping all her knowledge in reserve. So far, somehow, this had come,
+about of itself. Thus encouraged, directed in the way of duplicity, the
+refuge of the weak, she made a heroically conscious effort and forced
+her stiff, cold lips into a smile.
+
+Duplicity--the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the disarmed,
+too! Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her existence and
+a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity. It seemed to her that the man
+sitting there before her was an unavoidable presence, which had attended
+all her life. He was the embodied evil of the world. She was not ashamed
+of her duplicity. With a woman's frank courage, as soon as she saw
+that opening she threw herself into it without reserve, with only one
+doubt--that of her own strength. She was appalled by the situation; but
+already all her aroused femininity, understanding that whether Heyst
+loved her or not she loved him, and feeling that she had brought this on
+his head, faced the danger with a passionate desire to defend her own.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+To Ricardo the girl had been so unforeseen that he was unable to bring
+upon her the light of his critical faculties. Her smile appeared to him
+full of promise. He had not expected her to be what she was. Who, from
+the talk he had heard, could expect to meet a girl like this? She was
+a blooming miracle, he said to himself, familiarly, yet with a tinge
+of respect. She was no meat for the likes of that tame, respectable
+gin-slinger. Ricardo grew hot with indignation. Her courage, her
+physical strength, demonstrated at the cost of his discomfiture,
+commanded his sympathy. He felt himself drawn to her by the proofs
+of her amazing spirit. Such a girl! She had a strong soul; and her
+reflective disposition to throw over her connection proved that she was
+no hypocrite.
+
+"Is your gentleman a good shot?" he said, looking down on the floor
+again, as if indifferent.
+
+She hardly understood the phrase; but in its form it suggested some
+accomplishment. It was safe to whisper an affirmative.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Mine, too--and better than good," Ricardo murmured, and then, in a
+confidential burst: "I am not so good at it, but I carry a pretty deadly
+thing about me, all the same!"
+
+He tapped his leg. She was past the stage of shudders now. Stiff all
+over, unable even to move her eyes, she felt an awful mental tension
+which was like blank forgetfulness. Ricardo tried to influence her in
+his own way.
+
+"And my gentleman is not the sort that would drop me. He ain't no
+foreigner; whereas you, with your baron, you don't know what's before
+you--or, rather, being a woman, you know only too well. Much better
+not to wait for the chuck. Pile in with us and get your share--of the
+plunder, I mean. You have some notion about it already."
+
+She felt that if she as much as hinted by word or sign that there was no
+such thing on the island, Heyst's life wouldn't be worth half an hour's
+purchase; but all power of combining words had vanished in the tension
+of her mind. Words themselves were too difficult to think of--all except
+the word "yes," the saving word! She whispered it with not a feature of
+her face moving. To Ricardo the faint and concise sound proved a cool,
+reserved assent, more worth having from that amazing mistress of herself
+than a thousand words from any other woman. He thought with exultation
+that he had come upon one in a million--in ten millions! His whisper
+became frankly entreating.
+
+"That's good! Now all you've got to do is to make sure where he keeps
+his swag. Only do be quick about it! I can't stand much longer this
+crawling-on-the-stomach business so as not to scare your gentleman. What
+do you think a fellow is--a reptile?"
+
+She stared without seeing anyone, as a person in the night sits staring
+and listening to deadly sounds, to evil incantations. And always in her
+head there was that tension of the mind trying to get hold of something,
+of a saving idea which seemed to be so near and could not be captured.
+Suddenly she seized it. Yes--she had to get that man out of the
+house. At that very moment, raised outside, not very near, but heard
+distinctly, Heyst's voice uttered the words:
+
+"Have you been looking out for me, Wang?"
+
+It was for her like a flash of lightning framed in the darkness which
+had beset her on all sides, showing a deadly precipice right under her
+feet. With a convulsive movement she sat up straight, but had no power
+to rise. Ricardo, on the contrary, was on his feet on the instant, as
+noiseless as a cat. His yellow eyes gleamed, gliding here and there;
+but he too seemed unable to make another movement. Only his moustaches
+stirred visibly, like the feelers of some animal.
+
+Wang's answer, "Ya tuan," was heard by the two in the room, but more
+faintly. Then Heyst again:
+
+"All right! You may bring the coffee in. Mem Putih out in the room yet?"
+
+To this question Wang made no answer.
+
+Ricardo's and the girl's eyes met, utterly without expression, all their
+faculties being absorbed in listening for the first sound of Heyst's
+footsteps, for any sound outside which would mean that Ricardo's retreat
+was cut off. Both understood perfectly well that Wang must have gone
+round the house, and that he was now at the back, making it impossible
+for Ricardo to slip out unseen that way before Heyst came in at the
+front.
+
+A darkling shade settled on the face of the devoted secretary. Here was
+the business utterly spoiled! It was the gloom of anger, and even of
+apprehension. He would perhaps have made a dash for it through the back
+door, if Heyst had not been heard ascending the front steps. He climbed
+them slowly, very slowly, like a man who is discouraged or weary--or
+simply thoughtful; and Ricardo had a mental vision of his face, with its
+martial moustache, the lofty forehead, the impassive features, and the
+quiet, meditative eyes. Trapped! Confound it! After all, perhaps the
+governor was right. Women had to be shunned. Fooling with this one had
+apparently ruined the whole business. For, trapped as he was he might
+just as well kill, since, anyhow, to be seen was to be unmasked. But he
+was too fair-minded to be angry with the girl.
+
+Heyst had paused on the veranda, or in the very doorway.
+
+"I shall be shot down like a dog if I ain't quick," Ricardo muttered
+excitedly to the girl.
+
+He stooped to get hold of his knife; and the next moment would have
+hurled himself out through the curtain, nearly, as prompt and fully as
+deadly to Heyst as an unexpected thunderbolt. The feel more than the
+strength of the girl's hand, clutching at his shoulder, checked him. He
+swung round, crouching with a yellow upward glare. Ah! Was she turning
+against him?
+
+He would have stuck his knife into the hollow of her bare throat if
+he had not seen her other hand pointing to the window. It was a long
+opening, high up, close under the ceiling almost, with a single pivoting
+shutter.
+
+While he was still looking at it she moved noiselessly away, picking
+up the overturned chair, and placed it under the wall. Then she looked
+round; but he didn't need to be beckoned to. In two long, tiptoeing
+strides he was at her side.
+
+"Be quick!" she gasped.
+
+He seized her hand and wrung it with all the force of his dumb
+gratitude, as a man does to a chum when there is no time for words. Then
+he mounted the chair. Ricardo was short--too short to get over without a
+noisy scramble. He hesitated an instant; she, watchful, bore rigidly on
+the seat with her beautiful bare arms, while, light and sure, he used
+the back of the chair as a ladder. The masses of her brown hair fell all
+about her face.
+
+Footsteps resounded in the next room, and Heyst's voice, not very loud,
+called her by name.
+
+"Lena!"
+
+"Yes! In a minute," she answered with a particular intonation which she
+knew would prevent Heyst from coming in at once.
+
+When she looked up, Ricardo had vanished, letting himself down outside
+so lightly that she had not heard the slightest noise. She stood up
+then, bewildered, frightened, as if awakened from a drugged sleep, with
+heavy, downcast, unseeing eyes, her fortitude tired out, her imagination
+as if dead within her and unable to keep her fear alive.
+
+Heyst moved about aimlessly in the other room. This sound roused her
+exhausted wits. At once she began to think, hear, see; and what she
+saw--or rather recognized, for her eyes had been resting on it all the
+time--was Ricardo's straw slipper, lost in the scuffle, lying near the
+bath. She had just time to step forward and plant her foot on it when
+the curtains shook, and, pushed aside, disclosed Heyst in the doorway.
+
+Out of the appeased enchantment of the senses she had found with him,
+like a sort of bewitched state, his danger brought a sensation of warmth
+to her breast. She felt something stir in there, something profound,
+like a new sort of life.
+
+The room was in partial darkness, Ricardo having accidentally swung
+the pivoted shutter as he went out of the window. Heyst peered from the
+doorway.
+
+"Why, you haven't done your hair yet," he said.
+
+"I won't stop to do it now. I shan't be long," she replied steadily, and
+remained still, feeling Ricardo's slipper under the sole of her foot.
+
+Heyst, with a movement of retreat, let the curtain drop slowly. On the
+instant she stooped for the slipper, and, with it in her hand, spun
+round wildly, looking for some hiding-place; but there was no such spot
+in the bare room. The chest, the leather bunk, a dress or two of hers
+hanging on pegs--there was no place where the merest hazard might not
+guide Heyst's hand at any moment. Her wildly roaming eyes were caught
+by the half-closed window. She ran to it, and by raising herself on her
+toes was able to reach the shutter with her fingertips. She pushed it
+square, stole back to the middle of the room, and, turning about, swung
+her arm, regulating the force of the throw so as not to let the slipper
+fly too far out and hit the edge of the overhanging eaves. It was a
+task of the nicest judgement for the muscles of those round arms, still
+quivering from the deadly wrestle with a man, for that brain, tense with
+the excitement of the situation and for the unstrung nerves flickering
+darkness before her eyes. At last the slipper left her hand. As soon as
+it passed the opening, it was out of her sight. She listened. She did
+not hear it strike anything; it just vanished, as if it had wings to fly
+on through the air. Not a sound! It had gone clear.
+
+Her valiant arms hanging close against her side, she stood as if turned
+into stone. A faint whistle reached her ears. The forgetful Ricardo,
+becoming very much aware of his loss, had been hanging about in great
+anxiety, which was relieved by the appearance of the slipper flying from
+under the eaves; and now, thoughtfully, he had ventured a whistle to put
+her mind at ease.
+
+Suddenly the girl reeled forward. She saved herself from a fall only by
+embracing with both arms one of the tall, roughly carved posts holding
+the mosquito net above the bed. For a long time she clung to it, with
+her forehead leaning against the wood. One side of her loosened sarong
+had slipped down as low as her hip. The long brown tresses of her hair
+fell in lank wisps, as if wet, almost black against her white body. Her
+uncovered flank, damp with the sweat of anguish and fatigue, gleamed
+coldly with the immobility of polished marble in the hot, diffused
+light falling through the window above her head--a dim reflection of the
+consuming, passionate blaze of sunshine outside, all aquiver with the
+effort to set the earth on fire, to burn it to ashes.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+Heyst, seated at the table with his chin on his breast, raised his head
+at the faint rustle of Lena's dress. He was startled by the dead pallor
+of her cheeks, by something lifeless in her eyes, which looked at
+him strangely, without recognition. But to his anxious inquiries she
+answered reassuringly that there was nothing the matter with her,
+really. She had felt giddy on rising. She had even had a moment of
+faintness, after her bath. She had to sit down to wait for it to pass.
+This had made her late dressing.
+
+"I didn't try to do my hair. I didn't want to keep you waiting any
+longer," she said.
+
+He was unwilling to press her with questions about her health, since she
+seemed to make light of this indisposition. She had not done her hair,
+but she had brushed it, and had tied it with a ribbon behind. With her
+forehead uncovered, she looked very young, almost a child, a careworn
+child; a child with something on its mind.
+
+What surprised Heyst was the non-appearance of Wang. The Chinaman had
+always materialized at the precise moment of his service, neither too
+soon nor too late. This time the usual miracle failed. What was the
+meaning of this?
+
+Heyst raised his voice--a thing he disliked doing. It was promptly
+answered from the compound:
+
+"Ada tuan!"
+
+Lena, leaning on her elbow, with her eyes on her plate, did not seem to
+hear anything. When Wang entered with a tray, his narrow eyes, tilted
+inward by the prominence of salient cheek-bones, kept her under stealthy
+observation all the time. Neither the one nor the other of that white
+couple paid the slightest attention to him and he withdrew without
+having heard them exchange a single word. He squatted on his heels on
+the back veranda. His Chinaman's mind, very clear but not far-reaching,
+was made up according to the plain reason of things, such as it appeared
+to him in the light of his simple feeling for self-preservation,
+untrammelled by any notions of romantic honour or tender conscience. His
+yellow hands, lightly clasped, hung idly between his knees. The graves
+of Wang's ancestors were far away, his parents were dead, his elder
+brother was a soldier in the yamen of some Mandarin away in Formosa. No
+one near by had a claim on his veneration or his obedience. He had been
+for years a labouring restless vagabond. His only tie in the world
+was the Alfuro woman, in exchange for whom he had given away some
+considerable part of his hard-earned substance; and his duty, in reason,
+could be to no one but himself.
+
+The scuffle behind the curtain was a thing of bad augury for that Number
+One for whom the Chinaman had neither love nor dislike. He had been awed
+enough by that development to hang back with the coffee-pot till at last
+the white man was induced to call him in. Wang went in with curiosity.
+Certainly, the white woman looked as if she had been wrestling with
+a spirit which had managed to tear half her blood out of her before
+letting her go. As to the man, Wang had long looked upon him as being in
+some sort bewitched; and now he was doomed. He heard their voices in
+the room. Heyst was urging the girl to go and lie down again. He was
+extremely concerned. She had eaten nothing.
+
+"The best thing for you. You really must!"
+
+She sat listless, shaking her head from time to time negatively, as if
+nothing could be any good. But he insisted; she saw the beginning of
+wonder in his eyes, and suddenly gave way.
+
+"Perhaps I had better."
+
+She did not want to arouse his wonder, which would lead him straight to
+suspicion. He must not suspect!
+
+Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that
+something rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace, there
+was born in her a woman's innate mistrust of masculinity, of that
+seductive strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from the
+recognition of the naked necessity of facts, which never yet frightened
+a woman worthy of the name. She had no plan; but her mind, quieted down
+somewhat by the very effort to preserve outward composure for his sake,
+perceived that her behaviour had secured, at any rate, a short period of
+safety. Perhaps because of the similarity of their miserable origin in
+the dregs of mankind, she had understood Ricardo perfectly. He would
+keep quiet for a time now. In this momentarily soothing certitude her
+bodily fatigue asserted itself, the more overpoweringly since its cause
+was not so much the demand on her strength as the awful suddenness of
+the stress she had had to meet. She would have tried to overcome it
+from the mere instinct of resistance, if it had not been for Heyst's
+alternate pleadings and commands. Before this eminently masculine
+fussing she felt the woman's need to give way, the sweetness of
+surrender.
+
+"I will do anything you like," she said.
+
+Getting up, she was surprised by a wave of languid weakness that came
+over her, embracing and enveloping her like warm water, with a noise in
+her ears as of a breaking sea.
+
+"You must help me along," she added quickly.
+
+While he put his arm round her waist--not by any means an uncommon thing
+for him to do--she found a special satisfaction in the feeling of being
+thus sustained. She abandoned all her weight to that encircling and
+protecting pressure, while a thrill went through her at the sudden
+thought that it was she who would have to protect him, to be the
+defender of a man who was strong enough to lift her bodily, as he was
+doing even then in his two arms. For Heyst had done this as soon as they
+had crept through the doorway of the room. He thought it was quicker
+and simpler to carry her the last step or two. He had grown really too
+anxious to be aware of the effort. He lifted her high and deposited her
+on the bed, as one lays a child on its side in a cot. Then he sat down
+on the edge, masking his concern with a smile which obtained no response
+from the dreamy immobility of her eyes. But she sought his hand, seized
+it eagerly; and while she was pressing it with all the force of
+which she was capable, the sleep she needed overtook her suddenly,
+overwhelmingly, as it overtakes a child in a cot, with her lips parted
+for a safe, endearing word which she had thought of but had no time to
+utter.
+
+The usual flaming silence brooded over Samburan.
+
+"What in the world is this new mystery?" murmured Heyst to himself,
+contemplating her deep slumber.
+
+It was so deep, this enchanted sleep, that when some time afterwards he
+gently tried to open her fingers and free his hand, he succeeded without
+provoking the slightest stir.
+
+"There is some very simple explanation, no doubt," he thought, as he
+stole out into the living-room.
+
+Absent-mindedly he pulled a book out of the top shelf, and sat down with
+it; but even after he had opened it on his knee, and had been staring
+at the pages for a time, he had not the slightest idea of what it was
+about. He stared and stared at the crowded, parallel lines. It was only
+when, raising his eyes for no particular reason, he saw Wang standing
+motionless on the other side of the table, that he regained complete
+control of his faculties.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said, as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten appointment
+of a not particularly welcome sort.
+
+He waited a little, and then, with reluctant curiosity, forced himself
+to ask the silent Wang what he had to say. He had some idea that the
+matter of the vanished revolver would come up at last; but the guttural
+sounds which proceeded from the Chinaman did not refer to that delicate
+subject. His speech was concerned with cups, saucers, plates, forks, and
+knives. All these things had been put away in the cupboards on the
+back veranda, where they belonged, perfectly clean, "all plopel." Heyst
+wondered at the scrupulosity of a man who was about to abandon him;
+for he was not surprised to hear Wang conclude the account of his
+stewardship with the words:
+
+"I go now."
+
+"Oh! You go now?" said Heyst, leaning back, his book on his knees.
+
+"Yes. Me no likee. One man, two man, three man--no can do! Me go now."
+
+"What's frightening you away like this?" asked Heyst, while through his
+mind flashed the hope that something enlightening might come from that
+being so unlike himself, taking contact with the world with a simplicity
+and directness of which his own mind was not capable. "Why?" he went on.
+"You are used to white men. You know them well."
+
+"Yes. Me savee them," assented Wang inscrutably. "Me savee plenty."
+
+All that he really knew was his own mind. He had made it up to withdraw
+himself and the Alfuro woman from the uncertainties of the relations
+which were going to establish themselves between those white men. It
+was Pedro who had been the first cause of Wang's suspicion and fear. The
+Chinaman had seen wild men. He had penetrated, in the train of a Chinese
+pedlar, up one or two of the Bornean rivers into the country of the
+Dyaks. He had also been in the interior of Mindanao, where there are
+people who live in trees--savages, no better than animals; but a
+hairy brute like Pedro, with his great fangs and ferocious growls, was
+altogether beyond his conception of anything that could be looked upon
+as human. The strong impression made on him by Pedro was the prime
+inducement which had led Wang to purloin the revolver. Reflection on
+the general situation, and on the insecurity of Number One, came later,
+after he had obtained possession of the revolver and of the box of
+cartridges out of the table drawer in the living-room.
+
+"Oh, you savee plenty about white men," Heyst went on in a slightly
+bantering tone, after a moment of silent reflection in which he had
+confessed to himself that the recovery of the revolver was not to be
+thought of, either by persuasion or by some more forcible means. "You
+speak in that fashion, but you are frightened of those white men over
+there."
+
+"Me no flightened," protested Wang raucously, throwing up his
+head--which gave to his throat a more strained, anxious appearance than
+ever. "Me no likee," he added in a quieter tone. "Me velly sick."
+
+He put his hand over the region under the breast-bone.
+
+"That," said Heyst, serenely positive, "belong one piecee lie. That
+isn't proper man-talk at all. And after stealing my revolver, too!"
+
+He had suddenly decided to speak about it, because this frankness could
+not make the situation much worse than it was. He did not suppose for a
+moment that Wang had the revolver anywhere about his person; and after
+having thought the matter over, he had arrived at the conclusion that
+the Chinaman never meant to use the weapon against him. After a slight
+start, because the direct charge had taken him unawares, Wang tore open
+the front of his jacket with a convulsive show of indignation.
+
+"No hab got. Look see!" he mouthed in pretended anger.
+
+He slapped his bare chest violently; he uncovered his very ribs, all
+astir with the panting of outraged virtue; his smooth stomach heaved
+with indignation. He started his wide blue breeches flapping about his
+yellow calves. Heyst watched him quietly.
+
+"I never said you had it on you," he observed, without raising his
+voice; "but the revolver is gone from where I kept it."
+
+"Me no savee levolvel," Wang said obstinately.
+
+The book lying open on Heyst's knee slipped suddenly and he made a
+sharp movement to catch it up. Wang was unable to see the reason of
+this because of the table, and leaped away from what seemed to him a
+threatening symptom. When Heyst looked up, the Chinaman was already at
+the door facing the room, not frightened, but alert.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Heyst.
+
+Wang nodded his shaven head significantly at the curtain closing the
+doorway of the bedroom.
+
+"Me no likee," he repeated.
+
+"What the devil do you mean?" Heyst was genuinely amazed. "Don't like
+what?"
+
+Wang pointed a long lemon-coloured finger at the motionless folds.
+
+"Two," he said.
+
+"Two what? I don't understand."
+
+"Suppose you savee, you no like that fashion. Me savee plenty. Me go
+now."
+
+Heyst had risen from his chair, but Wang kept his ground in the doorway
+for a little longer. His almond-shaped eyes imparted to his face an
+expression of soft and sentimental melancholy. The muscles of his throat
+moved visibly while he uttered a distinct and guttural "Goodbye" and
+vanished from Number One's sight.
+
+The Chinaman's departure altered the situation. Heyst reflected on what
+would be best to do in view of that fact. For a long time he hesitated;
+then, shrugging his shoulders wearily, he walked out on the veranda,
+down the steps, and continued at a steady gait, with a thoughtful mien,
+in the direction of his guests' bungalow. He wanted to make an important
+communication to them, and he had no other object--least of all to give
+them the shock of a surprise call. Nevertheless, their brutish henchman
+not being on watch, it was Heyst's fate to startle Mr. Jones and his
+secretary by his sudden appearance in the doorway. Their conversation
+must have been very interesting to prevent them from hearing the
+visitor's approach. In the dim room--the shutters were kept constantly
+closed against the heat--Heyst saw them start apart. It was Mr. Jones
+who spoke:
+
+"Ah, here you are again! Come in, come in!"
+
+Heyst, taking his hat off in the doorway, entered the room.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+Waking up suddenly, Lena looked, without raising her head from the
+pillow, at the room in which she was alone. She got up quickly, as if
+to counteract the awful sinking of her heart by the vigorous use of her
+limbs. But this sinking was only momentary. Mistress of herself from
+pride, from love, from necessity, and also because of a woman's
+vanity in self-sacrifice, she met Heyst, returning from the strangers'
+bungalow, with a clear glance and a smile.
+
+The smile he managed to answer, but, noticing that he avoided her eyes,
+she composed her lips and lowered her gaze. For the same reason she
+hastened to speak to him in a tone of indifference, which she put on
+without effort, as if she had grown adept in duplicity since sunrise.
+
+"You have been over there again?"
+
+"I have. I thought--but you had better know first that we have lost Wang
+for good."
+
+She repeated "For good?" as if she had not understood.
+
+"For good or evil--I shouldn't know which if you were to ask me. He has
+dismissed himself. He's gone."
+
+"You expected him to go, though, didn't you?"
+
+Heyst sat down on the other side of the table.
+
+"Yes. I expected it as soon as I discovered that he had annexed my
+revolver. He says he hasn't taken it. That's untrue of course. A
+Chinaman would not see the sense of confessing under any circumstances.
+To deny any charge is a principle of right conduct; but he hardly
+expected to be believed. He was a little enigmatic at the last, Lena. He
+startled me."
+
+Heyst paused. The girl seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.
+
+"He startled me," repeated Heyst. She noted the anxiety in his tone, and
+turned her head slightly to look at him across the table.
+
+"It must have been something--to startle you," she said. In the depth
+of her parted lips, like a ripe pomegranate, there was a gleam of white
+teeth.
+
+"It was only a single word--and some of his gestures. He had been making
+a good deal of noise. I wonder we didn't wake you up. How soundly you
+can sleep! I say, do you feel all right now?"
+
+"As fresh as can be," she said, treating him to another deep gleam of
+a smile. "I heard no noise, and I'm glad of it. The way he talks in his
+harsh voice frightens me. I don't like all these foreign people."
+
+"It was just before he went away--bolted out, I should say. He nodded
+and pointed at the curtain to our room. He knew you were there, of
+course. He seemed to think--he seemed to try to give me to understand
+that you were in special--well, danger. You know how he talks."
+
+She said nothing; she made no sound, only the faint tinge of colour
+ebbed out of her cheek.
+
+"Yes," Heyst went on. "He seemed to try to warn me. That must have been
+it Did he imagine I had forgotten your existence? The only word he said
+was 'two'. It sounded so, at least. Yes, 'two'--and that he didn't like
+it."
+
+"What does that mean?" she whispered.
+
+"We know what the word two means, don't we, Lena? We are two. Never
+were such a lonely two out of the world, my dear! He might have tried
+to remind me that he himself has a woman to look after. Why are you so
+pale, Lena?"
+
+"Am I pale?" she asked negligently.
+
+"You are." Heyst was really anxious.
+
+"Well, it isn't from fright," she protested truthfully.
+
+Indeed, what she felt was a sort of horror which left her absolutely
+in the full possession of all her faculties; more difficult to bear,
+perhaps, for that reason, but not paralysing to her fortitude.
+
+Heyst in his turn smiled at her.
+
+"I really don't know that there is any reason to be frightened."
+
+"I mean I am not frightened for myself."
+
+"I believe you are very plucky," he said. The colour had returned to her
+face. "I" continued Heyst, "am so rebellious to outward impressions
+that I can't say that much about myself. I don't react with sufficient
+distinctness." He changed his tone. "You know I went to see those men
+first thing this morning."
+
+"I know. Be careful!" she murmured.
+
+"I wonder how one can be careful! I had a long talk with--but I don't
+believe you have seen them. One of them is a fantastically thin, long
+person, apparently ailing; I shouldn't wonder if he were really so. He
+makes rather a point of it in a mysterious manner. I imagine he must
+have suffered from tropical fevers, but not so much as he tries to make
+out. He's what people would call a gentleman. He seemed on the point of
+volunteering a tale of his adventures--for which I didn't ask him--but
+remarked that it was a long story; some other time, perhaps.
+
+"'I suppose you would like to know who I am?' he asked me.
+
+"I told him I would leave it to him, in a tone which, between gentlemen,
+could have left no doubt in his mind. He raised himself on his elbow--he
+was lying down on the camp-bed--and said:
+
+"'I am he who is--'"
+
+Lena seemed not to be listening; but when Heyst paused, she turned her
+head quickly to him. He took it for a movement of inquiry, but in this
+he was wrong. A great vagueness enveloped her impressions, but all her
+energy was concentrated on the struggle that she wanted to take upon
+herself, in a great exaltation of love and self-sacrifice, which is
+woman's sublime faculty; altogether on herself, every bit of it, leaving
+him nothing, not even the knowledge of what she did, if that were
+possible. She would have liked to lock him up by some stratagem. Had
+she known of some means to put him to sleep for days she would have used
+incantations or philtres without misgivings. He seemed to her too good
+for such contacts, and not sufficiently equipped. This last feeling had
+nothing to do with the material fact of the revolver being stolen. She
+could hardly appreciate that fact at its full value.
+
+Observing her eyes fixed and as if sightless--for the concentration on
+her purpose took all expression out of them--Heyst imagined it to be the
+effect of a great mental effort.
+
+"No use asking me what he meant, Lena; I don't know, and I did not
+ask him. The gentleman, as I have told you before, seems devoted to
+mystification. I said nothing, and he laid down his head again on
+the bundle of rugs he uses for a pillow. He affects a state of great
+weakness, but I suspect that he's perfectly capable of leaping to his
+feet if he likes. Having been ejected, he said, from his proper social
+sphere because he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions,
+he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up and down the earth. As
+I really did not want to listen to all this nonsense, I told him that
+I had heard that sort of story about somebody else before. His grin is
+really ghastly. He confessed that I was very far from the sort of man he
+expected to meet. Then he said:
+
+"'As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are thinking of, and
+I have neither more nor less determination.'"
+
+Heyst looked across the table at Lena. Propped on her elbows, and
+holding her head in both hands, she moved it a little with an air of
+understanding.
+
+"Nothing could be plainer, eh?" said Heyst grimly. "Unless, indeed, this
+is his idea of a pleasant joke; for, when he finished speaking, he burst
+into a loud long laugh. I didn't join him!"
+
+"I wish you had," she breathed out.
+
+"I didn't join him. It did not occur to me. I am not much of a
+diplomatist. It would probably have been wise, for, indeed, I believe
+he had said more than he meant to say, and was trying to take it back by
+this affected jocularity. Yet when one thinks of it, diplomacy without
+force in the background is but a rotten reed to lean upon. And I don't
+know whether I could have done it if I had thought of it. I don't know.
+It would have been against the grain. Could I have done it? I have lived
+too long within myself, watching the mere shadows and shades of life.
+To deceive a man on some issue which could be decided quicker, by his
+destruction while one is disarmed, helpless, without even the power to
+run away--no! That seems to me too degrading. And yet I have you here.
+I have your very existence in my keeping. What do you say, Lena? Would I
+be capable of throwing you to the lions to save my dignity?"
+
+She got up, walked quickly round the table, posed herself on his knees
+lightly, throwing one arm round his neck, and whispered in his ear:
+
+"You may if you like. And may be that's the only way I would consent to
+leave you. For something like that. If it were something no bigger than
+your little finger."
+
+She gave him a light kiss on the lips and was gone before he could
+detain her. She regained her seat and propped her elbows again on the
+table. It was hard to believe that she had moved from the spot at all.
+The fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the hug round his neck,
+the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have been the
+unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life;
+a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts. He
+hesitated to speak till she said, businesslike:
+
+"Well. And what then?"
+
+Heyst gave a start.
+
+"Oh, yes. I didn't join him. I let him have his laugh out by himself. He
+was shaking all over, like a merry skeleton, under a cotton sheet he was
+covered with--I believe in order to conceal the revolver that he had in
+his right hand. I didn't see it, but I have a distinct impression it was
+there in his fist. As he had not been looking at me for some time, but
+staring into a certain part of the room, I turned my head and saw a
+hairy, wild sort of creature which they take about with them, squatting
+on its heels in the angle of the walls behind me. He wasn't there when
+I came in. I didn't like the notion of that watchful monster behind my
+back. If I had been less at their mercy, I should certainly have changed
+my position. As things are now, to move would have been a mere weakness.
+So I remained where I was. The gentleman on the bed said he could assure
+me of one thing; and that was that his presence here was no more morally
+reprehensible than mine.
+
+"'We pursue the same ends,' he said, 'only perhaps I pursue them with
+more openness than you--with more simplicity.'
+
+"That's what he said," Heyst went on, after looking at Lena in a sort of
+inquiring silence. "I asked him if he knew beforehand that I was living
+here; but he only gave me a ghastly grin. I didn't press him for an
+answer, Lena. I thought I had better not."
+
+On her smooth forehead a ray of light always seemed to rest. Her loose
+hair, parted in the middle, covered the hands sustaining her head. She
+seemed spellbound by the interest of the narrative. Heyst did not pause
+long. He managed to continue his relation smoothly enough, beginning
+afresh with a piece of comment.
+
+"He would have lied impudently--and I detest being told a lie. It makes
+me uncomfortable. It's pretty clear that I am not fitted for the affairs
+of the wide world. But I did not want him to think that I accepted his
+presence too meekly, so I said that his comings or goings on the
+earth were none of my business, of course, except that I had a natural
+curiosity to know when he would find it convenient to resume them.
+
+"He asked me to look at the state he was in. Had I been all alone here,
+as they think I am, I should have laughed at him. But not being alone--I
+say, Lena, you are sure you haven't shown yourself where you could be
+seen?"
+
+"Certain," she said promptly.
+
+He looked relieved.
+
+"You understand, Lena, that when I ask you to keep so strictly out of
+sight, it is because you are not for them to look at--to talk about. My
+poor Lena! I can't help that feeling. Do you understand it?"
+
+She moved her head slightly in a manner that was neither affirmative nor
+negative.
+
+"People will have to see me some day," she said.
+
+"I wonder how long it will be possible for you to keep out of sight?"
+murmured Heyst thoughtfully. He bent over the table. "Let me finish
+telling you. I asked him point blank what it was he wanted with me; he
+appeared extremely unwilling to come to the point. It was not really
+so pressing as all that, he said. His secretary, who was in fact his
+partner, was not present, having gone down to the wharf to look at
+their boat. Finally the fellow proposed that he should put off a certain
+communication he had to make till the day after tomorrow. I agreed;
+but I also told him that I was not at all anxious to hear it. I had no
+conception in what way his affairs could concern me.
+
+"'Ah, Mr. Heyst,' he said, 'you and I have much more in common than you
+think.'"
+
+Heyst struck the table with his fist unexpectedly.
+
+"It was a jeer; I am sure it was!"
+
+He seemed ashamed of this outburst and smiled faintly into the
+motionless eyes of the girl.
+
+"What could I have done--even if I had had my pockets full of
+revolvers?"
+
+She made an appreciative sign.
+
+"Killing's a sin, sure enough," she murmured.
+
+"I went away," Heyst continued. "I left him there, lying on his side
+with his eyes shut. When I got back here, I found you looking ill. What
+was it, Lena? You did give me a scare! Then I had the interview with
+Wang while you rested. You were sleeping quietly. I sat here to consider
+all these things calmly, to try to penetrate their inner meaning and
+their outward bearing. It struck me that the two days we have before
+us have the character of a sort of truce. The more I thought of it, the
+more I felt that this was tacitly understood between Jones and myself.
+It was to our advantage, if anything can be of advantage to people
+caught so completely unawares as we are. Wang was gone. He, at any rate,
+had declared himself, but as I did not know what he might take it into
+his head to do, I thought I had better warn these people that I was no
+longer responsible for the Chinaman. I did not want Mr. Wang making some
+move which would precipitate the action against us. Do you see my point
+of view?"
+
+She made a sign that she did. All her soul was wrapped in her passionate
+determination, in an exalted belief in herself--in the contemplation
+of her amazing opportunity to win the certitude, the eternity, of that
+man's love.
+
+"I never saw two men," Heyst was saying, "more affected by a piece of
+information than Jones and his secretary, who was back in the bungalow
+by then. They had not heard me come up. I told them I was sorry to
+intrude.
+
+"'Not at all! Not at all,' said Jones.
+
+"The secretary backed away into a corner and watched me like a wary cat.
+In fact, they both were visibly on their guard.
+
+"'I am come,' I told them, 'to let you know that my servant has
+deserted--gone off.'
+
+"At first they looked at each other as if they had not understood what I
+was saying; but very soon they seemed quite concerned.
+
+"'You mean to say your Chink's cleared out?' said Ricardo, coming
+forward from his corner. 'Like this--all at once? What did he do it
+for?'
+
+"I said that a Chinaman had always a simple and precise reason for what
+he did, but that to get such a reason out of him was not so easy. All he
+told me, I said, was that he 'didn't like'.
+
+"They were extremely disturbed at this. Didn't like what, they wanted to
+know.
+
+"'The looks of you and your party,' I told Jones.
+
+"'Nonsense!' he cried out, and immediately Ricardo, the short man,
+struck in.
+
+"'Told you that? What did he take you for, sir--an infant? Or do you
+take us for kids?--meaning no offence. Come, I bet you will tell us next
+that you've missed something.'"
+
+"'I didn't mean to tell you anything of the sort,' I said, 'but as a
+matter of fact it is so.'
+
+"He slapped his thigh.
+
+"'Thought so. What do you think of this trick, governor?'
+
+"Jones made some sort of sign to him, and then that extraordinary
+cat-faced associate proposed that he and their servant should come out
+and help me catch or kill the Chink.
+
+"My object, I said, was not to get assistance. I did not intend to chase
+the Chinaman. I had come only to warn them that he was armed, and that
+he really objected to their presence on the island. I wanted them to
+understand that I was not responsible for anything that might happen.
+
+"'Do you mean to tell us,' asked Ricardo, 'that there is a crazy Chink
+with a six-shooter broke loose on this island, and that you don't care?'
+
+"Strangely enough they did not seem to believe my story. They were
+exchanging significant looks all the time. Ricardo stole up close to
+his principal; they had a confabulation together, and then something
+happened which I did not expect. It's rather awkward, too.
+
+"Since I would not have their assistance to get hold of the Chink
+and recover my property, the least they could do was to send me their
+servant. It was Jones who said that, and Ricardo backed up the idea.
+
+"'Yes, yes--let our Pedro cook for all hands in your compound! He isn't
+so bad as he looks. That's what we will do!'
+
+"He bustled out of the room to the veranda, and let out an ear-splitting
+whistle for their Pedro. Having heard the brute's answering howl,
+Ricardo ran back into the room.
+
+"'Yes, Mr. Heyst. This will do capitally, Mr. Heyst. You just direct
+him to do whatever you are accustomed to have done for you in the way of
+attendance. See?'
+
+"Lena, I confess to you that I was taken completely by surprise. I had
+not expected anything of the sort. I don't know what I expected. I am so
+anxious about you that I can't keep away from these infernal scoundrels.
+And only two months ago I would not have cared. I would have defied
+their scoundrelism as much as I have scorned all the other intrusions of
+life. But now I have you! You stole into my life, and--"
+
+Heyst drew a deep breath. The girl gave him a quick, wide-eyed glance.
+
+"Ah! That's what you are thinking of--that you have me!"
+
+It was impossible to read the thoughts veiled by her steady grey eyes,
+to penetrate the meaning of her silences, her words, and even her
+embraces. He used to come out of her very arms with the feeling of a
+baffled man.
+
+"If I haven't you, if you are not here, then where are you?" cried
+Heyst. "You understand me very well."
+
+She shook her head a little. Her red lips, at which he looked now, her
+lips as fascinating as the voice that came out of them, uttered the
+words:
+
+"I hear what you say; but what does it mean?"
+
+"It means that I could lie and perhaps cringe for your sake."
+
+"No! No! Don't you ever do that," she said in haste, while her eyes
+glistened suddenly. "You would hate me for it afterwards!"
+
+"Hate you?" repeated Heyst, who had recalled his polite manner. "No!
+You needn't consider the extremity of the improbable--as yet. But I will
+confess to you that I--how shall I call it?--that I dissembled. First I
+dissembled my dismay at the unforeseen result of my idiotic diplomacy.
+Do you understand, my dear girl?"
+
+It was evident that she did not understand the word. Heyst produced his
+playful smile, which contrasted oddly with the worried character of his
+whole expression. His temples seemed to have sunk in, his face looked a
+little leaner.
+
+"A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is
+true, but the sentiment which seems to prompt it. I have never been
+diplomatic in my relation with mankind--not from regard for its
+feelings, but from a certain regard for my own. Diplomacy doesn't go
+well with consistent contempt. I cared little for life and still less
+for death."
+
+"Don't talk like that!"
+
+"I dissembled my extreme longing to take these wandering scoundrels
+by their throats," he went on. "I have only two hands--I wish I had a
+hundred to defend you--and there were three throats. By that time
+their Pedro was in the room too. Had he seen me engaged with their two
+throats, he would have been at mine like a fierce dog, or any other
+savage and faithful brute. I had no difficulty in dissembling my longing
+for the vulgar, stupid, and hopeless argument of fight. I remarked that
+I really did not want a servant. I couldn't think of depriving them of
+their man's services; but they would not hear me. They had made up their
+minds.
+
+"'We shall send him over at once,' Ricardo said, 'to start cooking
+dinner for everybody. I hope you won't mind me coming to eat it with
+you in your bungalow; and we will send the governor's dinner over to him
+here.'
+
+"I could do nothing but hold my tongue or bring on a quarrel--some
+manifestation of their dark purpose, which we have no means to resist.
+Of course, you may remain invisible this evening; but with that
+atrocious-brute prowling all the time at the back of the house, how long
+can your presence be concealed from these men?"
+
+Heyst's distress could be felt in his silence. The girl's head,
+sustained by her hands buried in the thick masses of her hair, had a
+perfect immobility.
+
+"You are certain you have not been seen so far?" he asked suddenly.
+
+The motionless head spoke.
+
+"How can I be certain? You told me you wanted me to keep out of the way.
+I kept out of the way. I didn't ask your reason. I thought you didn't
+want people to know that you had a girl like me about you."
+
+"What? Ashamed?" cried Heyst.
+
+"It isn't what's right, perhaps--I mean for you--is it?"
+
+Heyst lifted his hands, reproachfully courteous.
+
+"I look upon it as so very much right that I couldn't bear the idea of
+any other than sympathetic, respectful eyes resting on you. I disliked
+and mistrusted these fellows from the first. Didn't you understand?"
+
+"Yes; I did keep out of sight," she said.
+
+A silence fell. At last Heyst stirred slightly.
+
+"All this is of very little importance now," he said with a sigh.
+"This is a question of something infinitely worse than mere looks and
+thoughts, however base and contemptible. As I have told you, I met
+Ricardo's suggestions by silence. As I was turning away he said:
+
+"'If you happen to have the key of that store-room of yours on you,
+Mr. Heyst, you may just as well let me have it; I will give it to our
+Pedro.'
+
+"I had it on me, and I tendered it to him without speaking. The hairy
+creature was at the door by then, and caught the key, which Ricardo
+threw to him, better than any trained ape could have done. I came away.
+All the time I had been thinking anxiously of you, whom I had left
+asleep, alone here, and apparently ill."
+
+Heyst interrupted himself, with a listening turn of his head. He had
+heard the faint sound of sticks being snapped in the compound. He rose
+and crossed the room to look out of the back door.
+
+"And here the creature is," he said, returning to the table. "Here he
+is, already attending to the fire. Oh, my dear Lena!"
+
+She had followed him with her eyes. She watched him go out on the front
+veranda cautiously. He lowered stealthily a couple of screens that hung
+between the column, and remained outside very still, as if interested
+by something on the open ground. Meantime she had risen in her turn, to
+take a peep into the compound. Heyst, glancing over his shoulder, saw
+her returning to her seat. He beckoned to her, and she continued to
+move, crossing the shady room, pure and bright in her white dress, her
+hair loose, with something of a sleep-walker in her unhurried motion, in
+her extended hand, in the sightless effect of her grey eyes luminous in
+the half-light. He had never seen such an expression in her face
+before. It had dreaminess in it, intense attention, and something like
+sternness. Arrested in the doorway by Heyst's extended arm, she seemed
+to wake up, flushed faintly--and this flush, passing off, carried away
+with it the strange transfiguring mood. With a courageous gesture
+she pushed back the heavy masses of her hair. The light clung to her
+forehead. Her delicate nostrils quivered. Heyst seized her arm and
+whispered excitedly:
+
+"Slip out here, quickly! The screens will conceal you. Only you must
+mind the stair-space. They are actually out--I mean the other two. You
+had better see them before you--"
+
+She made a barely perceptible movement of recoil, checked at once, and
+stood still. Heyst released her arm.
+
+"Yes, perhaps I had better," she said with unnatural deliberation, and
+stepped out on the veranda to stand close by his side.
+
+Together, one on each side of the screen, they peeped between the edge
+of the canvas and the veranda-post entwined with creepers. A great heat
+ascended from the sun-smitten ground, in an ever-rising wave, as if from
+some secret store of earth's fiery heart; for the sky was growing cooler
+already, and the sun had declined sufficiently for the shadows of Mr.
+Jones and his henchman to be projected towards the bungalow side by
+side--one infinitely slender, the other short and broad.
+
+The two visitors stood still and gazed. To keep up the fiction of his
+invalidism, Mr. Jones, the gentleman, leaned on the arm of Ricardo, the
+secretary, the top of whose hat just came up to his governor's shoulder.
+
+"Do you see them?" Heyst whispered into the girl's ear. "Here they
+are, the envoys of the outer world. Here they are before you--evil
+intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm. The brute force is at
+the back. A trio of fitting envoys perhaps--but what about the welcome?
+Suppose I were armed, could I shoot these two down where they stand?
+Could I?"
+
+Without moving her head, the girl felt for Heyst's hand, pressed it and
+thereafter did not let it go. He continued, bitterly playful:
+
+"I don't know. I don't think so. There is a strain in me which lays me
+under an insensate obligation to avoid even the appearance of murder.
+I have never pulled a trigger or lifted my hand on a man, even in
+self-defence."
+
+The suddenly tightened grip of her hand checked him.
+
+"They are making a move," she murmured.
+
+"Can they be thinking of coming here?" Heyst wondered anxiously.
+
+"No, they aren't coming this way," she said; and there was another
+pause. "They are going back to their house," she reported finally.
+
+After watching them a little longer, she let go Heyst's hand and moved
+away from the screen. He followed her into the room.
+
+"You have seen them now," he began. "Think what it was to me to see them
+land in the dusk, fantasms from the sea--apparitions, chimeras! And they
+persist. That's the worst of it--they persist. They have no right to
+be--but they are. They ought to have aroused my fury. But I have
+refined everything away by this time--anger, indignation, scorn itself.
+Nothing's left but disgust. Since you have told me of that abominable
+calumny, it has become immense--it extends even to myself." He looked up
+at her.
+
+"But luckily I have you. And if only Wang had not carried off that
+miserable revolver--yes, Lena, here we are, we two!"
+
+She put both her hands on his shoulders and looked straight into his
+eyes. He returned her penetrating gaze. It baffled him. He could not
+pierce the grey veil of her eyes; but the sadness of her voice thrilled
+him profoundly.
+
+"You are not reproaching me?" she asked slowly.
+
+"Reproach? What a word between us! It could only be myself--but the
+mention of Wang has given me an idea. I have been, not exactly cringing,
+not exactly lying, but still dissembling. You have been hiding
+yourself, to please me, but still you have been hiding. All this is very
+dignified. Why shouldn't we try begging now? A noble art? Yes. Lena,
+we must go out together. I couldn't think of leaving you alone, and
+I must--yes, I must speak to Wang. We shall go and seek that man, who
+knows what he wants and how to secure what he wants. We will go at
+once!"
+
+"Wait till I put my hair up," she agreed instantly, and vanished behind
+the curtain.
+
+When the curtain had fallen behind her, she turned her head back with
+an expression of infinite and tender concern for him--for him whom she
+could never hope to understand, and whom she was afraid she could never
+satisfy, as if her passion were of a hopelessly lower quality, unable
+to appease some exalted and delicate desire of his superior soul. In a
+couple of minutes she reappeared. They left the house by the door of
+the compound, and passed within three feet of the thunderstruck Pedro,
+without even looking in his direction. He rose from stooping over a fire
+of sticks, and, balancing himself clumsily, uncovered his enormous fangs
+in gaping astonishment. Then suddenly he set off rolling on his bandy
+legs to impart to his masters the astonishing discovery of a woman.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+As luck would have it, Ricardo was lounging alone on the veranda of the
+former counting-house. He scented some new development at once, and ran
+down to meet the trotting, bear-like figure. The deep, growling noises
+it made, though they had only a very remote resemblance to the Spanish
+language, or indeed to any sort of human speech, were from long
+practice quite intelligible to Mr. Jones's secretary. Ricardo was rather
+surprised. He had imagined that the girl would continue to keep out of
+sight. That line apparently was given up. He did not mistrust her. How
+could he? Indeed, he could not think of her existence calmly.
+
+He tried to keep her image out of his mind so that he should be able
+to use its powers with some approach to that coolness which the complex
+nature of the situation demanded from him, both for his own sake and as
+the faithful follower of plain Mr. Jones, gentleman.
+
+He collected his wits and thought. This was a change of policy, probably
+on the part of Heyst. If so, what could it mean? A deep fellow! Unless
+it was her doing; in which case--h'm--all right. Must be. She would
+know what she was doing. Before him Pedro, lifting his feet alternately,
+swayed to and fro sideways--his usual attitude of expectation. His
+little red eyes, lost in the mass of hair, were motionless. Ricardo
+stared into them with calculated contempt and said in a rough, angry
+voice:
+
+"Woman! Of course there is. We know that without you!" He gave the tame
+monster a push. "Git! Vamos! Waddle! Get back and cook the dinner. Which
+way did they go, then?"
+
+Pedro extended a huge, hairy forearm to show the direction, and went off
+on his bandy legs. Advancing a few steps, Ricardo was just in time to
+see, above some bushes, two white helmets moving side by side in the
+clearing. They disappeared. Now that he had managed to keep Pedro from
+informing the governor that there was a woman on the island, he could
+indulge in speculation as to the movements of these people. His attitude
+towards Mr. Jones had undergone a spiritual change, of which he himself
+was not yet fully aware.
+
+That morning, before tiffin, after his escape from the Heyst bungalow,
+completed in such an inspiring way by the recovery of the slipper,
+Ricardo had made his way to their allotted house, reeling as he ran,
+his head in a whirl. He was wildly excited by visions of inconceivable
+promise. He waited to compose himself before he dared to meet the
+governor. On entering the room, he found Mr. Jones sitting on the camp
+bedstead like a tailor on his board, cross-legged, his long back against
+the wall.
+
+"I say, sir. You aren't going to tell me you are bored?"
+
+"Bored! No! Where the devil have you been all this time?"
+
+"Observing--watching--nosing around. What else? I knew you had company.
+Have you talked freely, sir?"
+
+"Yes, I have," muttered Mr. Jones.
+
+"Not downright plain, sir?"
+
+"No. I wished you had been here. You loaf all the morning, and now you
+come in out of breath. What's the matter?"
+
+"I haven't been wasting my time out there," said Ricardo. "Nothing's the
+matter. I--I--might have hurried a bit." He was in truth still panting;
+only it was not with running, but with the tumult of thoughts and
+sensations long repressed, which had been set free by the adventure of
+the morning. He was almost distracted by them now. He forgot himself in
+the maze of possibilities threatening and inspiring. "And so you had a
+long talk?" he said, to gain time.
+
+"Confound you! The sun hasn't affected your head, has it? Why are you
+staring at me like a basilisk?"
+
+"Beg pardon, sir. Wasn't aware I stared," Ricardo apologized
+good-humouredly. "The sun might well affect a thicker skull than mine.
+It blazes. Phew! What do you think a fellow is, sir--a salamander?"
+
+"You ought to have been here," observed Mr. Jones.
+
+"Did the beast give any signs of wanting to prance?" asked Ricardo
+quickly, with absolutely genuine anxiety. "It wouldn't do, sir. You must
+play him easy for at least a couple of days, sir. I have a plan. I have
+a notion that I can find out a lot in a couple of days."
+
+"You have? In what way?"
+
+"Why, by watching," Ricardo answered slowly.
+
+Mr Jones grunted.
+
+"Nothing new, that. Watch, eh? Why not pray a little, too?"
+
+"Ha, ha, ha! That's a good one," burst out the secretary, fixing Mr.
+Jones with mirthless eyes.
+
+The latter dropped the subject indolently.
+
+"Oh, you may be certain of at least two days," he said.
+
+Ricardo recovered himself. His eyes gleamed voluptuously.
+
+"We'll pull this off yet--clean--whole--right through, if you will only
+trust me, sir."
+
+"I am trusting you right enough," said Mr. Jones. "It's your interest,
+too."
+
+And, indeed, Ricardo was truthful enough in his statement. He did
+absolutely believe in success now. But he couldn't tell his governor
+that he had intelligences in the enemy's camp. It wouldn't do to tell
+him of the girl. Devil only knew what he would do if he learned there
+was a woman about. And how could he begin to tell of it? He couldn't
+confess his sudden escapade.
+
+"We'll pull it off, sir," he said, with perfectly acted cheerfulness.
+He experienced gusts of awful joy expanding in his heart and hot like a
+fanned flame.
+
+"We must," pronounced Mr. Jones. "This thing, Martin, is not like our
+other tries. I have a peculiar feeling about this. It's a different
+thing. It's a sort of test."
+
+Ricardo was impressed by the governor's manner; for the first time a
+hint of passion could be detected in him. But also a word he used, the
+word "test," had struck him as particularly significant somehow. It was
+the last word uttered during that morning's conversation. Immediately
+afterwards Ricardo went out of the room. It was impossible for him to
+keep still. An elation in which an extraordinary softness mingled with
+savage triumph would not allow it. It prevented his thinking, also. He
+walked up and down the veranda far into the afternoon, eyeing the other
+bungalow at every turn. It gave no sign of being inhabited. Once or
+twice he stopped dead short and looked down at his left slipper. Each
+time he chuckled audibly. His restlessness kept on increasing till at
+last it frightened him. He caught hold of the balustrade of the veranda
+and stood still, smiling not at his thought but at the strong sense of
+life within him. He abandoned himself to it carelessly, even recklessly.
+He cared for no one, friend or enemy. At that moment Mr. Jones called
+him by name from within. A shadow fell on the secretary's face.
+
+"Here, sir," he answered; but it was a moment before he could make up
+his mind to go in.
+
+He found the governor on his feet. Mr. Jones was tired of lying down
+when there was no necessity for it. His slender form, gliding about the
+room, came to a standstill.
+
+"I've been thinking, Martin, of something you suggested. At the time it
+did not strike me as practical; but on reflection it seems to me that
+to propose a game is as good a way as any to let him understand that the
+time has come to disgorge. It's less--how should I say?--vulgar. He will
+know what it means. It's not a bad form to give to the business--which
+in itself is crude, Martin, crude."
+
+"Want to spare his feelings?" jeered the secretary in such a bitter tone
+that Mr. Jones was really surprised.
+
+"Why, it was your own notion, confound you!"
+
+"Who says it wasn't?" retorted Ricardo sulkily. "But I am fairly sick of
+this crawling. No! No! Get the exact bearings of his swag and then a rip
+up. That's plenty good enough for him."
+
+His passions being thoroughly aroused, a thirst for blood was allied in
+him with a thirst for tenderness--yes, tenderness. A sort of anxious,
+melting sensation pervaded and softened his heart when he thought of
+that girl--one of his own sort. And at the same time jealousy started
+gnawing at his breast as the image of Heyst intruded itself on his
+fierce anticipation of bliss.
+
+"The crudeness of your ferocity is positively gross, Martin," Mr. Jones
+said disdainfully. "You don't even understand my purpose. I mean to
+have some sport out of him. Just try to imagine the atmosphere of the
+game--the fellow handling the cards--the agonizing mockery of it! Oh,
+I shall appreciate this greatly. Yes, let him lose his money instead of
+being forced to hand it over. You, of course, would shoot him at once,
+but I shall enjoy the refinement and the jest of it. He's a man of the
+best society. I've been hounded out of my sphere by people very much
+like that fellow. How enraged and humiliated he will be! I promise
+myself some exquisite moments while watching his play."
+
+"Ay, and suppose he suddenly starts prancing. He may not appreciate the
+fun."
+
+"I mean you to be present," Mr. Jones remarked calmly.
+
+"Well, as long as I am free to plug him or rip him up whenever I think
+the time has come, you are welcome to your bit of sport, sir. I shan't
+spoil it."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+It was at this precise moment of their conversation that Heyst had
+intruded on Mr. Jones and his secretary with his warning about Wang, as
+he had related to Lena. When he left them, the two looked at each other
+in wondering silence. My Jones was the first to break it.
+
+"I say, Martin!"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"What does this mean?"
+
+"It's some move. Blame me if I can understand."
+
+"Too deep for you?" Mr. Jones inquired dryly.
+
+"It's nothing but some of his infernal impudence," growled the
+secretary. "You don't believe all that about the Chink, do you, sir?
+'Tain't true."
+
+"It isn't necessary for it to be true to have a meaning for us. It's the
+why of his coming to tell us this tale that's important."
+
+"Do you think he made it up to frighten us?" asked Ricardo.
+
+Mr Jones scowled at him thoughtfully.
+
+"The man looked worried," he muttered, as if to himself. "Suppose that
+Chinaman has really stolen his money! The man looked very worried."
+
+"Nothing but his artfulness, sir," protested Ricardo earnestly, for the
+idea was too disconcerting to entertain. "Is it likely that he would
+have trusted a Chink with enough knowledge to make it possible?" he
+argued warmly. "Why, it's the very thing that he would keep close about.
+There's something else there. Ay, but what?"
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!" Mr. Jones let out a ghostly, squeaky laugh. "I've never
+been placed in such a ridiculous position before," he went on, with a
+sepulchral equanimity of tone. "It's you, Martin, who dragged me into
+it. However, it's my own fault too. I ought to--but I was really
+too bored to use my brain, and yours is not to be trusted. You are a
+hothead!"
+
+A blasphemous exclamation of grief escaped from Ricardo. Not to be
+trusted! Hothead! He was almost tearful.
+
+"Haven't I heard you, sir, saying more than twenty times since we got
+fired out from Manila that we should want a lot of capital to work the
+East Coast with? You were always telling me that to prime properly all
+them officials and Portuguese scallywags we should have to lose heavily
+at first. Weren't you always worrying about some means of getting hold
+of a good lot of cash? It wasn't to be got hold of by allowing yourself
+to become bored in that rotten Dutch town and playing a two-penny game
+with confounded beggarly bank clerks and such like. Well, I've brought
+you here, where there is cash to be got--and a big lot, to a moral," he
+added through his set teeth.
+
+Silence fell. Each of them was staring into a different corner of the
+room. Suddenly, with a slight stamp of his foot, Mr. Jones made for the
+door. Ricardo caught him up outside.
+
+"Put an arm through mine, sir," he begged him gently but firmly. "No use
+giving the game away. An invalid may well come out for a breath of fresh
+air after the sun's gone down a bit. That's it, sir. But where do you
+want to go? Why did you come out, sir?"
+
+Mr Jones stopped short.
+
+"I hardly know myself," he confessed in a hollow mutter, staring
+intently at the Number One bungalow. "It's quite irrational," he
+declared in a still lower tone.
+
+"Better go in, sir," suggested Ricardo. "What's that? Those screens
+weren't down before. He's spying from behind them now, I bet--the
+dodging, artful, plotting beast!"
+
+"Why not go over there and see if we can't get to the bottom of this
+game?" was the unexpected proposal uttered by Mr. Jones. "He will have
+to talk to us."
+
+Ricardo repressed a start of dismay, but for a moment could not speak.
+He only pressed the governor's hand to his side instinctively.
+
+"No, sir. What could you say? Do you expect to get to the bottom of his
+lies? How could you make him talk? It isn't time yet to come to grips
+with that gent. You don't think I would hang back, do you? His Chink, of
+course, I'll shoot like a dog the moment I catch sight of him; but as
+to that Mr. Blasted Heyst, the time isn't yet. My head's cooler just now
+than yours. Let's go in again. Why, we are exposed here. Suppose he
+took it into his head to let off a gun on us! He's an unaccountable,
+'yporcritical skunk."
+
+Allowing himself to be persuaded, Mr. Jones returned to his seclusion.
+The secretary, however, remained on the veranda--for the purpose, he
+said, of seeing whether that Chink wasn't sneaking around; in which
+case he proposed to take a long shot at the galoot and chance the
+consequences. His real reason was that he wanted to be alone, away from
+the governor's deep-sunk eyes. He felt a sentimental desire to indulge
+his fancies in solitude. A great change had come over Mr. Ricardo since
+that morning. A whole side of him which from prudence, from necessity,
+from loyalty, had been kept dormant, was aroused now, colouring
+his thoughts and disturbing his mental poise by the vision of such
+staggering consequences as, for instance, the possibility of an active
+conflict with the governor. The appearance of the monstrous Pedro with
+his news drew Ricardo out of a feeling of dreaminess wrapped up in a
+sense of impending trouble. A woman? Yes, there was one; and it made all
+the difference. After driving away Pedro, and watching the white
+helmets of Heyst and Lena vanishing among the bushes he stood lost in
+meditation.
+
+"Where could they be off to like this?" he mentally asked himself.
+
+The answer found by his speculative faculties on their utmost stretch
+was--to meet that Chink. For in the desertion of Wang Ricardo did not
+believe. It was a lying yarn, the organic part of a dangerous plot.
+Heyst had gone to combine some fresh move. But then Ricardo felt sure
+that the girl was with him--the girl full of pluck, full of sense, full
+of understanding; an ally of his own kind!
+
+He went indoors briskly. Mr. Jones had resumed his cross-legged pose at
+the head of the bed, with his back against the wall.
+
+"Anything new?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+Ricardo walked about the room as if he had no care in the world. He
+hummed snatches of song. Mr. Jones raised his waspish eyebrows, at the
+sound. The secretary got down on his knees before an old leather trunk,
+and, rummaging in there, brought out a small looking-glass. He fell to
+examining his physiognomy in it with silent absorption.
+
+"I think I'll shave," he decided, getting up.
+
+He gave a sidelong glance to the governor, and repeated it several times
+during the operation, which did not take long, and even afterwards, when
+after putting away the implements, he resumed his walking, humming more
+snatches of unknown songs. Mr. Jones preserved a complete immobility,
+his thin lips compressed, his eyes veiled. His face was like a carving.
+
+"So you would like to try your hand at cards with that skunk, sir?" said
+Ricardo, stopping suddenly and rubbing his hands.
+
+Mr Jones gave no sign of having heard anything.
+
+"Well, why not? Why shouldn't he have the experience? You remember in
+that Mexican town--what's its name?--the robber fellow they caught in
+the mountains and condemned to be shot? He played cards half the night
+with the jailer and the sheriff. Well, this fellow is condemned, too.
+He must give you your game. Hang it all, a gentleman ought to have some
+little relaxation! And you have been uncommonly patient, sir."
+
+"You are uncommonly volatile all of a sudden," Mr. Jones remarked in a
+bored voice. "What's come to you?"
+
+The secretary hummed for a while, and then said:
+
+"I'll try to get him over here for you tonight, after dinner. If I ain't
+here myself, don't you worry, sir. I shall be doing a bit of nosing
+around--see?"
+
+"I see," sneered Mr. Jones languidly. "But what do you expect to see in
+the dark?"
+
+Ricardo made no answer, and after another turn or two slipped out of the
+room. He no longer felt comfortable alone with the governor.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+Meantime Heyst and Lena, walking rather fast, approached Wang's hut.
+Asking the girl to wait, Heyst ascended the little ladder of bamboos
+giving access to the door. It was as he had expected. The smoky interior
+was empty, except for a big chest of sandalwood too heavy for hurried
+removal. Its lid was thrown up, but whatever it might have contained was
+no longer there. All Wang's possessions were gone. Without tarrying in
+the hut, Heyst came back to the girl, who asked no questions, with her
+strange air of knowing or understanding everything.
+
+"Let us push on," he said.
+
+He went ahead, the rustle of her white skirt following him into the
+shades of the forest, along the path of their usual walk. Though the air
+lay heavy between straight denuded trunks, the sunlit patches moved on
+the ground, and raising her eyes Lena saw far above her head the
+flutter of the leaves, the surface shudder on the mighty limbs extended
+horizontally in the perfect immobility of patience. Twice Heyst looked
+over his shoulder at her. Behind the readiness of her answering smile
+there was a fund of devoted, concentrated passion, burning with the hope
+of a more perfect satisfaction. They passed the spot where it was their
+practice to turn towards the barren summit of the central hill. Heyst
+held steadily on his way towards the upper limit of the forest. The
+moment they left its shelter, a breeze enveloped them, and a great
+cloud, racing over the sun, threw a peculiar sombre tint over
+everything. Heyst pointed up a precipitous, rugged path clinging to the
+side of the hill. It ended in a barricade of felled trees, a primitively
+conceived obstacle which must have cost much labour to erect at just
+that spot.
+
+"This," Heyst, explained in his urbane tone, "is a barrier against the
+march of civilization. The poor folk over there did not like it, as it
+appeared to them in the shape of my company--a great step forward, as
+some people used to call it with mistaken confidence. The advanced foot
+has been drawn back, but the barricade remains."
+
+They went on climbing slowly. The cloud had driven over, leaving an
+added brightness on the face of the world.
+
+"It's a very ridiculous thing," Heyst went on; "but then it is the
+product of honest fear--fear of the unknown, of the incomprehensible.
+It's pathetic, too, in a way. And I heartily wish, Lena, that we were on
+the other side of it."
+
+"Oh, stop, stop!" she cried, seizing his arm.
+
+The face of the barricade they were approaching had been piled up with a
+lot of fresh-cut branches. The leaves were still green. A gentle breeze,
+sweeping over the top, stirred them a little; but what had startled the
+girl was the discovery of several spear-blades protruding from the mass
+of foliage. She had made them out suddenly. They did not gleam, but she
+saw them with extreme distinctness, very still, very vicious to look at.
+
+"You had better let me go forward alone, Lena," said Heyst.
+
+She tugged, persistently at his arm, but after a time, during which
+he never ceased to look smilingly into her terrified eyes, he ended by
+disengaging himself.
+
+"It's a sign rather than a demonstration," he argued, persuasively.
+"Just wait here a moment. I promise not to approach near enough to be
+stabbed."
+
+As in a nightmare she watched Heyst go up the few yards of the path as
+if he never meant to stop; and she heard his voice, like voices heard
+in dreams, shouting unknown words in an unearthly tone. Heyst was only
+demanding to see Wang. He was not kept waiting very long. Recovering
+from the first flurry of her fright, Lena noticed a commotion in the
+green top-dressing of the barricade. She exhaled a sigh of relief when
+the spear-blades retreated out of sight, sliding inward--the horrible
+things! in a spot facing Heyst a pair of yellow hands parted the leaves,
+and a face filled the small opening--a face with very noticeable eyes.
+It was Wang's face, of course, with no suggestion of a body belonging to
+it, like those cardboard faces at which she remembered gazing as a child
+in the window of a certain dim shop kept by a mysterious little man in
+Kingsland Road. Only this face, instead of mere holes, had eyes which
+blinked. She could see the beating of the eyelids. The hands on each
+side of the face, keeping the boughs apart, also did not look as if they
+belonged to any real body. One of them was holding a revolver--a weapon
+which she recognized merely by intuition, never having seen such an
+object before.
+
+She leaned her shoulders against the rock of the perpendicular hillside
+and kept her eyes on Heyst, with comparative composure, since the spears
+were not menacing him any longer. Beyond the rigid and motionless back
+he presented to her, she saw Wang's unreal cardboard face moving its
+thin lips and grimacing artificially. She was too far down the path to
+hear the dialogue, carried on in an ordinary voice. She waited patiently
+for its end. Her shoulders felt the warmth of the rock; now and then a
+whiff of cooler air seemed to slip down upon her head from above; the
+ravine at her feet, choked full of vegetation, emitted the faint, drowsy
+hum of insect life. Everything was very quiet. She failed to notice
+the exact moment when Wang's head vanished from the foliage, taking the
+unreal hands away with it. To her horror, the spear-blades came gliding
+slowly out. The very hair on her head stirred; but before she had
+time to cry out, Heyst, who seemed rooted to the ground, turned round
+abruptly and began to move towards her. His great moustaches did not
+quite hide an ugly but irresolute smile; and when he had come down near
+enough to touch her, he burst out into a harsh laugh:
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+She looked at him, uncomprehending. He cut short his laugh and said
+curtly:
+
+"We had better go down as we came."
+
+She followed him into the forest. The advance of the afternoon had
+filled it with gloom. Far away a slant of light between the trees closed
+the view. All was dark beyond. Heyst stopped.
+
+"No reason to hurry, Lena," he said in his ordinary, serenely polite
+tones. "We return unsuccessful. I suppose you know, or at least can
+guess, what was my object in coming up there?"
+
+"No, I can't guess, dear," she said, and smiled, noticing with
+emotion that his breast was heaving as if he had been out of breath.
+Nevertheless, he tried to command his speech, pausing only a little
+between the words.
+
+"No? I went up to find Wang. I went up"--he gasped again here, but this
+was for the last time--"I made you come with me because I didn't like
+to leave you unprotected in the proximity of those fellows." Suddenly he
+snatched his cork helmet off his head and dashed it on the ground. "No!"
+he cried roughly. "All this is too unreal altogether. It isn't to be
+borne! I can't protect you! I haven't the power."
+
+He glared at her for a moment, then hastened after his hat which had
+bounded away to some distance. He came back looking at her face, which
+was very white.
+
+"I ought to beg your pardon for these antics," he said, adjusting his
+hat. "A movement of childish petulance! Indeed, I feel very much like a
+child in my ignorance, in my powerlessness, in my want of resource, in
+everything except in the dreadful consciousness of some evil hanging
+over your head--yours!"
+
+"It's you they are after," she murmured.
+
+"No doubt, but unfortunately--"
+
+"Unfortunately--what?"
+
+"Unfortunately, I have not succeeded with Wang," he said. "I failed to
+move his Celestial, heart--that is, if there is such a thing. He told me
+with horrible Chinese reasonableness that he could not let us pass the
+barrier, because we should be pursued. He doesn't like fights. He gave
+me to understand that he would shoot me with my own revolver without
+any sort of compunction, rather than risk a rude and distasteful
+contest with the strange barbarians for my sake. He has preached to the
+villagers. They respect him. He is the most remarkable man they have
+ever seen, and their kinsman by marriage. They understand his policy.
+And anyway only women and children and a few old fellows are left in the
+village. This is the season when the men are away in trading vessels.
+But it would have been all the same. None of them have a taste for
+fighting--and with white men too! They are peaceable, kindly folk and
+would have seen me shot with extreme satisfaction. Wang seemed to think
+my insistence--for I insisted, you know--very stupid and tactless. But a
+drowning man clutches at straws. We were talking in such Malay as we are
+both equal to.
+
+"'Your fears are foolish,' I said to him.
+
+"'Foolish? of course I am foolish,' he replied. 'If I were a wise man,
+I would be a merchant with a big hong in Singapore, instead of being a
+mine coolie turned houseboy. But if you don't go away in time, I will
+shoot you before it grows too dark to take aim. Not till then, Number
+One, but I will do it then. Now--finish!'
+
+"'All right,' I said. 'Finish as far as I am concerned; but you can have
+no objections to the mem putih coming over to stay with the Orang Kaya's
+women for a few days. I will make a present in silver for it.' Orang
+Kaya, is the head man of the village, Lena," added Heyst.
+
+She looked at him in astonishment.
+
+"You wanted me to go to that village of savages?" she gasped. "You
+wanted me to leave you?"
+
+"It would have given me a freer hand."
+
+Heyst stretched out his hands and looked at them for a moment, then let
+them fall by his side. Indignation was expressed more in the curve of
+her lips than in her clear eyes, which never wavered.
+
+"I believe Wang laughed," he went on. "He made a noise like a
+turkey-cock."
+
+"'That would be worse than anything,' he told me.
+
+"I was taken aback. I pointed out to him that he was talking nonsense.
+It could not make any difference to his security where you were, because
+the evil men, as he calls them, did not know of your existence. I did
+not lie exactly, Lena, though I did stretch the truth till it cracked;
+but the fellow seems to have an uncanny insight. He shook his head. He
+assured me they knew all about you. He made a horrible grimace at me."
+
+"It doesn't matter," said the girl. "I didn't want--I would not have
+gone."
+
+Heyst raised his eyes.
+
+"Wonderful intuition! As I continued to press him, Wang made that
+very remark about you. When he smiles, his face looks like a conceited
+death's head. It was his very last remark that you wouldn't want to. I
+went away then."
+
+She leaned back against a tree. Heyst faced her in the same attitude of
+leisure, as if they had done with time and all the other concerns of the
+earth. Suddenly, high above their heads the roof of leaves whispered at
+them tumultuously and then ceased.
+
+"That was a strange notion of yours, to send me away," she said. "Send
+me away? What for? Yes, what for?"
+
+"You seem indignant," he remarked listlessly.
+
+"To these savages, too!" she pursued. "And you think I would have gone?
+You can do what you like with me--but not that, not that!"
+
+Heyst looked into the dim aisles of the forest. Everything was so still
+now that the very ground on which they stood seemed to exhale silence
+into the shade.
+
+"Why be indignant?" he remonstrated. "It has not happened. I gave up
+pleading with Wang. Here we are, repulsed! Not only without power to
+resist the evil, but unable to make terms for ourselves with the worthy
+envoys, the envoys extraordinary of the world we thought we had done
+with for years and years. And that's bad, Lena, very bad."
+
+"It's funny," she said thoughtfully. "Bad? I suppose it is. I don't know
+that it is. But do you? Do you? You talk as if you didn't believe in
+it."
+
+She gazed at him earnestly.
+
+"Do I? Ah! That's it. I don't know how to talk. I have managed to refine
+everything away. I've said to the Earth that bore me: 'I am I and you
+are a shadow.' And, by Jove, it is so! But it appears that such words
+cannot be uttered with impunity. Here I am on a Shadow inhabited
+by Shades. How helpless a man is against the Shades! How is one to
+intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself against them? I have lost
+all belief in realities . . . Lena, give me your hand."
+
+She looked at him surprised, uncomprehending.
+
+"Your hand," he cried.
+
+She obeyed; he seized it with avidity as if eager to raise it to his
+lips, but halfway up released his grasp. They looked at each other for a
+time.
+
+"What's the matter, dear?" she whispered timidly.
+
+"Neither force nor conviction," Heyst muttered wearily to himself. "How
+am I to meet this charmingly simple problem?"
+
+"I am sorry," she murmured.
+
+"And so am I," he confessed quickly. "And the bitterest of this
+humiliation is its complete uselessness--which I feel, I feel!"
+
+She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling. Across his
+ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade. He spoke suddenly:
+
+"I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them in the
+night, with a knife, and cut their throats one after another, as they
+slept! I wonder--"
+
+She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words in
+his mouth, and said earnestly:
+
+"Don't you try to do such a thing! Don't you think of it!"
+
+"I don't possess anything bigger than a penknife. As to thinking of it,
+Lena, there's no saying what one may think of. I don't think. Something
+in me thinks--something foreign to my nature. What is the matter?"
+
+He noticed her parted lips, and the peculiar stare in her eyes, which
+had wandered from his face.
+
+"There's somebody after us. I saw something white moving," she cried.
+
+Heyst did not turn his head; he only glanced at her out-stretched arm.
+
+"No doubt we are followed; we are watched."
+
+"I don't see anything now," she said.
+
+"And it does not matter," Heyst went on in his ordinary voice. "Here we
+are in the forest. I have neither strength nor persuasion. Indeed, it's
+extremely difficult to be eloquent before a Chinaman's head stuck at
+one out of a lot of brushwood. But can we wander among these big trees
+indefinitely? Is this a refuge? No! What else is left to us? I did think
+for a moment of the mine; but even there we could not remain very long.
+And then that gallery is not safe. The props were too weak to begin
+with. Ants have been at work there--ants after the men. A death-trap, at
+best. One can die but once, but there are many manners of death."
+
+The girl glanced about fearfully, in search of the watcher or follower
+whom she had glimpsed once among the trees; but if he existed, he had
+concealed himself. Nothing met her eyes but the deepening shadows of the
+short vistas between the living columns of the still roof of leaves.
+She looked at the man beside her expectantly, tenderly, with suppressed
+affright and a sort of awed wonder.
+
+"I have also thought of these people's boat," Heyst went on. "We could
+get into that, and--only they have taken everything out of her. I have
+seen her oars and mast in a corner of their room. To shove off in an
+empty boat would be nothing but a desperate expedient, supposing even
+that she would drift out a good distance between the islands before the
+morning. It would only be a complicated manner of committing suicide--to
+be found dead in a boat, dead from sun and thirst. A sea mystery.
+I wonder who would find us! Davidson, perhaps; but Davidson passed
+westward ten days ago. I watched him steaming past one early morning,
+from the jetty."
+
+"You never told me," she said.
+
+"He must have been looking at me through his big binoculars. Perhaps, if
+I had raised my arm--but what did we want with Davidson then, you and
+I? He won't be back this way for three weeks or more, Lena. I wish I had
+raised my arm that morning."
+
+"What would have been the good of it?" she sighed out.
+
+"What good? No good, of course. We had no forebodings. This seemed to be
+an inexpugnable refuge, where we could live untroubled and learn to know
+each other."
+
+"It's perhaps in trouble that people get to know each other," she
+suggested.
+
+"Perhaps," he said indifferently. "At any rate, we would not have gone
+away from here with him; though I believe he would have come in eagerly
+enough, and ready for any service he could render. It's that fat man's
+nature--a delightful fellow. You would not come on the wharf that time
+I sent the shawl back to Mrs. Schomberg through him. He has never seen
+you."
+
+"I didn't know that you wanted anybody ever to see me," she said.
+
+He had folded his arms on his breast and hung his head.
+
+"And I did not know that you cared to be seen as yet. A misunderstanding
+evidently. An honourable misunderstanding. But it does not matter now."
+
+He raised his head after a silence.
+
+"How gloomy this forest has grown! Yet surely the sun cannot have set
+already."
+
+She looked round; and as if her eyes had just been opened, she perceived
+the shades of the forest surrounding her, not so much with gloom, but
+with a sullen, dumb, menacing hostility. Her heart sank in the engulfing
+stillness, at that moment she felt the nearness of death, breathing on
+her and on the man with her. If there had been a sudden stir of leaves,
+the crack of a dry branch, the faintest rustle, she would have screamed
+aloud. But she shook off the unworthy weakness. Such as she was, a
+fiddle-scraping girl picked up on the very threshold of infamy, she
+would try to rise above herself, triumphant and humble; and then
+happiness would burst on her like a torrent, flinging at her feet the
+man whom she loved.
+
+Heyst stirred slightly.
+
+"We had better be getting back, Lena, since we can't stay all night in
+the woods--or anywhere else, for that matter. We are the slaves of
+this infernal surprise which has been sprung on us by--shall I say
+fate?--your fate, or mine."
+
+It was the man who had broken the silence, but it was the woman who
+led the way. At the very edge of the forest she stopped, concealed by a
+tree. He joined her cautiously.
+
+"What is it? What do you see, Lena?" he whispered.
+
+She said that it was only a thought that had come into her head. She
+hesitated for a moment giving him over her shoulder a shining gleam in
+her grey eyes. She wanted to know whether this trouble, this danger,
+this evil, whatever it was, finding them out in their retreat, was not a
+sort of punishment.
+
+"Punishment?" repeated Heyst. He could not understand what she meant.
+When she explained, he was still more surprised. "A sort of retribution,
+from an angry Heaven?" he said in wonder. "On us? What on earth for?"
+
+He saw her pale face darken in the dusk. She had blushed. Her whispering
+flowed very fast. It was the way they lived together--that wasn't right,
+was it? It was a guilty life. For she had not been forced into it,
+driven, scared into it. No, no--she had come to him of her own free
+will, with her whole soul yearning unlawfully.
+
+He was so profoundly touched that he could not speak for a moment. To
+conceal his trouble, he assumed his best Heystian manner.
+
+"What? Are our visitors then messengers of morality, avengers of
+righteousness, agents of Providence? That's certainly an original view.
+How flattered they would be if they could hear you!"
+
+"Now you are making fun of me," she said in a subdued voice which broke
+suddenly.
+
+"Are you conscious of sin?" Heyst asked gravely. She made no answer.
+"For I am not," he added; "before Heaven, I am not!"
+
+"You! You are different. Woman is the tempter. You took me up from pity.
+I threw myself at you."
+
+"Oh, you exaggerate, you exaggerate. It was not so bad as that," he said
+playfully, keeping his voice steady with an effort.
+
+He considered himself a dead man already, yet forced to pretend that
+he was alive for her sake, for her defence. He regretted that he had
+no Heaven to which he could recommend this fair, palpitating handful of
+ashes and dust--warm, living sentient his own--and exposed helplessly to
+insult, outrage, degradation, and infinite misery of the body.
+
+She had averted her face from him and was still. He suddenly seized her
+passive hand.
+
+"You will have it so?" he said. "Yes? Well, let us then hope for mercy
+together."
+
+She shook her head without looking at him, like an abashed child.
+
+"Remember," he went on incorrigible with his delicate raillery, "that
+hope is a Christian virtue, and surely you can't want all the mercy for
+yourself."
+
+Before their eyes the bungalow across the cleared ground stood bathed in
+a sinister light. An unexpected chill gust of wind made a noise in the
+tree-tops. She snatched her hand away and stepped out into the open;
+but before she had advanced more than three yards, she stood still and
+pointed to the west.
+
+"Oh look there!" she exclaimed.
+
+Beyond the headland of Diamond Bay, lying black on a purple sea, great
+masses of cloud stood piled up and bathed in a mist of blood. A crimson
+crack like an open wound zigzagged between them, with a piece of dark
+red sun showing at the bottom. Heyst cast an indifferent glance at the
+ill-omened chaos of the sky.
+
+"Thunderstorm making up. We shall hear it all night, but it won't visit
+us, probably. The clouds generally gather round the volcano."
+
+She was not listening to him. Her eyes reflected the sombre and violent
+hues of the sunset.
+
+"That does not look much like a sign of mercy," she said slowly, as if
+to herself, and hurried on, followed by Heyst. Suddenly she stopped. "I
+don't care. I would do more yet! And some day you'll forgive me. You'll
+have to forgive me!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+Stumbling up the steps, as if suddenly exhausted, Lena entered the room
+and let herself fall on the nearest chair. Before following her, Heyst
+took a survey of the surroundings from the veranda. It was a complete
+solitude. There was nothing in the aspect of this familiar scene to tell
+him that he and the girl were not as completely alone as they had been
+in the early days of their common life on this abandoned spot, with only
+Wang discreetly materializing from time to time and the uncomplaining
+memory of Morrison to keep them company.
+
+After the cold gust of wind there was an absolute stillness of the
+air. The thunder-charged mass hung unbroken beyond the low, ink-black
+headland, darkening the twilight. By contrast, the sky at the zenith
+displayed pellucid clearness, the sheen of a delicate glass bubble which
+the merest movement of air might shatter. A little to the left, between
+the black masses of the headland and of the forest, the volcano, a
+feather of smoke by day and a cigar-glow at night, took its first fiery
+expanding breath of the evening. Above it a reddish star came out like
+an expelled spark from the fiery bosom of the earth, enchanted into
+permanency by the mysterious spell of frozen spaces.
+
+In front of Heyst the forest, already full of the deepest shades, stood
+like a wall. But he lingered, watching its edge, especially where it
+ended at the line of bushes, masking the land end of the jetty. Since
+the girl had spoken of catching a glimpse of something white among the
+trees, he believed pretty firmly that they had been followed in their
+excursion up the mountain by Mr. Jones's secretary. No doubt the fellow
+had watched them out of the forest, and now, unless he took the trouble
+to go back some distance and fetch a considerable circuit inland over
+the clearing, he was bound to walk out into the open space before the
+bungalows. Heyst did, indeed, imagine at one time some movement between
+the trees, lost as soon as perceived. He stared patiently, but nothing
+more happened. After all, why should he trouble about these people's
+actions? Why this stupid concern for the preliminaries, since, when
+the issue was joined, it would find him disarmed and shrinking from the
+ugliness and degradation of it?
+
+He turned and entered the room. Deep dusk reigned in there already.
+Lena, near the door, did not move or speak. The sheen of the white
+tablecloth was very obtrusive. The brute these two vagabonds had tamed
+had entered on its service while Heyst and Lena were away. The table was
+laid. Heyst walked up and down the room several times. The girl remained
+without sound or movement on the chair. But when Heyst, placing the two
+silver candelabra on the table, struck a match to light the candles,
+she got up suddenly and went into the bedroom. She came out again almost
+immediately, having taken off her hat. Heyst looked at her over his
+shoulder.
+
+"What's the good of shirking the evil hour? I've lighted these
+candles for a sign of our return. After all, we might not have been
+watched--while returning, I mean. Of course we were seen leaving the
+house."
+
+The girl sat down again. The great wealth of her hair looked very dark
+above her colourless face. She raised her eyes, glistening softly in
+the light with a sort of unreadable appeal, with a strange effect of
+unseeing innocence.
+
+"Yes," said Heyst across the table, the fingertips of one hand resting
+on the immaculate cloth. "A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw,
+hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic ape, has laid this
+table. Are you awake, Lena? Am I? I would pinch myself, only I know that
+nothing would do away with this dream. Three covers. You know it is the
+shorter of the two who's coming--the gentleman who, in the play of his
+shoulders as he walks, and in his facial structure, recalls a Jaguar.
+Ah, you don't know what a jaguar is? But you have had a good look at
+these two. It's the short one, you know, who's to be our guest."
+
+She made a sign with her head that she knew; Heyst's insistence brought
+Ricardo vividly before her mental vision. A sudden languor, like the
+physical echo of her struggle with the man, paralysed all her limbs.
+She lay still in the chair, feeling very frightened at this
+phenomenon--ready to pray aloud for strength.
+
+Heyst had started to pace the room.
+
+"Our guest! There is a proverb--in Russia, I believe--that when a
+guest enters the house, God enters the house. The sacred virtue of
+hospitality! But it leads one into trouble as well as any other."
+
+The girl unexpectedly got up from the chair, swaying her supple figure
+and stretching her arms above her head. He stopped to look at her
+curiously, paused, and then went on:
+
+"I venture to think that God has nothing to do with such a hospitality
+and with such a guest!"
+
+She had jumped to her feet to react against the numbness, to discover
+whether her body would obey her will. It did. She could stand up, and
+she could move her arms freely. Though no physiologist, she concluded
+that all that sudden numbness was in her head, not in her limbs. Her
+fears assuaged, she thanked God for it mentally, and to Heyst murmured a
+protest:
+
+"Oh, yes! He's got to do with everything--every little thing. Nothing
+can happen--"
+
+"Yes," he said hastily, "one of the two sparrows can't be struck to the
+ground--you are thinking of that." The habitual playful smile faded on
+the kindly lips under the martial moustache. "Ah, you remember what you
+have been told--as a child--on Sundays."
+
+"Yes, I do remember." She sank into the chair again. "It was the only
+decent bit of time I ever had when I was a kid, with our landlady's two
+girls, you know."
+
+"I wonder, Lena," Heyst said, with a return to his urbane playfulness,
+"whether you are just a little child, or whether you represent something
+as old as the world."
+
+She surprised Heyst by saying dreamily:
+
+"Well--and what about you?"
+
+"I? I date later--much later. I can't call myself a child, but I am so
+recent that I may call myself a man of the last hour--or is it the hour
+before last? I have been out of it so long that I am not certain how far
+the hands of the clock have moved since--since--"
+
+He glanced at the portrait of his father, exactly above the head of the
+girl, as if it were ignoring her in its painted austerity of feeling. He
+did not finish the sentence; but he did not remain silent for long.
+
+"Only what must be avoided are fallacious inferences, my dear
+Lena--especially at this hour."
+
+"Now you are making fun of me again," she said without looking up.
+
+"Am I?" he cried. "Making fun? No, giving warning. Hang it all, whatever
+truth people told you in the old days, there is also this one--that
+sparrows do fall to the ground, that they are brought to the ground.
+This is no vain assertion, but a fact. That's why"--again his
+tone changed, while he picked up the table knife and let it fall
+disdainfully--"that's why I wish these wretched round knives had some
+edge on them. Absolute rubbish--neither edge, point, nor substance. I
+believe one of these forks would make a better weapon at a pinch. But
+can I go about with a fork in my pocket?" He gnashed his teeth with a
+rage very real, and yet comic.
+
+"There used to be a carver here, but it was broken and thrown away a
+long time ago. Nothing much to carve here. It would have made a noble
+weapon, no doubt; but--"
+
+He stopped. The girl sat very quiet, with downcast eyes. As he kept
+silence for some time, she looked up and said thoughtfully:
+
+"Yes, a knife--it's a knife that you would want, wouldn't you, in case,
+in case--"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"There must be a crowbar or two in the sheds; but I have given up all
+the keys together. And then, do you see me walking about with a crowbar
+in my hand? Ha, ha! And besides, that edifying sight alone might start
+the trouble for all I know. In truth, why has it not started yet?"
+
+"Perhaps they are afraid of you," she whispered, looking down again.
+
+"By Jove, it looks like it," he assented meditatively. "They do seem to
+hang back for some reason. Is that reason prudence, or downright fear,
+or perhaps the leisurely method of certitude?"
+
+Out in the black night, not very far from the bungalow, resounded a loud
+and prolonged whistle. Lena's hands grasped the sides of the chair, but
+she made no movement. Heyst started, and turned his face away from the
+door.
+
+The startling sound had died away.
+
+"Whistles, yells, omens, signals, portents--what do they matter?" he
+said. "But what about the crowbar? Suppose I had it! Could I stand
+in ambush at the side of the door--this door--and smash the first
+protruding head, scatter blood and brains over the floor, over these
+walls, and then run stealthily to the other door to do the same
+thing--and repeat the performance for a third time, perhaps? Could I? On
+suspicion, without compunction, with a calm and determined purpose? No,
+it is not in me. I date too late. Would you like to see me attempt this
+thing while that mysterious prestige of mine lasts--or their not less
+mysterious hesitation?"
+
+"No, no!" she whispered ardently, as if compelled to speak by his
+eyes fixed on her face. "No, it's a knife you want to defend yourself
+with--to defend--there will be time--"
+
+"And who knows if it isn't really my duty?" he began again, as if he had
+not heard her disjointed words at all. "It may be--my duty to you, to
+myself. For why should I put up with the humiliation of their secret
+menaces? Do you know what the world would say?"
+
+He emitted a low laugh, which struck her with terror. She would have got
+up, but he stooped so low over her that she could not move without first
+pushing him away.
+
+"It would say, Lena, that I--the Swede--after luring my friend and
+partner to his death from mere greed of money, have murdered these
+unoffending shipwrecked strangers from sheer funk. That would be
+the story whispered--perhaps shouted--certainly spread out, and
+believed--and believed, my dear Lena!"
+
+"Who would believe such awful things?"
+
+"Perhaps you wouldn't--not at first, at any rate; but the power of
+calumny grows with time. It's insidious and penetrating. It can even
+destroy one's faith in oneself--dry-rot the soul."
+
+All at once her eyes leaped to the door and remained fixed, stony, a
+little enlarged. Turning his head, Heyst beheld the figure of Ricardo
+framed in the doorway. For a moment none of the three moved, then,
+looking from the newcomer to the girl in the chair, Heyst formulated a
+sardonic introduction.
+
+"Mr Ricardo, my dear."
+
+Her head drooped a little. Ricardo's hand went up to his moustache. His
+voice exploded in the room.
+
+"At your service, ma'am!"
+
+He stepped in, taking his hat off with a flourish, and dropping it
+carelessly on a chair near the door.
+
+"At your service," he repeated, in quite another tone. "I was made aware
+there was a lady about, by that Pedro of ours; only I didn't know I
+should have the privilege of seeing you tonight, ma'am."
+
+Lena and Heyst looked at him covertly, but he, with a vague gaze
+avoiding them both, looked at nothing, seeming to pursue some point in
+space.
+
+"Had a pleasant walk?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Yes. And you?" returned Heyst, who had managed to catch his glance.
+
+"I haven't been a yard away from the governor this afternoon till
+I started for here." The genuineness of the accent surprised Heyst,
+without convincing him of the truth of the words.
+
+"Why do you ask?" pursued Ricardo with every inflection of perfect
+candour.
+
+"You might have wished to explore the island a little," said Heyst,
+studying the man, who, to render him justice, did not try to free his
+captured gaze. "I may remind you that it wouldn't be a perfectly safe
+proceeding."
+
+Ricardo presented a picture of innocence.
+
+"Oh, yes--meaning that Chink that has ran away from you. He ain't much!"
+
+"He has a revolver," observed Heyst meaningly.
+
+"Well, and you have a revolver, too," Mr. Ricardo argued unexpectedly.
+"I don't worry myself about that."
+
+"That's different. I am not afraid of you," Heyst made answer after a
+short pause.
+
+"Of me?"
+
+"Of all of you."
+
+"You have a queer way of putting things," began Ricardo.
+
+At that moment the door on the compound side of the house came open with
+some noise, and Pedro entered, pressing the edge of a loaded tray to his
+breast. His big, hairy head rolled a little, his feet fell in front of
+each other with a short, hard thump on the floor. The arrival changed
+the current of Ricardo's thought, perhaps, but certainly of his speech.
+
+"You heard me whistling a little while ago outside? That was to give him
+a hint, as I came along, that it was time to bring in the dinner; and
+here it is."
+
+Lena rose and passed to the right of Ricardo, who lowered his glance for
+a moment. They sat down at the table. The enormous gorilla back of Pedro
+swayed out through the door.
+
+"Extraordinary strong brute, ma'am," said Ricardo. He, had a propensity
+to talk about "his Pedro," as some men will talk of their dog. "He ain't
+pretty, though. No, he ain't pretty. And he has got to be kept under. I
+am his keeper, as it might be. The governor don't trouble his head much
+about dee-tails. All that's left to Martin. Martin, that's me, ma'am."
+
+Heyst saw the girl's eyes turn towards Mr. Jones's secretary and rest
+blankly on his face. Ricardo, however, looked vaguely into space,
+and, with faint flickers of a smile about his lips, made conversation
+indefatigably against the silence of his entertainers. He boasted
+largely of his long association with Mr. Jones--over four years now, he
+said. Then, glancing rapidly at Heyst:
+
+"You can see at once he's a gentleman, can't you?"
+
+"You people," Heyst said, his habitual playful intonation tinged with
+gloom, "are divorced from all reality in my eyes."
+
+Ricardo received this speech as if he had been expecting to hear
+those very words, or else did not mind at all what Heyst might say.
+He muttered an absent-minded "Ay, ay," played with a bit of biscuit,
+sighed, and said, with a peculiar stare which did not seem to carry any
+distance, but to stop short at a point in the air very near his face:
+
+"Anybody can see at once you are one. You and the governor ought to
+understand each other. He expects to see you tonight. The governor isn't
+well, and we've got to think of getting away from here."
+
+While saying these words he turned himself full towards Lena, but
+without any marked expression. Leaning back with folded arms, the girl
+stared before her as if she had been alone in the room. But under
+that aspect of almost vacant unconcern the perils and emotion that had
+entered into her life warmed her heart, exalted her mind with a sense of
+an inconceivable intensity of existence.
+
+"Really? Thinking of going away from here?" Heyst murmured.
+
+"The best of friends must part," Ricardo pronounced slowly. "And, as
+long as they part friends, there's no harm done. We two are used to be
+on the move. You, I understand, prefer to stick in one place."
+
+It was obvious that all this was being said merely for the sake of
+talking, and that Ricardo's mind was concentrated on some purpose
+unconnected with the words that were coming out of his mouth.
+
+"I should like to know," Heyst asked with incisive politeness, "how you
+have come to understand this or anything else about me? As far as I can
+remember, I've made you no confidences."
+
+Ricardo, gazing comfortably into space out of the back of his chair--for
+some time all three had given up any pretence of eating--answered
+abstractedly:
+
+"Any fellow might have guessed it!" He sat up suddenly, and uncovered
+all his teeth in a grin of extraordinary ferocity, which was belied by
+the persistent amiability of his tone. "The governor will be the man
+to tell you something about that. I wish you would say you would see my
+governor. He's the one who does all our talking. Let me take you to him
+this evening. He ain't at all well; and he can't make up his mind to go
+away without having a talk with you."
+
+Heyst, looking up, met Lena's eyes. Their expression of candour seemed
+to hide some struggling intention. Her head, he fancied, had made an
+imperceptible affirmative movement. Why? What reason could she have? Was
+it the prompting of some obscure instinct? Or was it simply a delusion
+of his own senses? But in this strange complication invading the
+quietude of his life, in his state of doubt and disdain and almost of
+despair with which he looked at himself, he would let even a delusive
+appearance guide him through a darkness so dense that it made for
+indifference.
+
+"Well, suppose I do say so."
+
+Ricardo did not conceal his satisfaction, which for a moment interested
+Heyst.
+
+"It can't be my life they are after," he said to himself. "What good
+could it be to them?"
+
+He looked across the table at the girl. What did it matter whether she
+had nodded or not? As always when looking into her unconscious eyes, he
+tasted something like the dregs of tender pity. He had decided to go.
+Her nod, imaginary or not imaginary, advice or illusion, had tipped the
+scale. He reflected that Ricardo's invitation could scarcely be anything
+in the nature of a trap. It would have been too absurd. Why carry subtly
+into a trap someone already bound hand and foot, as it were?
+
+All this time he had been looking fixedly at the girl he called Lena. In
+the submissive quietness of her being, which had been her attitude ever
+since they had begun their life on the island, she remained as secret
+as ever. Heyst got up abruptly, with a smile of such enigmatic and
+despairing character that Mr. Secretary Ricardo, whose abstract gaze had
+an all-round efficiency, made a slight crouching start, as if to dive
+under the table for his leg-knife--a start that was repressed, as soon
+as begun. He had expected Heyst to spring on him or draw a revolver,
+because he created for himself a vision of him in his own image. Instead
+of doing either of these obvious things, Heyst walked across the
+room, opened the door and put his head through it to look out into the
+compound.
+
+As soon as his back was turned, Ricardo's hand sought the girl's arm
+under the table. He was not looking at her, but she felt the groping,
+nervous touch of his search, felt suddenly the grip of his fingers above
+her wrist. He leaned forward a little; still he dared not look at her.
+His hard stare remained fastened on Heyst's back. In an extremely low
+hiss, his fixed idea of argument found expression scathingly:
+
+"See! He's no good. He's not the man for you!"
+
+He glanced at her at last. Her lips moved a little, and he was awed
+by that movement without a sound. Next instant the hard grasp of his
+fingers vanished from her arm. Heyst had shut the door. On his way back
+to the table, he crossed the path of the girl they had called Alma--she
+didn't know why--also Magdalen, whose mind had remained so long in doubt
+as to the reason of her own existence. She no longer wondered at that
+bitter riddle, since her heart found its solution in a blinding, hot
+glow of passionate purpose.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+She passed by Heyst as if she had indeed been blinded by some secret,
+lurid, and consuming glare into which she was about to enter. The
+curtain of the bedroom door fell behind her into rigid folds. Ricardo's
+vacant gaze seemed to be watching the dancing flight of a fly in mid
+air.
+
+"Extra dark outside, ain't it?" he muttered.
+
+"Not so dark but that I could see that man of yours prowling about
+there," said Heyst in measured tones.
+
+"What--Pedro? He's scarcely a man you know; or else I wouldn't be so
+fond of him as I am."
+
+"Very well. Let's call him your worthy associate."
+
+"Ay! Worthy enough for what we want of him. A great standby is Peter in
+a scrimmage. A growl and a bite--oh, my! And you don't want him about?"
+
+"I don't."
+
+"You want him out of the way?" insisted Ricardo with an affectation
+of incredulity which Heyst accepted calmly, though the air in the room
+seemed to grow more oppressive with every word spoken.
+
+"That's it. I do want him out of the way." He forced himself to speak
+equably.
+
+"Lor'! That's no great matter. Pedro's not much use here. The business
+my governor's after can be settled by ten minutes' rational talk
+with--with another gentleman. Quiet talk!"
+
+He looked up suddenly with hard, phosphorescent eyes. Heyst didn't move
+a muscle. Ricardo congratulated himself on having left his revolver
+behind. He was so exasperated that he didn't know what he might have
+done. He said at last:
+
+"You want poor, harmless Peter out of the way before you let me take you
+to see the governor--is that it?"
+
+"Yes, that is it."
+
+"H'm! One can see," Ricardo said with hidden venom, "that you are a
+gentleman; but all that gentlemanly fancifulness is apt to turn sour on
+a plain man's stomach. However--you'll have to pardon me."
+
+He put his fingers into his mouth and let out a whistle which seemed to
+drive a thin, sharp shaft of air solidly against one's nearest ear-drum.
+Though he greatly enjoyed Heyst's involuntary grimace, he sat perfectly
+stolid waiting for the effect of the call.
+
+It brought Pedro in with an extraordinary, uncouth, primeval
+impetuosity. The door flew open with a clatter, and the wild figure it
+disclosed seemed anxious to devastate the room in leaps and bounds;
+but Ricardo raised his open palm, and the creature came in quietly.
+His enormous half-closed paws swung to and fro a little in front of his
+bowed trunk as he walked. Ricardo looked on truculently.
+
+"You go to the boat--understand? Go now!"
+
+The little red eyes of the tame monster blinked with painful attention
+in the mass of hair.
+
+"Well? Why don't you get? Forgot human speech, eh? Don't you know any
+longer what a boat is?"
+
+"Si--boat," the creature stammered out doubtfully.
+
+"Well, go there--the boat at the jetty. March off to it and sit there,
+lie down there, do anything but go to sleep there--till you hear my
+call, and then fly here. Them's your orders. March! Get, vamos! No, not
+that way--out through the front door. No sulks!"
+
+Pedro obeyed with uncouth alacrity. When he had gone, the gleam of
+pitiless savagery went out of Ricardo's yellow eyes, and his physiognomy
+took on, for the first time that evening, the expression of a domestic
+cat which is being noticed.
+
+"You can watch him right into the bushes, if you like. Too dark, eh? Why
+not go with him to the very spot, then?"
+
+Heyst made a gesture of vague protest.
+
+"There's nothing to assure me that he will stay there. I have no doubt
+of his going, but it's an act without guarantee."
+
+"There you are!" Ricardo shrugged his shoulders philosophically. "Can't
+be helped. Short of shooting our Pedro, nobody can make absolutely sure
+of his staying in the same place longer than he has a mind to; but I
+tell you, he lives in holy terror of my temper. That's why I put on my
+sudden-death air when I talk to him. And yet I wouldn't shoot him--not
+I, unless in such a fit of rage as would make a man shoot his favourite
+dog. Look here, sir! This deal is on the square. I didn't tip him a wink
+to do anything else. He won't budge from the jetty. Are you coming along
+now, sir?"
+
+A short-silence ensued. Ricardo's jaws were working ominously under his
+skin. His eyes glided: voluptuously here and there, cruel and dreamy,
+Heyst checked a sudden movement, reflected for a while, then said:
+
+"You must wait a little."
+
+"Wait a little! Wait a little! What does he think a fellow is--a graven
+image?" grumbled Ricardo half audibly.
+
+Heyst went into the bedroom, and shut the door after him with a bang.
+Coming from the light, he could not see a thing in there at first; yet
+he received the impression of the girl getting up from the floor. On
+the less opaque darkness of the shutter-hole, her head detached itself
+suddenly, very faint, a mere hint of a round, dark shape without a face.
+
+"I am going, Lena. I am going to confront these scoundrels." He was
+surprised to feel two arms falling on his shoulders. "I thought that
+you--" he began.
+
+"Yes, yes!" the girl whispered hastily.
+
+She neither clung to him, nor yet did she try to draw him to her. Her
+hands grasped his shoulders, and she seemed to him to be staring into
+his face in the dark. And now he could see something of her face,
+too--an oval without features--and faintly distinguish her person, in
+the blackness, a form without definite lines.
+
+"You have a black dress here, haven't you, Lena?" he asked, speaking
+rapidly, and so low that she could just hear him.
+
+"Yes--an old thing."
+
+"Very good. Put it on at once."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Not for mourning!" There was something peremptory in the slightly
+ironic murmur. "Can you find it and get into it in the dark?"
+
+She could. She would try. He waited, very still. He could imagine
+her movements over there at the far end of the room; but his eyes,
+accustomed now to the darkness, had lost her completely. When she spoke,
+her voice surprised him by its nearness. She had done what he had told
+her to do, and had approached him, invisible.
+
+"Good! Where's that piece of purple veil I've seen lying about?" he
+asked.
+
+There was no answer, only a slight rustle.
+
+"Where is it?" he repeated impatiently.
+
+Her unexpected breath was on his cheek.
+
+"In my hands."
+
+"Capital! Listen, Lena. As soon as I leave the bungalow with that
+horrible scoundrel, you slip out at the back--instantly, lose no
+time!--and run round into the forest. That will be your time, while we
+are walking away, and I am sure he won't give me the slip. Run into the
+forest behind the fringe of bushes between the big trees. You will know,
+surely, how to find a place in full view of the front door. I fear for
+you; but in this black dress, with most of your face muffled up in that
+dark veil, I defy anybody to find you there before daylight. Wait in the
+forest till the table is pushed into full view of the doorway, and you
+see three candles out of four blown out and one relighted--or, should
+the lights be put out here while you watch them, wait till three candles
+are lighted and then two put out. At either of these signals run back as
+hard as you can, for it will mean that I am waiting for you here."
+
+While he was speaking, the girl had sought and seized one of his
+hands. She did not press it; she held it loosely, as it were timidly,
+caressingly. It was no grasp; it was a mere contact, as if only to make
+sure that he was there, that he was real and no mere darker shadow in
+the obscurity. The warmth of her hand gave Heyst a strange, intimate
+sensation of all her person. He had to fight down a new sort of emotion,
+which almost unmanned him. He went on, whispering sternly:
+
+"But if you see no such signals, don't let anything--fear, curiosity,
+despair, or hope--entice you back to this house; and with the first sign
+of dawn steal away along the edge of the clearing till you strike the
+path. Wait no longer, because I shall probably be dead."
+
+The murmur of the word "Never!" floated into his ear as if it formed
+itself in the air.
+
+"You know the path," he continued. "Make your way to the barricade. Go
+to Wang--yes, to Wang. Let nothing stop you!" It seemed to him that the
+girl's hand trembled a little. "The worst he can do to you is to shoot
+you, but he won't. I really think he won't, if I am not there. Stay with
+the villagers, with the wild people, and fear nothing. They will be more
+awed by you than you can be frightened of them. Davidson's bound to turn
+up before very long. Keep a look-out for a passing steamer. Think of
+some sort of signal to call him."
+
+She made no answer. The sense of the heavy, brooding silence in the
+outside world seemed to enter and fill the room--the oppressive infinity
+of it, without breath, without light. It was as if the heart of hearts
+had ceased to beat and the end of all things had come.
+
+"Have you understood? You are to run out of the house at once," Heyst
+whispered urgently.
+
+She lifted his hand to her lips and let it go. He was startled.
+
+"Lena!" he cried out under his breath.
+
+She was gone from his side. He dared not trust himself--no, not even to
+the extent of a tender word.
+
+Turning to go out he heard a thud somewhere in the house. To open the
+door, he had first to lift the curtain; he did so with his face over his
+shoulder. The merest trickle of light, coming through the keyhole and
+one or two cracks, was enough for his eyes to see her plainly, all
+black, down on her knees, with her head and arms flung on the foot of
+the bed--all black in the desolation of a mourning sinner. What was
+this? A suspicion that there were everywhere more things than he
+could understand crossed Heyst's mind. Her arm, detached from the bed,
+motioned him away. He obeyed, and went out, full of disquiet.
+
+The curtain behind him had not ceased to tremble when she was up on her
+feet, close against it, listening for sounds, for words, in a stooping,
+tragic attitude of stealthy attention, one hand clutching at her breast
+as if to compress, to make less loud the beating of her heart. Heyst
+had caught Mr. Jones's secretary in the contemplation of his closed
+writing-desk. Ricardo might have been meditating how to break into it;
+but when he turned about suddenly, he showed so distorted a face that
+it made Heyst pause in wonder at the upturned whites of the eyes, which
+were blinking horribly, as if the man were inwardly convulsed.
+
+"I thought you were never coming," Ricardo mumbled.
+
+"I didn't know you were pressed for time. Even if your going away
+depends on this conversation, as you say, I doubt if you are the men to
+put to sea on such a night as this," said Heyst, motioning Ricardo to
+precede him out of the house.
+
+With feline undulations of hip and shoulder, the secretary left the
+room at once. There was something cruel in the absolute dumbness of the
+night. The great cloud covering half the sky hung right against one,
+like an enormous curtain hiding menacing preparations of violence. As
+the feet of the two men touched the ground, a rumble came from behind
+it, preceded by a swift, mysterious gleam of light on the waters of the
+bay.
+
+"Ha!" said Ricardo. "It begins."
+
+"It may be nothing in the end," observed Heyst, stepping along steadily.
+
+"No! Let it come!" Ricardo said viciously. "I am in the humour for it!"
+
+By the time the two men had reached the other bungalow, the far-off
+modulated rumble growled incessantly, while pale lightning in waves of
+cold fire flooded and ran off the island in rapid succession. Ricardo,
+unexpectedly, dashed ahead up the steps and put his head through the
+doorway.
+
+"Here he is, governor! Keep him with you as long as you can--till you
+hear me whistle. I am on the track."
+
+He flung these words into the room with inconceivable speed, and stood
+aside to let the visitor pass through the doorway; but he had to wait
+an appreciable moment, because Heyst, seeing his purpose, had scornfully
+slowed his pace. When Heyst entered the room it was with a smile, the
+Heyst smile, lurking under his martial moustache.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+Two candles were burning on the stand-up desk. Mr. Jones, tightly
+enfolded in an old but gorgeous blue silk dressing-gown, kept his
+elbows close against his sides and his hands deeply plunged into the
+extraordinarily deep pockets of the garment. The costume accentuated his
+emaciation. He resembled a painted pole leaning against the edge of the
+desk, with a dried head of dubious distinction stuck on the top of it.
+Ricardo lounged in the doorway. Indifferent in appearance to what
+was going on, he was biding his time. At a given moment, between two
+flickers of lightning, he melted out of his frame into the outer
+air. His disappearance was observed on the instant by Mr. Jones, who
+abandoned his nonchalant immobility against the desk, and made a few
+steps calculated to put him between Heyst and the doorway.
+
+"It's awfully close," he remarked
+
+Heyst, in the middle of the room, had made up his mind to speak plainly.
+
+"We haven't met to talk about the weather. You favoured me earlier in
+the day with a rather cryptic phrase about yourself. 'I am he that is,'
+you said. What does that mean?"
+
+Mr. Jones, without looking at Heyst, continued his absentminded
+movements till, attaining the desired position, he brought his shoulders
+with a thump against the wall near the door, and raised his head. In
+the emotion of the decisive moment his haggard face glistened with
+perspiration. Drops ran down his hollow cheeks and almost blinded the
+spectral eyes in their bony caverns.
+
+"It means that I am a person to be reckoned with. No--stop! Don't put
+your hand into your pocket--don't."
+
+His voice had a wild, unexpected shrillness. Heyst started, and there
+ensued a moment of suspended animation, during which the thunder's
+deep bass muttered distantly and the doorway to the right of Mr. Jones
+flickered with bluish light. At last Heyst shrugged his shoulders; he
+even looked at his hand. He didn't put it in his pocket, however. Mr.
+Jones, glued against the wall, watched him raise both his hands to
+the ends of his horizontal moustaches, and answered the note of
+interrogation in his steady eyes.
+
+"A matter of prudence," said Mr. Jones in his natural hollow tones, and
+with a face of deathlike composure. "A man of your free life has surely
+perceived that. You are a much talked-about man, Mr. Heyst--and though,
+as far as I understand, you are accustomed to employ the subtler
+weapons of intelligence, still I can't afford to take any risks of
+the--er--grosser methods. I am not unscrupulous enough to be a match for
+you in the use of intelligence; but I assure you, Mr. Heyst, that in
+the other way you are no match for me. I have you covered at this
+very moment. You have been covered ever since you entered this room.
+Yes--from my pocket."
+
+During this harangue Heyst looked deliberately over his shoulder,
+stepped back a pace, and sat down on the end of the camp bedstead.
+Leaning his elbow on one knee, he laid his cheek in the palm of his hand
+and seemed to meditate on what he should say next. Mr. Jones, planted
+against the wall, was obviously waiting for some sort of overture.
+As nothing came, he resolved to speak himself; but he hesitated. For,
+though he considered that the most difficult step had been taken, he
+said to himself that every stage of progress required great caution,
+lest the man in Ricardo's phraseology, should "start to prance"--which
+would be most inconvenient. He fell back on a previous statement:
+
+"And I am a person to be reckoned with."
+
+The other man went on looking at the floor, as if he were alone in the
+room. There was a pause.
+
+"You have heard of me, then?" Heyst said at length, looking up.
+
+"I should think so! We have been staying at Schomberg's hotel."
+
+"Schom--" Heyst choked on the word.
+
+"What's the matter, Mr. Heyst?"
+
+"Nothing. Nausea," Heyst said resignedly. He resumed his former attitude
+of meditative indifference. "What is this reckoning you are talking
+about?" he asked after a time, in the quietest possible tone. "I don't
+know you."
+
+"It's obvious that we belong to the same--social sphere," began Mr.
+Jones with languid irony. Inwardly he was as watchful as he could be.
+"Something has driven you out--the originality of your ideas, perhaps.
+Or your tastes."
+
+Mr Jones indulged in one of his ghastly smiles. In repose his features
+had a curious character of evil, exhausted austerity; but when he
+smiled, the whole mask took on an unpleasantly infantile expression. A
+recrudescence of the rolling thunder invaded the room loudly, and passed
+into silence.
+
+"You are not taking this very well," observed Mr. Jones. This was
+what he said, but as a matter of fact he thought that the business
+was shaping quite satisfactorily. The man, he said to himself, had no
+stomach for a fight. Aloud he continued: "Come! You can't expect to have
+it always your own way. You are a man of the world."
+
+"And you?" Heyst interrupted him unexpectedly. "How do you define
+yourself?"
+
+"I, my dear sir? In one way I am--yes, I am the world itself, come to
+pay you a visit. In another sense I am an outcast--almost an outlaw.
+If you prefer a less materialistic view, I am a sort of fate--the
+retribution that waits its time."
+
+"I wish to goodness you were the commonest sort of ruffian!" said Heyst,
+raising his equable gaze to Mr. Jones. "One would be able to talk to you
+straight then, and hope for some humanity. As it is--"
+
+"I dislike violence and ferocity of every sort as much as you do," Mr.
+Jones declared, looking very languid as he leaned against the wall, but
+speaking fairly loud. "You can ask my Martin if it is not so. This, Mr.
+Heyst, is a soft age. It is also an age without prejudices. I've heard
+that you are free from them yourself. You mustn't be shocked if I tell
+you plainly that we are after your money--or I am, if you prefer to make
+me alone responsible. Pedro, of course, knows no more of it than
+any other animal would. Ricardo is of the faithful-retainer
+class--absolutely identified with all my ideas, wishes, and even whims!"
+
+Mr Jones pulled his left hand out of his pocket, got a handkerchief out
+of another, and began to wipe the perspiration from his forehead, neck,
+and chin. The excitement from which he suffered made his breathing
+visible. In his long dressing-gown he had the air of a convalescent
+invalid who had imprudently overtaxed his strength. Heyst,
+broad-shouldered, robust, watched the operation from the end of the camp
+bedstead, very calm, his hands on his knees.
+
+"And by the by," he asked, "where is he now, that henchman of yours?
+Breaking into my desk?"
+
+"That would be crude. Still, crudeness is one of life's conditions."
+There was the slightest flavour of banter in the tone of Ricardo's
+governor. "Conceivable, but unlikely. Martin is a little crude; but you
+are not, Mr. Heyst. To tell you the truth, I don't know precisely
+where he is. He has been a little mysterious of late; but he has my
+confidence. No, don't get up, Mr. Heyst!"
+
+The viciousness of his spectral face was indescribable. Heyst, who had
+moved a little, was surprised by the disclosure.
+
+"It was not my intention," he said.
+
+"Pray remain seated," Mr. Jones insisted in a languid voice, but with a
+very determined glitter in his black eye-caverns.
+
+"If you were more observant," said Heyst with dispassionate contempt,
+"you would have known before I had been five minutes in the room that I
+had no weapon of any sort on me."
+
+"Possibly; but pray keep your hands still. They are very well where they
+are. This is too big an affair for me to take any risks."
+
+"Big? Too big?" Heyst repeated with genuine surprise. "Good Heavens!
+Whatever you are looking for, there's very little of it here--very
+little of anything."
+
+"You would naturally say so, but that's not what we have heard,"
+retorted Mr. Jones quickly, with a grin so ghastly that it was
+impossible to think it voluntary.
+
+Heyst's face had grown very gloomy. He knitted his brows.
+
+"What have you heard?" he asked.
+
+"A lot, Mr. Heyst--a lot," affirmed Mr. Jones. He was vying to recover
+his manner of languid superiority. "We have heard, for instance, of a
+certain Mr. Morrison, once your partner."
+
+Heyst could not repress a slight movement.
+
+"Aha!" said Mr. Jones, with a sort of ghostly glee on his face.
+
+The muffled thunder resembled the echo of a distant cannonade below the
+horizon, and the two men seemed to be listening to it in sullen silence.
+
+"This diabolical calumny will end in actually and literally taking my
+life from me," thought Heyst.
+
+Then, suddenly, he laughed. Portentously spectral, Mr. Jones frowned at
+the sound.
+
+"Laugh as much as you please," he said. "I, who have been hounded out
+from society by a lot of highly moral souls, can't see anything funny in
+that story. But here we are, and you will now have to pay for your fun,
+Mr. Heyst."
+
+"You have heard a lot of ugly lies," observed Heyst. "Take my word for
+it!"
+
+"You would say so, of course--very natural. As a matter of fact I
+haven't heard very much. Strictly speaking, it was Martin. He collects
+information, and so on. You don't suppose I would talk to that Schomberg
+animal more than I could help? It was Martin whom he took into his
+confidence."
+
+"The stupidity of that creature is so great that it becomes formidable,"
+Heyst said, as if speaking to himself.
+
+Involuntarily, his mind turned to the girl, wandering in the forest,
+alone and terrified. Would he ever see her again? At that thought he
+nearly lost his self-possession. But the idea that if she followed
+his instructions those men were not likely to find her steadied him a
+little. They did not know that the island had any inhabitants; and he
+himself once disposed of, they would be too anxious to get away to waste
+time hunting for a vanished girl.
+
+All this passed through Heyst's mind in a flash, as men think in moments
+of danger. He looked speculatively at Mr. Jones, who, of course, had
+never for a moment taken his eyes from his intended victim. And, the
+conviction came to Heyst that this outlaw from the higher spheres was an
+absolutely hard and pitiless scoundrel.
+
+Mr Jones's voice made him start.
+
+"It would be useless, for instance, to tell me that your Chinaman has
+run off with your money. A man living alone with a Chinaman on an island
+takes care to conceal property of that kind so well that the devil
+himself--"
+
+"Certainly," Heyst muttered.
+
+Again, with his left hand, Mr. Jones mopped his frontal bone, his
+stalk-like neck, his razor jaws, his fleshless chin. Again his voice
+faltered and his aspect became still more gruesomely malevolent as of a
+wicked and pitiless corpse.
+
+"I see what you mean," he cried, "but you mustn't put too much trust
+in your ingenuity. You don't strike me as a very ingenious person, Mr.
+Heyst. Neither am I. My talents lie another way. But Martin--"
+
+"Who is now engaged in rifling my desk," interjected Heyst.
+
+"I don't think so. What I was going to say is that Martin is much
+cleverer than a Chinaman. Do you believe in racial superiority, Mr.
+Heyst? I do, firmly. Martin is great at ferreting out such secrets as
+yours, for instance."
+
+"Secrets like mine!" repeated Heyst bitterly. "Well I wish him joy of
+all he can ferret out!"
+
+"That's very kind of you," remarked Mr. Jones. He was beginning to
+be anxious for Martin's return. Of iron self-possession at the
+gaming-table, fearless in a sudden affray, he found that this rather
+special kind of work was telling on his nerves. "Keep still as you are!"
+he cried sharply.
+
+"I've told you I am not armed," said Heyst, folding his arms on his
+breast.
+
+"I am really inclined to believe that you are not," admitted Mr. Jones
+seriously. "Strange!" he mused aloud, the caverns of his eyes turned
+upon Heyst. Then briskly: "But my object is to keep you in this room.
+Don't provoke me, by some unguarded movement, to smash your knee or do
+something definite of that sort." He passed his tongue over his lips,
+which were dry and black, while his forehead glistened with moisture. "I
+don't know if it wouldn't be better to do it at once!"
+
+"He who deliberates is lost," said Heyst with grave mockery.
+
+Mr Jones disregarded the remark. He had the air of communing with
+himself.
+
+"Physically I am no match for you," he said slowly, his black gaze fixed
+upon the man sitting on the end of the bed. "You could spring--"
+
+"Are you trying to frighten yourself?" asked Heyst abruptly. "You don't
+seem to have quite enough pluck for your business. Why don't you do it
+at once?"
+
+Mr Jones, taking violent offence, snorted like a savage skeleton.
+
+"Strange as it may seem to you, it is because of my origin, my breeding,
+my traditions, my early associations, and such-like trifles. Not
+everybody can divest himself of the prejudices of a gentleman as easily
+as you have done, Mr. Heyst. But don't worry about my pluck. If you were
+to make a clean spring at me, you would receive in mid air, so to speak,
+something that would make you perfectly harmless by the time you landed.
+No, don't misapprehend us, Mr. Heyst. We are--er--adequate bandits; and
+we are after the fruit of your labours as a--er--successful swindler.
+It's the way of the world--gorge and disgorge!"
+
+He leaned wearily the back of his head against the wall. His vitality
+seemed exhausted. Even his sunken eyelids drooped within the bony
+sockets. Only his thin, waspish, beautifully pencilled eyebrows, drawn
+together a little, suggested the will and the power to sting--something
+vicious, unconquerable, and deadly.
+
+"Fruits! Swindler!" repeated Heyst, without heat, almost without
+contempt. "You are giving yourself no end of trouble, you and your
+faithful henchman, to crack an empty nut. There are no fruits here, as
+you imagine. There are a few sovereigns, which you may have if you like;
+and since you have called yourself a bandit--"
+
+"Yaas!" drawled Mr. Jones. "That, rather than a swindler. Open warfare
+at least!"
+
+"Very good! Only let me tell you that there were never in the world two
+more deluded bandits--never!"
+
+Heyst uttered these words with such energy that Mr. Jones, stiffening
+up, seemed to become thinner and taller in his metallic blue
+dressing-gown against the whitewashed wall.
+
+"Fooled by a silly, rascally innkeeper!" Heyst went on. "Talked over
+like a pair of children with a promise of sweets!"
+
+"I didn't talk with that disgusting animal," muttered Mr. Jones
+sullenly; "but he convinced Martin, who is no fool."
+
+"I should think he wanted very much to be convinced," said Heyst, with
+the courteous intonation so well known in the Islands. "I don't want to
+disturb your touching trust in your--your follower, but he must be the
+most credulous brigand in existence. What do you imagine? If the story
+of my riches were ever so true, do you think Schomberg would have
+imparted it to you from sheer altruism? Is that the way of the world,
+Mr. Jones?"
+
+For a moment the lower jaw of Ricardo's gentleman dropped; but it came
+up with a snap of scorn, and he said with spectral intensity:
+
+"The beast is cowardly! He was frightened, and wanted to get rid of
+us, if you want to know, Mr. Heyst. I don't know that the material
+inducement was so very great, but I was bored, and we decided to accept
+the bribe. I don't regret it. All my life I have been seeking new
+impressions, and you have turned out to be something quite out of
+the common. Martin, of course, looks to the material results. He's
+simple--and faithful--and wonderfully acute."
+
+"Ah, yes! He's on the track--" and now Heyst's speech had the character
+of politely grim raillery--"but not sufficiently on the track, as
+yet, to make it quite convenient to shoot me without more ado. Didn't
+Schomberg tell you precisely where I conceal the fruit of my rapines?
+Pah! Don't you know he would have told you anything, true or false, from
+a very clear motive? Revenge! Mad hate--the unclean idiot!"
+
+Mr Jones did not seem very much moved. On his right hand the doorway
+incessantly flickered with distant lightning, and the continuous rumble
+of thunder went on irritatingly, like the growl of an inarticulate giant
+muttering fatuously.
+
+Heyst overcame his immense repugnance to allude to her whose image,
+cowering in the forest was constantly before his eyes, with all the
+pathos and force of its appeal, august, pitiful, and almost holy to him.
+It was in a hurried, embarrassed manner that he went on:
+
+"If it had not been for that girl whom he persecuted with his insane and
+odious passion, and who threw herself on my protection, he would never
+have--but you know well enough!"
+
+"I don't know!" burst out Mr. Jones with amazing heat. "That
+hotel-keeper tried to talk to me once of some girl he had lost, but I
+told him I didn't want to hear any of his beastly women stories. It had
+something to do with you, had it?"
+
+Heyst looked on serenely at this outburst, then lost his patience a
+little.
+
+"What sort of comedy is this? You don't mean to say that you didn't know
+that I had--that there was a girl living with me here?"
+
+One could see that the eyes of Mr. Jones had become fixed in the depths
+of their black holes by the gleam of white becoming steady there. The
+whole man seemed frozen still.
+
+"Here! Here!" he screamed out twice. There was no mistaking his
+astonishment, his shocked incredulity--something like frightened
+disgust.
+
+Heyst was disgusted also, but in another way. He too was incredulous.
+He regretted having mentioned the girl; but the thing was done, his
+repugnance had been overcome in the heat of his argument against the
+absurd bandit.
+
+"Is it possible that you didn't know of that significant fact?" he
+inquired. "Of the only effective truth in the welter of silly lies that
+deceived you so easily?"
+
+"No, I didn't!" Mr. Jones shouted. "But Martin did!" he added in a faint
+whisper, which Heyst's ears just caught and no more.
+
+"I kept her out of sight as long as I could," said Heyst. "Perhaps, with
+your bringing up, traditions, and so on; you will understand my reason
+for it."
+
+"He knew. He knew before!" Mr. Jones mourned in a hollow voice. "He knew
+of her from the first!"
+
+Backed hard against the wall he no longer watched Heyst. He had the air
+of a man who had seen an abyss yawning under his feet.
+
+"If I want to kill him, this is my time," thought Heyst; but he did not
+move.
+
+Next moment Mr. Jones jerked his head up, glaring with sardonic fury.
+
+"I have a good mind to shoot you, you woman-ridden hermit, you man in
+the moon, that can't exist without--no, it won't be you that I'll shoot.
+It's the other woman-lover--the prevaricating, sly, low-class, amorous
+cuss! And he shaved--shaved under my very nose. I'll shoot him!"
+
+"He's gone mad," thought Heyst, startled by the spectre's sudden fury.
+
+He felt himself more in danger, nearer death, than ever since he had
+entered that room. An insane bandit is a deadly combination. He did not,
+could not know that Mr. Jones was quick-minded enough to see already the
+end of his reign over his excellent secretary's thoughts and feelings;
+the coming failure of Ricardo's fidelity. A woman had intervened!
+A woman, a girl, who apparently possessed the power to awaken
+men's disgusting folly. Her power had been proved in two instances
+already--the beastly innkeeper, and that man with moustaches, upon whom
+Mr. Jones, his deadly right hand twitching in his pocket, glared more in
+repulsion than in anger. The very object of the expedition was lost from
+view in his sudden and overwhelming sense of utter insecurity. And
+this made Mr. Jones feel very savage; but not against the man with the
+moustaches. Thus, while Heyst was really feeling that his life was
+not worth two minutes, purchase, he heard himself addressed with
+no affectation of languid impertinence but with a burst of feverish
+determination.
+
+"Here! Let's call a truce!" said Mr. Jones.
+
+Heyst's heart was too sick to allow him to smile.
+
+"Have I been making war on you?" he asked wearily. "How do you expect
+me to attach any meaning to your words?" he went on. "You seem to be a
+morbid, senseless sort of bandit. We don't speak the same language. If I
+were to tell you why I am here, talking to you, you wouldn't believe
+me, because you would not understand me. It certainly isn't the love
+of life, from which I have divorced myself long ago--not sufficiently,
+perhaps; but if you are thinking of yours, then I repeat to you that it
+has never been in danger from me. I am unarmed."
+
+Mr Jones was biting his lower lip, in a deep meditation. It was only
+towards the last that he looked at Heyst.
+
+"Unarmed, eh?" Then he burst out violently: "I tell you, a gentleman is
+no match for the common herd. And yet one must make use of the brutes.
+Unarmed, eh? And I suppose that creature is of the commonest sort. You
+could hardly have got her out of a drawing-room. Though they're all
+alike, for that matter. Unarmed! It's a pity. I am in much greater
+danger than you are or were--or I am much mistaken. But I am not--I know
+my man!"
+
+He lost his air of mental vacancy and broke out into shrill
+exclamations. To Heyst they seemed madder than anything that had gone
+before.
+
+"On the track! On the scent!" he cried, forgetting himself to the point
+of executing a dance of rage in the middle of the floor.
+
+Heyst looked on, fascinated by this skeleton in a gay dressing-gown,
+jerkily agitated like a grotesque toy on the end of an invisible string.
+It became quiet suddenly.
+
+"I might have smelt a rat! I always knew that this would be the danger."
+He changed suddenly to a confidential tone, fixing his sepulchral stare
+on Heyst. "And yet here I am, taken in by the fellow, like the veriest
+fool. I've been always on the watch for some beastly influence, but here
+I am, fairly caught. He shaved himself right in front of me and I never
+guessed!"
+
+The shrill laugh, following on the low tone of secrecy, sounded so
+convincingly insane that Heyst got up as if moved by a spring. Mr. Jones
+stepped back two paces, but displayed no uneasiness.
+
+"It's as clear as daylight!" he uttered mournfully, and fell silent.
+
+Behind him the doorway flickered lividly, and the sound as of a naval
+action somewhere away on the horizon filled the breathless pause.
+Mr. Jones inclined his head on his shoulder. His mood had completely
+changed.
+
+"What do you say, unarmed man? Shall we go and see what is detaining
+my trusted Martin so long? He asked me to keep you engaged in friendly
+conversation till he made a further examination of that track. Ha, ha,
+ha!"
+
+"He is no doubt ransacking my house," said Heyst.
+
+He was bewildered. It seemed to him that all this was an
+incomprehensible dream, or perhaps an elaborate other-world joke,
+contrived by that spectre in a gorgeous dressing gown.
+
+Mr Jones looked at him with a horrible, cadaverous smile of inscrutable
+mockery, and pointed to the door. Heyst passed through it first. His
+feelings had become so blunted that he did not care how soon he was shot
+in the back.
+
+"How oppressive the air is!" the voice of Mr. Jones said at his elbow.
+"This stupid storm gets on my nerves. I would welcome some rain, though
+it would be unpleasant to get wet. On the other hand, this exasperating
+thunder has the advantage of covering the sound of our approach. The
+lightning's not so convenient. Ah, your house is fully illuminated!
+My clever Martin is punishing your stock of candles. He belongs to the
+unceremonious classes, which are also unlovely, untrustworthy, and so
+on."
+
+"I left the candles burning," said Heyst, "to save him trouble."
+
+"You really believed he would go to your house?" asked Mr. Jones with
+genuine interest.
+
+"I had that notion, strongly. I do believe he is there now."
+
+"And you don't mind?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"You don't!" Mr. Jones stopped to wonder. "You are an extraordinary
+man," he said suspiciously, and moved on, touching elbows with Heyst.
+
+In the latter's breast dwelt a deep silence, the complete silence of
+unused faculties. At this moment, by simply shouldering Mr. Jones, he
+could have thrown him down and put himself, by a couple of leaps, beyond
+the certain aim of the revolver; but he did not even think of that. His
+very will seemed dead of weariness. He moved automatically, his head
+low, like a prisoner captured by the evil power of a masquerading
+skeleton out of a grave. Mr. Jones took charge of the direction. They
+fetched a wide sweep. The echoes of distant thunder seemed to dog their
+footsteps.
+
+"By the by," said Mr. Jones, as if unable to restrain his curiosity,
+"aren't you anxious about that--ouch!--that fascinating creature to whom
+you owe whatever pleasure you can find in our visit?"
+
+"I have placed her in safety," said Heyst. "I--I took good care of
+that."
+
+Mr Jones laid a hand on his arm.
+
+"You have? Look! is that what you mean?"
+
+Heyst raised his head. In the flicker of lightning the desolation of the
+cleared ground on his left leaped out and sank into the night, together
+with the elusive forms of things distant, pale, unearthly. But in the
+brilliant square of the door he saw the girl--the woman he had longed to
+see once more as if enthroned, with her hands on the arms of the chair.
+She was in black; her face was white, her head dreamily inclined on her
+breast. He saw her only as low as her knees. He saw her--there, in the
+room, alive with a sombre reality. It was no mocking vision. She was not
+in the forest--but there! She sat there in the chair, seemingly without
+strength, yet without fear, tenderly stooping.
+
+"Can you understand their power?" whispered the hot breath of Mr. Jones
+into his ear. "Can there be a more disgusting spectacle? It's enough to
+make the earth detestable. She seems to have found her affinity. Move
+on closer. If I have to shoot you in the end, then perhaps you will die
+cured."
+
+Heyst obeyed the pushing pressure of a revolver barrel between his
+shoulders. He felt it distinctly, but he did not feel the ground under
+his feet. They found the steps, without his being aware that he was
+ascending them--slowly, one by one. Doubt entered into him--a doubt of
+a new kind, formless, hideous. It seemed to spread itself all over him,
+enter his limbs, and lodge in his entrails. He stopped suddenly, with
+a thought that he who experienced such a feeling had no business to
+live--or perhaps was no longer living.
+
+Everything--the bungalow, the forest, the open ground--trembled
+incessantly, the earth, the sky itself, shivered all the time, and the
+only thing immovable in the shuddering universe was the interior of the
+lighted room and the woman in black sitting in the light of the eight
+candle-flames. They flung around her an intolerable brilliance which
+hurt his eyes, seemed to sear his very brain with the radiation of
+infernal heat. It was some time before his scorched eyes made out
+Ricardo seated on the floor at some little distance, his back to the
+doorway, but only partly so; one side of his upturned face showing the
+absorbed, all forgetful rapture of his contemplation.
+
+The grip of Mr. Jones's hard claw drew Heyst back a little. In the roll
+of thunder, swelling and subsiding, he whispered in his ear a sarcastic:
+"Of course!"
+
+A great shame descended upon Heyst--the shame of guilt, absurd and
+maddening. Mr. Jones drew him still farther back into the darkness of
+the veranda.
+
+"This is serious," he went on, distilling his ghostly venom into Heyst's
+very ear. "I had to shut my eyes many times to his little flings; but
+this is serious. He has found his soul-mate. Mud souls, obscene and
+cunning! Mud bodies, too--the mud of the gutter! I tell you, we are
+no match for the vile populace. I, even I, have been nearly caught. He
+asked me to detain you till he gave me the signal. It won't be you
+that I'll have to shoot, but him. I wouldn't trust him near me for five
+minutes after this!"
+
+He shook Heyst's arm a little.
+
+"If you had not happened to mention the creature, we should both have
+been dead before morning. He would have stabbed you as you came down
+the steps after leaving me and then he would have walked up to me and
+planted the same knife between my ribs. He has no prejudices. The viler
+the origin, the greater the freedom of these simple souls!"
+
+He drew a cautious, hissing breath and added in an agitated murmur: "I
+can see right into his mind, I have been nearly caught napping by his
+cunning."
+
+He stretched his neck to peer into the room from the side. Heyst, too,
+made a step forward, under the slight impulse of that slender hand
+clasping his hand with a thin, bony grasp.
+
+"Behold!" the skeleton of the crazy bandit jabbered thinly into his ear
+in spectral fellowship. "Behold the simple, Acis kissing the sandals
+of the nymph, on the way to her lips, all forgetful, while the menacing
+fife of Polyphemus already sounds close at hand--if he could only hear
+it! Stoop a little."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+On returning to the Heyst bungalow, rapid as if on wings, Ricardo
+found Lena waiting for him. She was dressed in black; and at once his
+uplifting exultation was replaced by an awed and quivering patience
+before her white face, before the immobility of her reposeful pose, the
+more amazing to him who had encountered the strength of her limbs and
+the indomitable spirit in her body. She had come out after Heyst's
+departure, and had sat down under the portrait to wait for the return of
+the man of violence and death. While lifting the curtain, she felt the
+anguish of her disobedience to her lover, which was soothed by a feeling
+she had known before--a gentle flood of penetrating sweetness. She
+was not automatically obeying a momentary suggestion, she was under
+influences more deliberate, more vague, and of greater potency. She had
+been prompted, not by her will, but by a force that was outside of her
+and more worthy. She reckoned upon nothing definite; she had calculated
+nothing. She saw only her purpose of capturing death--savage, sudden,
+irresponsible death, prowling round the man who possessed her, death
+embodied in the knife ready to strike into his heart. No doubt it had
+been a sin to throw herself into his arms. With that inspiration
+that descends at times from above for the good or evil of our common
+mediocrity, she had a sense of having been for him only a violent and
+sincere choice of curiosity and pity--a thing that passes. She did not
+know him. If he were to go away from her and disappear, she would utter
+no reproach, she would not resent it; for she would hold in herself the
+impress of something most rare and precious--his embraces made her own
+by her courage in saving his life.
+
+All she thought of--the essence of her tremors, her flushes of heat, and
+her shudders of cold--was the question how to get hold of that knife,
+the mark and sign of stalking death. A tremor of impatience to clutch
+the frightful thing, glimpsed once and unforgettable, agitated her
+hands.
+
+The instinctive flinging forward of these hands stopped Ricardo dead
+short between the door and her chair, with the ready obedience of a
+conquered man who can bide his time. Her success disconcerted her. She
+listened to the man's impassioned transports of terrible eulogy and even
+more awful declarations of love. She was even able to meet his eyes,
+oblique, apt to glide away, throwing feral gleams of desire.
+
+"No!" he was saying, after a fiery outpouring of words in which the most
+ferocious phrases of love were mingled with wooing accents of entreaty.
+"I will have no more of it! Don't you mistrust me. I am sober in my
+talk. Feel how quietly my heart beats. Ten times today when you, you,
+you, swam in my eye, I thought it would burst one of my ribs or leap
+out of my throat. It has knocked itself dead and tired, waiting for this
+evening, for this very minute. And now it can do no more. Feel how quiet
+it is!"
+
+He made a step forward, but she raised her clear voice commandingly:
+
+"No nearer!"
+
+He stopped with a smile of imbecile worship on his lips, and with the
+delighted obedience of a man who could at any moment seize her in his
+hands and dash her to the ground.
+
+"Ah! If I had taken you by the throat this morning and had my way with
+you, I should never have known what you are. And now I do. You are a
+wonder! And so am I, in my way. I have nerve, and I have brains, too.
+We should have been lost many times but for me. I plan--I plot for my
+gentleman. Gentleman--pah! I am sick of him. And you are sick of yours,
+eh? You, you!"
+
+He shook all over; he cooed at her a string of endearing names, obscene
+and tender, and then asked abruptly:
+
+"Why don't you speak to me?"
+
+"It's my part to listen," she said, giving him an inscrutable smile,
+with a flush on her cheek and her lips cold as ice.
+
+"But you will answer me?"
+
+"Yes," she said, her eyes dilated as if with sudden interest.
+
+"Where's that plunder? Do you know?"
+
+"No! Not yet."
+
+"But there is plunder stowed somewhere that's worth having?"
+
+"Yes, I think so. But who knows?" she added after a pause.
+
+"And who cares?" he retorted recklessly. "I've had enough of this
+crawling on my belly. It's you who are my treasure. It's I who found you
+out where a gentleman had buried you to rot for his accursed pleasure!"
+
+He looked behind him and all around for a seat, then turned to her his
+troubled eyes and dim smile.
+
+"I am dog-tired," he said, and sat down on the floor. "I went tired this
+morning, since I came in here and started talking to you--as tired as if
+I had been pouring my life-blood here on these planks for you to dabble
+your white feet in."
+
+Unmoved, she nodded at him thoughtfully. Woman-like, all her faculties
+remained concentrated on her heart's desire--on the knife--while the man
+went on babbling insanely at her feet, ingratiating and savage, almost
+crazy with elation. But he, too, was holding on to his purpose.
+
+"For you! For you I will throw away money, lives--all the lives but
+mine! What you want is a man, a master that will let you put the heel of
+your shoe on his neck; not that skulker, who will get tired of you in a
+year--and you of him. And then what? You are not the one to sit still;
+neither am I. I live for myself, and you shall live for yourself,
+too--not for a Swedish baron. They make a convenience of people like you
+and me. A gentleman is better than an employer, but an equal partnership
+against all the 'yporcrits is the thing for you and me. We'll go on
+wandering the world over, you and I both free and both true. You are no
+cage bird. We'll rove together, for we are of them that have no homes.
+We are born rovers!"
+
+She listened to him with the utmost attention, as if any unexpected
+word might give her some sort of opening to get that dagger, that awful
+knife--to disarm murder itself, pleading for her love at her feet. Again
+she nodded at him thoughtfully, rousing a gleam in his yellow eyes,
+yearning devotedly upon her face. When he hitched himself a little
+closer, her soul had no movement of recoil. This had to be. Anything
+had to be which would bring the knife within her reach. He talked more
+confidentially now.
+
+"We have met, and their time has come," he began, looking up into her
+eyes. "The partnership between me and my gentleman has to be ripped up.
+There's no room for him where we two are. Why, he would shoot me like a
+dog! Don't you worry. This will settle it not later than tonight!"
+
+He tapped his folded leg below the knee, and was surprised, flattered,
+by the lighting up of her face, which stooped towards him eagerly and
+remained expectant, the lips girlishly parted, red in the pale face, and
+quivering in the quickened drawing of her breath.
+
+"You marvel, you miracle, you man's luck and joy--one in a million! No,
+the only one. You have found your man in me," he whispered tremulously.
+"Listen! They are having their last talk together; for I'll do for your
+gentleman, too, by midnight."
+
+Without the slightest tremor she murmured, as soon as the tightening of
+her breast had eased off and the words would come:
+
+"I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry--with him."
+
+The pause, the tone, had all the value of meditated advice.
+
+"Good, thrifty girl!" he laughed low, with a strange feline gaiety,
+expressed by the undulating movement of his shoulders and the sparkling
+snap of his oblique eyes. "You are still thinking about the chance of
+that swag. You'll make a good partner, that you will! And, I say, what a
+decoy you will make! Jee-miny!"
+
+He was carried away for a moment, but his face darkened swiftly.
+
+"No! No reprieve. What do you think a fellow is--a scarecrow? All hat
+and clothes and no feeling, no inside, no brain to make fancies for
+himself? No!" he went on violently. "Never in his life will he go again
+into that room of yours--never any more!"
+
+A silence fell. He was gloomy with the torment of his jealousy, and did
+not even look at her. She sat up and slowly, gradually, bent lower and
+lower over him, as if ready to fall into his arms. He looked up at last,
+and checked this droop unwittingly.
+
+"Say! You, who are up to fighting a man with your bare hands, could
+you--eh?--could you manage to stick one with a thing like that knife of
+mine?"
+
+She opened her eyes very wide and gave him a wild smile.
+
+"How can I tell?" she whispered enchantingly. "Will you let me have a
+look at it?"
+
+Without taking his eyes from her face, he pulled the knife out of its
+sheath--a short, broad, cruel double-edged blade with a bone handle--and
+only then looked down at it.
+
+"A good friend," he said simply. "Take it in your hand and feel the
+balance," he suggested.
+
+At the moment when she bent forward to receive it from him, there was
+a flash of fire in her mysterious eyes--a red gleam in the white mist
+which wrapped the promptings and longings of her soul. She had done it!
+The very sting of death was in her hands, the venom of the viper in her
+paradise, extracted, safe in her possession--and the viper's head all
+but lying under her heel. Ricardo, stretched on the mats of the floor,
+crept closer and closer to the chair in which she sat.
+
+All her thoughts were busy planning how to keep possession of that
+weapon which had seemed to have drawn into itself every danger and
+menace on the death-ridden earth. She said with a low laugh, the
+exultation in which he failed to recognize:
+
+"I didn't think that you would ever trust me with that thing!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"For fear I should suddenly strike you with it."
+
+"What for? For this morning's work? Oh, no! There's no spite in you for
+that. You forgave me. You saved me. You got the better of me, too. And
+anyhow, what good would it be?"
+
+"No, no good," she admitted.
+
+In her heart she felt that she would not know how to do it; that if it
+came to a struggle, she would have to drop the dagger and fight with her
+hands.
+
+"Listen. When we are going about the world together, you shall always
+call me husband. Do you hear?"
+
+"Yes," she said bracing herself for the contest, in whatever shape it
+was coming.
+
+The knife was lying in her lap. She let it slip into the fold of her
+dress, and laid her forearms with clasped fingers over her knees, which
+she pressed desperately together. The dreaded thing was out of sight at
+last. She felt a dampness break out all over her.
+
+"I am not going to hide you, like that good-for-nothing, finicky, sneery
+gentleman. You shall be my pride and my chum. Isn't that better than
+rotting on an island for the pleasure of a gentleman, till he gives you
+the chuck?"
+
+"I'll be anything you like," she said.
+
+In his intoxication he crept closer with every word she uttered, with
+every movement she made.
+
+"Give your foot," he begged in a timid murmur, and in the full
+consciousness of his power.
+
+Anything! Anything to keep murder quiet and disarmed till strength had
+returned to her limbs and she could make up her mind what to do. Her
+fortitude had been shaken by the very facility of success that had come
+to her. She advanced her foot forward a little from under the hem of her
+skirt; and he threw himself on it greedily. She was not even aware of
+him. She had thought of the forest, to which she had been told to run.
+Yes, the forest--that was the place for her to carry off the terrible
+spoil, the sting of vanquished death. Ricardo, clasping her ankle,
+pressed his lips time after time to the instep, muttering gasping words
+that were like sobs, making little noises that resembled the sounds of
+grief and distress. Unheard by them both, the thunder growled distantly
+with angry modulations of it's tremendous voice, while the world outside
+shuddered incessantly around the dead stillness of the room where the
+framed profile of Heyst's father looked severely into space.
+
+Suddenly Ricardo felt himself spurned by the foot he had been
+cherishing--spurned with a push of such violence into the very hollow of
+his throat that it swung him back instantly into an upright position on
+his knees. He read his danger in the stony eyes of the girl; and in
+the very act of leaping to his feet he heard sharply, detached on the
+comminatory voice of the storm the brief report of a shot which half
+stunned him, in the manner of a blow. He turned his burning head, and
+saw Heyst towering in the doorway. The thought that the beggar had
+started to prance darted through his mind. For a fraction of a second
+his distracted eyes sought for his weapon all over the floor. He
+couldn't see it.
+
+"Stick him, you!" he called hoarsely to the girl, and dashed headlong
+for the door of the compound.
+
+While he thus obeyed the instinct of self-preservation, his reason was
+telling him that he could not possibly reach it alive. It flew open,
+however, with a crash, before his launched weight, and instantly he
+swung it to behind him. There, his shoulder leaning against it, his
+hands clinging to the handle, dazed and alone in the night full of
+shudders and muttered menaces, he tried to pull himself together. He
+asked himself if he had been shot at more than once. His shoulder was
+wet with the blood trickling from his head. Feeling above his ear, he
+ascertained that it was only a graze, but the shock of the surprise had
+unmanned him for the moment.
+
+What the deuce was the governor about to let the beggar break loose like
+this? Or--was the governor dead, perhaps?
+
+The silence within the room awed him. Of going back there could be no
+question.
+
+"But she knows how to take care of her self," he muttered.
+
+She had his knife. It was she now who was deadly, while he was disarmed,
+no good for the moment. He stole away from the door, staggering, the
+warm trickle running down his neck, to find out what had become of the
+governor and to provide himself with a firearm from the armoury in the
+trunks.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+Mr Jones, after firing his shot over Heyst's shoulder, had thought it
+proper to dodge away. Like the spectre he was, he noiselessly vanished
+from the veranda. Heyst stumbled into the room and looked around. All
+the objects in there--the books, portrait on the wall--seemed shadowy,
+unsubstantial, the dumb accomplices of an amazing dream-plot ending in
+an illusory effect of awakening and the impossibility of ever closing
+his eyes again. With dread he forced himself to look at the girl. Still
+in the chair, she was leaning forward far over her knees, and had hidden
+her face in her hands. Heyst remembered Wang suddenly. How clear all
+this was--and how extremely amusing! Very.
+
+She sat up a little, then leaned back, and taking her hands from her
+face, pressed both of them to her breast as if moved to the heart by
+seeing him there looking at her with a black, horror-struck curiosity.
+He would have pitied her, if the triumphant expression of her face had
+not given him a shock which destroyed the balance of his feelings. She
+spoke with an accent of wild joy:
+
+"I knew you would come back in time! You are safe now. I have done it!
+I would never, never have let him--" Her voice died out, while her eyes
+shone at him as when the sun breaks through a mist. "Never get it back.
+Oh, my beloved!"
+
+He bowed his head gravely, and said in his polite. Heystian tone:
+
+"No doubt you acted from instinct. Women have been provided with their
+own weapon. I was a disarmed man, I have been a disarmed man all my life
+as I see it now. You may glory in your resourcefulness and your profound
+knowledge of yourself; but I may say that the other attitude, suggestive
+of shame, had its charm. For you are full of charm!"
+
+The exultation vanished from her face.
+
+"You mustn't make fun of me now. I know no shame. I was thanking God
+with all my sinful heart for having been able to do it--for giving you
+to me in that way--oh, my beloved--all my own at last!"
+
+He stared as if mad. Timidly she tried to excuse herself for disobeying
+his directions for her safety. Every modulation of her enchanting voice
+cut deep into his very breast, so that he could hardly understand the
+words for the sheer pain of it. He turned his back on her; but a sudden
+drop, an extraordinary faltering of her tone, made him spin round. On
+her white neck her pale head dropped as in a cruel drought a withered
+flower droops on its stalk. He caught his breath, looked at her closely,
+and seemed to read some awful intelligence in her eyes. At the moment
+when her eyelids fell as if smitten from above by an the gleam of
+old silver familiar to him from boyhood, the very invisible power, he
+snatched her up bodily out of the chair, and disregarding an unexpected
+metallic clatter on the floor, carried her off into the other room. The
+limpness of her body frightened him. Laying her down on the bed, he
+ran out again, seized a four-branched candlestick on the table, and ran
+back, tearing down with a furious jerk the curtain that swung stupidly
+in his way, but after putting the candlestick on the table by the bed,
+he remained absolutely idle. There did not seem anything more for him
+to do. Holding his chin in his hand he looked down intently at her still
+face.
+
+"Has she been stabbed with this thing?" asked Davidson, whom suddenly he
+saw standing by his side and holding up Ricardo's dagger to his sight.
+Heyst uttered no word of recognition or surprise. He gave Davidson only
+a dumb look of unutterable awe, then, as if possessed with a sudden
+fury, started tearing open the front of the girls dress. She remained
+insensible under his hands, and Heyst let out a groan which made
+Davidson shudder inwardly the heavy plaint of a man who falls clubbed in
+the dark.
+
+They stood side by side, looking mournfully at the little black hole
+made by Mr. Jones's bullet under the swelling breast of a dazzling and
+as it were sacred whiteness. It rose and fell slightly--so slightly that
+only the eyes of the lover could detect the faint stir of life. Heyst,
+calm and utterly unlike himself in the face, moving about noiselessly,
+prepared a wet cloth, and laid it on the insignificant wound,
+round which there was hardly a trace of blood to mar the charm, the
+fascination, of that mortal flesh.
+
+Her eyelids fluttered. She looked drowsily about, serene, as if fatigued
+only by the exertions of her tremendous victory, capturing the very
+sting of death in the service of love. But her eyes became very
+wide awake when they caught sight of Ricardo's dagger, the spoil of
+vanquished death, which Davidson was still holding, unconsciously.
+
+"Give it to me," she said. "It's mine."
+
+Davidson put the symbol of her victory into her feeble hands extended to
+him with the innocent gesture of a child reaching eagerly for a toy.
+
+"For you," she gasped, turning her eyes to Heyst. "Kill nobody."
+
+"No," said Heyst, taking the dagger and laying it gently on her breast,
+while her hands fell powerless by her side.
+
+The faint smile on her deep-cut lips waned, and her head sank deep into
+the pillow, taking on the majestic pallor and immobility of marble.
+But over the muscles, which seemed set in their transfigured beauty for
+ever, passed a slight and awful tremor. With an amazing strength she
+asked loudly:
+
+"What's the matter with me?"
+
+"You have been shot, dear Lena," Heyst said in a steady voice, while
+Davidson, at the question, turned away and leaned his forehead against
+the post of the foot of the bed.
+
+"Shot? I did think, too, that something had struck me."
+
+Over Samburan the thunder had ceased to growl at last, and the world of
+material forms shuddered no more under the emerging stars. The spirit
+of the girl which was passing away from under them clung to her triumph
+convinced of the reality of her victory over death.
+
+"No more," she muttered. "There will be no more! Oh, my beloved," she
+cried weakly, "I've saved you! Why don't you take me into your arms and
+carry me out of this lonely place?"
+
+Heyst bent low over her, cursing his fastidious soul, which even at that
+moment kept the true cry of love from his lips in its infernal mistrust
+of all life. He dared not touch her and she had no longer the strength
+to throw her arms about his neck.
+
+"Who else could have done this for you?" she whispered gloriously.
+
+"No one in the world," he answered her in a murmur of unconcealed
+despair.
+
+She tried to raise herself, but all she could do was to lift her head
+a little from the pillow. With a terrible and gentle movement, Heyst
+hastened to slip his arm under her neck. She felt relieved at once of
+an intolerable weight, and was content to surrender to him the infinite
+weariness of her tremendous achievement. Exulting, she saw herself
+extended on the bed, in a black dress, and profoundly at peace, while,
+stooping over her with a kindly, playful smile, he was ready to lift
+her up in his firm arms and take her into the sanctuary of his innermost
+heart--for ever! The flush of rapture flooding her whole being broke out
+in a smile of innocent, girlish happiness; and with that divine radiance
+on her lips she breathed her last--triumphant, seeking for his glance in
+the shades of death.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+ "Yes, Excellency," said Davidson in his placid voice; "there are more dead in this affair--more white people, I mean--than have been killed in many of the battles in the last Achin war."
+
+Davidson was talking with an Excellency, because what was alluded to in
+conversation as "the mystery of Samburan" had caused such a sensation in
+the Archipelago that even those in the highest spheres were anxious to
+hear something at first hand. Davidson had been summoned to an audience.
+It was a high official on his tour.
+
+"You knew the late Baron Heyst well?"
+
+"The truth is that nobody out here can boast of having known him well,"
+said Davidson. "He was a queer chap. I doubt if he himself knew how
+queer he was. But everybody was aware that I was keeping my eye on him
+in a friendly way. And that's how I got the warning which made me turn
+round in my tracks. In the middle of my trip and steam back to Samburan,
+where, I am grieved to say, I arrived too late."
+
+Without enlarging very much, Davidson explained to the attentive
+Excellency how a woman, the wife of a certain hotel-keeper named
+Schomberg, had overheard two card-sharping rascals making inquiries from
+her husband as to the exact position of the island. She caught only a
+few words referring to the neighbouring volcano, but there were enough
+to arouse her suspicions--"which," went on Davidson, "she imparted to
+me, your Excellency. They were only too well founded!"
+
+"That was very clever of her," remarked the great man.
+
+"She's much cleverer than people have any conception of," said Davidson.
+
+But he refrained from disclosing to the Excellency the real cause which
+had sharpened Mrs. Schomberg's wits. The poor woman was in mortal terror
+of the girl being brought back within reach of her infatuated Wilhelm.
+Davidson only said that her agitation had impressed him; but he
+confessed that while going back, he began to have his doubts as to there
+being anything in it.
+
+"I steamed into one of those silly thunderstorms that hang about the
+volcano, and had some trouble in making the island," narrated Davidson.
+"I had to grope my way dead slow into Diamond Bay. I don't suppose that
+anybody, even if looking out for me, could have heard me let go the
+anchor."
+
+He admitted that he ought to have gone ashore at once; but everything
+was perfectly dark and absolutely quiet. He felt ashamed of his
+impulsiveness. What a fool he would have looked, waking up a man in the
+middle of the night just to ask him if he was all right! And then the
+girl being there, he feared that Heyst would look upon his visit as an
+unwarrantable intrusion.
+
+The first intimation he had of there being anything wrong was a big
+white boat, adrift, with the dead body of a very hairy man inside,
+bumping against the bows of his steamer. Then indeed he lost no time in
+going ashore--alone, of course, from motives of delicacy.
+
+"I arrived in time to see that poor girl die, as I have told your
+Excellency," pursued Davidson. "I won't tell you what a time I had with
+him afterwards. He talked to me. His father seems to have been a crank,
+and to have upset his head when he was young. He was a queer chap.
+Practically the last words he said to me, as we came out on the veranda,
+were:
+
+"'Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young
+to hope, to love--and to put its trust in life!'
+
+"As we stood there, just before I left him, for he said he wanted to be
+alone with his dead for a time, we heard a snarly sort of voice near the
+bushes by the shore calling out:
+
+"'Is that you, governor?'
+
+"'Yes, it's me.'
+
+"'Jeeminy! I thought the beggar had done for you. He has started
+prancing and nearly had me. I have been dodging around, looking for you
+ever since.'
+
+"'Well, here I am,' suddenly screamed the other voice, and then a shot
+rang out.
+
+"'This time he has not missed him,' Heyst said to me bitterly, and went
+back into the house.
+
+"I returned on board as he had insisted I should do. I didn't want
+to intrude on his grief. Later, about five in the morning, some of my
+calashes came running to me, yelling that there was a fire ashore. I
+landed at once, of course. The principal bungalow was blazing. The
+heat drove us back. The other two houses caught one after another like
+kindling-wood. There was no going beyond the shore end of the jetty till
+the afternoon."
+
+Davidson sighed placidly.
+
+"I suppose you are certain that Baron Heyst is dead?"
+
+"He is--ashes, your Excellency," said Davidson, wheezing a little; "he
+and the girl together. I suppose he couldn't stand his thoughts before
+her dead body--and fire purifies everything. That Chinaman of whom I
+told your Excellency helped me to investigate next day, when the
+embers got cooled a little. We found enough to be sure. He's not a bad
+Chinaman. He told me that he had followed Heyst and the girl through the
+forest from pity, and partly out of curiosity. He watched the house till
+he saw Heyst go out, after dinner, and Ricardo come back alone. While he
+was dodging there, it occurred to him that he had better cast the boat
+adrift, for fear those scoundrels should come round by water and bombard
+the village from the sea with their revolvers and Winchesters. He judged
+that they were devils enough for anything. So he walked down the wharf
+quietly; and as he got into the boat, to cast her off, that hairy man
+who, it seems, was dozing in her, jumped up growling, and Wang shot him
+dead. Then he shoved the boat off as far as he could and went away."
+
+There was a pause. Presently Davidson went on, in his tranquil manner:
+
+"Let Heaven look after what has been purified. The wind and rain will
+take care of the ashes. The carcass of that follower, secretary, or
+whatever the unclean ruffian called himself, I left where it lay, to
+swell and rot in the sun. His principal had shot him neatly through the
+head. Then, apparently, this Jones went down to the wharf to look for
+the boat and for the hairy man. I suppose he tumbled into the water by
+accident--or perhaps not by accident. The boat and the man were gone,
+and the scoundrel saw himself alone, his game clearly up, and fairly
+trapped. Who knows? The water's very clear there, and I could see him
+huddled up on the bottom, between two piles, like a heap of bones in a
+blue silk bag, with only the head and the feet sticking out. Wang was
+very pleased when he discovered him. That made everything safe, he said,
+and he went at once over the hill to fetch his Alfuro woman back to the
+hut."
+
+Davidson took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his
+forehead.
+
+"And then, your Excellency, I went away. There was nothing to be done
+there."
+
+"Clearly!" assented the Excellency.
+
+Davidson, thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and then
+murmured with placid sadness:
+
+"Nothing!"
+
+October 1912--May 1914
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Victory, by Joseph Conrad
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Victory, by Joseph Conrad
+(#27 in our series by Joseph Conrad)
+
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+
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+Title: Victory
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6378]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 3, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, VICTORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed by Tracy Camp.
+
+
+
+VICTORY:  AN ISLAND TALE
+
+
+
+
+NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
+
+
+
+The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914.  And that
+last word was the single word of the title.
+
+Those were the times of peace.  Now that the moment of publication
+approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the
+title-page.  The word "Victory" the shining and tragic goal of noble
+effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a
+mere novel.  There was also the possibility of falling under the
+suspicion of commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the
+belief that the book had something to do with war.
+
+Of that, however, I was not afraid very much.  What influenced my
+decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of
+awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.
+"Victory" was the last word I had written in peace-time.  It was the
+last literary thought which had occurred to me before the doors of
+the Temple of Janus flying open with a crash shook the minds, the
+hearts, the consciences of men all over the world.  Such coincidence
+could not be treated lightly.  And I made up my mind to let the word
+stand, in the same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen of
+Old Rome would have "accepted the Omen."
+
+The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence
+(in the novel) of a person named Schomberg.
+
+That I believe him to be true goes without saying.  I am not likely
+to offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously.  Schomberg is an
+old member of my company.  A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim
+as far back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain
+short story of mine published in 1902.  Here he appears in a still
+larger part, true to life (I hope), but also true to himself.  Only,
+in this instance, his deeper passions come into play, and thus his
+grotesque psychology is completed at last.
+
+I don't pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology;
+but it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton.  My object in
+mentioning him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being
+the incarnation of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old
+deep-seated, and, as it were, impartial conviction.
+
+J. C.
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S NOTE
+
+
+
+On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first
+thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its
+nearness to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was
+written, and to the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices
+the book obtained when first published almost exactly a year after
+the beginning of the war.  The writing of it was finished in 1914
+long before the murder of an Austrian Archduke sounded the first
+note of warning for a world already full of doubts and fears.
+
+The contemporaneous very short Author's Note which is preserved in
+this edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which I
+consented to the publication of the book.  The fact of the book
+having been published in the United States early in the year made it
+difficult to delay its appearance in England any longer.  It came
+out in the thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was
+troubled by the awful incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined
+drama into the welter of reality, tragic enough in all conscience,
+but even more cruel than tragic and more inspiring than cruel.  It
+seemed awfully presumptuous to think there would be eyes to spare
+for those pages in a community which in the crash of the big guns
+and in the din of brave words expressing the truth of an indomitable
+faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp knife at its throat.
+
+The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his
+power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment.  The fact
+seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears
+and too mysterious for his understanding.  Were the trump of the
+Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at
+his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's sonata and
+the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence
+in the virtues of the leather.  And with perfect propriety.  For
+what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful
+music too mighty our ears and too awful for our terrors?  Thus it
+happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath.  The
+reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic
+will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps
+from a sense of infinite littleness and which is yet the only
+faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.
+
+It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
+fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose
+his detachment.  It is very obvious that on the arrival of the
+gentlemanly Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful
+Pedro, Heyst, the man of universal detachment, loses his mental
+self-possession, that fine attitude before the universally
+irremediable which wears the name of stoicism.  It is all a matter
+of proportion.  There should have been a remedy for that sort of
+thing.  And yet there is no remedy.  Behind this minute instance of
+life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.  Besides,
+Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit asserting himself.
+I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
+physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the
+readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without
+reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime,
+in virtue, and, for the matter of that, even in love.  Thinking is
+the great enemy of perfection.  The habit of profound reflection, I
+am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed
+by the civilized man.
+
+But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel
+Heyst.  I have always liked him.  The flesh-and-blood individual who
+stands behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I
+remember as a mysterious Swede right enough.  Whether he was a
+baron, too, I am not so certain.  He himself never laid claim to
+that distinction.  His detachment was too great to make any claims,
+big or small, on one's credulity.  I will not say where I met him
+because I fear to give my readers a wrong impression, since a marked
+incongruity between a man and his surroundings is often a very
+misleading circumstance.  We became very friendly for a time, and I
+would not like to expose him to unpleasant suspicions though,
+personally, I am sure he would have been indifferent to suspicions
+as he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of life.  He
+was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only the physical and moral
+foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance.
+That it was short was certainly not my fault for he had charmed me
+by the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, I cannot
+help thinking he had carried to excess.  He went away from his rooms
+without leaving a trace.  I wondered where he had gone to--but now I
+know.  He vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure
+that, unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in
+looking upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight.  Often
+in the course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense
+of a phrase heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I
+have fastened on to him many words heard on other men's lips and
+belonging to other men's less perfect, less pathetic moods.
+
+The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who
+is built on a much slenderer connection.  Mr. Jones (or whatever his
+name was) did not drift away from me.  He turned his back on me and
+walked out of the room.  It was in a little hotel in the island of
+St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him
+one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud
+buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect
+gave a most gruesome significance.  Our invasion must have
+displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked
+out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin
+shanks.  One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most
+desperate gambler he had ever come across.  I said:  "A professional
+sharper?" and got for an answer:  "He's a terror; but I must say
+that up to a certain point he will play fair. . . "  I wonder what
+the point was.  I never saw him again because I believe he went
+straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other
+ports of call in the direction of Aspinall.  Mr. Jones's
+characteristic insolence belongs to another man of a quite different
+type.  I will say nothing as to the origins of his mentality because
+I don't intend to make any damaging admissions.
+
+It so happened that the very same year Ricardo--the physical
+Ricardo--was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small
+and extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days' passage
+between two places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names don't matter.
+For the most part he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and
+raising himself from time to time on his elbow would talk about
+himself and go on talking, not exactly to me or even at me (he would
+not even look up but kept his eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if
+communing in a low voice with his familiar devil.  Now and then he
+would give me a glance and make the hairs of his stiff little
+moustache stir quaintly.  His eyes were green and every cat I see to
+this day reminds me of the exact contour of his face.  What he was
+travelling for or what was his business in life he never confided to
+me.  Truth to say, the only passenger on board that schooner who
+could have talked openly about his activities and purposes was a
+very snuffy and conversationally delightful friar, the superior of a
+convent, attended by a very young lay brother, of a particularly
+ferocious countenance.  We had with us also, lying prostrate in the
+dark and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner, an old Spanish
+gentleman, owner of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured me, very
+ill indeed.  Ricardo seemed to be either a servant or the confidant
+of that aged and distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the
+passage held a long murmured conversation with the friar, and after
+that did nothing but groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and
+then call for Martin in a voice full of pain.  Then he who had
+become Ricardo in the book would go below into that beastly and
+noisome hole, remain there mysteriously, and coming up on deck again
+with a face on which nothing could be read, would as likely as not
+resume for my edification the exposition of his moral attitude
+towards life illustrated by striking particular instances of the
+most atrocious complexion.  Did he mean to frighten me?  Or seduce
+me?  Or astonish me?  Or arouse my admiration?  All he did was to
+arouse my amused incredulity.  As scoundrels go he was far from
+being a bore.  For the rest my innocence was so great then that I
+could not take his philosophy seriously.  All the time he kept one
+ear turned to the cuddy in the manner of a devoted servant, but I
+had the idea that in some way or other he had imposed the connection
+on the invalid for some end of his own.  The reader, therefore,
+won't be surprised to hear that one morning I was told without any
+particular emotion by the padrone of the schooner that the "rich
+man" down there was dead:  He had died in the night.  I don't
+remember ever being so moved by the desolate end of a complete
+stranger.  I looked down the skylight, and there was the devoted
+Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose
+white beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could make out in
+the dark depths of a horrible stuffy bunk.
+
+As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm
+during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late "rich
+man" had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of
+fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast
+of our destination.  The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me
+with an air of immense commiseration:  "The poor man has left a
+young daughter."  Who was to look after her I don't know, but I saw
+the devoted Martin taking the trunks ashore with great care just
+before I landed myself.  I would perhaps have tracked the ways of
+that man of immense sincerity for a little while, but I had some of
+my own very pressing business to attend to, which in the end got
+mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give to Ricardo.
+The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten him, though.
+
+My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my
+observation of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious.
+It ended in a sudden inspiration to get out of his way.  It was in a
+hovel of sticks and mats by the side of a path.  As I went in there
+only to ask for a bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the
+slightest idea what in my appearance or actions could have roused
+his terrible ire.  It became manifest to me less than two minutes
+after I had set eyes on him for the first time, and though immensely
+surprised of course I didn't stop to think it out I took the nearest
+short cut--through the wall.  This bestial apparition and a certain
+enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti only a couple of months
+afterwards, have fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning
+rage, as manifested in the human animal, to the end of my days.  Of
+the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.  Of Pedro never.
+The impression was less vivid.  I got away from him too quickly.
+
+It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my
+memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world--so
+natural that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there,
+they had to come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer
+of tales who had taken to his trade without preparation, or
+premeditation, and without any moral intention but that which
+pervades the whole scheme of this world of senses.
+
+Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the
+origins of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of
+Lena, because if I were to leave her out it would look like a
+slight; and nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a
+slight on Lena.  If of all the personages involved in the "mystery
+of Samburan" I have lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call
+Heyst) it was at her, whom I call Lena, that I have looked the
+longest and with a most sustained attention.  This attention
+originated in idleness for which I have a natural talent.  One
+evening I wandered into a cafe, in a town not of the tropics but of
+the South of France.  It was filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of
+voices, the rattling of dominoes, and the sounds of strident music.
+The orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed at
+Schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an
+enlisted band, and, I must confess, seemed rather more respectable
+than the Zangiacomo musical enterprise.  It was less pretentious
+also, more homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the
+intervals when all the performers left the platform one of them went
+amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in
+a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat.  It
+was a girl.  Her detachment from her task seems to me now to have
+equalled or even surpassed Heyst's aloofness from all the mental
+degradations to which a man's intelligence is exposed in its way
+through life.  Silent and wide-eyed she went from table to table
+with the air of a sleep-walker and with no other sound but the
+slight rattle of the coins to attract attention.  It was long after
+the sea-chapter of my life had been closed but it is difficult to
+discard completely the characteristics of half a lifetime, and it
+was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that I dropped a five-
+franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the sleep-walker turned
+her head to gaze at me and said "Merci, Monsieur" in a tone in which
+there was no gratitude but only surprise.  I must have been idle
+indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence that
+the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed their
+seats I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that
+particular performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard
+who conducted, and who might for all I know have been her father,
+but whose real mission in life was to be a model for the Zangiacomo
+of Victory.  Having got a clear line of sight I naturally (being
+idle) continued to look at the girl through all the second part of
+the programme.  The shape of her dark head inclined over the violin
+was fascinating, and, while resting between the pieces of that
+interminable programme she was, in her white dress and with her
+brown hands reposing in her lap, the very image of dreamy innocence.
+The mature, bad-tempered woman at the piano might have been her
+mother, though there was not the slightest resemblance between them.
+All I am certain of in their personal relation to each other is that
+cruel pinch on the upper part of the arm.  That I am sure I have
+seen!  There could be no mistake.  I was in too idle a mood to
+imagine such a gratuitous barbarity.  It may have been playfulness,
+yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp.  It may
+have been playfulness.  Yet I saw plainly poor "dreamy innocence"
+rub gently the affected place as she filed off with the other
+performers down the middle aisle between the marble tables in the
+uproar of voices, the rattling of dominoes through a blue atmosphere
+of tobacco smoke.  I believe that those people left the town next
+day.
+
+Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the
+other side of the Place de la Comedie.  It is very possible.  I did
+not go across to find out.  It was my perfect idleness that had
+invested the girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want to
+destroy it by any superfluous exertion.  The receptivity of my
+indolence made the impression so permanent that when the moment came
+for her meeting with Heyst I felt that she would be heroically equal
+to every demand of the risky and uncertain future.  I was so
+convinced of it that I let her go with Heyst, I won't say without a
+pang but certainly without misgivings.  And in view of her
+triumphant end what more could I have done for her rehabilitation
+and her happiness?
+
+1920.
+J. C.
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+
+
+There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very
+close chemical relation between coal and diamonds.  It is the
+reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black
+diamonds."  Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a
+much less portable form of property.  There is, from that point of
+view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal.  Now, if a coal-
+mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket--but it can't!  At the
+same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of
+the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a
+garish, unrestful hotel.  And I suppose those two considerations,
+the practical and the mystical, prevented Heyst--Axel Heyst--from
+going away.
+
+The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation.  The world of
+finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may
+appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.  First the capital
+evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation.  These are
+very unnatural physics, but they account for the persistent inertia
+of Heyst, at which we "out there" used to laugh among ourselves--but
+not inimically.  An inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no
+hostility, is scarcely worth derision.  It may, indeed, be in the
+way sometimes; but this could not be said of Axel Heyst.  He was out
+of everybody's way, as if he were perched on the highest peak of the
+Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous.  Everyone in that part of
+the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island.  An island is
+but the top of a mountain.  Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was
+surrounded, instead of the imponderable stormy and transparent ocean
+of air merging into infinity, by a tepid, shallow sea; a passionless
+offshoot of the great waters which embrace the continents of this
+globe.  His most frequent visitors were shadows, the shadows of
+clouds, relieving the monotony of the inanimate, brooding sunshine
+of the tropics.  His nearest neighbour--I am speaking now of things
+showing some sort of animation--was an indolent volcano which smoked
+faintly all day with its head just above the northern horizon, and
+at night levelled at him, from amongst the clear stars, a dull red
+glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of a
+gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark.  Axel Heyst was
+also a smoker; and when he lounged out on his veranda with his
+cheroot, the last thing before going to bed, he made in the night
+the same sort of glow and of the same size as that other one so many
+miles away.
+
+In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the
+night--which were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath
+of air through.  There was seldom enough wind to blow a feather
+along.  On most evenings of the year Heyst could have sat outside
+with a naked candle to read one of the books left him by his late
+father.  It was not a mean store.  But he never did that.  Afraid of
+mosquitoes, very likely.  Neither was he ever tempted by the silence
+to address any casual remarks to the companion glow of the volcano.
+He was not mad.  Queer chap--yes, that may have been said, and in
+fact was said; but there is a tremendous difference between the two,
+you will allow.
+
+On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan--the "Round
+Island" of the charts--was dazzling; and in the flood of cold light
+Heyst could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect of
+an abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle:  vague roofs above
+low vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long
+grass, something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged
+thickets towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with
+a black jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted
+side.  But the most conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard
+raised on two posts and presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over
+that side, the white letters "T. B. C. Co." in a row at least two
+feet high.  These were the initials of the Tropical Belt Coal
+Company, his employers--his late employers, to be precise.
+
+According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the T.
+B. C. Company's capital having evaporated in the course of two
+years, the company went into liquidation--forced, I believe, not
+voluntary.  There was nothing forcible in the process, however.  It
+was slow; and while the liquidation--in London and Amsterdam--
+pursued its languid course, Axel Heyst, styled in the prospectus
+"manager in the tropics," remained at his post on Samburan, the No.
+1 coaling-station of the company.
+
+And it was not merely a coaling-station.  There was a coal-mine
+there, with an outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards
+from the rickety wharf and the imposing blackboard.  The company's
+object had been to get hold of all the outcrops on tropical islands
+and exploit them locally.  And, Lord knows, there were any amount of
+outcrops.  It was Heyst who had located most of them in this part of
+the tropical belt during his rather aimless wanderings, and being a
+ready letter-writer had written pages and pages about them to his
+friends in Europe.  At least, so it was said.
+
+We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth--for himself, at any
+rate.  What he seemed mostly concerned for was the "stride forward,"
+as he expressed it, in the general organization of the universe,
+apparently.  He was heard by more than a hundred persons in the
+islands talking of a "great stride forward for these regions."  The
+convinced wave of the hand which accompanied the phrase suggested
+tropical distances being impelled onward.  In connection with the
+finished courtesy of his manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate
+silencing--for a time, at least.  Nobody cared to argue with him
+when he talked in this strain.  His earnestness could do no harm to
+anybody.  There was no danger of anyone taking seriously his dream
+of tropical coal, so what was the use of hurting his feelings?
+
+Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his
+entree as a person who came out East with letters of introduction--
+and modest letters of credit, too--some years before these coal-
+outcrops began to crop up in his playfully courteous talk.  From the
+first there was some difficulty in making him out.  He was not a
+traveller.  A traveller arrives and departs, goes on somewhere.
+Heyst did not depart.  I met a man once--the manager of the branch
+of the Oriental Banking Corporation in Malacca--to whom Heyst
+exclaimed, in no connection with anything in particular (it was in
+the billiard-room of the club):
+
+"I am enchanted with these islands!"
+
+He shot it out suddenly, a propos des bottes, as the French say, and
+while chalking his cue.  And perhaps it was some sort of
+enchantment.  There are more spells than your commonplace magicians
+ever dreamed of.
+
+Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles
+drawn round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst's case a magic
+circle.  It just touched Manila, and he had been seen there.  It
+just touched Saigon, and he was likewise seen there once.  Perhaps
+these were his attempts to break out.  If so, they were failures.
+The enchantment must have been an unbreakable one.  The manager--the
+man who heard the exclamation--had been so impressed by the tone,
+fervour, rapture, what you will, or perhaps by the incongruity of it
+that he had related the experience to more than one person.
+
+"Queer chap, that Swede," was his only comment; but this is the
+origin of the name "Enchanted Heyst" which some fellows fastened on
+our man.
+
+He also had other names.  In his early years, long before he got so
+becomingly bald on the top, he went to present a letter of
+introduction to Mr. Tesman of Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm--
+tip-top house.  Well, Mr. Tesman was a kindly, benevolent old
+gentleman.  He did not know what to make of that caller.  After
+telling him that they wished to render his stay among the islands as
+pleasant as possible, and that they were ready to assist him in his
+plans, and so on, and after receiving Heyst's thanks--you know the
+usual kind of conversation--he proceeded to query in a slow,
+paternal tone:
+
+"And you are interested in--?"
+
+"Facts," broke in Heyst in his courtly voice.  "There's nothing
+worth knowing but facts.  Hard facts!  Facts alone, Mr. Tesman."
+
+I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have
+spoken about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of "Hard
+Facts."  He had the singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to
+him and became part of his name.  Thereafter he mooned about the
+Java Sea in some of the Tesmans' trading schooners, and then
+vanished, on board an Arab ship, in the direction of New Guinea.  He
+remained so long in that outlying part of his enchanted circle that
+he was nearly forgotten before he swam into view again in a native
+proa full of Goram vagabonds, burnt black by the sun, very lean, his
+hair much thinned, and a portfolio of sketches under his arm.  He
+showed these willingly, but was very reserved as to anything else.
+He had had an "amusing time," he said.  A man who will go to New
+Guinea for fun--well!
+
+Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone
+off his face and all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-
+gold pair of horizontal moustaches had grown to really noble
+proportions, a certain disreputable white man fastened upon him an
+epithet.  Putting down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of
+its contents--paid for by Heyst--he said, with that deliberate
+sagacity which no mere water-drinker ever attained:
+
+"Heyst's a puffect g'n'lman.  Puffect!  But he's a ut-uto-utopist."
+
+Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where
+this pronouncement was voiced.  Utopist, eh?  Upon my word, the only
+thing I heard him say which might have had a bearing on the point
+was his invitation to old McNab himself.  Turning with that finished
+courtesy of attitude, movement voice, which was his obvious
+characteristic, he had said with delicate playfulness:
+
+"Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!"
+
+Perhaps that was it.  A man who could propose, even playfully, to
+quench old McNab's thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer of
+chimeras; for of downright irony Heyst was not prodigal.  And, may
+be, this was the reason why he was generally liked.  At that epoch
+in his life, in the fulness of his physical development, of a broad,
+martial presence, with his bald head and long moustaches, he
+resembled the portraits of Charles XII, of adventurous memory.
+However, there was no reason to think that Heyst was in any way a
+fighting man.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+
+
+It was about this time that Heyst became associated with Morrison on
+terms about which people were in doubt.  Some said he was a partner,
+others said he was a sort of paying guest, but the real truth of the
+matter was more complex.  One day Heyst turned up in Timor.  Why in
+Timor, of all places in the world, no one knows.  Well, he was
+mooning about Delli, that highly pestilential place, possibly in
+search of some undiscovered facts, when he came in the street upon
+Morrison, who, in his way, was also an "enchanted" man.  When you
+spoke to Morrison of going home--he was from Dorsetshire--he
+shuddered.  He said it was dark and wet there; that it was like
+living with your head and shoulders in a moist gunny-bag.  That was
+only his exaggerated style of talking.  Morrison was "one of us."
+He was owner and master of the Capricorn, trading brig, and was
+understood to be doing well with her, except for the drawback of too
+much altruism.  He was the dearly beloved friend of a quantity of
+God-forsaken villages up dark creeks and obscure bays, where he
+traded for produce.  He would often sail , through awfully dangerous
+channels up to some miserable settlement, only to find a very hungry
+population clamorous for rice, and without so much "produce" between
+them as would have filled Morrison's suitcase.  Amid general
+rejoicings, he would land the rice all the same, explain to the
+people that it was an advance, that they were in debt to him now;
+would preach to them energy and industry, and make an elaborate note
+in a pocket-diary which he always carried; and this would be the end
+of that transaction.  I don't know if Morrison thought so, but the
+villagers had no doubt whatever about it.  Whenever a coast village
+sighted the brig it would begin to beat all its gongs and hoist all
+its streamers, and all its girls would put flowers in their hair and
+the crowd would line the river bank, and Morrison would beam and
+glitter at all this excitement through his single eyeglass with an
+air of intense gratification.  He was tall and lantern-jawed, and
+clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister who had thrown his wig to
+the dogs.
+
+We used to remonstrate with him:
+
+"You will never see any of your advances if you go on like this,
+Morrison."
+
+He would put on a knowing air.
+
+"I shall squeeze them yet some day--never you fear.  And that
+reminds me"--pulling out his inseparable pocketbook--"there's that
+So-and-So village.  They are pretty well off again; I may just as
+well squeeze them to begin with."
+
+He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.
+
+Memo:  Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.
+
+Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with
+inflexible finality; but he never began the squeezing.  Some men
+grumbled at him.  He was spoiling the trade.  Well, perhaps to a
+certain extent; not much.  Most of the places he traded with were
+unknown not only to geography but also to the traders' special lore
+which is transmitted by word of mouth, without ostentation, and
+forms the stock of mysterious local knowledge.  It was hinted also
+that Morrison had a wife in each and every one of them, but the
+majority of us repulsed these innuendoes with indignation.  He was a
+true humanitarian and rather ascetic than otherwise.
+
+When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street,
+his eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the
+hopeless aspect of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads
+trudging from workhouse to workhouse.  Being hailed on the street he
+looked up with a wild worried expression.  He was really in trouble.
+He had come the week before into Delli and the Portuguese
+authorities, on some pretence of irregularity in his papers, had
+inflicted a fine upon him and had arrested his brig.
+
+Morrison never had any spare cash in hand.  With his system of
+trading it would have been strange if he had; and all these debts
+entered in the pocketbook weren't good enough to raise a millrei on-
+-let alone a shilling.  The Portuguese officials begged him not to
+distress himself.  They gave him a week's grace, and then proposed
+to sell the brig at auction.  This meant ruin for Morrison; and when
+Heyst hailed him across the street in his usual courtly tone, the
+week was nearly out.
+
+Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner of
+a prince addressing another prince on a private occasion:
+
+"What an unexpected pleasure.  Would you have any objection to drink
+something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there?  The sun is
+really too strong to talk in the street."
+
+The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel
+which he would have distained to enter at any other time.  He was
+distracted.  He did not know what he was doing.  You could have led
+him over the edge of a precipice just as easily as into that wine-
+shop.  He sat down like an automaton.  He was speechless, but he saw
+a glass full of rough red wine before him, and emptied it.  Heyst
+meantime, politely watchful, had taken a seat opposite.
+
+"You are in for a bout of fever, I fear," he said sympathetically.
+
+Poor Morrison's tongue was loosened at that.
+
+"Fever!" he cried.  "Give me fever.  Give me plague.  They are
+diseases.  One gets over them.  But I am being murdered.  I am being
+murdered by the Portuguese.  The gang here downed me at last among
+them.  I am to have my throat cut the day after tomorrow."
+
+In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a slight
+motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a drawing-
+room.  Morrison's despairing reserve had broken down.  He had been
+wandering with a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud
+hovels, silent, with no soul to turn to in his distress, and
+positively maddened by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled on
+a white man, figuratively and actually white--for Morrison refused
+to accept the racial whiteness of the Portuguese officials.  He let
+himself go for the mere relief of violent speech, his elbows planted
+on the table, his eyes blood-shot, his voice nearly gone, the brim
+of his round pith hat shading an unshaven, livid face.  His white
+clothes, which he had not taken off for three days, were dingy.  He
+had already gone to the bad, past redemption.  The sight was
+shocking to Heyst; but he let nothing of it appear in his hearing,
+concealing his impression under that consummate good-society manner
+of his.  Polite attention, what's due from one gentleman listening
+to another, was what he showed; and, as usual, it was catching; so
+that Morrison pulled himself together and finished his narrative in
+a conversational tone, with a man-of-the-world air.
+
+"It's a villainous plot.  Unluckily, one is helpless.  That
+scoundrel Cousinho--Andreas, you know--has been coveting the brig
+for years.  Naturally, I would never sell.  She is not only my
+livelihood; she's my life.  So he has hatched this pretty little
+plot with the chief of the customs.  The sale, of course, will be a
+farce.  There's no one here to bid.  He will get the brig for a
+song--no, not even that--a line of a song.  You have been some years
+now in the islands, Heyst.  You know us all; you have seen how we
+live.  Now you shall have the opportunity to see how some of us end;
+for it is the end, for me.  I can't deceive myself any longer.  You
+see it--don't your?"
+
+Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping
+strain on his recovered self-possession.  Heyst was beginning to say
+that he "could very well see all the bearings of this unfortunate--"
+when Morrison interrupted him jerkily.
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know why I have been telling you all this.  I
+suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my
+trouble to myself.  Words can't do it justice; but since I've told
+you so much I may as well tell you more.  Listen.  This morning on
+board, in my cabin I went down on my knees and prayed for help.  I
+went down on my knees!"
+
+"You are a believer, Morrison?" asked Heyst with a distinct note of
+respect.
+
+"Surely I am not an infidel."
+
+Morrison was swiftly reproachful in his answer, and there came a
+pause, Morrison perhaps interrogating his conscience, and Heyst
+preserving a mien of unperturbed, polite interest.
+
+"I prayed like a child, of course.  I believe in children praying--
+well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more
+self-reliant.  I don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the
+Almighty with his silly troubles.  It seems such cheek.  Anyhow,
+this morning I--I have never done any harm to any God's creature
+knowingly--I prayed.  A sudden impulse--I went flop on my knees; so
+you may judge--"
+
+They were gazing earnestly into each other's eyes.  Poor Morrison
+added, as a discouraging afterthought:
+
+"Only this is such a God-forsaken spot."
+
+Heyst inquired with a delicate intonation whether he might know the
+amount for which the brig was seized.
+
+Morrison suppressed an oath, and named curtly a sum which was in
+itself so insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have
+exclaimed at it.  And even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity out
+of his politely modulated voice as he asked if it was a fact that
+Morrison had not that amount in hand.
+
+Morrison hadn't.  He had only a little English gold, a few
+sovereigns, on board.  He had left all his spare cash with the
+Tesmans, in Samarang, to meet certain bills which would fall due
+while he was away on his cruise.  Anyhow, that money would not have
+been any more good to him than if it had been in the innermost
+depths of the infernal regions.  He said all this brusquely.  He
+looked with sudden disfavour at that noble forehead, at those great
+martial moustaches, at the tired eyes of the man sitting opposite
+him.  Who the devil was he?  What was he, Morrison, doing there,
+talking like this?  Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of
+us trading in the Archipelago did.  Had the Swede suddenly risen and
+hit him on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than
+when this stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a little
+bow across the table:
+
+"Oh!  If that's the case I would be very happy if you'd allow me to
+be of use!"
+
+Morrison didn't understand.  This was one of those things that don't
+happen--unheard of things.  He had no real inkling of what it meant,
+till Heyst said definitely:
+
+"I can lend you the amount."
+
+"You have the money?" whispered Morrison.  "Do you mean here, in
+your pocket?"
+
+"Yes, on me.  Glad to be of use."
+
+Morrison, staring open-mouthed, groped over his shoulder for the
+cord of the eyeglass hanging down his back.  When he found it, he
+stuck it in his eye hastily.  It was as if he expected Heyst's usual
+white suit of the tropics to change into a shining garment, flowing
+down to his toes, and a pair of great dazzling wings to sprout out
+on the Swede's shoulders--and didn't want to miss a single detail of
+the transformation.  But if Heyst was an angle from on high, sent in
+answer to prayer, he did not betray his heavenly origin by outward
+signs.  So, instead of going on his knees, as he felt inclined to
+do, Morrison stretched out his hand, which Heyst grasped with formal
+alacrity and a polite murmur in which "Trifle--delighted--of
+service," could just be distinguished.
+
+"Miracles do happen," thought the awestruck Morrison.  To him, as to
+all of us in the Islands, this wandering Heyst, who didn't toil or
+spin visibly, seemed the very last person to be the agent of
+Providence in an affair concerned with money.  The fact of his
+turning up in Timor or anywhere else was no more wonderful than the
+settling of a sparrow on one's window-sill at any given moment.  But
+that he should carry a sum of money in his pocket seemed somehow
+inconceivable.
+
+So inconceivable that as they were trudging together through the
+sand of the roadway to the custom-house--another mud hovel--to pay
+the fine, Morrison broke into a cold sweat, stopped short, and
+exclaimed in faltering accents:
+
+"I say!  You aren't joking, Heyst?"
+
+"Joking!"  Heyst's blue eyes went hard as he turned them on the
+discomposed Morrison.  "In what way, may I ask?" he continued with
+austere politeness.
+
+Morrison was abashed.
+
+"Forgive me, Heyst.  You must have been sent by God in answer to my
+prayer.  But I have been nearly off my chump for three days with
+worry; and it suddenly struck me:  'What if it's the Devil who has
+sent him?'"
+
+"I have no connection with the supernatural," said Heyst graciously,
+moving on.  "Nobody has sent me.  I just happened along."
+
+"I know better," contradicted Morrison.  "I may be unworthy, but I
+have been heard.  I know it.  I feel it.  For why should you offer--
+"
+
+Heyst inclined his head, as from respect for a conviction in which
+he could not share.  But he stuck to his point by muttering that in
+the presence of an odious fact like this, it was natural -
+
+Later in the day, the fine paid, and the two of them on board the
+brig, from which the guard had been removed, Morrison who, besides,
+being a gentleman was also an honest fellow began to talk about
+repayment.  He knew very well his inability to lay by any sum of
+money.  It was partly the fault of circumstances and partly of his
+temperament; and it would have been very difficult to apportion the
+responsibility between the two.  Even Morrison himself could not
+say, while confessing to the fact.  With a worried air he ascribed
+it to fatality:
+
+"I don't know how it is that I've never been able to save.  It's
+some sort of curse.  There's always a bill or two to meet."
+
+He plunged his hand into his pocket for the famous notebook so well
+known in the islands, the fetish of his hopes, and fluttered the
+pages feverishly.
+
+"And yet--look," he went on.  "There it is--more than five thousand
+dollars owing.  Surely that's something."
+
+He ceased suddenly.  Heyst, who had been all the time trying to look
+as unconcerned as he could, made reassuring noises in his throat.
+But Morrison was not only honest.  He was honourable, too; and on
+this stressful day, before this amazing emissary of Providence and
+in the revulsion of his feelings, he made his great renunciation.
+He cast off the abiding illusion of his existence.
+
+"No.  No.  They are not good.  I'll never be able to squeeze them.
+Never.  I've been saying for years I would, but I give it up.  I
+never really believed I could.  Don't reckon on that, Heyst.  I have
+robbed you."
+
+Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and
+remained in that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him
+soothingly with the utmost courtesy.  The Swede was as much
+distressed as Morrison; for he understood the other's feelings
+perfectly.  No decent feeling was ever scorned by Heyst.  But he was
+incapable of outward cordiality of manner, and he felt acutely his
+defect.  Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an
+emotional collapse.  They must have had, both of them, a fairly
+painful time of it in the cabin of the brig.  In the end Morrison,
+casting desperately for an idea in the blackness of his despondency,
+hit upon the notion of inviting Heyst to travel with him in his brig
+and have a share in his trading ventures up to the amount of his
+loan.
+
+It is characteristic of Heyst's unattached, floating existence that
+he was in a position to accept this proposal.  There is no reason to
+think that he wanted particularly just then to go poking aboard the
+brig into all the holes and corners of the Archipelago where
+Morrison picked up most of his trade.  Far from it; but he would
+have consented to almost any arrangement in order to put an end to
+the harrowing scene in the cabin.  There was at once a great
+transformation act:  Morrison raising his diminished head, and
+sticking the glass in his eye to looked affectionately at Heyst, a
+bottle being uncorked, and so on.  It was agreed that nothing should
+be said to anyone of this transaction.  Morrison, you understand,
+was not proud of the episode, and he was afraid of being
+unmercifully chaffed.
+
+"An old bird like me!  To let myself be trapped by those damned
+Portuguese rascals!  I should never hear the last of it.  We must
+keep it dark."
+
+From quite other motives, among which his native delicacy was the
+principal, Heyst was even more anxious to bind himself to silence.
+A gentleman would naturally shrink from the part of heavenly
+messenger that Morrison would force upon him.  It made Heyst
+uncomfortable, as it was.  And perhaps he did not care that it
+should be known that he had some means, whatever they might have
+been--sufficient, at any rate, to enable him to lend money to
+people.  These two had a duet down there, like conspirators in a
+comic opera, of "Sh--ssh, shssh!  Secrecy!  Secrecy!"  It must have
+been funny, because they were very serious about it.
+
+And for a time the conspiracy was successful in so far that we all
+concluded that Heyst was boarding with the good-natured --some said:
+sponging on the imbecile--Morrison, in his brig.  But you know how
+it is with all such mysteries.  There is always a leak somewhere.
+Morrison himself, not a perfect vessel by any means, was bursting
+with gratitude, and under the stress he must have let out something
+vague--enough to give the island gossip a chance.  And you know how
+kindly the world is in its comments on what it does not understand.
+A rumour sprang out that Heyst, having obtained some mysterious hold
+on Morrison, had fastened himself on him and was sucking him dry.
+Those who had traced these mutters back to their origin were very
+careful not to believe them.  The originator, it seems, was a
+certain Schomberg, a big, manly, bearded creature of the Teutonic
+persuasion, with an ungovernable tongue which surely must have
+worked on a pivot.  Whether he was a Lieutenant of the Reserve, as
+he declared, I don't know.  Out there he was by profession a hotel-
+keeper, first in Bangkok, then somewhere else, and ultimately in
+Sourabaya.  He dragged after him up and down that section of the
+tropical belt a silent, frightened, little woman with long ringlets,
+who smiled at one stupidly, showing a blue tooth.  I don't know why
+so many of us patronized his various establishments.  He was a
+noxious ass, and he satisfied his lust for silly gossip at the cost
+of his customers.  It was he who, one evening, as Morrison and Heyst
+went past the hotel--they were not his regular patrons--whispered
+mysteriously to the mixed company assembled on the veranda:
+
+"The spider and the fly just gone by, gentlemen."  Then, very
+important and confidential, his thick paw at the side of his mouth:
+"We are among ourselves; well, gentlemen, all I can say is, I don't
+you ever get mixed up with that Swede.  Don't you ever get caught in
+his web."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+
+
+Human nature being what it is, having a silly side to it as well as
+a mean side, there were not a few who pretended to be indignant on
+no better authority than a general propensity to believe every evil
+report; and a good many others who found it simply funny to call
+Heyst the Spider--behind his back, of course.  He was as serenely
+unconscious of this as of his several other nicknames.  But soon
+people found other things to say of Heyst; not long afterwards he
+came very much to the fore in larger affairs.  He blossomed out into
+something definite.  He filled the public eye as the manager on the
+spot of the Tropical Belt Coal Company with offices in London and
+Amsterdam, and other things about it that sounded and looked
+grandiose.  The offices in the two capitals may have consisted--and
+probably did--of one room in each; but at that distance, out East
+there, all this had an air.  We were more puzzled than dazzled, it
+is true; but even the most sober-minded among us began to think that
+there was something in it.  The Tesmans appointed agents, a contract
+for government mail-boats secured, the era of steam beginning for
+the islands--a great stride forward--Heyst's stride!
+
+And all this sprang from the meeting of the cornered Morrison and of
+the wandering Heyst, which may or may not have been the direct
+outcome of a prayer.  Morrison was not an imbecile, but he seemed to
+have got himself into a state of remarkable haziness as to his exact
+position towards Heyst.  For, if Heyst had been sent with money in
+his pocket by a direct decree of the Almighty in answer to
+Morrison's prayer then there was no reason for special gratitude,
+since obviously he could not help himself.  But Morrison believed
+both, in the efficacy of prayer and in the infinite goodness of
+Heyst.  He thanked God with awed sincerity for his mercy, and could
+not thank Heyst enough for the service rendered as between man and
+man.  In this (highly creditable) tangle of strong feelings
+Morrison's gratitude insisted on Heyst's partnership in the great
+discovery.  Ultimately we heard that Morrison had gone home through
+the Suez Canal in order to push the magnificent coal idea personally
+in London.  He parted from his brig and disappeared from our ken;
+but we heard that he had written a letter or letters to Heyst,
+saying that London was cold and gloomy; that he did not like either
+the men or things, that he was "as lonely as a crow in a strange
+country."  In truth, he pined after the Capricorn--I don't mean only
+the tropic; I mean the ship too.  Finally he went into Dorsetshire
+to see his people, caught a bad cold, and died with extraordinary
+precipitation in the bosom of his appalled family.  Whether his
+exertions in the City of London had enfeebled his vitality I don't
+know; but I believe it was this visit which put life into the coal
+idea.  Be it as it may, the Tropical Belt Coal Company was born very
+shortly after Morrison, the victim of gratitude and his native
+climate, had gone to join his forefathers in a Dorsetshire
+churchyard.
+
+Heyst was immensely shocked.  He got the news in the Moluccas
+through the Tesmans, and then disappeared for a time.  It appears
+that he stayed with a Dutch government doctor in Amboyna, a friend
+of his who looked after him for a bit in his bungalow.  He became
+visible again rather suddenly, his eyes sunk in his head, and with a
+sort of guarded attitude, as if afraid someone would reproach him
+with the death of Morrison.
+
+Naive Heyst!  As if anybody would . . . Nobody amongst us had any
+interest in men who went home.  They were all right; they did not
+count any more.  Going to Europe was nearly as final as going to
+Heaven.  It removed a man from the world of hazard and adventure.
+
+As a matter of fact, many of us did not hear of this death till
+months afterwards--from Schomberg, who disliked Heyst gratuitously
+and made up a piece of sinister whispered gossip:
+
+"That's what comes of having anything to do with that fellow.  He
+squeezes you dry like a lemon, then chucks you out--sends you home
+to die.  Take warning by Morrison!"
+
+Of course, we laughed at the innkeeper's suggestions of black
+mystery.  Several of us heard that Heyst was prepared to go to
+Europe himself, to push on his coal enterprise personally; but he
+never went.  It wasn't necessary.  The company was formed without
+him, and his nomination of manager in the tropics came out to him by
+post.
+
+From the first he had selected Samburan, or Round Island, for the
+central station.  Some copies of the prospectus issued in Europe,
+having found their way out East, were passed from hand to hand.  We
+greatly admired the map which accompanied them for the edification
+of the shareholders.  On it Samburan was represented as the central
+spot of the Eastern Hemisphere with its name engraved in enormous
+capitals.  Heavy lines radiated from it in all directions through
+the tropics, figuring a mysterious and effective star--lines of
+influence or lines of distance, or something of that sort.  Company
+promoters have an imagination of their own.  There's no more
+romantic temperament on earth than the temperament of a company
+promoter.  Engineers came out, coolies were imported, bungalows were
+put up on Samburan, a gallery driven into the hillside, and actually
+some coal got out.
+
+These manifestations shook the soberest minds.  For a time everybody
+in the islands was talking of the Tropical Belt Coal, and even those
+who smiled quietly to themselves were only hiding their uneasiness.
+Oh, yes; it had come, and anybody could see what would be the
+consequences--the end of the individual trader, smothered under a
+great invasion of steamers.  We could not afford to buy steamers.
+Not we.  And Heyst was the manager.
+
+"You know, Heyst, enchanted Heyst."
+
+"Oh, come!  He has been no better than a loafer around here as far
+back as any of us can remember."
+
+"Yes, he said he was looking for facts.  Well, he's got hold of one
+that will do for all of us," commented a bitter voice.
+
+"That's what they call development--and be hanged to it!" muttered
+another.
+
+Never was Heyst talked about so much in the tropical belt before.
+
+"Isn't he a Swedish baron or something?"
+
+"He, a baron?  Get along with you!"
+
+For my part I haven't the slightest doubt that he was.  While he was
+still drifting amongst the islands, enigmatical and disregarded like
+an insignificant ghost, he told me so himself on a certain occasion.
+It was a long time before he materialized in this alarming way into
+the destroyer of our little industry--Heyst the Enemy.
+
+It became the fashion with a good many to speak of Heyst as the
+Enemy.  He was very concrete, very visible now.  He was rushing all
+over the Archipelago, jumping in and out of local mail-packets as if
+they had been tram-cars, here, there, and everywhere--organizing
+with all his might.  This was no mooning about.  This was business.
+And this sudden display of purposeful energy shook the incredulity
+of the most sceptical more than any scientific demonstration of the
+value of these coal-outcrops could have done.  It was impressive.
+Schomberg was the only one who resisted the infection.  Big, manly
+in a portly style, and profusely bearded, with a glass of beer in
+his thick paw, he would approach some table where the topic of the
+hour was being discussed, would listen for a moment, and then come
+out with his invariable declaration:
+
+"All this is very well, gentlemen; but he can't throw any of his
+coal-dust in my eyes.  There's nothing in it.  Why, there can't be
+anything in it.  A fellow like that for manager?  Phoo!"
+
+Was it the clairvoyance of imbecile hatred, or mere stupid tenacity
+of opinion, which ends sometimes by scoring against the world in a
+most astonishing manner?  Most of us can remember instances of
+triumphant folly; and that ass Schomberg triumphed.  The T.B.C.
+Company went into liquidation, as I began by telling you.  The
+Tesmans washed their hands of it.  The Government cancelled those
+famous contracts, the talk died out, and presently it was remarked
+here and there that Heyst had faded completely away.  He had become
+invisible, as in those early days when he used to make a bolt clear
+out of sight in his attempts to break away from the enchantment of
+"these isles," either in the direction of New Guinea or in the
+direction of Saigon--to cannibals or to cafes.  The enchanted Heyst!
+Had he at last broken the spell?  Had he died?  We were too
+indifferent to wonder overmuch.  You see we had on the whole liked
+him well enough.  And liking is not sufficient to keep going the
+interest one takes in a human being.  With hatred, apparently, it is
+otherwise.  Schomberg couldn't forget Heyst.  The keen, manly
+Teutonic creature was a good hater.  A fool often is.
+
+"Good evening, gentlemen.  Have you got everything you want?  So!
+Good!  You see?  What was I always telling you?  Aha!  There was
+nothing in it.  I knew it.  But what I would like to know is what
+became of that--Swede."
+
+He put a stress on the word Swede as if it meant scoundrel.  He
+detested Scandinavians generally.  Why?  Goodness only knows.  A
+fool like that is unfathomable.  He continued:
+
+"It's five months or more since I have spoken to anybody who has
+seen him."
+
+As I have said, we were not much interested; but Schomberg, of
+course, could not understand that.  He was grotesquely dense.
+Whenever three people came together in his hotel, he took good care
+that Heyst should be with them.
+
+"I hope the fellow did not go and drown himself," he would add with
+a comical earnestness that ought to have made us shudder; only our
+crowd was superficial, and did not apprehend the psychology of this
+pious hope.
+
+"Why?  Heyst isn't in debt to you for drinks is he?" somebody asked
+him once with shallow scorn.
+
+"Drinks!  Oh, dear no!"
+
+The innkeeper was not mercenary.  Teutonic temperament seldom is.
+But he put on a sinister expression to tell us that Heyst had not
+paid perhaps three visits altogether to his "establishment."  This
+was Heyst's crime, for which Schomberg wished him nothing less than
+a long and tormented existence.  Observe the Teutonic sense of
+proportion and nice forgiving temper.
+
+At last, one afternoon, Schomberg was seen approaching a group of
+his customers.  He was obviously in high glee.  He squared his manly
+chest with great importance.
+
+"Gentlemen, I have news of him.  Who? why, that Swede.  He is still
+on Samburan.  He's never been away from it.  The company is gone,
+the engineers are gone, the clerks are gone, the coolies are gone,
+everything's gone; but there he sticks.  Captain Davidson, coming by
+from the westward, saw him with his own eyes.  Something white on
+the wharf, so he steamed in and went ashore in a small boat.  Heyst,
+right enough.  Put a book into his pocket, always very polite.  Been
+strolling on the wharf and reading.  'I remain in possession here,'
+he told Captain Davidson.  What I want to know is what he gets to
+eat there.  A piece of dried fish now and then--what?  That's coming
+down pretty low for a man who turned up his nose at my table
+d'hote!"
+
+He winked with immense malice.  A bell started ringing, and he led
+the way to the dining-room as if into a temple, very grave, with the
+air of a benefactor of mankind.  His ambition was to feed it at a
+profitable price, and his delight was to talk of it behind its back.
+It was very characteristic of him to gloat over the idea of Heyst
+having nothing decent to eat.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+
+
+A few of us who were sufficiently interested went to Davidson for
+details.  These were not many.  He told us that he passed to the
+north of Samburan on purpose to see what was going on.  At first, it
+looked as if that side of the island had been altogether abandoned.
+This was what he expected.  Presently, above the dense mass of
+vegetation that Samburan presents to view, he saw the head of the
+flagstaff without a flag.  Then, while steaming across the slight
+indentation which for a time was known officially as Black Diamond
+Bay, he made out with his glass the white figure on the coaling-
+wharf.  It could be no one but Heyst.
+
+"I thought for certain he wanted to be taken off, so I steamed in.
+He made no signs.  However, I lowered a boat.  I could not see
+another living being anywhere.  Yes.  He had a book in his hand.  He
+looked exactly as we have always seen him--very neat, white shoes,
+cork helmet.  He explained to me that he had always had a taste for
+solitude.  It was the first I ever heard of it, I told him.  He only
+smiled.  What could I say?  He isn't the sort of man one can speak
+familiarly to.  There's something in him.  One doesn't care to.
+
+"'But what's the object?  Are you thinking of keeping possession of
+the mine?' I asked him.
+
+"'Something of the sort,' he says.  'I am keeping hold.'
+
+"'But all this is as dead as Julius Caesar,' I cried.  'In fact, you
+have nothing worth holding on to, Heyst.'
+
+"'Oh, I am done with facts,' says he, putting his hand to his helmet
+sharply with one of his short bows."
+
+Thus dismissed, Davidson went on board his ship, swung her out, and
+as he was steaming away he watched from the bridge Heyst walking
+shoreward along the wharf.  He marched into the long grass and
+vanished--all but the top of his white cork helmet, which seemed to
+swim in a green sea.  Then that too disappeared, as if it had sunk
+into the living depths of the tropical vegetation, which is more
+jealous of men's conquests than the ocean, and which was about to
+close over the last vestiges of the liquidated Tropical Belt Coal
+Company--A. Heyst, manager in the East.
+
+Davidson, a good, simple fellow in his way, was strangely affected.
+It is to be noted that he knew very little of Heyst.  He was one of
+those whom Heyst's finished courtesy of attitude and intonation most
+strongly disconcerted.  He himself was a fellow of fine feeling, I
+think, though of course he had no more polish than the rest of us.
+We were naturally a hail-fellow-well-met crowd, with standards of
+our own--no worse, I daresay, than other people's; but polish was
+not one of them.  Davidson's fineness was real enough to alter the
+course of the steamer he commanded.  Instead of passing to the south
+of Samburan, he made it his practice to take the passage along the
+north shore, within about a mile of the wharf.
+
+"He can see us if he likes to see us," remarked Davidson.  Then he
+had an afterthought:  "I say!  I hope he won't think I am intruding,
+eh?"
+
+We reassured him on the point of correct behaviour.  The sea is open
+to all.
+
+This slight deviation added some ten miles to Davidson's round trip,
+but as that was sixteen hundred miles it did not matter much.
+
+"I have told my owner of it," said the conscientious commander of
+the Sissie.
+
+His owner had a face like an ancient lemon.  He was small and
+wizened--which was strange, because generally a Chinaman, as he
+grows in prosperity, puts on inches of girth and stature.  To serve
+a Chinese firm is not so bad.  Once they become convinced you deal
+straight by them, their confidence becomes unlimited.  You can do no
+wrong.  So Davidson's old Chinaman squeaked hurriedly:
+
+"All right, all right, all right.  You do what you like, captain--"
+
+And there was an end of the matter; not altogether, though.  From
+time to time the Chinaman used to ask Davidson about the white man.
+He was still there, eh?
+
+"I never see him," Davidson had to confess to his owner, who would
+peer at him silently through round, horn-rimmed spectacles, several
+sizes too large for his little old face.  "I never see him."
+
+To me, on occasions he would say:
+
+"I haven't a doubt he's there.  He hides.  It's very unpleasant."
+Davidson was a little vexed with Heyst.  "Funny thing," he went on.
+"Of all the people I speak to, nobody ever asks after him but that
+Chinaman of mine--and Schomberg," he added after a while.
+
+Yes, Schomberg, of course.  He was asking everybody about
+everything, and arranging the information into the most scandalous
+shape his imagination could invent.  From time to time he would step
+up, his blinking, cushioned eyes, his thick lips, his very chestnut
+beard, looking full of malice.
+
+"Evening, gentlemen.  Have you got all you want?  So!  Good!  Well,
+I am told the jungle has choked the very sheds in Black Diamond Bay.
+Fact.  He's a hermit in the wilderness now.  But what can this
+manager get to eat there?  It beats me."
+
+Sometimes a stranger would inquire with natural curiosity:
+
+"Who?  What manager?"
+
+"Oh, a certain Swede,"--with a sinister emphasis, as if he were
+saying "a certain brigand."  "Well known here.  He's turned hermit
+from shame.  That's what the devil does when he's found out."
+
+Hermit.  This was the latest of the more or less witty labels
+applied to Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of
+the tropical belt, where the inane clacking of Schomberg's tongue
+vexed our ears.
+
+But apparently Heyst was not a hermit by temperament.  The sight of
+his land was not invincibly odious to him.  We must believe this,
+since for some reason or other he did come out from his retreat for
+a while.  Perhaps it was only to see whether there were any letters
+for him at the Tesmans.  I don't know.  No one knows.  But this
+reappearance shows that his detachment from the world was not
+complete.  And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble.  Axel
+Heyst ought not to have cared for his letters--or whatever it was
+that brought him out after something more than a year and a half in
+Samburan.  But it was of no use.  He had not the hermit's vocation!
+That was the trouble, it seems.
+
+Be this as it may, he suddenly reappeared in the world, broad chest,
+bald forehead, long moustaches, polite manner, and all--the complete
+Heyst, even to the kindly sunken eyes on which there still rested
+the shadow of Morrison's death.  Naturally, it was Davidson who had
+given him a lift out of his forsaken island.  There were no other
+opportunities, unless some native craft were passing by--a very
+remote and unsatisfactory chance to wait for.  Yes, he came out with
+Davidson, to whom he volunteered the statement that it was only for
+a short time--a few days, no more.  He meant to go back to Samburan.
+
+Davidson expressing his horror and incredulity of such foolishness,
+Heyst explained that when the company came into being he had his few
+belongings sent out from Europe.
+
+To Davidson, as to any of us, the idea of Heyst, the wandering
+drifting, unattached Heyst, having any belongings of the sort that
+can furnish a house was startlingly novel.  It was grotesquely
+fantastic.  It was like a bird owning real property.
+
+"Belongings?  Do you mean chairs and tables?" Davidson asked with
+unconcealed astonishment.
+
+Heyst did mean that.  "My poor father died in London.  It has been
+all stored there ever since," he explained.
+
+"For all these years?" exclaimed Davidson, thinking how long we all
+had known Heyst flitting from tree to tree in a wilderness.
+
+"Even longer," said Heyst, who had understood very well.
+
+This seemed to imply that he had been wandering before he came under
+our observation.  In what regions?  And what early age?  Mystery.
+Perhaps he was a bird that had never had a nest.
+
+"I left school early," he remarked once to Davidson, on the passage.
+"It was in England.  A very good school.  I was not a shining
+success there."
+
+The confessions of Heyst.  Not one of us--with the probable
+exception of Morrison, who was dead--had ever heard so much of his
+history.  It looks as if the experience of hermit life had the power
+to loosen one's tongue, doesn't it?
+
+During that memorable passage, in the Sissie, which took about two
+days, he volunteered other hints--for you could not call it
+information--about his history.  And Davidson was interested.  He
+was interested not because the hints were exciting but because of
+that innate curiosity about our fellows which is a trait of human
+nature.  Davidson's existence, too, running the Sissie along the
+Java Sea and back again, was distinctly monotonous and, in a sense,
+lonely.  He never had any sort of company on board.  Native deck-
+passengers in plenty, of course, but never a white man, so the
+presence of Heyst for two days must have been a godsend.  Davidson
+was telling us all about it afterwards.  Heyst said that his father
+had written a lot of books.  He was a philosopher.
+
+"Seems to me he must have been something of a crank, too," was
+Davidson's comment.  "Apparently he had quarrelled with his people
+in Sweden.  Just the sort of father you would expect Heyst to have.
+Isn't he a bit of a crank himself?  He told me that directly his
+father died he lit out into the wide world on his own, and had been
+on the move till he fetched up against this famous coal business.
+Fits the son of the father somehow, don't you think?"
+
+For the rest, Heyst was as polite as ever.  He offered to pay for
+his passage; but when Davidson refused to hear of it he seized him
+heartily by the hand, gave one of his courtly bows, and declared
+that he was touched by his friendly proceedings.
+
+"I am not alluding to this trifling amount which you decline to
+take," he went on, giving a shake to Davidson's hand.  "But I am
+touched by your humanity."  Another shake.  "Believe me, I am
+profoundly aware of having been an object of it."  Final shake of
+the hand.  All this meant that Heyst understood in a proper sense
+the little Sissie's periodic appearance in sight of his hermitage.
+
+"He's a genuine gentleman," Davidson said to us.  "I was really
+sorry when he went ashore."
+
+We asked him where he had left Heyst.
+
+"Why, in Sourabaya--where else?"
+
+The Tesmans had their principal counting-house in Sourabaya.  There
+had long existed a connection between Heyst and the Tesmans.  The
+incongruity of a hermit having agents did not strike us, nor yet the
+absurdity of a forgotten cast-off, derelict manager of a wrecked,
+collapsed, vanished enterprise, having business to attend to.  We
+said Sourabaya, of course, and took it for granted that he would
+stay with one of the Tesmans.  One of us even wondered what sort of
+reception he would get; for it was known that Julius Tesman was
+unreasonably bitter about the Tropical Belt Coal fiasco.  But
+Davidson set us right.  It was nothing of the kind.  Heyst went to
+stay in Schomberg's hotel, going ashore in the hotel launch.  Not
+that Schomberg would think of sending his launch alongside a mere
+trader like the Sissie.  But she had been meeting a coastal mail-
+packet, and had been signalled to.  Schomberg himself was steering
+her.
+
+"You should have seen Schomberg's eyes bulge out when Heyst jumped
+in with an ancient brown leather bag!" said Davidson.  "He pretended
+not to know who it was--at first, anyway.  I didn't go ashore with
+them.  We didn't stay more than a couple of hours altogether.
+Landed two thousand coconuts and cleared out.  I have agreed to pick
+him up again on my next trip in twenty days' time."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+
+
+Davidson happened to be two days late on his return trip; no great
+matter, certainly, but he made a point of going ashore at once,
+during the hottest hour of the afternoon, to look for Heyst.
+Schomberg's hotel stood back in an extensive enclosure containing a
+garden, some large trees, and, under their spreading boughs, a
+detached "hall available for concerts and other performances," as
+Schomberg worded it in his advertisements.  Torn, and fluttering
+bills, intimating in heavy red capitals CONCERTS EVERY NIGHT, were
+stuck on the brick pillars on each side of the gateway.
+
+The walk had been long and confoundedly sunny.  Davidson stood
+wiping his wet neck and face on what Schomberg called "the piazza."
+Several doors opened on to it, but all the screens were down.  Not a
+soul was in sight, not even a China boy--nothing but a lot of
+painted iron chairs and tables.  Solitude, shade, and gloomy
+silence--and a faint, treacherous breeze which came from under the
+trees and quite unexpectedly caused the melting Davidson to shiver
+slightly--the little shiver of the tropics which in Sourabaya,
+especially, often means fever and the hospital to the incautious
+white man.
+
+The prudent Davidson sought shelter in the nearest darkened room.
+In the artificial dusk, beyond the levels of shrouded billiard-
+tables, a white form heaved up from two chairs on which it had been
+extended.  The middle of the day, table d'hote tiffin once over, was
+Schomberg's easy time.  He lounged out, portly, deliberate, on the
+defensive, the great fair beard like a cuirass over his manly chest.
+He did not like Davidson, never a very faithful client of his.  He
+hit a bell on one of the tables as he went by, and asked in a
+distant, Officer-in-Reserve manner:
+
+"You desire?"
+
+The good Davidson, still sponging his wet neck, declared with
+simplicity that he had come to fetch away Heyst, as agreed.
+
+"Not here!"
+
+A Chinaman appeared in response to the bell.  Schomberg turned to
+him very severely:
+
+"Take the gentleman's order."
+
+Davidson had to be going.  Couldn't wait--only begged that Heyst
+should be informed that the Sissie would leave at midnight.
+
+"Not--here, I am telling you!"
+
+Davidson slapped his thigh in concern.
+
+"Dear me!  Hospital, I suppose."  A natural enough surmise in a very
+feverish locality.
+
+The Lieutenant of the Reserve only pursed up his mouth and raised
+his eyebrows without looking at him.  It might have meant anything,
+but Davidson dismissed the hospital idea with confidence.  However,
+he had to get hold of Heyst between this and midnight:
+
+"He has been staying here?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, he was staying here."
+
+"Can you tell me where he is now?" Davidson went on placidly.
+Within himself he was beginning to grow anxious, having developed
+the affection of a self-appointed protector towards Heyst.  The
+answer he got was:
+
+"Can't tell.  It's none of my business," accompanied by majestic
+oscillations of the hotel-keeper's head, hinting at some awful
+mystery.
+
+Davidson was placidity itself.  It was his nature.  He did not
+betray his sentiments, which were not favourable to Schomberg.
+
+"I am sure to find out at the Tesmans' office," he thought.  But it
+was a very hot hour, and if Heyst was down at the port he would have
+learned already that the Sissie was in.  It was even possible that
+Heyst had already gone on board, where he could enjoy a coolness
+denied to the town.  Davidson, being stout, was much preoccupied
+with coolness and inclined to immobility.  He lingered awhile, as if
+irresolute.  Schomberg, at the door, looking out, affected perfect
+indifference.  He could not keep it up, though.  Suddenly he turned
+inward and asked with brusque rage:
+
+"You wanted to see him?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Davidson.  "We agreed to meet--"
+
+"Don't you bother.  He doesn't care about that now."
+
+"Doesn't he?"
+
+"Well, you can judge for yourself.  He isn't here, is he?  You take
+my word for it.  Don't you bother about him.  I am advising you as a
+friend."
+
+"Thank you," said, Davidson, inwardly startled at the savage tone.
+"I think I will sit down for a moment and have a drink, after all."
+
+This was not what Schomberg had expected to hear.  He called
+brutally:
+
+"Boy!"
+
+The Chinaman approached, and after referring him to the white man by
+a nod the hotel-keeper departed, muttering to himself.  Davidson
+heard him gnash his teeth as he went.
+
+Davidson sat alone with the billiard-tables as if there had been not
+a soul staying in the hotel.  His placidity was so genuine that he
+was not unduly, fretting himself over the absence of Heyst, or the
+mysterious manners Schomberg had treated him to.  He was considering
+these things in his own fairly shrewd way.  Something had happened;
+and he was loath to go away to investigate, being restrained by a
+presentiment that somehow enlightenment would come to him there.  A
+poster of CONCERTS EVERY EVENING, like those on the gate, but in a
+good state of preservation, hung on the wall fronting him.  He
+looked at it idly and was struck by the fact--then not so very
+common--that it was a ladies' orchestra; "Zangiacomo's eastern tour-
+-eighteen performers."  The poster stated that they had had the
+honour of playing their select repertoire before various colonial
+excellencies, also before pashas, sheiks, chiefs, H. H. the Sultan
+of Mascate, etc., etc.
+
+Davidson felt sorry for the eighteen lady-performers.  He knew what
+that sort of life was like, the sordid conditions and brutal
+incidents of such tours led by such Zangiacomos who often were
+anything but musicians by profession.  While he was staring at the
+poster, a door somewhere at his back opened, and a woman came in who
+was looked upon as Schomberg's wife, no doubt with truth.  As
+somebody remarked cynically once, she was too unattractive to be
+anything else.  The opinion that he treated her abominably was based
+on her frightened expression.  Davidson lifted his hat to her.  Mrs.
+Schomberg gave him an inclination of her sallow head and
+incontinently sat down behind a sort of raised counter, facing the
+door, with a mirror and rows of bottles at her back.  Her hair was
+very elaborately done with two ringlets on the left side of her
+scraggy neck; her dress was of silk, and she had come on duty for
+the afternoon.  For some reason or other Schomberg exacted this from
+her, though she added nothing to the fascinations of the place.  She
+sat there in the smoke and noise, like an enthroned idol, smiling
+stupidly over the billiards from time to time, speaking to no one,
+and no one speaking to her.  Schomberg himself took no more interest
+in her than may be implied in a sudden and totally unmotived scowl.
+Otherwise the very Chinamen ignored her existence.
+
+She had interrupted Davidson in his reflections.  Being alone with
+her, her silence and open-mouthed immobility made him uncomfortable.
+He was easily sorry for people.  It seemed rude not to take any
+notice of her.  He said, in allusion to the poster:
+
+"Are you having these people in the house?"
+
+She was so unused to being addressed by customers that at the sound
+of his voice she jumped in her seat.  Davidson was telling us
+afterwards that she jumped exactly like a figure made of wood,
+without losing her rigid immobility.  She did not even move her
+eyes; but she answered him freely, though her very lips seemed made
+of wood.
+
+"They stayed here over a month.  They are gone now.  They played
+every evening."
+
+"Pretty good, were they?"
+
+To this she said nothing; and as she kept on staring fixedly in
+front of her, her silence disconcerted Davidson.  It looked as if
+she had not heard him--which was impossible.  Perhaps she drew the
+line of speech at the expression of opinions.  Schomberg might have
+trained her, for domestic reasons, to keep them to herself.  But
+Davidson felt in honour obliged to converse; so he said, putting his
+own interpretation on this surprising silence:
+
+"I see--not much account.  Such bands hardly ever are.  An Italian
+lot, Mrs. Schomberg, to judge by the name of the boss?"
+
+She shook her head negatively.
+
+"No.  He is a German really; only he dyes his hair and beard black
+for business.  Zangiacomo is his business name."
+
+"That's a curious fact," said Davidson.  His head being full of
+Heyst, it occurred to him that she might be aware of other facts.
+This was a very amazing discovery to anyone who looked at Mrs.
+Schomberg.  Nobody had ever suspected her of having a mind.  I mean
+even a little of it, I mean any at all.  One was inclined to think
+of her as an It--an automaton, a very plain dummy, with an
+arrangement for bowing the head at times and smiling stupidly now
+and then.  Davidson viewed her profile with a flattened nose, a
+hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye.  He asked
+himself:  Did that speak just now?  Will it speak again?  It was as
+exciting, for the mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with a
+mechanism.  A smile played about the fat features of Davidson; the
+smile of a man making an amusing experiment.  He spoke again to her:
+
+"But the other members of that orchestra were real Italians, were
+they not?"
+
+Of course, he didn't care.  He wanted to see whether the mechanism
+would work again.  It did.  It said they were not.  They were of all
+sorts, apparently.  It paused, with the one goggle eye immovably
+gazing down the whole length of the room and through the door
+opening on to the "piazza."  It paused, then went on in the same low
+pitch:
+
+"There was even one English girl."
+
+"Poor devil!"--said Davidson, "I suppose these women are not much
+better than slaves really.  Was that fellow with the dyed beard
+decent in his way?"
+
+The mechanism remained silent.  The sympathetic soul of Davidson
+drew its own conclusions.
+
+"Beastly life for these women!" he said.  "When you say an English
+girl, Mrs. Schomberg, do you really mean a young girl?  Some of
+these orchestra girls are no chicks."
+
+"Young enough," came the low voice out of Mrs. Schomberg's unmoved
+physiognomy.
+
+Davidson, encouraged, remarked that he was sorry for her.  He was
+easily sorry for people.
+
+"Where did they go to from here?" he asked.
+
+"She did not go with them.  She ran away."
+
+This was the pronouncement Davidson obtained next.  It introduced a
+new sort of interest.
+
+"Well!  Well!" he exclaimed placidly; and then, with the air of a
+man who knows life:  "Who with?" he inquired with assurance.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg's immobility gave her an appearance of listening
+intently.  Perhaps she was really listening; but Schomberg must have
+been finishing his sleep in some distant part of the house.  The
+silence was profound, and lasted long enough to become startling.
+Then, enthroned above Davidson, she whispered at last:
+
+"That friend of yours."
+
+"Oh, you know I am here looking for a friend," said Davidson
+hopefully.  "Won't you tell me--"
+
+"I've told you"
+
+"Eh?"
+
+A mist seemed to roll away from before Davidson's eyes, disclosing
+something he could not believe.
+
+"You can't mean it!" he cried.  "He's not the man for it."  But the
+last words came out in a faint voice.  Mrs. Schomberg never moved
+her head the least bit.  Davidson, after the shock which made him
+sit up, went slack all over.
+
+"Heyst!  Such a perfect gentleman!" he exclaimed weakly.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg did not seem to have heard him.  This startling fact
+did not tally somehow with the idea Davidson had of Heyst.  He never
+talked of women, he never seemed to think of them, or to remember
+that they existed; and then all at once--like this!  Running off
+with a casual orchestra girl!
+
+"You might have knocked me down with a feather," Davidson told us
+some time afterwards.
+
+By then he was taking an indulgent view of both the parties to that
+amazing transaction.  First of all, on reflection, he was by no
+means certain that it prevented Heyst from being a perfect
+gentleman, as before.  He confronted our open grins or quiet smiles
+with a serious round face.  Heyst had taken the girl away to
+Samburan; and that was no joking matter.  The loneliness, the ruins
+of the spot, had impressed Davidson's simple soul.  They were
+incompatible with the frivolous comments of people who had not seen
+it.  That black jetty, sticking out of the jungle into the empty
+sea; these roof-ridges of deserted houses peeping dismally above the
+long grass!  Ough!  The gigantic and funeral blackboard sign of the
+Tropical Belt Coal Company, still emerging from a wild growth of
+bushes like an inscription stuck above a grave figured by the tall
+heap of unsold coal at the shore end of the wharf, added to the
+general desolation.
+
+Thus the sensitive Davidson.  The girl must have been miserable
+indeed to follow such a strange man to such a spot.  Heyst had, no
+doubt, told her the truth.  He was a gentleman.  But no words could
+do justice to the conditions of life on Samburan.  A desert island
+was nothing to it.  Moreover, when you were cast away on a desert
+island--why, you could not help yourself; but to expect a fiddle-
+playing girl out of an ambulant ladies' orchestra to remain content
+there for a day, for one single day, was inconceivable.  She would
+be frightened at the first sight of it.  She would scream.
+
+The capacity for sympathy in these stout, placid men!  Davidson was
+stirred to the depths; and it was easy to see that it was about
+Heyst that he was concerned.  We asked him if he had passed that way
+lately.
+
+"Oh, yes.  I always do--about half a mile off."
+
+"Seen anybody about?"
+
+"No, not a soul.  Not a shadow."
+
+"Did you blow your whistle?"
+
+"Blow the whistle?  You think I would do such a thing?"
+
+He rejected the mere possibility of such an unwarrantable intrusion.
+Wonderfully delicate fellow, Davidson!
+
+"Well, but how do you know that they are there?" he was naturally
+asked.
+
+Heyst had entrusted Mrs. Schomberg with a message for Davidson--a
+few lines in pencil on a scrap of crumpled paper.  It was to the
+effect:  that an unforeseen necessity was driving him away before
+the appointed time.  He begged Davidson's indulgence for the
+apparent discourtesy.  The woman of the house--meaning Mrs.
+Schomberg--would give him the facts, though unable to explain them,
+of course.
+
+"What was there to explain?" wondered Davidson dubiously.
+
+"He took a fancy to that fiddle-playing girl, and--"
+
+"And she to him, apparently," I suggested.
+
+"Wonderfully quick work," reflected Davidson.  "What do you think
+will come of it?"
+
+"Repentance, I should say.  But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg has
+been selected for a confidante?"
+
+For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that
+woman whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the
+two billiard-tables--without expression, without movement, without
+voice, without sight.
+
+"Why, she helped the girl to bolt," said Davidson turning at me his
+innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which
+this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow
+which sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling.
+It looked as though he would never get over it.
+
+"Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst's note, twisted like a pipe-light, into
+my lap while I sat there unsuspecting," Davidson went on.  "Directly
+I had recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth she had to do
+with it that Heyst should leave it with her.  And then, behaving
+like a painted image rather than a live woman, she whispered, just
+loud enough for me to hear:
+
+"I helped them.  I got her things together, tied them up in my own
+shawl, and threw them into the compound out of a back window.  I did
+it."
+
+"That woman that you would say hadn't the pluck to lift her little
+finger!" marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice.
+"What do you think of that?"
+
+I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve.  She
+was too lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion.  It was
+impossible to think that Heyst had bribed her.  Whatever means he
+had, he had not the means to do that.  Or could it be that she was
+moved by that disinterested passion for delivering a woman to a man
+which in respectable spheres is called matchmaking?--a highly
+irregular example of it!
+
+"It must have been a very small bundle," remarked Davidson further.
+
+"I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive," I said.
+
+"I don't know.  She was miserable.  I don't suppose it was more than
+a little linen and a couple of those white frocks they wear on the
+platform."
+
+Davidson pursued his own train of thought.  He supposed that such a
+thing had never been heard of in the history of the tropics.  For
+where could you find anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra?  No
+doubt fellows here and there took a fancy to some pretty one--but it
+was not for running away with her.  Oh dear no!  It needed a lunatic
+like Heyst.
+
+"Only think what it means," wheezed Davidson, imaginative under his
+invincible placidity.  "Just only try to think!  Brooding alone on
+Samburan has upset his brain.  He never stopped to consider, or he
+couldn't have done it.  No sane man . . . How is a thing like that
+to go on?  What's he going to do with her in the end?  It's
+madness."
+
+"You say that he's mad.  Schomberg tells us that he must be starving
+on his island; so he may end yet by eating her," I suggested.
+
+Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told
+us.  Indeed, the wonder was that they had been left alone so long.
+The drowsy afternoon was slipping by.  Footsteps and voices
+resounded on the veranda--I beg pardon, the piazza; the scraping of
+chairs, the ping of a smitten bell.  Customers were turning up.
+Mrs. Schomberg was begging Davidson hurriedly, but without looking
+at him, to say nothing to anyone, when on a half-uttered word her
+nervous whisper was cut short.  Through a small inner door Schomberg
+came in, his hair brushed, his beard combed neatly, but his eyelids
+still heavy from his nap.  He looked with suspicion at Davidson, and
+even glanced at his wife; but he was baffled by the natural
+placidity of the one and the acquired habit of immobility in the
+other.
+
+"Have you sent out the drinks?" he asked surlily.
+
+She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared
+with a loaded tray, on his way out.  Schomberg went to the door and
+greeted the customers outside, but did not join them.  He remained
+blocking half the doorway, with his back to the room, and was still
+there when Davidson, after sitting still for a while, rose to go.
+At the noise he made Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his
+hat to Mrs. Schomberg and receive her wooden bow accompanied by a
+stupid grin, and then looked away.  He was loftily dignified.
+Davidson stopped at the door, deep in his simplicity.
+
+"I am sorry you won't tell me anything about my friend's absence,"
+he said.  "My friend Heyst, you know.  I suppose the only course for
+me now is to make inquiries down at the port.  I shall hear
+something there, I don't doubt."
+
+"Make inquiries of the devil!" replied Schomberg in a hoarse mutter.
+
+Davidson's purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been mainly to
+make Mrs. Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain have
+heard something more of Heyst's exploit from another point of view.
+It was a shrewd try.  It was successful in a rather startling way,
+because the hotel-keeper's point of view was horribly abusive.  All
+of a sudden, in the same hoarse sinister tone, he proceeded to call
+Heyst many names, of which "pig-dog" was not the worst, with such
+vehemence that he actually choked himself.  Profiting from the
+pause, Davidson, whose temperament could withstand worse shocks,
+remonstrated in an undertone:
+
+"It's unreasonable to get so angry as that.  Even if he had run off
+with your cash-box--"
+
+The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close to
+Davidson's.
+
+"My cash-box!  My--he--look here, Captain Davidson!  He ran off with
+a girl.  What do I care for the girl?  The girl is nothing to me."
+
+He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start.  That's what
+the girl was; and he reiterated the assertion that she was nothing
+to him.  What he was concerned for was the good name of his house.
+Wherever he had been established, he had always had "artist parties"
+staying in his house.  One recommended him to the others; but what
+would happen now, when it got about that leaders ran the risk in his
+house--his house--of losing members of their troupe?  And just now,
+when he had spent seven hundred and thirty-four guilders in building
+a concert-hall in his compound.  Was that a thing to do in a
+respectable hotel?  The cheek, the indecency, the impudence, the
+atrocity!  Vagabond, impostor, swindler, ruffian, schwein-hund!
+
+He had seized Davidson by a button of his coat, detaining him in the
+doorway, and exactly in the line of Mrs. Schomberg's stony gaze.
+Davidson stole a glance in that direction and thought of making some
+sort of reassuring sign to her, but she looked so bereft of senses,
+and almost of life, perched up there, that it seemed not worth
+while.  He disengaged his button with firm placidity.  Thereupon,
+with a last stifled curse, Schomberg vanished somewhere within, to
+try and compose his spirits in solitude.  Davidson stepped out on
+the veranda.  The party of customers there had become aware of the
+explosive interlude in the doorway.  Davidson knew one of these men,
+and nodded to him in passing; but his acquaintance called out:
+
+"Isn't he in a filthy temper?  He's been like that ever since."
+
+The speaker laughed aloud, while all the others sat smiling.
+Davidson stopped.
+
+"Yes, rather."  His feelings were, he told us, those of bewildered
+resignation; but of course that was no more visible to the others
+than the emotions of a turtle when it withdraws into its shell.
+
+"It seems unreasonable," he murmured thoughtfully.
+
+"Oh, but they had a scrap!" the other said.
+
+"What do you mean?  Was there a fight!--a fight with Heyst?" asked
+Davidson, much perturbed, if somewhat incredulous.
+
+"Heyst?  No, these two--the bandmaster, the fellow who's taking
+these women about and our Schomberg.  Signor Zangiacomo ran amuck in
+the morning, and went for our worthy friend.  I tell you, they were
+rolling on the floor together on this very veranda, after chasing
+each other all over the house, doors slamming, women screaming,
+seventeen of them, in the dining-room; Chinamen up the trees.  Hey,
+John?  You climb tree to see the fight, eh?"
+
+The boy, almond-eyed and impassive, emitted a scornful grunt,
+finished wiping the table, and withdrew.
+
+"That's what it was--a real, go-as-you-please scrap.  And Zangiacomo
+began it.  Oh, here's Schomberg.  Say, Schomberg, didn't he fly at
+you, when the girl was missed, because it was you who insisted that
+the artists should go about the audience during the interval?"
+
+Schomberg had reappeared in the doorway.  He advanced.  His bearing
+was stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded, and he
+controlled his voice with apparent effort.
+
+"Certainly.  That was only business.  I quoted him special terms and
+all for your sake, gentlemen.  I was thinking of my regular
+customers.  There's nothing to do in the evenings in this town.  I
+think, gentlemen, you were all pleased at the opportunity of hearing
+a little good music; and where's the harm of offering a grenadine,
+or what not, to a lady artist?  But that fellow--that Swede--he got
+round the girl.  He got round all the people out here.  I've been
+watching him for years.  You remember how he got round Morrison."
+
+He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off.  The
+customers at the table exchanged glances silently.  Davidson's
+attitude was that of a spectator.  Schomberg's moody pacing of the
+billiard-room could be heard on the veranda.
+
+"And the funniest part is," resumed the man who had been speaking
+before--an English clerk in a Dutch house--"the funniest part is
+that before nine o'clock that same morning those two were driving
+together in a gharry down to the port, to look for Heyst and the
+girl.  I saw them rushing around making inquiries.  I don't know
+what they would have done to the girl, but they seemed quite ready
+to fall upon your Heyst, Davidson, and kill him on the quay."
+
+He had never, he said, seen anything so queer.  Those two
+investigators working feverishly to the same end were glaring at
+each other with surprising ferocity.  In hatred and mistrust they
+entered a steam-launch, and went flying from ship to ship all over
+the harbour, causing no end of sensation.  The captains of vessels,
+coming on shore later in the day, brought tales of a strange
+invasion, and wanted to know who were the two offensive lunatics in
+a steam-launch, apparently after a man and a girl, and telling a
+story of which one could make neither head nor tail.  Their
+reception by the roadstead was generally unsympathetic, even to the
+point of the mate of an American ship bundling them out over the
+rail with unseemly precipitation.
+
+Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone
+in the night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the
+eastward.  This was known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom
+Heyst hired for the purpose at three o'clock in the morning.  The
+Tesman schooner had sailed at daylight with the usual land breeze,
+and was probably still in sight in the offing at the time.  However,
+the two pursuers after their experience with the American mate, made
+for the shore.  On landing, they had another violent row in the
+German language.  But there was no second fight; and finally, with
+looks of fierce animosity, they got together into a gharry--
+obviously with the frugal view of sharing expenses--and drove away,
+leaving an astonished little crowd of Europeans and natives on the
+quay.
+
+After hearing this wondrous tale, Davidson went away from the hotel
+veranda, which was filling with Schomberg's regular customers.
+Heyst's escapade was the general topic of conversation.  Never
+before had that unaccountable individual been the cause of so much
+gossip, he judged.  No!  Not even in the beginnings of the Tropical
+Belt Coal Company when becoming for a moment a public character was
+he the object of a silly criticism and unintelligent envy for every
+vagabond and adventurer in the islands.  Davidson concluded that
+people liked to discuss that sort of scandal better than any other.
+
+I asked him if he believed that this was such a great scandal after
+all.
+
+"Heavens, no!" said that excellent man who, himself, was incapable
+of any impropriety of conduct.  "But it isn't a thing I would have
+done myself; I mean even if I had not been married."
+
+There was no implied condemnation in the statement; rather something
+like regret.  Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its
+essence the rescue of a distressed human being.  Not that we were
+two romantics, tingeing the world to the hue of our temperament, but
+that both of us had been acute enough to discover a long time ago
+that Heyst was.
+
+"I shouldn't have had the pluck," he continued.  "I see a thing all
+round, as it were; but Heyst doesn't, or else he would have been
+scared.  You don't take a woman into a desert jungle without being
+made sorry for it sooner or later, in one way or another; and Heyst
+being a gentleman only makes it worse."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+
+
+We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened
+that I did not meet Davidson again for some three months.  When we
+did come together, almost the first thing he said to me was:
+
+"I've seen him."
+
+Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty,
+that he had not intruded.  He was called in.  Otherwise he would not
+have dreamed of breaking in upon Heyst's privacy.
+
+"I am certain you wouldn't," I assured him, concealing my amusement
+at his wonderful delicacy.  He was the most delicate man that ever
+took a small steamer to and fro among the islands.  But his
+humanity, which was not less strong and praiseworthy, had induced
+him to take his steamer past Samburan wharf (at an average distance
+of a mile) every twenty-three days--exactly.  Davidson was delicate,
+humane, and regular.
+
+"Heyst called you in?" I asked, interested.
+
+Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date.
+Davidson was examining the shore through his glasses with his
+unwearied and punctual humanity as he steamed past Samburan.
+
+I saw a man in white.  It could only have been Heyst.  He had
+fastened some sort of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was waving
+it at the end of the old wharf.
+
+Davidson didn't like to take his steamer alongside--for fear of
+being indiscreet, I suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped
+his engines, and lowered a boat.  He went himself in that boat,
+which was manned, of course, by his Malay seamen.
+
+Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his
+signalling-pole; and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down
+engaged busily in unfastening the flag from it.
+
+"Was there anything wrong?" I inquired, Davidson having paused in
+his narrative and my curiosity being naturally aroused.  You must
+remember that Heyst as the Archipelago knew him was not--what shall
+I say--was not a signalling sort of man.
+
+"The very words that came out of my mouth," said Davidson, "before I
+laid the boat against the piles.  I could not help it!"
+
+Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag
+thing, which struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.
+
+"No, nothing wrong," he cried.  His white teeth flashed agreeably
+below the coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.
+
+I don't know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which
+prevented Davidson from clambering upon the wharf.  He stood up in
+the boat, and, above him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles,
+thanking him and apologizing for the liberty, exactly in his usual
+manner.  Davidson had expected some change in the man, but there was
+none.  Nothing in him betrayed the momentous fact that within that
+jungle there was a girl, a performer in a ladies' orchestra, whom he
+had carried straight off the concert platform into the wilderness.
+He was not ashamed or defiant or abashed about it.  He might have
+been a shade confidential when addressing Davidson.  And his words
+were enigmatical.
+
+"I took this course of signalling to you," he said to Davidson,
+"because to preserve appearances might be of the utmost importance.
+Not to me, of course.  I don't care what people may say, and of
+course no one can hurt me.  I suppose I have done a certain amount
+of harm, since I allowed myself to be tempted into action.  It
+seemed innocent enough, but all action is bound to be harmful.  It
+is devilish.  That is why this world is evil upon the whole.  But I
+have done with it!  I shall never lift a little finger again.  At
+one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the
+best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we
+want it or not; but now I, have done with observation, too."
+
+Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms
+alongside an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush.
+He had never heard anybody speak like this before; certainly not
+Heyst, whose conversation was concise, polite, with a faint ring of
+playfulness in the cultivated tones of his voice.
+
+"He's gone mad," Davidson thought to himself.
+
+But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was
+obliged to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy.  It was truly
+most unusual talk.  Then he remembered--in his surprise he had lost
+sight of it--that Heyst now had a girl there.  This bizarre
+discourse was probably the effect of the girl.  Davidson shook off
+the absurd feeling, and asked, wishing to make clear his
+friendliness, and not knowing what else to say:
+
+"You haven't run short of stores or anything like that?"
+
+Heyst smiled and shook his head:
+
+"No, no.  Nothing of the kind.  We are fairly well off here.
+Thanks, all the same.  If I have taken the liberty to detain you, it
+is I not from any uneasiness for myself and my--companion.  The
+person I was thinking of when I made up my mind to invoke your
+assistance is Mrs. Schomberg."
+
+"I have talked with her," interjected Davidson.
+
+"Oh!  You?  Yes, I hoped she would find means to--"
+
+"But she didn't tell me much," interrupted Davidson, who was not
+averse from hearing something--he hardly knew what.
+
+"H'm--Yes.  But that note of mine?  Yes?  She found an opportunity
+to give it to you?  That's good, very good.  She's more resourceful
+than one would give her credit for."
+
+"Women often are--" remarked Davidson.  The strangeness from which
+he had suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried off a
+girl, wore off as the minutes went by.  "There's a lot of
+unexpectedness about women," he generalized with a didactic aim
+which seemed to miss its mark; for the next thing Heyst said was:
+
+"This is Mrs. Schomberg's shawl."  He touched the stuff hanging over
+his arm.  "An Indian thing, I believe," he added, glancing at his
+arm sideways.
+
+"It isn't of particular value," said Davidson truthfully.
+
+"Very likely.  The point is that it belongs to Schomberg's wife.
+That Schomberg seems to be an unconscionable ruffian--don't you
+think so?"
+
+Davidson smiled faintly.
+
+"We out here have got used to him," he said, as if excusing a
+universal and guilty toleration of a manifest nuisance.  "I'd hardly
+call him that.  I only know him as a hotel-keeper."
+
+"I never knew him even as that--not till this time, when you were so
+obliging as to take me to Sourabaya, I went to stay there from
+economy.  The Netherlands House is very expensive, and they expect
+you to bring your own servant with you.  It's a nuisance."
+
+"Of course, of course," protested Davidson hastily.
+
+After a short silence Heyst returned to the matter of the shawl.  He
+wanted to send it back to Mrs. Schomberg.  He said that it might be
+very awkward for her if she were unable, if asked, to produce it.
+This had given him, Heyst, much uneasiness.  She was terrified of
+Schomberg.  Apparently she had reason to be.
+
+Davidson had remarked that, too.  Which did not prevent her, he
+pointed out, from making a fool of him, in a way, for the sake of a
+stranger.
+
+"Oh!  You know!" said Heyst.  "Yes, she helped me--us."
+
+"She told me so.  I had quite a talk with her," Davidson informed
+him.  "Fancy anyone having a talk with Mrs. Schomberg!  If I were to
+tell the fellows they wouldn't believe me.  How did you get round
+her, Heyst?  How did you think of it?  Why, she looks too stupid to
+understand human speech and too scared to shoo a chicken away.  Oh,
+the women, the women!  You don't know what there may be in the
+quietest of them."
+
+"She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life,"
+said Heyst.  "It's a very respectable task."
+
+"Is that it?  I had some idea it was that," confessed Davidson.
+
+He then imparted to Heyst the story of the violent proceedings
+following on the discovery of his flight.  Heyst's polite attention
+to the tale took on a sombre cast; but he manifested no surprise,
+and offered no comment.  When Davidson had finished he handed down
+the shawl into the boat, and Davidson promised to do his best to
+return it to Mrs. Schomberg in some secret fashion.  Heyst expressed
+his thanks in a few simple words, set off by his manner of finished
+courtesy.  Davidson prepared to depart.  They were not looking at
+each other.  Suddenly Heyst spoke:
+
+"You understand that this was a case of odious persecution, don't
+you?  I became aware of it and--"
+
+It was a view which the sympathetic Davidson was capable of
+appreciating.
+
+"I am not surprised to hear it," he said placidly.  "Odious enough,
+I dare say.  And you, of course--not being a married man--were free
+to step in.  Ah, well!"
+
+He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines
+in his hands when Heyst observed abruptly:
+
+"The world is a bad dog.  It will bite you if you give it a chance;
+but I think that here we can safely defy the fates."
+
+When relating all this to me, Davidson's only comment was:
+
+"Funny notion of defying the fates--to take a woman in tow!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+
+
+Some considerable time afterwards--we did not meet very often--I
+asked Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he
+had tackled his mission in a direct way, and had found it easy
+enough.  At the very first call he made in Samarang he rolled the
+shawl as tightly as he could into the smallest possible brown-paper
+parcel, which he carried ashore with him.  His business in the town
+being transacted, he got into a gharry with the parcel and drove to
+the hotel.  With his precious experience, he timed his arrival
+accurately for the hour of Schomberg's siesta.  Finding the place
+empty as on the former occasion, he marched into the billiard-room,
+took a seat at the back, near the sort of dais which Mrs. Schomberg
+would in due course come to occupy, and broke the slumbering silence
+of the house by thumping a bell vigorously.  Of course a Chinaman
+appeared promptly.  Davidson ordered a drink and sat tight.
+
+"I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if
+necessary," he said--Davidson's a very abstemious man--"rather than
+take that parcel out of the house again.  Couldn't leave it in a
+corner without letting the woman know it was there.  It might have
+turned out worse for her than not bringing the thing back at all."
+
+And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing
+two or three iced drinks which he did not want.  Presently, as he
+hoped it would happen, Mrs. Schomberg came in, silk dress, long
+neck, ringlets, scared eyes, and silly grin--all complete.  Probably
+that lazy beast had sent her out to see who was the thirsty customer
+waking up the echoes of the house at this quiet hour.  Bow, nod--and
+she clambered up to her post behind the raised counter, looking so
+helpless, so inane, as she sat there, that if it hadn't been for the
+parcel, Davidson declared, he would have thought he had merely
+dreamed all that had passed between them.  He ordered another drink,
+to get the Chinaman out of the room, and then seized the parcel,
+which was reposing on a chair near him, and with no more than a
+mutter--"this is something of yours"--he rammed it swiftly into a
+recess in the counter, at her feet.  There!  The rest was her
+affair.  And just in time, too.  Schomberg turned up, yawning
+affectedly, almost before Davidson had regained his seat.  He cast
+about suspicious and irate glances.  An invincible placidity of
+expression helped Davidson wonderfully at the moment, and the other,
+of course, could have no grounds for the slightest suspicion of any
+sort of understanding between his wife and this customer.
+
+As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss.  Davidson was lost
+in admiration.  He believed, now, that the woman had been putting it
+on for years.  She never even winked.  It was immense!  The insight
+he had obtained almost frightened him; he couldn't get over his
+wonder at knowing more of the real Mrs. Schomberg than anybody in
+the Islands, including Schomberg himself.  She was a miracle of
+dissimulation.  No wonder Heyst got the girl away from under two
+men's noses, if he had her to help with the job!
+
+The greatest wonder, after all, was Heyst getting mixed up with
+petticoats.  The fellow's life had been open to us for years and
+nothing could have been more detached from feminine associations.
+Except that he stood drinks to people on suitable occasions, like
+any other man, this observer of facts seemed to have no connection
+with earthly affairs and passions.  The very courtesy of his manner,
+the flavour of playfulness in the voice set him apart.  He was like
+a feather floating lightly in the workaday atmosphere which was the
+breath of our nostrils.  For this reason whenever this looker-on
+took contact with things he attracted attention.  First, it was the
+Morrison partnership of mystery, then came the great sensation of
+the Tropical Belt Coal where indeed varied interests were involved:
+a real business matter.  And then came this elopement, this
+incongruous phenomenon of self-assertion, the greatest wonder of
+all, astonishing and amusing.
+
+Davidson admitted to me that, the hubbub was subsiding; and the
+affair would have been already forgotten, perhaps, if that ass
+Schomberg had not kept on gnashing his teeth publicly about it.  It
+was really provoking that Davidson should not be able to give one
+some idea of the girl.  Was she pretty?  He didn't know.  He had
+stayed the whole afternoon in Schomberg's hotel, mainly for the
+purpose of finding out something about her.  But the story was
+growing stale.  The parties at the tables on the veranda had other,
+fresher, events to talk about and Davidson shrank from making direct
+inquiries.  He sat placidly there, content to be disregarded and
+hoping for some chance word to turn up.  I shouldn't wonder if the
+good fellow hadn't been dozing.  It's difficult to give you an
+adequate idea of Davidson's placidity.
+
+Presently Schomberg, wandering about, joined a party that had taken
+the table next to Davidson's.
+
+"A man like that Swede, gentlemen, is a public danger," he began.
+"I remember him for years.  I won't say anything of his spying--
+well, he used to say himself he was looking for out-of-the-way facts
+and what is that if not spying?  He was spying into everybody's
+business.  He got hold of Captain Morrison, squeezed him dry, like
+you would an orange, and scared him off to Europe to die there.
+Everybody knows that Captain Morrison had a weak chest.  Robbed
+first and murdered afterwards!  I don't mince words--not I.  Next he
+gets up that swindle of the Belt Coal.  You know all about it.  And
+now, after lining his pockets with other people's money, he kidnaps
+a white girl belonging to an orchestra which is performing in my
+public room for the benefit of my patrons, and goes off to live like
+a prince on that island, where nobody can get at him.  A damn silly
+girl . . . It's disgusting--tfui!"
+
+He spat.  He choked with rage--for he saw visions, no doubt.  He
+jumped up from his chair, and went away to flee from them--perhaps.
+He went into the room where Mrs. Schomberg sat.  Her aspect could
+not have been very soothing to the sort of torment from which he was
+suffering.
+
+Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst.  His proceeding
+was to enter into conversation with one and another, casually, and
+showing no particular knowledge of the affair, in order to discover
+something about the girl.  Was she anything out of the way?  Was she
+pretty?  She couldn't have been markedly so.  She had not attracted
+special notice.  She was young--on that everybody agreed.  The
+English clerk of Tesmans remembered that she had a sallow face.  He
+was respectable and highly proper.  He was not the sort to associate
+with such people.  Most of these women were fairly battered
+specimens.  Schomberg had them housed in what he called the
+Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending and
+washing their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out to
+dry between the trees, like a lot of washerwomen.  They looked very
+much like middle-aged washerwomen on the platform, too.  But the
+girl had been living in the main building along with the boss, the
+director, the fellow with the black beard, and a hard-bitten, oldish
+woman who took the piano and was understood to be the fellow's wife.
+
+This was not a very satisfactory result.  Davidson stayed on, and
+even joined the table d'hote dinner, without gleaning any more
+information.  He was resigned.
+
+"I suppose," he wheezed placidly, "I am bound to see her some day."
+
+He meant to take the Samburan channel every trip, as before of
+course.
+
+"Yes," I said.  "No doubt you will.  Some day Heyst will be
+signalling to you again; and I wonder what it will be for."
+
+Davidson made no reply.  He had his own ideas about that, and his
+silence concealed a good deal of thought.  We spoke no more of
+Heyst's girl.  Before we separated, he gave me a piece of unrelated
+observation.
+
+"It's funny," he said, "but I fancy there's some gambling going on
+in the evening at Schomberg's place, on the quiet.  I've noticed men
+strolling away in twos and threes towards that hall where the
+orchestra used to play.  The windows must be specially well
+shuttered, because I could not spy the smallest gleam of light from
+that direction; but I can't believe that those beggars would go in
+there only to sit and think of their sins in the dark."
+
+"That's strange.  It's incredible that Schomberg should risk that
+sort of thing," I said.
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+
+
+As we know, Heyst had gone to stay in Schomberg's hotel in complete
+ignorance that his person was odious to that worthy.  When he
+arrived, Zangiacomo's Ladies' Orchestra had been established there
+for some time.
+
+The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost
+corner of the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had
+something to do with money.  He transacted it quickly, and then
+found himself with nothing to do while he awaited Davidson, who was
+to take him back to his solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst
+meant to go.  He whom we used to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was
+suffering from thorough disenchantment.  Not with the islands,
+however.  The Archipelago has a lasting fascination.  It is not easy
+to shake off the spell of island life.  Heyst was disenchanted with
+life as a whole.  His scornful temperament, beguiled into action,
+suffered from failure in a subtle way unknown to men accustomed to
+grapple with the realities of common human enterprise.  It was like
+the gnawing pain of useless apostasy, a sort of shame before his own
+betrayed nature; and in addition, he also suffered from plain,
+downright remorse.  He deemed himself guilty of Morrison's death.  A
+rather absurd feeling, since no one could possibly have foreseen the
+horrors of the cold, wet summer lying in wait for poor Morrison at
+home.
+
+It was not in Heyst's character to turn morose; but his mental state
+was not compatible with a sociable mood.  He spent his evenings
+sitting apart on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel.  The lamentations
+of string instruments issued from the building in the hotel
+compound, the approaches to which were decorated with Japanese paper
+lanterns strung up between the trunks of several big trees.  Scraps
+of tunes more or less plaintive reached his ears.  They pursued him
+even into his bedroom, which opened into an upstairs veranda.  The
+fragmentary and rasping character of these sounds made their
+intrusion inexpressibly tedious in the long run.  Like most
+dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear the music of the
+spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had a taste for
+silence which he had been able to gratify for years.  The islands
+are very quiet.  One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark
+garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the
+sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness.  A
+sort of smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of
+their people are soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some
+protecting spell.
+
+Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the
+early days.  For him, however, that was broken.  He was no longer
+enchanted, though he was still a captive of the islands.  He had no
+intention to leave them ever.  Where could he have gone to, after
+all these years?  Not a single soul belonging to him lived anywhere
+on earth.  Of this fact--not such a remote one, after all--he had
+only lately become aware; for it is failure that makes a man enter
+into himself and reckon up his resources.  And though he had made up
+his mind to retire from the world in hermit fashion, yet he was
+irrationally moved by this sense of loneliness which had come to him
+in the hour of renunciation.  It hurt him.  Nothing is more painful
+than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our
+intelligence and our feelings.
+
+Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the comer of his eye.
+Towards the unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
+lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour.  Nudging certain of his
+customers with his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs "that
+Swede" was giving himself.
+
+"I really don't know why he has come to stay in my house.  This
+place isn't good enough for him.  I wish to goodness he had gone
+somewhere else to show off his superiority.  Here I have got up this
+series of concerts for you gentlemen, just to make things a little
+brighter generally; and do you think he'll condescend to step in and
+listen to a piece or two of an evening?  Not he.  I know him of old.
+There he sits at the dark end of the piazza, all the evening long--
+planning some new swindle, no doubt.  For two-pence I would ask him
+to go and look for quarters somewhere else; only one doesn't like to
+treat a white man like that out in the tropics.  I don't know how
+long he means to stay, but I'm willing to bet a trifle that he'll
+never work himself up to the point of spending the fifty cents of
+entrance money for the sake of a little good music."
+
+Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost.  One
+evening Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked,
+scraped snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with
+a mattress as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net.  He
+descended among the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns
+picked out parts of their great rugged trunks, here and there, in
+the great mass of darkness under the lofty foliage.  More lanterns,
+of the shape of cylindrical concertinas, hanging in a row from a
+slack string, decorated the doorway of what Schomberg called
+grandiloquently "my concert-hall."  In his desperate mood Heyst
+ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain, and went in.
+
+The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported
+pine boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning.
+An instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing,
+scraping, squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano,
+operated upon by a bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered nostrils,
+rained hard notes like hail through the tempest of fiddles.  The
+small platform was filled with white muslin dresses and crimson
+sashes slanting from shoulders provided with bare arms, which sawed
+away without respite.  Zangiacomo conducted.  He wore a white mess-
+jacket, a black dress waistcoat, and white trousers.  His longish,
+tousled hair and his great beard were purple-black.  He was
+horrible.  The heat was terrific.  There were perhaps thirty people
+having drinks at several little tables.  Heyst, quite overcome by
+the volume of noise, dropped into a chair.  In the quick time of
+that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the
+movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces,
+the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of
+brutality--something cruel, sensual and repulsive.
+
+"This is awful!" Heyst murmured to himself.
+
+But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise.  He did not
+flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do.
+He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing
+could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his
+senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this
+rude exhibition of vigour.  The Zangiacomo band was not making
+music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious
+energy.  One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that
+impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to see the people
+sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their
+glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger, or fear.  Heyst
+averted his gaze from the unnatural spectacle of their indifference.
+
+When the piece of music came to an end the relief was so great that
+he felt slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his
+feet.  When he raised his eyes, the audience, most perversely, was
+exhibiting signs of animation and interest in their faces, and the
+women in white muslin dresses were coming down in pairs from the
+platform into the body of Schomberg's "concert-hall."  They
+dispersed themselves all over the place.  The male creature with the
+hooked nose and purple-black beard disappeared somewhere.  This was
+the interval during which, as the astute Schomberg had stipulated,
+the members of the orchestra were encouraged to favour the members
+of the audience with their company--that is, such members as seemed
+inclined to fraternize with the arts in a familiar and generous
+manner; the symbol of familiarity and generosity consisting in
+offers of refreshment.
+
+The procedure struck Heyst as highly incorrect.  However, the
+impropriety of Schomberg's ingenious scheme was defeated by the
+circumstance that most of the women were no longer young, and that
+none of them had ever been beautiful.  Their more or less worn
+checks were slightly rouged, but apart from that fact, which might
+have been simply a matter of routine, they did not seem to take the
+success of the scheme unduly to heart.  The impulse to fraternize
+with the arts being obviously weak in the audience, some of the
+musicians sat down listlessly at unoccupied tables, while others
+went on perambulating the central passage:  arm in arm, glad enough,
+no doubt, to stretch their legs while resting their arms.  Their
+crimson sashes gave a factitious touch of gaiety to the smoky
+atmosphere of the concert-hall; and Heyst felt a sudden pity for
+these beings, exploited, hopeless, devoid of charm and grace, whose
+fate of cheerless dependence invested their coarse and joyless
+features with a touch of pathos.
+
+Heyst was temperamentally sympathetic.  To have them passing and
+repassing close to his little table was painful to him.  He was
+preparing to rise and go out when he noticed that two white muslin
+dresses and crimson sashes had not yet left the platform.  One of
+these dresses concealed the raw-boned frame of the woman with the
+bad-tempered curve to her nostrils.  She was no less a personage
+than Mrs. Zangiacomo.  She had left the piano, and, with her back to
+the hall, was preparing the parts for the second half of the
+concert, with a brusque, impatient action of her ugly elbow.  This
+task done, she turned, and, perceiving the other white muslin dress
+motionless on a chair in the second row, she strode towards it
+between the music-stands with an aggressive and masterful gait.  On
+the lap of that dress there lay, unclasped and idle, a pair of small
+hands, not very white, attached to well-formed arms.  The next
+detail Heyst was led to observe was the arrangement of the hair--two
+thick, brown tresses rolled round an attractively shaped head.
+
+"A girl, by Jove!" he exclaimed mentally.
+
+It was evident that she was a girl.  It was evident in the outline
+of the shoulders, in the slender white bust springing up, barred
+slantwise by the crimson sash, from the bell-shaped spread of muslin
+skirt hiding the chair on which she sat averted a little from the
+body of the hall.  Her feet, in low white shoes, were crossed
+prettily.
+
+She had captured Heyst's awakened faculty of observation; he had the
+sensation of a new experience.  That was because his faculty of
+observation had never before been captured by any feminine creature
+in that marked and exclusive fashion.  He looked at her anxiously,
+as no man ever looks at another man; and he positively forgot where
+he was.  He had lost touch with his surroundings.  The big woman,
+advancing, concealed the girl from his sight for a moment.  She bent
+over the seated youthful figure, in passing it very close, as if to
+drop a word into its ear.  Her lips did certainly move.  But what
+sort of word could it have been to make the girl jump up so swiftly?
+Heyst, at his table, was surprised into a sympathetic start.  He
+glanced quickly round.  Nobody was looking towards the platform; and
+when his eyes swept back there again, the girl, with the big woman
+treading at her heels, was coming down the three steps from the
+platform to the floor of the hall.  There she paused, stumbled one
+pace forward, and stood still again, while the other--the escort,
+the dragoon, the coarse big woman of the piano--passed her roughly,
+and, marching truculently down the centre aisle between the chairs
+and tables, went out to rejoin the hook-nosed Zangiacomo somewhere
+outside.  During her extraordinary transit, as if everything in the
+hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes met the upward
+glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl.  She had
+not moved.  Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.
+
+Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips.  Then
+he got up.  It was the same sort of impulse which years ago had made
+him cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli in the
+island of Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him
+then, a man in trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.
+
+It was the same impulse.  But he did not recognize it.  He was not
+thinking of Morrison then.  It may be said that, for the first time
+since the final abandonment of the Samburan coal mine, he had
+completely forgotten the late Morrison.  It is true that to a
+certain extent he had forgotten also where he was.  Thus, unchecked
+by any sort of self consciousness, Heyst walked up the central
+passage.
+
+Several of the women, by this time, had found anchorage here and
+there among the occupied tables.  They talked to the men, leaning on
+their elbows, and suggesting funnily--if it hadn't been for the
+crimson sashes--in their white dresses an assembly of middle-aged
+brides with free and easy manners and hoarse voices.  The murmuring
+noise of conversations carried on with some spirit filled
+Schomberg's concert-room.  Nobody remarked Heyst's movements; for
+indeed he was not the only man on his legs there.  He had been
+confronting the girl for some time before she became aware of his
+presence.  She was looking down, very still, without colour, without
+glances, without voice, without movement.  It was only when Heyst
+addressed her in his courteous tone that she raised her eyes.
+
+"Excuse me," he said in English, "but that horrible female has done
+something to you.  She has pinched you, hasn't she?  I am sure she
+pinched you just now, when she stood by your chair."
+
+The girl received this overture with the wide, motionless stare of
+profound astonishment.  Heyst, vexed with himself, suspected that
+she did not understand what he said.  One could not tell what
+nationality these women were, except that they were of all sorts.
+But she was astonished almost more by the near presence of the man
+himself, by his largely bald head, by the white brow, the sunburnt
+cheeks, the long, horizontal moustaches of crinkly bronze hair, by
+the kindly expression of the man's blue eyes looking into her own.
+He saw the stony amazement in hers give way to a momentary alarm,
+which was succeeded by an expression of resignation.
+
+"I am sure she pinched your arm most cruelly," he murmured, rather
+disconcerted now at what he had done.
+
+It was a great comfort to hear her say:
+
+"It wouldn't have been the first time.  And suppose she did--what
+are you going to do about it?"
+
+"I don't know," he said with a faint, remote playfulness in his tone
+which had not been heard in it lately, and which seemed to catch her
+ear pleasantly.  "I am grieved to say that I don't know.  But can I
+do anything?  What would you wish me to do?  Pray command me."
+
+Again, the greatest astonishment became visible in her face; for she
+now perceived how different he was from the other men in the room.
+He was as different from them as she was different from the other
+members of the ladies' orchestra.
+
+"Command you?" she breathed, after a time, in a bewildered tone.
+"Who are you?" she asked a little louder.
+
+"I am staying in this hotel for a few days.  I just dropped in
+casually here.  This outrage--"
+
+"Don't you try to interfere," she said so earnestly that Heyst
+asked, in his faintly playful tone:
+
+"Is it your wish that I should leave you?"
+
+"I haven't said that," the girl answered.  "She pinched me because I
+didn't get down here quick enough--"
+
+"I can't tell you how indignant I am--" said Heyst.  "But since you
+are down here now," he went on, with the ease of a man of the world
+speaking to a young lady in a drawing-room, "hadn't we better sit
+down?"
+
+She obeyed his inviting gesture, and they sat down on the nearest
+chairs.  They looked at each other across a little round table with
+a surprised, open gaze, self-consciousness growing on them so slowly
+that it was a long time before they averted their eyes; and very
+soon they met again, temporarily, only to rebound, as it were.  At
+last they steadied in contact, but by that time, say some fifteen
+minutes from the moment when they sat down, the "interval" came to
+an end.
+
+So much for their eyes.  As to the conversation, it had been
+perfectly insignificant because naturally they had nothing to say to
+each other.  Heyst had been interested by the girl's physiognomy.
+Its expression was neither simple nor yet very clear.  It was not
+distinguished--that could not be expected--but the features had more
+fineness than those of any other feminine countenance he had ever
+had the opportunity to observe so closely.  There was in it
+something indefinably audacious and infinitely miserable--because
+the temperament and the existence of that girl were reflected in it.
+But her voice!  It seduced Heyst by its amazing quality.  It was a
+voice fit to utter the most exquisite things, a voice which would
+have made silly chatter supportable and the roughest talk
+fascinating.  Heyst drank in its charm as one listens to the tone of
+some instrument without heeding the tune.
+
+"Do you sing as well as play?" he asked her abruptly.
+
+"Never sang a note in my life," she said, obviously surprised by the
+irrelevant question; for they had not been discoursing of sweet
+sounds.  She was clearly unaware of her voice.  "I don't remember
+that I ever had much reason to sing since I was little," she added.
+
+That inelegant phrase, by the mere vibrating, warm nobility of the
+sound, found its way into Heyst's heart.  His mind, cool, alert,
+watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity
+of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where
+our unexpressed longings lie.
+
+"You are English, of course?" he said.
+
+"What do you think?" she answered in the most charming accents.
+Then, as if thinking that it was her turn to place a question:  "Why
+do you always smile when you speak?"
+
+It was enough to make anyone look grave, but her good faith was so
+evident that Heyst recovered himself at once.
+
+"It's my unfortunate manner--" he said with his delicate, polished
+playfulness.  "It is very objectionable to you?"
+
+She was very serious.
+
+"No.  I only noticed it.  I haven't come across so many pleasant
+people as all that, in my life."
+
+"It's certain that this woman who plays the piano is infinitely more
+disagreeable than any cannibal I have ever had to do with."
+
+"I believe you!"  She shuddered.  "How did you come to have anything
+to do with cannibals?"
+
+"It would be too long a tale," said Heyst with a faint smile.
+Heyst's smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded badly with his
+great moustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked as
+comfortable as a shy bird in its native thicket.  "Much too long.
+How did you get amongst this lot here?"
+
+"Bad luck," she answered briefly.
+
+"No doubt, no doubt," Heyst assented with slight nods.  Then, still
+indignant at the pinch which he had divined rather than actually
+seen inflicted:  "I say, couldn't you defend yourself somehow?"
+
+She had risen already.  The ladies of the orchestra were slowly
+regaining their places.  Some were already seated, idle stony-eyed,
+before the music-stands.  Heyst was standing up, too.
+
+"They are too many for me," she said.
+
+These few words came out of the common experience of mankind; yet by
+virtue of her voice, they thrilled Heyst like a revelation.  His
+feelings were in a state of confusion, but his mind was clear.
+
+"That's bad.  But it isn't actual ill-usage that this girl is
+complaining of," he thought lucidly after she left him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+
+
+That was how it began.  How it was that it ended, as we know it did
+end, is not so easy to state precisely.  It is very clear that Heyst
+was not indifferent, I won't say to the girl, but to the girl's
+fate.  He was the same man who had plunged after the submerged
+Morrison whom he hardly knew otherwise than by sight and through the
+usual gossip of the islands.  But this was another sort of plunge
+altogether, and likely to lead to a very different kind of
+partnership.
+
+Did he reflect at all?  Probably.  He was sufficiently reflective.
+But if he did, it was with insufficient knowledge.  For there is no
+evidence that he paused at any time between the date of that evening
+and the morning of the flight.  Truth to say, Heyst was not one of
+those men who pause much.  Those dreamy spectators of the world's
+agitation are terrible once the desire to act gets hold of them.
+They lower their heads and charge a wall with an amazing serenity
+which nothing but an indisciplined imagination can give.
+
+He was not a fool.  I suppose he knew--or at least he felt--where
+this was leading him.  But his complete inexperience gave him the
+necessary audacity.  The girl's voice was charming when she spoke to
+him of her miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of
+unconscious cynicism inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of
+poverty.  And whether because he was humane or because her voice
+included all the modulations of pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in
+its compass, it was not disgust that the tale awakened in him, but
+the sense of an immense sadness.
+
+On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of the
+concert, the girl told Heyst about herself.  She was almost a child
+of the streets.  Her father was a musician in the orchestras of
+small theatres.  Her mother ran away from him while she was little,
+and the landladies of various poor lodging-houses had attended
+casually to her abandoned childhood.  It was never positive
+starvation and absolute rags, but it was the hopeless grip of
+poverty all the time.  It was her father who taught her to play the
+violin.  It seemed that he used to get drunk sometimes, but without
+pleasure, and only because he was unable to forget his fugitive
+wife.  After he had a paralytic stroke, falling over with a crash in
+the well of a music-hall orchestra during the performance, she had
+joined the Zangiacomo company.  He was now in a home for incurables.
+
+"And I am here," she finished, "with no one to care if I make a hole
+in the water the next chance I get or not."
+
+Heyst told her that he thought she could do a little better than
+that, if it was only a question of getting out of the world.  She
+looked at him with special attention, and with a puzzled expression
+which gave to her face an air of innocence.
+
+This was during one of the "intervals" between the two parts of the
+concert.  She had come down that time without being incited thereto
+by a pinch from the awful Zangiacomo woman.  It is difficult to
+suppose that she was seduced by the uncovered intellectual forehead
+and the long reddish moustaches of her new friend.  New is not the
+right word.  She had never had a friend before; and the sensation of
+this friendliness going out to her was exciting by its novelty
+alone.  Besides, any man who did not resemble Schomberg appeared for
+that very reason attractive.  She was afraid of the hotel-keeper,
+who, in the daytime, taking advantage of the fact that she lived in
+the hotel itself, and not in the Pavilion with the other "artists"
+prowled round her, mute, hungry, portentous behind his great beard,
+or else assailed her in quiet corners and empty passages with deep,
+mysterious murmurs from behind, which, not withstanding their clear
+import, sounded horribly insane somehow.
+
+The contrast of Heyst's quiet, polished manner gave her special
+delight and filled her with admiration.  She had never seen anything
+like that before.  If she had, perhaps, known kindness in her life,
+she had never met the forms of simple courtesy.  She was interested
+by it as a very novel experience, not very intelligible, but
+distinctly pleasurable.
+
+"I tell you they are too many for me," she repeated, sometimes
+recklessly, but more often shaking her head with ominous dejection.
+
+She had, of course, no money at all.  The quantities of "black men"
+all about frightened her.  She really had no definite idea where she
+was on the surface of the globe.  The orchestra was generally taken
+from the steamer to some hotel, and kept shut up there till it was
+time to go on board another steamer.  She could not remember the
+names she heard.
+
+"How do you call this place again?" she used to ask Heyst.
+
+"Sourabaya," he would say distinctly, and would watch the
+discouragement at the outlandish sound coming into her eyes, which
+were fastened on his face.
+
+He could not defend himself from compassion.  He suggested that she
+might go to the consul, but it was his conscience that dictated this
+advice, not his conviction.  She had never heard of the animal or of
+its uses.  A consul!  What was it?  Who was he?  What could he do?
+And when she learned that perhaps he could be induced to send her
+home, her head dropped on her breast.
+
+"What am I to do when I get there?" she murmured with an intonation
+so just, with an accent so penetrating--the charm of her voice did
+not fail her even in whispering--that Heyst seemed to see the
+illusion of human fellowship on earth vanish before the naked truth
+of her existence, and leave them both face to face in a moral desert
+as arid as the sands of Sahara, without restful shade, without
+refreshing water.
+
+She leaned slightly over the little table, the same little table at
+which they had sat when they first met each other; and with no other
+memories but of the stones in the streets her childhood had known,
+in the distress of the incoherent, confused, rudimentary impressions
+of her travels inspiring her with a vague terror of the world she
+said rapidly, as one speaks in desperation:
+
+"YOU do something!  You are a gentleman.  It wasn't I who spoke to
+you first, was it?  I didn't begin, did I?  It was you who came
+along and spoke to me when I was standing over there.  What did you
+want to speak to me for?  I don't care what it is, but you must do
+something."
+
+Her attitude was fierce and entreating at the same time--clamorous,
+in fact though her voice had hardly risen above a breath.  It was
+clamorous enough to be noticed.  Heyst, on purpose, laughed aloud.
+She nearly choked with indignation at this brutal heartlessness.
+
+"What did you mean, then, by saying 'command me!'?" she almost
+hissed.
+
+Something hard in his mirthless stare, and a quiet final "All
+right," steadied her.
+
+"I am not rich enough to buy you out," he went on, speaking with an
+extraordinary detached grin, "even if it were to be done; but I can
+always steal you."
+
+She looked at him profoundly, as though these words had a hidden and
+very complicated meaning.
+
+"Get away now," he said rapidly, "and try to smile as you go."
+
+She obeyed with unexpected readiness; and as she had a set of very
+good white teeth, the effect of the mechanical, ordered smile was
+joyous, radiant.  It astonished Heyst.  No wonder, it flashed
+through his mind, women can deceive men so completely.  The faculty
+was inherent in them; they seemed to be created with a special
+aptitude.  Here was a smile the origin of which was well known to
+him; and yet it had conveyed a sensation of warmth, had given him a
+sort of ardour to live which was very new to his experience.
+
+By this time she was gone from the table, and had joined the other
+"ladies of the orchestra."  They trooped towards the platform,
+driven in truculently by the haughty mate of Zangiacomo, who looked
+as though she were restraining herself with difficulty from punching
+their backs.  Zangiacomo followed, with his great, pendulous dyed
+beard and short mess-jacket, with an aspect of hang-dog
+concentration imparted by his drooping head and the uneasiness of
+his eyes, which were set very close together.  He climbed the steps
+last of all, turned about, displaying his purple beard to the hall,
+and tapped with his bow.  Heyst winced in anticipation of the
+horrible racket.  It burst out immediately unabashed and awful.  At
+the end of the platform the woman at the piano, presenting her cruel
+profile, her head tilted back, banged the keys without looking at
+the music.
+
+Heyst could not stand the uproar for more than a minute.  He went
+out, his brain racked by the rhythm of some more or less Hungarian
+dance music.  The forests inhabited by the New Guinea cannibals
+where he had encountered the most exciting of his earlier futile
+adventures were silent.  And this adventure, not in its execution,
+perhaps, but in its nature, required even more nerve than anything
+he had faced before.  Walking among the paper lanterns suspended to
+trees he remembered with regret the gloom and the dead stillness of
+the forests at the back of Geelvink Bay, perhaps the wildest, the
+unsafest, the most deadly spot on earth from which the sea can be
+seen.  Oppressed by his thoughts, he sought the obscurity and peace
+of his bedroom; but they were not complete.  The distant sounds of
+the concert reached his ear, faint indeed, but still disturbing.
+Neither did he feel very safe in there; for that sentiment depends
+not on extraneous circumstances but on our inward conviction.  He
+did not attempt to go to sleep; he did not even unbutton the top
+button of his tunic.  He sat in a chair and mused.  Formerly, in
+solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly and
+sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering
+optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-
+deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness.  But now he was troubled;
+a light veil seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening
+of a tenderness, indistinct and confused as yet, towards an unknown
+woman.
+
+Gradually silence, a real silence, had established itself round him.
+The concert was over; the audience had gone; the concert-hall was
+dark; and even the Pavilion, where the ladies' orchestra slept after
+its noisy labours, showed not a gleam of light.  Heyst suddenly felt
+restless in all his limbs, as this reaction from the long immobility
+would not be denied, he humoured it by passing quietly along the
+back veranda and out into the grounds at the side of the house, into
+the black shadows under the trees, where the extinguished paper
+lanterns were gently swinging their globes like withered fruit.
+
+He paced there to and fro for a long time, a calm, meditative ghost
+in his white drill-suit, revolving in his head thoughts absolutely
+novel, disquieting, and seductive; accustoming his mind to the
+contemplation of his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily
+it should appear praiseworthy and wise.  For the use of reason is to
+justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses,
+passions, prejudices, and follies, and also our fears.
+
+He felt that he had engaged himself by a rash promise to an action
+big with incalculable consequences.  And then he asked himself if
+the girl had understood what he meant.  Who could tell?  He was
+assailed by all sorts of doubts.  Raising his head, he perceived
+something white flitting between the trees.  It vanished almost at
+once; but there could be no mistake.  He was vexed at being detected
+roaming like this in the middle of the night.  Who could that be?
+It never occurred to him that perhaps the girl, too, would not be
+able to sleep.  He advanced prudently.  Then he saw the white,
+phantom-like apparition again; and the next moment all his doubts as
+to the state of her mind were laid at rest, because he felt her
+clinging to him after the manner of supplicants all the world over.
+Her whispers were so incoherent that he could not understand
+anything; but this did not prevent him from being profoundly moved.
+He had no illusions about her; but his sceptical mind was dominated
+by the fulness of his heart.
+
+"Calm yourself, calm yourself," he murmured in her ear, returning
+her clasp at first mechanically, and afterwards with a growing
+appreciation of her distressed humanity.  The heaving of her breast
+and the trembling of all her limbs, in the closeness of his embrace,
+seemed to enter his body, to infect his very heart.  While she was
+growing quieter in his arms, he was becoming more agitated, as if
+there were only a fixed quantity of violent emotion on this earth.
+The very night seemed more dumb, more still, and the immobility of
+the vague, black shapes, surrounding him more perfect.
+
+"It will be all right," he tried to reassure her, with a tone of
+conviction, speaking into her ear, and of necessity clasping her
+more closely than before.
+
+Either the words or the action had a very good effect.  He heard a
+light sigh of relief.  She spoke with a calmed ardour.
+
+"Oh, I knew it would be all right from the first time you spoke to
+me!  Yes, indeed, I knew directly you came up to me that evening.  I
+knew it would be all right, if you only cared to make it so; but of
+course I could not tell if you meant it.  'Command me,' you said.
+Funny thing for a man like you to say.  Did you really mean it?  You
+weren't making fun of me?"
+
+He protested that he had been a serious person all his life.
+
+"I believe you," she said ardently.  He was touched by this
+declaration.  "It's the way you have of speaking as if you were
+amused with people," she went on.  "But I wasn't deceived.  I could
+see you were angry with that beast of a woman.  And you are clever.
+You spotted something at once.  You saw it in my face, eh?  It isn't
+a bad face--say?  You'll never be sorry.  Listen--I'm not twenty
+yet.  It's the truth, and I can't be so bad looking, or else--I will
+tell you straight that I have been worried and pestered by fellows
+like this before.  I don't know what comes to them--"
+
+She was speaking hurriedly.  She choked, and then exclaimed, with an
+accent of despair:
+
+"What is it?  What's the matter?"
+
+Heyst had removed his arms from her suddenly, and had recoiled a
+little.  "Is it my fault?  I didn't even look at them, I tell you
+straight.  Never!  Have I looked at you?  Tell me.  It was you that
+began it."
+
+In truth, Heyst had shrunk from the idea of competition with fellows
+unknown, with Schomberg the hotel-keeper.  The vaporous white figure
+before him swayed pitifully in the darkness.  He felt ashamed of his
+fastidiousness.
+
+"I am afraid we have been detected," he murmured.  "I think I saw
+somebody on the path between the house and the bushes behind you."
+
+He had seen no one.  It was a compassionate lie, if there ever was
+one.  His compassion was as genuine as his shrinking had been, and
+in his judgement more honourable.
+
+She didn't turn her head.  She was obviously relieved.
+
+"Would it be that brute?" she breathed out, meaning Schomberg, of
+course.  "He's getting too forward with me now.  What can you
+expect?  Only this evening, after supper, he--but I slipped away.
+You don't mind him, do you?  Why, I could face him myself now that I
+know you care for me.  A girl can always put up a fight.  You
+believe me?  Only it isn't easy to stand up for yourself when you
+feel there's nothing and nobody at your back.  There's nothing so
+lonely in the world as a girl who has got to look after herself.
+When I left poor dad in that home--it was in the country, near a
+village--I came out of the gates with seven shillings and threepence
+in my old purse, and my railway ticket.  I tramped a mile, and got
+into a train--"
+
+She broke off, and was silent for a moment.
+
+"Don't you throw me over now," she went on.  "If you did, what
+should I do?  I should have to live, to be sure, because I'd be
+afraid to kill myself, but you would have done a thousand times
+worse than killing a body.  You told me you had been always alone,
+you had never had a dog even.  Well, then, I won't be in anybody's
+way if I live with you--not even a dog's.  And what else did you
+mean when you came up and looked at me so close?"
+
+"Close?  Did I?" he murmured unstirring before her in the profound
+darkness.  "So close as that?"
+
+She had an outbreak of anger and despair in subdued tones.
+
+"Have you forgotten, then?  What did you expect to find?  I know
+what sort of girl I am; but all the same I am not the sort that men
+turn their backs on--and you ought to know it, unless you aren't
+made like the others.  Oh, forgive me!  You aren't like the others;
+you are like no one in the world I ever spoke to.  Don't you care
+for me?  Don't you see--?"
+
+What he saw was that, white and spectral, she was putting out her
+arms to him out of the black shadows like an appealing ghost.  He
+took her hands, and was affected, almost surprised, to find them so
+warm, so real, so firm, so living in his grasp.  He drew her to him,
+and she dropped her head on his shoulder with a deep-sigh.
+
+"I am dead tired," she whispered plaintively.
+
+He put his arms around her, and only by the convulsive movements of
+her body became aware that she was sobbing without a sound.
+Sustaining her, he lost himself in the profound silence of the
+night.  After a while she became still, and cried quietly.  Then,
+suddenly, as if waking up, she asked:
+
+"You haven't seen any more of that somebody you thought was spying
+about?"
+
+He started at her quick, sharp whisper, and answered that very
+likely he had been mistaken.
+
+"If it was anybody at all," she reflected aloud, "it wouldn't have
+been anyone but that hotel woman--the landlord's wife."
+
+"Mrs. Schomberg," Heyst said, surprised.
+
+"Yes.  Another one that can't sleep o' nights.  Why?  Don't you see
+why?  Because, of course, she sees what's going on.  That beast
+doesn't even try to keep it from her.  If she had only the least bit
+of spirit!  She knows how I feel, too, only she's too frightened
+even to look him in the face, let alone open her mouth.  He would
+tell her to go hang herself."
+
+For some time Heyst said nothing.  A public, active contest with the
+hotel-keeper was not to be thought of.  The idea was horrible.
+Whispering gently to the girl, he tried to explain to her that as
+things stood, an open withdrawal from the company would be probably
+opposed.  She listened to his explanation anxiously, from time to
+time pressing the hand she had sought and got hold of in the dark.
+
+"As I told you, I am not rich enough to buy you out so I shall steal
+you as soon as I can arrange some means of getting away from here.
+Meantime it would be fatal to be seen together at night.  We mustn't
+give ourselves away.  We had better part at once.  I think I was
+mistaken just now; but if, as you say, that poor Mrs. Schomberg
+can't sleep of nights, we must be more careful.  She would tell the
+fellow."
+
+The girl had disengaged herself from his loose hold while he talked,
+and now stood free of him, but still clasping his hand firmly.
+
+"Oh, no," she said with perfect assurance.  "I tell you she daren't
+open her mouth to him.  And she isn't as silly as she looks.  She
+wouldn't give us away.  She knows a trick worth two of that.  She'll
+help--that's what she'll do, if she dares do anything at all."
+
+"You seem to have a very clear view of the situation," said Heyst,
+and received a warm, lingering kiss for this commendation.
+
+He discovered that to-part from her was not such an easy matter as
+he had supposed it would be.
+
+"Upon my word," he said before they separated, "I don't even know
+your name."
+
+"Don't you?  They call me Alma.  I don't know why.  Silly name!
+Magdalen too.  It doesn't matter; you can call me by whatever name
+you choose.  Yes, you give me a name.  Think of one you would like
+the sound of--something quite new.  How I should like to forget
+everything that has gone before, as one forgets a dream that's done
+with, fright and all!  I would try."
+
+"Would you really?" he asked in a murmur.  "But that's not
+forbidden.  I understand that women easily forget whatever in their
+past diminishes them in their eyes."
+
+"It's your eyes that I was thinking of, for I'm sure I've never
+wished to forget anything till you came up to me that night and
+looked me through and through.  I know I'm not much account; but I
+know how to stand by a man.  I stood by father ever since I could
+understand.  He wasn't a bad chap.  Now that I can't be of any use
+to him, I would just as soon forget all that and make a fresh start.
+But these aren't things that I could talk to you about.  What could
+I ever talk to you about?"
+
+"Don't let it trouble you," Heyst said.  "Your voice is enough.  I
+am in love with it, whatever it says."
+
+She remained silent for a while, as if rendered breathless by this
+quiet statement.
+
+"Oh!  I wanted to ask you--"
+
+He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected
+the question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation
+she went on:
+
+"Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-
+room there--you remember?"
+
+"I thought we were being observed.  A smile is the best of masks.
+Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some
+Dutch clerks from the town.  No doubt he was watching us--watching
+you, at least.  That's why I asked you to smile."
+
+"Ah, that's why.  It never came into my head!"
+
+"And you did it very well, too--very readily, as if you had
+understood my intention."
+
+"Readily!" she repeated.  "Oh, I was ready enough to smile then.
+That's the truth.  It was the first time for years I may say that I
+felt disposed to smile.  I've not had many chances to smile in my
+life, I can tell you; especially of late."
+
+"But you do it most charmingly--in a perfectly fascinating way."
+
+He paused.  She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of
+extreme delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.
+
+"It astonished me," he added.  "It went as straight to my heart as
+though you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling me.  I felt as if
+I had never seen a smile before in my life.  I thought of it after I
+left you.  It made me restless."
+
+"It did all that?" came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and
+incredulous.
+
+"If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come
+out here tonight," he said, with his playful earnestness of tone.
+"It was your triumph."
+
+He felt her lips touch his lightly, and the next moment she was
+gone.  Her white dress gleamed in the distance, and then the opaque
+darkness of the house seemed to swallow it.  Heyst waited a little
+before he went the same way, round the comer, up the steps of the
+veranda, and into his room, where he lay down at last--not to sleep,
+but to go over in his mind all that had been said at their meeting.
+
+"It's exactly true about that smile," he thought.  There he had
+spoken the truth to her; and about her voice, too.  For the rest--
+what must be must be.
+
+A great wave of heat passed over him.  He turned on his back, flung
+his arms crosswise on the broad, hard bed, and lay still, open-eyed
+under the mosquito net, till daylight entered his room, brightened
+swiftly, and turned to unfailing sunlight.  He got up then, went to
+a small looking-glass hanging on the wall, and stared at himself
+steadily.  It was not a new-born vanity which induced this long
+survey.  He felt so strange that he could not resist the suspicion
+of his personal appearance having changed during the night.  What he
+saw in the glass, however, was the man he knew before.  It was
+almost a disappointment--a belittling of his recent experience.  And
+then he smiled at his naiveness; for, being over five and thirty
+years of age, he ought to have known that in most cases the body is
+the unalterable mask of the soul, which even death itself changes
+but little, till it is put out of sight where no changes matter any
+more, either to our friends or to our enemies.
+
+Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies.  It was the
+very essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished
+not by hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but
+by a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an
+impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes.  In this scheme he had
+perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and
+almost without a single care in the world--invulnerable because
+elusive.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+
+
+For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and
+unapproachable, and in return was generally considered a "queer
+chap."  He had started off on these travels of his after the death
+of his father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied
+with his country and angry with all the world, which had
+instinctively rejected his wisdom.
+
+Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst
+had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of
+the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages.  For more
+than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the
+most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever
+fashioned to its ends of disillusion and regret.  One could not
+refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way
+unknown to mediocre souls.  His mother Heyst had never known, but he
+kept his father's pale, distinguished face in affectionate memory.
+He remembered him mainly in an ample blue dressing-gown in a large
+house of a quiet London suburb.  For three years, after leaving
+school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with the elder Heyst,
+who was then writing his last book.  In this work, at the end of his
+life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and
+intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.
+
+Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable
+age were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life.  The
+young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a
+reckoning of the cost.  It is not the clear-sighted who lead the
+world.  Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm
+mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis
+had blown away from the son.
+
+"I'll drift," Heyst had said to himself deliberately.
+
+He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally.  He
+meant to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a
+detached leaf drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable
+trees of a forest glade; to drift without ever catching on to
+anything.
+
+"This shall be my defence against life," he had said to himself with
+a sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his father there
+was no other worthy alternative.
+
+He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others do
+through drink, from vice, from some weakness of character--with
+deliberation, as others do in despair.  This, stripped of its facts,
+had been Heyst's life up to that disturbing night.  Next day, when
+he saw the girl called Alma, she managed to give him a glance of
+frank tenderness, quick as lightning and leaving a profound
+impression, a secret touch on the heart.  It was in the grounds of
+the hotel, about tiffin time, while the Ladies of the orchestra were
+strolling back to their pavilion after rehearsal, or practice, or
+whatever they called their morning musical exercises in the hall.
+Heyst, returning from the town, where he had discovered that there
+would be difficulties in the way of getting away at once, was
+crossing the compound, disappointed and worried.  He had walked
+almost unwittingly into the straggling group of Zangiacomo's
+performers.  It was a shock to him, on coming out of his brown
+study, to find the girl so near to him, as if one waking suddenly
+should see the figure of his dream turned into flesh and blood.  She
+did not raise her shapely head, but her glance was no dream thing.
+It was real, the most real impression of his detached existence--so
+far.
+
+Heyst had not acknowledged it in any way, though it seemed to him
+impossible that its effect on him should not be visible to anyone
+who happened to be looking on.  And there were several men on the
+veranda, steady customers of Schomberg's table d'hote, gazing in his
+direction--at the ladies of the orchestra, in fact.  Heyst's dread
+arose, not out of shame or timidity, but from his fastidiousness.
+On getting amongst them, however, he noticed no signs of interest or
+astonishment in their faces, any more than if they had been blind
+men.  Even Schomberg himself, who had to make way for him at the top
+of the stairs, was completely unperturbed, and continued the
+conversation he was carrying on with a client.
+
+Schomberg, indeed, had observed "that Swede" talking with the girl
+in the intervals.  A crony of his had nudged him; and he had thought
+that it was so much the better; the silly fellow would keep
+everybody else off.  He was rather pleased than otherwise and
+watched them out of the corner of his eye with a malicious enjoyment
+of the situation--a sort of Satanic glee.  For he had little doubt
+of his personal fascination, and still less of his power to get hold
+of the girl, who seemed too ignorant to know how to help herself,
+and who was worse than friendless, since she had for some reason
+incurred the animosity of Mrs. Zangiacomo, a woman with no
+conscience.  The aversion she showed him as far as she dared (for it
+is not always safe for the helpless to display the delicacy of their
+sentiments), Schomberg pardoned on the score of feminine
+conventional silliness.  He had told Alma, as an argument, that she
+was a clever enough girl to see that she could do no better than to
+put her trust in a man of substance, in the prime of life, who knew
+his way about.  But for the excited trembling of his voice, and the
+extraordinary way in which his eyes seemed to be starting out of his
+crimson, hirsute countenance, such speeches had every character of
+calm, unselfish advice--which, after the manner of lovers, passed
+easily into sanguine plans for the future.
+
+"We'll soon get rid of the old woman," he whispered to her
+hurriedly, with panting ferocity.  "Hang her!  I've never cared for
+her.  The climate don't suit her; I shall tell her to go to her
+people in Europe.  She will have to go, too!  I will see to it.
+Eins, zwei, march!  And then we shall sell this hotel and start
+another somewhere else."
+
+He assured her that he didn't care what he did for her sake; and it
+was true.  Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if
+in defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the
+sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill.  Her shrinking
+form, her downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered at
+the end of an empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission to
+the overpowering force of his will, the recognition of his personal
+fascinations.  For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should
+renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
+
+It's easy to imagine Schomberg's humiliation, his shocked fury, when
+he discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his attacks,
+his prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched from
+under his nose by "that Swede," apparently without any trouble worth
+speaking of.  He refused to believe the fact.  He would have it, at
+first, that the Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable reason, had
+played him a scurvy trick, but when no further doubt was possible,
+he changed his view of Heyst.  The despised Swede became for
+Schomberg the deepest, the most dangerous, the most hateful of
+scoundrels.  He could not believe that the creature he had coveted
+with so much force and with so little effect, was in reality tender,
+docile to her impulse, and had almost offered herself to Heyst
+without a sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and from a profound
+need of placing her trust where her woman's instinct guided her
+ignorance.  Nothing would serve Schomberg but that she must have
+been circumvented by some occult exercise of force or craft, by the
+laying of some subtle trap.  His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly
+at the means "that Swede" had employed to seduce her away from a man
+like him--Schomberg--as though those means were bound to have been
+extraordinary, unheard of, inconceivable.  He slapped his forehead
+openly before his customers; he would sit brooding in silence or
+else would burst out unexpectedly declaiming against Heyst without
+measure, discretion, or prudence, with swollen features and an
+affectation of outraged virtue which could not have deceived the
+most childlike of moralists for a moment--and greatly amused his
+audience.
+
+It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of
+Heyst, while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel.  It
+was, in a manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo
+concerts had ever been--intervals and all.  There was never any
+difficulty in starting the performer off.  Anybody could do it, by
+almost any distant allusion.  As likely as not he would start his
+endless denunciations in the very billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg
+sat enthroned as usual, swallowing her sobs, concealing her tortures
+of abject humiliation and terror under her stupid, set, everlasting
+grin, which, having been provided for her by nature, was an
+excellent mask, in as much as nothing--not even death itself,
+perhaps--could tear it away.
+
+But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its
+physiognomy.  So, after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward
+calm, as if his indignation had dried up within him.  And it was
+time.  He was becoming a bore with his inability to talk of anything
+else but Heyst's unfitness to be at large, Heyst's wickedness, his
+wiles, his astuteness, and his criminality.  Schomberg no longer
+pretended to despise him.  He could not have done it.  After what
+had happened he could not pretend, even to himself.  But his
+bottled-up indignation was fermenting venomously.  At the time of
+his immoderate loquacity one of his customers, an elderly man, had
+remarked one evening:
+
+"If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy."
+
+And this belief was less than half wrong.  Schomberg had Heyst on
+the brain.  Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which had
+never been so unpromising since he came out East directly after the
+Franco-Prussian War, he referred to some subtly noxious influence of
+Heyst.  It seemed to him that he could never be himself again till
+he had got even with that artful Swede.  He was ready to swear that
+Heyst had ruined his life.  The girl so unfairly, craftily, basely
+decoyed away would have inspired him to success in a new start.
+Obviously Mrs. Schomberg, whom he terrified by savagely silent moods
+combined with underhand, poisoned glances, could give him no
+inspiration.  He had grown generally neglectful, but with a
+partiality for reckless expedients, as if he did not care when and
+how his career as a hotel-keeper was to be brought to an end.  This
+demoralized state accounted for what Davidson had observed on his
+last visit to the Schomberg establishment, some two months after
+Heyst's secret departure with the girl to the solitude of Samburan.
+
+The Schomberg of a few years ago--the Schomberg of the Bangkok days,
+for instance, when he started the first of his famed table d'hote
+dinners--would never have risked anything of the sort.  His genius
+ran to catering, "white man for white men" and to the inventing,
+elaborating, and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction
+and impudent delight.  But now his mind was perverted by the pangs
+of wounded vanity and of thwarted passion.  In this state of moral
+weakness Schomberg allowed himself to be corrupted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+
+
+The business was done by a guest who arrived one fine morning by
+mail-boat--immediately from Celebes, having boarded her in Macassar,
+but generally, Schomberg understood, from up China Sea way; a
+wanderer clearly, even as Heyst was, but not alone and of quite
+another kind.
+
+Schomberg, looking up from the stern-sheets of his steam-launch,
+which he used for boarding passenger ships on arrival, discovered a
+dark sunken stare plunging down on him over the rail of the first-
+class part of the deck.  He was no great judge of physiognomy.
+Human beings, for him, were either the objects of scandalous gossip
+or else recipients of narrow strips of paper, with proper bill-heads
+stating the name of his hotel--"W. Schomberg, proprietor, accounts
+settled weekly."
+
+So in the clean-shaven, extremely thin face hanging over the mail-
+boat's rail Schomberg saw only the face of a possible "account."
+The steam-launches of other hotels were also alongside, but he
+obtained the preference.
+
+"You are Mr. Schomberg, aren't you?" the face asked quite
+unexpectedly.
+
+"I am at your service," he answered from below; for business is
+business, and its forms and formulas must be observed, even if one's
+manly bosom is tortured by that dull rage which succeeds the fury of
+baffled passion, like the glow of embers after a fierce blaze.
+
+Presently the possessor of the handsome but emaciated face was
+seated beside Schomberg in the stern-sheets of the launch.  His body
+was long and loose-jointed, his slender fingers, intertwined,
+clasped the leg resting on the knee, as he lolled back in a careless
+yet tense attitude.  On the other side of Schomberg sat another
+passenger, who was introduced by the clean-shaven man as -
+
+"My secretary.  He must have the room next to mine."
+
+"We can manage that easily for you."
+
+Schomberg steered with dignity, staring straight ahead, but very
+much interested by these two promising "accounts."  Their
+belongings, a couple of large leather trunks browned by age and a
+few smaller packages, were piled up in the bows.  A third
+individual--a nondescript, hairy creature--had modestly made his way
+forward and had perched himself on the luggage.  The lower part of
+his physiognomy was over-developed; his narrow and low forehead,
+unintelligently furrowed by horizontal wrinkles, surmounted wildly
+hirsute cheeks and a flat nose with wide, baboon-like nostrils.
+There was something equivocal in the appearance of his shaggy, hair-
+smothered humanity.  He, too, seemed to be a follower of the clean-
+shaven man, and apparently had travelled on deck with native
+passengers, sleeping under the awnings.  His broad, squat frame
+denoted great strength.  Grasping the gunwales of the launch, he
+displayed a pair of remarkably long arms, terminating in thick,
+brown hairy paws of simian aspect.
+
+"What shall we do with the fellow of mine?" the chief of the party
+asked Schomberg.  "There must be a boarding-house somewhere near the
+port--some grog-shop where they could let him have a mat to sleep
+on?"
+
+Schomberg said there was a place kept by a Portuguese half-caste.
+
+"A servant of yours?" he asked.
+
+"Well, he hangs on to me.  He is an alligator-hunter.  I picked him
+up in Colombia, you know.  Ever been in Colombia?"
+
+"No," said Schomberg, very much surprised.  "An alligator-hunter?
+Funny trade!  Are you coming from Colombia, then?"
+
+"Yes, but I have been coming for a long time.  I come from a good
+many places.  I am travelling west, you see."
+
+"For sport, perhaps?" suggested Schomberg.
+
+"Yes.  Sort of sport.  What do you say to chasing the sun?"
+
+"I see--a gentleman at large," said Schomberg, watching a sailing
+canoe about to cross his bow, and ready to clear it by a touch of
+the helm.
+
+The other passenger made himself heard suddenly.
+
+"Hang these native craft!  They always get in the way."
+
+He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a
+harsh voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a
+thin, dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of
+a rigid nose.  Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing
+secretarial about him.  Both he and his long, lank principal wore
+the usual white suit of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white
+shoes--all correct.  The hairy nondescript creature perched on their
+luggage in the bow had a check shirt and blue dungaree trousers.  He
+gazed in their direction from forward in an expectant, trained-
+animal manner.
+
+"You spoke to me first," said Schomberg in his manly tones.  "You
+were acquainted with my name.  Where did you hear of me, gentlemen,
+may I ask?"
+
+"In Manila," answered the gentleman at large, readily.  "From a man
+with whom I had a game of cards one evening in the Hotel Castille."
+
+"What man?  I've no friends in Manila that I know of," wondered
+Schomberg with a severe frown.
+
+"I can't tell you his name.  I've clean forgotten it; but don't you
+worry.  He was anything but a friend of yours.  He called you all
+the names he could think of.  He said you set a lot of scandal going
+about him once, somewhere--in Bangkok, I think.  Yes, that's it.
+You were running a table d'hote in Bangkok at one time, weren't
+you?"
+
+Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only
+throw out his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-
+the-Reserve manner.  A table d'hote?  Yes, certainly.  He always--
+for the sake of white men.  And here in this place, too?  Yes, in
+this place, too.
+
+"That's all right, then."  The stranger turned his black, cavernous,
+mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg, who sat gripping
+the brass tiller in a sweating palm.  "Many people in the evening at
+your place?"
+
+Schomberg had recovered somewhat.
+
+"Twenty covers or so, take one day with another," he answered
+feelingly, as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive.  "Ought
+to be more, if only people would see that it's for their own good.
+Precious little profit I get out of it.  You are partial to tables
+d'hote, gentlemen?"
+
+The new guest made answer that he liked a hotel where one could find
+some local people in the evening.  It was infernally dull otherwise.
+The secretary, in sign of approval, emitted a grunt of astonishing
+ferocity, as if proposing to himself to eat the local people.  All
+this sounded like a longish stay, thought Schomberg, satisfied under
+his grave air; till, remembering the girl snatched away from him by
+the last guest who had made a prolonged stay in his hotel, he ground
+his teeth so audibly that the other two looked at him in wonder.
+The momentary convulsion of his florid physiognomy seemed to strike
+them dumb.  They exchanged a quick glance.  Presently the clean-
+shaven man fired out another question in his curt, unceremonious
+manner:
+
+"You have no women in your hotel, eh?"
+
+"Women!" Schomberg exclaimed indignantly, but also as if a little
+frightened.  "What on earth do you mean by women?  What women?
+There's Mrs. Schomberg, of course," he added, suddenly appeased,
+with lofty indifference.
+
+"If she knows how to keep her place, then it will do.  I can't stand
+women near me.  They give me the horrors," declared the other.
+"They are a perfect curse!"
+
+During this outburst the secretary wore a savage grin.  The chief
+guest closed his sunken eyes, as if exhausted, and leaned the back
+of his head against the stanchion of the awning.  In this pose, his
+long, feminine eyelashes were very noticeable, and his regular
+features, sharp line of the jaw, and well-cut chin were brought into
+prominence, giving him a used-up, weary, depraved distinction.  He
+did not open his eyes till the steam-launch touched the quay.  Then
+he and the other man got ashore quickly, entered a carriage, and
+drove away to the hotel, leaving Schomberg to look after their
+luggage and take care of their strange companion.  The latter,
+looking more like a performing bear abandoned by his show men than a
+human being, followed all Schomberg's movements step by step, close
+behind his back, muttering to himself in a language that sounded
+like some sort of uncouth Spanish.  The hotel-keeper felt
+uncomfortable till at last he got rid of him at an obscure den where
+a very clean, portly Portuguese half-caste, standing serenely in the
+doorway, seemed to understand exactly how to deal with clients of
+every kind.  He took from the creature the strapped bundle it had
+been hugging closely through all its peregrinations in that strange
+town, and cut short Schomberg's attempts at explanation by a most
+confident -
+
+"I comprehend very well, sir."
+
+"It's more than I do," thought Schomberg, going away thankful at
+being relieved of the alligator-hunter's company.  He wondered what
+these fellows were, without being able to form a guess of sufficient
+probability.  Their names he learned that very day by direct inquiry
+"to enter in my books," he explained in his formal military manner,
+chest thrown out, beard very much in evidence.
+
+The shaven man, sprawling in a long chair, with his air of withered
+youth, raised his eyes languidly.
+
+"My name?  Oh, plain Mr. Jones--put that down--a gentleman at large.
+And this is Ricardo."  The pock-marked man, lying prostrate in
+another long chair, made a grimace, as if something had tickled the
+end of his nose, but did not come out of his supineness.  "Martin
+Ricardo, secretary.  You don't want any more of our history, do you?
+Eh, what?  Occupation?  Put down, well--tourists.  We've been called
+harder names before now; it won't hurt our feelings.  And that
+fellow of mine--where did you tuck him away?  Oh, he will be all
+right.  When he wants anything he'll take it.  He's Peter.  Citizen
+of Colombia.  Peter, Pedro--I don't know that he ever had any other
+name.  Pedro, alligator hunter.  Oh, yes--I'll pay his board with
+the half-caste.  Can't help myself.  He's so confoundedly devoted to
+me that if I were to give him the sack he would be at my throat.
+Shall I tell you how I killed his brother in the wilds of Colombia?
+Well, perhaps some other time--it's a rather long story.  What I
+shall always regret is that I didn't kill him, too.  I could have
+done it without any extra trouble then; now it's too late.  Great
+nuisance; but he's useful sometimes.  I hope you are not going to
+put all this in your book?"
+
+The offhand, hard manner and the contemptuous tone of "plain Mr.
+Jones" disconcerted Schomberg utterly.  He had never been spoken to
+like this in his life.  He shook his head in silence and withdrew,
+not exactly scared--though he was in reality of a timid disposition
+under his manly exterior--but distinctly mystified and impressed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+
+
+Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which
+filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned
+towards his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:
+
+"I must get rid of these two.  It won't do!"
+
+Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first; but
+she had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself.
+Sitting in her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was
+careful not to make a sound, knowing from experience that her very
+assent would be resented.  With her eyes she followed the figure of
+Schomberg, clad in his sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about
+the room.
+
+He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in her
+night attire, looked the most unattractive object in existence--
+miserable, insignificant, faded, crushed, old.  And the contrast
+with the feminine form he had ever in his mind's eye made his wife's
+appearance painful to his aesthetic sense.
+
+Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of
+screwing his courage up to the sticking point.
+
+"Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into his
+bedroom, and tell him to be off--him and that secretary of his--
+early in the morning.  I don't mind a round game of cards, but to
+make a decoy of my table d'hote--my blood boils!  He came here
+because some lying rascal in Manila told him I kept a table d'hote."
+
+He said these things, not for Mrs. Schomberg's information, but
+simply thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point
+where it would give him courage enough to face "plain Mr. Jones."
+
+"Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper," he went on.  "I have a
+good mind to--"
+
+He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so
+unlike the picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though
+his eyes strayed about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features
+awakened in the miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing
+for years a fear for his precious carcass, since the poor creature
+had nothing else but that to hold on to in the world.  She knew him
+well; but she did not know him altogether.  The last thing a woman
+will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she
+simply depends, is want of courage.  And, timid in her comer, she
+ventured to say pressingly:
+
+"Be careful, Wilhelm!  Remember the knives and revolvers in their
+trunks."
+
+In guise of thanks for that anxious reminder, he swore horribly in
+the direction of her shrinking person.  In her scanty nightdress,
+and barefooted, she recalled a mediaeval penitent being reproved for
+her sins in blasphemous terms.  Those lethal weapons were always
+present to Schomberg's mind.  Personally, he had never seen them.
+His part, ten days after his guests' arrival, had been to lounge in
+manly, careless attitudes on the veranda--keeping watch--while Mrs.
+Schomberg, provided with a bunch of assorted keys, her discoloured
+teeth chattering and her globular eyes absolutely idiotic with
+fright, was "going through" the luggage of these strange clients.
+Her terrible Wilhelm had insisted on it.
+
+"I'll be on the look-out, I tell you," he said.  "I shall give you a
+whistle when I see them coming back.  You couldn't whistle.  And if
+he were to catch you at it, and chuck you out by the scruff of the
+neck, it wouldn't hurt you much; but he won't touch a woman.  Not
+he!  He has told me so.  Affected beast.  I must find out something
+about their little game, and so there's an end of it.  Go in!  Go
+now!  Quick march!"
+
+It had been an awful job; but she did go in, because she was much
+more afraid of Schomberg than of any possible consequences of the
+act.  Her greatest concern was lest no key of the bunch he had
+provided her with should fit the locks.  It would have been such a
+disappointment for Wilhelm.  However, the trunks, she found, had
+been left open; but her investigation did not last long.  She was
+frightened of firearms, and generally of all weapons, not from
+personal cowardice, but as some women are, almost superstitiously,
+from an abstract horror of violence and murder.  She was out again
+on the veranda long before Wilhelm had any occasion for a warning
+whistle.  The instinctive, motiveless fear being the most difficult
+to overcome, nothing could induce her to return to her
+investigations, neither threatening growls nor ferocious hisses, nor
+yet a poke or two in the ribs.
+
+"Stupid female!" muttered the hotel-keeper, perturbed by the notion
+of that armoury in one of his bedrooms.  This was from no abstract
+sentiment, with him it was constitutional.  "Get out of my sight,"
+he snarled.  "Go and dress yourself for the table d'hote."
+
+Left to himself, Schomberg had meditated.  What the devil did this
+mean?  His thinking processes were sluggish and spasmodic; but
+suddenly the truth came to him.
+
+"By heavens, they are desperadoes!" he thought.
+
+Just then he beheld "plain Mr. Jones" and his secretary with the
+ambiguous name of Ricardo entering the grounds of the hotel.  They
+had been down to the port on some business, and now were returning;
+Mr. Jones lank, spare, opening his long legs with angular regularity
+like a pair of compasses, the other stepping out briskly by his
+side.  Conviction entered Schomberg's heart.  They WERE two
+desperadoes--no doubt about it.  But as the funk which he
+experienced was merely a general sensation, he managed to put on his
+most severe Officer-of-the-Reserve manner, long before they had
+closed with him.
+
+"Good morning, gentlemen."
+
+Being answered with derisive civility, he became confirmed in his
+sudden conviction of their desperate character.  The way Mr. Jones
+turned his hollow eyes on one, like an incurious spectre, and the
+way the other, when addressed, suddenly retracted his lips and
+exhibited his teeth without looking round--here was evidence enough
+to settle that point.  Desperadoes!  They passed through the
+billiard-room, inscrutably mysterious, to the back of the house, to
+join their violated trunks.
+
+"Tiffin bell will ring in five minutes, gentlemen."  Schomberg
+called after them, exaggerating the deep manliness of his tone.
+
+He had managed to upset himself very much.  He expected to see them
+come back infuriated and begin to bully him with an odious lack of
+restraint.  Desperadoes!  However they didn't; they had not noticed
+anything unusual about their trunks and Schomberg recovered his
+composure and said to himself that he must get rid of this deadly
+incubus as soon as practicable.  They couldn't possibly want to stay
+very long; this was not the town--the colony--for desperate
+characters.  He shrank from action.  He dreaded any kind of
+disturbance--"fracas" he called it--in his hotel.  Such things were
+not good for business.  Of course, sometimes one had to have a
+"fracas;" but it had been a comparatively trifling task to seize the
+frail Zangiacomo--whose bones were no larger than a chicken's--round
+the ribs, lift him up bodily, dash him to the ground, and fall on
+him.  It had been easy.  The wretched, hook-nosed creature lay
+without movement, buried under its purple beard.
+
+Suddenly, remembering the occasion of that "fracas," Schomberg
+groaned with the pain as of a hot coal under his breastbone, and
+gave himself up to desolation.  Ah, if he only had that girl with
+him he would have been masterful and resolute and fearless--fight
+twenty desperadoes--care for nobody on earth!  Whereas the
+possession of Mrs. Schomberg was no incitement to a display of manly
+virtues.  Instead of caring for no one, he felt that he cared for
+nothing.  Life was a hollow sham; he wasn't going to risk a shot
+through his lungs or his liver in order to preserve its integrity.
+It had no savour--damn it!
+
+In his state of moral decomposition, Schomberg, master as he was of
+the art of hotel-keeping, and careful of giving no occasion for
+criticism to the powers regulating that branch of human activity,
+let things take their course; though he saw very well where that
+course was tending.  It began first with a game or two after dinner-
+-for the drinks, apparently--with some lingering customer, at one of
+the little tables ranged against the walls of the billiard-room.
+Schomberg detected the meaning of it at once.  "That's what it was!
+This was what they were!  And, moving about restlessly (at that time
+his morose silent period had set in), he cast sidelong looks at the
+game; but he said nothing.  It was not worth while having a row with
+men who were so overbearing.  Even when money appeared in connection
+with these postprandial games, into which more and more people were
+being drawn, he still refrained from raising the question; he was
+reluctant to draw unduly the attention of "plain Mr. Jones" and of
+the equivocal Ricardo, to his person.  One evening, however, after
+the public rooms of the hotel had become empty, Schomberg made an
+attempt to grapple with the problem in an indirect way.
+
+In a distant corner the tired China boy dozed on his heels, his back
+against the wall.  Mrs. Schomberg had disappeared, as usual, between
+ten and eleven.  Schomberg walked about slowly in and out of the
+room and the veranda, thoughtful, waiting for his two guests to go
+to bed.  Then suddenly he approached them, militarily, his chest
+thrown out, his voice curt and soldierly.
+
+"Hot night, gentlemen."
+
+Mr Jones, lolling back idly in a chair, looked up.  Ricardo, as
+idle, but more upright, made no sign.
+
+"Won't you have a drink with me before retiring?" went on Schomberg,
+sitting down by the little table.
+
+"By all means," said Mr. Jones lazily.
+
+Ricardo showed his teeth in a strange, quick grin.  Schomberg felt
+painfully how difficult it was to get in touch with these men, both
+so quiet, so deliberate, so menacingly unceremonious.  He ordered
+the Chinaman to bring in the drinks.  His purpose was to discover
+how long these guests intended to stay.  Ricardo displayed no
+conversational vein, but Mr. Jones appeared communicative enough.
+His voice somehow matched his sunken eyes.  It was hollow without
+being in the least mournful; it sounded distant, uninterested, as
+though he were speaking from the bottom of a well.  Schomberg
+learned that he would have the privilege of lodging and boarding
+these gentlemen for at least a month more.  He could not conceal his
+discomfiture at this piece of news.
+
+"What's the matter?  Don't you like to have people in your house?"
+asked plain Mr. Jones languidly.  "I should have thought the owner
+of a hotel would be pleased."
+
+He lifted his delicate and beautifully pencilled eyebrows.
+Schomberg muttered something about the locality being dull and
+uninteresting to travellers--nothing going on--too quiet altogether,
+but he only provoked the declaration that quiet had its charm
+sometimes, and even dullness was welcome as a change.
+
+"We haven't had time to be dull for the last three years," added
+plain Mr. Jones, his eyes fixed darkly on Schomberg whom he further
+more invited to have another drink, this time with him, and not to
+worry himself about things he did not understand; and especially not
+to be inhospitable--which in a hotel-keeper is highly
+unprofessional.
+
+"I don't understand," grumbled Schomberg.  "Oh, yes, I understand
+perfectly well.  I--"
+
+"You are frightened," interrupted Mr. Jones.  "What is the matter?"
+
+"I don't want any scandal in my place.  That's what's the matter."
+
+Schomberg tried to face the situation bravely, but that steady,
+black stare affected him.  And when he glanced aside uncomfortably,
+he met Ricardo's grin uncovering a lot of teeth, though the man
+seemed absorbed in his thoughts all the time.
+
+"And, moreover," went on Mr. Jones in that distant tone of his, "you
+can't help yourself.  Here we are and here we stay.  Would you try
+to put us out?  I dare say you could do it; but you couldn't do it
+without getting hurt--very badly hurt.  We can promise him that,
+can't we, Martin?"
+
+The secretary retracted his lips and looked up sharply at Schomberg,
+as if only too anxious to leap upon him with teeth and claws.
+
+Schomberg managed to produce a deep laugh.
+
+"Ha! Ha! Ha!"
+
+Mr Jones closed his eyes wearily, as if the light hurt them, and
+looked remarkably like a corpse for a moment.  This was bad enough;
+but when he opened them again, it was almost a worse trial for
+Schomberg's nerves.  The spectral intensity of that glance, fixed on
+the hotel-keeper (and this was most frightful) without any definite
+expression, seemed to dissolve the last grain of resolution in his
+character.
+
+"You don't think, by any chance, that you have to do with ordinary
+people, do you?" inquired Mr. Jones, in his lifeless manner, which
+seemed to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave.
+
+"He's a gentleman," testified Martin Ricardo with a sudden snap of
+the lips, after which his moustaches stirred by themselves in an
+odd, feline manner.
+
+"Oh, I wasn't thinking of that," said plain Mr. Jones, while
+Schomberg, dumb and planted heavily in his chair looked from one to
+the other, leaning forward a little.  "Of course I am that; but
+Ricardo attaches too much importance to a social advantage.  What I
+mean, for instance, is that he, quiet and inoffensive as you see him
+sitting here, would think nothing of setting fire to this house of
+entertainment of yours.  It would blaze like a box of matches.
+Think of that!  It wouldn't advance your affairs much, would it?--
+whatever happened to us."
+
+"Come, come gentlemen," remonstrated Schomberg, in a murmur.  "This
+is very wild talk!"
+
+"And you have been used to deal with tame people, haven't you?  But
+we aren't tame.  We once kept a whole angry town at bay for two
+days, and then we got away with our plunder.  It was in Venezuela.
+Ask Martin here--he can tell you."
+
+Instinctively Schomberg looked at Ricardo, who only passed the tip
+of his tongue over his lips with an uncanny sort of gusto, but did
+not offer to begin.
+
+"Well, perhaps it would be a rather long story," Mr. Jones conceded
+after a short silence.
+
+"I have no desire to hear it, I am sure," said Schomberg.  "This
+isn't Venezuela.  You wouldn't get away from here like that.  But
+all this is silly talk of the worst sort.  Do you mean to say you
+would make deadly trouble for the sake of a few guilders that you
+and that other"--eyeing Ricardo suspiciously, as one would look at a
+strange animal--"gentleman can win of an evening?  Isn't as if my
+customers were a lot of rich men with pockets full of cash.  I
+wonder you take so much trouble and risk for so little money."
+
+Schomberg's argument was met by Mr. Jones's statement that one must
+do something to kill time.  Killing time was not forbidden.  For the
+rest, being in a communicative mood, Mr. Jones said languidly and in
+a voice indifferent, as if issuing from a tomb, that he depended on
+himself, as if the world were still one great, wild jungle without
+law.  Martin was something like that, too--for reasons of his own.
+
+All these statements Ricardo confirmed by short, inhuman grins.
+Schomberg lowered his eyes, for the sight of these two men
+intimidated him; but he was losing patience.
+
+"Of course, I could see at once that you were two desperate
+characters--something like what you say.  But what would you think
+if I told you that I am pretty near as desperate as you two
+gentlemen?  'Here's that Schomberg has an easy time running his
+hotel,' people think; and yet it seems to me I would just as soon
+let you rip me open and burn the whole show as not.  There!"
+
+A low whistle was heard.  It came from Ricardo, and was derisive.
+Schomberg, breathing heavily, looked on the floor.  He was really
+desperate.  Mr. Jones remained languidly sceptical.
+
+"Tut, tut!  You have a tolerable business.  You are perfectly tame;
+you--"  He paused, then added in a tone of disgust:  "You have a
+wife."
+
+Schomberg tapped the floor angrily with his foot and uttered an
+indistinct, laughing curse.
+
+"What do you mean by flinging that damned trouble at my head?" he
+cried.  "I wish you would carry her off with you some where to the
+devil!  I wouldn't run after you."
+
+The unexpected outburst affected Mr. Jones strangely.  He had a
+horrified recoil, chair and all, as if Schomberg had thrust a
+wriggling viper in his face.
+
+"What's this infernal nonsense?" he muttered thickly.  "What do you
+mean?  How dare you?"
+
+Ricardo chuckled audibly.
+
+"I tell you I am desperate," Schomberg repeated.  "I am as desperate
+as any man ever was.  I don't care a hang what happens to me!"
+
+"Well, then"--Mr. Jones began to speak with a quietly threatening
+effect, as if the common words of daily use had some other deadly
+meaning to his mind--"well, then, why should you make yourself
+ridiculously disagreeable to us?  If you don't care, as you say, you
+might just as well let us have the key of that music-shed of yours
+for a quiet game; a modest bank--a dozen candles or so.  It would be
+greatly appreciated by your clients, as far as I can judge from the
+way they betted on a game of ecarte I had with that fair, baby-faced
+man--what's his name?  They just yearn for a modest bank.  And I am
+afraid Martin here would take it badly if you objected; but of
+course you won't.  Think of the calls for drinks!"
+
+Schomberg, raising his eyes, at last met the gleams in two dark
+caverns under Mr. Jones's devilish eyebrows, directed upon him
+impenetrably.  He shuddered as if horrors worse than murder had been
+lurking there, and said, nodding towards Ricardo:
+
+"I dare say he wouldn't think twice about sticking me, if he had you
+at his back!  I wish I had sunk my launch, and gone to the bottom
+myself in her, before I boarded the steamer you came by.  Ah, well,
+I've been already living in hell for weeks, so you don't make much
+difference.  I'll let you have the concert-room--and hang the
+consequences.  But what about the boy on late duty?  If he sees the
+cards and actual money passing, he will be sure to blab, and it will
+be all over the town in no time."
+
+A ghastly smile stirred the lips of Mr. Jones.
+
+"Ah, I see you want to make a success of it.  Very good.  That's the
+way to get on.  Don't let it disturb you.  You chase all the
+Chinamen to bed early, and we'll get Pedro here every evening.  He
+isn't the conventional waiter's cut, but he will do to run to and
+fro with the tray, while you sit here from nine to eleven serving
+out drinks and gathering the money."
+
+"There will be three of them now," thought the unlucky Schomberg.
+
+But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute, if
+a murderous one.  There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny,
+no suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man,
+or of an insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and
+bones and a subtle power of terror.  Pedro with his fangs, his
+tangled beard, and queer stare of his little bear's eyes was, by
+comparison, delightfully natural.  Besides, Schomberg could no
+longer help himself.
+
+"That will do very well," he asserted mournfully.  "But if you
+gentlemen, if you had turned up here only three months ago--ay, less
+than three months ago--you would have found somebody very different
+from what I am now to talk to you.  It's true.  What do you think of
+that?"
+
+"I scarcely know what to think.  I should think it was a lie.  You
+were probably as tame three months ago as you are now.  You were
+born tame, like most people in the world."
+
+Mr Jones got up spectrally, and Ricardo imitated him with a snarl
+and a stretch.  Schomberg, in a brown study, went on, as if to
+himself:
+
+"There has been an orchestra here--eighteen women."
+
+Mr Jones let out an exclamation of dismay, and looked about as if
+the walls around him and the whole house had been infected with
+plague.  Then he became very angry, and swore violently at Schomberg
+for daring to bring up such subjects.  The hotel-keeper was too much
+surprised to get up.  He gazed from his chair at Mr. Jones's anger,
+which had nothing spectral in it but was not the more comprehensible
+for that.
+
+"What's the matter?" he stammered out.  "What subject?  Didn't you
+hear me say it was an orchestra?  There's nothing wrong in that.
+Well, there was a girl amongst them--"  Schomberg's eyes went stony;
+he clasped his hands in front of his breast with such force that his
+knuckles came out white.  "Such a girl!  Tame, am I?  I would have
+kicked everything to pieces about me for her.  And she, of course .
+. . I am in the prime of life . . . then a fellow bewitched her--a
+vagabond, a false, bring, swindling, underhand, stick-at-nothing
+brute.  Ah!"
+
+His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out
+his arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury.  The
+other two looked at his shaking back--the attenuated Mr. Jones with
+mingled scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of a
+cat which sees a piece of fish in the pantry out of reach.
+Schomberg flung himself backwards.  He was dry-eyed, but he gulped
+as if swallowing sobs.
+
+"No wonder you can do with me what you like.  You have no idea--just
+let me tell you of my trouble--"
+
+"I don't want to know anything of your beastly trouble," said Mr.
+Jones, in his most lifelessly positive voice.
+
+He stretched forth an arresting hand, and, as Schomberg remained
+open-mouthed, he walked out of the billiard-room in all the
+uncanniness of his thin shanks.  Ricardo followed at his leader's
+heels; but he showed his teeth to Schomberg over his shoulder.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+
+
+From that evening dated those mysterious but significant phenomena
+in Schomberg's establishment which attracted Captain Davidson's
+casual notice when he dropped in, placid yet astute, in order to
+return Mrs. Schomberg's Indian shawl.  And strangely enough, they
+lasted some considerable time.  It argued either honesty and bad
+luck or extraordinary restraint on the part of "plain Mr. Jones and
+Co." in their discreet operations with cards.
+
+It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg's
+concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled
+up on and about the musicians' platform, and lighted at the other by
+two dozen candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with
+green cloth.  In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned
+into a banker, faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned
+into a croupier.  By contrast, the other faces round that table,
+anything between twenty and thirty, must have looked like collected
+samples of intensely artless, helpless humanity--pathetic in their
+innocent watch for the small turns of luck which indeed might have
+been serious enough for them.  They had no notice to spare for the
+hairy Pedro, carrying a tray with the clumsiness of a creature
+caught in the woods and taught to walk on its hind legs.
+
+As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way.  He remained in the
+billiard-room, serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an
+air of not seeing the growling monster, of not knowing where the
+drinks went, of ignoring that there was such a thing as a music-room
+over there under the trees within fifty yards of the hotel.  He
+submitted himself to the situation with a low-spirited stoicism
+compounded of fear and resignation.  Directly the party had broken
+up, (he could see dark shapes of the men drifting singly and in
+knots through the gate of the compound), he would withdraw out of
+sight behind a door not quit closed, in order to avoid meeting his
+two extraordinary guests; but he would watch through the crack their
+contrasted forms pass through the billiard-room and disappear on
+their way to bed.  Then he would hear doors being slammed upstairs;
+and a profound silence would fall upon the whole house, upon his
+hotel appropriated, haunted by those insolently outspoken men
+provided with a whole armoury of weapons in their trunks.  A
+profound silence.  Schomberg sometimes could not resist the notion
+that he must be dreaming.  Shuddering, he would pull himself
+together, and creep out, with movements strangely inappropriate to
+the Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve bearing by which he tried to keep up
+his self-respect before the world.
+
+A great loneliness oppressed him.  One after another he would
+extinguish the lamps, and move softly towards his bedroom, where
+Mrs. Schomberg waited for him--no fit companion for a man of his
+ability and "in the prime of life."  But that life, alas, was
+blighted.  He felt it; and never with such force as when on opening
+the door he perceived that woman sitting patiently in a chair, her
+toes peeping out under the edge of her night-dress, an amazingly
+small amount of hair on her head drooping on the long stalk of
+scraggy neck, with that everlasting scared grin showing a blue tooth
+and meaning nothing--not even real fear.  For she was used to him.
+
+Sometimes he was tempted to screw the head off the stalk.  He
+imagined himself doing it--with one hand, a twisting movement.  Not
+seriously, of course.  Just a simple indulgence for his exasperated
+feelings.  He wasn't capable of murder.  He was certain of that.
+And, remembering suddenly the plain speeches of Mr. Jones, he would
+think:  "I suppose I am too tame for that"--quite unaware that he
+had murdered the poor woman morally years ago.  He was too
+unintelligent to have the notion of such a crime.  Her bodily
+presence was bitterly offensive, because of its contrast with a very
+different feminine image.  And it was no use getting rid of her.
+She was a habit of years, and there would be nothing to put in her
+place.  At any rate, he could talk to that idiot half the night if
+he chose.
+
+That night he had been vapouring before her as to his intention to
+face his two guests and, instead of that inspiration he needed, had
+merely received the usual warning:  "Be careful, Wilhelm."  He did
+not want to be told to be careful by an imbecile female.  What he
+needed was a pair of woman's arms which, flung round his neck, would
+brace him up for the encounter.  Inspire him, he called it to
+himself.
+
+He lay awake a long time; and his slumbers, when they came, were
+unsatisfactory and short.  The morning light had no joy for his
+eyes.  He listened dismally to the movements in the house.  The
+Chinamen were unlocking and flinging wide the doors of the public
+rooms which opened on the veranda.  Horrors!  Another poisoned day
+to get through somehow!  The recollection of his resolve made him
+feel actually sick for a moment.  First of all the lordly, abandoned
+attitudes of Mr. Jones disconcerted him.  Then there was his
+contemptuous silence.  Mr. Jones never addressed himself to
+Schomberg with any general remarks, never opened his lips to him
+unless to say "Good morning"--two simple words which, uttered by
+that man, seemed a mockery of a threatening character.  And, lastly,
+it was not a frank physical fear he inspired--for as to that, even a
+cornered rat will fight--but a superstitious shrinking awe,
+something like an invincible repugnance to seek speech with a wicked
+ghost.  That it was a daylight ghost surprisingly angular in his
+attitudes, and for the most part spread out on three chairs, did not
+make it any easier.  Daylight only made him a more weird, a more
+disturbing and unlawful apparition.  Strangely enough in the evening
+when he came out of his mute supineness, this unearthly side of him
+was less obtrusive.  At the gaming-table, when actually handling the
+cards, it was probably sunk quite out of sight; but Schomberg,
+having made up his mind in ostrich-like fashion to ignore what was
+going on, never entered the desecrated music-room.  He had never
+seen Mr. Jones in the exercise of his vocation--or perhaps it was
+only his trade.
+
+"I will speak to him tonight," Schomberg said to himself, while he
+drank his morning tea, in pyjamas, on the veranda, before the rising
+sun had topped the trees of the compound, and while the undried dew
+still lay silvery on the grass, sparkled on the blossoms of the
+central flower-bed, and darkened the yellow gravel of the drive.
+"That's what I'll do.  I won't keep out of sight tonight.  I shall
+come out and catch him as he goes to bed carrying the cash-box."
+
+After all, what was the fellow but common desperado?  Murderous?
+Oh, yes; murderous enough, perhaps--and the muscles of Schomberg's
+stomach had a quivering contraction under his airy attire.  But even
+a common desperado would think twice or, more likely, a hundred
+times, before openly murdering an inoffensive citizen in a
+civilized, European-ruled town.  He jerked his shoulders.  Of
+course!  He shuddered again, and paddled back to his room to dress
+himself.  His mind was made up, and he would think no more about it;
+but still he had his doubts.  They grew and unfolded themselves with
+the progress of the day, as some plants do.  At times they made him
+perspire more than usual, and they did away with the possibility of
+his afternoon siesta.  After turning over on his couch more than a
+dozen times, he gave up this mockery of repose, got up, and went
+downstairs.
+
+It was between three and four o'clock, the hour of profound peace.
+The very flowers seemed to doze on their stalks set with sleepy
+leaves.  Not even the air stirred, for the sea-breeze was not due
+till later.  The servants were out of sight, catching naps in the
+shade somewhere behind the house.  Mrs. Schomberg in a dim up-stair
+room with closed jalousies, was elaborating those two long pendant
+ringlets which were such a feature of her hairdressing for her
+afternoon duties.  At that time no customers ever troubled the
+repose of the establishment.  Wandering about his premises in
+profound solitude, Schomberg recoiled at the door of the billiard-
+room, as if he had seen a snake in his path.  All alone with the
+billiards, the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs,
+Mr. Secretary Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning
+rapidity something that looked like tricks with his own personal
+pack of cards, which he always carried about in his pocket.
+Schomberg would have backed out quietly if Ricardo had not turned
+his head.  Having been seen, the hotel-keeper elected to walk in as
+the lesser risk of the two.  The consciousness of his inwardly
+abject attitude towards these men caused him always to throw his
+chest out and assume a severe expression.  Ricardo watched his
+approach, clasping the pack of cards in both hands.
+
+"You want something, perhaps?" suggested Schomberg in his
+lieutenant-of-the-Reserve voice.
+
+Ricardo shook his head in silence and looked expectant.  With him
+Schomberg exchanged at least twenty words every day.  He was
+infinitely more communicative than his patron.  At times he looked
+very much like an ordinary human being of his class; and he seemed
+to be in an amiable mood at that moment.  Suddenly spreading some
+ten cards face downward in the form of a fan, he thrust them towards
+Schomberg.
+
+"Come, man, take one quick!"
+
+Schomberg was so surprised that he took one hurriedly, after a very
+perceptible start.  The eyes of Martin Ricardo gleamed
+phosphorescent in the half-light of the room screened from the heat
+and glare of the tropics.
+
+"That's the king of hearts you've got," he chuckled, showing his
+teeth in a quick flash.
+
+Schomberg, after looking at the card, admitted that it was, and laid
+it down on the table.
+
+"I can make you take any card I like nine times out of ten," exulted
+the secretary, with a strange curl of his lips and a green flicker
+in his raised eyes.
+
+Schomberg looked down at him dumbly.  For a few seconds neither of
+them stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his
+fingers, let the whole pack fall on the table.  Schomberg sat down.
+He sat down because of the faintness in his legs, and for no other
+reason.  His mouth was dry.  Having sat down, he felt that he must
+speak.  He squared his shoulders in parade style.
+
+"You are pretty good at that sort of thing," he said.
+
+"Practice makes perfect," replied the secretary.
+
+His precarious amiability made it impossible for Schomberg to get
+away.  Thus, from his very timidity, the hotel-keeper found himself
+engaged in a conversation the thought of which filled him with
+apprehension.  It must be said, in justice to Schomberg, that he
+concealed his funk very creditably.  The habit of throwing out his
+chest and speaking in a severe voice stood him in good stead.  With
+him, too, practice made perfect; and he would probably have kept it
+up to the end, to the very last moment, to the ultimate instant of
+breaking strain which would leave him grovelling on the floor.  To
+add to his secret trouble, he was at a loss what to say.  He found
+nothing else but the remark:
+
+"I suppose you are fond of cards."
+
+"What would you expect?" asked Ricardo in a simple, philosophical
+tone.  "It is likely I should not be?"  Then, with sudden fire:
+"Fond of cards?  Ay, passionately!"
+
+The effect of this outburst was augmented by the quiet lowering of
+the eyelids, by a reserved pause as though this had been a
+confession of another kind of love.  Schomberg cudgelled his brains
+for a new topic, but he could not find one.  His usual scandalous
+gossip would not serve this turn.  That desperado did not know
+anyone anywhere within a thousand miles.  Schomberg was almost
+compelled to keep to the subject.
+
+"I suppose you've always been so--from your early youth."
+
+Ricardo's eyes remained cast down.  His fingers toyed absently with
+the pack on the table.
+
+"I don't know that it was so early.  I first got in the way of it
+playing for tobacco--in forecastles of ships, you know--common
+sailor games.  We used to spend whole watches below at it, round a
+chest, under a slush lamp.  We would hardly spare the time to get a
+bite of salt horse--neither eat nor sleep.  We could hardly stand
+when the watches were mustered on deck.  Talk of gambling!"  He
+dropped the reminiscent tone to add the information, "I was bred to
+the sea from a boy, you know."
+
+Schomberg had fallen into a reverie, but without losing the sense of
+impending calamity.  The next words he heard were:
+
+"I got on all right at sea, too.  Worked up to be mate.  I was mate
+of a schooner--a yacht, you might call her--a special good berth
+too, in the Gulf of Mexico, a soft job that you don't run across
+more than once in a lifetime.  Yes, I was mate of her when I left
+the sea to follow him."
+
+Ricardo tossed up his chin to indicate the room above; from which
+Schomberg, his wits painfully aroused by this reminder of Mr.
+Jones's existence, concluded that the latter had withdrawn into his
+bedroom.  Ricardo, observing him from under lowered eyelids, went
+on:
+
+"It so happened that we were shipmates."
+
+"Mr Jones, you mean?  Is he a sailor too?"
+
+Ricardo raised his eyelids at that.
+
+"He's no more Mr. Jones than you are," he said with obvious pride.
+"He a sailor!  That just shows your ignorance.  But there!  A
+foreigner can't be expected to know any better.  I am an Englishman,
+and I know a gentleman at sight.  I should know one drunk, in the
+gutter, in jail, under the gallows.  There's a something--it isn't
+exactly the appearance, it's a--no use me trying to tell you.  You
+ain't an Englishman, and if you were, you wouldn't need to be told."
+
+An unsuspected stream of loquacity had broken its dam somewhere deep
+within the man, had diluted his fiery blood and softened his
+pitiless fibre.  Schomberg experienced mingled relief and
+apprehension, as if suddenly an enormous savage cat had begun to
+wind itself about his legs in inexplicable friendliness.  No prudent
+man under such circumstances would dare to stir.  Schomberg didn't
+stir.  Ricardo assumed an easy attitude, with an elbow on the table.
+Schomberg squared his shoulders afresh.
+
+"I was employed, in that there yacht--schooner, whatever you call
+it--by ten gentlemen at once.  That surprises you, eh?  Yes, yes,
+ten.  Leastwise there were nine of them gents good enough in their
+way, and one downright gentleman, and that was . . . "
+
+Ricardo gave another upward jerk of his chin as much as to say:  He!
+The only one.
+
+"And no mistake," he went on.  "I spotted him from the first day.
+How?  Why?  Ay, you may ask.  Hadn't seen that many gentlemen in my
+life.  Well, somehow I did.  If you were an Englishman, you would--"
+
+"What was your yacht?" Schomberg interrupted as impatiently as he
+dared; for this harping on nationality jarred on his already tried
+nerves.  "What was the game?"
+
+"You have a headpiece on you!  Game!  'Xactly.  That's what it was--
+the sort of silliness gentlemen will get up among themselves to play
+at adventure.  A treasure-hunting expedition.  Each of them put down
+so much money, you understand, to buy the schooner.  Their agent in
+the city engaged me and the skipper.  The greatest secrecy and all
+that.  I reckon he had a twinkle in his eye all the time--and no
+mistake.  But that wasn't our business.  Let them bust their money
+as they like.  The pity of it was that so little of it came our way.
+Just fair pay and no more.  And damn any pay, much or little,
+anyhow--that's what I say!"
+
+He blinked his eyes greenishly in the dim light.  The heat seemed to
+have stilled everything in the world but his voice.  He swore at
+large, abundantly, in snarling undertones, it was impossible to say
+why, then calmed down as inexplicably, and went on, as a sailor
+yarns.
+
+"At first there were only nine of them adventurous sparks, then,
+just a day or two before the sailing date, he turned up.  Heard of
+it somehow, somewhere--I would say from some woman, if I didn't know
+him as I do.  He would give any woman a ten-mile berth.  He can't
+stand them.  Or maybe in a flash bar.  Or maybe in one of them grand
+clubs in Pall Mall.  Anyway, the agent netted him in all right--cash
+down, and only about four and twenty hours for him to get ready; but
+he didn't miss his ship.  Not he!  You might have called it a pier-
+head jump--for a gentleman.  I saw him come along.  Know the West
+India Docks, eh?"
+
+Schomberg did not know the West India Docks.  Ricardo looked at him
+pensively for a while, and then continued, as if such ignorance had
+to be disregarded.
+
+"Our tug was already alongside.  Two loafers were carrying his
+dunnage behind him.  I told the dockman at our moorings to keep all
+fast for a minute.  The gangway was down already; but he made
+nothing of it.  Up he jumps, one leap, swings his long legs over the
+rail, and there he is on board.  They pass up his swell dunnage, and
+he puts his hand in his trousers pocket and throws all his small
+change on the wharf for them chaps to pick up.  They were still
+promenading that wharf on all fours when we cast off.  It was only
+then that he looked at me--quietly, you know; in a slow way.  He
+wasn't so thin then as he is now; but I noticed he wasn't so young
+as he looked--not by a long chalk.  He seemed to touch me inside
+somewhere.  I went away pretty quick from there; I was wanted
+forward anyhow.  I wasn't frightened.  What should I be frightened
+for?  I only felt touched--on the very spot.  But Jee-miny, if
+anybody had told me we should be partners before the year was out--
+well, I would have--"
+
+He swore a variety of strange oaths, some common, others quaintly
+horrible to Schomberg's ears, and all mere innocent exclamations of
+wonder at the shifts and changes of human fortune.  Schomberg moved
+slightly in his chair.  But the admirer and partner of "plain Mr.
+Jones" seemed to have forgotten Schomberg's existence for the
+moment.  The stream of ingenuous blasphemy--some of it in bad
+Spanish--had run dry, and Martin Ricardo, connoisseur in gentlemen,
+sat dumb with a stony gaze as if still marvelling inwardly at the
+amazing elections, conjunctions, and associations of events which
+influence man's pilgrimage on this earth.
+
+At last Schomberg spoke tentatively:
+
+"And so the--the gentleman, up there, talked you over into leaving a
+good berth?"
+
+Ricardo started.
+
+"Talked me over!  Didn't need to talk me over.  Just beckoned to me,
+and that was enough.  By that time we were in the Gulf of Mexico.
+One night we were lying at anchor, close to a dry sandbank--to this
+day I am not sure where it was--off the Colombian coast or
+thereabouts.  We were to start digging the next morning, and all
+hands had turned in early, expecting a hard day with the shovels.
+Up he comes, and in his quiet, tired way of speaking--you can tell a
+gentleman by that as much as by anything else almost--up he comes
+behind me and says, just like that into my ear, in a manner:  'Well,
+what do you think of our treasure hunt now?'
+
+"I didn't even turn my head; 'xactly as I stood, I remained, and I
+spoke no louder than himself:
+
+"'If you want to know, sir, it's nothing but just damned tom-
+foolery.'
+
+"We had, of course, been having short talks together at one time or
+another during the passage.  I dare say he had read me like a book.
+There ain't much to me, except that I have never been tame, even
+when walking the pavement and cracking jokes and standing drinks to
+chums--ay, and to strangers, too.  I would watch them lifting their
+elbows at my expense, or splitting their side at my fun--I CAN be
+funny when I like, you bet!"
+
+A pause for self-complacent contemplation of his own fun and
+generosity checked the flow of Ricardo's speech.  Schomberg was
+concerned to keep within bounds the enlargement of his eyes, which
+he seemed to feel growing bigger in his head.
+
+"Yes, yes," he whispered hastily.
+
+"I would watch them and think:  'You boys don't know who I am.  If
+you did--!'  With girls, too.  Once I was courting a girl.  I used
+to kiss her behind the ear and say to myself:  'If you only knew
+who's kissing you, my dear, you would scream and bolt!'  Ha! ha!
+Not that I wanted to do them any harm; but I felt the power in
+myself.  Now, here we sit, friendly like, and that's all right.  You
+aren't in my way.  But I am not friendly to you.  I just don't care.
+Some men do say that; but I really don't.  You are no more to me one
+way or another than that fly there.  Just so.  I'd squash you or
+leave you alone.  I don't care what I do."
+
+If real force of character consists in overcoming our sudden
+weaknesses, Schomberg displayed plenty of that quality.  At the
+mention of the fly, he re-enforced the severe dignity of his
+attitude as one inflates a collapsing toy balloon with a great
+effort of breath.  The easy-going, relaxed attitude of Ricardo was
+really appalling.
+
+"That's so," he went on.  "I am that sort of fellow.  You wouldn't
+think it, would you?  No.  You have to be told.  So I am telling
+you, and I dare say you only half believe it.  But you can't say to
+yourself that I am drunk, stare at me as you may.  I haven't had
+anything stronger than a glass of iced water all day.  Takes a real
+gentleman to see through a fellow.  Oh, yes--he spotted me.  I told
+you we had a few talks at sea about one thing or another.  And I
+used to watch him down the skylight, playing cards in the cuddy with
+the others.  They had to pass the time away somehow.  By the same
+token he caught me at it once, and it was then that I told him I was
+fond of cards--and generally lucky in gambling, too.  Yes, he had
+sized me up.  Why not?  A gentleman's just like any other man--and
+something more."
+
+It flashed through Schomberg's mind:  that these two were indeed
+well matched in their enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in
+different disguises.
+
+"Says he to me"--Ricardo started again in a gossiping manner--'I'm
+packed up.  It's about time to go, Martin.'
+
+"It was the first time he called me Martin.  Says I:
+
+"'Is that it, sir?'
+
+"'You didn't think I was after that sort of treasure, did you?  I
+wanted to clear out from home quietly.  It's a pretty expensive way
+of getting a passage across, but it has served my turn.'
+
+"I let him know very soon that I was game for anything, from pitch
+and toss to wilful murder, in his company.
+
+"'Wilful murder?' says he in his quiet way.  'What the deuce is
+that?  What are you talking about?  People do get killed sometimes
+when they get in one's way, but that's self-defence--you
+understand?'
+
+"I told him I did.  And then I said I would run below for a minute,
+to ram a few of my things into a sailor's bag I had.  I've never
+cared for a lot of dunnage; I believed in going about flying light
+when I was at sea.  I came back and found him strolling up and down
+the deck, as if he were taking a breath of fresh air before turning
+in, like any other evening.
+
+"'Ready?'
+
+"'Yes, sir.'
+
+"He didn't even look at me.  We had had a boat in the water astern
+ever since we came to anchor in the afternoon.  He throws the stump
+of his cigar overboard.
+
+"'Can you get the captain out on deck?' he asks.
+
+"That was the last thing in the world I should have thought of
+doing.  I lost my tongue for a moment.
+
+"'I can try,' says I.
+
+"'Well, then, I am going below.  You get him up and keep him with
+you till I come back on deck.  Mind!  Don't let him go below till I
+return.'
+
+"I could not help asking why he told me to rouse a sleeping man,
+when we wanted everybody on board to sleep sweetly till we got clear
+of the schooner.  He laughs a little and says that I didn't see all
+the bearings of this business.
+
+"'Mind,' he says, 'don't let him leave you till you see me come up
+again.'  He puts his eyes close to mine.  'Keep him with you at all
+costs.'
+
+"'And that means?' says I.
+
+"'All costs to him--by every possible or impossible means.  I don't
+want to be interrupted in my business down below.  He would give me
+lots of trouble.  I take you with me to save myself trouble in
+various circumstances; and you've got to enter on your work right
+away.'
+
+"'Just so, sir,' says I; and he slips down the companion.
+
+"With a gentleman you know at once where you are; but it was a
+ticklish job.  The skipper was nothing to me one way or another, any
+more than you are at this moment, Mr. Schomberg.  You may light your
+cigar or blow your brains out this minute, and I don't care a hang
+which you do, both or neither.  To bring the skipper up was easy
+enough.  I had only to stamp on the deck a few times over his head.
+I stamped hard.  But how to keep him up when he got there?
+
+"'Anything the matter; Mr. Ricardo?' I heard his voice behind me.
+
+"There he was, and I hadn't thought of anything to say to him; so I
+didn't turn round.  The moonlight was brighter than many a day I
+could remember in the North Sea.
+
+"'Why did you call me?  What are you staring at out there, Mr.
+Ricardo?'
+
+"He was deceived by my keeping my back to him.  I wasn't staring at
+anything, but his mistake gave me a notion.
+
+"'I am staring at something that looks like a canoe over there,' I
+said very slowly.
+
+"The skipper got concerned at once.  It wasn't any danger from the
+inhabitants, whoever they were.
+
+"'Oh, hang it!' says he.  'That's very unfortunate.'  He had hoped
+that the schooner being on the coast would not get known so very
+soon.  'Dashed awkward, with the business we've got in hand, to have
+a lot of niggers watching operations.  But are you certain this is a
+canoe?'
+
+"'It may be a drift-log,' I said; 'but I thought you had better have
+a look with your own eyes.  You may make it out better than I can.'
+
+"His eyes weren't anything as good as mine.  But he says:
+
+"'Certainly.  Certainly.  You did quite right.'
+
+"And it's a fact I had seen some drift-logs at sunset.  I saw what
+they were then and didn't trouble my head about them, forgot all
+about it till that very moment.  Nothing strange in seeing drift-
+logs off a coast like that; and I'm hanged if the skipper didn't
+make one out in the wake of the moon.  Strange what a little thing a
+man's life hangs on sometimes--a single word!  Here you are, sitting
+unsuspicious before me, and you may let out something unbeknown to
+you that would settle your hash.  Not that I have any ill-feeling.
+I have no feelings.  If the skipper had said, 'O, bosh!' and had
+turned his back on me, he would not have gone three steps towards
+his bed; but he stood there and stared.  And now the job was to get
+him off the deck when he was no longer wanted there.
+
+"'We are just trying to make out if that object there is a canoe or
+a log,' says he to Mr. Jones.
+
+"Mr Jones had come up, lounging as carelessly as when he went below.
+While the skipper was jawing about boats and drifting logs.  I asked
+by signs, from behind, if I hadn't better knock him on the head and
+drop him quietly overboard.  The night was slipping by, and we had
+to go.  It couldn't be put off till next night no more.  No.  No
+more.  And do you know why?"
+
+Schomberg made a slight negative sign with his head.  This direct
+appeal annoyed him, jarred on the induced quietude of a great talker
+forced into the part of a listener and sunk in it as a man sinks
+into slumber.  Mr. Ricardo struck a note of scorn.
+
+"Don't know why?  Can't you guess?  No?  Because the boss had got
+hold of the skipper's cash-box by then.  See?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+
+
+"A common thief!"
+
+Schomberg bit his tongue just too late, and woke up completely as he
+saw Ricardo retract his lips in a cat-like grin; but the companion
+of "plain Mr. Jones" didn't alter his comfortable, gossiping
+attitude.
+
+"Garn!  What if he did want to see his money back, like any tame
+shopkeeper, hash-seller, gin-slinger, or ink-spewer does?  Fancy a
+mud turtle like you trying to pass an opinion on a gentleman!  A
+gentleman isn't to be sized up so easily.  Even I ain't up to it
+sometimes.  For instance, that night, all he did was to waggle his
+finger at me.  The skipper stops his silly chatter, surprised.
+
+"'Eh?  What's the matter?' asks he.
+
+"The matter!  It was his reprieve--that's what was the matter.
+
+"'O, nothing, nothing,' says my gentleman.  'You are perfectly
+right.  A log--nothing but a log.'
+
+"Ha, ha!  Reprieve, I call it, because if the skipper had gone on
+with his silly argument much longer he would have had to be knocked
+out of the way.  I could hardly hold myself in on account of the
+precious minutes.  However, his guardian angel put it into his head
+to shut up and go back to his bed.  I was ramping mad about the lost
+time."
+
+"'Why didn't you let me give him one on his silly coconut sir?' I
+asks.
+
+"'No ferocity, no ferocity,' he says, raising his finger at me as
+calm as you please.
+
+"You can't tell how a gentleman takes that sort of thing.  They
+don't lost their temper.  It's bad form.  You'll never see him lose
+his temper--not for anybody to see anyhow.  Ferocity ain't good
+form, either--that much I've learned by this time, and more, too.
+I've had that schooling that you couldn't tell by my face if I meant
+to rip you up the next minute--as of course I could do in less than
+a jiffy.  I have a knife up the leg of my trousers."
+
+"You haven't!" exclaimed Schomberg incredulously.
+
+Mr Ricardo was as quick as lightning in changing his lounging, idle
+attitude for a stooping position, and exhibiting the weapon with one
+jerk at the left leg of his trousers.  Schomberg had just a view of
+it, strapped to a very hairy limb, when Mr. Ricardo, jumping up,
+stamped his foot to get the trouser-leg down, and resumed his
+careless pose with one elbow on the table.
+
+"It's a more handy way to carry a tool than you would think," he
+went on, gazing abstractedly into Schomberg's wide-open eyes.
+"Suppose some little difference comes up during a game.  Well, you
+stoop to pick up a dropped card, and when you come up--there you are
+ready to strike, or with the thing up you sleeve ready to throw.  Or
+you just dodge under the table when there's some shooting coming.
+You wouldn't believe the damage a fellow with a knife under the
+table can do to ill-conditioned skunks that want to raise trouble,
+before they begin to understand what the screaming's about, and make
+a bolt--those that can, that is."
+
+The roses of Schomberg's cheek at the root of his chestnut beard
+faded perceptibly.  Ricardo chuckled faintly.
+
+"But no ferocity--no ferocity!  A gentleman knows.  What's the good
+of getting yourself into a state?  And no shirking necessity,
+either.  No gentleman ever shirks.  What I learn I don't forget.
+Why!  We gambled on the plains, with a damn lot of cattlemen in
+ranches; played fair, mind--and then had to fight for our winnings
+afterwards as often as not.  We've gambled on the hills and in the
+valleys and on the sea-shore, and out of sight of land--mostly fair.
+Generally it's good enough.  We began in Nicaragua first, after we
+left that schooner and her fool errand.  There were one hundred and
+twenty-seven sovereigns and some Mexican dollars in that skipper's
+cash-box.  Hardly enough to knock a man on the head for from behind,
+I must confess; but that the skipper had a narrow escape the
+governor himself could not deny afterwards.
+
+"'Do you want me to understand, sir, that you mind there being one
+life more or less on this earth?' I asked him, a few hours after we
+got away.
+
+"'Certainly not,' says he.
+
+"'Well, then, why did you stop me?'
+
+"'There's a proper way of doing things.  You'll have to learn to be
+correct.  There's also unnecessary exertion.  That must be avoided,
+too--if only for the look of the thing.'  A gentleman's way of
+putting things to you--and no mistake!
+
+"At sunrise we got into a creek, to lie hidden in case the treasure
+hunt party had a mind to take a spell hunting for us.  And dash me
+if they didn't!  We saw the schooner away out, running to leeward,
+with ten pairs of binoculars sweeping the sea, no doubt on all
+sides.  I advised the governor to give her time to beat back again
+before we made a start.  So we stayed up that creek something like
+ten days, as snug as can be.  On the seventh day we had to kill a
+man, though--the brother of this Pedro here.  They were alligator-
+hunters, right enough.  We got our lodgings in their hut.  Neither
+the boss nor I could habla Espanol--speak Spanish, you know--much
+then.  Dry bank, nice shade, jolly hammocks, fresh fish, good game,
+everything lovely.  The governor chucked them a few dollars to begin
+with; but it was like boarding with a pair of savage apes, anyhow.
+By and by we noticed them talking a lot together.  They had twigged
+the cash-box, and the leather portmanteaus, and my bag--a jolly lot
+of plunder to look at.  They must have been saying to each other:
+
+"'No one's ever likely to come looking for these two fellows, who
+seem to have fallen from the moon.  Let's cut their throats.'
+
+"Why, of course!  Clear as daylight.  I didn't need to spy one of
+them sharpening a devilish long knife behind some bushes, while
+glancing right and left with his wild eyes, to know what was in the
+wind.  Pedro was standing by, trying the edge of another long knife.
+They thought we were away on our lookout at the mouth of the river,
+as was usual with us during the day.  Not that we expected to see
+much of the schooner, but it was just as well to make certain, if
+possible; and then it was cooler out of the woods, in the breeze.
+Well, the governor was there right enough, lying comfortable on a
+rug, where he could watch the offing, but I had gone back to the hut
+to get a chew of tobacco out of my bag.  I had not broken myself of
+the habit then, and I couldn't be happy unless I had a lump as big
+as a baby's fist in my cheek."
+
+At the cannibalistic comparison, Schomberg muttered a faint, sickly
+"don't."  Ricardo hitched himself up in his seat and glanced down
+his outstretched legs complacently.
+
+"I am tolerably light on my feet, as a general thing," he went on.
+"Dash me if I don't think I could drop a pinch of salt on a
+sparrow's tail, if I tried.  Anyhow, they didn't hear me.  I watched
+them two brown, hairy brutes not ten yards off.  All they had on was
+white linen drawers rolled up on their thighs.  Not a word they said
+to each other.  Antonio was down on his thick hams, busy rubbing a
+knife on a flat stone; Pedro was leaning against a small tree and
+passing his thumb along the edge of his blade.  I got away quieter
+than a mouse, you bet."
+
+"I didn't say anything to the boss then.  He was leaning on his
+elbow on his rug, and didn't seem to want to be spoken to.  He's
+like that--sometimes that familiar you might think he would eat out
+of your hand, and at others he would snub you sharper than a devil--
+but always quiet.  Perfect gentleman, I tell you.  I didn't bother
+him, then; but I wasn't likely to forget them two fellows, so
+businesslike with their knives.  At that time we had only one
+revolver between us two--the governor's six-shooter, but loaded only
+in five chambers; and we had no more cartridges.  He had left the
+box behind in a drawer in his cabin.  Awkward!  I had nothing but an
+old clasp-knife--no good at all for anything serious.
+
+"In the evening we four sat round a bit of fire outside the
+sleeping-shed, eating broiled fish off plantain leaves, with roast
+yams for bread--the usual thing.  The governor and I were on one
+side, and these two beauties cross-legged on the other, grunting a
+word or two to each other, now and then, hardly human speech at all,
+and their eyes down, fast on the ground.  For the last three days we
+couldn't get them to look us in the face.  Presently I began to talk
+to the boss quietly, just as I am talking to you now, careless like,
+and I told him all I had observed.  He goes on picking up pieces of
+fish and putting them into his mouth as calm as anything.  It's a
+pleasure to have anything to do with a gentleman.  Never looked
+across at them once.
+
+"'And now,' says I, yawning on purpose, 'we've got to stand watch at
+night, turn about, and keep our eyes skinned all day, too, and mind
+we don't get jumped upon suddenly.'
+
+"'It's perfectly intolerable,' says the governor.  'And you with no
+weapon of any sort!'
+
+"'I mean to stick pretty close to you, sir, from this on, if you
+don't mind,' says I.
+
+"He just nods the least bit, wipes his fingers on the plantain leaf,
+puts his hand behind his back, as if to help himself to rise from
+the ground, snatches his revolver from under his jacket and plugs a
+bullet plumb centre into Mr. Antonio's chest.  See what it is to
+have to do with a gentleman.  No confounded fuss, and things done
+out of hand.  But he might have tipped me a wink or something.  I
+nearly jumped out of my skin.  Scared ain't in it!  I didn't even
+know who had fired.  Everything had been so still just before that
+the bang of the shot seemed the loudest noise I had ever heard.  The
+honourable Antonio pitches forward--they always do, towards the
+shot; you must have noticed that yourself--yes, he pitches forward
+on to the embers, and all that lot of hair on his face and head
+flashes up like a pinch of gunpowder.  Greasy, I expect; always
+scraping the fat off them alligators' hides--"
+
+"Look here," exclaimed Schomberg violently, as if trying to burst
+some invisible bonds, "do you mean to say that all this happened?"
+
+"No," said Ricardo coolly.  "I am making it all up as I go along,
+just to help you through the hottest part of the afternoon.  So down
+he pitches his nose on the red embers, and up jumps our handsome
+Pedro and I at the same time, like two Jacks-in-the-box.  He starts
+to bolt away, with his head over his shoulder, and I, hardly knowing
+what I was doing, spring on his back.  I had the sense to get my
+hands round his neck at once, and it's about all I could do to lock
+my fingers tight under his jaw.  You saw the beauty's neck, didn't
+you?  Hard as iron, too.  Down we both went.  Seeing this the
+governor puts his revolver in his pocket.
+
+"'Tie his legs together, sir,' I yell.  'I'm trying to strangle
+him.'
+
+"There was a lot of their fibre-lines lying about.  I gave him a
+last squeeze and then got up.
+
+"'I might have shot you,' says the governor, quite concerned.
+
+"'But you are glad to have saved a cartridge, sir,' I tell him.
+
+"My jump did save it.  It wouldn't have done to let him get away in
+the dark like that, and have the beauty dodging around in the
+bushes, perhaps, with the rusty flint-lock gun they had.  The
+governor owned up that the jump was the correct thing.
+
+"'But he isn't dead,' says he, bending over him.
+
+"Might as well hope to strangle an ox.  We made haste to tie his
+elbows back, and then, before he came to himself, we dragged him to
+a small tree, sat him up, and bound him to it, not by the waist but
+by the neck--some twenty turns of small line round his throat and
+the trunk, finished off with a reef-knot under his ear.  Next thing
+we did was to attend to the honourable Antonio, who was making a
+great smell frizzling his face on the red coals.  We pushed and
+rolled him into the creek, and left the rest to the alligators.
+
+"I was tired.  That little scrap took it out of me something awful.
+The governor hadn't turned a hair.  That's where a gentleman has the
+pull of you.  He don't get excited.  No gentleman does--or hardly
+ever.  I fell asleep all of a sudden and left him smoking by the
+fire I had made up, his railway rug round his legs, as calm as if he
+were sitting in a first-class carriage.  We hardly spoke ten words
+to each other after it was over, and from that day to this we have
+never talked of the business.  I wouldn't have known he remembered
+it if he hadn't alluded to it when talking with you the other day--
+you know, with regard to Pedro."
+
+"It surprised you, didn't it?  That's why I am giving you this yarn
+of how he came to be with us, like a sort of dog--dashed sight more
+useful, though.  You know how he can trot around with trays?  Well,
+he could bring down an ox with his fist, at a word from the boss,
+just as cleverly.  And fond of the governor!  Oh, my word!  More
+than any dog is of any man."
+
+Schomberg squared his chest.
+
+"Oh, and that's one of the things I wanted to mention to Mr. Jones,"
+he said.  "It's unpleasant to have that fellow round the house so
+early.  He sits on the stairs at the back for hours before he is
+needed here, and frightens people so that the service suffers.  The
+Chinamen--"
+
+Ricardo nodded and raised his hand.
+
+"When I first saw him he was fit to frighten a grizzly bear, let
+alone a Chinaman.  He's become civilized now to what he once was.
+Well, that morning, first thing on opening my eyes, I saw him
+sitting there, tied up by the neck to the tree.  He was blinking.
+We spend the day watching the sea, and we actually made out the
+schooner working to windward, which showed that she had given us up.
+Good!  When the sun rose again, I took a squint at our Pedro.  He
+wasn't blinking.  He was rolling his eyes, all white one minute and
+black the next, and his tongue was hanging out a yard.  Being tied
+up short by the neck like this would daunt the arch devil himself--
+in time--in time, mind!  I don't know but that even a real gentleman
+would find it difficult to keep a stiff lip to the end.  Presently
+we went to work getting our boat ready.  I was busying myself
+setting up the mast, when the governor passes the remark:
+
+"'I think he wants to say something.'
+
+"I had heard a sort of croaking going on for some time, only I
+wouldn't take any notice; but then I got out of the boat and went up
+to him, with some water.  His eyes were red--red and black and half
+out of his head.  He drank all the water I gave him, but he hadn't
+much to say for himself.  I walked back to the governor.
+
+"'He asks for a bullet in his head before we go,' I said.  I wasn't
+at all pleased.
+
+"'Oh, that's out of the question altogether,' says the governor.
+
+"He was right there.  Only four shots left, and ninety miles of wild
+coast to put behind us before coming to the first place where you
+could expect to buy revolver cartridges.
+
+"'Anyhow,' I tells him, 'he wants to be killed some way or other, as
+a favour.'
+
+"And then I go on setting up the boat's mast.  I didn't care much
+for the notion of butchering a man bound hand and foot and fastened
+by the neck besides.  I had a knife then--the honourable Antonio's
+knife; and that knife is this knife.
+
+Ricardo gave his leg a resounding slap.
+
+"First spoil in my new life," he went on with harsh joviality.  "The
+dodge of carrying it down there I learned later.  I carried it stuck
+in my belt that day.  No, I hadn't much stomach for the job; but
+when you work with a gentleman of the real right sort you may depend
+on your feelings being seen through your skin.  Says the governor
+suddenly:
+
+"'It may even be looked upon as his right'--you hear a gentleman
+speaking there?--'but what do you think of taking him with us in the
+boat?'
+
+"And the governor starts arguing that the beggar would be useful in
+working our way along the coast.  We could get rid of him before
+coming to the first place that was a little civilized.  I didn't
+want much talking over.  Out I scrambled from the boat.
+
+"'Ay, but will he be manageable, sir?'
+
+"'Oh, yes.  He's daunted.  Go on, cut him loose--I take the
+responsibility.'
+
+"'Right you are, sir.'
+
+"He sees me come along smartly with his brother's knife in my hand--
+I wasn't thinking how it looked from his side of the fence, you
+know--and jiminy, it nearly killed him!  He stared like a crazed
+bullock and began to sweat and twitch all over, something amazing.
+I was so surprised, that I stopped to look at him.  The drops were
+pouring over his eyebrows, down his beard, off his nose--and he
+gurgled.  Then it struck me that he couldn't see what was in my
+mind.  By favour or by right he didn't like to die when it came to
+it; not in that way, anyhow.  When I stepped round to get at the
+lashing, he let out a sort of soft bellow.  Thought I was going to
+stick him from behind, I guess.  I cut all the turns with one slash,
+and he went over on his side, flop, and started kicking with his
+tied legs.  Laugh!  I don't know what there was so funny about it,
+but I fairly shouted.  What between my laughing and his wriggling, I
+had a job in cutting him free.  As soon as he could feel his limbs
+he makes for the bank, where the governor was standing, crawls up to
+him on his hands and knees, and embraces his legs.  Gratitude, eh?
+You could see that being allowed to live suited that chap down to
+the ground.  The governor gets his legs away from him gently and
+just mutters to me:
+
+"'Let's be off.  Get him into the boat.'
+
+"It was not difficult," continued Ricardo, after eyeing Schomberg
+fixedly for a moment.  "He was ready enough to get into the boat,
+and--here he is.  He would let himself be chopped into small pieces-
+-with a smile, mind; with a smile!--for the governor.  I don't know
+about him doing that much for me; but pretty near, pretty near.  I
+did the tying up and the untying, but he could see who was the boss.
+And then he knows a gentleman.  A dog knows a gentleman--any dog.
+It's only some foreigners that don't know; and nothing can teach
+them, either."
+
+"And you mean to say," asked Schomberg, disregarding what might have
+been annoying for himself in the emphasis of the final remark, "you
+mean to say that you left steady employment at good wages for a life
+like this?"
+
+"There!" began Ricardo quietly.  "That's just what a man like you
+would say.  You are that tame!  I follow a gentleman.  That ain't
+the same thing as to serve an employer.  They give you wages as
+they'd fling a bone to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful.
+It's worse than slavery.  You don't expect a slave that's bought for
+money to be grateful.  And if you sell your work--what is it but
+selling your own self?  You've got so many days to live and you sell
+them one after another.  Hey?  Who can pay me enough for my life?
+Ay!  But they throw at you your week's money and expect you to say
+'thank you' before you pick it up."
+
+He mumbled some curses, directed at employers generally, as it
+seemed, then blazed out:
+
+"Work be damned!  I ain't a dog walking on its hind legs for a bone;
+I am a man who's following a gentleman.  There's a difference which
+you will never understand, Mr. Tame Schomberg."
+
+He yawned slightly.  Schomberg, preserving a military stiffness
+reinforced by a slight frown, had allowed his thoughts to stray
+away.  They were busy detailing the image of a young girl--absent--
+gone--stolen from him.  He became enraged.  There was that rascal
+looking at him insolently.  If the girl had not been shamefully
+decoyed away from him, he would not have allowed anyone to look at
+him insolently.  He would have made nothing of hitting that rogue
+between the eyes.  Afterwards he would have kicked the other without
+hesitation.  He saw himself doing it; and in sympathy with this
+glorious vision Schomberg's right foot, and arm moved convulsively.
+
+At this moment he came out of his sudden reverie to note with alarm
+the wide-awake curiosity of Mr. Ricardo's stare.
+
+"And so you go like this about the world, gambling," he remarked
+inanely, to cover his confusion.  But Ricardo's stare did not change
+its character, and he continued vaguely:
+
+"Here and there and everywhere."  He pulled himself together,
+squared his shoulders.  "Isn't it very precarious?" he said firmly.
+
+The word precarious--seemed to be effective, because Ricardo's eyes
+lost their dangerously interested expression.
+
+"No, not so bad," Ricardo said, with indifference.  "It's my opinion
+that men will gamble as long as they have anything to put on a card.
+Gamble?  That's nature.  What's life itself?  You never know what
+may turn up.  The worst of it is that you never can tell exactly
+what sort of cards you are holding yourself.  What's trumps?--that
+is the question.  See?  Any man will gamble if only he's given a
+chance, for anything or everything.  You too--"
+
+"I haven't touched a card now for twenty years," said Schomberg in
+an austere tone.
+
+"Well, if you got your living that way you would be no worse than
+you are now, selling drinks to people--beastly beer and spirits,
+rotten stuff fit to make an old he-goat yell if you poured it down
+its throat.  Pooh!  I can't stand the confounded liquor.  Never
+could.  A whiff of neat brandy in a glass makes me feel sick.
+Always did.  If everybody was like me, liquor would be going a-
+begging.  You think it's funny in a man, don't you?"
+
+Schomberg made a vague gesture of toleration.  Ricardo hitched up
+his chair and settled his elbow afresh on the table.
+
+"French siros I must say I do like.  Saigon's the place for them.  I
+see you have siros in the bar.  Hang me if I ain't getting dry,
+conversing like this with you.  Come, Mr. Schomberg, be hospitable,
+as the governor says."
+
+Schomberg rose and walked with dignity to the counter.  His
+footsteps echoed loudly on the floor of polished boards.  He took
+down a bottle, labelled "Sirop de Groseille."  The little sounds he
+made, the clink of glass, the gurgling of the liquid, the pop of the
+soda-water cork had a preternatural sharpness.  He came back
+carrying a pink and glistening tumbler.  Mr. Ricardo had followed
+his movements with oblique, coyly expectant yellow eyes, like a cat
+watching the preparation of a saucer of milk, and the satisfied
+sound after he had drunk might have been a slightly modified form of
+purring, very soft and deep in his throat.  It affected Schomberg
+unpleasantly as another example of something inhuman in those men
+wherein lay the difficulty of dealing with them.  A spectre, a cat,
+an ape--there was a pretty association for a mere man to remonstrate
+with, he reflected with an inward shudder; for Schomberg had been
+overpowered, as it were, by his imagination, and his reason could
+not react against that fanciful view of his guests.  And it was not
+only their appearance.  The morals of Mr. Ricardo seemed to him to
+be pretty much the morals of a cat.  Too much.  What sort of
+argument could a mere man offer to a . . . or to a spectre, either!
+What the morals of a spectre could be, Schomberg had no idea.
+Something dreadful, no doubt.  Compassion certainly had no place in
+them.  As to the ape--well, everybody knew what an ape was.  It had
+no morals.  Nothing could be more hopeless.
+
+Outwardly, however, having picked up the cigar which he had laid
+aside to get the drink, with his thick fingers, one of them
+ornamented by a gold ring, Schomberg smoked with moody composure.
+Facing him, Ricardo blinked slowly for a time, then closed his eyes
+altogether, with the placidity of the domestic cat dozing on the
+hearth-rug.  In another moment he opened them very wide, and seemed
+surprised to see Schomberg there.
+
+"You're having a very slack time today, aren't you?" he observed.
+"But then this whole town is confoundedly slack, anyhow; and I've
+never faced such a slack party at a table before.  Come eleven
+o'clock, they begin to talk of breaking up.  What's the matter with
+them?  Want to go to bed so early, or what?"
+
+"I reckon you don't lose a fortune by their wanting to go to bed,"
+said Schomberg, with sombre sarcasm.
+
+"No," admitted Ricardo, with a grin that stretched his thin mouth
+from ear to ear, giving a sudden glimpse of his white teeth.  "Only,
+you see, when I once start, I would play for nuts, for parched peas,
+for any rubbish.  I would play them for their souls.  But these
+Dutchmen aren't any good.  They never seem to get warmed up
+properly, win or lose.  I've tried them both ways, too.  Hang them
+for a beggarly, bloodless lot of animated cucumbers!"
+
+"And if anything out of the way was to happen, they would be just as
+cool in locking you and your gentleman up," Schomberg snarled
+unpleasantly.
+
+"Indeed!" said Ricardo slowly, taking Schomberg's measure with his
+eyes.  "And what about you?"
+
+"You talk mighty big," burst out the hotel-keeper.  "You talk of
+ranging all over the world, and doing great things, and taking
+fortune by the scruff of the neck, but here you stick at this
+miserable business!"
+
+"It isn't much of a lay--that's a fact," admitted Ricardo
+unexpectedly.
+
+Schomberg was red in the face with audacity.
+
+"I call it paltry," he spluttered.
+
+"That's how it looks.  Can't call it anything else."  Ricardo seemed
+to be in an accommodating mood.  "I should be ashamed of it myself,
+only you see the governor is subject to fits--"
+
+"Fits!" Schomberg cried out, but in a low tone.  "You don't say so!"
+He exulted inwardly, as if this disclosure had in some way
+diminished the difficulty of the situation.  "Fits!  That's a
+serious thing, isn't it?  You ought to take him to the civil
+hospital--a lovely place."
+
+Ricardo nodded slightly, with a faint grin.
+
+"Serious enough.  Regular fits of laziness, I call them.  Now and
+then he lays down on me like this, and there's no moving him.  If
+you think I like it, you're a long way out.  Generally speaking, I
+can talk him over.  I know how to deal with a gentleman.  I am no
+daily-bread slave.  But when he has said, 'Martin, I am bored,' then
+look out!  There's nothing to do but to shut up, confound it!"
+
+Schomberg, very much cast down, had listened open-mouthed.
+
+"What's the cause of it?" he asked.  "Why is he like this?  I don't
+understand."
+
+"I think I do," said Ricardo.  "A gentleman, you know, is not such a
+simple person as you or I; and not so easy to manage, either.  If
+only I had something to lever him out with!"
+
+"What do you mean, to lever him out with?" muttered Schomberg
+hopelessly.
+
+Ricardo was impatient with this denseness.
+
+"Don't you understand English?  Look here!  I couldn't make this
+billiard table move an inch if I talked to it from now till the end
+of days--could I?  Well, the governor is like that, too, when the
+fits are on him.  He's bored.  Nothing's worthwhile, nothing's good
+enough, that's mere sense.  But if I saw a capstan bar lying about
+here, I would soon manage to shift that billiard table of yours a
+good many inches.  And that's all there is to it."
+
+He rose noiselessly, stretched himself, supple and stealthy, with
+curious sideways movements of his head and unexpected elongations of
+his thick body, glanced out of the corners of his eyes in the
+direction of the door, and finally leaned back against the table,
+folding his arms on his breast comfortably, in a completely human
+attitude.
+
+"That's another thing you can tell a gentleman by--his freakishness.
+A gentleman ain't accountable to nobody, any more than a tramp on
+the roads.  He ain't got to keep time.  The governor got like this
+once in a one-horse Mexican pueblo on the uplands, away from
+everywhere.  He lay all day long in a dark room--"
+
+"Drunk?"  This word escaped Schomberg by inadvertence at which he
+became frightened.  But the devoted secretary seemed to find it
+natural.
+
+"No, that never comes on together with this kind of fit.  He just
+lay there full length on a mat, while a ragged, bare-legged boy that
+he had picked up in the street sat in the patio, between two
+oleanders near the open door of his room, strumming on a guitar and
+singing tristes to him from morning to night.  You know tristes--
+twang, twang, twang, aouh, hoo!  Chroo, yah!"
+
+Schomberg uplifted his hands in distress.  This tribute seemed to
+flatter Ricardo.  His mouth twitched grimly.
+
+"Like that--enough to give colic to an ostrich, eh?  Awful.  Well,
+there was a cook there who loved me--an old fat, Negro woman with
+spectacles.  I used to hide in the kitchen and turn her to, to make
+me dulces--sweet things, you know, mostly eggs and sugar--to pass
+the time away.  I am like a kid for sweet things.  And, by the way,
+why don't you ever have a pudding at your tablydott, Mr. Schomberg?
+Nothing but fruit, morning, noon, and night.  Sickening!  What do
+you think a fellow is--a wasp?"
+
+Schomberg disregarded the injured tone.
+
+"And how long did that fit, as you call it, last?" he asked
+anxiously.
+
+"Weeks, months, years, centuries, it seemed to me," returned Mr.
+Ricardo with feeling.  "Of an evening the governor would stroll out
+into the sala and fritter his life away playing cards with the juez
+of the place--a little Dago with a pair of black whiskers--ekarty,
+you know, a quick French game, for small change.  And the
+comandante, a one-eyed, half-Indian, flat-nosed ruffian, and I, we
+had to stand around and bet on their hands.  It was awful!"
+
+"Awful," echoed Schomberg, in a Teutonic throaty tone of despair.
+"Look here, I need your rooms."
+
+"To be sure.  I have been thinking that for some time past," said
+Ricardo indifferently.
+
+"I was mad when I listened to you.  This must end!"
+
+"I think you are mad yet," said Ricardo, not even unfolding his arms
+or shifting his attitude an inch.  He lowered his voice to add:
+"And if I thought you had been to the police, I would tell Pedro to
+catch you round the waist and break your fat neck by jerking your
+head backward--snap!  I saw him do it to a big buck nigger who was
+flourishing a razor in front of the governor.  It can be done.  You
+hear a low crack, that's all--and the man drops down like a limp
+rag."
+
+Not even Ricardo's head, slightly inclined on the left shoulder, had
+moved; but when he ceased the greenish irises which had been staring
+out of doors glided into the corners of his eyes nearest to
+Schomberg and stayed there with a coyly voluptuous expression.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+
+
+Schomberg felt desperation, that lamentable substitute for courage,
+ooze out of him.  It was not so much the threat of death as the
+weirdly circumstantial manner of its declaration which affected him.
+A mere "I'll murder you," however ferocious in tone, and earnest, in
+purpose, he could have faced; but before this novel mode of speech
+and procedure, his imagination being very sensitive to the unusual,
+he collapsed as if indeed his moral neck had been broken--snap!
+
+"Go to the police?  Of course not.  Never dreamed of it.  Too late
+now.  I've let myself be mixed up in this.  You got my consent while
+I wasn't myself.  I explained it to you at the time."
+
+Ricardo's eye glided gently off Schomberg to stare far away.
+
+"Ay!  Some trouble with a girl.  But that's nothing to us."
+
+"Naturally.  What I say is, what's the good of all that savage talk
+to me?"  A bright argument occurred to him.  "It's out of
+proportion; for even if I were fool enough to go to the police now,
+there's nothing serious to complain about.  It would only mean
+deportation for you.  They would put you on board the first west-
+bound steamer to Singapore."  He had become animated.  "Out of this
+to the devil," he added between his teeth for his own private
+satisfaction.
+
+Ricardo made no comment, and gave no sign of having heard a single
+word.  This discouraged Schomberg, who had looked up hopefully.
+
+"Why do you want to stick here?" he cried.  "It can't pay you people
+to fool around like this.  Didn't you worry just now about moving
+your governor?  Well, the police would move him for you; and from
+Singapore you can go on to the east coast of Africa."
+
+"I'll be hanged if the fellow isn't up to that silly trick!" was
+Ricardo's comment, spoken in an ominous tone which recalled
+Schomberg to the realities of his position.
+
+"No!  No!" he protested.  "It's a manner of speaking.  Of course I
+wouldn't."
+
+"I think that trouble about the girl has really muddled your brains,
+Mr. Schomberg.  Believe me, you had better part friends with us;
+for, deportation or no deportation, you'll be seeing one of us
+turning up before long to pay you off for any nasty dodge you may be
+hatching in that fat head of yours."
+
+"Gott im Himmel!" groaned Schomberg.  "Will nothing move him out?
+Will he stop here immer--I mean always?  Suppose I were to make it
+worth your while, couldn't you--"
+
+"No," Ricardo interrupted.  "I couldn't, unless I had something to
+lever him out with.  I've told you that before."
+
+"An inducement?" muttered Schomberg.
+
+"Ay.  The east coast of Africa isn't good enough.  He told me the
+other day that it will have to wait till he is ready for it; and he
+may not be ready for a long time, because the east coast can't run
+away, and no one is likely to run off with it."
+
+These remarks, whether considered as truisms or as depicting Mr.
+Jones's mental state, were distinctly discouraging to the long-
+suffering Schomberg; but there is truth in the well-known saying
+that places the darkest hour before the dawn.  The sound of words,
+apart from the context, has its power; and these two words, 'run
+off,' had a special affinity to the hotel-keeper's, haunting idea.
+It was always present in his brain, and now it came forward evoked
+by a purely fortuitous expression.  No, nobody could run off with a
+continent; but Heyst had run off with the girl!
+
+Ricardo could have had no conception of the cause of Schomberg's
+changed expression.  Yet it was noticeable enough to interest him so
+much that he stopped the careless swinging of his leg and said,
+looking at the hotel-keeper:
+
+"There's not much use arguing against that sort of talk--is there?"
+
+Schomberg was not listening.
+
+"I could put you on another track," he said slowly, and stopped, as
+if suddenly choked by an unholy emotion of intense eagerness
+combined with fear of failure.  Ricardo waited, attentive, yet not
+without a certain contempt.
+
+"On the track of a man!" Schomberg uttered convulsively, and paused
+again, consulting his rage and his conscience.
+
+"The man in the moon, eh?" suggested Ricardo, in a jeering murmur.
+
+Schomberg shook his head.
+
+"It would be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man in the
+moon.  You go and try.  It isn't so very far."
+
+He reflected.  These men were thieves and murderers as well as
+gamblers.  Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly
+complete.  But he preferred not to think of it in detail.  He put it
+to himself summarily that he would be paying Heyst out and would, at
+the same time, relieve himself of these men's oppression.  He had
+only to let loose his natural gift for talking scandalously about
+his fellow creatures.  And in this case his great practice in it was
+assisted by hate, which, like love, has an eloquence of its own.
+With the utmost ease he portrayed for Ricardo, now seriously
+attentive, a Heyst fattened by years of private and public rapines,
+the murderer of Morrison, the swindler of many shareholders, a
+wonderful mixture of craft and impudence, of deep purposes and
+simple wiles, of mystery and futility.  In this exercise of his
+natural function Schomberg revived, the colour coming back to his
+face, loquacious, florid, eager, his manliness set off by the
+military bearing.
+
+"That's the exact story.  He was seen hanging about this part of the
+world for years, spying into everybody's business:  but I am the
+only one who has seen through him from the first--contemptible,
+double-faced, stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow."
+
+"Dangerous, is he?"
+
+Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo's voice.
+
+"Well, you know what I mean," he said uneasily.  "A lying,
+circumventing, soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal.  Nothing open
+about him."
+
+Mr Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the
+room in an oblique, noiseless manner.  He flashed a grin at
+Schomberg in passing, and a snarling:
+
+"Ah!  H'm!"
+
+"Well, what more dangerous do you want?" argued Schomberg.  "He's in
+no way a fighting man, I believe," he added negligently.
+
+"And you say he has been living alone there?"
+
+"Like the man in the moon," answered Schomberg readily.  "There's no
+one that cares a rap what becomes of him.  He has been lying low,
+you understand, after bagging all that plunder.
+
+"Plunder, eh?  Why didn't he go home with it?" inquired Ricardo.
+
+The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this was
+something worth looking into.  And he was pursuing truth in the
+manner of men of sounder morality and purer intentions than his own;
+that is he pursued it in the light of his own experience and
+prejudices.  For facts, whatever their origin (and God only knows
+where they come from), can be only tested by our own particular
+suspicions.  Ricardo was suspicious all round.  Schomberg, such is
+the tonic of recovered self-esteem, Schomberg retorted fearlessly:
+
+"Go home?  Why don't you go home?  To hear your talk, you must have
+made a pretty considerable pile going round winning people's money.
+You ought to be ready by this time."
+
+Ricardo stopped to look at Schomberg with surprise.
+
+"You think yourself very clever, don't you?" he said.
+
+Schomberg just then was so conscious of being clever that the
+snarling irony left him unmoved.  There was positively a smile in
+his noble Teutonic beard, the first smile for weeks.  He was in a
+felicitous vein.
+
+"How do you know that he wasn't thinking of going home?  As a matter
+of fact, he was on his way home."
+
+"And how do I know that you are not amusing yourself by spinning out
+a blamed fairy tale?" interrupted Ricardo roughly.  "I wonder at
+myself listening to the silly rot!"
+
+Schomberg received this turn of temper unmoved.  He did not require
+to be very subtly observant to notice that he had managed to arouse
+some sort of feeling, perhaps of greed, in Ricardo's breast.
+
+"You won't believe me?  Well!  You can ask anybody that comes here
+if that--that Swede hadn't got as far as this house on his way home.
+Why should he turn up here if not for that?  You ask anybody."
+
+"Ask, indeed!" returned the other.  "Catch me asking at large about
+a man I mean to drop on!  Such jobs must be done on the quiet--or
+not at all."
+
+The peculiar intonation of the last phrase touched the nape of
+Schomberg's neck with a chill.  He cleared his throat slightly and
+looked away as though he had heard something indelicate.  Then, with
+a jump as it were:
+
+"Of course he didn't tell me.  Is it likely?  But haven't I got
+eyes?  Haven't I got my common sense to tell me?  I can see through
+people.  By the same token, he called on the Tesmans.  Why did he
+call on the Tesmans two days running, eh?  You don't know?  You
+can't tell?"
+
+He waited complacently till Ricardo had finished swearing quite
+openly at him for a confounded chatterer, and then went on:
+
+"A fellow doesn't go to a counting-house in business hours for a
+chat about the weather, two days running.  Then why?  To close his
+account with them one day, and to get his money out the next!
+Clear, what?"
+
+Ricardo, with his trick of looking one way and moving another
+approached Schomberg slowly.
+
+"To get his money?" he purred.
+
+"Gewiss," snapped Schomberg with impatient superiority.  "What else?
+That is, only the money he had with the Tesmans.  What he has buried
+or put away on the island, devil only knows.  When you think of the
+lot of hard cash that passed through that man's hands, for wages and
+stores and all that--and he's just a cunning thief, I tell you."
+Ricardo's hard stare discomposed the hotel-keeper, and he added in
+an embarrassed tone:  "I mean a common, sneaking thief--no account
+at all.  And he calls himself a Swedish baron, too!  Tfui!"
+
+"He's a baron, is he?  That foreign nobility ain't much," commented
+Mr. Ricardo seriously.  "And then what?  He hung about here!"
+
+"Yes, he hung about," said Schomberg, making a wry mouth.  "He--hung
+about.  That's it.  Hung--"
+
+His voice died out.  Curiosity was depicted in Ricardo's
+countenance.
+
+"Just like that; for nothing?  And then turned about and went back
+to that island again?"
+
+"And went back to that island again," Schomberg echoed lifelessly,
+fixing his gaze on the floor.
+
+"What's the matter with you?" asked Ricardo with genuine surprise.
+"What is it?"
+
+Schomberg, without looking up, made an impatient gesture.  His face
+was crimson, and he kept it lowered.  Ricardo went back to the
+point.
+
+"Well, but how do you account for it?  What was his reason?  What
+did he go back to the island for?"
+
+"Honeymoon!" spat out Schomberg viciously.
+
+Perfectly still, his eyes downcast, he suddenly, with no preliminary
+stir, hit the table with his fist a blow which caused the utterly
+unprepared Ricardo to leap aside.  And only then did Schomberg look
+up with a dull, resentful expression.
+
+Ricardo stared hard for a moment, spun on his heel, walked to the
+end of the room, came back smartly, and muttered a profound "Ay!
+Ay!" above Schomberg's rigid head.  That the hotel-keeper was
+capable of a great moral effort was proved by a gradual return of
+his severe, Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner.
+
+"Ay, ay!" repeated Ricardo more deliberately than before, and as if
+after a further survey of the circumstances, "I wish I hadn't asked
+you, or that you had told me a lie.  It don't suit me to know that
+there's a woman mixed up in this affair.  What's she like?  It's the
+girl you--"
+
+"Leave off!" muttered Schomberg, utterly pitiful behind his stiff
+military front.
+
+"Ay, ay!" Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more and more
+enlightened and perplexed.  "Can't bear to talk about it--so bad as
+that?  And yet I would bet she isn't a miracle to look at."
+
+Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn't know, as if he didn't care.
+Then he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.
+
+"Swedish baron--h'm!" Ricardo continued meditatively.  "I believe
+the governor would think that business worth looking up, quite, if I
+put it to him properly.  The governor likes a duel, if you will call
+it so; but I don't know a man that can stand up to him on the
+square.  Have you ever seen a cat play with a mouse?  It's a pretty
+sight!"
+
+Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression,
+looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the
+alarm of a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession
+of his breast.
+
+"There are no lies between you and me," he said, more steadily than
+he thought he could speak.
+
+"What's the good now?  He funks women.  In that Mexican pueblo where
+we lay grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak, I used to go to
+dances of an evening.  The girls there would ask me if the English
+caballero in the posada was a monk in disguise, or if he had taken a
+vow to the sancissima madre not to speak to a woman, or whether--You
+can imagine what fairly free-spoken girls will ask when they come to
+the point of not caring what they say; and it used to vex me.  Yes,
+the governor funks facing women."
+
+"One woman?" interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.
+
+"One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred, for
+that matter.  In a place that's full of women you needn't look at
+them unless you like; but if you go into a room where there is only
+one woman, young or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her.
+And, unless you are after her, then--the governor is right enough--
+she's in the way."
+
+"Why notice them?" muttered Schomberg.  "What can they do?"
+
+"Make a noise, if nothing else," opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the
+distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed,
+nothing is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty
+and absorbing card game.  "Noise, noise, my friend," he went on
+forcibly; "confounded screeching about something or other, and I
+like it no more than the governor does.  But with the governor
+there's something else besides.  He can't stand them at all."
+
+He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no
+philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong
+sentiment without some terror, as there is no real religion without
+a little fetishism, he emitted his own conclusion, which surely
+could not go to the root of the matter.
+
+"I'm hanged if I don't think they are to him what liquor is to me.
+Brandy--pah!"
+
+He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder.  Schomberg
+listened to him in wonder.  It looked as if the very scoundrelism,
+of that--that Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity
+standing between the thief and the retribution.
+
+"That's so, old buck."  Ricardo broke the silence after
+contemplating Schomberg's mute dejection with a sort of sympathy.
+"I don't think this trick will work."
+
+"But that's silly," whispered the man deprived of the vengeance
+which he had seemed already to hold in his hand, by a mysterious and
+exasperating idiosyncrasy.
+
+"Don't you set yourself to judge a gentleman."  Ricardo without
+anger administered a moody rebuke.  "Even I can't understand the
+governor thoroughly.  And I am an Englishman and his follower.  No,
+I don't think I care to put it before him, sick as I am of staying
+here."
+
+Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of
+seeing him stay.  Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of
+Heyst as created by his own power of false inferences, of his hate,
+of his love of scandal, that he could not contain a stifled cry of
+conviction as sincere as most of our convictions, the disguised
+servants of our passions, can appear at a supreme moment.
+
+"It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand
+pounds, or two or three times as much, for all I know.  No trouble,
+no--"
+
+"The petticoat's the trouble," Ricardo struck in.
+
+He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which an
+observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such as
+a wild animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might
+betray.  Schomberg saw nothing.  It would probably have cheered his
+drooping spirits; but in a general way he preferred not to look at
+Ricardo.  Ricardo, however, with one of his slanting, gliding,
+restless glances, observed the bitter smile on Schomberg's bearded
+lips--the unmistakable smile of ruined hopes.
+
+"You are a pretty unforgiving sort of chap," he said, stopping for a
+moment with an air of interest.  "Hang me if I ever saw anybody look
+so disappointed!  I bet you would send black plague to that island
+if you only knew how--eh, what?  Plague too good for them?  Ha, ha,
+ha!"
+
+He bent down to stare at Schomberg who sat unstirring with stony
+eyes and set features, and apparently deaf to the rasping derision
+of that laughter so close to his red fleshy ear.
+
+"Black plague too good for them, ha, ha!"  Ricardo pressed the point
+on the tormented hotel-keeper.  Schomberg kept his eyes down
+obstinately.
+
+"I don't wish any harm to the girl--" he muttered.
+
+"But did she bolt from you?  A fair bilk?  Come!"
+
+"Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her--what
+he promised her, how he frightened her.  She couldn't have cared for
+him, I know."  Schomberg's vanity clung to the belief in some
+atrocious, extraordinary means of seduction employed by Heyst.
+"Look how he bewitched that poor Morrison," he murmured.
+
+"Ah, Morrison--got all his money, what?"
+
+"Yes--and his life."
+
+"Terrible fellow, that Swedish baron!  How is one to get at him?"
+
+Schomberg exploded.
+
+"Three against one!  Are you shy?  Do you want me to give you a
+letter of introduction?"
+
+"You ought to look at yourself in a glass," Ricardo said quietly.
+"Dash me if you don't get a stroke of some kind presently.  And this
+is the fellow who says women can do nothing!  That one will do for
+you, unless you manage to forget her."
+
+"I wish I could," Schomberg admitted earnestly.  "And it's all the
+doing of that Swede.  I don't get enough sleep, Mr. Ricardo.  And
+then, to finish me off, you gentlemen turn up . . . as if I hadn't
+enough worry."
+
+"That's done you good," suggested the secretary with ironic
+seriousness.  "Takes your mind off that silly trouble.  At your age
+too."
+
+He checked himself, as if in pity, and changing his tone:
+
+"I would really like to oblige you while doing a stroke of business
+at the same time."
+
+"A good stroke," insisted Schomberg, as if it were mechanically.  In
+his simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered
+his head.  An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with
+Schomberg ideas were rare and therefore tenacious.  "Minted gold,"
+he murmured with a sort of anguish.
+
+Such an expressive combination of words was not without effect upon
+Ricardo.  Both these men were amenable to the influence of verbal
+suggestions.  The secretary of "plain Mr. Jones" sighed and
+murmured.
+
+"Yes.  But how is one to get at it?"
+
+"Being three to one," said Schomberg, "I suppose you could get it
+for the asking."
+
+"One would think the fellow lived next door," Ricardo growled
+impatiently.  "Hang it all, can't you understand a plain question?
+I have asked you the way."
+
+Schomberg seemed to revive.
+
+"The way?"
+
+The torpor of deceived hopes underlying his superficial changes of
+mood had been pricked by these words which seemed pointed with
+purpose.
+
+"The way is over the water, of course," said the hotel-keeper.  "For
+people like you, three days in a good, big boat is nothing.  It's no
+more than a little outing, a bit of a change.  At this season the
+Java Sea is a pond.  I have an excellent, safe boat--a ship's life-
+boat--carry thirty, let alone three, and a child could handle her.
+You wouldn't get a wet face at this time of the year.  You might
+call it a pleasure-trip."
+
+"And yet, having this boat, you didn't go after her yourself--or
+after him?  Well, you are a fine fellow for a disappointed lover."
+
+Schomberg gave a start at the suggestion.
+
+"I am not three men," he said sulkily, as the shortest answer of the
+several he could have given.
+
+"Oh, I know your sort," Ricardo let fall negligently.  "You are like
+most people--or perhaps just a little more peaceable than the rest
+of the buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten show.  Well,
+well, you respectable citizen," he went on, "let us go thoroughly
+into the matter."
+
+When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones's henchman
+was ready to discuss, in his own words, "this boat of yours, with
+courses and distances," and such concrete matters of no good augury
+to that villainous Swede, he recovered his soldierly bearing,
+squared his shoulders, and asked in his military manner:
+
+"You wish, then, to proceed with the business?"
+
+Ricardo nodded.  He had a great mind to, he said.  A gentleman had
+to be humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too, on
+occasions, for his own good.  And it was the business of the right
+sort of "follower" to know the proper time and the proper methods of
+that delicate part of his duty.  Having exposed this theory Ricardo
+proceeded to the application.
+
+"I've never actually lied to him," he said, "and I ain't going to
+now.  I shall just say nothing about the girl.  He will have to get
+over the shock the best he can.  Hang it all!  Too much humouring
+won't do here."
+
+"Funny thing," Schomberg observed crisply.
+
+"Is it?  Ay, you wouldn't mind taking a woman by the throat in some
+dark corner and nobody by, I bet!"
+
+Ricardo's dreadful, vicious, cat-like readiness to get his claws out
+at any moment startled Schomberg as usual.  But it was provoking
+too.
+
+"And you?" he defended himself.  "Don't you want me to believe you
+are up to anything?"
+
+"I, my boy?  Oh, yes.  I am not that gentleman; neither are you.
+Take 'em by the throat or chuck 'em under the chin is all one to me-
+-almost," affirmed Ricardo, with something obscurely ironical in his
+complacency.  "Now, as to this business.  A three days' jaunt in a
+good boat isn't a thing to frighten people like us.  You are right,
+so far; but there are other details."
+
+Schomberg was ready enough to enter into details.  He explained that
+he had a small plantation, with a fairly habitable hut on it, on
+Madura.  He proposed that his guest should start from town in his
+boat, as if going for an excursion to that rural spot.  The custom-
+house people on the quay were used to see his boat go off on such
+trips.
+
+From Madura, after some repose and on a convenient day, Mr. Jones
+and party would make the real start.  It would all be plain sailing.
+Schomberg undertook to provision the boat.  The greatest hardship
+the voyagers need apprehend would be a mild shower of rain.  At that
+season of the year there were no serious thunderstorms.
+
+Schomberg's heart began to thump as he saw himself nearing his
+vengeance.  His speech was thick but persuasive.
+
+"No risk at all--none whatever."
+
+Ricardo dismissed these assurances of safety with an impatient
+gesture.  He was thinking of other risks.
+
+"The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted at
+sea, and that may bring awkwardness later on.  A ship's boat with
+three white men in her, knocking about out of sight of land, is
+bound to make talk.  Are we likely to be seen on our way?"
+
+"No, unless by native craft," said Schomberg.
+
+Ricardo nodded, satisfied.  Both these white men looked on native
+life as a mere play of shadows.  A play of shadows the dominant race
+could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its
+incomprehensible aims and needs.  No.  Native craft did not count,
+of course.  It was an empty, solitary part of the sea, Schomberg
+expounded further.  Only the Ternate mail-boat crossed that region
+about the eighth of every month, regularly--nowhere near the island
+though.  Rigid, his voice hoarse, his heart thumping, his mind
+concentrated on the success of his plan, the hotel-keeper multiplied
+words, as if to keep as many of them as possible between himself and
+the murderous aspect of his purpose.
+
+"So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at sunset on
+the eighth--always best to make a start at night, with a land
+breeze--it's a hundred to one--What am I saying?--it's a thousand to
+one that no human eye will see you on the passage.  All you've got
+to do is keep her heading north-east for, say, fifty hours; perhaps
+not quite so long.  There will always be draft enough to keep a boat
+moving; you may reckon on that; and then--"
+
+The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with
+eagerness, with impatience, and with something like apprehension,
+the true nature of which was not clear to him.  And he did not want
+to investigate it.  Ricardo regarded him steadily, with those dry
+eyes of his shining more like polished stones than living tissue.
+
+"And then what?" he asked.
+
+"And then--why, you will astonish der herr baron--ha, ha!"
+
+Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself in
+a hoarse bass.
+
+"And you believe he has all that plunder by him?" asked Ricardo,
+rather perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely
+probable when looked at all round by his acute mind.
+
+Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.
+
+"How can it be otherwise?  He was going home, he was on his way, in
+this hotel.  Ask people.  Was it likely he would leave it behind
+him?"
+
+Ricardo was thoughtful.  Then, suddenly raising his head, he
+remarked:
+
+"Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh?  That's not much of a sailing
+direction.  I've heard of a port being missed before on better
+information.  Can't you say what sort of landfall a fellow may
+expect?  But I suppose you have never seen that island yourself?"
+
+Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a man
+congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an
+unsavoury experience.  No, certainly not.  He had never had any
+business to call there.  But what of that?  He could give Mr.
+Ricardo as good a sea-mark as anybody need wish for.  He laughed
+nervously.  Miss it!  He defied anyone that came within forty miles
+of it to miss the retreat of that villainous Swede.
+
+"What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of fire at
+night?  There's a volcano in full blast near that island--enough to
+guide almost a blind man.  What more do you want?  An active volcano
+to steer by?"
+
+These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and
+glared.  The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs.
+Schomberg, dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length
+of the room.  She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and
+glided to her place, where she sat down to stare straight before
+her, as usual.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+
+
+Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial
+enterprise.  The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt
+Coal Company had been screened from the side of the sea; from the
+side where prying eyes--if any were sufficiently interested, either
+in malice or in sorrow--could have noted the decaying bones of that
+once sanguine enterprise.
+
+Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass
+of two wet seasons' growth.  The silence of his surroundings, broken
+only by such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of rain
+through the foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing
+the leaves of the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the
+shore, favoured rather than hindered his solitary meditation.
+
+A meditation is always--in a white man, at least--more or less an
+interrogative exercise.  Heyst meditated in simple terms on the
+mystery of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest
+reflection:
+
+"There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all."
+
+He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that his
+primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed.  The oldest voice in the
+world is just the one that never ceases to speak.  If anybody could
+have silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst's
+father, with his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort;
+but apparently he could not.  There was in the son a lot of that
+first ancestor who, as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from
+the celestial mould, started inspecting and naming the animals of
+that paradise which he was so soon to lose.
+
+Action--the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth!
+The barbed hook, baited with the illusions of progress, to bring out
+of the lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!
+
+"And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the
+silliest fish of them all."  Heyst said to himself.
+
+He suffered.  He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought
+to have been a masterpiece of aloofness.  He remembered always his
+last evening with his father.  He remembered the thin features, the
+great mass of white hair, and the ivory complexion.  A five-branched
+candlestick stood on a little table by the side of the easy chair.
+They had been talking a long time.  The noises of the street had
+died out one by one, till at last, in the moonlight, the London
+houses began to look like the tombs of an unvisited, unhonoured,
+cemetery of hopes.
+
+He had listened.  Then, after a silence, he had asked--for he was
+really young then:
+
+"Is there no guidance?"
+
+His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the
+moon swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town.
+
+"You still believe in something, then?" he said in a clear voice,
+which had been growing feeble of late.  "You believe in flesh and
+blood, perhaps?  A full and equable contempt would soon do away with
+that, too.  But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to
+cultivate that form of contempt which is called pity.  It is perhaps
+the least difficult--always remembering that you, too, if you are
+anything, are as pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity
+for yourself."
+
+"What is one to do, then?" sighed the young man, regarding his
+father, rigid in the high-backed chair.
+
+"Look on--make no sound," were the last words of the man who had
+spent his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which
+filled heaven and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way
+unheeding.
+
+That very night he died in his bed, so quietly that they found him
+in his usual attitude of sleep, lying on his side, one hand under
+his cheek, and his knees slightly bent.  He had not even
+straightened his legs.
+
+His son buried the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of
+beliefs.  He observed that the death of that bitter contemner of
+life did not trouble the flow of life's stream, where men and women
+go by thick as dust, revolving and jostling one another like figures
+cut out of cork and weighted with lead just sufficiently to keep
+them in their proudly upright posture.
+
+After the funeral, Heyst sat alone, in the dusk, and his meditation
+took the form of a definite vision of the stream, of the fatuously
+jostling, nodding, spinning figures hurried irresistibly along, and
+giving no sign of being aware that the voice on the bank had been
+suddenly silenced . . . Yes.  A few obituary notices generally
+insignificant and some grossly abusive.  The son had read them all
+with mournful detachment.
+
+"This is the hate and rage of their fear," he thought to himself,
+"and also of wounded vanity.  They shriek their little shriek as
+they fly past.  I suppose I ought to hate him too . . . "
+
+He became aware of his eyes being wet.  It was not that the man was
+his father.  For him it was purely a matter of hearsay which could
+not in itself cause this emotion.  No!  It was because he had looked
+at him so long that he missed him so much.  The dead man had kept
+him on the bank by his side.  And now Heyst felt acutely that he was
+alone on the bank of the stream.  In his pride he determined not to
+enter it.
+
+A few slow tears rolled down his face.  The rooms, filling with
+shadows, seemed haunted by a melancholy, uneasy presence which could
+not express itself.  The young man got up with a strange sense of
+making way for something impalpable that claimed possession, went
+out of the house, and locked the door.  A fortnight later he started
+on his travels--to "look on and never make a sound."
+
+The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain
+quantity of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and
+pictures, which might have complained of heartless desertion after
+many years of faithful service; for there is a soul in things.
+Heyst, our Heyst, had often thought of them, reproachful and mute,
+shrouded and locked up in those rooms, far away in London with the
+sounds of the street reaching them faintly, and sometimes a little
+sunshine, when the blinds were pulled up and the windows opened from
+time to time in pursuance of his original instructions and later
+reminders.  It seemed as if in his conception of a world not worth
+touching, and perhaps not substantial enough to grasp, these objects
+familiar to his childhood and his youth, and associated with the
+memory of an old man, were the only realities, something having an
+absolute existence.  He would never have them sold, or even moved
+from the places they occupied when he looked upon them last.  When
+he was advised from London that his lease had expired, and that the
+house, with some others as like it as two peas, was to be
+demolished, he was surprisingly distressed.
+
+He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies.
+Already the Tropical Belt Coal Company was in existence.  He sent
+instructions to have some of the things sent out to him at Samburan,
+just as any ordinary, credulous person would have done.  They came,
+torn out from their long repose--a lot of books, some chairs and
+tables, his father's portrait in oils, which surprised Heyst by its
+air of youth, because he remembered his father as a much older man;
+a lot of small objects, such as candlesticks, inkstands, and
+statuettes from his father's study, which surprised him because they
+looked so old and so much worn.
+
+The manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, unpacking them on the
+veranda in the shade besieged by a fierce sunshine, must have felt
+like a remorseful apostate before these relics.  He handled them
+tenderly; and it was perhaps their presence there which attached him
+to the island when he woke up to the failure of his apostasy.
+Whatever the decisive reason, Heyst had remained where another would
+have been glad to be off.  The excellent Davidson had discovered the
+fact without discovering the reason, and took a humane interest in
+Heyst's strange existence, while at the same time his native
+delicacy kept him from intruding on the other's whim of solitude.
+He could not possibly guess that Heyst, alone on the island, felt
+neither more nor less lonely than in any other place, desert or
+populous.  Davidson's concern was, if one may express it so, the
+danger of spiritual starvation; but this was a spirit which had
+renounced all outside nourishment, and was sustaining itself proudly
+on its own contempt of the usual coarse ailments which life offers
+to the common appetites of men.
+
+Neither was Heyst's body in danger of starvation, as Schomberg had
+so confidently asserted.  At the beginning of the company's
+operations the island had been provisioned in a manner which had
+outlasted the need.  Heyst did not need to fear hunger; and his very
+loneliness had not been without some alleviation.  Of the crowd of
+imported Chinese labourers, one at least had remained in Samburan,
+solitary and strange, like a swallow left behind at the migrating
+season of his tribe.
+
+Wang was not a common coolie.  He had been a servant to white men
+before.  The agreement between him and Heyst consisted in the
+exchange of a few words on the day when the last batch of the mine
+coolies was leaving Samburan.  Heyst, leaning over the balustrade of
+the veranda, was looking on, as calm in appearance as though he had
+never departed from the doctrine that this world, for the wise, is
+nothing but an amusing spectacle.  Wang came round the house, and
+standing below, raised up his yellow, thin face.
+
+"All finished?" he asked.  Heyst nodded slightly from above,
+glancing towards the jetty.  A crowd of blue-clad figures with
+yellow faces and calves was being hustled down into the boats of the
+chartered steamer lying well out, like a painted ship on a painted
+sea; painted in crude colours, without shadows, without feeling,
+with brutal precision.
+
+"You had better hurry up if you don't want to be left behind."
+
+But the Chinaman did not move.
+
+"We stop," he declared.  Heyst looked down at him for the first
+time.
+
+"You want to stop here?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What were you?  What was your work here?"
+
+"Mess-loom boy."
+
+"Do you want to stay with me here as my boy?" inquired Heyst,
+surprised.
+
+The Chinaman unexpectedly put on a deprecatory expression, and said,
+after a marked pause:
+
+"Can do."
+
+"You needn't," said Heyst, "unless you like.  I propose to stay on
+here--it may be for a very long time.  I have no power to make you
+go if you wish to remain, but I don't see why you should."
+
+"Catchee one piecee wife," remarked Wang unemotionally, and marched
+off, turning his back on the wharf and the great world beyond,
+represented by the steamer waiting for her boats.
+
+Heyst learned presently that Wang had persuaded one of the women of
+Alfuro village, on the west shore of the island, beyond the central
+ridge, to come over to live with him in a remote part of the
+company's clearing.  It was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros,
+having been frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had
+blocked the path over the ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept
+strictly on their own side.  The coolies, as a body, mistrusting the
+manifest mildness of these harmless fisher-folk, had kept to their
+lines, without attempting to cross the island.  Wang was the
+brilliant exception.  He must have been uncommonly fascinating, in a
+way that was not apparent to Heyst, or else uncommonly persuasive.
+The woman's services to Heyst were limited to the fact that she had
+anchored Wang to the spot by her charms, which remained unknown to
+the white man, because she never came near the houses.  The couple
+lived at the edge of the forest, and she could sometimes be seen
+gazing towards the bungalow shading her eyes with her hand.  Even
+from a distance she appeared to be a shy, wild creature, and Heyst,
+anxious not to try her primitive nerves unduly, scrupulously avoided
+that side of the clearing in his strolls.
+
+The day--or rather the first night--after his hermit life began, he
+was aware of vague sounds of revelry in that direction.  Emboldened
+by the departure of the invading strangers, some Alfuros, the
+woman's friends and relations, had ventured over the ridge to attend
+something in the nature of a wedding feast.  Wang had invited them.
+But this was the only occasion when any sound louder than the
+buzzing of insects had troubled the profound silence of the
+clearing.  The natives were never invited again.  Wang not, only
+knew how to live according to conventional proprieties, but had
+strong personal views as to the manner of arranging his domestic
+existence.  After a time Heyst perceived that Wang had annexed all
+the keys.  Any keys left lying about vanished after Wang had passed
+that way.  Subsequently some of them--those that did not belong to
+the store-rooms and the empty bungalows, and could not be regarded
+as the common property of this community of two--were returned to
+Heyst, tied in a bunch with a piece of string.  He found them one
+morning lying by the side of his plate.  He had not been
+inconvenienced by their absence, because he never locked up anything
+in the way of drawers and boxes.  Heyst said nothing.  Wang also
+said nothing.  Perhaps he had always been a taciturn man; perhaps he
+was influenced by the genius of the locality, which was certainly
+that of silence.  Till Heyst and Morrison had landed in Black
+Diamond Bay, and named it, that side of Samburan had hardly ever
+heard the sound of human speech.  It was easy to be taciturn with
+Heyst, who had plunged himself into an abyss of meditation over
+books, and remained in it till the shadow of Wang falling across the
+page, and the sound of a rough, low voice uttering the Malay word
+"makan," would force him to climb out to a meal.
+
+Wang in his native province in China might have been an
+aggressively, sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had
+clothed himself in a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent
+not being spoken to except in single words, at a rate which did not
+average half a dozen per day.  And he gave no more than he got.  It
+is to be presumed that if he suffered he made up for it with the
+Alfuro woman.  He always went back to her at the first fall of dusk,
+vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at this hour, like a sort of
+topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a white jacket and a
+pigtail.  Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling passion, he
+could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between the
+mighty stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe.  After a
+time, he discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the
+empty store-rooms, and it is to be supposed that he got on famously;
+but nothing of it could be seen, because he went to the trouble of
+pulling to pieces one of the company's sheds in order to get
+materials for making a high and very close fence round his patch, as
+if the growing of vegetables were a patented process, or an awful
+and holy mystery entrusted to the keeping of his race.
+
+Heyst, following from a distance the progress of Wang's gardening
+and of these precautions--there was nothing else to look at--was
+amused at the thought that he, in his own person, represented the
+market for its produce.  The Chinaman had found several packets of
+seeds in the store-rooms, and had surrendered to an irresistible
+impulse to put them into the ground.  He would make his master pay
+for the vegetables which he was raising to satisfy his instinct.
+And, looking silently at the silent Wang going about his work in the
+bungalow in his unhasty, steady way; Heyst envied the Chinaman's
+obedience to his instincts, the powerful simplicity of purpose which
+made his existence appear almost automatic in the mysterious
+precision of its facts.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+
+
+During his master's absence at Sourabaya, Wang had busied himself
+with the ground immediately in front of the principal bungalow.
+Emerging from the fringe of grass growing across the shore end of
+the coal-jetty, Heyst beheld a broad, clear space, black and level,
+with only one or two clumps of charred twigs, where the flame had
+swept from the front of his house to the nearest trees of the
+forest.
+
+"You took the risk of firing the grass?" Heyst asked.
+
+Wang nodded.  Hanging on the arm of the white man before whom he
+stood was the girl called Alma; but neither from the Chinaman's eyes
+nor from his expression could anyone have guessed that he was in the
+slightest degree aware of the fact.
+
+"He has been tidying the place in his labour-saving way," explained
+Heyst, without looking at the girl, whose hand rested on his
+forearm.  "He's the whole establishment, you see.  I told you I
+hadn't even a dog to keep me company here."
+
+Wang had marched off towards the wharf.
+
+"He's like those waiters in that place," she said.  That place was
+Schomberg's hotel.
+
+"One Chinaman looks very much like another," Heyst remarked.  "We
+shall find it useful to have him here.  This is the house."
+
+They faced, at some distance, the six shallow steps leading up to
+the veranda.  The girl had abandoned Heyst's arm.
+
+"This is the house," he repeated.
+
+She did not offer to budge away from his side, but stood staring
+fixedly at the steps, as if they had been something unique and
+impracticable.  He waited a little, but she did not move.
+
+"Don't you want to go in?" he asked, without turning his head to
+look at her.  "The sun's too heavy to stand about here."  He tried
+to overcome a sort of fear, a sort of impatient faintness, and his
+voice sounded rough.  "You had better go in," he concluded.
+
+They both moved then, but at the foot of the stairs Heyst stopped,
+while the girl went on rapidly, as if nothing could stop her now.
+She crossed the veranda swiftly, and entered the twilight of the big
+central room opening upon it, and then the deeper twilight of the
+room beyond.  She stood still in the dusk, in which her dazzled eyes
+could scarcely make out the forms of objects, and sighed a sigh of
+relief.  The impression of the sunlight, of sea and sky, remained
+with her like a memory of a painful trial gone through--done with at
+last!
+
+Meanwhile Heyst had walked back slowly towards the jetty; but he did
+not get so far as that.  The practical and automatic Wang had got
+hold of one of the little trucks that had been used for running
+baskets of coal alongside ships.  He appeared pushing it before him,
+loaded lightly with Heyst's bag and the bundle of the girl's
+belongings, wrapped in Mrs. Schomberg's shawl.  Heyst turned about
+and walked by the side of the rusty rails on which the truck ran.
+Opposite the house Wang stopped, lifted the bag to his shoulder,
+balanced it carefully, and then took the bundle in his hand.
+
+"Leave those things on the table in the big room--understand?"
+
+"Me savee," grunted Wang, moving off.
+
+Heyst watched the Chinaman disappear from the veranda.  It was not
+till he had seen Wang come out that he himself entered the twilight
+of the big room.  By that time Wang was out of sight at the back of
+the house, but by no means out of hearing.  The Chinaman could hear
+the voice of him who, when there were many people there, was
+generally referred to as "Number One."  Wang was not able to
+understand the words, but the tone interested him.
+
+"Where are you?" cried Number One.
+
+Then Wang heard, much more faint, a voice he had never heard before-
+-a novel impression which he acknowledged by cocking his head
+slightly to one side.
+
+"I am here--out of the sun."
+
+The new voice sounded remote and uncertain.  Wang heard nothing
+more, though he waited for some time, very still, the top of his
+shaven poll exactly level with the floor of the back veranda.  His
+face meanwhile preserved an inscrutable immobility.  Suddenly he
+stooped to pick up the lid of a deal candle-box which was lying on
+the ground by his foot.  Breaking it up with his fingers, he
+directed his steps towards the cook-shed, where, squatting on his
+heels, he proceeded to kindle a small fire under a very sooty
+kettle, possibly to make tea.  Wang had some knowledge of the more
+superficial rites and ceremonies of white men's existence, otherwise
+so enigmatically remote to his mind, and containing unexpected
+possibilities of good and evil, which had to be watched for with
+prudence and care.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+
+
+That morning, as on all the others of the full tale of mornings
+since his return with the girl to Samburan, Heyst came out on the
+veranda and spread his elbows on the railing, in an easy attitude of
+proprietorship.  The bulk of the central ridge of the island cut off
+the bungalow from sunrises, whether glorious or cloudy, angry or
+serene.  The dwellers therein were debarred from reading early the
+fortune of the new-born day.  It sprang upon them in its fulness
+with a swift retreat of the great shadow when the sun, clearing the
+ridge, looked down, hot and dry, with a devouring glare like the eye
+of an enemy.  But Heyst, once the Number One of this locality, while
+it was comparatively teeming with mankind, appreciated the
+prolongation of early coolness, the subdued, lingering half-light,
+the faint ghost of the departed night, the fragrance of its dewy,
+dark soul captured for a moment longer between the great glow of the
+sky and the intense blaze of the uncovered sea.
+
+It was naturally difficult for Heyst to keep his mind from dwelling
+on the nature and consequences of this, his latest departure from
+the part of an unconcerned spectator.  Yet he had retained enough of
+his wrecked philosophy to prevent him from asking himself
+consciously how it would end.  But at the same time he could not
+help being temperamentally, from long habit and from set purpose, a
+spectator still, perhaps a little less naive but (as he discovered
+with some surprise) not much more far sighted than the common run of
+men.  Like the rest of us who act, all he could say to himself, with
+a somewhat affected grimness, was:
+
+"We shall see!"
+
+This mood of grim doubt intruded on him only when he was alone.
+There were not many such moments in his day now; and he did not like
+them when they came.  On this morning he had no time to grow uneasy.
+Alma came out to join him long before the sun, rising above the
+Samburan ridge, swept the cool shadow of the early morning and the
+remnant of the night's coolness clear off the roof under which they
+had dwelt for more than three months already.  She came out as on
+other mornings.  He had heard her light footsteps in the big room--
+the room where he had unpacked the cases from London; the room now
+lined with the backs of books halfway up on its three sides.  Above
+the cases the fine matting met the ceiling of tightly stretched
+white calico.  In the dusk and coolness nothing gleamed except the
+gilt frame of the portrait of Heyst's father, signed by a famous
+painter, lonely in the middle of a wall.
+
+Heyst did not turn round.
+
+"Do you know what I was thinking of?" he asked.
+
+"No," she said.  Her tone betrayed always a shade of anxiety, as
+though she were never certain how a conversation with him would end.
+She leaned on the guard-rail by his side.
+
+"No," she repeated.  "What was it?"  She waited.  Then, rather with
+reluctance than shyness, she asked:
+
+"Were you thinking of me?"
+
+"I was wondering when you would come out," said Heyst, still without
+looking at the girl--to whom, after several experimental essays in
+combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given the
+name of Lena.
+
+She remarked after a pause:
+
+"I was not very far from you."
+
+"Apparently you were not near enough for me."
+
+"You could have called if you wanted me," she said.  "And I wasn't
+so long doing my hair."
+
+"Apparently it was too long for me."
+
+"Well, you were thinking of me, anyhow.  I am glad of it.  Do you
+know, it seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking of
+me I shouldn't be in the world at all!"
+
+He turned round and looked at her.  She often said things which
+surprised him.  A vague smile faded away on her lips before his
+scrutiny.
+
+"What is it?" he asked.  "It is a reproach?"
+
+"A reproach!  Why, how could it be?" she defended herself.
+
+"Well, what did it mean?" he insisted.
+
+"What I said--just what I said.  Why aren't you fair?"
+
+"Ah, this is at least a reproach!"
+
+She coloured to the roots of her hair.
+
+"It looks as if you were trying to make out that I am disagreeable,"
+she murmured.  "Am I?  You will make me afraid to open my mouth
+presently.  I shall end by believing I am no good."
+
+Her head drooped a little.  He looked at her smooth, low brow, the
+faintly coloured checks, and the red lips parted slightly, with the
+gleam of her teeth within.
+
+"And then I won't be any good," she added with conviction.  "That I
+won't!  I can only be what you think I am."
+
+He made a slight movement.  She put her hand on his arm, without
+raising her head, and went on, her voice animated in the stillness
+of her body:
+
+"It is so.  It couldn't be any other way with a girl like me and a
+man like you.  Here we are, we two alone, and I can't even tell
+where we are."
+
+"A very well-known spot of the globe," Heyst uttered gently.  "There
+must have been at least fifty thousand circulars issued at the time-
+-a hundred and fifty thousand, more likely.  My friend was looking
+after that, and his ideas were large and his belief very strong.  Of
+us two it was he who had the faith.  A hundred and fifty thousand,
+certainly."
+
+"What is it you mean?" she asked in a low tone.
+
+"What should I find fault with you for?" Heyst went on.  "For being
+amiable, good, gracious--and pretty?"
+
+A silence fell.  Then she said:
+
+"It's all right that you should think that of me.  There's no one
+here to think anything of us, good or bad."
+
+The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she
+uttered.  The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave
+him, he was aware, was more physical than moral.  Every time she
+spoke to him she seemed to abandon to him something of herself--
+something excessively subtle and inexpressible, to which he was
+infinitely sensible, which he would have missed horribly if she were
+to go away.  While he was looking into her eyes she raised her bare
+forearm, out of the short sleeve, and held it in the air till he
+noticed it and hastened to pose his great bronze moustaches on the
+whiteness of the skin.  Then they went in.
+
+Wang immediately appeared in front, and, squatting on his heels,
+began to potter mysteriously about some plants at the foot of the
+veranda.  When Heyst and the girl came out again, the Chinaman had
+gone in his peculiar manner, which suggested vanishing out of
+existence rather than out of sight, a process of evaporation rather
+than of movement.  They descended the steps, looking at each other,
+and started off smartly across the cleared ground; but they were not
+ten yards away when, without perceptible stir or sound, Wang
+materialized inside the empty room.  The Chinaman stood still with
+roaming eyes, examining the walls as if for signs, for inscriptions;
+exploring the floor as if for pitfalls, for dropped coins.  Then he
+cocked his head slightly at the profile of Heyst's father, pen in
+hand above a white sheet of paper on a crimson tablecloth; and,
+moving forward noiselessly, began to clear away the breakfast
+things.
+
+Though he proceeded without haste, the unerring precision of his
+movements, the absolute soundlessness of the operation, gave it
+something of the quality of a conjuring trick.  And, the trick
+having been performed, Wang vanished from the scene, to materialize
+presently in front of the house.  He materialized walking away from
+it, with no visible or guessable intention; but at the end of some
+ten paces he stopped, made a half turn, and put his hand up to shade
+his eyes.  The sun had topped the grey ridge of Samburan.  The great
+morning shadow was gone; and far away in the devouring sunshine Wang
+was in time to see Number One and the woman, two remote white specks
+against the sombre line of the forest.  In a moment they vanished.
+With the smallest display of action, Wang also vanished from the
+sunlight of the clearing.
+
+Heyst and Lena entered the shade of the forest path which crossed
+the island, and which, near its highest point had been blocked by
+felled trees.  But their intention was not to go so far.  After
+keeping to the path for some distance, they left it at a point where
+the forest was bare of undergrowth, and the trees, festooned with
+creepers, stood clear of one another in the gloom of their own
+making.  Here and there great splashes of light lay on the ground.
+They moved, silent in the great stillness, breathing the calmness,
+the infinite isolation, the repose of a slumber without dreams.
+They emerged at the upper limit of vegetation, among some rocks; and
+in a depression of the sharp slope, like a small platform, they
+turned about and looked from on high over the sea, lonely, its
+colour effaced by sunshine, its horizon a heat mist, a mere
+unsubstantial shimmer in the pale and blinding infinity overhung by
+the darker blaze of the sky.
+
+"It makes my head swim," the girl murmured, shutting her eyes and
+putting her hand on his shoulder.
+
+Heyst, gazing fixedly to the southward, exclaimed:
+
+"Sail ho!"
+
+A moment of silence ensued.
+
+"It must be very far away," he went on.  "I don't think you could
+see it.  Some native craft making for the Moluccas, probably.  Come,
+we mustn't stay here."
+
+With his arm round her waist, he led her down a little distance, and
+they settled themselves in the shade; she, seated on the ground, he
+a little lower, reclining at her feet.
+
+"You don't like to look at the sea from up there?" he said after a
+time.
+
+She shook her head.  That empty space was to her the abomination of
+desolation.  But she only said again:
+
+"It makes my head swim."
+
+"Too big?" he inquired.
+
+"Too lonely.  It makes my heart sink, too," she added in a low
+voice, as if confessing a secret.
+
+"I'm am afraid," said Heyst, "that you would be justified in
+reproaching me for these sensations.  But what would you have?"
+
+His tone was playful, but his eyes, directed at her face, were
+serious.  She protested.
+
+"I am not feeling lonely with you--not a bit.  It is only when we
+come up to that place, and I look at all that water and all that
+light--"
+
+"We will never come here again, then," he interrupted her.
+
+She remained silent for a while, returning his gaze till he removed
+it.
+
+"It seems as if everything that there is had gone under," she said.
+
+"Reminds you of the story of the deluge," muttered the man,
+stretched at her feet and looking at them.  "Are you frightened at
+it?"
+
+"I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone.  When I say,
+I, of course I mean we."
+
+"Do you?" . . . Heyst remained silent for a while.  "The vision of a
+world destroyed," he mused aloud.  "Would you be sorry for it?"
+
+"I should be sorry for the happy people in it," she said simply.
+
+His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he
+seemed to detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a
+glimpse of the sun through the clouds.
+
+"I should have thought it's they specially who ought to have been
+congratulated.  Don't you?"
+
+"Oh, yes--I understand what you mean; but there were forty days
+before it was all over."
+
+"You seem to be in possession of all the details."
+
+Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in
+silence.  She was not looking at him.
+
+"Sunday school," she murmured.  "I went regularly from the time I
+was eight till I was thirteen.  We lodged in the north of London,
+off Kingsland Road.  It wasn't a bad time.  Father was earning good
+money then.  The woman of the house used to pack me off in the
+afternoon with her own girls.  She was a good woman.  Her husband
+was in the post office.  Sorter or something.  Such a quiet man.  He
+used to go off after supper for night-duty, sometimes.  Then one day
+they had a row, and broke up the home.  I remember I cried when we
+had to pack up all of a sudden and go into other lodgings.  I never
+knew what it was, though--"
+
+"The deluge," muttered Heyst absently.
+
+He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the
+first moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had
+come together.  The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its
+modulations of audacity and sadness, would have given interest to
+the most inane chatter.  But she was no chatterer.  She was rather
+silent, with a capacity for immobility, an upright stillness, as
+when resting on the concert platform between the musical numbers,
+her feet crossed, her hands reposing on her lap.  But in the
+intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced upon him the
+sensation of something inexplicable reposing within her; stupidity
+or inspiration, weakness or force--or simply an abysmal emptiness,
+reserving itself even in the moments of complete surrender.
+
+During a long pause she did not look at him.  Then suddenly, as if
+the word "deluge" had stuck in her mind, she asked, looking up at
+the cloudless sky:
+
+"Does it ever rain here?"
+
+"There is a season when it rains almost every day," said Heyst,
+surprised.  "There are also thunderstorms.  We once had a 'mud-
+shower.'"
+
+"Mud-shower?"
+
+"Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes.  He sometimes clears his
+red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at the same
+time.  It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally well
+behaved--just smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first showed
+you the smudge in the sky from the schooner's deck.  He's a good-
+natured, lazy fellow of a volcano."
+
+"I saw a mountain smoking like that before," she said, staring at
+the slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front of her.
+"It wasn't very long after we left England--some few days, though.
+I was so ill at first that I lost count of days.  A smoking
+mountain--I can't think how they called it."
+
+"Vesuvius, perhaps," suggested Heyst.
+
+"That's the name."
+
+"I saw it, too, years, ages ago," said Heyst.
+
+"On your way here?"
+
+"No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of the
+world.  I was yet a boy."
+
+She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover
+some trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the
+hair thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches.  Heyst stood
+the frank examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound
+effect these veiled grey eyes produced--whether on his heart or on
+his nerves, whether sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he
+was unable to say.
+
+"Well, princess of Samburan," he said at last, "have I found favour
+in your sight?"
+
+She seemed to wake up, and shook her head.
+
+"I was thinking," she murmured very low.
+
+"Thought, action--so many snares!  If you begin to think you will be
+unhappy."
+
+"I wasn't thinking of myself!" she declared with a simplicity which
+took Heyst aback somewhat.
+
+"On the lips of a moralist this would sound like a rebuke," he said,
+half seriously; "but I won't suspect you of being one.  Moralists
+and I haven't been friends for many years."
+
+She had listened with an air of attention.
+
+"I understood you had no friends," she said.  "I am pleased that
+there's nobody to find fault with you for what you have done.  I
+like to think that I am in no one's way."
+
+Heyst would have said something, but she did not give him time.
+Unconscious of the movement he made she went on:
+
+"What I was thinking to myself was, why are you here?"
+
+Heyst let himself sink on his elbow again.
+
+"If by 'you' you mean 'we'--well, you know why we are here."
+
+She bent her gaze down at him.
+
+"No, it isn't that.  I meant before--all that time before you came
+across me and guessed at once that I was in trouble, with no one to
+turn to.  And you know it was desperate trouble too."
+
+Her voice fell on the last words, as if she would end there; but
+there was something so expectant in Heyst's attitude as he sat at
+her feet, looking up at her steadily, that she continued, after
+drawing a short, quick breath:
+
+"It was, really.  I told you I had been worried before by bad
+fellows.  It made me unhappy, disturbed--angry, too.  But oh, how I
+hated, hated, HATED that man!"
+
+"That man" was the florid Schomberg with the military bearing,
+benefactor of white men ('decent food to eat in decent company')--
+mature victim of belated passion.  The girl shuddered.  The
+characteristic harmoniousness of her face became, as it were,
+decomposed for an instant.  Heyst was startled.
+
+"Why think of it now?" he cried.
+
+"It's because I was cornered that time.  It wasn't as before.  It
+was worse, ever so much.  I wished I could die of my fright--and yet
+it's only now that I begin to understand what a horror it might have
+been.  Yes, only now, since we--"
+
+Heyst stirred a little.
+
+"Came here," he finished.
+
+Her tenseness relaxed, her flushed face went gradually back to its
+normal tint.
+
+"Yes," she said indifferently, but at the same time she gave him a
+stealthy glance of passionate appreciation; and then her face took
+on a melancholy cast, her whole figure drooped imperceptibly.
+
+"But you were coming back here anyhow?" she asked.
+
+"Yes.  I was only waiting for Davidson.  Yes, I was coming back
+here, to these ruins--to Wang, who perhaps did not expect to see me
+again.  It's impossible to guess at the way that Chinaman draws his
+conclusions, and how he looks upon one."
+
+"Don't talk about him.  He makes me feel uncomfortable.  Talk about
+yourself!"
+
+"About myself?  I see you are still busy with the mystery of my
+existence here; but it isn't at all mysterious.  Primarily the man
+with the quill pen in his hand in that picture you so often look at
+is responsible for my existence.  He is also responsible for what my
+existence is, or rather has been.  He was a great man in his way.  I
+don't know much of his history.  I suppose he began like other
+people; took fine words for good, ringing coin and noble ideals for
+valuable banknotes.  He was a great master of both, himself, by the
+way.  Later he discovered--how am I to explain it to you?  Suppose
+the world were a factory and all mankind workmen in it.  Well, he
+discovered that the wages were not good enough.  That they were paid
+in counterfeit money."
+
+"I see!" the girl said slowly.
+
+"Do you?"
+
+Heyst, who had been speaking as if to himself, looked up curiously.
+
+"It wasn't a new discovery, but he brought his capacity for scorn to
+bear on it.  It was immense.  It ought to have withered this globe.
+I don't know how many minds he convinced.  But my mind was very
+young then, and youth I suppose can be easily seduced--even by a
+negation.  He was very ruthless, and yet he was not without pity.
+He dominated me without difficulty.  A heartless man could not have
+done so.  Even to fools he was not utterly merciless.  He could be
+indignant, but he was too great for flouts and jeers.  What he said
+was not meant for the crowd; it could not be; and I was flattered to
+find myself among the elect.  They read his books, but I have heard
+his living word.  It was irresistible.  It was as if that mind were
+taking me into its confidence, giving me a special insight into its
+mastery of despair.  Mistake, no doubt.  There is something of my
+father in every man who lives long enough.  But they don't say
+anything.  They can't.  They wouldn't know how, or perhaps, they
+wouldn't speak if they could.  Man on this earth is an unforeseen
+accident which does not stand close investigation.  However, that
+particular man died as quietly as a child goes to sleep.  But, after
+listening to him, I could not take my soul down into the street to
+fight there.  I started off to wander about, an independent
+spectator--if that is possible."
+
+For a long time the girl's grey eyes had been watching his face.
+She discovered that, addressing her, he was really talking to
+himself.  Heyst looked up, caught sight of her as it were, and
+caught himself up, with a low laugh and a change of tone.
+
+"All this does not tell you why I ever came here.  Why, indeed?
+It's like prying into inscrutable mysteries which are not worth
+scrutinizing.  A man drifts.  The most successful men have drifted
+into their successes.  I don't want to tell you that this is a
+success.  You wouldn't believe me if I did.  It isn't; neither is it
+the ruinous failure it looks.  It proves nothing, unless perhaps
+some hidden weakness in my character--and even that is not certain."
+
+He looked fixedly at her, and with such grave eyes that she felt
+obliged to smile faintly at him, since she did not understand what
+he meant.  Her smile was reflected, still fainter, on his lips.
+
+"This does not advance you much in your inquiry," he went on.  "And
+in truth your question is unanswerable; but facts have a certain
+positive value, and I will tell you a fact.  One day I met a
+cornered man.  I use the word because it expresses the man's
+situation exactly, and because you just used it yourself.  You know
+what that means?"
+
+"What do you say?" she whispered, astounded.  "A man!"
+
+Heyst laughed at her wondering eyes.
+
+"No!  No!  I mean in his own way."
+
+"I knew very well it couldn't be anything like that," she observed
+under her breath.
+
+"I won't bother you with the story.  It was a custom-house affair,
+strange as it may sound to you.  He would have preferred to be
+killed outright--that is, to have his soul dispatched to another
+world, rather than to be robbed of his substance, his very
+insignificant substance, in this.  I saw that he believed in another
+world because, being cornered, as I have told you, he went down on
+his knees and prayed.  What do you think of that?"
+
+Heyst paused.  She looked at him earnestly.
+
+"You didn't make fun of him for that?" she said.
+
+Heyst made a brusque movement of protest
+
+"My dear girl, I am not a ruffian," he cried.  Then, returning to
+his usual tone:  "I didn't even have to conceal a smile.  Somehow it
+didn't look a smiling matter.  No, it was not funny; it was rather
+pathetic; he was so representative of an the past victims of the
+Great Joke.  But it is by folly alone that the world moves, and so
+it is a respectable thing upon the whole.  And besides, he was what
+one would call a good man.  I don't mean especially because he had
+offered up a prayer.  No!  He was really a decent fellow, he was
+quite unfitted for this world, he was a failure, a good man
+cornered--a sight for the gods; for no decent mortal cares to look
+at that sort."  A thought seemed to occur to him.  He turned his
+face to the girl.  "And you, who have been cornered too--did you
+think of offering a prayer?"
+
+Neither her eyes nor a single one of her features moved the least
+bit.  She only let fall the words:
+
+"I am not what they call a good girl."
+
+"That sounds evasive," said Heyst after a short silence.  "Well, the
+good fellow did pray and after he had confessed to it I was struck
+by the comicality of the situation.  No, don't misunderstand me--I
+am not alluding to his act, of course.  And even the idea of
+Eternity, Infinity, Omnipotence, being called upon to defeat the
+conspiracy of two miserable Portuguese half-castes did not move my
+mirth.  From the point of view of the supplicant, the danger to be
+conjured was something like the end of the world, or worse.  No!
+What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel Heyst, the most detached
+of creatures in this earthly captivity, the veriest tramp on this
+earth, an indifferent stroller going through the world's bustle--
+that I should have been there to step into the situation of an agent
+of Providence.  _I_, a man of universal scorn and unbelief . . . "
+
+"You are putting it on," she interrupted in her seductive voice,
+with a coaxing intonation.
+
+"No.  I am not like that, born or fashioned, or both.  I am not for
+nothing the son of my father, of that man in the painting.  I am he,
+all but the genius.  And there is even less in me than I make out,
+because the very scorn is falling away from me year after year.  I
+have never been so amused as by that episode in which I was suddenly
+called to act such an incredible part.  For a moment I enjoyed it
+greatly.  It got him out of his corner, you know."
+
+"You saved a man for fun--is that what you mean?  Just for fun?"
+
+"Why this tone of suspicion?" remonstrated Heyst.  "I suppose the
+sight of this particular distress was disagreeable to me.  What you
+call fun came afterwards, when it dawned on me that I was for him a
+walking, breathing, incarnate proof of the efficacy of prayer.  I
+was a little fascinated by it--and then, could I have argued with
+him?  You don't argue against such evidence, and besides it would
+have looked as if I had wanted to claim all the merit.  Already his
+gratitude was simply frightful.  Funny position, wasn't it?  The
+boredom came later, when we lived together on board his ship.  I
+had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie.  How to
+define it precisely I don't know.  One gets attached in a way to
+people one has done something for.  But is that friendship?  I am
+not sure what it was.  I only know that he who forms a tie is lost.
+The germ of corruption has entered into his soul."
+
+Heyst's tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which
+seasoned all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of
+his thoughts.  The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed
+himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he
+did not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so
+strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had
+ever known in all his life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+
+
+With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her
+head in both her hands.
+
+"Are you tired of sitting here?" Heyst asked.
+
+An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the
+answer she made.
+
+"Why are you looking so serious?" he pursued, and immediately
+thought that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more
+bearable than constant gaiety.  "However, this expression suits you
+exceedingly," he added, not diplomatically, but because, by the
+tendency of his taste, it was a true statement.  "And as long as I
+can be certain that it is not boredom which gives you this severe
+air, I am willing to sit here and look at you till you are ready to
+go."
+
+And this was true.  He was still under the fresh sortilege of their
+common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his
+possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has
+ceased to be masculine.  Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on
+him, then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot
+of the straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly
+withdrawing their shade.  The warm air stirred slightly about her
+motionless head.  She would not look at him, from some obscure fear
+of betraying herself.  She felt in her innermost depths an
+irresistible desire to give herself up to him more completely, by
+some act of absolute sacrifice.  This was something of which he did
+not seem to have an idea.  He was a strange being without needs.
+She felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept silent, she said
+uneasily--for she didn't know what his silences might mean:
+
+"And so you lived with that friend--that good man?"
+
+"Excellent fellow," Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did
+not expect.  "But it was a weakness on my part.  I really didn't
+want to, only he wouldn't let me off, and I couldn't explain.  He
+was the sort of man to whom you can't explain anything.  He was
+extremely sensitive, and it would have been a tigerish thing to do
+to mangle his delicate feelings by the sort of plain speaking that
+would have been necessary.  His mind was like a white-walled, pure
+chamber, furnished with, say, six straw-bottomed chairs, and he was
+always placing and displacing them in various combinations.  But
+they were always the same chairs.  He was extremely easy to live
+with; but then he got hold of this coal idea--or, rather, the idea
+got hold of him, it entered into that scantily furnished chamber of
+which I have just spoken, and sat on all the chairs.  There was no
+dislodging it, you know!  It was going to make his fortune, my
+fortune, everybody's fortune.  In past years, in moments of doubt
+that will come to a man determined to remain free from absurdities
+of existence, I often asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what
+way would life try to get hold of me?  And this was the way.  He got
+it into his head that he could do nothing without me.  And was I
+now, he asked me, to spurn and ruin him?  Well, one morning--I
+wonder if he had gone down on his knees to pray that night!--one
+morning I gave in."
+
+Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away
+from him with a nervous gesture.
+
+"I gave in," he repeated.
+
+Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl
+noticed the strong feeling on his face with that intense interest
+which his person awakened in her mind and in her heart.  But it soon
+passed away, leaving only a moody expression.
+
+"It's difficult to resist where nothing matters," he observed.  "And
+perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature.  It amused me
+to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases.  I was never so
+well thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial
+gibberish like the veriest idiot.  Upon my word, I believe that I
+was actually respected for a time.  I was as grave as an owl over
+it; I had to be loyal to the man.  I have been, from first to last,
+completely, utterly loyal to the best of my ability.  I thought he
+understood something about coal.  And if I had been aware that he
+knew nothing of it, as in fact he didn't, well--I don't know what I
+could have done to stop him.  In one way or another I should have
+had to be loyal.  Truth, work, ambition, love itself, may be only
+counters in the lamentable or despicable game of life, but when one
+takes a hand one must play the game.  No, the shade of Morrison
+needn't haunt me.  What's the matter?  I say, Lena, why are you
+staring like that?  Do you feel ill?"
+
+Heyst made as if to get on his feet.  The girl extended her arm to
+arrest him, and he remained staring in a sitting posture, propped on
+one arm, observing her indefinable expression of anxiety, as if she
+were unable to draw breath.
+
+"What has come to you?" he insisted, feeling strangely unwilling to
+move, to touch her.
+
+"Nothing!"  She swallowed painfully.  "Of course it can't be.  What
+name did you say?  I didn't hear it properly."
+
+"Name?" repeated Heyst dazedly.  "I only mentioned Morrison.  It's
+the name of that man of whom I've been speaking.  What of it?"
+
+"And you mean to say that he was your friend?"
+
+"You have heard enough to judge for yourself.  You know as much of
+our connection as I know myself.  The people in this part of the
+world went by appearances, and called us friends, as far as I can
+remember.  Appearances--what more, what better can you ask for?  In
+fact you can't have better.  You can't have anything else."
+
+"You are trying to confuse me with your talk," she cried.  "You
+can't make fun of this."
+
+"Can't?  Well, no I can't.  It's a pity.  Perhaps it would have been
+the best way," said Heyst, in a tone which for him could be called
+gloomy.  "Unless one could forget the silly business altogether."
+His faint playfulness of manner and speech returned, like a habit
+one has schooled oneself into, even before his forehead had cleared
+completely.  "But why are you looking so hard at me?  Oh, I don't
+object, and I shall try not to flinch.  Your eyes--"
+
+He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had
+forgotten all about the late Morrison at that moment.
+
+"No," he exclaimed suddenly.  "What an impenetrable girl you are
+Lena, with those grey eyes of yours!  Windows of the soul, as some
+poet has said.  The fellow must have been a glazier by vocation.
+Well, nature has provided excellently for the shyness of your soul."
+
+When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of
+her breath.  He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he
+thought he knew so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:
+
+"And that partner of yours is dead?"
+
+"Morrison?  Oh, yes, as I've told you, he--"
+
+"You never told me."
+
+"Didn't I?  I thought I did; or, rather, I thought you must know.
+It seems impossible that anybody with whom I speak should not know
+that Morrison is dead."
+
+She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like an
+expression of horror on her face.
+
+"Morrison!" she whispered in an appalled tone.  "Morrison!"  Her
+head drooped.  Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her
+voice that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the
+syllables of that unromantic name.  A thought flashed through his
+head--could she have known Morrison?  But the mere difference of
+their origins made it wildly improbable.
+
+"This is very extraordinary!" he said.  "Have you ever heard the
+name before?"
+
+Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as if
+she could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him.  She
+was biting her lower lip.
+
+"Did you ever know anybody of that name?" he asked.
+
+The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke,
+jerkily, as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear.  She had
+heard of that very man, she told Heyst.
+
+"Impossible!" he said positively.  "You are mistaken.  You couldn't
+have heard of him, it's--"
+
+He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was
+perfectly useless; that one doesn't argue against thin air.
+
+"But I did hear of him; only I didn't know then, I couldn't guess,
+that it was your partner they were talking about."
+
+"Talking about my partner?" repeated Heyst slowly.
+
+"No."  Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as full of incredulity,
+as his.  "No.  They were talking of you really; only I didn't know
+it."
+
+"Who were they?" Heyst raised his voice.  "Who was talking of me?
+Talking where?"
+
+With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining
+position; at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on
+a level.
+
+"Why, in that town, in that hotel.  Where else could it have been?"
+she said.
+
+The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst's
+simplified conception of himself.  For a moment he was as much
+surprised as if he had believed himself to be a mere gliding shadow
+among men.  Besides, he had in him a half-unconscious notion that he
+was above the level of island gossip.
+
+"But you said first that it was of Morrison they talked," he
+remarked to the girl, sinking on his heels, and no longer much
+interested.  "Strange that you should have the opportunity to hear
+any talk at all!  I was rather under the impression that you never
+saw anybody belonging to the town except from the platform."
+
+"You forget that I was not living with the other girls," she said.
+"After meals they used to go back to the Pavilion, but I had to stay
+in the hotel and do my sewing, or what not, in the room where they
+talked."
+
+"I didn't think of that.  By the by, you never told me who they
+were."
+
+"Why, that horrible red-faced beast," she said, with all the energy
+of disgust which the mere thought of the hotel-keeper provoked in
+her.
+
+"Oh, Schomberg!" Heyst murmured carelessly.
+
+"He talked to the boss--to Zangiacomo, I mean.  I had to sit there.
+That devil-woman sometimes wouldn't let me go away.  I mean Mrs.
+Zangiacomo."
+
+"I guessed," murmured Heyst.  "She liked to torment you in a variety
+of ways.  But it is really strange that the hotel-keeper should talk
+of Morrison to Zangiacomo.  As far as I can remember he saw very
+little of Morrison professionally.  He knew many others much
+better."
+
+The girl shuddered slightly.
+
+"That was the only name I ever overheard.  I would get as far away
+from them as I could, to the other end of the room, but when that
+beast started shouting I could not help hearing.  I wish I had never
+heard anything.  If I had got up and gone out of the room I don't
+suppose the woman would have killed me for it; but she would have
+rowed me in a nasty way.  She would have threatened me and called me
+names.  That sort, when they know you are helpless, there's nothing
+to stop them.  I don't know how it is, but bad people, real bad
+people that you can see are bad, they get over me somehow.  It's the
+way they set about downing one.  I am afraid of wickedness."
+
+Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face.  He encouraged
+her, profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.
+
+"I quite understand.  You needn't apologize for your great delicacy
+in the perception of inhuman evil.  I am a little like you."
+
+"I am not very plucky," she said.
+
+"Well!  I don't know myself what I would do, what countenance I
+would have before a creature which would strike me as being evil
+incarnate.  Don't you be ashamed!"
+
+She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid
+expression on her face, and murmured:
+
+"You don't seem to want to know what he was saying."
+
+"About poor Morrison?  It couldn't have been anything bad, for the
+poor fellow was innocence itself.  And then, you know, he is dead,
+and nothing can possibly matter to him now."
+
+"But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!" she cried.
+
+"He was saying that Morrison's partner first got all there was to
+get out of him, and then, and then--well, as good as murdered him--
+sent him out to die somewhere!"
+
+"You believe that of me?" said Heyst, after a moment of perfect
+silence.
+
+"I didn't know it had anything to do with you.  Schomberg was
+talking of some Swede.  How was I to know?  It was only when you
+began telling me about how you came here--"
+
+"And now you have my version."  Heyst forced himself to speak
+quietly.  "So that's how the business looked from outside!" he
+muttered.
+
+"I remember him saying that everybody in these parts knew the
+story," the girl added breathlessly.
+
+"Strange that it should hurt me!" mused Heyst to himself; "yet it
+does.  I seem to be as much of a fool as those everybodies who know
+the story and no doubt believe it.  Can you remember any more?" he
+addressed the girl in a grimly polite tone.  "I've often heard of
+the moral advantages of seeing oneself as others see one.  Let us
+investigate further.  Can't you recall something else that everybody
+knows?"
+
+"Oh!  Don't laugh!" she cried.
+
+"Did I laugh?  I assure you I was not aware of it.  I won't ask you
+whether you believe the hotel-keeper's version.  Surely you must
+know the value of human judgement!"
+
+She unclasped her hands, moved them slightly, and twined her fingers
+as before.  Protest?  Assent?  Was there to be nothing more?  He was
+relieved when she spoke in that warm and wonderful voice which in
+itself comforted and fascinated one's heart, which made her lovable.
+
+"I heard this before you and I ever spoke to each other.  It went
+out of my memory afterwards.  Everything went out of my memory then;
+and I was glad of it.  It was a fresh start for me, with you--and
+you know it.  I wish I had forgotten who I was--that would have been
+best; and I very nearly did forget."
+
+He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words.  She seemed
+to be talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious terms
+of special significance.  He thought that if she only could talk to
+him in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the
+sheer beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and
+feeling.
+
+"But," she went on, "the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when
+you mentioned it--"
+
+"It broke the spell," muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if
+he had been deceived in some hope.
+
+The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still
+eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with
+a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before,
+because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the
+abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm.  What if he
+should grow weary of the burden?
+
+"And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!"
+
+Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her
+steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise.  It was a
+purely mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor
+puzzled.  In fact, she could understand him better then than at any
+moment since she first set eyes on him.
+
+He laughed scornfully.
+
+"What am I thinking of?" he cried.  "As if it could matter to me
+what anybody had ever said or believed, from the beginning of the
+world till the crack of doom!"
+
+"I never heard you laugh till today," she observed.  "This is the
+second time!"
+
+He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.
+
+"That's because, when one's heart has been broken into in the way
+you have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to
+enter--shame, anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears--stupid
+laughter, too.  I wonder what interpretation you are putting on it?"
+
+"It wasn't gay, certainly," she said.  "But why are you angry with
+me?  Are you sorry you took me away from those beasts?  I told you
+who I was.  You could see it."
+
+"Heavens!" he muttered.  He had regained his command of himself.  "I
+assure you I could see much more than you could tell me.  I could
+see quite a lot that you don't even suspect yet, but you can't be
+seen quite through."
+
+He sank to the ground by her side and took her hand.  She asked
+gently:
+
+"What more do you want from me?"
+
+He made no sound for a time.
+
+"The impossible, I suppose," he said very low, as one makes a
+confidence, and pressing the hand he grasped.
+
+It did not return the pressure.  He shook his head as if to drive
+away the thought of this, and added in a louder, light tone:
+
+"Nothing less.  And it isn't because I think little of what I've got
+already.  Oh, no!  It is because I think so much of this possession
+of mine that I can't have it complete enough.  I know it's
+unreasonable.  You can't hold back anything--now."
+
+"Indeed I couldn't," she whispered, letting her hand lie passive in
+his tight grasp.  "I only wish I could give you something more, or
+better, or whatever it is you want."
+
+He was touched by the sincere accent of these simple words.
+
+"I tell you what you can do--you can tell me whether you would have
+gone with me like this if you had known of whom that abominable
+idiot of a hotel-keeper was speaking.  A murderer--no less!"
+
+"But I didn't know you at all then," she cried.  "And I had the
+sense to understand what he was saying.  It wasn't murder, really.
+I never thought it was."
+
+"What made him invent such an atrocity?" Heyst exclaimed.  "He seems
+a stupid animal.  He IS stupid.  How did he manage to hatch that
+pretty tale?  Have I a particularly vile countenance?  Is black
+selfishness written all over my face?  Or is that sort of thing so
+universally human that it might be said of anybody?"
+
+"It wasn't murder," she insisted earnestly.
+
+"I know.  I understand.  It was worse.  As to killing a man, which
+would be a comparatively decent thing to do, well--I have never done
+that."
+
+"Why should you do it?" she asked in a frightened voice.
+
+"My dear girl, you don't know the sort of life I have been leading
+in unexplored countries, in the wilds; it's difficult to give you an
+idea.  There are men who haven't been in such tight places as I have
+found myself in who have had to--to shed blood, as the saying is.
+Even the wilds hold prizes which tempt some people; but I had no
+schemes, no plans--and not even great firmness of mind to make me
+unduly obstinate.  I was simply moving on, while the others,
+perhaps, were going somewhere.  An indifference as to roads and
+purposes makes one meeker, as it were.  And I may say truly, too,
+that I never did care, I won't say for life--I had scorned what
+people call by that name from the first--but for being alive.  I
+don't know if that is what men call courage, but I doubt it very
+much."
+
+"You!  You have no courage?" she protested.
+
+"I really don't know.  Not the sort that always itches for a weapon,
+for I have never been anxious to use one in the quarrels that a man
+gets into in the most innocent way sometimes.  The differences for
+which men murder each other are, like everything else they do, the
+most contemptible, the most pitiful things to look back upon.  No,
+I've never killed a man or loved a woman--not even in my thoughts,
+not even in my dreams."
+
+He raised her hand to his lips, and let them rest on it for a space,
+during which she moved a little closer to him.  After the lingering
+kiss he did not relinquish his hold.
+
+"To slay, to love--the greatest enterprises of life upon a man!  And
+I have no experience of either.  You must forgive me anything that
+may have appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive in my
+speeches, untimely in my silences."
+
+He moved uneasily, a little disappointed by her attitude, but
+indulgent to it, and feeling, in this moment of perfect quietness,
+that in holding her surrendered hand he had found a closer communion
+than they had ever achieved before.  But even then there still
+lingered in him a sense of incompleteness not altogether overcome--
+which, it seemed, nothing ever would overcome--the fatal
+imperfection of all the gifts of life, which makes of them a
+delusion and a snare.
+
+All of a sudden he squeezed her hand angrily.  His delicately
+playful equanimity, the product of kindness and scorn, had perished
+with the loss of his bitter liberty.
+
+"Not murder, you say!  I should think not.  But when you led me to
+talk just now, when the name turned up, when you understood that it
+was of me that these things had been said, you showed a strange
+emotion.  I could see it."
+
+"I was a bit startled," she said.
+
+"At the baseness of my conduct?" he asked.
+
+"I wouldn't judge you, not for anything."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is."  With
+her other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one
+movement the earth and the heaven.  "I wouldn't do such a thing."
+
+Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:
+
+"I!  I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!" he cried.  "I, who
+could not bear to hurt his feelings.  I, who respected his very
+madness!  Yes, this madness, the wreck of which you can see lying
+about the jetty of Diamond Bay.  What else could I do?  He insisted
+on regarding me as his saviour; he was always restraining the
+eternal obligation on the tip of his tongue, till I was burning with
+shame at his gratitude.  What could I do?  He was going to repay me
+with this infernal coal, and I had to join him as one joins a
+child's game in a nursery.  One would no more have thought of
+humiliating him than one would think of humiliating a child.  What's
+the use of talking of all this!  Of course, the people here could
+not understand the truth of our relation to each other.  But what
+business of theirs was it?  Kill old Morrison!  Well, it is less
+criminal, less base--I am not saying it is less difficult--to kill a
+man than to cheat him in that way.  You understand that?"
+
+She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction.
+His eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.
+
+"But it was neither one nor the other," he went on.  "Then, why I
+your emotion?  All you confess is that you wouldn't judge me."
+
+She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing
+of her wonder could be read.
+
+"I said I couldn't," she whispered.
+
+"But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!" the
+playfulness of tone hardly concealed his irritation.  "What power
+there must be in words, only imperfectly heard--for you did not
+listen with particular care, did you?  What were they?  What evil
+effort of invention drove them into that idiot's mouth out of his
+lying throat?  If you were to try to remember, they would perhaps
+convince me, too."
+
+"I didn't listen," she protested.  "What was it to me what they said
+of anybody?  He was saying that there never were such loving friends
+to look at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him
+and got thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home
+and die."
+
+Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in
+these quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice.  She
+ceased abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally
+weary, sick at heart.
+
+"Of course, why shouldn't you get tired of that or any other--
+company?  You aren't like anyone else, and--and the thought of it
+made me unhappy suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe anything bad
+of you.  I--"
+
+A brusque movement of his arm, flinging her hand away, stopped her
+short.  Heyst had again lost control of himself.  He would have
+shouted, if shouting had been in his character.
+
+"No, this earth must be the appointed hatching planet of calumny
+enough to furnish the whole universe.  I feel a disgust at my own
+person, as if I had tumbled into some filthy hole.  Pah!  And you--
+all you can say is that you won't judge me; that you--"
+
+She raised her head at this attack, though indeed he had not turned
+to her.
+
+"I don't believe anything bad of you," she repeated.  "I couldn't."
+
+He made a gesture as if to say:
+
+"That's sufficient."
+
+In his soul and in his body he experienced a nervous reaction from
+tenderness.  All at once, without transition, he detested her.  But
+only for a moment.  He remembered that she was pretty, and, more,
+that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life.  She had the
+secret of individuality which excites--and escapes.
+
+He jumped up and began to walk to and fro.  Presently his hidden
+fury fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving
+behind emptiness, desolation, regret.  His resentment was not
+against the girl, but against life itself--that commonest of snares,
+in which he felt himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots
+and unconsoled by the lucidity of his mind.
+
+He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side.
+Before she could make a movement or even turn her head his way, he
+took her in his arms and kissed her lips.  He tasted on them the
+bitterness of a tear fallen there.  He had never seen her cry.  It
+was like another appeal to his tenderness--a new seduction.  The
+girl glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face.  With
+her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone--a command
+which Heyst did not obey.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+
+
+When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst scrambled quickly
+to his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had rolled a
+little way off.  Meanwhile she busied herself in doing up her hair,
+plaited on the top of her head in two heavy, dark tresses, which had
+come loose.  He tendered her the helmet in silence, and waited as if
+unwilling to hear the sound of his own voice.
+
+"We had better go down now," he suggested in a low tone.
+
+He extended his hand to help her up.  He had the intention to smile,
+but abandoned it at the nearer sight of her still face, in which was
+depicted the infinite lassitude of her soul.  On their way to regain
+the forest path they had to pass through the spot from which the
+view of the sea could be obtained.  The flaming abyss of emptiness,
+the liquid, undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light,
+made her long for the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an
+austere spell; for the velvety dark sky and the mysterious great
+shadow of the sea, conveying peace to the day-weary heart.  She put
+her hand to her eyes.  Behind her back Heyst spoke gently.
+
+"Let us get on, Lena."
+
+She walked ahead in silence.  Heyst remarked that they had never
+been out before during the hottest hours.  It would do her no good,
+he feared.  This solicitude pleased and soothed her.  She felt more
+and more like herself--a poor London girl playing in an orchestra,
+and snatched out from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a
+miserable existence, by a man like whom there was not, there could
+not be, another in this world.  She felt this with elation, with
+uneasiness, with an intimate pride--and with a peculiar sinking of
+the heart.
+
+"I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat," she said
+decisively.
+
+"Yes, but I don't forget that you're not a tropical bird."
+
+"You weren't born in these parts, either," she returned.
+
+"No, and perhaps I haven't even your physique.  I am a transplanted
+being.  Transplanted!  I ought to call myself uprooted--an unnatural
+state of existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything."
+
+She looked back at him and received a smile.  He told her to keep in
+the shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full
+of heat if free from glare.  Now and then they had glimpses of the
+company's old clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps
+of trees stood charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister.
+They crossed the open in a direct line for the bungalow.  On the
+veranda they fancied they had a glimpse of the vanishing Wang,
+though the girl was not at all sure that she had seen anything move.
+Heyst had no doubts.
+
+"Wang has been looking out for us.  We are late."
+
+"Was he?  I thought I saw something white for a moment, and then I
+did not see it any more."
+
+"That's it--he vanishes.  It's a very remarkable gift in that
+Chinaman."
+
+"Are they all like that?" she asked with naive curiosity and
+uneasiness.
+
+"Not in such perfection," said Heyst, amused.
+
+He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk.  The
+drops of perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool,
+white petal of a flower.  He looked at her figure of grace and
+strength, solid and supple, with an ever-growing appreciation.
+
+"Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then Mr. Wang
+will give us something to eat," he said.
+
+They had found the table laid.  When they came together again and
+sat down to it, Wang materialized without a sound, unheard,
+uncalled, and did his office.  Which being accomplished, at a given
+moment he was not.
+
+A great silence brooded over Samburan--the silence of the great heat
+that seems pregnant with fatal issues, like the silence of ardent
+thought.  Heyst remained alone in the big room.  The girl seeing him
+take up a book, had retreated to her chamber.  Heyst sat down under
+his father's portrait; and the abominable calumny crept back into
+his recollection.  The taste of it came on his lips, nauseating and
+corrosive like some kinds of poison.  He was tempted to spit on the
+floor, naively, in sheer unsophisticated disgust of the physical
+sensation.  He shook his head, surprised at himself.  He was not
+used to receive his intellectual impressions in that way--reflected
+in movements of carnal emotion.  He stirred impatiently in his
+chair, and raised the book to his eyes with both hands.  It was one
+of his father's.  He opened it haphazard, and his eyes fell on the
+middle of the page.  The elder Heyst had written of everything in
+many books--of space and of time, of animals and of stars; analysing
+ideas and actions, the laughter and the frowns of men, and the
+grimaces of their agony.  The son read, shrinking into himself,
+composing his face as if under the author's eye, with a vivid
+consciousness of the portrait on his right hand, a little above his
+head; a wonderful presence in its heavy frame on the flimsy wall of
+mats, looking exiled and at home, out of place and masterful, in the
+painted immobility of profile.
+
+And Heyst, the son, read:
+
+
+Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love-
+-the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.
+
+
+He turned the pages of the little volume, "Storm and Dust," glancing
+here and there at the broken text of reflections, maxims, short
+phrases, enigmatical sometimes and sometimes eloquent.  It seemed to
+him that he was hearing his father's voice, speaking and ceasing to
+speak again.  Startled at first, he ended by finding a charm in the
+illusion.  He abandoned himself to the half-belief that something of
+his father dwelt yet on earth--a ghostly voice, audible to the ear
+of his own flesh and blood.  With what strange serenity, mingled
+with terrors, had that man considered the universal nothingness!  He
+had plunged into it headlong, perhaps to render death, the answer
+that faced one at every inquiry, more supportable.
+
+Heyst stirred, and the ghostly voice ceased; but his eyes followed
+the words on the last page of the book:
+
+
+Men of tormented conscience, or of a criminal imagination, are aware
+of much that minds of a peaceful, resigned cast do not even suspect.
+It is not poets alone who dare descend into the abyss of infernal
+regions, or even who dream of such a descent.  The most inexpressive
+of human beings must have said to himself, at one time or another:
+"Anything but this!" . . .
+
+We all have our instants of clairvoyance.  They are not very
+helpful.  The character of the scheme does not permit that or
+anything else to be helpful.  Properly speaking its character,
+judged by the standards established by its victims, is infamous.  It
+excuses every violence of protest and at the same time never fails
+to crush it, just as it crushes the blindest assent.  The so-called
+wickedness must be, like the so-called virtue, its own reward--to be
+anything at all . . .
+
+Clairvoyance or no clairvoyance, men love their captivity.  To the
+unknown force of negation they prefer the miserably tumbled bed of
+their servitude.  Man alone can give one the disgust of pity; yet I
+find it easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its
+wickedness.
+
+
+These were the last words.  Heyst lowered the book to his knees.
+Lena's voice spoke above his drooping head:
+
+"You sit there as if you were unhappy."
+
+"I thought you were asleep," he said.
+
+"I was lying down right enough, but I never closed my eyes."
+
+"The rest would have done you good after our walk.  Didn't you try?"
+
+"I was lying down, I tell you, but sleep I couldn't."
+
+"And you made no sound!  What want of sincerity.  Or did you want to
+be alone for a time?"
+
+"I--alone?" she murmured.
+
+He noticed her eyeing the book, and got up to put it back in the
+bookcase.  When he turned round, he saw that she had dropped into
+the chair--it was the one she always used--and looked as if her
+strength had suddenly gone from her, leaving her only her youth,
+which seemed very pathetic, very much at his mercy.  He moved
+quickly towards the chair.
+
+"Tired, are you?  It's my fault, taking you up so high and keeping
+you out so long.  Such a windless day, too!"
+
+She watched his concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him,
+but as unreadable as ever.  He avoided looking into them for that
+very reason.  He forgot himself in the contemplation of those
+passive arms, of these defenceless lips, and--yes, one had to go
+back to them--of these wide-open eyes.  Something wild in their grey
+stare made him think of sea-birds in the cold murkiness of high
+latitudes.  He started when she spoke, all the charm of physical
+intimacy revealed suddenly in that voice.
+
+"You should try to love me!" she said.
+
+He made a movement of astonishment.
+
+"Try," he muttered.  "But it seems to me--"  He broke off, saying to
+himself that if he loved her, he had never told her so in so many
+words.  Simple words!  They died on his lips.  "What makes you say
+that?" he asked.
+
+She lowered her eyelids and turned her head a little.
+
+"I have done nothing," she said in a low voice.  "It's you who have
+been good, helpful, and tender to me.  Perhaps you love me for that-
+-just for that; or perhaps you love me for company, and because--
+well!  But sometimes it seems to me that you can never love me for
+myself, only for myself, as people do love each other when it is to
+be for ever."  Her head drooped.  "Forever," she breathed out again;
+then, still more faintly, she added an entreating:  "Do try!"
+
+These last words went straight to his heart--the sound of them more
+than the sense.  He did not know what to say, either from want of
+practice in dealing with women or simply from his innate honesty of
+thought.  All his defences were broken now.  Life had him fairly by
+the throat.  But he managed a smile, though she was not looking at
+him; yes, he did manage it--the well-known Heyst smile of playful
+courtesy, so familiar to all sorts and conditions of men in the
+islands.
+
+"My dear Lena," he said, "it looks as if you were trying to pick a
+very unnecessary quarrel with me--of all people!"
+
+She made no movement.  With his elbows spread out he was twisting
+the ends of his long moustaches, very masculine and perplexed,
+enveloped in the atmosphere of femininity as in a cloud, suspecting
+pitfalls, and as if afraid to move.
+
+"I must admit, though," he added, "that there is no one else; and I
+suppose a certain amount of quarrelling is necessary for existence
+in this world."
+
+That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like
+a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious,
+like any writing to the illiterate.  As far as women went he was
+altogether uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which
+is fostered in the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of
+the heart fitting it for the encounters of a world, in which love
+itself rests as much on antagonism as on attraction.  His mental
+attitude was that of a man looking this way and that on a piece of
+writing which he is unable to decipher, but which may be big with
+some revelation.  He didn't know what to say.  All he found to add
+was:
+
+"I don't even understand what I have done or left undone to distress
+you like this."
+
+He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense of the
+imperfections of their relations--a sense which made him desire her
+constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand, and which, when
+she was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and
+illusory, a promise that could not be embraced and held.
+
+"No!  I don't see clearly what you mean.  Is your mind turned
+towards the future?" he interpellated her with marked playfulness,
+because he was ashamed to let such a word pass his lips.  But all
+his cherished negations were falling off him one by one.
+
+"Because if it is so there is nothing easier than to dismiss it.  In
+our future, as in what people call the other life, there is nothing
+to be frightened of."
+
+She raised her eyes to him; and if nature had formed them to express
+anything else but blank candour he would have learned how terrified
+she was by his talk and the fact that her sinking heart loved him
+more desperately than ever.  He smiled at her.
+
+"Dismiss all thought of it," he insisted.  "Surely you don't suspect
+after what I have heard from you, that I am anxious to return to
+mankind.  I!  I! murder my poor Morrison!  It's possible that I may
+be really capable of that which they say I have done.  The point is
+that I haven't done it.  But it is an unpleasant subject to me.  I
+ought to be ashamed to confess it--but it is!  Let us forget it.
+There's that in you, Lena, which can console me for worse things,
+for uglier passages.  And if we forget, there are no voices here to
+remind us."
+
+She had raised her head before he paused.
+
+"Nothing can break in on us here," he went on and, as if there had
+been an appeal or a provocation in her upward glance, he bent down
+and took her under the arms, raising her straight out of the chair
+into a sudden and close embrace.  Her alacrity to respond, which
+made her seem as light as a feather, warmed his heart at that moment
+more than closer caresses had done before.  He had not expected that
+ready impulse towards himself which had been dormant in her passive
+attitude.  He had just felt the clasp of her arms round his neck,
+when, with a slight exclamation--"He's here!"--she disengaged
+herself and bolted, away into her room.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+
+
+Heyst was astounded.  Looking all round, as if to take the whole
+room to witness of this outrage, he became aware of Wang
+materialized in the doorway.  The intrusion was as surprising as
+anything could be, in view of the strict regularity with which Wang
+made himself visible.  Heyst was tempted to laugh at first.  This
+practical comment on his affirmation that nothing could break in on
+them relieved the strain of his feelings.  He was a little vexed,
+too.  The Chinaman preserved a profound silence.
+
+"What do you want?" asked Heyst sternly.
+
+"Boat out there," said the Chinaman.
+
+"Where?  What do you mean?  Boat adrift in the straits?"
+
+Some subtle change in Wang's bearing suggested his being out of
+breath; but he did not pant, and his voice was steady.
+
+"No--row."
+
+It was Heyst now who was startled and raised his voice.
+
+"Malay man, eh?"
+
+Wang made a slight negative movement with his head.
+
+"Do you hear, Lena?" Heyst called out.  "Wang says there is a boat
+in sight--somewhere near apparently.  Where's that boat Wang?"
+
+"Round the point," said Wang, leaping into Malay unexpectedly, and
+in a loud voice.  "White men three."
+
+"So close as that?" exclaimed Heyst, moving out on the veranda
+followed by Wang.  "White men?  Impossible!"
+
+Over the clearing the shadows were already lengthening.  The sun
+hung low; a ruddy glare lay on the burnt black patch in front of the
+bungalow, and slanted on the ground between the straight, tall,
+mast-like trees soaring a hundred feet or more without a branch.
+The growth of bushes cut off all view of the jetty from the veranda.
+Far away to the right Wang's hut, or rather its dark roof of mats,
+could be seen above the bamboo fence which insured the privacy of
+the Alfuro woman.  The Chinaman looked that way swiftly.  Heyst
+paused, and then stepped back a pace into the room.
+
+"White men, Lena, apparently.  What are you doing?"
+
+"I am just bathing my eyes a little," the girl's voice said from the
+inner room.
+
+"Oh, yes; all right!"
+
+"Do you want me?"
+
+"No.  You had better--I am going down to the jetty.  Yes, you had
+better stay in.  What an extraordinary thing!"
+
+It was so extraordinary that nobody could possibly appreciate how
+extraordinary it was but himself.  His mind was full of mere
+exclamations, while his feet were carrying him in the direction of
+the jetty.  He followed the line of the rails, escorted by Wang.
+
+"Where were you when you first saw the boat?" he asked over his
+shoulder.
+
+Wang explained in Malay that he had gone to the shore end of the
+wharf, to get a few lumps of coal from the big heap, when, happening
+to raise his eyes from the ground, he saw the boat--a white man
+boat, not a canoe.  He had good eyes.  He had seen the boat, with
+the men at the oars; and here Wang made a particular gesture over
+his eyes, as if his vision had received a blow.  He had turned at
+once and run to the house to report.
+
+"No mistake, eh?" said Heyst, moving on.  At the very outer edge of
+the belt he stopped short.  Wang halted behind him on the path, till
+the voice of Number One called him sharply forward into the open.
+He obeyed.
+
+"Where's that boat?" asked Heyst forcibly.  "I say--where is it?"
+
+Nothing whatever was to be seen between the point and the jetty.
+The stretch of Diamond Bay was like a piece of purple shadow,
+lustrous and empty, while beyond the land, the open sea lay blue and
+opaque under the sun.  Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till
+they met, far off, the dark cone of the volcano, with its faint
+plume of smoke broadening and vanishing everlastingly at the top,
+without altering its shape in the glowing transparency of the
+evening.
+
+"The fellow has been dreaming," he muttered to himself.
+
+He looked hard at the Chinaman.  Wang seemed turned into stone.
+Suddenly, as if he had received a shock, he started, flung his arm
+out with a pointing forefinger, and made guttural noises to the
+effect that there, there, there, he had seen a boat.
+
+It was very uncanny.  Heyst thought of some strange hallucination.
+Unlikely enough; but that a boat with three men in it should have
+sunk between the point and the jetty, suddenly, like a stone,
+without leaving as much on the surface as a floating oar, was still
+more unlikely.  The theory of a phantom boat would have been more
+credible than that.
+
+"Confound it!" he muttered to himself.
+
+He was unpleasantly affected by this mystery; but now a simple
+explanation occurred to him.  He stepped hastily out on the wharf.
+The boat, if it had existed and had retreated, could perhaps be seen
+from the far end of the long jetty.
+
+Nothing was to be seen.  Heyst let his eyes roam idly over the sea.
+He was so absorbed in his perplexity that a hollow sound, as of
+somebody tumbling about in a boat, with a clatter of oars and spars,
+failed to make him move for a moment.  When his mind seized its
+meaning, he had no difficulty in locating the sound.  It had come
+from below--under the jetty!
+
+He ran back for a dozen yards or so, and then looked over.  His
+sight plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the
+greater part of which was hidden from him by the planking of the
+jetty.  His eyes fell on the thin back of a man doubled up over the
+tiller in a queer, uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow.
+Another man, more directly below Heyst, sprawled on his back from
+gunwale to gunwale, half off the after thwart, his head lower than
+his feet.  This second man glared wildly upward, and struggled to
+raise himself, but to all appearance was much too drunk to succeed.
+The visible part of the boat contained also a flat, leather trunk,
+on which the first man's long legs were tucked up nervelessly.  A
+large earthenware jug, with its wide mouth uncorked, rolled out on
+the bottom-boards from under the sprawling man.
+
+Heyst had never been so much astonished in his life.  He stared
+dumbly at the strange boat's crew.  From the first he was positive
+that these men were not sailors.  They wore the white drill-suit of
+tropical civilization; but their apparition in a boat Heyst could
+not connect with anything plausible.  The civilization of the
+tropics could have had nothing to do with it.  It was more like
+those myths, current in Polynesia, of amazing strangers, who arrive
+at an island, gods or demons, bringing good or evil to the innocence
+of the inhabitants--gifts of unknown things, words never heard
+before.
+
+Heyst noticed a cork helmet floating alongside the boat, evidently
+fallen from the head of the man doubled over the tiller, who
+displayed a dark, bony poll.  An oar, too, had been knocked
+overboard, probably by the sprawling man, who was still struggling,
+between the thwarts.  By this time Heyst regarded the visitation no
+longer with surprise, but with the sustained attention demanded by a
+difficult problem.  With one foot poised on the string-piece, and
+leaning on his raised knee, he was taking in everything.  The
+sprawling man rolled off the thwart, collapsed, and, most
+unexpectedly, got on his feet.  He swayed dizzily, spreading his
+arms out and uttered faintly a hoarse, dreamy "Hallo!"  His upturned
+face was swollen, red, peeling all over the nose and cheeks.  His
+stare was irrational.  Heyst perceived stains of dried blood all
+over the front of his dirty white coat, and also on one sleeve.
+
+"What's the matter?  Are you wounded?"
+
+The other glanced down, reeled--one of his feet was inside a large
+pith hat--and, recovering himself, let out a dismal, grating sound
+in the manner of a grim laugh.
+
+"Blood--not mine.  Thirst's the matter.  Exhausted's the matter.
+Done up.  Drink, man!  Give us water!"
+
+Thirst was in the very tone of his words, alternating a broken croak
+and a faint, throaty rustle which just reached Heyst's ears.  The
+man in the boat raised his hands to be helped up on the jetty,
+whispering:
+
+"I tried.  I am too weak.  I tumbled down."
+
+Wang was coming along the jetty slowly, with intent, straining eyes.
+
+"Run back and bring a crowbar here.  There's one lying by the coal-
+heap," Heyst shouted to him.
+
+The man standing in the boat sat down on the thwart behind him.  A
+horrible coughing laugh came through his swollen lips.
+
+"Crowbar?  What's that for?" he mumbled, and his head dropped on his
+chest mournfully.
+
+Meantime, Heyst, as if he had forgotten the boat, started kicking
+hard at a large brass tap projecting above the planks.  To
+accommodate ships that came for coal and happened to need water as
+well, a stream had been tapped in the interior and an iron pipe led
+along the jetty.  It terminated with a curved end almost exactly
+where the strangers' boat had been driven between the piles; but the
+tap was set fast.
+
+"Hurry up!" Heyst yelled to the Chinaman, who was running with the
+crowbar in his hand.
+
+Heyst snatched it from him and, obtaining a leverage against the
+string-piece, wrung the stiff tap round with a mighty jerk.  "I hope
+that pipe hasn't got choked!" he muttered to himself anxiously.
+
+It hadn't; but it did not yield a strong gush.  The sound of a thin
+stream, partly breaking on the gunwale of the boat and partly
+splashing alongside, became at once audible.  It was greeted by a
+cry of inarticulate and savage joy.  Heyst knelt on the string-piece
+and peered down.  The man who had spoken was already holding his
+open mouth under the bright trickle.  Water ran over his eyelids and
+over his nose, gurgled down his throat, flowed over his chin.  Then
+some obstruction in the pipe gave way, and a sudden thick jet broke
+on his face.  In a moment his shoulders were soaked, the front of
+his coat inundated; he streamed and dripped; water ran into his
+pockets, down his legs, into his shoes; but he had clutched the end
+of the pipe, and, hanging on with both hands, swallowed, spluttered,
+choked, snorted with the noises of a swimmer.  Suddenly a curious
+dull roar reached Heyst's ears.  Something hairy and black flew from
+under the jetty.  A dishevelled head, coming on like a cannonball,
+took the man at the pipe in flank, with enough force to tear his
+grip loose and fling him headlong into the stern-sheets.  He fell
+upon the folded legs of the man at the tiller, who, roused by the
+commotion in the boat, was sitting up, silent, rigid, and very much
+like a corpse.  His eyes were but two black patches, and his teeth
+glistened with a death's head grin between his retracted lips, no
+thicker than blackish parchment glued over the gums.
+
+From him Heyst's eyes wandered to the creature who had replaced the
+first man at the end of the water-pipe.  Enormous brown paws
+clutched it savagely; the wild, big head hung back, and in a face
+covered with a wet mass of hair there gaped crookedly a wide mouth
+full of fangs.  The water filled it, welled up in hoarse coughs, ran
+down on each side of the jaws and down the hairy throat, soaked the
+black pelt of the enormous chest, naked under a torn check shirt,
+heaving convulsively with a play of massive muscles carved in red
+mahogany.
+
+As soon as the first man had recovered the breath knocked out of him
+by the irresistible charge, a scream of mad cursing issued from the
+stern-sheets.  With a rigid, angular crooking of the elbow, the man
+at the tiller put his hand back to his hip.
+
+"Don't shoot him, sir!" yelled the first man.  "Wait!  Let me have
+that tiller.  I will teach him to shove himself in front of a
+caballero!"
+
+Martin Ricardo flourished the heavy piece of wood, leaped forward
+with astonishing vigour, and brought it down on Pedro's head with a
+crash that resounded all over the quiet sweep of Black Diamond Bay.
+A crimson patch appeared on the matted hair, red veins appeared in
+the water flowing all over his face, and it dripped in rosy drops
+off his head.  But the man hung on.  Not till a second furious blow
+descended did the hairy paws let go their grip and the squirming
+body sink limply.  Before it could touch the bottom-boards, a
+tremendous kick in the ribs from Ricardo's foot shifted it forward
+out of sight, whence came the noise of a heavy thud, a clatter of
+spars, and a pitiful grunt.  Ricardo stooped to look under the
+jetty.
+
+"Aha, dog!  This will teach you to keep back where you belong, you
+murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you!  You infidel, you
+robber of churches!  Next time I will rip you open from neck to
+heel, you carrion-cater!  Esclavo!"
+
+He backed a little and straightened himself up.
+
+"I don't mean it really," he remarked to Heyst, whose steady eyes
+met his from above.  He ran aft briskly.
+
+"Come along, sir.  It's your turn.  I oughtn't to have drunk first.
+'S truth, I forgot myself!  A gentleman like you will overlook that,
+I know."  As he made these apologies, Ricardo extended his hand.
+"Let me steady you, sir."
+
+Slowly Mr. Jones unfolded himself in all his slenderness, rocked,
+staggered, and caught Ricardo's shoulder.  His henchman assisted him
+to the pipe, which went on gushing a clear stream of water,
+sparkling exceedingly against the black piles and the gloom under
+the jetty.
+
+"Catch hold, sir," Ricardo advised solicitously.  "All right?"
+
+He stepped back, and, while Mr. Jones revelled in the abundance of
+water, he addressed himself to Heyst with a sort of justificatory
+speech, the tone of which, reflecting his feelings, partook of
+purring and spitting.  They had been thirty hours tugging at the
+oars, he explained, and they had been more than forty hours without
+water, except that the night before they had licked the dew off the
+gunwales.
+
+Ricardo did not explain to Heyst how it happened.  At that precise
+moment he had no explanation ready for the man on the wharf, who, he
+guessed, must be wondering much more at the presence of his visitors
+than at their plight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+
+
+The explanation lay in the two simple facts that the light winds and
+strong currents of the Java Sea had drifted the boat about until
+they partly lost their bearings; and that by some extra-ordinary
+mistake one of the two jars put into the boat by Schomberg's man
+contained salt water.  Ricardo tried to put some pathos into his
+tones.  Pulling for thirty hours with eighteen-foot oars!  And the
+sun!  Ricardo relieved his feelings by cursing the sun.  They had
+felt their hearts and lungs shrivel within them.  And then, as if
+all that hadn't been trouble enough, he complained bitterly, he had
+had to waste his fainting strength in beating their servant about
+the head with a stretcher.  The fool had wanted to drink sea water,
+and wouldn't listen to reason.  There was no stopping him otherwise.
+It was better to beat him into insensibility than to have him go
+crazy in the boat, and to be obliged to shoot him.  The preventive,
+administered with enough force to brain an elephant, boasted
+Ricardo, had to be applied on two occasions--the second time all but
+in sight of the jetty.
+
+"You have seen the beauty," Ricardo went on expansively, hiding his
+lack of some sort of probable story under this loquacity.  "I had to
+hammer him away from the spout.  Opened afresh all the old broken
+spots on his head.  You saw how hard I had to hit.  He has no
+restraint, no restraint at all.  If it wasn't that he can be made
+useful in one way or another, I would just as soon have let the
+governor shoot him."
+
+He smiled up at Heyst in his peculiar lip-retracting manner, and
+added by way of afterthought:
+
+"That's what will happen to him in the end, if he doesn't learn to
+restrain himself.  But I've taught him to mind his manners for a
+while, anyhow!"
+
+And again he addressed his quick grin up to the man on the wharf.
+His round eyes had never left Heyst's face ever since he began to
+deliver his account of the voyage.
+
+"So that's how he looks!" Ricardo was saying to himself.
+
+He had not expected Heyst to be like this.  He had formed for
+himself a conception containing the helpful suggestion of a
+vulnerable point.  These solitary men were often tipplers.  But no!-
+-this was not a drinking man's face; nor could he detect the
+weakness of alarm, or even the weakness of surprise, on these
+features, in those steady eyes.
+
+"We were too far gone to climb out," Ricardo went on.  "I heard you
+walking along though.  I thought I shouted; I tried to.  You didn't
+hear me shout?"
+
+Heyst made an almost imperceptible negative sign, which the greedy
+eyes of Ricardo--greedy for all signs--did not miss.
+
+"Throat too parched.  We didn't even care to whisper to each other
+lately.  Thirst chokes one.  We might have died there under this
+wharf before you found us."
+
+"I couldn't think where you had gone to."  Heyst was heard at last,
+addressing directly the newcomers from the sea.  "You were seen as
+soon as you cleared that point."
+
+"We were seen, eh?" grunted Mr. Ricardo.  "We pulled like machines -
+-daren't stop.  The governor sat at the tiller, but he couldn't
+speak to us.  She drove in between the piles till she hit something,
+and we all tumbled off the thwarts as if we had been drunk.  Drunk--
+ha, ha!  Too dry, by George!  We fetched in here with the very last
+of our strength, and no mistake.  Another mile would have done for
+us.  When I heard your footsteps, above, I tried to get up, and I
+fell down."
+
+"That was the first sound I heard," said Heyst.
+
+Mr Jones, the front of his soiled white tunic soaked and plastered
+against his breast-bone, staggered away from the water-pipe.
+Steadying himself on Ricardo's shoulder, he drew a long breath,
+raised his dripping head, and produced a smile of ghastly
+amiability, which was lost upon the thoughtful Heyst.  Behind his
+back the sun, touching the water, was like a disc of iron cooled to
+a dull red glow, ready to start rolling round the circular steel
+plate of the sea, which, under the darkening sky, looked more solid
+than the high ridge of Samburan; more solid than the point, whose
+long outlined slope melted into its own unfathomable shadow blurring
+the dim sheen on the bay.  The forceful stream from the pipe broke
+like shattered glass on the boat's gunwale.  Its loud, fitful, and
+persistent splashing revealed the depths of the world's silence.
+
+"Great notion, to lead the water out here," pronounced Ricardo
+appreciatively.
+
+Water was life.  He felt now as if he could run a mile, scale a ten-
+foot wall, sing a song.  Only a few minutes ago he was next door to
+a corpse, done up, unable to stand, to lift a hand; unable to groan.
+A drop of water had done that miracle.
+
+"Didn't you feel life itself running and soaking into you, sir?" he
+asked his principal, with deferential but forced vivacity.
+
+Without a word, Mr. Jones stepped off the thwart and sat down in the
+stern-sheets.
+
+"Isn't that man of yours bleeding to death in the bows under there?"
+inquired Heyst.
+
+Ricardo ceased his ecstasies over the life-giving water and answered
+in a tone of innocence:
+
+"He?  You may call him a man, but his hide is a jolly sight tougher
+than the toughest alligator he ever skinned in the good old days.
+You don't know how much he can stand:  I do.  We have tried him a
+long time ago.  Ola, there!  Pedro!  Pedro!" he yelled, with a force
+of lung testifying to the regenerative virtues of water.
+
+A weak "Senor?" came from under the wharf.
+
+"What did I tell you?" said Ricardo triumphantly.  "Nothing can hurt
+him.  He's all right.  But, I say, the boat's getting swamped.
+Can't you turn this water off before you sink her under us?  She's
+half full already."
+
+At a sign from Heyst, Wang hammered at the brass tap on the wharf,
+then stood behind Number One, crowbar in hand, motionless as before.
+Ricardo was perhaps not so certain of Pedro's toughness as he
+affirmed; for he stooped, peering under the wharf, then moved
+forward out of sight.  The gush of water ceasing suddenly, made a
+silence which became complete when the after-trickle stopped.  Afar,
+the sun was reduced to a red spark, glowing very low in the
+breathless immensity of twilight.  Purple gleams lingered on the
+water all round the boat.  The spectral figure in the stern-sheets
+spoke in a languid tone:
+
+"That--er--companion--er--secretary of mine is a queer chap.  I am
+afraid we aren't presenting ourselves in a very favourable light."
+
+Heyst listened.  It was the conventional voice of an educated man,
+only strangely lifeless.  But more strange yet was this concern for
+appearances, expressed, he did not know, whether in jest or in
+earnest.  Earnestness was hardly to be supposed under the
+circumstances, and no one had ever jested in such dead tones.  It
+was something which could not be answered, and Heyst said nothing.
+The other went on:
+
+"Travelling as I do, I find a man of his sort extremely useful.  He
+has his little weaknesses, no doubt."
+
+"Indeed!" Heyst was provoked into speaking.  "Weakness of the arm is
+not one of them; neither is an exaggerated humanity, as far as I can
+judge."
+
+"Defects of temper," explained Mr. Jones from the stern-sheets.
+
+The subject of this dialogue, coming out just then from under the
+wharf into the visible part of the boat, made himself heard in his
+own defence, in a voice full of life, and with nothing languid in
+his manner on the contrary, it was brisk, almost jocose.  He begged
+pardon for contradicting.  He was never out of temper with "our
+Pedro."  The fellow was a Dago of immense strength and of no sense
+whatever.  This combination made him dangerous, and he had to be
+treated accordingly, in a manner which he could understand.
+Reasoning was beyond him.
+
+"And so"--Ricardo addressed Heyst with animation--"you mustn't be
+surprised if--"
+
+"I assure you," Heyst interrupted, "that my wonder at your arrival
+in your boat here is so great that it leaves no room for minor
+astonishments.  But hadn't you better land?"
+
+"That's the talk, sir!"  Ricardo began to bustle about the boat,
+talking all the time.  Finding himself unable to "size up" this man,
+he was inclined to credit him with extraordinary powers of
+penetration, which, it seemed to him, would be favoured by silence.
+Also, he feared some pointblank question.  He had no ready-made
+story to tell.  He and his patron had put off considering that
+rather important detail too long.  For the last two days, the
+horrors of thirst, coming on them unexpectedly, had prevented
+consultation.  They had had to pull for dear life.  But the man on
+the wharf, were he in league with the devil himself, would pay for
+all their sufferings, thought Ricardo with an unholy joy.
+
+Meantime, splashing in the water which covered the bottom-boards,
+Ricardo congratulated himself aloud on the luggage being out of the
+way of the wet.  He had piled it up forward.  He had roughly tied up
+Pedro's head.  Pedro had nothing to grumble about.  On the contrary,
+he ought to be mighty thankful to him, Ricardo, for being alive at
+all.
+
+"Well, now, let me give you a leg up, sir," he said cheerily to his
+motionless principal in the stern-sheets.  "All our troubles are
+over--for a time, anyhow.  Ain't it luck to find a white man on this
+island?  I would have just as soon expected to meet an angel from
+heaven--eh, Mr. Jones?  Now then--ready, sir? one, two, three, up
+you go!"
+
+Helped from below by Ricardo, and from above by the man more
+unexpected than an angel, Mr. Jones scrambled up and stood on the
+wharf by the side of Heyst.  He swayed like a reed.  The night
+descending on Samburan turned into dense shadow the point of land
+and the wharf itself, and gave a dark solidity to the unshimmering
+water extending to the last faint trace of light away to the west.
+Heyst stared at the guests whom the renounced world had sent him
+thus at the end of the day.  The only other vestige of light left on
+earth lurked in the hollows of the thin man's eyes.  They gleamed,
+mobile and languidly evasive.  The eyelids fluttered.
+
+"You are feeling weak," said Heyst.
+
+"For the moment, a little," confessed the other.
+
+With loud panting, Ricardo scrambled on his hands and knees upon the
+wharf, energetic and unaided.  He rose up at Heyst's elbow and
+stamped his foot on the planks, with a sharp, provocative, double
+beat, such as is heard sometimes in fencing-schools before the
+adversaries engage their foils.  Not that the renegade seaman
+Ricardo knew anything of fencing.  What he called "shooting-irons,"
+were his weapons, or the still less aristocratic knife, such as was
+even then ingeniously strapped to his leg.  He thought of it, at
+that moment.  A swift stooping motion, then, on the recovery, a
+ripping blow, a shove off the wharf, and no noise except a splash in
+the water that would scarcely disturb the silence.  Heyst would have
+no time for a cry.  It would be quick and neat, and immensely in
+accord with Ricardo's humour.  But he repressed this gust of
+savagery.  The job was not such a simple one.  This piece had to be
+played to another tune, and in much slower time.  He returned to his
+note of talkative simplicity.
+
+"Ay; and I too don't feel as strong as I thought I was when the
+first drink set me up.  Great wonder-worker water is!  And to get it
+right here on the spot!  It was heaven--hey, sir?"
+
+Mr Jones, being directly addressed, took up his part in the
+concerted piece:
+
+"Really, when I saw a wharf on what might have been an uninhabited
+island, I couldn't believe my eyes.  I doubted its existence.  I
+thought it was a delusion till the boat actually drove between the
+piles, as you see her lying now."
+
+While he was speaking faintly, in a voice which did not seem to
+belong to the earth, his henchman, in extremely loud and terrestrial
+accents, was fussing about their belongings in the boat, addressing
+himself to Pedro:
+
+"Come, now--pass up the dunnage there!  Move, yourself, hombre, or
+I'll have to get down again and give you a tap on those bandages of
+yours, you growling bear, you!"
+
+"Ah!  You didn't believe in the reality of the wharf?" Heyst was
+saying to Mr. Jones.
+
+"You ought to kiss my hands!"
+
+Ricardo caught hold of an ancient Gladstone bag and swung it on the
+wharf with a thump.
+
+"Yes!  You ought to burn a candle before me as they do before the
+saints in your country.  No saint has ever done so much for you as I
+have, you ungrateful vagabond.  Now then!  Up you get!"
+
+Helped by the talkative Ricardo, Pedro scrambled up on the wharf,
+where he remained for some time on all fours, swinging to and fro
+his shaggy head tied up in white rags.  Then he got up clumsily,
+like a bulky animal in the dusk, balancing itself on its hind legs.
+
+Mr Jones began to explain languidly to Heyst that they were in a
+pretty bad state that morning, when they caught sight of the smoke
+of the volcano.  It nerved them to make an effort for their lives.
+Soon afterwards they made out the island.
+
+"I had just wits enough left in my baked brain to alter the
+direction of the boat," the ghostly voice went on.  "As to finding
+assistance, a wharf, a white man--nobody would have dreamed of it.
+Simply preposterous!"
+
+"That's what I thought when my Chinaman came and told me he had seen
+a boat with white men pulling up," said Heyst.
+
+"Most extraordinary luck," interjected Ricardo, standing by
+anxiously attentive to every word.  "Seems a dream," he added.  "A
+lovely dream!"
+
+A silence fell on that group of three, as if everyone had become
+afraid to speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis.  Pedro
+on one side of them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful
+spectators.  A few stars had come out pursuing the ebbing twilight.
+A light draught of air tepid enough in the thickening twilight after
+the scorching day, struck a chill into Mr. Jones in his soaked
+clothes.
+
+"I may infer, then, that there is a settlement of white people
+here?" he murmured, shivering visibly.
+
+Heyst roused himself.
+
+"Oh, abandoned, abandoned.  I am alone here--practically alone; but
+several empty houses are still standing.  No lack of accommodation.
+We may just as well--here, Wang, go back to the shore and run the
+trolley out here."
+
+The last words having been spoken in Malay, he explained courteously
+that he had given directions for the transport of the luggage.  Wang
+had melted into the night--in his soundless manner.
+
+"My word!  Rails laid down and all," exclaimed Ricardo softly, in a
+tone of admiration.  "Well, I never!"
+
+"We were working a coal-mine here," said the late manager of the
+Tropical Belt Coal Company.  "These are only the ghosts of things
+that have been."
+
+Mr Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint
+puff of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays
+on the dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the
+grave of the sun.
+
+"We might be moving on," proposed Heyst.  "My Chinaman and that--ah-
+-ungrateful servant of yours, with the broken head, can load the
+things and come along after us."
+
+The suggestion was accepted without words.  Moving towards the
+shore, the three men met the trolley, a mere metallic rustle which
+whisked past them, the shadowy Wang running noiselessly behind.
+Only the sound of their footsteps accompanied them.  It was a long
+time since so many footsteps had rung together on that jetty.
+Before they stepped on to the path trodden through the grass, Heyst
+said:
+
+"I am prevented from offering you a share of my own quarters."  The
+distant courtliness of this beginning arrested the other two
+suddenly, as if amazed by some manifest incongruity.  "I should
+regret it more," he went on, "if I were not in a position to give
+you the choice of those empty bungalows for a temporary home."
+
+He turned round and plunged into the narrow track, the two others
+following in single file.
+
+"Queer start!" Ricardo took the opportunity for whispering, as he
+fell behind Mr. Jones, who swayed in the gloom, enclosed by the
+stalks of tropical grass, almost as slender as a stalk of grass
+himself.
+
+In this order they emerged into the open space kept clear of
+vegetation by Wang's judicious system of periodic firing.  The
+shapes of buildings, unlighted, high-roofed, looked mysteriously
+extensive and featureless against the increasing glitter of the
+stars.  Heyst was pleased at the absence of light in his bungalow.
+It looked as uninhabited as the others.  He continued to lead the
+way, inclining to the right.  His equable voice was heard:
+
+"This one would be the best.  It was our counting-house.  There is
+some furniture in it yet.  I am pretty certain that you'll find a
+couple of camp bedsteads in one of the rooms."
+
+The high-pitched roof of the bungalow towered up very close,
+eclipsing the sky.
+
+"Here we are.  Three steps.  As you see, there's a wide veranda.
+Sorry to keep you waiting for a moment; the door is locked, I
+think."
+
+He was heard trying it.  Then he leaned against the rail, saying:
+
+"Wang will get the keys."
+
+The others waited, two vague shapes nearly mingled together in the
+darkness of the veranda, from which issued a sudden chattering of
+Mr. Jones's teeth, directly suppressed, and a slight shuffle of
+Ricardo's feet.  Their guide and host, his back against the rail,
+seemed to have forgotten their existence.  Suddenly he moved, and
+murmured:
+
+"Ah, here's the trolley."
+
+Then he raised his voice in Malay, and was answered, "Ya tuan," from
+an indistinct group that could be made out in the direction of the
+track.
+
+"I have sent Wang for the key and a light," he said, in a voice that
+came out without any particular direction--a peculiarity which
+disconcerted Ricardo.
+
+Wang did not tarry long on his mission.  Very soon from the distant
+recesses of obscurity appeared the swinging lantern he carried.  It
+cast a fugitive ray on the arrested trolley with the uncouth figure
+of the wild Pedro drooping over the load; then it moved towards the
+bungalow and ascended the stairs.  After working at the stiff lock,
+Wang applied his shoulder to the door.  It came open with explosive
+suddenness, as if in a passion at being thus disturbed after two
+years' repose.  From the dark slope of a tall stand-up writing-desk
+a forgotten, solitary sheet of paper flew up and settled gracefully
+on the floor.
+
+Wang and Pedro came and went through the offended door, bringing the
+things off the trolley, one flitting swiftly in and out, the other
+staggering heavily.  Later, directed by a few quiet words from
+Number One, Wang made several journeys with the lantern to the
+store-rooms, bringing in blankets, provisions in tins, coffee,
+sugar, and a packet of candles.  He lighted one, and stuck it on the
+ledge of the stand-up desk.  Meantime Pedro, being introduced to
+some kindling-wood and a bundle of dry sticks, had busied himself
+outside in lighting a fire, on which he placed a ready-filled kettle
+handed to him by Wang impassively, at arm's length, as if across a
+chasm.  Having received the thanks of his guests, Heyst wished them
+goodnight and withdrew, leaving them to their repose.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+
+
+Heyst walked away slowly.  There was still no light in his bungalow,
+and he thought that perhaps it was just as well.  By this time he
+was much less perturbed.  Wang had preceded him with the lantern, as
+if in a hurry to get away from the two white men and their hairy
+attendant.  The light was not dancing along any more; it was
+standing perfectly still by the steps of the veranda.
+
+Heyst, glancing back casually, saw behind him still another light--
+the light of the strangers' open fire.  A black, uncouth form,
+stooping over it monstrously, staggered away into the outlying
+shadows.  The kettle had boiled, probably.
+
+With that weird vision of something questionably human impressed
+upon his senses, Heyst moved on a pace or two.  What could the
+people be who had such a creature for their familiar attendant?  He
+stopped.  The vague apprehension, of a distant future, in which he
+saw Lena unavoidably separated from him by profound and subtle
+differences; the sceptical carelessness which had accompanied every
+one of his attempts at action, like a secret reserve of his soul,
+fell away from him.  He no longer belonged to himself.  There was a
+call far more imperious and august.  He came up to the bungalow, and
+at the very limit of the lantern's light, on the top step, he saw
+her feet and the bottom part of her dress.  The rest of her person
+was suggested dimly as high as her waist.  She sat on a chair, and
+the gloom of the low eaves descended upon her head and shoulders.
+She didn't stir.
+
+"You haven't gone to sleep here?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, no!  I was waiting for you--in the dark."
+
+Heyst, on the top step, leaned against a wooden pillar, after moving
+the lantern to one side.
+
+"I have been thinking that it is just as well you had no light.  But
+wasn't it dull for you to sit in the dark?"
+
+"I don't need a light to think of you."  Her charming voice gave a
+value to this banal answer, which had also the merit of truth.
+Heyst laughed a little, and said that he had had a curios
+experience.  She made no remark.  He tried to figure to himself the
+outlines of her easy pose.  A spot of dim light here and there
+hinted at the unfailing grace of attitude which was one of her
+natural possessions.
+
+She had thought of him, but not in connection with the strangers.
+She had admired him from the first; she had been attracted by his
+warm voice, his gentle eye, but she had felt him too wonderfully
+difficult to know.  He had given to life a savour, a movement, a
+promise mingled with menaces, which she had not suspected were to be
+found in it--or, at any rate, not by a girl wedded to misery as she
+was.  She said to herself that she must not be irritated because he
+seemed too self-contained, and as if shut up in a world of his own.
+When he took her in his arms, she felt that his embrace had a great
+and compelling force, that he was moved deeply, and that perhaps he
+would not get tired of her so very soon.  She thought that he had
+opened to her the feelings of delicate joy, that the very uneasiness
+he caused her was delicious in its sadness, and that she would try
+to hold him as long as she could--till her fainting arms, her
+sinking soul, could cling to him no more.
+
+"Wang's not here, of course?" Heyst said suddenly.  She answered as
+if in her sleep.
+
+"He put this light down here without stopping, and ran."
+
+"Ran, did he?  H'm!  Well, it's considerably later than his usual
+time to go home to his Alfuro wife; but to be seen running is a sort
+of degradation for Wang, who has mastered the art of vanishing.  Do
+you think he was startled out of his perfection by something?"
+
+"Why should he be startled?"
+
+Her voice remained dreamy, a little uncertain.
+
+"I have been startled," Heyst said.
+
+She was not listening to him.  The lantern at their feet threw the
+shadows of her face upward.  Her eyes glistened, as if frightened
+and attentive, above a lighted chin and a very white throat.
+
+"Upon my word," mused Heyst, "now that I don't see them, I can
+hardly believe that those fellows exist!"
+
+"And what about me?" she asked, so swiftly that he made a movement
+like somebody pounced upon from an ambush.  "When you don't see me,
+do you believe that I exist?"
+
+"Exist?  Most charmingly!  My dear Lena, you don't know your own
+advantages.  Why, your voice alone would be enough to make you
+unforgettable!"
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean forgetting in that way.  I dare say if I were to
+die you would remember me right enough.  And what good would that be
+to anybody?  It's while I am alive that I want--"
+
+Heyst stood by her chair, a stalwart figure imperfectly lighted.
+The broad shoulders, the martial face that was like a disguise of
+his disarmed soul, were lost in the gloom above the plane of light
+in which his feet were planted.  He suffered from a trouble with
+which she had nothing to do.  She had no general conception of the
+conditions of the existence he had offered to her.  Drawn into its
+peculiar stagnation she remained unrelated to it because of her
+ignorance.
+
+For instance, she could never perceive the prodigious improbability
+of the arrival of that boat.  She did not seem to be thinking of it.
+Perhaps she had already forgotten the fact herself.  And Heyst
+resolved suddenly to say nothing more of it.  It was not that he
+shrank from alarming her.  Not feeling anything definite himself he
+could not imagine a precise effect being produced on her by any
+amount of explanation.  There is a quality in events which is
+apprehended differently by different minds or even by the same mind
+at different times.  Any man living at all consciously knows that
+embarrassing truth.  Heyst was aware that this visit could bode
+nothing pleasant.  In his present soured temper towards all mankind
+he looked upon it as a visitation of a particularly offensive kind.
+
+He glanced along the veranda in the direction of the other bungalow.
+The fire of sticks in front of it had gone out.  No faint glow of
+embers, not the slightest thread of light in that direction, hinted
+at the presence of strangers.  The darker shapes in the obscurity,
+the dead silence, betrayed nothing of that strange intrusion.  The
+peace of Samburan asserted itself as on any other night.  Everything
+was as before, except--Heyst became aware of it suddenly--that for a
+whole minute, perhaps, with his hand on the back of the girl's chair
+and within a foot of her person, he had lost the sense of her
+existence, for the first time since he had brought her over to share
+this invincible, this undefiled peace.  He picked up the lantern,
+and the act made a silent stir all along the veranda.  A spoke of
+shadow swung swiftly across her face, and the strong light rested on
+the immobility of her features, as of a woman looking at a vision.
+Her eyes were still, her lips serious.  Her dress, open at the neck,
+stirred slightly to her even breathing.
+
+"We had better go in, Lena," suggested Heyst, very low, as if
+breaking a spell cautiously.
+
+She rose without a word.  Heyst followed her indoors.  As they
+passed through the living-room, he left the lantern burning on the
+centre table.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+
+
+That night the girl woke up, for the first time in her new
+experience, with the sensation of having been abandoned to her own
+devices.  She woke up from a painful dream of separation brought
+about in a way which she could not understand, and missed the relief
+of the waking instant.  The desolate feeling of being alone
+persisted.  She was really alone.  A night-light made it plain
+enough, in the dim, mysterious manner of a dream; but this was
+reality.  It startled her exceedingly.
+
+In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway, and
+raised it with a steady hand.  The conditions of their life in
+Samburan would have made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her
+character.  This was not a movement of curiosity, but of downright
+alarm--the continued distress and fear of the dream.  The night
+could not have been very far advanced.  The light of the lantern was
+burning strongly, striping the floor and walls of the room with
+thick black bands.  She hardly knew whether she expected to see
+Heyst or not; but she saw him at once, standing by the table in his
+sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway.  She stepped in noiselessly
+with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall behind her.  Something
+characteristic in Heyst's attitude made her say, almost in a
+whisper:
+
+"You are looking for something."
+
+He could not have heard her before; but he didn't start at the
+unexpected whisper.  He only pushed the drawer of the table in and,
+without even looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting her
+presence as if he had been aware of all her movements:
+
+"I say, are you certain that Wang didn't go through this room this
+evening?"
+
+"Wang?  When?"
+
+"After leaving the lantern, I mean."
+
+"Oh, no.  He ran on.  I watched him."
+
+"Or before, perhaps--while I was with these boat people?  Do you
+know?  Can you tell?"
+
+"I hardly think so.  I came out as the sun went down, and sat
+outside till you came back to me."
+
+"He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda."
+
+"I heard nothing in here," she said.  "What is the matter?"
+
+"Naturally you wouldn't hear.  He can be as quiet as a shadow, when
+he likes.  I believe he could steal the pillows from under our
+heads.  He might have been here ten minutes ago."
+
+"What woke you up?  Was it a noise?"
+
+"Can't say that.  Generally one can't tell, but is it likely, Lena?
+You are, I believe, the lighter sleeper of us two.  A noise loud
+enough to wake me up would have awakened you, too.  I tried to be as
+quiet as I could.  What roused you?"
+
+"I don't know--a dream, perhaps.  I woke up crying."
+
+"What was the dream?"
+
+Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her
+direction, his round, uncovered head set on a fighter's muscular
+neck.  She left his question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.
+
+"What is it you have missed?" she asked in her turn, very grave.
+
+Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses
+for the night.  Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity
+of its width, its unshining whiteness.  It was a sculptural
+forehead.  He had a moment of acute appreciation intruding upon
+another order of thoughts.  It was as if there could be no end of
+his discoveries about that girl, at the most incongruous moments.
+
+She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong--one of Heyst's
+few purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made.  He had
+forgotten all about it till she came, and then had found it at the
+bottom of an old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days.
+She had quickly learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe
+twist, as Malay village girls do when going down to bathe in a
+river.  Her shoulders and arms were bare; one of her tresses,
+hanging forward, looked almost black against the white skin.  As she
+was taller than the average Malay woman, the sarong ended a good way
+above her ankles.  She stood poised firmly, half-way between the
+table and the curtained doorway, the insteps of her bare feet
+gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor.  The
+fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her
+arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something
+statuesque, the charm of art tense with life.  She was not very big-
+-Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little girl,"--
+but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform
+dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her
+form and in the proportions of her body which suggested a reduction
+from a heroic size.
+
+She moved forward a step.
+
+"What is it you have missed?" she asked again.
+
+Heyst turned his back altogether on the table.  The black spokes of
+darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in
+a path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them.  It was
+his turn to ignore a question.
+
+"You woke up in a fright, you say?" he said.
+
+She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman's
+face and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy
+disguise, but her expression was serious.
+
+"No," she replied.  "It was distress, rather.  You see, you weren't
+there, and I couldn't tell why you had gone away from me.  A nasty
+dream--the first I've had, too, since--"
+
+"You don't believe in dreams, do you?" asked Heyst.
+
+"I once knew a woman who did.  Leastwise, she used to tell people
+what dreams mean, for a shilling."
+
+"Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?" inquired Heyst
+jocularly.
+
+"She lived in Camberwell.  She was a nasty old thing!"
+
+Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
+
+"Dreams are madness, my dear.  It's things that happen in the waking
+world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the
+meaning of."
+
+"You have missed something out of this drawer," she said positively.
+
+"This or some other.  I have looked into every single one of them
+and come back to this again, as people do.  It's difficult to
+believe the evidence of my own senses; but it isn't there.  Now,
+Lena, are you sure that you didn't--"
+
+"I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me."
+
+"Lena!" he cried.
+
+He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he
+had not made.  It was what a servant might have said--an inferior
+open to suspicion--or, at any rate, a stranger.  He was angry at
+being so wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being
+instinctively aware of the place he had secretly given her in his
+thoughts.
+
+"After all," he said to himself, "we are strangers to each other."
+
+And then he felt sorry for her.  He spoke calmly:
+
+"I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that
+the Chinaman has been in this room tonight?"
+
+"You suspect him?" she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
+
+"There is no one else to suspect.  You may call it a certitude."
+
+"You don't want to tell me what it is?" she inquired, in the equable
+tone in which one takes a fact into account.
+
+Heyst only smiled faintly.
+
+"Nothing very precious, as far as value goes," he replied.
+
+"I thought it might have been money," she said.
+
+"Money!" exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether
+preposterous.  She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add:
+"Of course, there is some money in the house--there, in that
+writing-desk, the drawer on the left.  It's not locked.  You can
+pull it right out.  There is a recess, and the board at the back
+pivots:  a very simple hiding-place, when you know the way to it.  I
+discovered it by accident, and I keep our store of sovereigns in
+there.  The treasure, my dear, is not big enough to require a
+cavern."
+
+He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.
+
+"The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in
+that unlocked left drawer.  I have no doubt Wang knows what there is
+in it, but he isn't a thief, and that's why I--no, Lena, what I've
+missed is not gold or jewels; and that's what makes the fact
+interesting--which the theft of money cannot be."
+
+She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money.  A
+great curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from
+pressing him with questions.  She only gave him one of her deep-
+gleaming smiles.
+
+"It isn't me so it must be Wang.  You ought to make him give it back
+to you."
+
+Heyst said nothing to that naive and practical suggestion, for the
+object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.
+
+It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had
+never used in his life.  Ever since the London furniture had arrived
+in Samburan, it had been reposing in the drawer of the table.  The
+real dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be
+repelled by swords or bullets.  On the other hand neither his manner
+nor his appearance looked sufficiently inoffensive to expose him to
+light-minded aggression.
+
+He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer
+in the middle of the night.  He had started up suddenly--which was
+very unusual with him.  He had found himself sitting up and
+extremely wide awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his
+side, lying with her face away from him, a vague, characteristically
+feminine form in the dim light.  She was perfectly still.
+
+At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and
+the sides of the mosquito net were looped up.  Heyst swung his feet
+to the floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had
+become aware of his intention to get up.
+
+Why he did this he did not know.  He didn't wish to wake her up, and
+the slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very loud to him.
+He turned round apprehensively and waited for her to move, but she
+did not stir.  While he looked at her, he had a vision of himself
+lying there too, also fast asleep, and--it occurred to him for the
+first time in his life--very defenceless.  This quite novel
+impression of the dangers of slumber made him think suddenly of his
+revolver.  He left the bedroom with noiseless footsteps.  The
+lightness of the curtain he had to lift as he passed out, and the
+outer door, wide open on the blackness of the veranda--for the roof
+eaves came down low, shutting out the starlight--gave him a sense of
+having been dangerously exposed, he could not have said to what.  He
+pulled the drawer open.  Its emptiness cut his train of self-
+communion short.  He murmured to the assertive fact:
+
+"Impossible!  Somewhere else!"
+
+He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked
+whispers of memory were not encouraging.  Foraging in every
+receptacle and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly
+to the conclusion that it was not in that room.  Neither was it in
+the other.  The whole bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a
+profuse allowance of veranda all round.  Heyst stepped out on the
+veranda.
+
+"It's Wang, beyond a doubt," he thought, staring into the night.
+"He has got hold of it for some reason."
+
+There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from
+materializing suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at
+any moment, and toppling him over with a dead sure shot.  The danger
+was so irremediable that it was not worth worrying about, any more
+than the general precariousness of human life.  Heyst speculated on
+this added risk.  How long had he been at the mercy of a slender
+yellow finger on the trigger?  That is, if that was the fellow's
+reason for purloining the revolver.
+
+"Shoot and inherit," thought Heyst.  "Very simple."  Yet there was
+in his mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of
+vegetables in the light of a murderer.
+
+"No, it wasn't that.  For Wang could have done it any time this last
+twelve months or more--"
+
+Heyst's mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed
+himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at
+that period of his speculation his point of view changed.  It struck
+him with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been
+taken only late in the day, or on that very night.  Wang, of course.
+But why?  So there had been no danger in the past.  It was all
+ahead.
+
+"He has me at his mercy now," thought Heyst, without particular
+excitement.
+
+The sentiment he experienced was curiosity.  He forgot himself in
+it:  it was as if he were considering somebody else's strange
+predicament.  But even that sort of interest was dying out when,
+looking to his left, he saw the accustomed shapes of the other
+bungalows looming in the night, and remembered the arrival of the
+thirsty company in the boat.  Wang would hardly risk such a crime in
+the presence of other white men.  It was a peculiar instance of the
+"safety in numbers," principle, which somehow was not much to
+Heyst's taste.
+
+He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and
+unsatisfactory thought.  He had just made up his mind that he must
+breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind
+him.  She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to
+turn round at once under the impression that she might read his
+trouble in his face.  Yes, she had taken him by surprise, and for
+that reason the conversation which began was not exactly as he would
+have conducted it if he had been prepared for her pointblank
+question.  He ought to have said at once:  "I've missed nothing."
+It was a deplorable thing that he should have let it come so far as
+to have her ask what it was he missed.  He closed the conversation
+by saying lightly:
+
+"It's an object of very small value.  Don't worry about it--it isn't
+worth while.  The best you can do is to go and lie down again,
+Lena."
+
+Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked:  "And
+you?"
+
+"I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda.  I don't feel
+sleepy for the moment."
+
+"Well, don't be long."
+
+He made no answer.  She saw him standing there, very still, with a
+frown on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
+
+Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the
+veranda.  He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the
+stars how the night went on.  It was going very slowly.  Why it
+should have irked him he did not know, for he had nothing to expect
+from the dawn; but everything round him had become unreasonable,
+unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying him under an obligation, but
+giving him no line of action.  He felt contemptuously irritated with
+the situation.  The outer world had broken upon him; and he did not
+know what wrong he had done to bring this on himself, any more than
+he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible calumny about his
+treatment of poor Morrison.  For he could not forget this.  It had
+reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect
+confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.
+
+"And she only half disbelieves it," he thought, with hopeless
+humiliation.
+
+This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his
+strength from him, as a physical wound would have done.  He had no
+desire to do anything--neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter
+of the revolver nor to find out from the strangers who they were,
+and how their predicament had come about.  He flung his glowing
+cigar away into the night.  But Samburan was no longer a solitude
+wherein he could indulge in all his moods.  The fiery parabolic path
+the cast-out stump traced in the air was seen from another veranda
+at a distant of some twenty yards.  It was noted as a symptom of
+importance by an observer with his faculties greedy for signs, and
+in a state of alertness tense enough almost to hear the grass grow.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+
+
+The observer was Martin Ricardo.  To him life was not a matter of
+passive renunciation, but of a particularly active warfare.  He was
+not mistrustful of it, he was not disgusted with it, still less was
+he inclined to be suspicious of its disenchantments; but he was
+vividly aware that it held many possibilities of failure.  Though
+very far from being a pessimist, he was not a man of foolish
+illusions.  He did not like failure, not only because of its
+unpleasant and dangerous consequences, but also because of its
+damaging effect upon his own appreciation of Martin Ricardo.  And
+this was a special job, of his own contriving, and of considerable
+novelty.  It was not, so to speak, in his usual line of business--
+except, perhaps, from a moral standpoint, about which he was not
+likely to trouble his head.  For these reasons Martin Ricardo was
+unable to sleep.
+
+Mr Jones, after repeated shivering fits, and after drinking much hot
+tea, had apparently fallen into deep slumber.  He had very
+peremptorily discouraged attempts at conversation on the part of his
+faithful follower.  Ricardo listened to his regular breathing.  It
+was all very well for the governor.  He looked upon it as a sort of
+sport.  A gentleman naturally would.  But this ticklish and
+important job had to be pulled off at all costs, both for honour and
+for safety.  Ricardo rose quietly, and made his way on the veranda.
+He could not lie still.  He wanted to go out for air, and he had a
+feeling that by the force of his eagerness even the darkness and the
+silence could be made to yield something to his eyes and ears.
+
+He noted the stars, and stepped back again into the dense darkness.
+He resisted the growing impulse to go out and steal towards the
+other bungalow.  It would have been madness to start prowling in the
+dark on unknown ground.  And for what end?  Unless to relieve the
+oppression.  Immobility lay on his limbs like a leaden garment.  And
+yet he was unwilling to give up.  He persisted in his objectless
+vigil.  The man of the island was keeping quiet.
+
+It was at that moment that Ricardo's eyes caught the vanishing red
+trail of light made by the cigar--a startling revelation of the
+man's wakefulness.  He could not suppress a low "Hallo!" and began
+to sidle along towards the door, with his shoulders rubbing the
+wall.  For all he knew, the man might have been out in front by this
+time, observing the veranda.  As a matter of fact, after flinging
+away the cheroot, Heyst had gone indoors with the feeling of a man
+who gives up an unprofitable occupation.  But Ricardo fancied he
+could hear faint footfalls on the open ground, and dodged quickly
+into the room.  There he drew breath, and meditated for a while.
+His next step was to feel for the matches on the tall desk, and to
+light the candle.  He had to communicate to his governor views and
+reflections of such importance that it was absolutely necessary for
+him to watch their effect on the very countenance of the hearer.  At
+first he had thought that these matters could have waited till
+daylight; but Heyst's wakefulness, disclosed in that startling way,
+made him feel suddenly certain that there could be no sleep for him
+that night.
+
+He said as much to his governor.  When the little dagger-like flame
+had done its best to dispel the darkness, Mr. Jones was to be seen
+reposing on a camp bedstead, in a distant part of the room.  A
+railway rug concealed his spare form up to his very head, which
+rested on the other railway rug rolled up for a pillow.  Ricardo
+plumped himself down cross-legged on the floor, very close to the
+low bedstead; so that Mr. Jones--who perhaps had not been so very
+profoundly asleep--on opening his eyes found them conveniently
+levelled at the face of his secretary.
+
+"Eh?  What is it you say?  No sleep for you tonight?  But why can't
+you let ME sleep?  Confound your fussiness!"
+
+"Because that there fellow can't sleep--that's why.  Dash me if he
+hasn't been doing a think just now!  What business has he to think
+in the middle of the night?"
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"He was out, sir--up in the middle of the night.  My own eyes saw
+it."
+
+"But how do you know that he was up to think?" inquired Mr. Jones.
+"It might have been anything--toothache, for instance.  And you may
+have dreamed it for all I know.  Didn't you try to sleep?"
+
+"No, sir.  I didn't even try to go to sleep."
+
+Ricardo informed his patron of his vigil on the veranda, and of the
+revelation which put an end to it.  He concluded that a man up with
+a cigar in the middle of the night must be doing a think.
+
+Mr Jones raised himself on his elbow.  This sign of interest
+comforted his faithful henchman.
+
+"Seems to me it's time we did a little think ourselves," added
+Ricardo, with more assurance.  Long as they had been together the
+moods of his governor were still a source of anxiety to his simple
+soul.
+
+"You are always making a fuss," remarked Mr. Jones, in a tolerant
+tone.
+
+"Ay, but not for nothing, am I?  You can't say that, sir.  Mine may
+not be a gentleman's way of looking round a thing, but it isn't a
+fool's way, either.  You've admitted that much yourself at odd
+times."
+
+Ricardo was growing warmly argumentative.  Mr. Jones interrupted him
+without heat.
+
+"You haven't roused me to talk about yourself, I presume?"
+
+"No, sir."  Ricardo remained silent for a minute, with the tip of
+his tongue caught between his teeth.  "I don't think I could tell
+you anything about myself that you don't know," he continued.  There
+was a sort of amused satisfaction in his tone which changed
+completely as he went on.  "It's that man, over there, that's got to
+be talked over.  I don't like him."
+
+He, failed to observe the flicker of a ghastly smile on his
+governor's lips.
+
+"Don't you?" murmured Mr. Jones, whose face, as he reclined on his
+elbow, was on a level with the top of his follower's head.
+
+"No, sir," said Ricardo emphatically.  The candle from the other
+side of the room threw his monstrous black shadow on the wall.  "He-
+-I don't know how to say it--he isn't hearty-like."
+
+Mr Jones agreed languidly in his own manner:
+
+"He seems to be a very self-possessed man."
+
+"Ay, that's it.  Self--" Ricardo choked with indignation.  "I would
+soon let out some of his self-possession through a hole between his
+ribs, if this weren't a special job!"
+
+Mr Jones had been making his own reflections, for he asked:
+
+"Do you think he is suspicious?"
+
+"I don't see very well what he can be suspicious of," pondered
+Ricardo.  "Yet there he was doing a think.  And what could be the
+object of it?  What made him get out of his bed in the middle of the
+night.  'Tain't fleas, surely."
+
+"Bad conscience, perhaps," suggested Mr. Jones jocularly.
+
+His faithful secretary suffered from irritation, and did not see the
+joke.  In a fretful tone he declared that there was no such thing as
+conscience.  There was such a thing as funk; but there was nothing
+to make that fellow funky in any special way.  He admitted, however,
+that the man might have been uneasy at the arrival of strangers,
+because of all that plunder of his put away somewhere.
+
+Ricardo glanced here and there, as if he were afraid of being
+overheard by the heavy shadows cast by the dim light all over the
+room.  His patron, very quiet, spoke in a calm whisper:
+
+"And perhaps that hotel-keeper has been lying to you about him.  He
+may be a very poor devil indeed."
+
+Ricardo shook his head slightly.  The Schombergian theory of Heyst
+had become in him a profound conviction, which he had absorbed as
+naturally as a sponge takes up water.  His patron's doubts were a
+wanton denying of what was self-evident; but Ricardo's voice
+remained as before, a soft purring with a snarling undertone.
+
+"I am sup-prised at you, sir!  It's the very way them tame ones--the
+common 'yporcrits of the world--get on.  When it comes to plunder
+drifting under one's very nose, there's not one of them that would
+keep his hands off.  And I don't blame them.  It's the way they do
+it that sets my back up.  Just look at the story of how he got rid
+of that pal of his!  Send a man home to croak of a cold on the
+chest--that's one of your tame tricks.  And d'you mean to say, sir,
+that a man that's up to it wouldn't bag whatever he could lay his
+hands in his 'yporcritical way?  What was all that coal business?
+Tame citizen dodge; 'yporcrisy--nothing else.  No, no, sir!  The
+thing is to extract it from him as neatly as possible.  That's the
+job; and it isn't so simple as it looks.  I reckon you have looked
+at it all round, sir, before you took up the notion of this trip."
+
+"No."  Mr. Jones was hardly audible, staring far away from his
+couch.  "I didn't think about it much.  I was bored."
+
+"Ay, that you were--bad.  I was feeling pretty desperate that
+afternoon, when that bearded softy of a landlord got talking to me
+about this fellow here.  Quite accidentally, it was.  Well, sir,
+here we are after a mighty narrow squeak.  I feel all limp yet; but
+never mind--his swag will pay for the lot!"
+
+"He's all alone here," remarked Mr. Jones in a hollow murmur.
+
+"Ye-es, in a way.  Yes, alone enough.  Yes, you may say he is."
+
+"There's that Chinaman, though."
+
+"Ay, there's the Chink," assented Ricardo rather absentmindedly.
+
+He was debating in his mind the advisability of making a clean
+breast of his knowledge of the girl's existence.  Finally he
+concluded he wouldn't.  The enterprise was difficult enough without
+complicating it with an upset to the sensibilities of the gentleman
+with whom he had the honour of being associated.  Let the discovery
+come of itself, he thought, and then he could swear that he had
+known nothing of that offensive presence.
+
+He did not need to lie.  He had only to hold his tongue.
+
+"Yes," he muttered reflectively, "there's that Chink, certainly."
+
+At bottom, he felt a certain ambiguous respect for his governor's
+exaggerated dislike of women, as if that horror of feminine presence
+were a sort of depraved morality; but still morality, since he
+counted it as an advantage.  It prevented many undesirable
+complications.  He did not pretend to understand it.  He did not
+even try to investigate this idiosyncrasy of his chief.  All he knew
+was that he himself was differently inclined, and that it did not
+make him any happier or safer.  He did not know how he would have
+acted if he had been knocking about the world on his own.  Luckily
+he was a subordinate, not a wage-slave but a follower--which was a
+restraint.  Yes!  The other sort of disposition simplified matters
+in general; it wasn't to be gainsaid.  But it was clear that it
+could also complicate them--as in this most important and, in
+Ricardo's view, already sufficiently delicate case.  And the worst
+of it was that one could not tell exactly in what precise manner it
+would act.
+
+It was unnatural, he thought somewhat peevishly.  How was one to
+reckon up the unnatural?  There were no rules for that.  The
+faithful henchman of plain Mr. Jones, foreseeing many difficulties
+of a material order, decided to keep the girl out of the governor's
+knowledge, out of his sight, too, for as long a time as it could be
+managed.  That, alas, seemed to be at most a matter of a few hours;
+whereas Ricardo feared that to get the affair properly going would
+take some days.  Once well started, he was not afraid of his
+gentleman failing him.  As is often the case with lawless natures,
+Ricardo's faith in any given individual was of a simple,
+unquestioning character.  For man must have some support in life.
+
+Cross-legged, his head drooping a little and perfectly still, he
+might have been meditating in a bonze-like attitude upon the sacred
+syllable "Om."  It was a striking illustration of the untruth of
+appearances, for his contempt for the world was of a severely
+practical kind.  There was nothing oriental about Ricardo but the
+amazing quietness of his pose.  Mr. Jones was also very quiet.  He
+had let his head sink on the rolled-up rug, and lay stretched out on
+his side with his back to the light.  In that position the shadows
+gathered in the cavities of his eyes made them look perfectly empty.
+When he spoke, his ghostly voice had only to travel a few inches
+straight into Ricardo's left ear.
+
+"Why don't you say something, now that you've got me awake?"
+
+"I wonder if you were sleeping as sound as you are trying to make
+out, sir," said the unmoved Ricardo.
+
+"I wonder," repeated Mr. Jones.  "At any rate, I was resting
+quietly!"
+
+"Come, sir!" Ricardo's whisper was alarmed.  "You don't mean to say
+you're going to be bored?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Quite right!"  The secretary was very much relieved.  "There's no
+occasion to be, I can tell you, sir," he whispered earnestly.
+"Anything but that!  If I didn't say anything for a bit, it ain't
+because there isn't plenty to talk about.  Ay, more than enough."
+
+"What's the matter with you?" breathed out his patron.  "Are you
+going to turn pessimist?"
+
+"Me turn?  No, sir!  I ain't of those that turn.  You may call me
+hard names, if you like, but you know very well that I ain't a
+croaker."  Ricardo changed his tone.  "If I said nothing for a
+while, it was because I was meditating over the Chink, sir."
+
+"You were?  Waste of time, my Martin.  A Chinaman is unfathomable."
+
+Ricardo admitted that this might be so.  Anyhow, a Chink was neither
+here nor there, as a general thing, unfathomable as he might be; but
+a Swedish baron wasn't--couldn't be!  The woods were full of such
+barons.
+
+"I don't know that he is so tame," was Mr. Jones's remark, in a
+sepulchral undertone.
+
+"How do you mean, sir?  He ain't a rabbit, of course.  You couldn't
+hypnotize him, as I saw you do to more than one Dago, and other
+kinds of tame citizens, when it came to the point of holding them
+down to a game."
+
+"Don't you reckon on that," murmured plain Mr. Jones seriously.
+
+"No, sir, I don't, though you have a wonderful power of the eye.
+It's a fact."
+
+"I have a wonderful patience," remarked Mr. Jones dryly.
+
+A dim smile flitted over the lips of the faithful Ricardo who never
+raised his head.
+
+"I don't want to try you too much, sir, but this is like no other
+job we ever turned our minds to."
+
+"Perhaps not.  At any rate let us think so."
+
+A weariness with the monotony of life was reflected in the tone of
+this qualified assent.  It jarred on the nerves of the sanguine
+Ricardo.
+
+"Let us think of the way to go to work," he retorted a little
+impatiently.  "He's a deep one.  Just look at the way he treated
+that chum of his.  Did you ever hear of anything so low?  And the
+artfulness of the beast--the dirty, tame artfulness!"
+
+"Don't you start moralizing, Martin," said Mr. Jones warningly.  "As
+far as I can make out the story that German hotel-keeper told you,
+it seems to show a certain amount of character;--and independence
+from common feelings which is not usual.  It's very remarkable, if
+true."
+
+"Ay, ay!  Very remarkable.  It's mighty low down, all the same,"
+muttered, Ricardo obstinately.  "I must say I am glad to think he
+will be paid off for it in a way that'll surprise him!"
+
+The tip of his tongue appeared lively for an instant, as if trying
+for the taste of that ferocious retribution on his compressed lips.
+For Ricardo was sincere in his indignation before the elementary
+principle of loyalty to a chum violated in cold blood, slowly, in a
+patient duplicity of years.  There are standards in villainy as in
+virtue, and the act as he pictured it to himself acquired an
+additional horror from the slow pace of that treachery so atrocious
+and so tame.  But he understood too the educated judgement of his
+governor, a gentleman looking on all this with the privileged
+detachment of a cultivated mind, of an elevated personality.
+
+"Ay, he's deep--he's artful," he mumbled between his sharp teeth.
+
+"Confound you!" Mr. Jones's calm whisper crept into his ear.  "Come
+to the point."
+
+Obedient, the secretary shook off his thoughtfulness.  There was a
+similarity of mind between these two--one the outcast of his vices,
+the other inspired by a spirit of scornful defiance, the
+aggressiveness of a beast of prey looking upon all the tame
+creatures of the earth as its natural victim.  Both were astute
+enough, however, and both were aware that they had plunged into this
+adventure without a sufficient scrutiny of detail.  The figure of a
+lonely man far from all assistance had loomed up largely,
+fascinating and defenceless in the middle of the sea, filling the
+whole field of their vision.  There had not seemed to be any need
+for thinking.  As Schomberg had been saying:  "Three to one."
+
+But it did not look so simple now in the face of that solitude which
+was like an armour for this man.  The feeling voiced by the henchman
+in his own way--"We don't seem much forwarder now we are here" was
+acknowledged by the silence of the patron.  It was easy enough to
+rip a fellow up or drill a hole in him, whether he was alone or not,
+Ricardo reflected in low, confidential tones, but -
+
+"He isn't alone," Mr. Jones said faintly, in his attitude of a man
+composed for sleep.  "Don't forget that Chinaman."  Ricardo started
+slightly.
+
+"Oh, ay--the Chink!"
+
+Ricardo had been on the point of confessing about the girl; but no!
+He wanted his governor to be unperturbed and steady.  Vague
+thoughts, which he hardly dared to look in the face, were stirring
+his brain in connection with that girl.  She couldn't be much
+account, he thought.  She could be frightened.  And there were also
+other possibilities.  The Chink, however, could be considered
+openly.
+
+"What I was thinking about it, sir," he went on earnestly, "is this-
+-here we've got a man.  He's nothing.  If he won't be good, he can
+be made quiet.  That's easy.  But then there's his plunder.  He
+doesn't carry it in his pocket."
+
+"I hope not," breathed Mr. Jones.
+
+"Same here.  It's too big, we know, but if he were alone, he would
+not feel worried about it overmuch--I mean the safety of the pieces.
+He would just put the lot into any box or drawer that was handy."
+
+"Would he?"
+
+"Yes, sir.  He would keep it under his eye, as it were.  Why not?
+It is natural.  A fellow doesn't put his swag underground, unless
+there's a very good reason for it."
+
+"A very good reason, eh?"
+
+"Yes, sir.  What do you think a fellow is--a mole?"
+
+From his experience, Ricardo declared that man was not a burrowing
+beast.  Even the misers very seldom buried their hoard, unless for
+exceptional reasons.  In the given situation of a man alone on an
+island, the company of a Chink was a very good reason.  Drawers
+would not be safe, nor boxes, either, from a prying, slant-eyed
+Chink.  No, sir, unless a safe--a proper office safe.  But the safe
+was there in the room.
+
+"Is there a safe in this room?  I didn't notice it," whispered Mr.
+Jones.
+
+That was because the thing was painted white, like the walls of the
+room; and besides, it was tucked away in the shadows of a corner.
+Mr. Jones had been too tired to observe anything on his first coming
+ashore; but Ricardo had very soon spotted the characteristic form.
+He only wished he could believe that the plunder of treachery,
+duplicity, and all the moral abominations of Heyst had been there.
+But no; the blamed thing was open.
+
+"It might have been there at one time or another," he commented
+gloomily, "but it isn't there now."
+
+"The man did not elect to live in this house," remarked Mr. Jones.
+"And by the by, what could he have meant by speaking of
+circumstances which prevented him lodging us in the other bungalow?
+You remember what he said, Martin?  Sounded cryptic."
+
+Martin, who remembered and understood the phrase as directly motived
+by the existence of the girl, waited a little before saying:
+
+"Some of his artfulness, sir; and not the worst of it either.  That
+manner of his to us, this asking no questions, is some more of his
+artfulness.  A man's bound to be curious, and he is; yet he goes on
+as if he didn't care.  He does care--or else what was he doing up
+with a cigar in the middle of the night, doing a think?  I don't
+like it."
+
+"He may be outside, observing the light here, and saying the very
+same thing to himself of our own wakefulness," gravely suggested
+Ricardo's governor.
+
+"He may be, sir; but this is too important to be talked over in the
+dark.  And the light is all right, it can be accounted for.  There's
+a light in this bungalow in the middle of the night because--why,
+because you are not well.  Not well, sir--that's what's the matter,
+and you will have to act up to it."
+
+The consideration had suddenly occurred to the faithful henchman, in
+the light of a felicitous expedient to keep his governor and the
+girl apart as long as possible.  Mr. Jones received the suggestion
+without the slightest stir, even in the deep sockets of his eyes,
+where a steady, faint gleam was the only thing telling of life and
+attention in his attenuated body.  But Ricardo, as soon as he had
+enunciated his happy thought, perceived in it other possibilities
+more to the point and of greater practical advantage.
+
+"With your looks, sir, it will be easy enough," he went on evenly,
+as if no silence had intervened, always respectful, but frank, with
+perfect simplicity of purpose.  "All you've got to do is just to lie
+down quietly.  I noticed him looking sort of surprised at you on the
+wharf, sir."
+
+At these words, a naive tribute to the aspect of his physique, even
+more suggestive of the grave than of the sick-bed, a fold appeared
+on that side of the governor's face which was exposed to the dim
+light--a deep, shadowy, semicircular fold from the side of the nose
+to bottom of the chin--a silent smile.  By a side-glance Ricardo had
+noted this play of features.  He smiled, too, appreciative,
+encouraged.
+
+"And you as hard as nails all the time," he went on.  "Hang me if
+anybody would believe you aren't sick, if I were to swear myself
+black in the face!  Give us a day or two to look into matters and
+size up that 'yporcrit."
+
+Ricardo's eyes remained fixed on his crossed shins.  The chief, in
+his lifeless accents, approved.
+
+"Perhaps it would be a good idea."
+
+"The Chink, he's nothing.  He can be made quiet any time."
+
+One of Ricardo's hands, reposing palm upwards on his folded legs,
+made a swift thrusting gesture, repeated by the enormous darting
+shadow of an arm very low on the wall.  It broke the spell of
+perfect stillness in the room.  The secretary eyed moodily the wall
+from which the shadow had gone.  Anybody could be made quiet, he
+pointed out.  It was not anything that the Chink could do; no, it
+was the effect that his company must have produced on the conduct of
+the doomed man.  A man!  What was a man?  A Swedish baron could be
+ripped up, or else holed by a shot, as easily as any other creature;
+but that was exactly what was to be avoided, till one knew where he
+had hidden his plunder.
+
+"I shouldn't think it would be some sort of hole in his bungalow,"
+argued Ricardo with real anxiety.
+
+No.  A house can be burnt--set on fire accidentally, or on purpose,
+while a man's asleep.  Under the house--or in some crack, cranny, or
+crevice?  Something told him it wasn't that.  The anguish of mental
+effort contracted Ricardo's brow.  The skin of his head seemed to
+move in this travail of vain and tormenting suppositions.
+
+"What did you think a fellow is, sir--a baby?" he said, in answer to
+Mr. Jones's objections.  "I am trying to find out what I would do
+myself.  He wouldn't be likely to be cleverer than I am."
+
+"And what do you know about yourself?"
+
+Mr Jones seemed to watch his follower's perplexities with amusement
+concealed in a death-like composure.
+
+Ricardo disregarded the question.  The material vision of the spoil
+absorbed all his faculties.  A great vision!  He seemed to see it.
+A few small canvas bags tied up with thin cord, their distended
+rotundity showing the inside pressure of the disk-like forms of
+coins--gold, solid, heavy, eminently portable.  Perhaps steel cash-
+boxes with a chased design, on the covers; or perhaps a black and
+brass box with a handle on the top, and full of goodness knows what.
+Bank notes?  Why not?  The fellow had been going home; so it was
+surely something worth going home with.
+
+"And he may have put it anywhere outside--anywhere!" cried Ricardo
+in a deadened voice, "in the forest--"
+
+That was it!  A temporary darkness replaced the dim light of the
+room.  The darkness of the forest at night and in it the gleam of a
+lantern, by which a figure is digging at the foot of a tree-trunk.
+As likely as not, another figure holding that lantern--ha, feminine!
+The girl!
+
+The prudent Ricardo stifled a picturesque and profane exclamation,
+partly joy, partly dismay.  Had the girl been trusted or mistrusted
+by that man?  Whatever it was, it was bound to be wholly!  With
+women there could be no half-measures.  He could not imagine a
+fellow half-trusting a woman in that intimate relation to himself,
+and in those particular circumstances of conquest and loneliness
+where no confidences could appear dangerous since, apparently, there
+could be no one she could give him away to.  Moreover, in nine cases
+out of ten the woman would be trusted.  But, trusted or mistrusted,
+was her presence a favourable or unfavourable condition of the
+problem?  That was the question!
+
+The temptation to consult his chief, to talk over the weighty fact,
+and get his opinion on it, was great indeed.  Ricardo resisted it;
+but the agony of his solitary mental conflict was extremely sharp.
+A woman in a problem is an incalculable quantity, even if you have
+something to go upon in forming your guess.  How much more so when
+you haven't even once caught sight of her.
+
+Swift as were his mental processes, he felt that a longer silence
+was inadvisable.  He hastened to speak:
+
+"And do you see us, sir, you and I, with a couple of spades having
+to tackle this whole confounded island?"
+
+He allowed himself a slight movement of the arm.  The shadow
+enlarged it into a sweeping gesture.
+
+"This seems rather discouraging, Martin," murmured the unmoved
+governor.
+
+"We mustn't be discouraged--that's all!" retorted his henchman.
+"And after what we had to go through in that boat too!  Why it would
+be--"
+
+He couldn't find the qualifying words.  Very calm, faithful, and yet
+astute, he expressed his new-born hopes darkly.
+
+"Something's sure to turn up to give us a hint; only this job can't
+be rushed.  You may depend on me to pick up the least little bit of
+a hint; but you, sir--you've got to play him very gently.  For the
+rest you can trust me."
+
+"Yes; but I ask myself what YOU are trusting to."
+
+"Our luck," said the faithful Ricardo.  "Don't say a word against
+that.  It might spoil the run of it."
+
+"You are a superstitious beggar.  No, I won't say anything against
+it."
+
+"That's right, sir.  Don't you even think lightly of it.  Luck's not
+to be played with."
+
+"Yes, luck's a delicate thing," assented Mr. Jones in a dreamy
+whisper.
+
+A short silence ensued, which Ricardo ended in a discreet and
+tentative voice.
+
+"Talking of luck, I suppose he could be made to take a hand with
+you, sir--two-handed picket or ekkarty, you being seedy and keeping
+indoors--just to pass the time.  For all we know, he may be one of
+them hot ones once they start--"
+
+"Is it likely?" came coldly from the principal.  "Considering what
+we know of his history--say with his partner."
+
+"True, sir.  He's a cold-blooded beast; a cold-blooded, inhuman--"
+
+"And I'll tell you another thing that isn't likely.  He would not be
+likely to let himself be stripped bare.  We haven't to do with a
+young fool that can be led on by chaff or flattery, and in the end
+simply overawed.  This is a calculating man."
+
+Ricardo recognized that clearly.  What he had in his mind was
+something on a small scale, just to keep the enemy busy while he,
+Ricardo, had time to nose around a bit.
+
+"You could even lose a little money to him, sir," he suggested.
+
+"I could."
+
+Ricardo was thoughtful for a moment.
+
+"He strikes me, too, as the sort of man to start prancing when one
+didn't expect it.  What do you think, sir?  Is he a man that would
+prance?  That is, if something startled him.  More likely to prance
+than to run--what?"
+
+The answer came at once, because Mr. Jones understood the peculiar
+idiom of his faithful follower.
+
+"Oh, without doubt!  Without doubt!"
+
+"It does me good to hear that you think so.  He's a prancing beast,
+and so we mustn't startle him--not till I have located the stuff.
+Afterwards--"
+
+Ricardo paused, sinister in the stillness of his pose.  Suddenly he
+got up with a swift movement and gazed down at his chief in moody
+abstraction.  Mr. Jones did not stir.
+
+"There's one thing that's worrying me," began Ricardo in a subdued
+voice.
+
+"Only one?" was the faint comment from the motionless body on the
+bedstead.
+
+"I mean more than all the others put together."
+
+"That's grave news."
+
+"Ay, grave enough.  It's this--how do you feel in yourself, sir?
+Are you likely to get bored?  I know them fits come on you suddenly;
+but surely you can tell--"
+
+"Martin, you are an ass."
+
+The moody face of the secretary brightened up.
+
+"Really, sir?  Well, I am quite content to be on these terms--I mean
+as long as you don't get bored.  It wouldn't do, sir."
+
+For coolness, Ricardo had thrown open his shirt and rolled up his
+sleeves.  He moved stealthily across the room, bare-footed, towards
+the candle, the shadow of his head and shoulders growing bigger
+behind him on the opposite wall, to which the face of plain Mr.
+Jones was turned.  With a feline movement, Ricardo glanced over his
+shoulder at the thin back of the spectre reposing on the bed, and
+then blew out the candle.
+
+"In fact, I am rather amused, Martin," Mr. Jones said in the dark.
+
+He heard the sound of a slapped thigh and the jubilant exclamation
+of his henchman:
+
+"Good!  That's the way to talk, sir!"
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+
+
+Ricardo advanced prudently by short darts from one tree-trunk to
+another, more in the manner of a squirrel than a cat.  The sun had
+risen some time before.  Already the sparkle of open sea was
+encroaching rapidly on the dark, cool, early-morning blue of Diamond
+Bay; but the deep dusk lingered yet under the mighty pillars of the
+forest, between which the secretary dodged.
+
+He was watching Number One's bungalow with an animal-like patience,
+if with a very human complexity of purpose.  This was the second
+morning of such watching.  The first one had not been rewarded by
+success.  Well, strictly speaking, there was no hurry.
+
+The sun, swinging above the ridge all at once, inundated with light
+the space of burnt grass in front of Ricardo and the face of the
+bungalow, on which his eyes were fixed, leaving only the one dark
+spot of the doorway.  To his right, to his left, and behind him,
+splashes of gold appeared in the deep shade of the forest, thinning
+the gloom under the ragged roof of leaves.
+
+This was not a very favourable circumstance for Ricardo's purpose.
+He did not wish to be detected in his patient occupation.  For what
+he was watching for was a sight of the girl--that girl! just a
+glimpse across the burnt patch to see what she was like.  He had
+excellent eyes, and the distance was not so great.  He would be able
+to distinguish her face quite easily if she only came out on the
+veranda; and she was bound to do that sooner or later.  He was
+confident that he could form some opinion about her--which, he felt,
+was very necessary, before venturing on some steps to get in touch
+with her behind that Swedish baron's back.  His theoretical view of
+the girl was such that he was quite prepared, on the strength of
+that distant examination, to show himself discreetly--perhaps even
+make a sign.  It all depended on his reading of the face.  She
+couldn't be much.  He knew that sort!
+
+By protruding his head a little he commanded, through the foliage of
+a festooning creeper, a view of the three bungalows.  Irregularly
+disposed along a flat curve, over the veranda rail of the
+farthermost one hung a dark rug of a tartan pattern, amazingly
+conspicuous.  Ricardo could see the very checks.  A brisk fire of
+sticks was burning on the ground in front of the steps, and in the
+sunlight the thin, fluttering flame had paled almost to
+invisibility--a mere rosy stir under a faint wreath of smoke.  He
+could see the white bandage on the head of Pedro bending over it,
+and the wisps of black hair standing up weirdly.  He had wound that
+bandage himself, after breaking that shaggy and enormous head.  The
+creature balanced it like a load, staggering towards the steps.
+Ricardo could see a small, long-handled saucepan at the end of a
+great hairy paw.
+
+Yes, he could see all that there was to be seen, far and near.
+Excellent eyes!  The only thing they could not penetrate was the
+dark oblong of the doorway on the veranda under the low eaves of the
+bungalow's roof.  And that was vexing.  It was an outrage.  Ricardo
+was easily outraged.  Surely she would come out presently!  Why
+didn't she?  Surely the fellow did not tie her up to the bedpost
+before leaving the house!
+
+Nothing appeared.  Ricardo was as still as the leafy cables of
+creepers depending in a convenient curtain from the mighty limb
+sixty feet above his head.  His very eyelids were still, and this
+unblinking watchfulness gave him the dreamy air of a cat posed on a
+hearth-rug contemplating the fire.  Was he dreaming?  There, in
+plain sight, he had before him a white, blouse-like jacket, short
+blue trousers, a pair of bare yellow calves, a pigtail, long and
+slender -
+
+"The confounded Chink!" he muttered, astounded.
+
+He was not conscious of having looked away; and yet right there, in
+the middle of the picture, without having come round the right-hand
+corner or the left-hand corner of the house, without falling from
+the sky or surging up from the ground, Wang had become visible,
+large as life, and engaged in the young-ladyish occupation of
+picking flowers.  Step by step, stooping repeatedly over the flower-
+beds at the foot of the veranda, the startlingly materialized
+Chinaman passed off the scene in a very commonplace manner, by going
+up the steps and disappearing in the darkness of the doorway.
+
+Only then the yellow eyes of Martin Ricardo lost their intent
+fixity.  He understood that it was time for him to be moving.  That
+bunch of flowers going into the house in the hand of a Chinaman was
+for the breakfast-table.  What else could it be for?
+
+"I'll give you flowers!" he muttered threateningly.  "You wait!"
+
+Another moment, just for a glance towards the Jones bungalow, whence
+he expected Heyst to issue on his way to that breakfast so
+offensively decorated, and Ricardo began his retreat.  His impulse,
+his desire, was for a rush into the open, face to face with the
+appointed victim, for what he called a "ripping up," visualized
+greedily, and always with the swift preliminary stooping movement on
+his part--the forerunner of certain death to his adversary.  This
+was his impulse; and as it was, so to speak, constitutional, it was
+extremely difficult to resist when his blood was up.  What could be
+more trying than to have to skulk and dodge and restrain oneself,
+mentally and physically, when one's blood was up?  Mr. Secretary
+Ricardo began his retreat from his post of observation behind a tree
+opposite Heyst's bungalow, using great care to remain unseen.  His
+proceedings were made easier by the declivity of the ground, which
+sloped sharply down to the water's edge.  There, his feet feeling
+the warmth of the island's rocky foundation already heated by the
+sun, through the thin soles of his straw slippers he was, as it
+were, sunk out of sight of the houses.  A short scramble of some
+twenty feet brought him up again to the upper level, at the place
+where the jetty had its root in the shore.  He leaned his back
+against one of the lofty uprights which still held up the company's
+signboard above the mound of derelict coal.  Nobody could have
+guessed how much his blood was up.  To contain himself he folded his
+arms tightly on his breast.
+
+Ricardo was not used to a prolonged effort of self-control.  His
+craft, his artfulness, felt themselves always at the mercy of his
+nature, which was truly feral and only held in subjection by the
+influence of the "governor," the prestige of a gentleman.  It had
+its cunning too, but it was being almost too severely tried since
+the feral solution of a growl and a spring was forbidden by the
+problem.  Ricardo dared not venture out on the cleared ground.  He
+dared not.
+
+"If I meet the beggar," he thought, "I don't know what I mayn't do.
+I daren't trust myself."
+
+What exasperated him just now was his inability to understand Heyst.
+Ricardo was human enough to suffer from the discovery of his
+limitations.  No, he couldn't size Heyst up.  He could kill him with
+extreme ease--a growl and a spring--but that was forbidden!
+However, he could not remain indefinitely under the funereal
+blackboard.
+
+"I must make a move," he thought.
+
+He moved on, his head swimming a little with the repressed desire of
+violence, and came out openly in front of the bungalows, as if he
+had just been down to the jetty to look at the boat.  The sunshine
+enveloped him, very brilliant, very still, very hot.  The three
+buildings faced him.  The one with the rug on the balustrade was the
+most distant; next to it was the empty bungalow; the nearest, with
+the flower-beds at the foot of its veranda, contained that
+bothersome girl, who had managed so provokingly to keep herself
+invisible.  That was why Ricardo's eyes lingered on that building.
+The girl would surely be easier to "size up" than Heyst.  A sight of
+her, a mere glimpse, would have been something to go by, a step
+nearer to the goal--the first real move, in fact.  Ricardo saw no
+other move.  And any time she might appear on that veranda!
+
+She did not appear; but, like a concealed magnet, she exercised her
+attraction.  As he went on, he deviated towards the bungalow.
+Though his movements were deliberate, his feral instincts had such
+sway that if he had met Heyst walking towards him, he would have had
+to satisfy his need of violence.  But he saw nobody.  Wang was at
+the back of the house, keeping the coffee hot against Number One's
+return for breakfast.  Even the simian Pedro was out of sight, no
+doubt crouching on the door-step, his red little eyes fastened with
+animal-like devotion on Mr. Jones, who was in discourse with Heyst
+in the other bungalow--the conversation of an evil spectre with a
+disarmed man, watched by an ape.
+
+His will having very little to do with it, Ricardo, darting swift
+glances in all directions, found himself at the steps of the Heyst
+bungalow.  Once there, falling under an uncontrollable force of
+attraction, he mounted them with a savage and stealthy action of his
+limbs, and paused for a moment under the eaves to listen to the
+silence.  Presently he advanced over the threshold one leg--it
+seemed to stretch itself, like a limb of india-rubber--planted his
+foot within, brought up the other swiftly, and stood inside the
+room, turning his head from side to side.  To his eyes, brought in
+there from the dazzling sunshine, all was gloom for a moment.  His
+pupils, like a cat's, dilating swiftly, he distinguished an enormous
+quantity of books.  He was amazed; and he was put off too.  He was
+vexed in his astonishment.  He had meant to note the aspect and
+nature of things, and hoped to draw some useful inference, some hint
+as to the man.  But what guess could one make out of a multitude of
+books?  He didn't know what to think; and he formulated his
+bewilderment in the mental exclamation:
+
+"What the devil has this fellow been trying to set up here--a
+school?"
+
+He gave a prolonged stare to the portrait of Heyst's father, that
+severe profile ignoring the vanities of this earth.  His eyes
+gleamed sideways at the heavy silver candlesticks--signs of
+opulence.  He prowled as a stray cat entering a strange place might
+have done, for if Ricardo had not Wang's miraculous gift of
+materializing and vanishing, rather than coming and going, he could
+be nearly as noiseless in his less elusive movements.  He noted the
+back door standing just ajar; and an the time his slightly pointed
+ears, at the utmost stretch of watchfulness, kept in touch with the
+profound silence outside enveloping the absolute stillness of the
+house.
+
+He had not been in the room two minutes when it occurred to him that
+he must be alone in the bungalow.  The woman, most likely, had
+sneaked out and was walking about somewhere in the grounds at the
+back.  She had been probably ordered to keep out of sight.  Why?
+Because the fellow mistrusted his guests; or was it because he
+mistrusted HER?
+
+Ricardo reflected that from a certain point of view it amounted
+nearly to the same thing.  He remembered Schomberg's story.  He felt
+that running away with somebody only to get clear of that beastly,
+tame, hotel-keeper's attention was no proof of hopeless infatuation.
+She could be got in touch with.
+
+His moustaches stirred.  For some time he had been looking at a
+closed door.  He would peep into that other room, and perhaps see
+something more informing than a confounded lot of books.  As he
+crossed over, he thought recklessly:
+
+"If the beggar comes in suddenly, and starts to prance, I'll rip him
+up and be done with it!"
+
+He laid his hand on the handle, and felt the door come unlatched.
+Before he pulled it open, he listened again to the silence.  He felt
+it all about him, complete, without a flaw.
+
+The necessity of prudence had exasperated his self-restraint.  A
+mood of ferocity woke up in him, and, as always at such times, he
+became physically aware of the sheeted knife strapped to his leg.
+He pulled at the door with fierce curiosity.  It came open without a
+squeak of hinge, without a rustle, with no sound at all; and he
+found himself glaring at the opaque surface of some rough blue
+stuff, like serge.  A curtain was fitted inside, heavy enough and
+long enough not to stir.
+
+A curtain!  This unforeseen veil, baffling his curiosity checked his
+brusqueness.  He did not fling it aside with an impatient movement;
+he only looked at it closely, as if its texture had to be examined
+before his hand could touch such stuff.  In this interval of
+hesitation, he seemed to detect a flaw in the perfection of the
+silence, the faintest possible rustle, which his ears caught and
+instantly, in the effort of conscious listening, lost again.  No!
+Everything was still inside and outside the house, only he had no
+longer the sense of being alone there.
+
+When he put out his hand towards the motionless folds it was with
+extreme caution, and merely to push the stuff aside a little,
+advancing his head at the same time to peep within.  A moment of
+complete immobility ensued.  Then, without anything else of him
+stirring, Ricardo's head shrank back on his shoulders, his arm
+descended slowly to his side.  There was a woman in there.  The very
+woman!  Lighted dimly by the reflection of the outer glare, she
+loomed up strangely big and shadowy at the other end of the long,
+narrow room.  With her back to the door, she was doing her hair with
+bare arms uplifted.  One of them gleamed pearly white; the other
+detached its perfect form in black against the unshuttered,
+uncurtained square window-hole.  She was there, her fingers busy
+with her dark hair, utterly unconscious, exposed and defenceless--
+and tempting.
+
+Ricardo drew back one foot and pressed his elbows close to his
+sides; his chest started heaving convulsively as if he were
+wrestling or running a race; his body began to sway gently back and
+forth.  The self-restraint was at an end:  his psychology must have
+its way.  The instinct for the feral spring could no longer be
+denied.  Ravish or kill--it was all one to him, as long as by the
+act he liberated the suffering soul of savagery repressed for so
+long.  After a quick glance over his shoulder, which hunters of big
+game tell us no lion or tiger omits to give before charging home,
+Ricardo charged, head down, straight at the curtain.  The stuff,
+tossed up violently by his rush, settled itself with a slow,
+floating descent Into vertical folds, motionless, without a shudder
+even, in the still, warm air.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+
+
+The clock--which once upon a time had measured the hours of
+philosophic meditation--could not have ticked away more than five
+seconds when Wang materialized within the living-room.  His concern
+primarily was with the delayed breakfast, but at once his slanting
+eyes became immovably fixed upon the unstirring curtain.  For it was
+behind it that he had located the strange, deadened scuffling sounds
+which filled the empty room.  The slanting eyes of his race could
+not achieve a round, amazed stare, but they remained still, dead
+still, and his impassive yellow face grew all at once careworn and
+lean with the sudden strain of intense, doubtful, frightened
+watchfulness.  Contrary impulses swayed his body, rooted to the
+floor-mats.  He even went so far as to extend his hand towards the
+curtain.  He could not reach it, and he didn't make the necessary
+step forward.
+
+The mysterious struggle was going on with confused thuds of bare
+feet, in a mute wrestling match, no human sound, hiss, groan,
+murmur, or exclamation coming through the curtain.  A chair fell
+over, not with a crash but lightly, as if just grazed, and a faint
+metallic ring of the tin bath succeeded.  Finally the tense silence,
+as of two adversaries locked in a deadly grip, was ended by the
+heavy, dull thump of a soft body flung against the inner partition
+of planks.  It seemed to shake the whole bungalow.  By that time,
+walking backward, his eyes, his very throat, strained with fearful
+excitement, his extended arm still pointing at the curtain, Wang had
+disappeared through the back door.  Once out in the compound, he
+bolted round the end of the house.  Emerging innocently between the
+two bungalows he lingered and lounged in the open, where anybody
+issuing from any of the dwellings was bound to see him--a self-
+possessed Chinaman idling there, with nothing but perhaps an
+unserved breakfast on his mind.
+
+It was at this time that Wang made up his mind to give up all
+connection with Number One, a man not only disarmed but already half
+vanquished.  Till that morning he had had doubts as to his course of
+action, but this overheard scuffle decided the question.  Number One
+was a doomed man--one of those beings whom it is unlucky to help.
+Even as he walked in the open with a fine air of unconcern, Wang
+wondered that no sound of any sort was to be heard inside the house.
+For all he knew, the white woman might have been scuffling in there
+with an evil spirit, which had of course killed her.  For nothing
+visible came out of the house he watched out of the slanting comer
+of his eye.  The sunshine and the silence outside the bungalow
+reigned undisturbed.
+
+But in the house the silence of the big room would not have struck
+an acute ear as perfect.  It was troubled by a stir so faint that it
+could hardly be called a ghost of whispering from behind the
+curtain.
+
+Ricardo, feeling his throat with tender care, breathed out
+admiringly:
+
+"You have fingers like steel.  Jimminy!  You have muscles like a
+giant!"
+
+Luckily for Lena, Ricardo's onset had been so sudden--she was
+winding her two heavy tresses round her head--that she had no time
+to lower her arms.  This, which saved them from being pinned to her
+sides, gave her a better chance to resist.  His spring had nearly
+thrown her down.  Luckily, again, she was standing so near the wall
+that, though she was driven against it headlong, yet the shock was
+not heavy enough to knock all the breath out of her body.  On the
+contrary, it helped her first instinctive attempt to drive her
+assailant backward.
+
+After the first gasp of a surprise that was really too over-powering
+for a cry, she was never in doubt of the nature of her danger.  She
+defended herself in the full, clear knowledge of it, from the force
+of instinct which is the true source of every great display of
+energy, and with a determination which could hardly have been
+expected from a girl who, cornered in a dim corridor by the red-
+faced, stammering Schomberg, had trembled with shame, disgust, and
+fear; had drooped, terrified, before mere words spluttered out
+odiously by a man who had never in his life laid his big paw on her.
+
+This new enemy's attack was simple, straightforward violence.  It
+was not the slimy, underhand plotting to deliver her up like a
+slave, which had sickened her heart and had made her feel in her
+loneliness that her oppressors were too many for her.  She was no
+longer alone in the world now.  She resisted without a moment of
+faltering, because she was no longer deprived of moral support;
+because she was a human being who counted; because she was no longer
+defending herself for herself alone; because of the faith that had
+been born in her--the faith in the man of her destiny, and perhaps
+in the Heaven which had sent him so wonderfully to cross her path.
+
+She had defended herself principally by maintaining a desperate,
+murderous clutch on Ricardo's windpipe, till she felt a sudden
+relaxation of the terrific hug in which he stupidly and
+ineffectually persisted to hold her.  Then with a supreme effort of
+her arms and of her suddenly raised knee, she sent him flying
+against the partition.  The cedar-wood chest stood in the way, and
+Ricardo, with a thump which boomed hollow through the whole
+bungalow, fell on it in a sitting posture, half strangled, and
+exhausted not so much by the efforts as by the emotions of the
+struggle.
+
+With the recoil of her exerted strength, she too reeled, staggered
+back, and sat on the edge of the bed.  Out of breath, but calm and
+unabashed, she busied herself in readjusting under her arms the
+brown and yellow figured Celebes sarong, the tuck of which had come
+undone during the fight.  Then, folding her bare arms tightly on her
+breast, she leaned forward on her crossed legs, determined and
+without fear.
+
+Ricardo, leaning forward too, his nervous force gone, crestfallen
+like a beast of prey that has missed its spring, met her big grey
+eyes looking at him--wide open, observing, mysterious--from under
+the dark arches of her courageous eyebrows.  Their faces were not a
+foot apart.  He ceased feeling about his aching throat and dropped
+the palms of his hands heavily on his knees.  He was not looking at
+her bare shoulders, at her strong arms; he was looking down at the
+floor.  He had lost one of his straw slippers.  A chair with a white
+dress on it had been overturned.  These, with splashes of water on
+the floor out of a brusquely misplaced sponge-bath, were the only
+traces of the struggle.
+
+Ricardo swallowed twice consciously, as if to make sure of his
+throat before he spoke again:
+
+"All right.  I never meant to hurt you--though I am no joker when it
+comes to it."
+
+He pulled up the leg of his pyjamas to exhibit the strapped knife.
+She glanced at it without moving her head, and murmured with
+scornful bitterness:
+
+"Ah, yes--with that thing stuck in my side.  In no other way."
+
+He shook his head with a shamefaced smile.
+
+"Listen!  I am quiet now.  Straight--I am.  I don't need to explain
+why--you know how it is.  And I can see, now, this wasn't the way
+with you."
+
+She made no sound.  Her still, upward gaze had a patient,
+mournfulness which troubled him like a suggestion of an
+inconceivable depth.  He added thoughtfully:
+
+"You are not going to make a noise about this silly try of mine?"
+
+She moved her head the least bit.
+
+"Jee-miny!  You are a wonder--" he murmured earnestly, relieved more
+than she could have guessed.
+
+Of course, if she had attempted to run out, he would have stuck the
+knife between her shoulders, to stop her screaming; but all the fat
+would have been in the fire, the business utterly spoiled, and the
+rage of the governor--especially when he learned the cause--
+boundless.  A woman that does not make a noise after an attempt of
+that kind has tacitly condoned the offence.  Ricardo had no small
+vanities.  But clearly, if she would pass it over like this, then he
+could not be so utterly repugnant to her.  He felt flattered.  And
+she didn't seem afraid of him either.  He already felt almost tender
+towards the girl--that plucky, fine girl who had not tried to run
+screaming from him.
+
+"We shall be friends yet.  I don't give you up.  Don't think it.
+Friends as friends can be!" he whispered confidently.  "Jee-miny!
+You aren't a tame one.  Neither am I.  You will find that out before
+long."
+
+He could not know that if she had not run out, it was because that
+morning, under the sum of growing uneasiness at the presence of the
+incomprehensible visitors, Heyst had confessed to her that it was
+his revolver he had been looking for in the night; that it was gone,
+that he was a disarmed, defenceless man.  She had hardly
+comprehended the meaning of his confession.  Now she understood
+better what it meant.  The effort of her self-control, her
+stillness, impressed Ricardo.  Suddenly she spoke:
+
+"What are you after?"
+
+He did not raise his eyes.  His hands reposing on his knees, his
+drooping head, something reflective in his pose, suggested the
+weariness of a simple soul, the fatigue of a mental rather than
+physical contest.  He answered the direct question by a direct
+statement, as if he were too tired to dissemble:
+
+"After the swag."
+
+The word was strange to her.  The veiled ardour of her grey gaze
+from under the dark eyebrows never left Ricardo's.
+
+"A swag?" she murmured quietly.  "What's that?"
+
+"Why, swag, plunder--what your gentleman has been pinching right and
+left for years--the pieces.  Don't you know?  This!"
+
+Without looking up, he made the motion of counting money into the
+palm of his hand.  She lowered her eyes slightly to observe this bit
+of pantomime, but returned them to his face at once.  Then, in a
+mere breath:
+
+"How do you know anything about him?" she asked, concealing her
+puzzled alarm.  "What has it got to do with you?"
+
+"Everything," was Ricardo's concise answer, in a low, emphatic
+whisper.  He reflected that this girl was really his best hope.  Out
+of the unfaded impression of past violence there was growing the
+sort of sentiment which prevents a man from being indifferent to a
+woman he has once held in his arms--if even against her will--and
+still more so if she has pardoned the outrage.  It becomes then a
+sort of bond.  He felt positively the need to confide in her--a
+subtle trait of masculinity, this almost physical need of trust
+which can exist side by side with the most brutal readiness of
+suspicion.
+
+"It's a game of grab--see?" he went on, with a new inflection of
+intimacy in his murmur.  He was looking straight at her now.
+
+"That fat, tame slug of a gin-slinger, Schomberg, put us up to it."
+
+So strong is the impression of helpless and persecuted misery, that
+the girl who had fought down a savage assault without faltering
+could not completely repress a shudder at the mere sound of the
+abhorred name.
+
+Ricardo became more rapid and confidential:
+
+"He wants to pay him off--pay both of you, at that; so he told me.
+He was hot after you.  He would have given all he had into those
+hands of yours that have nearly strangled me.  But you couldn't, eh?
+Nohow--what?"  He paused.  "So, rather than--you followed a
+gentleman?"
+
+He noticed a slight movement of her head and spoke quickly.
+
+"Same here--rather than be a wage-slave.  Only these foreigners
+aren't to be trusted.  You're too good for him.  A man that will rob
+his best chum?" She raised her head.  He went on, well pleased with
+his progress, whispering hurriedly:  "Yes.  I know all about him.
+So you may guess how he's likely to treat a woman after a bit!"
+
+He did not know that he was striking terror into her breast now.
+Still the grey eyes remained fixed on him unmovably watchful, as if
+sleepy under the white forehead.  She was beginning to understand.
+His words conveyed a definite, dreadful meaning to her mind, which
+he proceeded to enlighten further in a convinced murmur.
+
+"You and I are made to understand each other.  Born alike, bred
+alike, I guess.  You are not tame.  Same here!  You have been
+chucked out into this rotten world of 'yporcrits.  Same here!"
+
+Her stillness, her appalled stillness, wore to him an air of
+fascinated attention.  He asked abruptly:
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+She made an effort to breathe out:
+
+"Where's what?"
+
+His tone expressed excited secrecy.
+
+"The swag--plunder--pieces.  It's a game of grab.  We must have it;
+but it isn't easy, and so you will have to lend a hand.  Come! is it
+kept in the house?"
+
+As often with women, her wits were sharpened by the very terror of
+the glimpsed menace.  She shook her head negatively.
+
+"No."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Sure," she said.
+
+"Ay!  Thought so.  Does your gentleman trust you?"
+
+Again she shook her head.
+
+"Blamed 'yporcrit," he said feelingly, and then reflected:  "He's
+one of the tame ones, ain't he?"
+
+"You had better find out for yourself," she said.
+
+"You trust me.  I don't want to die before you and I have made
+friends."  This was said with a strange air of feline gallantry.
+Then, tentatively:  "But he could be brought to trust you, couldn't
+he?"
+
+"Trust me?" she said, in a tone which bordered on despair, but which
+he mistook for derision.
+
+"Stand in with us," he urged.  "Give the chuck to all this blamed
+'yporcrisy.  Perhaps, without being trusted, you have managed to
+find out something already, eh?"
+
+"Perhaps I have," she uttered with lips that seemed to her to be
+freezing fast.
+
+Ricardo now looked at her calm face with something like respect.  He
+was even a little awed by her stillness, by her economy of words.
+Womanlike, she felt the effect she had produced, the effect of
+knowing much and of keeping all her knowledge in reserve.  So far,
+somehow, this had come, about of itself.  Thus encouraged, directed
+in the way of duplicity, the refuge of the weak, she made a
+heroically conscious effort and forced her stiff, cold lips into a
+smile.
+
+Duplicity--the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the
+disarmed, too!  Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her
+existence and a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity.  It seemed to
+her that the man sitting there before her was an unavoidable
+presence, which had attended all her life.  He was the embodied evil
+of the world.  She was not ashamed of her duplicity.  With a woman's
+frank courage, as soon as she saw that opening she threw herself
+into it without reserve, with only one doubt--that of her own
+strength.  She was appalled by the situation; but already all her
+aroused femininity, understanding that whether Heyst loved her or
+not she loved him, and feeling that she had brought this on his
+head, faced the danger with a passionate desire to defend her own.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+
+
+To Ricardo the girl had been so unforeseen that he was unable to
+bring upon her the light of his critical faculties.  Her smile
+appeared to him full of promise.  He had not expected her to be what
+she was.  Who, from the talk he had heard, could expect to meet a
+girl like this?  She was a blooming miracle, he said to himself,
+familiarly, yet with a tinge of respect.  She was no meat for the
+likes of that tame, respectable gin-slinger.  Ricardo grew hot with
+indignation.  Her courage, her physical strength, demonstrated at
+the cost of his discomfiture, commanded his sympathy.  He felt
+himself drawn to her by the proofs of her amazing spirit.  Such a
+girl!  She had a strong soul; and her reflective disposition to
+throw over her connection proved that she was no hypocrite.
+
+"Is your gentleman a good shot?" he said, looking down on the floor
+again, as if indifferent.
+
+She hardly understood the phrase; but in its form it suggested some
+accomplishment.  It was safe to whisper an affirmative.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Mine, too--and better than good," Ricardo murmured, and then, in a
+confidential burst:  "I am not so good at it, but I carry a pretty
+deadly thing about me, all the same!"
+
+He tapped his leg.  She was past the stage of shudders now.  Stiff
+all over, unable even to move her eyes, she felt an awful mental
+tension which was like blank forgetfulness.  Ricardo tried to
+influence her in his own way.
+
+"And my gentleman is not the sort that would drop me.  He ain't no
+foreigner; whereas you, with your baron, you don't know what's
+before you--or, rather, being a woman, you know only too well.  Much
+better not to wait for the chuck.  Pile in with us and get your
+share--of the plunder, I mean.  You have some notion about it
+already."
+
+She felt that if she as much as hinted by word or sign that there
+was no such thing on the island, Heyst's life wouldn't be worth half
+an hour's purchase; but all power of combining words had vanished in
+the tension of her mind.  Words themselves were too difficult to
+think of--all except the word "yes," the saving word!  She whispered
+it with not a feature of her face moving.  To Ricardo the faint and
+concise sound proved a cool, reserved assent, more worth having from
+that amazing mistress of herself than a thousand words from any
+other woman.  He thought with exultation that he had come upon one
+in a million--in ten millions!  His whisper became frankly
+entreating.
+
+"That's good!  Now all you've got to do is to make sure where he
+keeps his swag.  Only do be quick about it!  I can't stand much
+longer this crawling-on-the-stomach business so as not to scare your
+gentleman.  What do you think a fellow is--a reptile?"
+
+She stared without seeing anyone, as a person in the night sits
+staring and listening to deadly sounds, to evil incantations.  And
+always in her head there was that tension of the mind trying to get
+hold of something, of a saving idea which seemed to be so near and
+could not be captured.  Suddenly she seized it.  Yes--she had to get
+that man out of the house.  At that very moment, raised outside, not
+very near, but heard distinctly, Heyst's voice uttered the words:
+
+"Have you been looking out for me, Wang?"
+
+It was for her like a flash of lightning framed in the darkness
+which had beset her on all sides, showing a deadly precipice right
+under her feet.  With a convulsive movement she sat up straight, but
+had no power to rise.  Ricardo, on the contrary, was on his feet on
+the instant, as noiseless as a cat.  His yellow eyes gleamed,
+gliding here and there; but he too seemed unable to make another
+movement.  Only his moustaches stirred visibly, like the feelers of
+some animal.
+
+Wang's answer, "Ya tuan," was heard by the two in the room, but more
+faintly.  Then Heyst again:
+
+"All right!  You may bring the coffee in.  Mem Putih out in the room
+yet?"
+
+To this question Wang made no answer.
+
+Ricardo's and the girl's eyes met, utterly without expression, all
+their faculties being absorbed in listening for the first sound of
+Heyst's footsteps, for any sound outside which would mean that
+Ricardo's retreat was cut off.  Both understood perfectly well that
+Wang must have gone round the house, and that he was now at the
+back, making it impossible for Ricardo to slip out unseen that way
+before Heyst came in at the front.
+
+A darkling shade settled on the face of the devoted secretary.  Here
+was the business utterly spoiled!  It was the gloom of anger, and
+even of apprehension.  He would perhaps have made a dash for it
+through the back door, if Heyst had not been heard ascending the
+front steps.  He climbed them slowly, very slowly, like a man who is
+discouraged or weary--or simply thoughtful; and Ricardo had a mental
+vision of his face, with its martial moustache, the lofty forehead,
+the impassive features, and the quiet, meditative eyes.  Trapped!
+Confound it!  After all, perhaps the governor was right.  Women had
+to be shunned.  Fooling with this one had apparently ruined the
+whole business.  For, trapped as he was he might just as well kill,
+since, anyhow, to be seen was to be unmasked.  But he was too fair-
+minded to be angry with the girl.
+
+Heyst had paused on the veranda, or in the very doorway.
+
+"I shall be shot down like a dog if I ain't quick,"  Ricardo
+muttered excitedly to the girl.
+
+He stooped to get hold of his knife; and the next moment would have
+hurled himself out through the curtain, nearly, as prompt and fully
+as deadly to Heyst as an unexpected thunderbolt.  The feel more than
+the strength of the girl's hand, clutching at his shoulder, checked
+him.  He swung round, crouching with a yellow upward glare.  Ah!
+Was she turning against him?
+
+He would have stuck his knife into the hollow of her bare throat if
+he had not seen her other hand pointing to the window.  It was a
+long opening, high up, close under the ceiling almost, with a single
+pivoting shutter.
+
+While he was still looking at it she moved noiselessly away, picking
+up the overturned chair, and placed it under the wall.  Then she
+looked round; but he didn't need to be beckoned to.  In two long,
+tiptoeing strides he was at her side.
+
+"Be quick!" she gasped.
+
+He seized her hand and wrung it with all the force of his dumb
+gratitude, as a man does to a chum when there is no time for words.
+Then he mounted the chair.  Ricardo was short--too short to get over
+without a noisy scramble.  He hesitated an instant; she, watchful,
+bore rigidly on the seat with her beautiful bare arms, while, light
+and sure, he used the back of the chair as a ladder.  The masses of
+her brown hair fell all about her face.
+
+Footsteps resounded in the next room, and Heyst's voice, not very
+loud, called her by name.
+
+"Lena!"
+
+"Yes!  In a minute," she answered with a particular intonation which
+she knew would prevent Heyst from coming in at once.
+
+When she looked up, Ricardo had vanished, letting himself down
+outside so lightly that she had not heard the slightest noise.  She
+stood up then, bewildered, frightened, as if awakened from a drugged
+sleep, with heavy, downcast, unseeing eyes, her fortitude tired out,
+her imagination as if dead within her and unable to keep her fear
+alive.
+
+Heyst moved about aimlessly in the other room.  This sound roused
+her exhausted wits.  At once she began to think, hear, see; and what
+she saw--or rather recognized, for her eyes had been resting on it
+all the time--was Ricardo's straw slipper, lost in the scuffle,
+lying near the bath.  She had just time to step forward and plant
+her foot on it when the curtains shook, and, pushed aside, disclosed
+Heyst in the doorway.
+
+Out of the appeased enchantment of the senses she had found with
+him, like a sort of bewitched state, his danger brought a sensation
+of warmth to her breast.  She felt something stir in there,
+something profound, like a new sort of life.
+
+The room was in partial darkness, Ricardo having accidentally swung
+the pivoted shutter as he went out of the window.  Heyst peered from
+the doorway.
+
+"Why, you haven't done your hair yet," he said.
+
+"I won't stop to do it now.  I shan't be long," she replied
+steadily, and remained still, feeling Ricardo's slipper under the
+sole of her foot.
+
+Heyst, with a movement of retreat, let the curtain drop slowly.  On
+the instant she stooped for the slipper, and, with it in her hand,
+spun round wildly, looking for some hiding-place; but there was no
+such spot in the bare room.  The chest, the leather bunk, a dress or
+two of hers hanging on pegs--there was no place where the merest
+hazard might not guide Heyst's hand at any moment.  Her wildly
+roaming eyes were caught by the half-closed window.  She ran to it,
+and by raising herself on her toes was able to reach the shutter
+with her fingertips.  She pushed it square, stole back to the middle
+of the room, and, turning about, swung her arm, regulating the force
+of the throw so as not to let the slipper fly too far out and hit
+the edge of the overhanging eaves.  It was a task of the nicest
+judgement for the muscles of those round arms, still quivering from
+the deadly wrestle with a man, for that brain, tense with the
+excitement of the situation and for the unstrung nerves flickering
+darkness before her eyes.  At last the slipper left her hand.  As
+soon as it passed the opening, it was out of her sight.  She
+listened.  She did not hear it strike anything; it just vanished, as
+if it had wings to fly on through the air.  Not a sound!  It had
+gone clear.
+
+Her valiant arms hanging close against her side, she stood as if
+turned into stone.  A faint whistle reached her ears.  The forgetful
+Ricardo, becoming very much aware of his loss, had been hanging
+about in great anxiety, which was relieved by the appearance of the
+slipper flying from under the eaves; and now, thoughtfully, he had
+ventured a whistle to put her mind at ease.
+
+Suddenly the girl reeled forward.  She saved herself from a fall
+only by embracing with both arms one of the tall, roughly carved
+posts holding the mosquito net above the bed.  For a long time she
+dung to it, with her forehead leaning against the wood.  One side of
+her loosened sarong had slipped down as low as her hip.  The long
+brown tresses of her hair fell in lank wisps, as if wet, almost
+black against her white body.  Her uncovered flank, damp with the
+sweat of anguish and fatigue, gleamed coldly with the immobility of
+polished marble in the hot, diffused light falling through the
+window above her head--a dim reflection of the consuming, passionate
+blaze of sunshine outside, all aquiver with the effort to set the
+earth on fire, to burn it to ashes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+
+
+Heyst, seated at the table with his chin on his breast, raised his
+head at the faint rustle of Lena's dress.  He was startled by the
+dead pallor of her cheeks, by something lifeless in her eyes, which
+looked at him strangely, without recognition.  But to his anxious
+inquiries she answered reassuringly that there was nothing the
+matter with her, really.  She had felt giddy on rising.  She had
+even had a moment of faintness, after her bath.  She had to sit down
+to wait for it to pass.  This had made her late dressing.
+
+"I didn't try to do my hair.  I didn't want to keep you waiting any
+longer," she said.
+
+He was unwilling to press her with questions about her health, since
+she seemed to make light of this indisposition.  She had not done
+her hair, but she had brushed it, and had tied it with a ribbon
+behind.  With her forehead uncovered, she looked very young, almost
+a child, a careworn child; a child with something on its mind.
+
+What surprised Heyst was the non-appearance of Wang.  The Chinaman
+had always materialized at the precise moment of his service,
+neither too soon nor too late.  This time the usual miracle failed.
+What was the meaning of this?
+
+Heyst raised his voice--a thing he disliked doing.  It was promptly
+answered from the compound:
+
+"Ada tuan!"
+
+Lena, leaning on her elbow, with her eyes on her plate, did not seem
+to hear anything.  When Wang entered with a tray, his narrow eyes,
+tilted inward by the prominence of salient cheek-bones, kept her
+under stealthy observation all the time.  Neither the one nor the
+other of that white couple paid the slightest attention to him and
+he withdrew without having heard them exchange a single word.  He
+squatted on his heels on the back veranda.  His Chinaman's mind,
+very clear but not far-reaching, was made up according to the plain
+reason of things, such as it appeared to him in the light of his
+simple feeling for self-preservation, untrammelled by any notions of
+romantic honour or tender conscience.  His yellow hands, lightly
+clasped, hung idly between his knees.  The graves of Wang's
+ancestors were far away, his parents were dead, his elder brother
+was a soldier in the yamen of some Mandarin away in Formosa.  No one
+near by had a claim on his veneration or his obedience.  He had been
+for years a labouring restless vagabond.  His only tie in the world
+was the Alfuro woman, in exchange for whom he had given away some
+considerable part of his hard-earned substance; and his duty, in
+reason, could be to no one but himself.
+
+The scuffle behind the curtain was a thing of bad augury for that
+Number One for whom the Chinaman had neither love nor dislike.  He
+had been awed enough by that development to hang back with the
+coffee-pot till at last the white man was induced to call him in.
+Wang went in with curiosity.  Certainly, the white woman looked as
+if she had been wrestling with a spirit which had managed to tear
+half her blood out of her before letting her go.  As to the man,
+Wang had long looked upon him as being in some sort bewitched; and
+now he was doomed.  He heard their voices in the room.  Heyst was
+urging the girl to go and lie down again.  He was extremely
+concerned.  She had eaten nothing.
+
+"The best thing for you.  You really must!"
+
+She sat listless, shaking her head from time to time negatively, as
+if nothing could be any good.  But he insisted; she saw the
+beginning of wonder in his eyes, and suddenly gave way.
+
+"Perhaps I had better."
+
+She did not want to arouse his wonder, which would lead him straight
+to suspicion.  He must not suspect!
+
+Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that
+something rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace,
+there was born in her a woman's innate mistrust of masculinity, of
+that seductive strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from
+the recognition of the naked necessity of facts, which never yet
+frightened a woman worthy of the name.  She had no plan; but her
+mind, quieted down somewhat by the very effort to preserve outward
+composure for his sake, perceived that her behaviour had secured, at
+any rate, a short period of safety.  Perhaps because of the
+similarity of their miserable origin in the dregs of mankind, she
+had understood Ricardo perfectly.  He would keep quiet for a time
+now.  In this momentarily soothing certitude her bodily fatigue
+asserted itself, the more overpoweringly since its cause was not so
+much the demand on her strength as the awful suddenness of the
+stress she had had to meet.  She would have tried to overcome it
+from the mere instinct of resistance, if it had not been for Heyst's
+alternate pleadings and commands.  Before this eminently masculine
+fussing she felt the woman's need to give way, the sweetness of
+surrender.
+
+"I will do anything you like," she said.
+
+Getting up, she was surprised by a wave of languid weakness that
+came over her, embracing and enveloping her like warm water, with a
+noise in her ears as of a breaking sea.
+
+"You must help me along," she added quickly.
+
+While he put his arm round her waist--not by any means an uncommon
+thing for him to do--she found a special satisfaction in the feeling
+of being thus sustained.  She abandoned all her weight to that
+encircling and protecting pressure, while a thrill went through her
+at the sudden thought that it was she who would have to protect him,
+to be the defender of a man who was strong enough to lift her
+bodily, as he was doing even then in his two arms.  For Heyst had
+done this as soon as they had crept through the doorway of the room.
+He thought it was quicker and simpler to carry her the last step or
+two.  He had grown really too anxious to be aware of the effort.  He
+lifted her high and deposited her on the bed, as one lays a child on
+its side in a cot.  Then he sat down on the edge, masking his
+concern with a smile which obtained no response from the dreamy
+immobility of her eyes.  But she sought his hand, seized it eagerly;
+and while she was pressing it with all the force of which she was
+capable, the sleep she needed overtook her suddenly, overwhelmingly,
+as it overtakes a child in a cot, with her lips parted for a safe,
+endearing word which she had thought of but had no time to utter.
+
+The usual flaming silence brooded over Samburan.
+
+"What in the world is this new mystery?" murmured Heyst to himself,
+contemplating her deep slumber.
+
+It was so deep, this enchanted sleep, that when some time afterwards
+he gently tried to open her fingers and free his hand, he succeeded
+without provoking the slightest stir.
+
+"There is some very simple explanation, no doubt," he thought, as he
+stole out into the living-room.
+
+Absent-mindedly he pulled a book out of the top shelf, and sat down
+with it; but even after he had opened it on his knee, and had been
+staring at the pages for a time, he had not the slightest idea of
+what it was about.  He stared and stared at the crowded, parallel
+lines.  It was only when, raising his eyes for no particular reason,
+he saw Wang standing motionless on the other side of the table, that
+he regained complete control of his faculties.
+
+"Oh, yes," he said, as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten
+appointment of a not particularly welcome sort.
+
+He waited a little, and then, with reluctant curiosity, forced
+himself to ask the silent Wang what he had to say.  He had some idea
+that the matter of the vanished revolver would come up at last; but
+the guttural sounds which proceeded from the Chinaman did not refer
+to that delicate subject.  His speech was concerned with cups,
+saucers, plates, forks, and knives.  All these things had been put
+away in the cupboards on the back veranda, where they belonged,
+perfectly clean, "all plopel."  Heyst wondered at the scrupulosity
+of a man who was about to abandon him; for he was not surprised to
+hear Wang conclude the account of his stewardship with the words:
+
+"I go now."
+
+"Oh!  You go now?" said Heyst, leaning back, his book on his knees.
+
+"Yes.  Me no likee.  One man, two man, three man--no can do!  Me go
+now."
+
+"What's frightening you away like this?" asked Heyst, while through
+his mind flashed the hope that something enlightening might come
+from that being so unlike himself, taking contact with the world
+with a simplicity and directness of which his own mind was not
+capable.  "Why?" he went on.  "You are used to white men.  You know
+them well."
+
+"Yes.  Me savee them," assented Wang inscrutably.  "Me savee
+plenty."
+
+All that he really knew was his own mind.  He had made it up to
+withdraw himself and the Alfuro woman from the uncertainties of the
+relations which were going to establish themselves between those
+white men.  It was Pedro who had been the first cause of Wang's
+suspicion and fear.  The Chinaman had seen wild men.  He had
+penetrated, in the train of a Chinese pedlar, up one or two of the
+Bornean rivers into the country of the Dyaks.  He had also been in
+the interior of Mindanao, where there are people who live in trees--
+savages, no better than animals; but a hairy brute like Pedro, with
+his great fangs and ferocious growls, was altogether beyond his
+conception of anything that could be looked upon as human.  The
+strong impression made on him by Pedro was the prime inducement
+which had led Wang to purloin the revolver.  Reflection on the
+general situation, and on the insecurity of Number One, came later,
+after he had obtained possession of the revolver and of the box of
+cartridges out of the table drawer in the living-room.
+
+"Oh, you savee plenty about white men," Heyst went on in a slightly
+bantering tone, after a moment of silent reflection in which he had
+confessed to himself that the recovery of the revolver was not to be
+thought of, either by persuasion or by some more forcible means.
+"You speak in that fashion, but you are frightened of those white
+men over there."
+
+"Me no flightened," protested Wang raucously, throwing up his head--
+which gave to his throat a more strained, anxious appearance than
+ever.  "Me no likee," he added in a quieter tone.  "Me velly sick."
+
+He put his hand over the region under the breast-bone.
+
+"That," said Heyst, serenely positive, "belong one piecee lie.  That
+isn't proper man-talk at all.  And after stealing my revolver, too!"
+
+He had suddenly decided to speak about it, because this frankness
+could not make the situation much worse than it was.  He did not
+suppose for a moment that Wang had the revolver anywhere about his
+person; and after having thought the matter over, he had arrived at
+the conclusion that the Chinaman never meant to use the weapon
+against him.  After a slight start, because the direct charge had
+taken him unawares, Wang tore open the front of his jacket with a
+convulsive show of indignation.
+
+"No hab got.  Look see!" he mouthed in pretended anger.
+
+He slapped his bare chest violently; he uncovered his very ribs, all
+astir with the panting of outraged virtue; his smooth stomach heaved
+with indignation.  He started his wide blue breeches flapping about
+his yellow calves.  Heyst watched him quietly.
+
+"I never said you had it on you," he observed, without raising his
+voice; "but the revolver is gone from where I kept it."
+
+"Me no savee levolvel," Wang said obstinately.
+
+The book lying open on Heyst's knee slipped suddenly and he made a
+sharp movement to catch it up.  Wang was unable to see the reason of
+this because of the table, and leaped away from what seemed to him a
+threatening symptom.  When Heyst looked up, the Chinaman was already
+at the door facing the room, not frightened, but alert.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Heyst.
+
+Wang nodded his shaven head significantly at the curtain closing the
+doorway of the bedroom.
+
+"Me no likee," he repeated.
+
+"What the devil do you mean?" Heyst was genuinely amazed.  "Don't
+like what?"
+
+Wang pointed a long lemon-coloured finger at the motionless folds.
+
+"Two," he said.
+
+"Two what?  I don't understand."
+
+"Suppose you savee, you no like that fashion.  Me savee plenty.  Me
+go now."
+
+Heyst had risen from his chair, but Wang kept his ground in the
+doorway for a little longer.  His almond-shaped eyes imparted to his
+face an expression of soft and sentimental melancholy.  The muscles
+of his throat moved visibly while he uttered a distinct and guttural
+"Goodbye" and vanished from Number One's sight.
+
+The Chinaman's departure altered the situation.  Heyst reflected on
+what would be best to do in view of that fact.  For a long time he
+hesitated; then, shrugging his shoulders wearily, he walked out on
+the veranda, down the steps, and continued at a steady gait, with a
+thoughtful mien, in the direction of his guests' bungalow.  He
+wanted to make an important communication to them, and he had no
+other object--least of all to give them the shock of a surprise
+call.  Nevertheless, their brutish henchman not being on watch, it
+was Heyst's fate to startle Mr. Jones and his secretary by his
+sudden appearance in the doorway.  Their conversation must have been
+very interesting to prevent them from hearing the visitor's
+approach.  In the dim room--the shutters were kept constantly closed
+against the heat--Heyst saw them start apart.  It was Mr. Jones who
+spoke:
+
+"Ah, here you are again!  Come in, come in!"
+
+Heyst, taking his hat off in the doorway, entered the room.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+
+
+Waking up suddenly, Lena looked, without raising her head from the
+pillow, at the room in which she was alone.  She got up quickly, as
+if to counteract the awful sinking of her heart by the vigorous use
+of her limbs.  But this sinking was only momentary.  Mistress of
+herself from pride, from love, from necessity, and also because of a
+woman's vanity in self-sacrifice, she met Heyst, returning from the
+strangers' bungalow, with a dear glance and a smile.
+
+The smile he managed to answer, but, noticing that he avoided her
+eyes, she composed her lips and lowered her gaze.  For the same
+reason she hastened to speak to him in a tone of indifference, which
+she put on without effort, as if she had grown adept in duplicity
+since sunrise.
+
+"You have been over there again?"
+
+"I have.  I thought--but you had better know first that we have lost
+Wang for good."
+
+She repeated "For good?" as if she had not understood.
+
+"For good or evil--I shouldn't know which if you were to ask me.  He
+has dismissed himself.  He's gone."
+
+"You expected him to go, though, didn't you?"
+
+Heyst sat down on the other side of the table.
+
+"Yes.  I expected it as soon as I discovered that he had annexed my
+revolver.  He says he hasn't taken it.  That's untrue of course.  A
+Chinaman would not see the sense of confessing under any
+circumstances.  To deny any charge is a principle of right conduct;
+but he hardly expected to be believed.  He was a little enigmatic at
+the last, Lena.  He startled me."
+
+Heyst paused.  The girl seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.
+
+"He startled me," I repeated Heyst.  She noted the anxiety in his
+tone, and turned her head slightly to look at him across the table.
+
+"It must have been something--to startle you," she said.  In the
+depth of her parted lips, like a ripe pomegranate, there was a gleam
+of white teeth.
+
+"It was only a single word--and some of his gestures.  He had been
+making a good deal of noise.  I wonder we didn't wake you up.  How
+soundly you can sleep!  I say, do you feel all right now?"
+
+"As fresh as can be," she said, treating him to another deep gleam
+of a smile.  "I heard no noise, and I'm glad of it.  The way he
+talks in his harsh voice frightens me.  I don't like all these
+foreign people."
+
+"It was just before he went away--bolted out, I should say.  He
+nodded and pointed at the curtain to our room.  He knew you were
+there, of course.  He seemed to think--he seemed to try to give me
+to understand that you were in special--well, danger.  You know how
+he talks."
+
+She said nothing; she made no sound, only the faint tinge of colour
+ebbed out of her cheek.
+
+"Yes," Heyst went on.  "He seemed to try to warn me.  That must have
+been it Did he imagine I had forgotten your existence?  The only
+word he said was 'two'.  It sounded so, at least.  Yes, 'two'--and
+that he didn't like it."
+
+"What does that mean?" she whispered.
+
+"We know what the word two means, don't we, Lena?  We are two.
+Never were such a lonely two out of the world, my dear!  He might
+have tried to remind me that he himself has a woman to look after.
+Why are you so pale, Lena?"
+
+"Am I pale?" she asked negligently.
+
+"You are."  Heyst was really anxious.
+
+"Well, it isn't from fright," she protested truthfully.
+
+Indeed, what she felt was a sort of horror which left her absolutely
+in the full possession of all her faculties; more difficult to bear,
+perhaps, for that reason, but not paralysing to her fortitude.
+
+Heyst in his turn smiled at her.
+
+"I really don't know that there is any reason to be frightened."
+
+"I mean I am not frightened for myself."
+
+"I believe you are very plucky," he said.  The colour had returned
+to her face.  "I" continued Heyst, "am so rebellious to outward
+impressions that I can't say that much about myself.  I don't react
+with sufficient distinctness."  He changed his tone.  "You know I
+went to see those men first thing this morning."
+
+"I know.  Be careful!" she murmured.
+
+"I wonder how one can be careful!  I had a long talk with--but I
+don't believe you have seen them.  One of them is a fantastically
+thin, long person, apparently ailing; I shouldn't wonder if he were
+really so.  He makes rather a point of it in a mysterious manner.  I
+imagine he must have suffered from tropical fevers, but not so much
+as he tries to make out.  He's what people would call a gentleman.
+He seemed on the point of volunteering a tale of his adventures--for
+which I didn't ask him--but remarked that it was a long story; some
+other time, perhaps.
+
+"'I suppose you would like to know who I am?' he asked me.
+
+"I told him I would leave it to him, in a tone which, between
+gentlemen, could have left no doubt in his mind.  He raised himself
+on his elbow--he was lying down on the camp-bed--and said:
+
+"'I am he who is--'"
+
+Lena seemed not to be listening; but when Heyst paused, she turned
+her head quickly to him.  He took it for a movement of inquiry, but
+in this he was wrong.  A great vagueness enveloped her impressions,
+but all her energy was concentrated on the struggle that she wanted
+to take upon herself, in a great exaltation of love and self-
+sacrifice, which is woman's sublime faculty; altogether on herself,
+every bit of it, leaving him nothing, not even the knowledge of what
+she did, if that were possible.  She would have liked to lock him up
+by some stratagem.  Had she known of some means to put him to sleep
+for days she would have used incantations or philtres without
+misgivings.  He seemed to her too good for such contacts, and not
+sufficiently equipped.  This last feeling had nothing to do with the
+material fact of the revolver being stolen.  She could hardly
+appreciate that fact at its full value.
+
+Observing her eyes fixed and as if sightless--for the concentration
+on her purpose took all expression out of them--Heyst imagined it to
+be the effect of a great mental effort.
+
+"No use asking me what he meant, Lena; I don't know, and I did not
+ask him.  The gentleman, as I have told you before, seems devoted to
+mystification.  I said nothing, and he laid down his head again on
+the bundle of rugs he uses for a pillow.  He affects a state of
+great weakness, but I suspect that he's perfectly capable of leaping
+to his feet if he likes.  Having been ejected, he said, from his
+proper social sphere because he had refused to conform to certain
+usual conventions, he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up
+and down the earth.  As I really did not want to listen to all this
+nonsense, I told him that I had heard that sort of story about
+somebody else before.  His grin is really ghastly.  He confessed
+that I was very far from the sort of man he expected to meet.  Then
+he said:
+
+"'As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are thinking of,
+and I have neither more nor less determination.'"
+
+Heyst looked across the table at Lena.  Propped on her elbows, and
+holding her head in both hands, she moved it a little with an air of
+understanding.
+
+"Nothing could be plainer, eh?" said Heyst grimly.  "Unless, indeed,
+this is his idea of a pleasant joke; for, when he finished speaking,
+he burst into a loud long laugh.  I didn't join him!"
+
+"I wish you had," she breathed out.
+
+"I didn't join him.  It did not occur to me.  I am not much of a
+diplomatist.  It would probably have been wise, for, indeed, I
+believe he had said more than he meant to say, and was trying to
+take it back by this affected jocularity.  Yet when one thinks of
+it, diplomacy without force in the background is but a rotten reed
+to lean upon.  And I don't know whether I could have done it if I
+had thought of it.  I don't know.  It would have been against the
+grain.  Could I have done it?  I have lived too long within myself,
+watching the mere shadows and shades of life.  To deceive a man on
+some issue which could be decided quicker, by his destruction while
+one is disarmed, helpless, without even the power to run away--no!
+That seems to me too degrading.  And yet I have you here.  I have
+your very existence in my keeping.  What do you say, Lena?  Would I
+be capable of throwing you to the lions to save my dignity?"
+
+She got up, walked quickly round the table, posed herself on his
+knees lightly, throwing one arm round his neck, and whispered in his
+ear:
+
+"You may if you like.  And may be that's the only way I would
+consent to leave you.  For something like that.  If it were
+something no bigger than your little finger."
+
+She gave him a light kiss on the lips and was gone before he could
+detain her.  She regained her seat and propped her elbows again on
+the table.  It was hard to believe that she had moved from the spot
+at all.  The fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the hug round
+his neck, the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have
+been the unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of
+waking life; a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his
+thoughts.  He hesitated to speak till she said, businesslike:
+
+"Well.  And what then?"
+
+Heyst gave a start.
+
+"Oh, yes.  I didn't join him.  I let him have his laugh out by
+himself.  He was shaking all over, like a merry skeleton, under a
+cotton sheet he was covered with--I believe in order to conceal the
+revolver that he had in his right hand.  I didn't see it, but I have
+a distinct impression it was there in his fist.  As he had not been
+looking at me for some time, but staring into a certain part of the
+room, I turned my head and saw a hairy, wild sort of creature which
+they take about with them, squatting on its heels in the angle of
+the walls behind me.  He wasn't there when I came in.  I didn't like
+the notion of that watchful monster behind my back.  If I had been
+less at their mercy, I should certainly have changed my position.
+As things are now, to move would have been a mere weakness.  So I
+remained where I was.  The gentleman on the bed said he could assure
+me of one thing; and that was that his presence here was no more
+morally reprehensible than mine.
+
+"'We pursue the same ends,' he said, 'only perhaps I pursue them
+with more openness than you--with more simplicity.'
+
+"That's what he said," Heyst went on, after looking at Lena in a
+sort of inquiring silence.  "I asked him if he knew beforehand that
+I was living here; but he only gave me a ghastly grin.  I didn't
+press him for an answer, Lena.  I thought I had better not."
+
+On her smooth forehead a ray of light always seemed to rest.  Her
+loose hair, parted in the middle, covered the hands sustaining her
+head.  She seemed spellbound by the interest of the narrative.
+Heyst did not pause long.  He managed to continue his relation
+smoothly enough, beginning afresh with a piece of comment.
+
+"He would have lied impudently--and I detest being told a lie.  It
+makes me uncomfortable.  It's pretty clear that I am not fitted for
+the affairs of the wide world.  But I did not want him to think that
+I accepted his presence too meekly, so I said that his comings or
+goings on the earth were none of my business, of course, except that
+I had a natural curiosity to know when he would find it convenient
+to resume them.
+
+"He asked me to look at the state he was in.  Had I been all alone
+here, as they think I am, I should have laughed at him.  But not
+being alone--I say, Lena, you are sure you haven't shown yourself
+where you could be seen?"
+
+"Certain," she said promptly.
+
+He looked relieved.
+
+"You understand, Lena, that when I ask you to keep so strictly out
+of sight, it is because you are not for them to look at--to talk
+about.  My poor Lena!  I can't help that feeling.  Do you understand
+it?"
+
+She moved her head slightly in a manner that was neither affirmative
+nor negative.
+
+"People will have to see me some day," she said.
+
+"I wonder how long it will be possible for you to keep out of
+sight?" murmured Heyst thoughtfully.  He bent over the table.  "Let
+me finish telling you.  I asked him point blank what it was he
+wanted with me; he appeared extremely unwilling to come to the
+point.  It was not really so pressing as all that, he said.  His
+secretary, who was in fact his partner, was not present, having gone
+down to the wharf to look at their boat.  Finally the fellow
+proposed that he should put off a certain communication he had to
+make till the day after tomorrow.  I agreed; but I also told him
+that I was not at all anxious to hear it.  I had no conception in
+what way his affairs could concern me.
+
+"'Ah, Mr. Heyst,' he said, 'you and I have much more in common than
+you think.'"
+
+Heyst struck the table with his fist unexpectedly.
+
+"It was a jeer; I am sure it was!"
+
+He seemed ashamed of this outburst and smiled faintly into the
+motionless eyes of the girl.
+
+"What could I have done--even if I had had my pockets full of
+revolvers?"
+
+She made an appreciative sign.
+
+"Killing's a sin, sure enough," she murmured.
+
+"I went away," Heyst continued.  "I left him there, lying on his
+side with his eyes shut.  When I got back here, I found you looking
+ill.  What was it, Lena?  You did give me a scare!  Then I had the
+interview with Wang while you rested.  You were sleeping quietly.  I
+sat here to consider all these things calmly, to try to penetrate
+their inner meaning and their outward bearing.  It struck me that
+the two days we have before us have the character of a sort of
+truce.  The more I thought of it, the more I felt that this was
+tacitly understood between Jones and myself.  It was to our
+advantage, if anything can be of advantage to people caught so
+completely unawares as we are.  Wang was gone.  He, at any rate, had
+declared himself, but as I did not know what he might take it into
+his head to do, I thought I had better warn these people that I was
+no longer responsible for the Chinaman.  I did not want Mr. Wang
+making some move which would precipitate the action against us.  Do
+you see my point of view?"
+
+She made a sign that she did.  All her soul was wrapped in her
+passionate determination, in an exalted belief in herself--in the
+contemplation of her amazing opportunity to win the certitude, the
+eternity, of that man's love.
+
+"I never saw two men," Heyst was saying, "more affected by a piece
+of information than Jones and his secretary, who was back in the
+bungalow by then.  They had not heard me come up.  I told them I was
+sorry to intrude.
+
+"'Not at all!  Not at all,' said Jones.
+
+"The secretary backed away into a corner and watched me like a wary
+cat.  In fact, they both were visibly on their guard.
+
+"'I am come,' I told them, 'to let you know that my servant has
+deserted--gone off.'
+
+"At first they looked at each other as if they had not understood
+what I was saying; but very soon they seemed quite concerned.
+
+"'You mean to say your Chink's cleared out?' said Ricardo, coming
+forward from his corner.  'Like this--all at once?  What did he do
+it for?'
+
+"I said that a Chinaman had always a simple and precise reason for
+what he did, but that to get such a reason out of him was not so
+easy.  All he told me, I said, was that he "didn't like".
+
+"They were extremely disturbed at this.  Didn't like what, they
+wanted to know.
+
+"'The looks of you and your party,' I told Jones.
+
+"'Nonsense!' he cried out, and immediately Ricardo, the short man,
+struck in.
+
+"'Told you that?  What did he take you for, sir--an infant?  Or do
+you take us for kids?--meaning no offence.  Come, I bet you will
+tell us next that you've missed something.'"
+
+"'I didn't mean to tell you anything of the sort,' I said, 'but as a
+matter of fact it is so.'
+
+"He slapped his thigh.
+
+"'Thought so.  What do you think of this trick, governor?'
+
+"Jones made some sort of sign to him, and then that extraordinary
+cat-faced associate proposed that he and their servant should come
+out and help me catch or kill the Chink.
+
+"My object, I said, was not to get assistance.  I did not intend to
+chase the Chinaman.  I had come only to warn them that he was armed,
+and that he really objected to their presence on the island.  I
+wanted them to understand that I was not responsible for anything
+that might happen.
+
+"'Do you mean to tell us,' asked Ricardo, 'that there is a crazy
+Chink with a six-shooter broke loose on this island, and that you
+don't care?'
+
+"Strangely enough they did not seem to believe my story.  They were
+exchanging significant looks all the time.  Ricardo stole up close
+to his principal; they had a confabulation together, and then
+something happened which I did not expect.  It's rather awkward,
+too.
+
+"Since I would not have their assistance to get hold of the Chink
+and recover my property, the least they could do was to send me
+their servant.  It was Jones who said that, and Ricardo backed up
+the idea.
+
+"'Yes, yes--let our Pedro cook for all hands in your compound!  He
+isn't so bad as he looks.  That's what we will do!'
+
+"He bustled out of the room to the veranda, and let out an ear-
+splitting whistle for their Pedro.  Having heard the brute's
+answering howl, Ricardo ran back into the room.
+
+"'Yes, Mr. Heyst.  This will do capitally, Mr. Heyst.  You just
+direct him to do whatever you are accustomed to have done for you in
+the way of attendance.  See?'
+
+"Lena, I confess to you that I was taken completely by surprise.  I
+had not expected anything of the sort.  I don't know what I
+expected.  I am so anxious about you that I can't keep away from
+these infernal scoundrels.  And only two months ago I would not have
+cared.  I would have defied their scoundrelism as much as I have
+scorned all the other intrusions of life.  But now I have you!  You
+stole into my life, and--"
+
+Heyst drew a deep breath.  The girl gave him a quick, wide-eyed
+glance.
+
+"Ah!  That's what you are thinking of--that you have me!"
+
+It was impossible to read the thoughts veiled by her steady grey
+eyes, to penetrate the meaning of her silences, her words, and even
+her embraces.  He used to come out of her very arms with the feeling
+of a baffled man.
+
+"If I haven't you, if you are not here, then where are you?" cried
+Heyst.  "You understand me very well."
+
+She shook her head a little.  Her red lips, at which he looked now,
+her lips as fascinating as the voice that came out of them, uttered
+the words:
+
+"I hear what you say; but what does it mean?"
+
+"It means that I could lie and perhaps cringe for your sake."
+
+"No!  No!  Don't you ever do that," she said in haste, while her
+eyes glistened suddenly.  "You would hate me for it afterwards!"
+
+"Hate you?" repeated Heyst, who had recalled his polite manner.
+"No!  You needn't consider the extremity of the improbable--as yet.
+But I will confess to you that I--how shall I call it?--that I
+dissembled.  First I dissembled my dismay at the unforeseen result
+of my idiotic diplomacy.  Do you understand, my dear girl?"
+
+It was evident that she did not understand the word.  Heyst produced
+his playful smile, which contrasted oddly with the worried character
+of his whole expression.  His temples seemed to have sunk in, his
+face looked a little leaner.
+
+"A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is
+true, but the sentiment which seems to prompt it.  I have never been
+diplomatic in my relation with mankind--not from regard for its
+feelings, but from a certain regard for my own.  Diplomacy doesn't
+go well with consistent contempt.  I cared little for life and still
+less for death."
+
+"Don't talk like that!"
+
+"I dissembled my extreme longing to take these wandering scoundrels
+by their throats," he went on.  "I have only two hands--I wish I had
+a hundred to defend you--and there were three throats.  By that time
+their Pedro was in the room too.  Had he seen me engaged with their
+two throats, he would have been at mine like a fierce dog, or any
+other savage and faithful brute.  I had no difficulty in dissembling
+my longing for the vulgar, stupid, and hopeless argument of fight.
+I remarked that I really did not want a servant.  I couldn't think
+of depriving them of their man's services; but they would not hear
+me.  They had made up their minds.
+
+"'We shall send him over at once,' Ricardo said, 'to start cooking
+dinner for everybody.  I hope you won't mind me coming to eat it
+with you in your bungalow; and we will send the governor's dinner
+over to him here.'
+
+"I could do nothing but hold my tongue or bring on a quarrel--some
+manifestation of their dark purpose, which we have no means to
+resist.  Of course, you may remain invisible this evening; but with
+that atrocious-brute prowling all the time at the back of the house,
+how long can your presence be concealed from these men?"
+
+Heyst's distress could be felt in his silence.  The girl's head,
+sustained by her hands buried in the thick masses of her hair, had a
+perfect immobility.
+
+"You are certain you have not been seen so far?" he asked suddenly.
+
+The motionless head spoke.
+
+"How can I be certain?  You told me you wanted me to keep out of the
+way.  I kept out of the way.  I didn't ask your reason.  I thought
+you didn't want people to know that you had a girl like me about
+you."
+
+"What?  Ashamed?" cried Heyst.
+
+"It isn't what's right, perhaps--I mean for you--is it?"
+
+Heyst lifted his hands, reproachfully courteous.
+
+"I look upon it as so very much right that I couldn't bear the idea
+of any other than sympathetic, respectful eyes resting on you.  I
+disliked and mistrusted these fellows from the first.  Didn't you
+understand?"
+
+"Yes; I did keep out of sight," she said.
+
+A silence fell.  At last Heyst stirred slightly.
+
+"All this is of very little importance now," he said with a sigh.
+"This is a question of something infinitely worse than mere looks
+and thoughts, however base and contemptible.  As I have told you, I
+met Ricardo's suggestions by silence.  As I was turning away he
+said:
+
+"'If you happen to have the key of that store-room of yours on you,
+Mr. Heyst, you may just as well let me have it; I will give it to
+our Pedro.'
+
+"I had it on me, and I tendered it to him without speaking.  The
+hairy creature was at the door by then, and caught the key, which
+Ricardo threw to him, better than any trained ape could have done.
+I came away.  All the time I had been thinking anxiously of you,
+whom I had left asleep, alone here, and apparently ill."
+
+Heyst interrupted himself, with a listening turn of his head.  He
+had heard the faint sound of sticks being snapped in the compound.
+He rose and crossed the room to look out of the back door.
+
+"And here the creature is," he said, returning to the table.  "Here
+he is, already attending to the fire.  Oh, my dear Lena!"
+
+She had followed him with her eyes.  She watched him go out on the
+front veranda cautiously.  He lowered stealthily a couple of screens
+that hung between the column, and remained outside very still, as if
+interested by something on the open ground.  Meantime she had risen
+in her turn, to take a peep into the compound.  Heyst, glancing over
+his shoulder, saw her returning to her seat.  He beckoned to her,
+and she continued to move, crossing the shady room, pure and bright
+in her white dress, her hair loose, with something of a sleep-walker
+in her unhurried motion, in her extended hand, in the sightless
+effect of her grey eyes luminous in the half-light.  He had never
+seen such an expression in her face before.  It had dreaminess in
+it, intense attention, and something like sternness.  Arrested in
+the doorway by Heyst's extended arm, she seemed to wake up, flushed
+faintly--and this flush, passing off, carried away with it the
+strange transfiguring mood.  With a courageous gesture she pushed
+back the heavy masses of her hair.  The light clung to her forehead.
+Her delicate nostrils quivered.  Heyst seized her arm and whispered
+excitedly:
+
+"Slip out here, quickly!  The screens will conceal you.  Only you
+must mind the stair-space.  They are actually out--I mean the other
+two.  You had better see them before you--"
+
+She made a barely perceptible movement of recoil, checked at once,
+and stood still.  Heyst released her arm.
+
+"Yes, perhaps I had better," she said with unnatural deliberation,
+and stepped out on the veranda to stand close by his side.
+
+Together, one on each side of the screen, they peeped between the
+edge of the canvas and the veranda-post entwined with creepers.  A
+great heat ascended from the sun-smitten ground, in an ever-rising
+wave, as if from some secret store of earth's fiery heart; for the
+sky was growing cooler already, and the sun had declined
+sufficiently for the shadows of Mr. Jones and his henchman to be
+projected towards the bungalow side by side--one infinitely slender,
+the other short and broad.
+
+The two visitors stood still and gazed.  To keep up the fiction of
+his invalidism, Mr. Jones, the gentleman, leaned on the arm of
+Ricardo, the secretary, the top of whose hat just came up to his
+governor's shoulder.
+
+"Do you see them?" Heyst whispered into the girl's ear.  "Here they
+are, the envoys of the outer world.  Here they are before you--evil
+intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm.  The brute force is
+at the back.  A trio of fitting envoys perhaps--but what about the
+welcome?  Suppose I were armed, could I shoot these two down where
+they stand?  Could I?"
+
+Without moving her head, the girl felt for Heyst's hand, pressed it
+and thereafter did not let it go.  He continued, bitterly playful:
+
+"I don't know.  I don't think so.  There is a strain in me which
+lays me under an insensate obligation to avoid even the appearance
+of murder.  I have never pulled a trigger or lifted my hand on a
+man, even in self-defence."
+
+The suddenly tightened grip of her hand checked him.
+
+"They are making a move," she murmured.
+
+"Can they be thinking of coming here?" Heyst wondered anxiously.
+
+"No, they aren't coming this way," she said; and there was another
+pause.  "They are going back to their house," she reported finally.
+
+After watching them a little longer, she let go Heyst's hand and
+moved away from the screen.  He followed her into the room.
+
+"You have seen them now," he began.  "Think what it was to me to see
+them land in the dusk, fantasms from the sea--apparitions, chimeras!
+And they persist.  That's the worst of it--they persist.  They have
+no right to be--but they are.  They ought to have aroused my fury.
+But I have refined everything away by this time--anger, indignation,
+scorn itself.  Nothing's left but disgust.  Since you have told me
+of that abominable calumny, it has become immense--it extends even
+to myself."  He looked up at her.
+
+"But luckily I have you.  And if only Wang had, not carried off that
+miserable revolver--yes, Lena, here we are, we two!"
+
+She put both her hands on his shoulders and looked straight into his
+eyes.  He returned her penetrating gaze.  It baffled him.  He could
+not pierce the grey veil of her eyes; but the sadness of her voice
+thrilled him profoundly.
+
+"You are not reproaching me?" she asked slowly.
+
+"Reproach?  What a word between us!  It could only be myself--but
+the mention of Wang has given me an idea.  I have been, not exactly
+cringing, not exactly lying, but still dissembling.  You have been
+hiding yourself, to please me, but still you have been hiding.  All
+this is very dignified.  Why shouldn't we try begging now?  A noble
+art?  Yes.  Lena, we must go out together.  I couldn't think of
+leaving you alone, and I must--yes, I must speak to Wang.  We shall
+go and seek that man, who knows what he wants and how to secure what
+he wants.  We will go at once!"
+
+"Wait till I put my hair up," she agreed instantly, and vanished
+behind the curtain.
+
+When the curtain had fallen behind her, she turned her head back
+with an expression of infinite and tender concern for him--for him
+whom she could never hope to understand, and whom she was afraid she
+could never satisfy, as if her passion were of a hopelessly lower
+quality, unable to appease some exalted and delicate desire of his
+superior soul.  In a couple of minutes she reappeared.  They left
+the house by the door of the compound, and passed within three feet
+of the thunderstruck Pedro, without even looking in his direction.
+He rose from stooping over a fire of sticks, and, balancing himself
+clumsily, uncovered his enormous fangs in gaping astonishment.  Then
+suddenly he set off rolling on his bandy legs to impart to his
+masters the astonishing discovery of a woman.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+
+
+As luck would have it, Ricardo was lounging alone on the veranda of
+the former counting-house.  He scented some new development at once,
+and ran down to meet the trotting, bear-like figure.  The deep,
+growling noises it made, though they had only a very remote
+resemblance to the Spanish language, or indeed to any sort of human
+speech, were from long practice quite intelligible to Mr. Jones's
+secretary.  Ricardo was rather surprised.  He had imagined that the
+girl would continue to keep out of sight.  That line apparently was
+given up.  He did not mistrust her.  How could he?  Indeed, he could
+not think of her existence calmly.
+
+He tried to keep her image out of his mind so that he should be able
+to use its powers with some approach to that coolness which the
+complex nature of the situation demanded from him, both for his own
+sake and as the faithful follower of plain Mr. Jones, gentleman.
+
+He collected his wits and thought.  This was a change of policy,
+probably on the part of Heyst.  If so, what could it mean?  A deep
+fellow!  Unless it was her doing; in which case--h'm--all right.
+Must be.  She would know what she was doing.  Before him Pedro,
+lifting his feet alternately, swayed to and fro sideways--his usual
+attitude of expectation.  His little red eyes, lost in the mass of
+hair, were motionless.  Ricardo stared into them with calculated
+contempt and said in a rough, angry voice:
+
+"Woman!  Of course there is.  We know that without you!"  He gave
+the tame monster a push.  "Git!  Vamos!  Waddle!  Get back and cook
+the dinner.  Which way did they go, then?"
+
+Pedro extended a huge, hairy forearm to show the direction, and went
+off on his bandy legs.  Advancing a few steps, Ricardo was just in
+time to see, above some bushes, two white helmets moving side by
+side in the clearing.  They disappeared.  Now that he had managed to
+keep Pedro from informing the governor that there was a woman on the
+island, he could indulge in speculation as to the movements of these
+people.  His attitude towards Mr. Jones had undergone a spiritual
+change, of which he himself was not yet fully aware.
+
+That morning, before tiffin, after his escape from the Heyst
+bungalow, completed in such an inspiring way by the recovery of the
+slipper, Ricardo had made his way to their allotted house, reeling
+as he ran, his head in a whirl.  He was wildly excited by visions of
+inconceivable promise.  He waited to compose himself before he dared
+to meet the governor.  On entering the room, he found Mr. Jones
+sitting on the camp bedstead like a tailor on his board, cross-
+legged, his long back against the wall.
+
+"I say, sir.  You aren't going to tell me you are bored?"
+
+"Bored!  No!  Where the devil have you been all this time?"
+
+"Observing--watching--nosing around.  What else?  I knew you had
+company.  Have you talked freely, sir?"
+
+"Yes, I have," muttered Mr. Jones.
+
+"Not downright plain, sir?"
+
+"No.  I wished you had been here.  You loaf all the morning, and now
+you come in out of breath.  What's the matter?"
+
+"I haven't been wasting my time out there," said Ricardo.
+"Nothing's the matter.  I--I--might have hurried a bit."  He was in
+truth still panting; only it was not with running, but with the
+tumult of thoughts and sensations long repressed, which had been set
+free by the adventure of the morning.  He was almost distracted by
+them now.  He forgot himself in the maze of possibilities
+threatening and inspiring.  "And so you had a long talk?" he said,
+to gain time.
+
+"Confound you!  The sun hasn't affected your head, has it?  Why are
+you staring at me like a basilisk?"
+
+"Beg pardon, sir.  Wasn't aware I stared," Ricardo apologized good-
+humouredly.  "The sun might well affect a thicker skull than mine.
+It blazes.  Phew!  What do you think a fellow is, sir--a
+salamander?"
+
+"You ought to have been here," observed Mr. Jones.
+
+"Did the beast give any signs of wanting to prance?" asked Ricardo
+quickly, with absolutely genuine anxiety.  "It wouldn't do, sir.
+You must play him easy for at least a couple of days, sir.  I have a
+plan.  I have a notion that I can find out a lot in a couple of
+days."
+
+"You have?  In what way?"
+
+"Why, by watching," Ricardo answered slowly.
+
+Mr Jones grunted.
+
+"Nothing new, that.  Watch, eh?  Why not pray a little, too?"
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!  That's a good one," burst out the secretary, fixing
+Mr. Jones with mirthless eyes.
+
+The latter dropped the subject indolently.
+
+"Oh, you may be certain of at least two days," he said.
+
+Ricardo recovered himself.  His eyes gleamed voluptuously.
+
+"We'll pull this off yet--clean--whole--right through, if you will
+only trust me, sir."
+
+"I am trusting you right enough," said Mr. Jones.  "It's your
+interest, too."
+
+And, indeed, Ricardo was truthful enough in his statement.  He did
+absolutely believe in success now.  But he couldn't tell his
+governor that he had intelligences in the enemy's camp.  It wouldn't
+do to tell him of the girl.  Devil only knew what he would do if he
+learned there was a woman about.  And how could he begin to tell of
+it?  He couldn't confess his sudden escapade.
+
+"We'll pull it off, sir," he said, with perfectly acted
+cheerfulness.  He experienced gusts of awful joy expanding in his
+heart and hot like a fanned flame.
+
+"We must," pronounced Mr. Jones.  "This thing, Martin, is not like
+our other tries.  I have a peculiar feeling about this.  It's a
+different thing.  It's a sort of test."
+
+Ricardo was impressed by the governor's manner; for the first time a
+hint of passion could be detected in him.  But also a word he used,
+the word "test," had struck him as particularly significant somehow.
+It was the last word uttered during that morning's conversation.
+Immediately afterwards Ricardo went out of the room.  It was
+impossible for him to keep still.  An elation in which an
+extraordinary softness mingled with savage triumph would not allow
+it.  It prevented his thinking, also.  He walked up and down the
+veranda far into the afternoon, eyeing the bungalow at every turn.
+It gave no sign of being inhabited.  Once or twice he stopped dead
+short and looked down at his left slipper.  Each time he chuckled
+audibly.  His restlessness kept on increasing till at last it
+frightened him.  He caught hold of the balustrade of the veranda and
+stood still, smiling not at his thought but at the strong sense of
+life within him.  He abandoned himself to it carelessly, even
+recklessly.  He cared for no one, friend or enemy.  At that moment
+Mr. Jones called him by name from within.  A shadow fell on the
+secretary's face.
+
+"Here, sir," he answered; but it was a moment before he could make
+up his mind to go in.
+
+He found the governor on his feet.  Mr. Jones was tired of lying
+down when there was no necessity for it.  His slender form, gliding
+about the room, came to a standstill.
+
+"I've been thinking, Martin, of something you suggested.  At the
+time it did not strike me as practical; but on reflection it seems
+to me that to propose a game is as good a way as any to let him
+understand that the time has come to disgorge.  It's less--how
+should I say?--vulgar.  He will know what it means.  It's not a bad
+form to give to the business--which in itself is crude, Martin,
+crude."
+
+"Want to spare his feelings?" jeered the secretary in such a bitter
+tone that Mr. Jones was really surprised.
+
+"Why, it was your own notion, confound you!"
+
+"Who says it wasn't?" retorted Ricardo sulkily.  "But I am fairly
+sick of this crawling.  No!  No!  Get the exact bearings of his swag
+and then a rip up.  That's plenty good enough for him."
+
+His passions being thoroughly aroused, a thirst for blood was allied
+in him with a thirst for tenderness--yes, tenderness.  A sort of
+anxious, melting sensation pervaded and softened his heart when he
+thought of that girl--one of his own sort.  And at the same time
+jealousy started gnawing at his breast as the image of Heyst
+intruded itself on his fierce anticipation of bliss.
+
+"The crudeness of your ferocity is positively gross, Martin," Mr.
+Jones said disdainfully.  "You don't even understand my purpose.  I
+mean to have some sport out of him.  Just try to imagine the
+atmosphere of the game--the fellow handling the cards--the agonizing
+mockery of it!  Oh, I shall appreciate this greatly.  Yes, let him
+lose his money instead of being forced to hand it over.  You, of
+course, would shoot him at once, but I shall enjoy the refinement
+and the jest of it.  He's a man of the best society.  I've been
+hounded out of my sphere by people very much like that fellow.  How
+enraged and humiliated he will be!  I promise myself some exquisite
+moments while watching his play."
+
+"Ay, and suppose he suddenly starts prancing.  He may not appreciate
+the fun."
+
+"I mean you to be present," Mr. Jones remarked calmly.
+
+"Well, as long as I am free to plug him or rip him up whenever I
+think the time has come, you are welcome to your bit of sport, sir.
+I shan't spoil it."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+
+
+It was at this precise moment of their conversation that Heyst had
+intruded on Mr. Jones and his secretary with his warning about Wang,
+as he had related to Lena.  When he left them, the two looked at
+each other in wondering silence.  My Jones was the first to break
+it.
+
+"I say, Martin!"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"What does this mean?"
+
+"It's some move.  Blame me if I can understand."
+
+"Too deep for you?" Mr. Jones inquired dryly.
+
+"It's nothing but some of his infernal impudence," growled the
+secretary.  "You don't believe all that about the Chink, do you,
+sir?  'Tain't true."
+
+"It isn't necessary for it to be true to have a meaning for us.
+It's the why of his coming to tell us this tale that's important."
+
+"Do you think he made it up to frighten us?" asked Ricardo.
+
+Mr Jones scowled at him thoughtfully.
+
+"The man looked worried," he muttered, as if to himself.  "Suppose
+that Chinaman has really stolen his money!  The man looked very
+worried."
+
+"Nothing but his artfulness, sir," protested Ricardo earnestly, for
+the idea was too disconcerting to entertain.  "Is it likely that he
+would have trusted a Chink with enough knowledge to make it
+possible?" he argued warmly.  "Why, it's the very thing that he
+would keep close about.  There's something else there.  Ay, but
+what?"
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!" Mr. Jones let out a ghostly, squeaky laugh.  "I've
+never been placed in such a ridiculous position before," he went on,
+with a sepulchral equanimity of tone.  "It's you, Martin, who
+dragged me into it.  However, it's my own fault too.  I ought to--
+but I was really too bored to use my brain, and yours is not to be
+trusted.  You are a hothead!"
+
+A blasphemous exclamation of grief escaped from Ricardo.  Not to be
+trusted!  Hothead!  He was almost tearful.
+
+"Haven't I heard you, sir, saying more than twenty times since we
+got fired out from Manila that we should want a lot of capital to
+work the East Coast with?  You were always telling me that to prime
+properly all them officials and Portuguese scallywags we should have
+to lose heavily at first.  Weren't you always worrying about some
+means of getting hold of a good lot of cash?  It wasn't to be got
+hold of by allowing yourself to become bored in that rotten Dutch
+town and playing a two-penny game with confounded beggarly bank
+clerks and such like.  Well, I've brought you here, where there is
+cash to be got--and a big lot, to a moral," he added through his set
+teeth.
+
+Silence fell.  Each of them was staring into a different corner of
+the room.  Suddenly, with a slight stamp of his foot, Mr. Jones made
+for the door.  Ricardo caught him up outside.
+
+"Put an arm through mine, sir," he begged him gently but firmly.
+"No use giving the game away.  An invalid may well come out for a
+breath of fresh air after the sun's gone down a bit.  That's it,
+sir.  But where do you want to go?  Why did you come out, sir?"
+
+Mr Jones stopped short.
+
+"I hardly know myself," he confessed in a hollow mutter, staring
+intently at the Number One bungalow.  "It's quite irrational," he
+declared in a still lower tone.
+
+"Better go in, sir," suggested Ricardo.  "What's that?  Those
+screens weren't down before.  He's spying from behind them now, I
+bet--the dodging, artful, plotting beast!"
+
+"Why not go over there and see if we can't get to the bottom of this
+game?" was the unexpected proposal uttered by Mr. Jones.  "He will
+have to talk to us."
+
+Ricardo repressed a start of dismay, but for a moment could not
+speak.  He only pressed the governor's hand to his side
+instinctively.
+
+"No, sir.  What could you say?  Do you expect to get to the bottom
+of his lies?  How could you make him talk?  It isn't time yet to
+come to grips with that gent.  You don't think I would hang back, do
+you?  His Chink, of course, I'll shoot like a dog the moment I catch
+sight of him; but as to that Mr. Blasted Heyst, the time isn't yet.
+My head's cooler just now than yours.  Let's go in again.  Why, we
+are exposed here.  Suppose he took it into his head to let off a gun
+on us!  He's an unaccountable, 'yporcritical skunk."
+
+Allowing himself to be persuaded, Mr. Jones returned to his
+seclusion.  The secretary, however, remained on the veranda--for the
+purpose, he said, of seeing whether that Chink wasn't sneaking
+around; in which case he proposed to take a long shot at the galoot
+and chance the consequences.  His real reason was that he wanted to
+be alone, away from the governor's deep-sunk eyes.  He felt a
+sentimental desire to indulge his fancies in solitude.  A great
+change had come over Mr. Ricardo since that morning.  A whole side
+of him which from prudence, from necessity, from loyalty, had been
+kept dormant, was aroused now, colouring his thoughts and disturbing
+his mental poise by the vision of such staggering consequences as,
+for instance, the possibility of an active conflict with the
+governor.  The appearance of the monstrous Pedro with his news drew
+Ricardo out of a feeling of dreaminess wrapped up in a sense of
+impending trouble.  A woman?  Yes, there was one; and it made all
+the difference.  After driving away Pedro, and watching the white
+helmets of Heyst and Lena vanishing among the bushes he stood lost
+in meditation.
+
+"Where could they be off to like this?" he mentally asked himself.
+
+The answer found by his speculative faculties on their utmost
+stretch was--to meet that Chink.  For in the desertion of Wang
+Ricardo did not believe.  It was a lying yarn, the organic part of a
+dangerous plot.  Heyst had gone to combine some fresh move.  But
+then Ricardo felt sure that the girl was with him--the girl full of
+pluck, full of sense, full of understanding; an ally of his own
+kind!
+
+He went indoors briskly.  Mr. Jones had resumed his cross-legged
+pose at the head of the bed, with his back against the wall.
+
+"Anything new?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+Ricardo walked about the room as if he had no care in the world.  He
+hummed snatches of song.  Mr. Jones raised his waspish eyebrows, at
+the sound.  The secretary got down on his knees before an old
+leather trunk, and, rummaging in there, brought out a small looking-
+glass.  He fell to examining his physiognomy in it with silent
+absorption.
+
+"I think I'll shave," he decided, getting up.
+
+He gave a sidelong glance to the governor, and repeated it several
+times during the operation, which did not take long, and even
+afterwards, when after putting away the implements, he resumed his
+walking, humming more snatches of unknown songs.  Mr. Jones
+preserved a complete immobility, his thin lips compressed, his eyes
+veiled.  His face was like a carving.
+
+"So you would like to try your hand at cards with that skunk, sir?"
+said Ricardo, stopping suddenly and rubbing his hands.
+
+Mr Jones gave no sign of having heard anything.
+
+"Well, why not?  Why shouldn't he have the experience?  You remember
+in that Mexican town--what's its name?--the robber fellow they
+caught in the mountains and condemned to be shot?  He played cards
+half the night with the jailer and the sheriff.  Well, this fellow
+is condemned, too.  He must give you your game.  Hang it all, a
+gentleman ought to have some little relaxation!  And you have been
+uncommonly patient, sir."
+
+"You are uncommonly volatile all of a sudden," Mr. Jones remarked in
+a bored voice.  "What's come to you?"
+
+The secretary hummed for a while, and then said:
+
+"I'll try to get him over here for you tonight, after dinner.  If I
+ain't here myself, don't you worry, sir.  I shall be doing a bit of
+nosing around--see?"
+
+"I see," sneered Mr. Jones languidly.  "But what do you expect to
+see in the dark?"
+
+Ricardo made no answer, and after another turn or two slipped out of
+the room.  He no longer felt comfortable alone with the governor.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+
+
+Meantime Heyst and Lena, walking rather fast, approached Wang's hut.
+Asking the girl to wait, Heyst ascended the little ladder of bamboos
+giving access to the door.  It was as he had expected.  The smoky
+interior was empty, except for a big chest of sandalwood too heavy
+for hurried removal.  Its lid was thrown up, but whatever it might
+have contained was no longer there.  All Wang's possessions were
+gone.  Without tarrying in the hut, Heyst came back to the girl, who
+asked no questions, with her strange air of knowing or understanding
+everything.
+
+"Let us push on," he said.
+
+He went ahead, the rustle of her white skirt following him into the
+shades of the forest, along the path of their usual walk.  Though
+the air lay heavy between straight denuded trunks, the sunlit
+patches moved on the ground, and raising her eyes Lena saw far above
+her head the flutter of the leaves, the surface shudder on the
+mighty limbs extended horizontally in the perfect immobility of
+patience.  Twice Heyst looked over his shoulder at her.  Behind the
+readiness of her answering smile there was a fund of devoted,
+concentrated passion, burning with the hope of a more perfect
+satisfaction.  They passed the spot where it was their practice to
+turn towards the barren summit of the central hill.  Heyst held
+steadily on his way towards the upper limit of the forest.  The
+moment they left its shelter, a breeze enveloped them, and a great
+cloud, racing over the sun, threw a peculiar sombre tint over
+everything.  Heyst pointed up a precipitous, rugged path clinging to
+the side of the hill.  It ended in a barricade of felled trees, a
+primitively conceived obstacle which must have cost much labour to
+erect at just that spot.
+
+"This," Heyst, explained in his urbane tone, "is a barrier against
+the march of civilization.  The poor folk over there did not like
+it, as it appeared to them in the shape of my company--a great step
+forward, as some people used to call it with mistaken confidence.
+The advanced foot has been drawn back, but the barricade remains."
+
+They went on climbing slowly.  The cloud had driven over, leaving an
+added brightness on the face of the world.
+
+"It's a very ridiculous thing," Heyst went on; "but then it is the
+product of honest fear--fear of the unknown, of the
+incomprehensible.  It's pathetic, too, in a way.  And I heartily
+wish, Lena, that we were on the other side of it."
+
+"Oh, stop, stop!" she cried, seizing his arm.
+
+The face of the barricade they were approaching had been piled up
+with a lot of fresh-cut branches.  The leaves were still green.  A
+gentle breeze, sweeping over the top, stirred them a little; but
+what had startled the girl was the discovery of several spear-blades
+protruding from the mass of foliage.  She had made them out
+suddenly.  They did not gleam, but she saw them with extreme
+distinctness, very still, very vicious to look at.
+
+"You had better let me go forward alone, Lena," said Heyst.
+
+She tugged, persistently at his arm, but after a time, during which
+he never ceased to look smilingly into her terrified eyes, he ended
+by disengaging himself.
+
+"It's a sign rather than a demonstration," he argued, persuasively.
+"Just wait here a moment.  I promise not to approach near enough to
+be stabbed."
+
+As in a nightmare she watched Heyst go up the few yards of the path
+as if he never meant to stop; and she heard his voice, like voices
+heard in dreams, shouting unknown words in an unearthly tone.  Heyst
+was only demanding to see Wang.  He was not kept waiting very long.
+Recovering from the first flurry of her fright, Lena noticed a
+commotion in the green top-dressing of the barricade.  She exhaled a
+sigh of relief when the spear-blades retreated out of sight, sliding
+inward--the horrible things! in a spot facing Heyst a pair of yellow
+hands parted the leaves, and a face filled the small opening--a face
+with very noticeable eyes.  It was Wang's face, of course, with no
+suggestion of a body belonging to it, like those cardboard faces at
+which she remembered gazing as a child in the window of a certain
+dim shop kept by a mysterious little man in Kingsland Road.  Only
+this face, instead of mere holes, had eyes which blinked.  She could
+see the beating of the eyelids.  The hands on each side of the face,
+keeping the boughs apart, also did not look as if they belonged to
+any real body.  One of them was holding a revolver--a weapon which
+she recognized merely by intuition, never having seen such an object
+before.
+
+She leaned her shoulders against the rock of the perpendicular
+hillside and kept her eyes on Heyst, with comparative composure,
+since the spears were not menacing him any longer.  Beyond the rigid
+and motionless back he presented to her, she saw Wang's unreal
+cardboard face moving its thin lips and grimacing artificially.  She
+was too far down the path to hear the dialogue, carried on in an
+ordinary voice.  She waited patiently for its end.  Her shoulders
+felt the warmth of the rock; now and then a whiff of cooler air
+seemed to slip down upon her head from above; the ravine at her
+feet, choked fun of vegetation, emitted the faint, drowsy hum of
+insect life.  Everything was very quiet.  She failed to notice the
+exact moment when Wang's head vanished from the foliage, taking the
+unreal hands away with it.  To her horror, the spear-blades came
+gliding slowly out.  The very hair on her head stirred; but before
+she had time to cry out, Heyst, who seemed rooted to the ground,
+turned round abruptly and began to move towards her.  His great
+moustaches did not quite hide an ugly but irresolute smile; and when
+he had come down near enough to touch her, he burst out into a harsh
+laugh:
+
+"Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+She looked at him, uncomprehending.  He cut short his laugh and said
+curtly:
+
+"We had better go down as we came."
+
+She followed him into the forest.  The advance of the afternoon had
+filled it with gloom.  Far away a slant of light between the trees
+closed the view.  All was dark beyond.  Heyst stopped.
+
+"No reason to hurry, Lena," he said in his ordinary, serenely polite
+tones.  "We return unsuccessful.  I suppose you know, or at least
+can guess, what was my object in coming up there?"
+
+"No, I can't guess, dear," she said, and smiled, noticing with
+emotion that his breast was heaving as if he had been out of breath.
+Nevertheless, he tried to command his speech, pausing only a little
+between the words.
+
+"No?  I went up to find Wang.  I went up"--he gasped again here, but
+this was for the last time--"I made you come with me because I
+didn't like to leave you unprotected in the proximity of those
+fellows."  Suddenly he snatched his cork helmet off his head and
+dashed it on the ground.  "No!" he cried roughly.  "All this is too
+unreal altogether.  It isn't to be borne!  I can't protect you!  I
+haven't the power."
+
+He glared at her for a moment, then hastened after his hat which had
+bounded away to some distance.  He came back looking at her face,
+which was very white.
+
+"I ought to beg your pardon for these antics," he said, adjusting
+his hat.  "A movement of childish petulance!  Indeed, I feel very
+much like a child in my ignorance, in my powerlessness, in my want
+of resource, in everything except in the dreadful consciousness of
+some evil hanging over your head--yours!"
+
+"It's you they are after," she murmured.
+
+"No doubt, but unfortunately--"
+
+"Unfortunately--what?"
+
+"Unfortunately, I have not succeeded with Wang," he said.  "I failed
+to move his Celestial, heart--that is, if there is such a thing.  He
+told me with horrible Chinese reasonableness that he could not let
+us pass the barrier, because we should be pursued.  He doesn't like
+fights.  He gave me to understand that he would shoot me with my own
+revolver without any sort of compunction, rather than risk a rude
+and distasteful contest with the strange barbarians for my sake.  He
+has preached to the villagers.  They respect him.  He is the most
+remarkable man they have ever seen, and their kinsman by marriage.
+They understand his policy.  And anyway only women and children and
+a few old fellows are left in the village.  This is the season when
+the men are away in trading vessels.  But it would have been all the
+same.  None of them have a taste for fighting--and with white men
+too!  They are peaceable, kindly folk and would have seen me shot
+with extreme satisfaction.  Wang seemed to think my insistence--for
+I insisted, you know--very stupid and tactless.  But a drowning man
+clutches at straws.  We were talking in such Malay as we are both
+equal to.
+
+"'Your fears are foolish,' I said to him.
+
+"'Foolish? of course I am foolish,' he replied.  'If I were a wise
+man, I would be a merchant with a big hong in Singapore, instead of
+being a mine coolie turned houseboy.  But if you don't go away in
+time, I will shoot you before it grows too dark to take aim.  Not
+till then, Number One, but I will do it then.  Now--finish!'
+
+"'All right,' I said.  'Finish as far as I am concerned; but you can
+have no objections to the mem putih coming over to stay with the
+Orang Kaya's women for a few days.  I will make a present in silver
+for it.'  Orang Kaya, is the head man of the village, Lena," added
+Heyst.
+
+She looked at him in astonishment.
+
+"You wanted me to go to that village of savages?" she gasped.  "You
+wanted me to leave you?"
+
+"It would have given me a freer hand."
+
+Heyst stretched out his hands and looked at them for a moment, then
+let them fall by his side.  Indignation was expressed more in the
+curve of her lips than in her clear eyes, which never wavered.
+
+"I believe Wang laughed," he went on.  "He made a noise like a
+turkey-cock."
+
+"'That would be worse than anything,' he told me.
+
+"I was taken aback.  I pointed out to him that he was talking
+nonsense.  It could not make any difference to his security where
+you were, because the evil men, as he calls them, did not know of
+your existence.  I did not lie exactly, Lena, though I did stretch
+the truth till it cracked; but the fellow seems to have an uncanny
+insight.  He shook his head.  He assured me they knew all about you.
+He made a horrible grimace at me."
+
+"It doesn't matter," said the girl.  "I didn't want--I would not
+have gone."
+
+Heyst raised his eyes.
+
+"Wonderful intuition!  As I continued to press him, Wang made that
+very remark about you.  When he smiles, his face looks like a
+conceited death's head.  It was his very last remark that you
+wouldn't want to.  I went away then."
+
+She leaned back against a tree.  Heyst faced her in the same
+attitude of leisure, as if they had done with time and all the other
+concerns of the earth.  Suddenly, high above their heads the roof of
+leaves whispered at them tumultuously and then ceased.
+
+"That was a strange notion of yours, to send me away," she said.
+"Send me away?  What for?  Yes, what for?"
+
+"You seem indignant," he remarked listlessly.
+
+"To these savages, too!" she pursued.  "And you think I would have
+gone?  You can do what you like with me--but not that, not that!"
+
+Heyst looked into the dim aisles of the forest.  Everything was so
+still now that the very ground on which they stood seemed to exhale
+silence into the shade.
+
+"Why be indignant?" he remonstrated.  "It has not happened.  I gave
+up pleading with Wang.  Here we are, repulsed!  Not only without
+power to resist the evil, but unable to make terms for ourselves
+with the worthy envoys, the envoys extraordinary of the world we
+thought we had done with for years and years.  And that's bad, Lena,
+very bad."
+
+"It's funny," she said thoughtfully.  "Bad?  I suppose it is.  I
+don't know that it is.  But do you?  Do you?  You talk as if you
+didn't believe in it."
+
+She gazed at him earnestly.
+
+"Do I?  Ah!  That's it.  I don't know how to talk.  I have managed
+to refine everything away.  I've said to the Earth that bore me:  'I
+am I and you are a shadow.'  And, by Jove, it is so!  But it appears
+that such words cannot be uttered with impunity.  Here I am on a
+Shadow inhabited by Shades.  How helpless a man is against the
+Shades!  How is one to intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself
+against them?  I have lost all belief in realities . . . Lena, give
+me your hand."
+
+She looked at him surprised, uncomprehending.
+
+"Your hand," he cried.
+
+She obeyed; he seized it with avidity as if eager to raise it to his
+lips, but halfway up released his grasp.  They looked at each other
+for a time.
+
+"What's the matter, dear?" she whispered timidly.
+
+"Neither force nor conviction," Heyst muttered wearily to himself.
+"How am I to meet this charmingly simple problem?"
+
+"I am sorry," she murmured.
+
+"And so am I," he confessed quickly.  "And the bitterest of this
+humiliation is its complete uselessness--which I feel, I feel!"
+
+She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling.  Across
+his ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade.  He spoke
+suddenly:
+
+"I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them in the
+night, with a knife, and cut their throats one after another, as
+they slept!  I wonder--"
+
+She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words
+in his mouth, and said earnestly:
+
+"Don't you try to do such a thing!  Don't you think of it!"
+
+"I don't possess anything bigger than a penknife.  As to thinking of
+it, Lena, there's no saying what one may think of.  I don't think.
+Something in me thinks--something foreign to my nature.  What is the
+matter?"
+
+He noticed her parted lips, and the peculiar stare in her eyes,
+which had wandered from his face.
+
+"There's somebody after us.  I saw something white moving," she
+cried.
+
+Heyst did not turn his head; he only glanced at her out-stretched
+arm.
+
+"No doubt we are followed; we are watched."
+
+"I don't see anything now," she said.
+
+"And it does not matter," Heyst went on in his ordinary voice.
+"Here we are in the forest.  I have neither strength nor persuasion.
+Indeed, it's extremely difficult to be eloquent before a Chinaman's
+head stuck at one out of a lot of brushwood.  But can we wander
+among these big trees indefinitely?  Is this a refuge?  No!  What
+else is left to us?  I did think for a moment of the mine; but even
+there we could not remain very long.  And then that gallery is not
+safe.  The props were too weak to begin with.  Ants have been at
+work there--ants after the men.  A death-trap, at best.  One can die
+but once, but there are many manners of death."
+
+The girl glanced about fearfully, in search of the watcher or
+follower whom she had glimpsed once among the trees; but if he
+existed, he had concealed himself.  Nothing met her eyes but the
+deepening shadows of the short vistas between the living columns of
+the still roof of leaves.  She looked at the man beside her
+expectantly, tenderly, with suppressed affright and a sort of awed
+wonder.
+
+"I have also thought of these people's boat," Heyst went on.  "We
+could get into that, and--only they have taken everything out of
+her.  I have seen her oars and mast in a corner of their room.  To
+shove off in an empty boat would be nothing but a desperate
+expedition, supposing even that she would drift out a good distance
+between the islands before the morning.  It would only be a
+complicated manner of committing suicide--to be found dead in a
+boat, dead from sun and thirst.  A sea mystery.  I wonder who would
+find us!  Davidson, perhaps; but Davidson passed westward ten days
+ago.  I watched him steaming past one early morning, from the
+jetty."
+
+"You never told me," she said.
+
+"He must have been looking at me through his big binoculars.
+Perhaps, if I had raised my arm--but what did we want with Davidson
+then, you and I?  He won't be back this way for three weeks or more,
+Lena.  I wish I had raised my arm that morning."
+
+"What would have been the good of it?" she sighed out.
+
+"What good?  No good, of course.  We had no forebodings.  This
+seemed to be an inexpugnable refuge, where we could live untroubled
+and learn to know each other."
+
+"It's perhaps in trouble that people get to know each other," she
+suggested.
+
+"Perhaps," he said indifferently.  "At any rate, we would not have
+gone away from here with him; though I believe he would have come in
+eagerly enough, and ready for any service he could render.  It's
+that fat man's nature--a delightful fellow.  You would not come on
+the wharf that time I sent the shawl back to Mrs. Schomberg through
+him.  He has never seen you."
+
+"I didn't know that you wanted anybody ever to see me," she said.
+
+He had folded his arms on his breast and hung his head.
+
+"And I did not know that you cared to be seen as yet.  A
+misunderstanding evidently.  An honourable misunderstanding.  But it
+does not matter now."
+
+He raised his head after a silence.
+
+"How gloomy this forest has grown!  Yet surely the sun cannot have
+set already."
+
+She looked round; and as if her eyes had just been opened, she
+perceived the shades of the forest surrounding her, not so much with
+gloom, but with a sullen, dumb, menacing hostility.  Her heart sank
+in the engulfing stillness, at that moment she felt the nearness of
+death, breathing on her and on the man with her.  If there had been
+a sudden stir of leaves, the crack of a dry branch, the faintest
+rustle, she would have screamed aloud.  But she shook off the
+unworthy weakness.  Such as she was, a fiddle-scraping girl picked
+up on the very threshold of infamy, she would try to rise above
+herself, triumphant and humble; and then happiness would burst on
+her like a torrent, flinging at her feet the man whom she loved.
+
+Heyst stirred slightly.
+
+"We had better be getting back, Lena, since we can't stay all night
+in the woods--or anywhere else, for that matter.  We are the slaves
+of this infernal surprise which has been sprung on us by--shall I
+say fate?--your fate, or mine."
+
+It was the man who had broken the silence, but it was the woman who
+led the way.  At the very edge of the forest she stopped, concealed
+by a tree.  He joined her cautiously.
+
+"What is it?  What do you see, Lena?" he whispered.
+
+She said that it was only a thought that had come into her head.
+She hesitated for a moment giving him over her shoulder a shining
+gleam in her grey eyes.  She wanted to know whether this trouble,
+this danger, this evil, whatever it was, finding them out in their
+retreat, was not a sort of punishment.
+
+"Punishment?" repeated Heyst.  He could not understand what she
+meant.  When she explained, he was still more surprised.  "A sort of
+retribution, from an angry Heaven?" he said in wonder.  "On us?
+What on earth for?"
+
+He saw her pale face darken in the dusk.  She had blushed.  Her
+whispering flowed very fast.  It was the way they lived together--
+that wasn't right, was it?  It was a guilty life.  For she had not
+been forced into it, driven, scared into it.  No, no--she had come
+to him of her own free will, with her whole soul yearning
+unlawfully.
+
+He was so profoundly touched that he could not speak for a moment.
+To conceal his trouble, he assumed his best Heystian manner.
+
+"What?  Are our visitors then messengers of morality, avengers of
+righteousness, agents of Providence?  That's certainly an original
+view.  How flattered they would be if they could hear you!"
+
+"Now you are making fun of me," she said in a subdued voice which
+broke suddenly.
+
+"Are you conscious of sin?" Heyst asked gravely.  She made no
+answer.  "For I am not," he added; "before Heaven, I am not!"
+
+"You!  You are different.  Woman is the tempter.  You took me up
+from pity.  I threw myself at you."
+
+"Oh, you exaggerate, you exaggerate.  It was not so bad as that," he
+said playfully, keeping his voice steady with an effort.
+
+He considered himself a dead man already, yet forced to pretend that
+he was alive for her sake, for her defence.  He regretted that he
+had no Heaven to which he could recommend this fair, palpitating
+handful of ashes and dust--warm, living sentient his own--and
+exposed helplessly to insult, outrage, degradation, and infinite
+misery of the body.
+
+She had averted her face from him and was still.  He suddenly seized
+her passive hand.
+
+"You will have it so?" he said.  "Yes?  Well, let us then hope for
+mercy together."
+
+She shook her head without looking at him, like an abashed child.
+
+"Remember," he went on incorrigible with his delicate raillery,
+"that hope is a Christian virtue, and surely you can't want all the
+mercy for yourself."
+
+Before their eyes the bungalow across the cleared ground stood
+bathed in a sinister light.  An unexpected chill gust of wind made a
+noise in the tree-tops.  She snatched her hand away and stepped out
+into the open; but before she had advanced more than three yards,
+she stood still and pointed to the west.
+
+"Oh look there!" she exclaimed.
+
+Beyond the headland of Diamond Bay, lying black on a purple sea,
+great masses of cloud stood piled up and bathed in a mist of blood.
+A crimson crack like an open wound zigzagged between them, with a
+piece of dark red sun showing at the bottom.  Heyst cast an
+indifferent glance at the ill-omened chaos of the sky.
+
+"Thunderstorm making up.  We shall hear it all night, but it won't
+visit us, probably.  The clouds generally gather round the volcano."
+
+She was not listening to him.  Her eyes reflected the sombre and
+violent hues of the sunset.
+
+"That does not look much like a sign of mercy," she said slowly, as
+if to herself, and hurried on, followed by Heyst.  Suddenly she
+stopped.  "I don't care.  I would do more yet!  And some day you'll
+forgive me.  You'll have to forgive me!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+
+
+Stumbling up the steps, as if suddenly exhausted, Lena entered the
+room and let herself fall on the nearest chair.  Before following
+her, Heyst took a survey of the surroundings from the veranda.  It
+was a complete solitude.  There was nothing in the aspect of this
+familiar scene to tell him that he and the girl were not completely
+alone as they had been in the early days of their common life on
+this abandoned spot, with only Wang discreetly materializing from
+time to time and the uncomplaining memory of Morrison to keep them
+company.
+
+After the cold gust of wind there was an absolute stillness of the
+air.  The thunder-charged mass hung unbroken beyond the low, ink-
+black headland, darkening the twilight.  By contrast, the sky at the
+zenith displayed pellucid clearness, the sheen of a delicate glass
+bubble which the merest movement of air might shatter.  A little to
+the left, between the black masses of the headland and of the
+forest, the volcano, a feather of smoke by day and a cigar-glow at
+night, took its first fiery expanding breath of the evening.  Above
+it a reddish star came out like an expelled spark from the fiery
+bosom of the earth, enchanted into permanency by the mysterious
+spell of frozen spaces.
+
+In front of Heyst the forest, already full of the deepest shades,
+stood like a wall.  But he lingered, watching its edge, especially
+where it ended at the line of bushes, masking the land end of the
+jetty.  Since the girl had spoken of catching a glimpse of something
+white among the trees, he believed pretty firmly that they had been
+followed in their excursion up the mountain by Mr. Jones's
+secretary.  No doubt the fellow had watched them out of the forest,
+and now, unless he took the trouble to go back some distance and
+fetch a considerable circuit inland over the clearing, he was bound
+to walk out into the open space before the bungalows.  Heyst did,
+indeed, imagine at one time some movement between the trees, lost as
+soon as perceived.  He stated patiently, but nothing more happened.
+After all, why should he trouble about these people's actions?  Why
+this stupid concern for the preliminaries, since, when the issue was
+joined, it would find him disarmed and shrinking from the ugliness
+and degradation of it?
+
+He turned and entered the room.  Deep dusk reigned in there already.
+Lena, near the door, did not move or speak.  The sheen of the white
+tablecloth was very obtrusive.  The brute these two vagabonds had
+tamed had entered on its service while Heyst and Lena were away.
+The table was laid.  Heyst walked up and down the room several
+times.  The girl remained without sound or movement on the chair.
+But when Heyst, placing the two silver candelabra on the table,
+struck a match to light the candles, she got up suddenly and went
+into the bedroom.  She came out again almost immediately, having
+taken off her hat.  Heyst looked at her over his shoulder.
+
+"What's the good of shirking the evil hour?  I've lighted these
+candles for a sign of our return.  After all, we might not have been
+watched--while returning, I mean.  Of course we were seen leaving
+the house."
+
+The girl sat down again.  The great wealth of her hair looked very
+dark above her colourless face.  She raised her eyes, glistening
+softly in the light with a sort of unreadable appeal, with a strange
+effect of unseeing innocence.
+
+"Yes," said Heyst across the table, the fingertips of one hand
+resting on the immaculate cloth.  "A creature with an antediluvian
+lower jaw, hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic
+ape, has laid this table.  Are you awake, Lena?  Am I?  I would
+pinch myself, only I know that nothing would do away with this
+dream.  Three covers.  You know it is the shorter of the two who's
+coming--the gentleman who, in the play of his shoulders as he walks,
+and in his facial structure, recalls a Jaguar.  Ah, you don't know
+what a jaguar is?  But you have had a good look at these two.  It's
+the short one, you know, who's to be our guest."
+
+She made a sign with her head that she knew; Heyst's insistence
+brought Ricardo vividly before her mental vision.  A sudden languor,
+like the physical echo of her struggle with the man, paralysed all
+her limbs.  She lay still in the chair, feeling very frightened at
+this phenomenon--ready to pray aloud for strength.
+
+Heyst had started to pace the room.
+
+"Our guest!  There is a proverb--in Russia, I believe--that when a
+guest enters the house, God enters the house.  The sacred virtue of
+hospitality!  But it leads one into trouble as well as any other."
+
+The girl unexpectedly got up from the chair, swaying her supple
+figure and stretching her arms above her head.  He stopped to look
+at her curiously, paused, and then went on:
+
+"I venture to think that God has nothing to do with such a
+hospitality and with such a guest!"
+
+She had jumped to her feet to react against the numbness, to
+discover whether her body would obey her will.  It did.  She could
+stand up, and she could move her arms freely.  Though no
+physiologist, she concluded that all that sudden numbness was in her
+head, not in her limbs.  Her fears assuaged, she thanked God for it
+mentally, and to Heyst murmured a protest:
+
+"Oh, yes!  He's got to do with everything--every little thing.
+Nothing can happen--"
+
+"Yes," he said hastily, "one of the two sparrows can't be struck to
+the ground--you are thinking of that."  The habitual playful smile
+faded on the kindly lips under the martial moustache.  "Ah, you
+remember what you have been told--as a child--on Sundays."
+
+"Yes, I do remember."  She sank into the chair again.  "It was the
+only decent bit of time I ever had when I was a kid, with our
+landlady's two girls, you know."
+
+"I wonder, Lena," Heyst said, with a return to his urbane
+playfulness, "whether you are just a little child, or whether you
+represent something as old as the world."
+
+She surprised Heyst by saying dreamily:
+
+"Well--and what about you?"
+
+"I?  I date later--much later.  I can't call myself a child, but I
+am so recent that I may call myself a man of the last hour--or is it
+the hour before last?  I have been out of it so long that I am not
+certain how far the hands of the clock have moved since--since--"
+
+He glanced at the portrait of his father, exactly above the head of
+the girl, as if it were ignoring her in its painted austerity of
+feeling.  He did not finish the sentence; but he did not remain
+silent for long.
+
+"Only what must be avoided are fallacious inferences, my dear Lena--
+especially at this hour."
+
+"Now you are making fun of me again," she said without looking up.
+
+"Am I?" he cried.  "Making fun?  No, giving warning.  Hang it all,
+whatever truth people told you in the old days, there is also this
+one--that sparrows do fall to the ground, that they are brought to
+the ground.  This is no vain assertion, but a fact.  That's why"--
+again his tone changed, while he picked up the table knife and let
+it fall disdainfully--"that's why I wish these wretched round knives
+had some edge on them.  Absolute rubbish--neither edge, point, nor
+substance.  I believe one of these forks would make a better weapon
+at a pinch.  But can I go about with a fork in my pocket?"  He
+gnashed his teeth with a rage very real, and yet comic.
+
+"There used to be a carver here, but it was broken and thrown away a
+long time ago.  Nothing much to carve here.  It would have made a
+noble weapon, no doubt; but--"
+
+He stopped.  The girl sat very quiet, with downcast eyes.  As he
+kept silence for some time, she looked up and said thoughtfully:
+
+"Yes, a knife--it's a knife that you would want, wouldn't you, in
+case, in case--"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"There must be a crowbar or two in the sheds; but I have given up
+all the keys together.  And then, do you see me walking about with a
+crowbar in my hand?  Ha, ha!  And besides, that edifying sight alone
+might start the trouble for all I know.  In truth, why has it not
+started yet?"
+
+"Perhaps they are afraid of you," she whispered, looking down again.
+
+"By Jove, it looks like it," he assented meditatively.  "They do
+seem to hang back for some reason.  Is that reason prudence, or
+downright fear, or perhaps the leisurely method of certitude?"
+
+Out in the black night, not very far from the bungalow, resounded a
+loud and prolonged whistle.  Lena's hands grasped the sides of the
+chair, but she made no movement.  Heyst started, and turned his face
+away from the door.
+
+The startling sound had died away.
+
+"Whistles, yells, omens, signals, portents--what do they matter?" he
+said.  "But what about the crowbar?  Suppose I had it!  Could I
+stand in ambush at the side of the door--this door--and smash the
+first protruding head, scatter blood and brains over the floor, over
+these walls, and then run stealthily to the other door to do the
+same thing--and repeat the performance for a third time, perhaps?
+Could I?  On suspicion, without compunction, with a calm and
+determined purpose?  No, it is not in me.  I date too late.  Would
+you like to see me attempt this thing while that mysterious prestige
+of mine lasts--or their not less mysterious hesitation?"
+
+"No, no!" she whispered ardently, as if compelled to speak by his
+eyes fixed on her face.  "No, it's a knife you want to defend
+yourself with--to defend--there will be time--"
+
+"And who knows if it isn't really my duty?" he began again, as if he
+had not heard her disjointed words at all.  "It may be--my duty to
+you, to myself.  For why should I put up with the humiliation of
+their secret menaces?  Do you know what the world would say?"
+
+He emitted a low laugh, which struck her with terror.  She would
+have got up, but he stooped so low over her that she could not move
+without first pushing him away.
+
+"It would say, Lena, that I--the Swede--after luring my friend and
+partner to his death from mere greed of money, have murdered these
+unoffending shipwrecked strangers from sheer funk.  That would be
+the story whispered--perhaps shouted--certainly spread out, and
+believed--and believed, my dear Lena!"
+
+"Who would believe such awful things?"
+
+"Perhaps you wouldn't--not at first, at any rate; but the power of
+calumny grows with time.  It's insidious and penetrating.  It can
+even destroy one's faith in oneself--dry-rot the soul."
+
+All at once her eyes leaped to the door and remained fixed, stony, a
+little enlarged.  Turning his head, Heyst beheld the figure of
+Ricardo framed in the doorway.  For a moment none of the three
+moved, then, looking from the newcomer to the girl in the chair,
+Heyst formulated a sardonic introduction.
+
+"Mr Ricardo, my dear."
+
+Her head drooped a little.  Ricardo's hand went up to his moustache.
+His voice exploded in the room.
+
+"At your service, ma'am!"
+
+He stepped in, taking his hat off with a flourish, and dropping it
+carelessly on a chair near the door.
+
+"At your service," he repeated, in quite another tone.  "I was made
+aware there was a lady about, by that Pedro of ours; only I didn't
+know I should have the privilege of seeing you tonight, ma'am."
+
+Lena and Heyst looked at him covertly, but he, with a vague gaze
+avoiding them both, looked at nothing, seeming to pursue some point
+in space.
+
+"Had a pleasant walk?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Yes.  And you?" returned Heyst, who had managed to catch his
+glance.
+
+"I haven't been a yard away from the governor this afternoon till I
+started for here."  The genuineness of the accent surprised Heyst,
+without convincing him of the truth of the words.
+
+"Why do you ask?" pursued Ricardo with every inflection of perfect
+candour.
+
+"You might have wished to explore the island a little," said Heyst,
+studying the man, who, to render him justice, did not try to free
+his captured gaze.  "I may remind you that it wouldn't be a
+perfectly safe proceeding."
+
+Ricardo presented a picture of innocence.
+
+"Oh, yes--meaning that Chink that has ran away from you.  He ain't
+much!"
+
+"He has a revolver," observed Heyst meaningly.
+
+"Well, and you have a revolver, too," Mr. Ricardo argued
+unexpectedly.  "I don't worry myself about that."
+
+"That's different.  I am not afraid of you," Heyst made answer after
+a short pause.
+
+"Of me?"
+
+"Of all of you."
+
+"You have a queer way of putting things," began Ricardo.
+
+At that moment the door on the compound side of the house came open
+with some noise, and Pedro entered, pressing the edge of a loaded
+tray to his breast.  His big, hairy head rolled a little, his feet
+fell in front of each other with a short, hard thump on the floor.
+The arrival changed the current of Ricardo's thought, perhaps, but
+certainly of his speech.
+
+"You heard me whistling a little while ago outside?  That was to
+give him a hint, as I came along, that it was time to bring in the
+dinner; and here it is."
+
+Lena rose and passed to the right of Ricardo, who lowered his glance
+for a moment.  They sat down at the table.  The enormous gorilla
+back of Pedro swayed out through the door.
+
+"Extraordinary strong brute, ma'am," said Ricardo.  He, had a
+propensity to talk about "his Pedro," as some men will talk of their
+dog.  "He ain't pretty, though.  No, he ain't pretty.  And he has
+got to be kept under.  I am his keeper, as it might be.  The
+governor don't trouble his head much about dee-tails.  All that's
+left to Martin.  Martin, that's me, ma'am."
+
+Heyst saw the girl's eyes turn towards Mr. Jones's secretary and
+rest blankly on his face.  Ricardo, however, looked vaguely into
+space, and, with faint flickers of a smile about his lips, made
+conversation indefatigably against the silence of his entertainers.
+He boasted largely of his long association with Mr. Jones--over four
+years now, he said.  Then, glancing rapidly at Heyst:
+
+"You can see at once he's a gentleman, can't you?"
+
+"You people," Heyst said, his habitual playful intonation tinged
+with gloom, "are divorced from all reality in my eyes."
+
+Ricardo received this speech as if he had been expecting to hear
+those very words, or else did not mind at all what Heyst might say.
+He muttered an absent-minded "Ay, ay," played with a bit of biscuit,
+sighed, and said, with a peculiar stare which did not seem to carry
+any distance, but to stop short at a point in the air very near his
+face:
+
+"Anybody can see at once YOU are one.  You and the governor ought to
+understand each other.  He expects to see you tonight.  The governor
+isn't well, and we've got to think of getting away from here."
+
+While saying these words he turned himself full towards Lena, but
+without any marked expression.  Leaning back with folded arms, the
+girl stared before her as if she had been alone in the room.  But
+under that aspect of almost vacant unconcern the perils and emotion
+that had entered into her life warmed her heart, exalted her mind
+with a sense of an inconceivable intensity of existence.
+
+"Really?  Thinking of going away from here?" Heyst murmured.
+
+"The best of friends must part," Ricardo pronounced slowly.  "And,
+as long as they part friends, there's no harm done.  We two are used
+to be on the move.  You, I understand, prefer to stick in one
+place."
+
+It was obvious that all this was being said merely for the sake of
+talking, and that Ricardo's mind was concentrated on some purpose
+unconnected with the words that were coming but of his mouth.
+
+"I should like to know," Heyst asked with incisive politeness, "how
+you have come to understand this or anything else about me?  As far
+as I can remember, I've made you no confidences."
+
+Ricardo, gazing comfortably into space out of the back of his chair-
+-for some time all three had given up any pretence of eating--
+answered abstractedly:
+
+"Any fellow might have guessed it!"  He sat up suddenly, and
+uncovered all his teeth in a grin of extraordinary ferocity, which
+was belied by the persistent amiability of his tone.  "The governor
+will be the man to tell you something about that.  I wish you would
+say you would see my governor.  He's the one who does all our
+talking.  Let me take you to him this evening.  He ain't at all
+well; and he can't make up his mind to go away without having a talk
+with you."
+
+Heyst, looking up, met Lena's eyes.  Their expression of candour
+seemed to hide some struggling intention.  Her head, he fancied, had
+made an imperceptible affirmative movement.  Why?  What reason could
+she have?  Was it the prompting of some obscure instinct?  Or was it
+simply a delusion of his own senses?  But in this strange
+complication invading the quietude of his life, in his state of
+doubt and disdain and almost of despair with which he looked at
+himself, he would let even a delusive appearance guide him through a
+darkness so dense that it made for indifference.
+
+"Well, suppose I DO say so."
+
+Ricardo did not conceal his satisfaction, which for a moment
+interested Heyst.
+
+"It can't be my life they are after," he said to himself.  "What
+good could it be to them?"
+
+He looked across the table at the girl.  What did it matter whether
+she had nodded or not?  As always when looking into her unconscious
+eyes, he tasted something like the dregs of tender pity.  He had
+decided to go.  Her nod, imaginary or not imaginary, advice or
+illusion, had tipped the scale.  He reflected that Ricardo's
+invitation could scarcely be anything in the nature of a trap.  It
+would have been too absurd.  Why carry subtly into a trap someone
+already bound hand and foot, as it were?
+
+All this time he had been looking fixedly at the girl he called
+Lena.  In the submissive quietness of her being, which had been her
+attitude ever since they had begun their life on the island, she
+remained as secret as ever.  Heyst got up abruptly, with a smile of
+such enigmatic and despairing character that Mr. Secretary Ricardo,
+whose abstract gaze had an all-round efficiency, made a slight
+crouching start, as if to dive under the table for his leg-knife--a
+start that was repressed, as soon as begun.  He had expected Heyst
+to spring on him or draw a revolver, because he created for himself
+a vision of him in his own image.  Instead of doing either of these
+obvious things, Heyst walked across the room, opened the door and
+put his head through it to look out into the compound.
+
+As soon as his back was turned, Ricardo's hand sought the girl's arm
+under the table.  He was not looking at her, but she felt the
+groping, nervous touch of his search, felt suddenly the grip of his
+fingers above her wrist.  He leaned forward a little; still he dared
+not look at her.  His hard stare remained fastened on Heyst's back.
+In an extremely low hiss, his fixed idea of argument found
+expression scathingly:
+
+"See!  He's no good.  He's not the man for you!"
+
+He glanced at her at last.  Her lips moved a little, and he was awed
+by that movement without a sound.  Next instant the hard grasp of
+his fingers vanished from her arm.  Heyst had shut the door.  On his
+way back to the table, he crossed the path of the girl they had
+called Alma--she didn't know why--also Magdalen, whose mind had
+remained so long in doubt as to the reason of her own existence.
+She no longer wondered at that bitter riddle, since her heart found
+its solution in a blinding, hot glow of passionate pride.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+
+
+She passed by Heyst as if she had indeed been blinded by some
+secret, lurid, and consuming glare into which she was about to
+enter.  The curtain of the bedroom door fell behind her into rigid
+folds.  Ricardo's vacant gaze seemed to be watching the dancing
+flight of a fly in mid air.
+
+"Extra dark outside, ain't it?" he muttered.
+
+"Not so dark but that I could see that man of yours prowling about
+there," said Heyst in measured tones.
+
+"What--Pedro?  He's scarcely a man you know; or else I wouldn't be
+so fond of him as I am."
+
+"Very well.  Let's call him your worthy associate."
+
+"Ay!  Worthy enough for what we want of him.  A great standby is
+Peter in a scrimmage.  A growl and a bite--oh, my!  And you don't
+want him about?"
+
+"I don't."
+
+"You want him out of the way?" insisted Ricardo with an affectation
+of incredulity which Heyst accepted calmly, though the air in the
+room seemed to grow more oppressive with every word spoken.
+
+"That's it.  I do want him out of the way."  He forced himself to
+speak equably.
+
+"Lor'!  That's no great matter.  Pedro's not much use here.  The
+business my governor's after can be settled by ten minutes' rational
+talk with--with another gentleman.  Quiet talk!"
+
+He looked up suddenly with hard, phosphorescent eyes.  Heyst didn't
+move a muscle.  Ricardo congratulated himself on having left his
+revolver behind.  He was so exasperated that he didn't know what he
+might have done.  He said at last:
+
+"You want poor, harmless Peter out of the way before you let me take
+you to see the governor--is that it?"
+
+"Yes, that is it."
+
+"H'm!  One can see," Ricardo said with hidden venom, "that you are a
+gentleman; but all that gentlemanly fancifulness is apt to turn sour
+on a plain man's stomach.  However--you'll have to pardon me."
+
+He put his fingers into his mouth and let out a whistle which seemed
+to drive a thin, sharp shaft of air solidly against one's nearest
+ear-drum.  Though he greatly enjoyed Heyst's involuntary grimace, he
+sat perfectly stolid waiting for the effect of the call.
+
+It brought Pedro in with an extraordinary, uncouth, primeval
+impetuosity.  The door flew open with a clatter, and the wild figure
+it disclosed seemed anxious to devastate the room in leaps and
+bounds; but Ricardo raised his open palm, and the creature came in
+quietly.  His enormous half-closed paws swung to and fro a little in
+front of his bowed trunk as he walked.  Ricardo looked on
+truculently.
+
+"You go to the boat--understand?  Go now!"
+
+The little red eyes of the tame monster blinked with painful
+attention in the mass of hair.
+
+"Well?  Why don't you get?  Forgot human speech, eh?  Don't you know
+any longer what a boat is?"
+
+"Si--boat," the creature stammered out doubtfully.
+
+"Well, go there--the boat at the jetty.  March off to it and sit
+there, lie down there, do anything but go to sleep there--till you
+hear my call, and then fly here.  Them's your orders.  March!  Get,
+vamos!  No, not that way--out through the front door.  No sulks!"
+
+Pedro obeyed with uncouth alacrity.  When he had gone, the gleam of
+pitiless savagery went out of Ricardo's yellow eyes, and his
+physiognomy took on, for the first time that evening, the expression
+of a domestic cat which is being noticed.
+
+"You can watch him right into the bushes, if you like.  Too dark,
+eh?  Why not go with him to the very spot, then?"
+
+Heyst made a gesture of vague protest.
+
+"There's nothing to assure me that he will stay there.  I have no
+doubt of his going, but it's an act without guarantee."
+
+"There you are!"  Ricardo shrugged his shoulders philosophically.
+"Can't be helped.  Short of shooting our Pedro, nobody can make
+absolutely sure of his staying in the same place longer than he has
+a mind to; but I tell you, he lives in holy terror of my temper.
+That's why I put on my sudden-death air when I talk to him.  And yet
+I wouldn't shoot him--not I, unless in such a fit of rage as would
+make a man shoot his favourite dog.  Look here, sir!  This deal is
+on the square.  I didn't tip him a wink to do anything else.  He
+won't budge from the jetty.  Are you coming along now, sir?"
+
+A short-silence ensued.  Ricardo's jaws were working ominously under
+his skin.  His eyes glided:  voluptuously here and there, cruel and
+dreamy, Heyst checked a sudden movement, reflected for a while, then
+said:
+
+"You must wait a little."
+
+"Wait a little!  Wait a little!  What does he think a fellow is--a
+graven image?" grumbled Ricardo half audibly.
+
+Heyst went into the bedroom, and shut the door after him with a
+bang.  Coming from the light, he could not see a thing in there at
+first; yet he received the impression of the girl getting up from
+the floor.  On the less opaque darkness of the shutter-hole, her
+head detached itself suddenly, very faint, a mere hint of a round,
+dark shape without a face.
+
+"I am going, Lena.  I am going to confront these scoundrels."  He
+was surprised to feel two arms falling on his shoulders.  "I thought
+that you--" he began.
+
+"Yes, yes!" the girl whispered hastily.
+
+She neither clung to him, nor yet did she try to draw him to her.
+Her hands grasped his shoulders, and she seemed to him to be staring
+into his face in the dark.  And now he could see something of her
+face, too--an oval without features--and faintly distinguish her
+person, in the blackness, a form without definite lines.
+
+"You have a black dress here, haven't you, Lena?" he asked, speaking
+rapidly, and so low that she could just hear him.
+
+"Yes--an old thing."
+
+"Very good.  Put it on at once."
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Not for mourning!"  Them was something peremptory in the slightly
+ironic murmur.  "Can you find it and get into it in the dark?"
+
+She could.  She would try.  He waited, very still.  He could imagine
+her movements over there at the far end of the room; but his eyes,
+accustomed now to the darkness, had lost her completely.  When she
+spoke, her voice surprised him by its nearness.  She had done what
+he had told her to do, and had approached him, invisible.
+
+"Good!  Where's that piece of purple veil I've seen lying about?" he
+asked.
+
+There was no answer, only a slight rustle.
+
+"Where is it?" he repeated impatiently.
+
+Her unexpected breath was on his cheek.
+
+"In my hands."
+
+"Capital!  Listen, Lena.  As soon as I leave the bungalow with that
+horrible scoundrel, you slip out at the back--instantly, lose no
+time!--and run round into the forest.  That will be your time, while
+we are walking away, and I am sure he won't give me the slip.  Run
+into the forest behind the fringe of bushes between the big trees.
+You will know, surely, how to find a place in full view of the front
+door.  I fear for you; but in this black dress, with most of your
+face muffled up in that dark veil, I defy anybody to find you there
+before daylight.  Wait in the forest till the table is pushed into
+full view of the doorway, and you see three candles out of four
+blown out and one relighted--or, should the lights be put out here
+while you watch them, wait till three candles are lighted and then
+two put out.  At either of these signals run back as hard as you
+can, for it will mean that I am waiting for you here."
+
+While he was speaking, the girl had sought and seized one of his
+hands.  She did not press it; she held it loosely, as it were
+timidly, caressingly.  It was no grasp; it was a mere contact, as if
+only to make sure that he was there, that he was real and no mere
+darker shadow in the obscurity.  The warmth of her hand gave Heyst a
+strange, intimate sensation of all her person.  He had to fight down
+a new sort of emotion, which almost unmanned him.  He went on,
+whispering sternly:
+
+"But if you see no such signals, don't let anything--fear,
+curiosity, despair, or hope--entice you back to this house; and with
+the first sign of dawn steal away along the edge of the clearing
+till you strike the path.  Wait no longer, because I shall probably
+be dead."
+
+The murmur of the word "Never!" floated into his ear as if it formed
+itself in the air.
+
+"You know the path," he continued.  "Make your way to the barricade.
+Go to Wang--yes, to Wang.  Let nothing stop you!"  It seemed to him
+that the girl's hand trembled a little.  "The worst he can do to you
+is to shoot you, but he won't.  I really think he won't, if I am not
+there.  Stay with the villagers, with the wild people, and fear
+nothing.  They will be more awed by you than you can be frightened
+of them.  Davidson's bound to turn up before very long.  Keep a
+look-out for a passing steamer.  Think of some sort of signal to
+call him."
+
+She made no answer.  The sense of the heavy, brooding silence in the
+outside world seemed to enter and fill the room--the oppressive
+infinity of it, without breath, without light.  It was as if the
+heart of hearts had ceased to beat and the end of all things had
+come.
+
+"Have you understood?  You are to run out of the house at once,"
+Heyst whispered urgently.
+
+She lifted his hand to her lips and let it go.  He was startled.
+
+"Lena!" he cried out under his breath.
+
+She was gone from his side.  He dared not trust himself--no, not
+even to the extent of a tender word.
+
+Turning to go out he heard a thud somewhere in the house.  To open
+the door, he had first to lift the curtain; he did so with his face
+over his shoulder.  The merest trickle of light, earning through the
+keyhole and one or two cracks, was enough for his eyes to see her
+plainly, all black, down on her knees, with her head and arms flung
+on the foot of the bed--all black in the desolation of a mourning
+sinner.  What was this?  A suspicion that there were everywhere more
+things than he could understand crossed Heyst's mind.  Her arm,
+detached from the bed, motioned him away.  He obeyed, and went out,
+full of disquiet.
+
+The curtain behind him had not ceased to tremble when she was up on
+her feet, close against it, listening for sounds, for words, in a
+stooping, tragic attitude of stealthy attention, one hand clutching
+at her breast as if to compress, to make less loud the beating of
+her heart.  Heyst had caught Mr. Jones's secretary in the
+contemplation of his closed writing-desk.  Ricardo might have been
+meditating how to break into it; but when he turned about suddenly,
+he showed so distorted a face that it made Heyst pause in wonder at
+the upturned whites of the eyes, which were blinking horribly, as if
+the man were inwardly convulsed.
+
+"I thought you were never coming," Ricardo mumbled.
+
+"I didn't know you were pressed for time.  Even if your going away
+depends on this conversation, as you say, I doubt if you are the men
+to put to sea on such a night as this," said Heyst, motioning
+Ricardo to precede him out of the house.
+
+With feline undulations of hip and shoulder, the secretary left the
+room at once.  There was something cruel in the absolute dumbness of
+the night.  The great cloud covering half the sky hung right against
+one, like an enormous curtain hiding menacing preparations of
+violence.  As the feet of the two men touched the ground, a rumble
+came from behind it, preceded by a swift, mysterious gleam of light
+on the waters of the bay.
+
+"Ha!" said Ricardo.  "It begins."
+
+"It may be nothing in the end," observed Heyst, stepping along
+steadily.
+
+"No!  Let it come!" Ricardo said viciously.  "I am in the humour for
+it!"
+
+By the time the two men had reached the other bungalow, the far-off
+modulated rumble growled incessantly, while pale lightning in waves
+of cold fire flooded and ran off the island in rapid succession.
+Ricardo, unexpectedly, dashed ahead up the steps and put his head
+through the doorway.
+
+"Here he is, governor!  Keep him with you as long as you can--till
+you hear me whistle.  I am on the track."
+
+He flung these words into the room with inconceivable speed, and
+stood aside to let the visitor pass through the doorway; but he had
+to wait an appreciable moment, because Heyst, seeing his purpose,
+had scornfully slowed his pace.  When Heyst entered the room it was
+with a smile, the Heyst smile, lurking under his martial moustache.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+
+
+Two candles were burning on the stand-up desk.  Mr. Jones, tightly
+enfolded in an old but gorgeous blue silk dressing-gown, kept his
+elbows close against his sides and his hands deeply plunged into the
+extraordinarily deep pockets of the garment.  The costume
+accentuated his emaciation.  He resembled a painted pole leaning
+against the edge of the desk, with a dried head of dubious
+distinction stuck on the top of it.  Ricardo lounged in the doorway.
+Indifferent in appearance to what was going on, he was biding his
+time.  At a given moment, between two flickers of lightning, he
+melted out of his frame into the outer air.  His disappearance was
+observed on the instant by Mr. Jones, who abandoned his nonchalant
+immobility against the desk, and made a few steps calculated to put
+him between Heyst and the doorway.
+
+"It's awfully close," he remarked
+
+Heyst, in the middle of the room, had made up his mind to speak
+plainly.
+
+"We haven't met to talk about the weather.  You favoured me earlier
+in the day with a rather cryptic phrase about yourself.  'I am he
+that is,' you said.  What does that mean?"
+
+Mr. Jones, without looking at Heyst, continued his absentminded
+movements till, attaining the desired position, he brought his
+shoulders with a thump against the wall near the door, and raised
+his head.  In the emotion of the decisive moment his haggard face
+glistened with perspiration.  Drops ran down his hollow cheeks and
+almost blinded the spectral eyes in their bony caverns.
+
+"It means that I am a person to be reckoned with.  No--stop!  Don't
+put your hand into your pocket--don't."
+
+His voice had a wild, unexpected shrillness.  Heyst started, and
+there ensued a moment of suspended animation, during which the
+thunder's deep bass muttered distantly and the doorway to the right
+of Mr. Jones flickered with bluish light.  At last Heyst shrugged
+his shoulders; he even looked at his hand.  He didn't put it in his
+pocket, however.  Mr. Jones, glued against the wall, watched him
+raise both his hands to the ends of his horizontal moustaches, and
+answered the note of interrogation in his steady eyes.
+
+"A matter of prudence," said Mr. Jones in his natural hollow tones,
+and with a face of deathlike composure.  "A man of your free life
+has surely perceived that.  You are a much talked-about man, Mr.
+Heyst--and though, as far as I understand, you are accustomed to
+employ the subtler weapons of intelligence, still I can't afford to
+take any risks of the--er--grosser methods.  I am not unscrupulous
+enough to be a match for you in the use of intelligence; but I
+assure you, Mr. Heyst, that in the other way you are no match for
+me.  I have you covered at this very moment.  You have been covered
+ever since you entered this room.  Yes--from my pocket."
+
+During this harangue Heyst looked deliberately over his shoulder,
+stepped back a pace, and sat down on the end of the camp bedstead.
+Leaning his elbow on one knee, he laid his cheek in the palm of his
+hand and seemed to meditate on what he should say next.  Mr. Jones,
+planted against the wall, was obviously waiting for some sort of
+overture.  As nothing came, he resolved to speak himself; but he
+hesitated.  For, though he considered that the most difficult step
+had been taken, he said to himself that every stage of progress
+required great caution, lest the man in Ricardo's phraseology,
+should "start to prance"--which would be most inconvenient.  He fell
+back on a previous statement:
+
+"And I am a person to be reckoned with."
+
+The other man went on looking at the floor, as if he were alone in
+the room.  There was a pause.
+
+"You have heard of me, then?" Heyst said at length, looking up.
+
+"I should think so!  We have been staying at Schomberg's hotel."
+
+"Schom--" Heyst choked on the word.
+
+"What's the matter, Mr. Heyst?"
+
+"Nothing.  Nausea," Heyst said resignedly.  He resumed his former
+attitude of meditative indifference.  "What is this reckoning you
+are talking about?" he asked after a time, in the quietest possible
+tone.  "I don't know you."
+
+"It's obvious that we belong to the same--social sphere," began Mr.
+Jones with languid irony.  Inwardly he was as watchful as he could
+be.  "Something has driven you out--the originality of your ideas,
+perhaps.  Or your tastes."
+
+Mr Jones indulged in one of his ghastly smiles.  In repose his
+features had a curious character of evil, exhausted austerity; but
+when he smiled, the whole mask took on an unpleasantly infantile
+expression.  A recrudescence of the rolling thunder invaded the room
+loudly, and passed into silence.
+
+"You are not taking this very well," observed Mr. Jones.  This was
+what he said, but as a matter of fact he thought that the business
+was shaping quite satisfactorily.  The man, he said to himself, had
+no stomach for a fight.  Aloud he continued:  "Come!  You can't
+expect to have it always your own way.  You are a man of the world."
+
+"And you?" Heyst interrupted him unexpectedly.  "How do you define
+yourself?"
+
+"I, my dear sir?  In one way I am--yes, I am the world itself, come
+to pay you a visit.  In another sense I am an outcast--almost an
+outlaw.  If you prefer a less materialistic view, I am a sort of
+fate--the retribution that waits its time."
+
+"I wish to goodness you were the commonest sort of ruffian!" said
+Heyst, raising his equable gaze to Mr. Jones.  "One would be able to
+talk to you straight then, and hope for some humanity.  As it is--"
+
+"I dislike violence and ferocity of every sort as much as you do,"
+Mr. Jones declared, looking very languid as he leaned against the
+wall, but speaking fairly loud.  "You can ask my Martin if it is not
+so.  This, Mr. Heyst, is a soft age.  It is also an age without
+prejudices.  I've heard that you are free from them yourself.  You
+mustn't be shocked if I tell you plainly that we are after your
+money--or I am, if you prefer to make me alone responsible.  Pedro,
+of course, knows no more of it than any other animal would.  Ricardo
+is of the faithful-retainer class--absolutely identified with all my
+ideas, wishes, and even whims!"
+
+Mr Jones pulled his left hand out of his pocket, got a handkerchief
+out of another, and began to wipe the perspiration from his
+forehead, neck, and chin.  The excitement from which he suffered
+made his breathing visible.  In his long dressing-gown he had the
+air of a convalescent invalid who had imprudently overtaxed his
+strength.  Heyst, broad-shouldered, robust, watched the operation
+from the end of the camp bedstead, very calm, his hands on his
+knees.
+
+"And by the by," he asked, "where is he now, that henchman of yours?
+Breaking into my desk?"
+
+"That would be crude.  Still, crudeness is one of life's
+conditions."  There was the slightest flavour of banter in the tone
+of Ricardo's governor.  "Conceivable, but unlikely.  Martin is a
+little crude; but you are not, Mr. Heyst.  To tell you the truth, I
+don't know precisely where he is.  He has been a little mysterious
+of late; but he has my confidence.  No, don't get up, Mr. Heyst!"
+
+The viciousness of his spectral face was indescribable.  Heyst, who
+had moved a little, was surprised by the disclosure.
+
+"It was not my intention," he said.
+
+"Pray remain seated," Mr. Jones insisted in a languid voice, but
+with a very determined glitter in his black eye-caverns.
+
+"If you were more observant," said Heyst with dispassionate
+contempt, "you would have known before I had been five minutes in
+the room that I had no weapon of any sort on me."
+
+"Possibly; but pray keep your hands still.  They are very well where
+they are.  This is too big an affair for me to take any risks."
+
+"Big?  Too big?" Heyst repeated with genuine surprise.  "Good
+Heavens!  Whatever you are looking for, there's very little of it
+here--very little of anything."
+
+"You would naturally say so, but that's not what we have heard,"
+retorted Mr. Jones quickly, with a grin so ghastly that it was
+impossible to think it voluntary.
+
+Heyst's face had grown very gloomy.  He knitted his brows.
+
+"What have you heard?" he asked.
+
+"A lot, Mr. Heyst--a lot," affirmed Mr. Jones.  He was vying to
+recover his manner of languid superiority.  "We have heard, for
+instance, of a certain Mr. Morrison, once your partner."
+
+Heyst could not repress a slight movement.
+
+"Aha!" said Mr. Jones, with a sort of ghostly glee on his face.
+
+The muffled thunder resembled the echo of a distant cannonade below
+the horizon, and the two men seemed to be listening to it in sullen
+silence.
+
+"This diabolical calumny will end in actually and literally taking
+my life from me," thought Heyst.
+
+Then, suddenly, he laughed.  Portentously spectral, Mr. Jones
+frowned at the sound.
+
+"Laugh as much as you please," he said.  "I, who have been hounded
+out from society by a lot of highly moral souls, can't see anything
+funny in that story.  But here we are, and you will now have to pay
+for your fun, Mr. Heyst."
+
+"You have heard a lot of ugly lies," observed Heyst.  "Take my word
+for it!"
+
+"You would say so, of course--very natural.  As a matter of fact I
+haven't heard very much.  Strictly speaking, it was Martin.  He
+collects information, and so on.  You don't suppose I would talk to
+that Schomberg animal more than I could help?  It was Martin whom he
+took into his confidence."
+
+"The stupidity of that creature is so great that it becomes
+formidable," Heyst said, as if speaking to himself.
+
+Involuntarily, his mind turned to the girl, wandering in the forest,
+alone and terrified.  Would he ever see her again?  At that thought
+he nearly lost his self-possession.  But the idea that if she
+followed his instructions those men were not likely to find her
+steadied him a little.  They did not know that the island had any
+inhabitants; and he himself once disposed of, they would be too
+anxious to get away to waste time hunting for a vanished girl.
+
+All this passed through Heyst's mind in a flash, as men think in
+moments of danger.  He looked speculatively at Mr. Jones, who, of
+course, had never for a moment taken his eyes from his intended
+victim.  And, the conviction came to Heyst that this outlaw from the
+higher spheres was an absolutely hard and pitiless scoundrel.
+
+Mr Jones's voice made him start.
+
+"It would be useless, for instance, to tell me that your Chinaman
+has run off with your money.  A man living alone with a Chinaman on
+an island takes care to conceal property of that kind so well that
+the devil himself--"
+
+"Certainly," Heyst muttered.
+
+Again, with his left hand, Mr. Jones mopped his frontal bone, his
+stalk-like neck, his razor jaws, his fleshless chin.  Again his
+voice faltered and his aspect became still more gruesomely
+malevolent as of a wicked and pitiless corpse.
+
+"I see what you mean," he cried, "but you mustn't put too much trust
+in your ingenuity.  You don't strike me as a very ingenious person,
+Mr. Heyst.  Neither am I.  My talents lie another way.  But Martin--
+"
+
+"Who is now engaged in rifling my desk," interjected Heyst.
+
+"I don't think so.  What I was going to say is that Martin is much
+cleverer than a Chinaman.  Do you believe in racial superiority, Mr.
+Heyst?  I do, firmly.  Martin is great at ferreting out such secrets
+as yours, for instance."
+
+"Secrets like mine!" repeated Heyst bitterly.  "Well I wish him joy
+of all he can ferret out!"
+
+"That's very kind of you," remarked Mr. Jones.  He was beginning to
+be anxious for Martin's return.  Of iron self-possession at the
+gaming-table, fearless in a sudden affray, he found that this rather
+special kind of work was telling on his nerves.  "Keep still as you
+are!" he cried sharply.
+
+"I've told you I am not armed," said Heyst, folding his arms on his
+breast.
+
+"I am really inclined to believe that you are not," admitted Mr.
+Jones seriously.  "Strange!" he mused aloud, the caverns of his eyes
+turned upon Heyst.  Then briskly:  "But my object is to keep you in
+this room.  Don't provoke me, by some unguarded movement, to smash
+your knee or do something definite of that sort."  He passed his
+tongue over his lips, which were dry and black, while his forehead
+glistened with moisture.  "I don't know if it wouldn't be better to
+do it at once!"
+
+"He who deliberates is lost," said Heyst with grave mockery.
+
+Mr Jones disregarded the remark.  He had the air of communing with
+himself.
+
+"Physically I am no match for you," he said slowly, his black gaze
+fixed upon the man sitting on the end of the bed.  "You could
+spring--"
+
+"Are you trying to frighten yourself?" asked Heyst abruptly.  "You
+don't seem to have quite enough pluck for your business.  Why don't
+you do it at once?"
+
+Mr Jones, taking violent offence, snorted like a savage skeleton.
+
+"Strange as it may seem to you, it is because of my origin, my
+breeding, my traditions, my early associations, and such-like
+trifles.  Not everybody can divest himself of the prejudices of a
+gentleman as easily as you have done, Mr, Heyst.  But don't worry
+about my pluck.  If you were to make a clean spring at me, you would
+receive in mid air, so to speak, something that would make you
+perfectly harmless by the time you landed.  No, don't misapprehend
+us, Mr. Heyst.  We are--er--adequate bandits; and we are after the
+fruit of your labours as a--er--successful swindler.  It's the way
+of the world--gorge and disgorge!"
+
+He leaned wearily the back of his head against the wall.  His
+vitality seemed exhausted.  Even his sunken eyelids drooped within
+the bony sockets.  Only his thin, waspish, beautifully pencilled
+eyebrows, drawn together a little, suggested the will and the power
+to sting--something vicious, unconquerable, and deadly.
+
+"Fruits!  Swindler!" repeated Heyst, without heat, almost without
+contempt.  "You are giving yourself no end of trouble, you and your
+faithful henchman, to crack an empty nut.  There are no fruits here,
+as you imagine.  There are a few sovereigns, which you may have if
+you like; and since you have called yourself a bandit--"
+
+"Yaas!" drawled Mr. Jones.  "That, rather than a swindler.  Open
+warfare at least!"
+
+"Very good!  Only let me tell you that there were never in the world
+two more deluded bandits--never!"
+
+Heyst uttered these words with such energy that Mr. Jones,
+stiffening up, seemed to become thinner and taller in his metallic
+blue dressing-gown against the whitewashed wall.
+
+"Fooled by a silly, rascally innkeeper!" Heyst went on.  "Talked
+over like a pair of children with a promise of sweets!"
+
+"I didn't talk with that disgusting animal," muttered Mr. Jones
+sullenly; "but he convinced Martin, who is no fool."
+
+"I should think he wanted very much to be convinced," said Heyst,
+with the courteous intonation so well known in the Islands.  "I
+don't want to disturb your touching trust in your--your follower,
+but he must be the most credulous brigand in existence.  What do you
+imagine?  If the story of my riches were ever so true, do you think
+Schomberg would have imparted it to you from sheer altruism?  Is
+that the way of the world, Mr. Jones?"
+
+For a moment the lower jaw of Ricardo's gentleman dropped; but it
+came up with a snap of scorn, and he said with spectral intensity:
+
+"The beast is cowardly!  He was frightened, and wanted to get rid of
+us, if you want to know, Mr. Heyst.  I don't know that the material
+inducement was so very great, but I was bored, and we decided to
+accept the bribe.  I don't regret it.  All my life I have been
+seeking new impressions, and you have turned out to be something
+quite out of the common.  Martin, of course, looks to the material
+results.  He's simple--and faithful--and wonderfully acute."
+
+"Ah, yes!  He's on the track--" and now Heyst's speech had the
+character of politely grim raillery--"but not sufficiently on the
+track, as yet, to make it quite convenient to shoot me without more
+ado.  Didn't Schomberg tell you precisely where I conceal the fruit
+of my rapines?  Pah!  Don't you know he would have told you
+anything, true or false, from a very clear motive?  Revenge!  Mad
+hate--the unclean idiot!"
+
+Mr Jones did not seem very much moved.  On his right hand the
+doorway incessantly flickered with distant lightning, and the
+continuous rumble of thunder went on irritatingly, like the growl of
+an inarticulate giant muttering fatuously.
+
+Heyst overcame his immense repugnance to allude to her whose image,
+cowering in the forest was constantly before his eyes, with all the
+pathos and force of its appeal, august, pitiful, and almost holy to
+him.  It was in a hurried, embarrassed manner that he went on:
+
+"If it had not been for that girl whom he persecuted with his insane
+and odious passion, and who threw herself on my protection, he would
+never have--but you know well enough!"
+
+"I don't know!" burst out Mr. Jones with amazing heat.  "That hotel-
+keeper tried to talk to me once of some girl he had lost, but I told
+him I didn't want to hear any of his beastly women stories.  It had
+something to do with you, had it?"
+
+Heyst looked on serenely at this outburst, then lost his patience a
+little.
+
+"What sort of comedy is this?  You don't mean to say that you didn't
+know that I had--that there was a girl living with me here?"
+
+One could see that the eyes of Mr. Jones had become fixed in the
+depths of their black holes by the gleam of white becoming steady
+there.  The whole man seemed frozen still.
+
+"Here!  Here!" he screamed out twice.  There was no mistaking his
+astonishment, his shocked incredulity--something like frightened
+disgust.
+
+Heyst was disgusted also, but in another way.  He too was
+incredulous.  He regretted having mentioned the girl; but the thing
+was done, his repugnance had been overcome in the heat of his
+argument against the absurd bandit.
+
+"Is it possible that you didn't know of that significant fact?" he
+inquired.  "Of the only effective truth in the welter of silly lies
+that deceived you so easily?"
+
+"No, I didn't!" Mr. Jones shouted.  "But Martin did!" he added in a
+faint whisper, which Heyst's ears just caught and no more.
+
+"I kept her out of sight as long as I could," said Heyst.  "Perhaps,
+with your bringing up traditions, and so on; you will understand my
+reason for it."
+
+"He knew.  He knew before!"  Mr. Jones mourned in a hollow voice.
+"He knew of her from the first!"
+
+Backed hard against the wall he no longer watched Heyst.  He had the
+air of a man who had seen an abyss yawning under his feet.
+
+"If I want to kill him, this is my time," thought Heyst; but he did
+not move.
+
+Next moment Mr. Jones jerked his head up, glaring with sardonic
+fury.
+
+"I have a good mind to shoot you, you woman-ridden hermit, you man
+in the moon, that can't exist without--no, it won't be you that I'll
+shoot.  It's the other woman-lover--the prevaricating, sly, low-
+class, amorous cuss!  And he shaved--shaved under my very nose.
+I'll shoot him!"
+
+"He's gone mad," thought Heyst, startled by the spectre's sudden
+fury.
+
+He felt himself more in danger, nearer death, than ever since he had
+entered that room.  An insane bandit is a deadly combination.  He
+did not, could not know that Mr. Jones was quick-minded enough to
+see already the end of his reign over his excellent secretary's
+thoughts and feelings; the coming failure of Ricardo's fidelity.  A
+woman had intervened!  A woman, a girl, who apparently possessed the
+power to awaken men's disgusting folly.  Her power had been proved
+in two instances already--the beastly innkeeper, and that man with
+moustaches, upon whom Mr. Jones, his deadly right hand twitching in
+his pocket, glared more in repulsion than in anger.  The very object
+of the expedition was lost from view in his sudden and overwhelming
+sense of utter insecurity.  And this made Mr. Jones feel very
+savage; but not against the man with the moustaches.  Thus, while
+Heyst was really feeling that his life was not worth two minutes,
+purchase, he heard himself addressed with no affection of languid
+impertinence but with a burst of feverish determination.
+
+"Here!  Let's call a truce!" said Mr. Jones.
+
+Heyst's heart was too sick to allow him to smile.
+
+"Have I been making war on you?" he asked wearily.  "How do you
+expect me to attach any meaning to your words?" he went on.  "You
+seem to be a morbid, senseless sort of bandit.  We don't speak the
+same language.  If I were to tell you why I am here, talking to you,
+you wouldn't believe me, because you would not understand me.  It
+certainly isn't the love of life, from which I have divorced myself
+long ago--not sufficiently, perhaps; but if you are thinking of
+yours, then I repeat to you that it has never been in danger from
+me.  I am unarmed."
+
+Mr Jones was biting his lower lip, in a deep meditation.  It was
+only towards the last that he looked at Heyst.
+
+"Unarmed, eh?"  Then he burst out violently:  "I tell you, a
+gentleman is no match for the common herd.  And yet one must make
+use of the brutes.  Unarmed, eh?  And I suppose that creature is of
+the commonest sort.  You could hardly have got her out of a drawing-
+room.  Though they're all alike, for that matter.  Unarmed!  It's a
+pity.  I am in much greater danger than you are or were--or I am
+much mistaken.  But I am not--I know my man!"
+
+He lost his air of mental vacancy and broke out into shrill
+exclamations.  To Heyst they seemed madder than anything that had
+gone before.
+
+"On the track!  On the scent!" he cried, forgetting himself to the
+point of executing a dance of rage in the middle of the floor.
+
+Heyst looked on, fascinated by this skeleton in a gay dressing-gown,
+jerkily agitated like a grotesque toy on the end of an invisible
+string.  It became quiet suddenly.
+
+"I might have smelt a rat!  I always knew that this would be the
+danger."  He changed suddenly to a confidential tone, fixing his
+sepulchral stare on Heyst.  "And yet here I am, taken in by the
+fellow, like the veriest fool.  I've been always on the watch for
+some beastly influence, but here I am, fairly caught.  He shaved
+himself right in front of me and I never guessed!"
+
+The shrill laugh, following on the low tone of secrecy, sounded so
+convincingly insane that Heyst got up as if moved by a spring.  Mr.
+Jones stepped back two paces, but displayed no uneasiness.
+
+"It's as clear as daylight!" he uttered mournfully, and fell silent.
+
+Behind him the doorway flickered lividly, and the sound as of a
+naval action somewhere away on the horizon filled the breathless
+pause.  Mr, Jones inclined his head on his shoulder.  His mood had
+completely changed.
+
+"What do you say, unarmed man?  Shall we go and see what is
+detaining my trusted Martin so long?  He asked me to keep you
+engaged in friendly conversation till he made a further examination
+of that track.  Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+"He is no doubt ransacking my house," said Heyst.
+
+He was is bewildered.  It seemed to him that all this was an
+incomprehensible dream, or perhaps an elaborate other-world joke,
+contrived by that spectre in a gorgeous dressing gown.
+
+Mr Jones looked at him with a horrible, cadaverous smile of
+inscrutable mockery, and pointed to the door.  Heyst passed through
+it first.  His feelings had become so blunted that he did not care
+how soon he was shot in the back.
+
+"How oppressive the air is!" the voice of Mr. Jones said at his
+elbow.  "This stupid storm gets on my nerves.  I would welcome some
+rain, though it would be unpleasant to get wet.  On the other hand,
+this exasperating thunder has the advantage of covering the sound of
+our approach.  The lightning's not so convenient.  Ah, your house is
+fully illuminated!  My clever Martin is punishing your stock of
+candles.  He belongs to the unceremonious classes, which are also
+unlovely, untrustworthy, and so on."
+
+"I left the candles burning," said Heyst, "to save him trouble."
+
+"You really believed he would go to your house?" asked Mr. Jones
+with genuine interest.
+
+"I had that notion, strongly.  I do believe he is there now."
+
+"And you don't mind?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"You don't!" Mr. Jones stopped to wonder.  "You are an extraordinary
+man," he said suspiciously, and moved on, touching elbows with
+Heyst.
+
+In the latter's breast dwelt a deep silence, the complete silence of
+unused faculties.  At this moment, by simply shouldering Mr. Jones,
+he could have thrown him down and put himself, by a couple of leaps,
+beyond the certain aim of the revolver; but he did not even think of
+that.  His very will seemed dead of weariness.  He moved
+automatically, his head low, like a prisoner captured by the evil
+power of a masquerading skeleton out of a grave.  Mr. Jones took
+charge of the direction.  They fetched a wide sweep.  The echoes of
+distant thunder seemed to dog their footsteps.
+
+"By the by," said Mr. Jones, as if unable to restrain his curiosity,
+"aren't you anxious about that--ouch!--that fascinating creature to
+whom you owe whatever pleasure you can find in our visit?"
+
+"I have placed her in safety," said Heyst.  "I--I took good care of
+that."
+
+Mr Jones laid a hand on his arm.
+
+"You have?  Look! is that what you mean?"
+
+Heyst raised his head.  In the flicker of lightning the desolation
+of the cleared ground on his left leaped out and sank into the
+night, together with the elusive forms of things distant, pale,
+unearthly.  But in the brilliant square of the door he saw the girl-
+-the woman he had longed to see once more as if enthroned, with her
+hands on the arms of the chair.  She was in black; her face was
+white, her head dreamily inclined on her breast.  He saw her only as
+low as her knees.  He saw her--there, in the room, alive with a
+sombre reality.  It was no mocking vision.  She was not in the
+forest--but there!  She sat there in the chair, seemingly without
+strength, yet without fear, tenderly stooping.
+
+"Can you understand their power?" whispered the hot breath of Mr.
+Jones into his ear.  "Can there be a more disgusting spectacle?
+It's enough to make the earth detestable.  She seems to have found
+her affinity.  Move on closer.  If I have to shoot you in the end,
+then perhaps you will die cured."
+
+Heyst obeyed the pushing pressure of a revolver barrel between his
+shoulders.  He felt it distinctly, but he did not feel the ground
+under his feet.  They found the steps, without his being aware that
+he was ascending them--slowly, one by one.  Doubt entered into him--
+a doubt of a new kind, formless, hideous.  It seemed to spread
+itself all over him, enter his limbs, and lodge in his entrails.  He
+stopped suddenly, with a thought that he who experienced such a
+feeling had no business to live--or perhaps was no longer living.
+
+Everything--the bungalow, the forest, the open ground--trembled
+incessantly, the earth, the sky itself, shivered all the time, and
+the only thing immovable in the shuddering universe was the interior
+of the lighted room and the woman in black sitting in the light of
+the eight candle-flames.  They flung around her an intolerable
+brilliance which hurt his eyes, seemed to sear his very brain with
+the radiation of infernal heat.  It was some time before his
+scorched eyes made out Ricardo seated on the floor at some little
+distance, his back to the doorway, but only partly so; one side of
+his upturned face showing the absorbed, all forgetful rapture of his
+contemplation.
+
+The grip of Mr. Jones's hard claw drew Heyst back a little.  In the
+roll of thunder, swelling and subsiding, he whispered in his ear a
+sarcastic:  "Of course!"
+
+A great shame descended upon Heyst--the shame of guilt, absurd and
+maddening.  Mr. Jones drew him still farther back into the darkness
+of the veranda.
+
+"This is serious," he went on, distilling his ghostly venom into
+Heyst's very ear.  "I had to shut my eyes many times to his little
+flings; but this is serious.  He has found his soul-mate.  Mud
+souls, obscene and cunning!  Mud bodies, too--the mud of the gutter!
+I tell you, we are no match for the vile populace.  I, even I, have
+been nearly caught.  He asked me to detain you till he gave me the
+signal.  It won't be you that I'll have to shoot, but him.  I
+wouldn't trust him near me for five minutes after this!"
+
+He shook Heyst's arm a little.
+
+"If you had not happened to mention the creature, we should both
+have been dead before morning.  He would have stabbed you as you
+came down the steps after leaving me and then he would have walked
+up to me and planted the same knife between my ribs.  He has no
+prejudices.  The viler the origin, the greater the freedom of these
+simple souls!"
+
+He drew a cautious, hissing breath and added in an agitated murmur:
+"I can see right into his mind, I have been nearly caught napping by
+his cunning."
+
+He stretched his neck to peer into the room from the side.  Heyst,
+too, made a step forward, under the slight impulse of that slender
+hand clasping his hand with a thin, bony grasp.
+
+"Behold!" the skeleton of the crazy bandit jabbered thinly into his
+ear in spectral fellowship.  "Behold the simple, Acis kissing the
+sandals of the nymph, on the way to her lips, all forgetful, while
+the menacing life of Polyphemus already sounds close at hand--if he
+could only hear it!  Stoop a little."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+
+
+On returning to the Heyst bungalow, rapid as if on wings, Ricardo
+found Lena waiting for him.  She was dressed in black; and at once
+his uplifting exultation was replaced by an awed and quivering
+patience before her white face, before the immobility of her
+reposeful pose, the more amazing to him who had encountered the
+strength of her limbs and the indomitable spirit in her body.  She
+had come out after Heyst's departure, and had sat down under the
+portrait to wait for the return of the man of violence and death.
+While lifting the curtain, she felt the anguish of her disobedience
+to her lover, which was soothed by a feeling she had known before--a
+gentle flood of penetrating sweetness.  She was not automatically
+obeying a momentary suggestion, she was under influences more
+deliberate, more vague, and of greater potency.  She had been
+prompted, not by her will, but by a force that was outside of her
+and more worthy.  She reckoned upon nothing definite; she had
+calculated nothing.  She saw only her purpose of capturing death--
+savage, sudden, irresponsible death, prowling round the man who
+possessed her, death embodied in the knife ready to strike into his
+heart.  No doubt it had been a sin to throw herself into his arms.
+With that inspiration that descends at times from above for the good
+or evil of our common mediocrity, she had a sense of having been for
+him only a violent and sincere choice of curiosity and pity--a thing
+that passes.  She did not know him.  If he were to go away from her
+and disappear, she would utter no reproach, she would not resent it;
+for she would hold in herself the impress of something most rare and
+precious--his embraces made her own by her courage in saving his
+life.
+
+All she thought of--the essence of her tremors, her flushes of heat,
+and her shudders of cold--was the question how to get hold of that
+knife, the mark and sign of stalking death.  A tremor of impatience
+to clutch the frightful thing, glimpsed once and unforgettable,
+agitated her hands.
+
+The instinctive flinging forward of these hands stopped Ricardo dead
+short between the door and her chair, with the ready obedience of a
+conquered man who can bide his time.  Her success disconcerted her.
+She listened to the man's impassioned transports of terrible eulogy
+and even more awful declarations of love.  She was even able to meet
+his eyes, oblique, apt to glide away, throwing feral gleams of
+desire.
+
+"No!" he was saying, after a fiery outpouring of words in which the
+most ferocious phrases of love were mingled with wooing accents of
+entreaty.  "I will have no more of it!  Don't you mistrust me.  I am
+sober in my talk.  Feel how quietly my heart beats.  Ten times today
+when you, you, you, swam in my eye, I thought it would burst one of
+my ribs or leap out of my throat.  It has knocked itself dead and
+tired, waiting for this evening, for this very minute.  And now it
+can do no more.  Feel how quiet it is!"
+
+He made a step forward, but she raised her clear voice commandingly:
+
+"No nearer!"
+
+He stopped with a smile of imbecile worship on his lips, and with
+the delighted obedience of a man who could at any moment seize her
+in his hands and dash her to the ground.
+
+"Ah!  If I had taken you by the throat this morning and had my way
+with you, I should never have known what you am.  And now I do.  You
+are a wonder!  And so am I, in my way.  I have nerve, and I have
+brains, too.  We should have been lost many times but for me.  I
+plan--I plot for my gentleman.  Gentleman--pah!  I am sick of him.
+And you are sick of yours, eh?  You, you!"
+
+He shook all over; he cooed at her a string of endearing names,
+obscene and tender, and then asked abruptly:
+
+"Why don't you speak to me?"
+
+"It's my part to listen," she said, giving him an inscrutable smile,
+with a flush on her cheek and her lips cold as ice.
+
+"But you will answer me?"
+
+"Yes," she said, her eyes dilated as if with sudden interest.
+
+"Where's that plunder?  Do you know?"
+
+"No!  Not yet."
+
+"But there is plunder stowed somewhere that's worth having?"
+
+"Yes, I think so.  But who knows?" she added after a pause.
+
+"And who cares?" he retorted recklessly.  "I've had enough of this
+crawling on my belly.  It's you who are my treasure.  It's I who
+found you out where a gentleman had buried you to rot for his
+accursed pleasure!"
+
+He looked behind him and all around for a seat, then turned to her
+his troubled eyes and dim smile.
+
+"I am dog-tired," he said, and sat down on the floor.  "I went tired
+this morning, since I came in here and started talking to you--as
+tired as if I had been pouring my life-blood here on these planks
+for you to dabble your white feet in."
+
+Unmoved, she nodded at him thoughtfully.  Woman-like, all her
+faculties remained concentrated on her heart's desire--on the knife-
+-while the man went on babbling insanely at her feet, ingratiating
+and savage, almost crazy with elation.  But he, too, was holding on
+to his purpose.
+
+"For you!  For you I will throw away money, lives--all the lives but
+mine!  What you want is a man, a master that will let you put the
+heel of your shoe on his neck; not that skulker, who will get tired
+of you in a year--and you of him.  And then what?  You are not the
+one to sit still; neither am I.  I live for myself, and you shall
+live for yourself, too--not for a Swedish baron.  They make a
+convenience of people like you and me.  A gentleman is better than
+an employer, but an equal partnership against all the 'yporcrits is
+the thing for you and me.  We'll go on wandering the world over, you
+and I both free and both true.  You are no cage bird.  We'll rove
+together, for we are of them that have no homes.  We are born
+rovers!"
+
+She listened to him with the utmost attention, as if any unexpected
+word might give her some sort of opening to get that dagger, that
+awful knife--to disarm murder itself, pleading for her love at her
+feet.  Again she nodded at him thoughtfully, rousing a gleam in his
+yellow eyes, yearning devotedly upon her face.  When he hitched
+himself a little closer, her soul had no movement of recoil.  This
+had to be.  Anything had to be which would bring the knife within
+her reach.  He talked more confidentially now.
+
+"We have met, and their time has come," he began, looking up into
+her eyes.  "The partnership between me and my gentleman has to be
+ripped up.  There's no room for him where we two are.  Why, he would
+shoot me like a dog!  Don't you worry.  This will settle it not
+later than tonight!"
+
+He tapped his folded leg below the knee, and was surprised,
+flattered, by the lighting up of her face, which stooped towards him
+eagerly and remained expectant, the lips girlishly parted, red in
+the pale face, and quivering in the quickened drawing of her breath.
+
+"You marvel, you miracle, you man's luck and joy--one in a million!
+No, the only one.  You have found your man in me," he whispered
+tremulously.  "Listen!  They are having their last talk together;
+for I'll do for your gentleman, too, by midnight."
+
+Without the slightest tremor she murmured, as soon as the tightening
+of her breast had eased off and the words would come:
+
+"I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry--with him."
+
+The pause, the tone, had all the value of meditated advice.
+
+"Good, thrifty girl!" he laughed low, with a strange feline gaiety,
+expressed by the undulating movement of his shoulders and the
+sparkling snap of his oblique eyes.  "You am still thinking about
+the chance of that swag.  You'll make a good partner, that you will!
+And, I say, what a decoy you will make!  Jee-miny!"
+
+He was carried away for a moment, but his face darkened swiftly.
+
+"No!  No reprieve.  What do you think a fellow is--a scarecrow?  All
+hat and clothes and no feeling, no inside, no brain to make fancies
+for himself?  No!" he went on violently.  "Never in his life will he
+go again into that room of yours--never any more!"
+
+A silence fell.  He was gloomy with the torment of his jealousy, and
+did not even look at her.  She sat up and slowly, gradually, bent
+lower and lower over him, as if ready to fall into his arms.  He
+looked up at last, and checked this droop unwittingly.
+
+"Say!  You, who are up to fighting a man with your bare hands, could
+you--eh?--could you manage to stick one with a thing like that knife
+of mine?"
+
+She opened her eyes very wide and gave him a wild smile.
+
+"How can I tell?" she whispered enchantingly.  "Will you let me have
+a look at it?"
+
+Without taking his eyes from her face, he pulled the knife out of
+its sheath--a short, broad, cruel double-edged blade with a bone
+handle--and only then looked down at it.
+
+"A good friend," he said simply.  "Take it in your hand and feel the
+balance," he suggested.
+
+At the moment when she bent forward to receive it from him, there
+was a flash of fire in her mysterious eyes--a red gleam in the white
+mist which wrapped the promptings and longings of her soul.  She had
+done it!  The very sting of death was in her hands, the venom of the
+viper in her paradise, extracted, safe in her possession--and the
+viper's head all but lying under her heel.  Ricardo, stretched on
+the mats of the floor, crept closer and closer to the chair in which
+she sat.
+
+All her thoughts were busy planning how to keep possession of that
+weapon which had seemed to have drawn into itself every danger and
+menace on the death-ridden earth.  She said with a low laugh, the
+exultation in which he failed to recognize:
+
+"I didn't think that you would ever trust me with that thing!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"For fear I should suddenly strike you with it."
+
+"What for?  For this morning's work?  Oh, no!  There's no spite in
+you for that.  You forgave me.  You saved me.  You got the better of
+me, too.  And anyhow, what good would it be?"
+
+"No, no good," she admitted.
+
+In her heart she felt that she would not know how to do it; that if
+it came to a struggle, she would have to drop the dagger and fight
+with her hands.
+
+"Listen.  When we are going about the world together, you shall
+always call me husband.  Do you hear?"
+
+"Yes," she said bracing herself for the contest, in whatever shape
+it was coming.
+
+The knife was lying in her lap.  She let it slip into the fold of
+her dress, and laid her forearms with clasped fingers over her
+knees, which she pressed desperately together.  The dreaded thing
+was out of sight at last.  She felt a dampness break out all over
+her.
+
+"I am not going to hide you, like that good-for-nothing, finicky,
+sneery gentleman.  You shall be my pride and my chum.  Isn't that
+better than rotting on an island for the pleasure of a gentleman,
+till he gives you the chuck?"
+
+"I'll be anything you like," she said.
+
+In his intoxication he crept closer with every word she uttered,
+with every movement she made.
+
+"Give your foot," he begged in a timid murmur, and in the full
+consciousness of his power.
+
+Anything!  Anything to keep murder quiet and disarmed till strength
+had returned to her limbs and she could make up her mind what to do.
+Her fortitude had been shaken by the very facility of success that
+had come to her.  She advanced her foot forward a little from under
+the hem of her skirt; and he threw himself on it greedily.  She was
+not even aware of him.  She had thought of the forest, to which she
+had been told to run.  Yes, the forest--that was the place for her
+to carry off the terrible spoil, the sting of vanquished death.
+Ricardo, clasping her ankle, pressed his lips time after time to the
+instep, muttering gasping words that were like sobs, making little
+noises that resembled the sounds of grief and distress.  Unheard by
+them both, the thunder growled distantly with angry modulations of
+it's tremendous voice, while the world outside shuddered incessantly
+around the dead stillness of the room where the framed profile of
+Heyst's father looked severely into space.
+
+Suddenly Ricardo felt himself spurned by the foot he had been
+cherishing--spurned with a push of such violence into the very
+hollow of his throat that it swung him back instantly into an
+upright position on his knees.  He read his danger in the stony eyes
+of the girl; and in the very act of leaping to his feet he heard
+sharply, detached on the comminatory voice of the storm the brief
+report of a shot which half stunned him, in the manner of a blow.
+He turned his burning head, and saw Heyst towering in the doorway.
+The thought that the beggar had started to prance darted through his
+mind.  For a fraction of a second his distracted eyes sought for his
+weapon an over the floor.  He couldn't see it.
+
+"Stick him, you!" he called hoarsely to the girl, and dashed
+headlong for the door of the compound.
+
+While he thus obeyed the instinct of self-preservation, his reason
+was telling him that he could not possibly reach it alive.  It flew
+open, however, with a crash, before his launched weight, and
+instantly he swung it to behind him.  There, his shoulder leaning
+against it, his hands clinging to the handle, dazed and alone in the
+night full of shudders and muttered menaces, he tried to pull
+himself together.  He asked himself if he had been shot at more than
+once.  His shoulder was wet with the blood trickling from his head.
+Feeling above his ear, he ascertained that it was only a graze, but
+the shock of the surprise had unmanned him for the moment.
+
+What the deuce was the governor about to let the beggar break loose
+like this?  Or--was the governor dead, perhaps?
+
+The silence within the room awed him.  Of going back there could be
+no question.
+
+"But she know show to take care of her self," he muttered.
+
+She had his knife.  It was she now who was deadly, while he was
+disarmed, no good for the moment.  He stole away from the door,
+staggering, the warm trickle running down his neck, to find out what
+had become of the governor and to provide himself with a firearm
+from the armoury in the trunks.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+
+
+Mr Jones, after firing his shot over Heyst's shoulder, had thought
+it proper to dodge away.  Like the spectre he was, he noiselessly
+vanished from the veranda.  Heyst stumbled into the room and looked
+around.  All the objects in there--the books, portrait on the wall--
+seemed shadowy, unsubstantial, the dumb accomplices of an amazing
+dream-plot ending in an illusory effect of awakening and the
+impossibility of ever closing his eyes again.  With dread he forced
+himself to look at the girl.  Still in the chair, she was leaning
+forward far over her knees, and had hidden her face in her hands.
+Heyst remembered Wang suddenly.  How clear all this was--and how
+extremely amusing!  Very.
+
+She sat up a little, then leaned back, and taking her hands from her
+face, pressed both of them to her breast as if moved to the heart by
+seeing him there looking at her with a black, horror-struck
+curiosity.  He would have pitied her, if the triumphant expression
+of her face had not given him a shock which destroyed the balance of
+his feelings.  She spoke with an accent of wild joy:
+
+"I knew you would come back in time!  You are safe now.  I have done
+it!  I would never, never have let him--"  Her voice died out, while
+her eyes shone at him as when the sun breaks through a mist.  "Never
+get it back.  Oh, my beloved!"
+
+He bowed his head gravely, and said in his polite.  Heystian tone:
+
+"No doubt you acted from instinct.  Women have been provided with
+their own weapon.  I was a disarmed man, I have been a disarmed man
+all my life as I see it now.  You may glory in your resourcefulness
+and your profound knowledge of yourself; but I may say that the
+other attitude, suggestive of shame, had its charm.  For you are
+full of charm!"
+
+The exultation vanished from her face.
+
+"You mustn't make fun of me now.  I know no shame.  I was thanking
+God with all my sinful heart for having been able to do it--for
+giving you to me in that way--oh, my beloved--all my own at last!"
+
+He stared as if mad.  Timidly she tried to excuse herself for
+disobeying his directions for her safety.  Every modulation of her
+enchanting voice cut deep into his very breast, so that he could
+hardly understand the words for the sheer pain of it.  He turned his
+back on her; but a sudden drop, an extraordinary faltering of her
+tone, made him spin round.  On her white neck her pale head dropped
+as in a cruel drought a withered flower droops on its stalk.  He
+caught his breath, looked at her closely, and seemed to read some
+awful intelligence in her eyes.  At the moment when her eyelids fell
+as if smitten from above by an the gleam of old silver familiar to
+him from boyhood, the very invisible power, he snatched her up
+bodily out of the chair, and disregarding an unexpected metallic
+clatter on the floor, carried her off into the other room.  The
+limpness of her body frightened him.  Laying her down on the bed, he
+ran out again, seized a four-branched candlestick on the table, and
+ran back, tearing down with a furious jerk the curtain that swung
+stupidly in his way, but after putting the candlestick on the table
+by the bed, he remained absolutely idle.  There did not seem
+anything more for him to do.  Holding his chin in his hand he looked
+down intently at her still face.
+
+"Has she been stabbed with this thing?" asked Davidson, whom
+suddenly he saw standing by his side and holding up Ricardo's dagger
+to his sight.  Heyst uttered no word of recognition or surprise.  He
+gave Davidson only a dumb look of unutterable awe, then, as if
+possessed with a sudden fury, started tearing open the front of the
+girls dress.  She remained insensible under his hands, and Heyst let
+out a groan which made Davidson shudder inwardly the heavy plaint of
+a man who falls clubbed in the dark.
+
+They stood side by side, looking mournfully at the little black hole
+made by Mr. Jones's bullet under the swelling breast of a dazzling
+and as it were sacred whiteness.  It rose and fell slightly--so
+slightly that only the eyes of the lover could detect the faint stir
+of life.  Heyst, calm and utterly unlike himself in the face, moving
+about noiselessly, prepared a wet cloth, and laid it on the
+insignificant wound, round which there was hardly a trace of blood
+to mar the charm, the fascination, of that mortal flesh.
+
+Her eyelids fluttered.  She looked drowsily about, serene, as if
+fatigued only by the exertions of her tremendous victory, capturing
+the very sting of death in the service of love.  But her eyes became
+very wide awake when they caught sight of Ricardo's dagger, the
+spoil of vanquished death, which Davidson was still holding,
+unconsciously.
+
+"Give it to me," she said.  "It's mine."
+
+Davidson put the symbol of her victory into her feeble hands
+extended to him with the innocent gesture of a child reaching
+eagerly for a toy.
+
+"For you," she gasped, turning her eyes to Heyst.  "Kill nobody."
+
+"No," said Heyst, taking the dagger and laying it gently on her
+breast, while her hands fell powerless by her side.
+
+The faint smile on her deep-cut lips waned, and her head sank deep
+into the pillow, taking on the majestic pallor and immobility of
+marble.  But over the muscles, which seemed set in their
+transfigured beauty for ever, passed a slight and awful tremor.
+With an amazing strength she asked loudly:
+
+"What's the matter with me?"
+
+"You have been shot, dear Lena," Heyst said in a steady voice, while
+Davidson, at the question, turned away and leaned his forehead
+against the post of the foot of the bed.
+
+"Shot?  I did think, too, that something had struck me."
+
+Over Samburan the thunder had ceased to growl at last, and the world
+of material forms shuddered no more under the emerging stars.  The
+spirit of the girl which was passing away from under them clung to
+her triumph convinced of the reality of her victory over death.
+
+"No more," she muttered.  "There will be no more!  Oh, my beloved,"
+she cried weakly, "I've saved you!  Why don't you take me into your
+arms and carry me out of this lonely place?"
+
+Heyst bent low over her, cursing his fastidious soul, which even at
+that moment kept the true cry of love from his lips in its infernal
+mistrust of all life.  He dared not touch her and she had no longer
+the strength to throw her arms about his neck.
+
+"Who else could have done this for you?" she whispered gloriously.
+
+"No one in the world," he answered her in a murmur of unconcealed
+despair.
+
+She tried to raise herself, but all she could do was to lift her
+head a little from the pillow.  With a terrible and gentle movement,
+Heyst hastened to slip his arm under her neck.  She felt relieved at
+once of an intolerable weight, and was content to surrender to him
+the infinite weariness of her tremendous achievement.  Exulting, she
+saw herself extended on the bed, in a black dress, and profoundly at
+peace, while, stooping over her with a kindly, playful smile, he was
+ready to lift her up in his firm arms and take her into the
+sanctuary of his innermost heart--for ever!  The flush of rapture
+flooding her whole being broke out in a smile of innocent, girlish
+happiness; and with that divine radiance on her lips she breathed
+her, last triumphant, seeking for his glance in the shades of death.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+
+
+"Yes, Excellency," said Davidson in his placid voice; "there are
+more dead in this affair--more white people, I mean--than have been
+killed in many of the battles in the last Achin war."
+
+Davidson was talking with an Excellency, because what was alluded to
+in conversation as "the mystery of Samburan" had caused such a
+sensation in the Archipelago that even those in the highest spheres
+were anxious to hear something at first hand.  Davidson had been
+summoned to an audience.  It was a high official on his tour.
+
+"You knew the late Baron Heyst well?"
+
+"The truth is that nobody out here can boast of having known him
+well," said Davidson.  "He was a queer chap.  I doubt if he himself
+knew how queer he was.  But everybody was aware that I was keeping
+my eye on him in a friendly way.  And that's how I got the warning
+which made me turn round in my tracks.  In the middle of my trip and
+steam back to Samburan, where, I am grieved to say, I arrived too
+late."
+
+Without enlarging very much, Davidson explained to the attentive
+Excellency how a woman, the wife of a certain hotel-keeper named
+Schomberg, had overheard two card-sharping rascals making inquiries
+from her husband as to the exact position of the island.  She caught
+only a few words referring to the neighbouring volcano, but there
+were enough to arouse her suspicions--"which," went on Davidson,
+"she imparted to me, your Excellency.  They were only too well
+founded!"
+
+"That was very clever of her," remarked the great man.
+
+"She's much cleverer than people have any conception of," said
+Davidson.
+
+But he refrained from disclosing to the Excellency the real cause
+which had sharpened Mrs. Schomberg's wits.  The poor woman was in
+mortal terror of the girl being brought back within reach of her
+infatuated Wilhelm.  Davidson only said that her agitation had
+impressed him; but he confessed that while going back, he began to
+have his doubts as to there being anything in it.
+
+"I steamed into one of those silly thunderstorms that hang about the
+volcano, and had some trouble in making the island," narrated
+Davidson.  "I had to grope my way dead slow into Diamond Bay.  I
+don't suppose that anybody, even if looking out for me, could have
+heard me let go the anchor."
+
+He admitted that he ought to have gone ashore at once; but
+everything was perfectly dark and absolutely quiet.  He felt ashamed
+of his impulsiveness.  What a fool he would have looked, waking up a
+man in the middle of the night just to ask him if he was all right!
+And then the girl being there, he feared that Heyst would look upon
+his visit as an unwarrantable intrusion.
+
+The first intimation he had of there being anything wrong was a big
+white boat, adrift, with the dead body of a very hairy man inside,
+bumping against the bows of his steamer.  Then indeed he lost no
+time in going ashore--alone, of course, from motives of delicacy.
+
+"I arrived in time to see that poor girl die, as I have told your
+Excellency," pursued Davidson.  "I won't tell you what a time I had
+with him afterwards.  He talked to me.  His father seems to have
+been a crank, and to have upset his head when he was young.  He was
+a queer chap.  Practically the last words be said to me, as we came
+out on the veranda, were:
+
+"'Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while
+young to hope, to love--and to put its trust in life!'
+
+"As we stood there, just before I left him, for he said be wanted to
+be alone with his dead for a time, we heard a snarly sort of voice
+near the bushes by the shore calling out:
+
+"'Is that you, governor?'
+
+"'Yes, it's me.'
+
+"'Jeeminy!  I thought the beggar had done for you.  He has started
+prancing and nearly had me.  I have been dodging around, looking for
+you ever since.'
+
+"'Well, here I am,' suddenly screamed the other voice, and then a
+shot rang out.
+
+"'This time he has not missed him,' Heyst said to me bitterly, and
+went back into the house.
+
+"I returned on board as he had insisted I should do.  I didn't want
+to intrude on his grief.  Later, about five in the morning, some of
+my calashes came running to me, yelling that there was a fire
+ashore.  I landed at once, of course.  The principal bungalow was
+blazing.  The heat drove us back.  The other two houses caught one
+after another like kindling-wood.  There was no going beyond the
+shore end of the jetty till the afternoon."
+
+Davidson sighed placidly.
+
+"I suppose you are certain that Baron Heyst is dead?"
+
+"He is--ashes, your Excellency," said Davidson, wheezing a little;
+"he and the girl together.  I suppose he couldn't stand his thoughts
+before her dead body--and fire purifies everything.  That Chinaman
+of whom I told your Excellency helped me to investigate next day,
+when the embers got cooled a little.  We found enough to be sure.
+He's not a bad Chinaman.  He told me that he had followed Heyst and
+the girl through the forest from pity, and partly out of curiosity.
+He watched the house till he saw Heyst go out, after dinner, and
+Ricardo come back alone.  While he was dodging there, it occurred to
+him that he had better cast the boat adrift, for fear those
+scoundrels should come round by water and bombard the village from
+the sea with their revolvers and Winchesters.  He judged that they
+were devils enough for anything.  So he walked down the wharf
+quietly; and as he got into the boat, to cast her off, that hairy
+man who, it seems, was dozing in her, jumped up growling, and Wang
+shot him dead.  Then he shoved the boat off as far as he could and
+went away."
+
+There was a pause.  Presently Davidson went on, in his tranquil
+manner:
+
+"Let Heaven look after what has been purified.  The wind and rain
+will take care of the ashes.  The carcass of that follower,
+secretary, or whatever the unclean ruffian called himself, I left
+where it lay, to swell and rot in the sun.  His principal had shot
+him neatly through the head.  Then, apparently, this Jones went down
+to the wharf to look for the boat and for the hairy man.  I suppose
+he tumbled into the water by accident--or perhaps not by accident.
+The boat and the man were gone, and the scoundrel saw himself alone,
+his game clearly up, and fairly trapped.  Who knows?  The water's
+very clear there, and I could see him huddled up on the bottom,
+between two piles, like a heap of bones in a blue silk bag, with
+only the head and the feet sticking out.  Wang was very pleased when
+he discovered him.  That made everything safe, he said, and he went
+at once over the hill to fetch his Alfuro woman back to the hut."
+
+Davidson took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his
+forehead.
+
+"And then, your Excellency, I went away.  There was nothing to be
+done there."
+
+"Clearly!" assented the Excellency.
+
+Davidson, thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and
+then murmured with placid sadness:
+
+"Nothing!"
+
+
+October 1912--May 1914
+
+
+
+
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+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">Victory, by Joseph Conrad</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Victory, by Joseph Conrad
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+Title: Victory
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6378]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 3, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p>
+<p>Transcribed by Tracy Camp.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h1>VICTORY: AN ISLAND TALE</h1>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The last word of this novel was written on 29 May 1914.&nbsp; And
+that last word was the single word of the title.</p>
+<p>Those were the times of peace.&nbsp; Now that the moment of publication
+approaches I have been considering the discretion of altering the title-page.&nbsp;
+The word &ldquo;Victory&rdquo; the shining and tragic goal of noble
+effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere
+novel.&nbsp; There was also the possibility of falling under the suspicion
+of commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the
+book had something to do with war.</p>
+<p>Of that, however, I was not afraid very much.&nbsp; What influenced
+my decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum
+of awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Victory&rdquo; was the last word I had written in peace-time.&nbsp;
+It was the last literary thought which had occurred to me before the
+doors of the Temple of Janus flying open with a crash shook the minds,
+the hearts, the consciences of men all over the world.&nbsp; Such coincidence
+could not be treated lightly.&nbsp; And I made up my mind to let the
+word stand, in the same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen
+of Old Rome would have &ldquo;accepted the Omen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The second point on which I wish to offer a remark is the existence
+(in the novel) of a person named Schomberg.</p>
+<p>That I believe him to be true goes without saying.&nbsp; I am not
+likely to offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously.&nbsp; Schomberg
+is an old member of my company.&nbsp; A very subordinate personage in
+Lord Jim as far back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a
+certain short story of mine published in 1902.&nbsp; Here he appears
+in a still larger part, true to life (I hope), but also true to himself.&nbsp;
+Only, in this instance, his deeper passions come into play, and thus
+his grotesque psychology is completed at last.</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology;
+but it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton.&nbsp; My object in
+mentioning him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being the
+incarnation of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old deep-seated,
+and, as it were, impartial conviction.</p>
+<p>J. C.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>AUTHOR&rsquo;S NOTE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first
+thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness
+to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written, and
+to the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained
+when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the
+war.&nbsp; The writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the murder
+of an Austrian Archduke sounded the first note of warning for a world
+already full of doubts and fears.</p>
+<p>The contemporaneous very short Author&rsquo;s Note which is preserved
+in this edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which
+I consented to the publication of the book.&nbsp; The fact of the book
+having been published in the United States early in the year made it
+difficult to delay its appearance in England any longer.&nbsp; It came
+out in the thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled
+by the awful incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into
+the welter of reality, tragic enough in all conscience, but even more
+cruel than tragic and more inspiring than cruel.&nbsp; It seemed awfully
+presumptuous to think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in
+a community which in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave
+words expressing the truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel
+the edge of a sharp knife at its throat.</p>
+<p>The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his
+power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment.&nbsp; The fact
+seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears
+and too mysterious for his understanding.&nbsp; Were the trump of the
+Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his
+piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven&rsquo;s sonata and
+the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence
+in the virtues of the leather.&nbsp; And with perfect propriety.&nbsp;
+For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel&rsquo;s vengeful
+music too mighty our ears and too awful for our terrors?&nbsp; Thus
+it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath.&nbsp;
+The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic
+will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps
+from a sense of infinite littleness and which is yet the only faculty
+that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.</p>
+<p>It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of
+our fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to
+lose his detachment.&nbsp; It is very obvious that on the arrival of
+the gentlemanly Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful
+Pedro, Heyst, the man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession,
+that fine attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the
+name of stoicism.&nbsp; It is all a matter of proportion.&nbsp; There
+should have been a remedy for that sort of thing.&nbsp; And yet there
+is no remedy.&nbsp; Behind this minute instance of life&rsquo;s hazards
+Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.&nbsp; Besides, Heyst in his fine
+detachment had lost the habit asserting himself.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or physical, but the
+mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of mind and the
+turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence
+in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the matter of that, even
+in love.&nbsp; Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.&nbsp; The
+habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious
+of all the habits formed by the civilized man.</p>
+<p>But I wouldn&rsquo;t be suspected even remotely of making fun of
+Axel Heyst.&nbsp; I have always liked him.&nbsp; The flesh-and-blood
+individual who stands behind the infinitely more familiar figure of
+the book I remember as a mysterious Swede right enough.&nbsp; Whether
+he was a baron, too, I am not so certain.&nbsp; He himself never laid
+claim to that distinction.&nbsp; His detachment was too great to make
+any claims, big or small, on one&rsquo;s credulity.&nbsp; I will not
+say where I met him because I fear to give my readers a wrong impression,
+since a marked incongruity between a man and his surroundings is often
+a very misleading circumstance.&nbsp; We became very friendly for a
+time, and I would not like to expose him to unpleasant suspicions though,
+personally, I am sure he would have been indifferent to suspicions as
+he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of life.&nbsp; He
+was not the whole Heyst of course; he is only the physical and moral
+foundation of my Heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance.&nbsp;
+That it was short was certainly not my fault for he had charmed me by
+the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, I cannot help
+thinking he had carried to excess.&nbsp; He went away from his rooms
+without leaving a trace.&nbsp; I wondered where he had gone to - but
+now I know.&nbsp; He vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure
+that, unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in looking
+upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight.&nbsp; Often in
+the course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense of
+a phrase heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that I have
+fastened on to him many words heard on other men&rsquo;s lips and belonging
+to other men&rsquo;s less perfect, less pathetic moods.</p>
+<p>The same observation will apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Jones, who
+is built on a much slenderer connection.&nbsp; Mr. Jones (or whatever
+his name was) did not drift away from me.&nbsp; He turned his back on
+me and walked out of the room.&nbsp; It was in a little hotel in the
+island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year &rsquo;75) where
+we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in
+the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous
+aspect gave a most gruesome significance.&nbsp; Our invasion must have
+displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out,
+leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks.&nbsp;
+One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler
+he had ever come across.&nbsp; I said: &ldquo;A professional sharper?&rdquo;
+and got for an answer: &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a terror; but I must say that
+up to a certain point he will play fair. . . &rdquo;&nbsp; I wonder
+what the point was.&nbsp; I never saw him again because I believe he
+went straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other
+ports of call in the direction of Aspinall.&nbsp; Mr. Jones&rsquo;s
+characteristic insolence belongs to another man of a quite different
+type.&nbsp; I will say nothing as to the origins of his mentality because
+I don&rsquo;t intend to make any damaging admissions.</p>
+<p>It so happened that the very same year Ricardo - the physical Ricardo
+- was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and extremely
+dirty little schooner, during a four days&rsquo; passage between two
+places in the Gulf of Mexico whose names don&rsquo;t matter.&nbsp; For
+the most part he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and raising
+himself from time to time on his elbow would talk about himself and
+go on talking, not exactly to me or even at me (he would not even look
+up but kept his eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if communing in
+a low voice with his familiar devil.&nbsp; Now and then he would give
+me a glance and make the hairs of his stiff little moustache stir quaintly.&nbsp;
+His eyes were green and every cat I see to this day reminds me of the
+exact contour of his face.&nbsp; What he was travelling for or what
+was his business in life he never confided to me.&nbsp; Truth to say,
+the only passenger on board that schooner who could have talked openly
+about his activities and purposes was a very snuffy and conversationally
+delightful friar, the superior of a convent, attended by a very young
+lay brother, of a particularly ferocious countenance.&nbsp; We had with
+us also, lying prostrate in the dark and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner,
+an old Spanish gentleman, owner of much luggage and, as Ricardo assured
+me, very ill indeed.&nbsp; Ricardo seemed to be either a servant or
+the confidant of that aged and distinguished-looking invalid, who early
+on the passage held a long murmured conversation with the friar, and
+after that did nothing but groan feebly, smoke cigarettes, and now and
+then call for Martin in a voice full of pain.&nbsp; Then he who had
+become Ricardo in the book would go below into that beastly and noisome
+hole, remain there mysteriously, and coming up on deck again with a
+face on which nothing could be read, would as likely as not resume for
+my edification the exposition of his moral attitude towards life illustrated
+by striking particular instances of the most atrocious complexion.&nbsp;
+Did he mean to frighten me?&nbsp; Or seduce me?&nbsp; Or astonish me?&nbsp;
+Or arouse my admiration?&nbsp; All he did was to arouse my amused incredulity.&nbsp;
+As scoundrels go he was far from being a bore.&nbsp; For the rest my
+innocence was so great then that I could not take his philosophy seriously.&nbsp;
+All the time he kept one ear turned to the cuddy in the manner of a
+devoted servant, but I had the idea that in some way or other he had
+imposed the connection on the invalid for some end of his own.&nbsp;
+The reader, therefore, won&rsquo;t be surprised to hear that one morning
+I was told without any particular emotion by the padrone of the schooner
+that the &ldquo;rich man&rdquo; down there was dead: He had died in
+the night.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t remember ever being so moved by the desolate
+end of a complete stranger.&nbsp; I looked down the skylight, and there
+was the devoted Martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the
+deceased whose white beard and hooked nose were the only parts I could
+make out in the dark depths of a horrible stuffy bunk.</p>
+<p>As it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm
+during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late &ldquo;rich
+man&rdquo; had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter
+of fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast
+of our destination.&nbsp; The excellent Father Superior mentioned to
+me with an air of immense commiseration: &ldquo;The poor man has left
+a young daughter.&rdquo;&nbsp; Who was to look after her I don&rsquo;t
+know, but I saw the devoted Martin taking the trunks ashore with great
+care just before I landed myself.&nbsp; I would perhaps have tracked
+the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a little while, but I
+had some of my own very pressing business to attend to, which in the
+end got mixed up with an earthquake and so I had no time to give to
+Ricardo.&nbsp; The reader need not be told that I have not forgotten
+him, though.</p>
+<p>My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my observation
+of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious.&nbsp; It ended
+in a sudden inspiration to get out of his way.&nbsp; It was in a hovel
+of sticks and mats by the side of a path.&nbsp; As I went in there only
+to ask for a bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the slightest
+idea what in my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible
+ire.&nbsp; It became manifest to me less than two minutes after I had
+set eyes on him for the first time, and though immensely surprised of
+course I didn&rsquo;t stop to think it out I took the nearest short
+cut - through the wall.&nbsp; This bestial apparition and a certain
+enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti only a couple of months afterwards,
+have fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested
+in the human animal, to the end of my days.&nbsp; Of the nigger I used
+to dream for years afterwards.&nbsp; Of Pedro never.&nbsp; The impression
+was less vivid.&nbsp; I got away from him too quickly.</p>
+<p>It seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of
+my memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world - so natural
+that I offer no excuse for their existence, They were there, they had
+to come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who
+had taken to his trade without preparation, or premeditation, and without
+any moral intention but that which pervades the whole scheme of this
+world of senses.</p>
+<p>Since this Note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the
+origins of the persons in the tale, I am bound also to speak of Lena,
+because if I were to leave her out it would look like a slight; and
+nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a slight on Lena.&nbsp;
+If of all the personages involved in the &ldquo;mystery of Samburan&rdquo;
+I have lived longest with Heyst (or with him I call Heyst) it was at
+her, whom I call Lena, that I have looked the longest and with a most
+sustained attention.&nbsp; This attention originated in idleness for
+which I have a natural talent.&nbsp; One evening I wandered into a cafe,
+in a town not of the tropics but of the South of France.&nbsp; It was
+filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes,
+and the sounds of strident music.&nbsp; The orchestra was rather smaller
+than the one that performed at Schomberg&rsquo;s hotel, had the air
+more of a family party than of an enlisted band, and, I must confess,
+seemed rather more respectable than the Zangiacomo musical enterprise.&nbsp;
+It was less pretentious also, more homely and familiar, so to speak,
+insomuch that in the intervals when all the performers left the platform
+one of them went amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous
+and francs in a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat.&nbsp;
+It was a girl.&nbsp; Her detachment from her task seems to me now to
+have equalled or even surpassed Heyst&rsquo;s aloofness from all the
+mental degradations to which a man&rsquo;s intelligence is exposed in
+its way through life.&nbsp; Silent and wide-eyed she went from table
+to table with the air of a sleep-walker and with no other sound but
+the slight rattle of the coins to attract attention.&nbsp; It was long
+after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed but it is difficult
+to discard completely the characteristics of half a lifetime, and it
+was in something of the Jack-ashore spirit that I dropped a five-franc
+piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the sleep-walker turned her head
+to gaze at me and said &ldquo;Merci, Monsieur&rdquo; in a tone in which
+there was no gratitude but only surprise.&nbsp; I must have been idle
+indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence that the
+voice was very charming and when the performers resumed their seats
+I shifted my position slightly in order not to have that particular
+performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard who conducted,
+and who might for all I know have been her father, but whose real mission
+in life was to be a model for the Zangiacomo of Victory.&nbsp; Having
+got a clear line of sight I naturally (being idle) continued to look
+at the girl through all the second part of the programme.&nbsp; The
+shape of her dark head inclined over the violin was fascinating, and,
+while resting between the pieces of that interminable programme she
+was, in her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in her lap,
+the very image of dreamy innocence.&nbsp; The mature, bad-tempered woman
+at the piano might have been her mother, though there was not the slightest
+resemblance between them.&nbsp; All I am certain of in their personal
+relation to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper part of the
+arm.&nbsp; That I am sure I have seen!&nbsp; There could be no mistake.&nbsp;
+I was in too idle a mood to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity.&nbsp;
+It may have been playfulness, yet the girl jumped up as if she had been
+stung by a wasp.&nbsp; It may have been playfulness.&nbsp; Yet I saw
+plainly poor &ldquo;dreamy innocence&rdquo; rub gently the affected
+place as she filed off with the other performers down the middle aisle
+between the marble tables in the uproar of voices, the rattling of dominoes
+through a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke.&nbsp; I believe that those
+people left the town next day.</p>
+<p>Or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big cafe, on the other
+side of the Place de la Comedie.&nbsp; It is very possible.&nbsp; I
+did not go across to find out.&nbsp; It was my perfect idleness that
+had invested the girl with a peculiar charm, and I did not want to destroy
+it by any superfluous exertion.&nbsp; The receptivity of my indolence
+made the impression so permanent that when the moment came for her meeting
+with Heyst I felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand
+of the risky and uncertain future.&nbsp; I was so convinced of it that
+I let her go with Heyst, I won&rsquo;t say without a pang but certainly
+without misgivings.&nbsp; And in view of her triumphant end what more
+could I have done for her rehabilitation and her happiness?</p>
+<p>1920.<br />J. C.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART ONE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER ONE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very
+close chemical relation between coal and diamonds.&nbsp; It is the reason,
+I believe, why some people allude to coal as &ldquo;black diamonds.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable
+form of property.&nbsp; There is, from that point of view, a deplorable
+lack of concentration in coal.&nbsp; Now, if a coal-mine could be put
+into one&rsquo;s waistcoat pocket - but it can&rsquo;t!&nbsp; At the
+same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of
+the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish,
+unrestful hotel.&nbsp; And I suppose those two considerations, the practical
+and the mystical, prevented Heyst - Axel Heyst - from going away.</p>
+<p>The Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation.&nbsp; The world
+of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may
+appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.&nbsp; First the capital evaporates,
+and then the company goes into liquidation.&nbsp; These are very unnatural
+physics, but they account for the persistent inertia of Heyst, at which
+we &ldquo;out there&rdquo; used to laugh among ourselves - but not inimically.&nbsp;
+An inert body can do no harm to anyone, provokes no hostility, is scarcely
+worth derision.&nbsp; It may, indeed, be in the way sometimes; but this
+could not be said of Axel Heyst.&nbsp; He was out of everybody&rsquo;s
+way, as if he were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and
+in a sense as conspicuous.&nbsp; Everyone in that part of the world
+knew of him, dwelling on his little island.&nbsp; An island is but the
+top of a mountain.&nbsp; Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was surrounded,
+instead of the imponderable stormy and transparent ocean of air merging
+into infinity, by a tepid, shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the
+great waters which embrace the continents of this globe.&nbsp; His most
+frequent visitors were shadows, the shadows of clouds, relieving the
+monotony of the inanimate, brooding sunshine of the tropics.&nbsp; His
+nearest neighbour - I am speaking now of things showing some sort of
+animation - was an indolent volcano which smoked faintly all day with
+its head just above the northern horizon, and at night levelled at him,
+from amongst the clear stars, a dull red glow, expanding and collapsing
+spasmodically like the end of a gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently
+in the dark.&nbsp; Axel Heyst was also a smoker; and when he lounged
+out on his veranda with his cheroot, the last thing before going to
+bed, he made in the night the same sort of glow and of the same size
+as that other one so many miles away.</p>
+<p>In a sense, the volcano was company to him in the shades of the night
+- which were often too thick, one would think, to let a breath of air
+through.&nbsp; There was seldom enough wind to blow a feather along.&nbsp;
+On most evenings of the year Heyst could have sat outside with a naked
+candle to read one of the books left him by his late father.&nbsp; It
+was not a mean store.&nbsp; But he never did that.&nbsp; Afraid of mosquitoes,
+very likely.&nbsp; Neither was he ever tempted by the silence to address
+any casual remarks to the companion glow of the volcano.&nbsp; He was
+not mad.&nbsp; Queer chap - yes, that may have been said, and in fact
+was said; but there is a tremendous difference between the two, you
+will allow.</p>
+<p>On the nights of full moon the silence around Samburan - the &ldquo;Round
+Island&rdquo; of the charts - was dazzling; and in the flood of cold
+light Heyst could see his immediate surroundings, which had the aspect
+of an abandoned settlement invaded by the jungle: vague roofs above
+low vegetation, broken shadows of bamboo fences in the sheen of long
+grass, something like an overgrown bit of road slanting among ragged
+thickets towards the shore only a couple of hundred yards away, with
+a black jetty and a mound of some sort, quite inky on its unlighted
+side.&nbsp; But the most conspicuous object was a gigantic blackboard
+raised on two posts and presenting to Heyst, when the moon got over
+that side, the white letters &ldquo;T. B. C. Co.&rdquo; in a row at
+least two feet high.&nbsp; These were the initials of the Tropical Belt
+Coal Company, his employers - his late employers, to be precise.</p>
+<p>According to the unnatural mysteries of the financial world, the
+T. B. C. Company&rsquo;s capital having evaporated in the course of
+two years, the company went into liquidation - forced, I believe, not
+voluntary.&nbsp; There was nothing forcible in the process, however.&nbsp;
+It was slow; and while the liquidation - in London and Amsterdam - pursued
+its languid course, Axel Heyst, styled in the prospectus &ldquo;manager
+in the tropics,&rdquo; remained at his post on Samburan, the No. 1 coaling-station
+of the company.</p>
+<p>And it was not merely a coaling-station.&nbsp; There was a coal-mine
+there, with an outcrop in the hillside less than five hundred yards
+from the rickety wharf and the imposing blackboard.&nbsp; The company&rsquo;s
+object had been to get hold of all the outcrops on tropical islands
+and exploit them locally.&nbsp; And, Lord knows, there were any amount
+of outcrops.&nbsp; It was Heyst who had located most of them in this
+part of the tropical belt during his rather aimless wanderings, and
+being a ready letter-writer had written pages and pages about them to
+his friends in Europe.&nbsp; At least, so it was said.</p>
+<p>We doubted whether he had any visions of wealth - for himself, at
+any rate.&nbsp; What he seemed mostly concerned for was the &ldquo;stride
+forward,&rdquo; as he expressed it, in the general organization of the
+universe, apparently.&nbsp; He was heard by more than a hundred persons
+in the islands talking of a &ldquo;great stride forward for these regions.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The convinced wave of the hand which accompanied the phrase suggested
+tropical distances being impelled onward.&nbsp; In connection with the
+finished courtesy of his manner, it was persuasive, or at any rate silencing
+- for a time, at least.&nbsp; Nobody cared to argue with him when he
+talked in this strain.&nbsp; His earnestness could do no harm to anybody.&nbsp;
+There was no danger of anyone taking seriously his dream of tropical
+coal, so what was the use of hurting his feelings?</p>
+<p>Thus reasoned men in reputable business offices where he had his
+entr&eacute;e as a person who came out East with letters of introduction
+- and modest letters of credit, too - some years before these coal-outcrops
+began to crop up in his playfully courteous talk.&nbsp; From the first
+there was some difficulty in making him out.&nbsp; He was not a traveller.&nbsp;
+A traveller arrives and departs, goes on somewhere.&nbsp; Heyst did
+not depart.&nbsp; I met a man once - the manager of the branch of the
+Oriental Banking Corporation in Malacca - to whom Heyst exclaimed, in
+no connection with anything in particular (it was in the billiard-room
+of the club):</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am enchanted with these islands!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shot it out suddenly, <i>&agrave; propos des bottes</i>, as the
+French say, and while chalking his cue.&nbsp; And perhaps it was some
+sort of enchantment.&nbsp; There are more spells than your commonplace
+magicians ever dreamed of.</p>
+<p>Roughly speaking, a circle with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn
+round a point in North Borneo was in Heyst&rsquo;s case a magic circle.&nbsp;
+It just touched Manila, and he had been seen there.&nbsp; It just touched
+Saigon, and he was likewise seen there once.&nbsp; Perhaps these were
+his attempts to break out.&nbsp; If so, they were failures.&nbsp; The
+enchantment must have been an unbreakable one.&nbsp; The manager - the
+man who heard the exclamation - had been so impressed by the tone, fervour,
+rapture, what you will, or perhaps by the incongruity of it that he
+had related the experience to more than one person.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Queer chap, that Swede,&rdquo; was his only comment; but this
+is the origin of the name &ldquo;Enchanted Heyst&rdquo; which some fellows
+fastened on our man.</p>
+<p>He also had other names.&nbsp; In his early years, long before he
+got so becomingly bald on the top, he went to present a letter of introduction
+to Mr. Tesman of Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm - tip-top house.&nbsp;
+Well, Mr. Tesman was a kindly, benevolent old gentleman.&nbsp; He did
+not know what to make of that caller.&nbsp; After telling him that they
+wished to render his stay among the islands as pleasant as possible,
+and that they were ready to assist him in his plans, and so on, and
+after receiving Heyst&rsquo;s thanks - you know the usual kind of conversation
+- he proceeded to query in a slow, paternal tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you are interested in - ?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Facts,&rdquo; broke in Heyst in his courtly voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;There&rsquo;s
+nothing worth knowing but facts.&nbsp; Hard facts!&nbsp; Facts alone,
+Mr. Tesman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must
+have spoken about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of &ldquo;Hard
+Facts.&rdquo;&nbsp; He had the singular good fortune that his sayings
+stuck to him and became part of his name.&nbsp; Thereafter he mooned
+about the Java Sea in some of the Tesmans&rsquo; trading schooners,
+and then vanished, on board an Arab ship, in the direction of New Guinea.&nbsp;
+He remained so long in that outlying part of his enchanted circle that
+he was nearly forgotten before he swam into view again in a native proa
+full of Goram vagabonds, burnt black by the sun, very lean, his hair
+much thinned, and a portfolio of sketches under his arm.&nbsp; He showed
+these willingly, but was very reserved as to anything else.&nbsp; He
+had had an &ldquo;amusing time,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; A man who will
+go to New Guinea for fun - well!</p>
+<p>Later, years afterwards, when the last vestiges of youth had gone
+off his face and all the hair off the top of his head, and his red-gold
+pair of horizontal moustaches had grown to really noble proportions,
+a certain disreputable white man fastened upon him an epithet.&nbsp;
+Putting down with a shaking hand a long glass emptied of its contents
+- paid for by Heyst - he said, with that deliberate sagacity which no
+mere water-drinker ever attained:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heyst&rsquo;s a puffect g&rsquo;n&rsquo;lman.&nbsp; Puffect!&nbsp;
+But he&rsquo;s a ut-uto-utopist.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst had just gone out of the place of public refreshment where
+this pronouncement was voiced.&nbsp; Utopist, eh?&nbsp; Upon my word,
+the only thing I heard him say which might have had a bearing on the
+point was his invitation to old McNab himself.&nbsp; Turning with that
+finished courtesy of attitude, movement voice, which was his obvious
+characteristic, he had said with delicate playfulness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come along and quench your thirst with us, Mr. McNab!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Perhaps that was it.&nbsp; A man who could propose, even playfully,
+to quench old McNab&rsquo;s thirst must have been a utopist, a pursuer
+of chimeras; for of downright irony Heyst was not prodigal.&nbsp; And,
+may be, this was the reason why he was generally liked.&nbsp; At that
+epoch in his life, in the fulness of his physical development, of a
+broad, martial presence, with his bald head and long moustaches, he
+resembled the portraits of Charles XII, of adventurous memory.&nbsp;
+However, there was no reason to think that Heyst was in any way a fighting
+man.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER TWO</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It was about this time that Heyst became associated with Morrison
+on terms about which people were in doubt.&nbsp; Some said he was a
+partner, others said he was a sort of paying guest, but the real truth
+of the matter was more complex.&nbsp; One day Heyst turned up in Timor.&nbsp;
+Why in Timor, of all places in the world, no one knows.&nbsp; Well,
+he was mooning about Delli, that highly pestilential place, possibly
+in search of some undiscovered facts, when he came in the street upon
+Morrison, who, in his way, was also an &ldquo;enchanted&rdquo; man.&nbsp;
+When you spoke to Morrison of going home - he was from Dorsetshire -
+he shuddered.&nbsp; He said it was dark and wet there; that it was like
+living with your head and shoulders in a moist gunny-bag.&nbsp; That
+was only his exaggerated style of talking.&nbsp; Morrison was &ldquo;one
+of us.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was owner and master of the <i>Capricorn</i>,
+trading brig, and was understood to be doing well with her, except for
+the drawback of too much altruism.&nbsp; He was the dearly beloved friend
+of a quantity of God-forsaken villages up dark creeks and obscure bays,
+where he traded for produce.&nbsp; He would often sail , through awfully
+dangerous channels up to some miserable settlement, only to find a very
+hungry population clamorous for rice, and without so much &ldquo;produce&rdquo;
+between them as would have filled Morrison&rsquo;s suitcase.&nbsp; Amid
+general rejoicings, he would land the rice all the same, explain to
+the people that it was an advance, that they were in debt to him now;
+would preach to them energy and industry, and make an elaborate note
+in a pocket-diary which he always carried; and this would be the end
+of that transaction.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know if Morrison thought so,
+but the villagers had no doubt whatever about it.&nbsp; Whenever a coast
+village sighted the brig it would begin to beat all its gongs and hoist
+all its streamers, and all its girls would put flowers in their hair
+and the crowd would line the river bank, and Morrison would beam and
+glitter at all this excitement through his single eyeglass with an air
+of intense gratification.&nbsp; He was tall and lantern-jawed, and clean-shaven,
+and looked like a barrister who had thrown his wig to the dogs.</p>
+<p>We used to remonstrate with him:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will never see any of your advances if you go on like
+this, Morrison.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He would put on a knowing air.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall squeeze them yet some day - never you fear.&nbsp;
+And that reminds me&rdquo; - pulling out his inseparable pocketbook
+- &ldquo;there&rsquo;s that So-and-So village.&nbsp; They are pretty
+well off again; I may just as well squeeze them to begin with.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He would make a ferocious entry in the pocketbook.</p>
+<p><i>Memo</i>: Squeeze the So-and-So village at the first time of calling.</p>
+<p>Then he would stick the pencil back and snap the elastic on with
+inflexible finality; but he never began the squeezing.&nbsp; Some men
+grumbled at him.&nbsp; He was spoiling the trade.&nbsp; Well, perhaps
+to a certain extent; not much.&nbsp; Most of the places he traded with
+were unknown not only to geography but also to the traders&rsquo; special
+lore which is transmitted by word of mouth, without ostentation, and
+forms the stock of mysterious local knowledge.&nbsp; It was hinted also
+that Morrison had a wife in each and every one of them, but the majority
+of us repulsed these innuendoes with indignation.&nbsp; He was a true
+humanitarian and rather ascetic than otherwise.</p>
+<p>When Heyst met him in Delli, Morrison was walking along the street,
+his eyeglass tossed over his shoulder, his head down, with the hopeless
+aspect of those hardened tramps one sees on our roads trudging from
+workhouse to workhouse.&nbsp; Being hailed on the street he looked up
+with a wild worried expression.&nbsp; He was really in trouble.&nbsp;
+He had come the week before into Delli and the Portuguese authorities,
+on some pretence of irregularity in his papers, had inflicted a fine
+upon him and had arrested his brig.</p>
+<p>Morrison never had any spare cash in hand.&nbsp; With his system
+of trading it would have been strange if he had; and all these debts
+entered in the pocketbook weren&rsquo;t good enough to raise a <i>millrei</i>
+on - let alone a shilling.&nbsp; The Portuguese officials begged him
+not to distress himself.&nbsp; They gave him a week&rsquo;s grace, and
+then proposed to sell the brig at auction.&nbsp; This meant ruin for
+Morrison; and when Heyst hailed him across the street in his usual courtly
+tone, the week was nearly out.</p>
+<p>Heyst crossed over, and said with a slight bow, and in the manner
+of a prince addressing another prince on a private occasion:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What an unexpected pleasure.&nbsp; Would you have any objection
+to drink something with me in that infamous wine-shop over there?&nbsp;
+The sun is really too strong to talk in the street.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The haggard Morrison followed obediently into a sombre, cool hovel
+which he would have distained to enter at any other time.&nbsp; He was
+distracted.&nbsp; He did not know what he was doing.&nbsp; You could
+have led him over the edge of a precipice just as easily as into that
+wine-shop.&nbsp; He sat down like an automaton.&nbsp; He was speechless,
+but he saw a glass full of rough red wine before him, and emptied it.&nbsp;
+Heyst meantime, politely watchful, had taken a seat opposite.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are in for a bout of fever, I fear,&rdquo; he said sympathetically.</p>
+<p>Poor Morrison&rsquo;s tongue was loosened at that.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fever!&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Give me fever.&nbsp;
+Give me plague.&nbsp; They are diseases.&nbsp; One gets over them.&nbsp;
+But I am being murdered.&nbsp; I am being murdered by the Portuguese.&nbsp;
+The gang here downed me at last among them.&nbsp; I am to have my throat
+cut the day after tomorrow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the face of this passion Heyst made, with his eyebrows, a slight
+motion of surprise which would not have been misplaced in a drawing-room.&nbsp;
+Morrison&rsquo;s despairing reserve had broken down.&nbsp; He had been
+wandering with a dry throat all over that miserable town of mud hovels,
+silent, with no soul to turn to in his distress, and positively maddened
+by his thoughts; and suddenly he had stumbled on a white man, figuratively
+and actually white - for Morrison refused to accept the racial whiteness
+of the Portuguese officials.&nbsp; He let himself go for the mere relief
+of violent speech, his elbows planted on the table, his eyes blood-shot,
+his voice nearly gone, the brim of his round pith hat shading an unshaven,
+livid face.&nbsp; His white clothes, which he had not taken off for
+three days, were dingy.&nbsp; He had already gone to the bad, past redemption.&nbsp;
+The sight was shocking to Heyst; but he let nothing of it appear in
+his hearing, concealing his impression under that consummate good-society
+manner of his.&nbsp; Polite attention, what&rsquo;s due from one gentleman
+listening to another, was what he showed; and, as usual, it was catching;
+so that Morrison pulled himself together and finished his narrative
+in a conversational tone, with a man-of-the-world air.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a villainous plot.&nbsp; Unluckily, one is helpless.&nbsp;
+That scoundrel Cousinho - Andreas, you know - has been coveting the
+brig for years.&nbsp; Naturally, I would never sell.&nbsp; She is not
+only my livelihood; she&rsquo;s my life.&nbsp; So he has hatched this
+pretty little plot with the chief of the customs.&nbsp; The sale, of
+course, will be a farce.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s no one here to bid.&nbsp;
+He will get the brig for a song - no, not even that - a line of a song.&nbsp;
+You have been some years now in the islands, Heyst.&nbsp; You know us
+all; you have seen how we live.&nbsp; Now you shall have the opportunity
+to see how some of us end; for it is the end, for me.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t
+deceive myself any longer.&nbsp; You see it - don&rsquo;t your?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Morrison had pulled himself together, but one felt the snapping strain
+on his recovered self-possession.&nbsp; Heyst was beginning to say that
+he &ldquo;could very well see all the bearings of this unfortunate -
+&rdquo; when Morrison interrupted him jerkily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Upon my word, I don&rsquo;t know why I have been telling you
+all this.&nbsp; I suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible
+to keep my trouble to myself.&nbsp; Words can&rsquo;t do it justice;
+but since I&rsquo;ve told you so much I may as well tell you more.&nbsp;
+Listen.&nbsp; This morning on board, in my cabin I went down on my knees
+and prayed for help.&nbsp; I went down on my knees!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are a believer, Morrison?&rdquo; asked Heyst with a distinct
+note of respect.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Surely I am not an infidel.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Morrison was swiftly reproachful in his answer, and there came a
+pause, Morrison perhaps interrogating his conscience, and Heyst preserving
+a mien of unperturbed, polite interest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I prayed like a child, of course.&nbsp; I believe in children
+praying - well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be
+more self-reliant.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t hold with a man everlastingly
+bothering the Almighty with his silly troubles.&nbsp; It seems such
+cheek.&nbsp; Anyhow, this morning I - I have never done any harm to
+any God&rsquo;s creature knowingly - I prayed.&nbsp; A sudden impulse
+- I went flop on my knees; so you may judge - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>They were gazing earnestly into each other&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; Poor
+Morrison added, as a discouraging afterthought:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only this is such a God-forsaken spot.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst inquired with a delicate intonation whether he might know the
+amount for which the brig was seized.</p>
+<p>Morrison suppressed an oath, and named curtly a sum which was in
+itself so insignificant that any other person than Heyst would have
+exclaimed at it.&nbsp; And even Heyst could hardly keep incredulity
+out of his politely modulated voice as he asked if it was a fact that
+Morrison had not that amount in hand.</p>
+<p>Morrison hadn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; He had only a little English gold, a
+few sovereigns, on board.&nbsp; He had left all his spare cash with
+the Tesmans, in Samarang, to meet certain bills which would fall due
+while he was away on his cruise.&nbsp; Anyhow, that money would not
+have been any more good to him than if it had been in the innermost
+depths of the infernal regions.&nbsp; He said all this brusquely.&nbsp;
+He looked with sudden disfavour at that noble forehead, at those great
+martial moustaches, at the tired eyes of the man sitting opposite him.&nbsp;
+Who the devil was he?&nbsp; What was he, Morrison, doing there, talking
+like this?&nbsp; Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us
+trading in the Archipelago did.&nbsp; Had the Swede suddenly risen and
+hit him on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than when
+this stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a little bow across
+the table:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; If that&rsquo;s the case I would be very happy if
+you&rsquo;d allow me to be of use!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Morrison didn&rsquo;t understand.&nbsp; This was one of those things
+that don&rsquo;t happen - unheard of things.&nbsp; He had no real inkling
+of what it meant, till Heyst said definitely:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can lend you the amount.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have the money?&rdquo; whispered Morrison.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do
+you mean here, in your pocket?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, on me.&nbsp; Glad to be of use.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Morrison, staring open-mouthed, groped over his shoulder for the
+cord of the eyeglass hanging down his back.&nbsp; When he found it,
+he stuck it in his eye hastily.&nbsp; It was as if he expected Heyst&rsquo;s
+usual white suit of the tropics to change into a shining garment, flowing
+down to his toes, and a pair of great dazzling wings to sprout out on
+the Swede&rsquo;s shoulders - and didn&rsquo;t want to miss a single
+detail of the transformation.&nbsp; But if Heyst was an angle from on
+high, sent in answer to prayer, he did not betray his heavenly origin
+by outward signs.&nbsp; So, instead of going on his knees, as he felt
+inclined to do, Morrison stretched out his hand, which Heyst grasped
+with formal alacrity and a polite murmur in which &ldquo;Trifle - delighted
+- of service,&rdquo; could just be distinguished.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Miracles do happen,&rdquo; thought the awestruck Morrison.&nbsp;
+To him, as to all of us in the Islands, this wandering Heyst, who didn&rsquo;t
+toil or spin visibly, seemed the very last person to be the agent of
+Providence in an affair concerned with money.&nbsp; The fact of his
+turning up in Timor or anywhere else was no more wonderful than the
+settling of a sparrow on one&rsquo;s window-sill at any given moment.&nbsp;
+But that he should carry a sum of money in his pocket seemed somehow
+inconceivable.</p>
+<p>So inconceivable that as they were trudging together through the
+sand of the roadway to the custom-house - another mud hovel - to pay
+the fine, Morrison broke into a cold sweat, stopped short, and exclaimed
+in faltering accents:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I say!&nbsp; You aren&rsquo;t joking, Heyst?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Joking!&rdquo;&nbsp; Heyst&rsquo;s blue eyes went hard as
+he turned them on the discomposed Morrison.&nbsp; &ldquo;In what way,
+may I ask?&rdquo; he continued with austere politeness.</p>
+<p>Morrison was abashed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Forgive me, Heyst.&nbsp; You must have been sent by God in
+answer to my prayer.&nbsp; But I have been nearly off my chump for three
+days with worry; and it suddenly struck me: &lsquo;What if it&rsquo;s
+the Devil who has sent him?&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have no connection with the supernatural,&rdquo; said Heyst
+graciously, moving on.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nobody has sent me.&nbsp; I just
+happened along.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know better,&rdquo; contradicted Morrison.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+may be unworthy, but I have been heard.&nbsp; I know it.&nbsp; I feel
+it.&nbsp; For why should you offer - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst inclined his head, as from respect for a conviction in which
+he could not share.&nbsp; But he stuck to his point by muttering that
+in the presence of an odious fact like this, it was natural -</p>
+<p>Later in the day, the fine paid, and the two of them on board the
+brig, from which the guard had been removed, Morrison who, besides,
+being a gentleman was also an honest fellow began to talk about repayment.&nbsp;
+He knew very well his inability to lay by any sum of money.&nbsp; It
+was partly the fault of circumstances and partly of his temperament;
+and it would have been very difficult to apportion the responsibility
+between the two.&nbsp; Even Morrison himself could not say, while confessing
+to the fact.&nbsp; With a worried air he ascribed it to fatality:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how it is that I&rsquo;ve never been able
+to save.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s some sort of curse.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s always
+a bill or two to meet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He plunged his hand into his pocket for the famous notebook so well
+known in the islands, the fetish of his hopes, and fluttered the pages
+feverishly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And yet - look,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;There it is
+- more than five thousand dollars owing.&nbsp; Surely that&rsquo;s something.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He ceased suddenly.&nbsp; Heyst, who had been all the time trying
+to look as unconcerned as he could, made reassuring noises in his throat.&nbsp;
+But Morrison was not only honest.&nbsp; He was honourable, too; and
+on this stressful day, before this amazing emissary of Providence and
+in the revulsion of his feelings, he made his great renunciation.&nbsp;
+He cast off the abiding illusion of his existence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; They are not good.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll never
+be able to squeeze them.&nbsp; Never.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been saying for
+years I would, but I give it up.&nbsp; I never really believed I could.&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t reckon on that, Heyst.&nbsp; I have robbed you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and remained
+in that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him soothingly with the
+utmost courtesy.&nbsp; The Swede was as much distressed as Morrison;
+for he understood the other&rsquo;s feelings perfectly.&nbsp; No decent
+feeling was ever scorned by Heyst.&nbsp; But he was incapable of outward
+cordiality of manner, and he felt acutely his defect.&nbsp; Consummate
+politeness is not the right tonic for an emotional collapse.&nbsp; They
+must have had, both of them, a fairly painful time of it in the cabin
+of the brig.&nbsp; In the end Morrison, casting desperately for an idea
+in the blackness of his despondency, hit upon the notion of inviting
+Heyst to travel with him in his brig and have a share in his trading
+ventures up to the amount of his loan.</p>
+<p>It is characteristic of Heyst&rsquo;s unattached, floating existence
+that he was in a position to accept this proposal.&nbsp; There is no
+reason to think that he wanted particularly just then to go poking aboard
+the brig into all the holes and corners of the Archipelago where Morrison
+picked up most of his trade.&nbsp; Far from it; but he would have consented
+to almost any arrangement in order to put an end to the harrowing scene
+in the cabin.&nbsp; There was at once a great transformation act: Morrison
+raising his diminished head, and sticking the glass in his eye to looked
+affectionately at Heyst, a bottle being uncorked, and so on.&nbsp; It
+was agreed that nothing should be said to anyone of this transaction.&nbsp;
+Morrison, you understand, was not proud of the episode, and he was afraid
+of being unmercifully chaffed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An old bird like me!&nbsp; To let myself be trapped by those
+damned Portuguese rascals!&nbsp; I should never hear the last of it.&nbsp;
+We must keep it dark.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>From quite other motives, among which his native delicacy was the
+principal, Heyst was even more anxious to bind himself to silence.&nbsp;
+A gentleman would naturally shrink from the part of heavenly messenger
+that Morrison would force upon him.&nbsp; It made Heyst uncomfortable,
+as it was.&nbsp; And perhaps he did not care that it should be known
+that he had some means, whatever they might have been - sufficient,
+at any rate, to enable him to lend money to people.&nbsp; These two
+had a duet down there, like conspirators in a comic opera, of &ldquo;Sh
+- ssh, shssh!&nbsp; Secrecy!&nbsp; Secrecy!&rdquo;&nbsp; It must have
+been funny, because they were very serious about it.</p>
+<p>And for a time the conspiracy was successful in so far that we all
+concluded that Heyst was boarding with the good-natured&nbsp; - some
+said: sponging on the imbecile - Morrison, in his brig.&nbsp; But you
+know how it is with all such mysteries.&nbsp; There is always a leak
+somewhere.&nbsp; Morrison himself, not a perfect vessel by any means,
+was bursting with gratitude, and under the stress he must have let out
+something vague - enough to give the island gossip a chance.&nbsp; And
+you know how kindly the world is in its comments on what it does not
+understand.&nbsp; A rumour sprang out that Heyst, having obtained some
+mysterious hold on Morrison, had fastened himself on him and was sucking
+him dry.&nbsp; Those who had traced these mutters back to their origin
+were very careful not to believe them.&nbsp; The originator, it seems,
+was a certain Schomberg, a big, manly, bearded creature of the Teutonic
+persuasion, with an ungovernable tongue which surely must have worked
+on a pivot.&nbsp; Whether he was a Lieutenant of the Reserve, as he
+declared, I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; Out there he was by profession a
+hotel-keeper, first in Bangkok, then somewhere else, and ultimately
+in Sourabaya.&nbsp; He dragged after him up and down that section of
+the tropical belt a silent, frightened, little woman with long ringlets,
+who smiled at one stupidly, showing a blue tooth.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+know why so many of us patronized his various establishments.&nbsp;
+He was a noxious ass, and he satisfied his lust for silly gossip at
+the cost of his customers.&nbsp; It was he who, one evening, as Morrison
+and Heyst went past the hotel - they were not his regular patrons -
+whispered mysteriously to the mixed company assembled on the veranda:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The spider and the fly just gone by, gentlemen.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Then, very important and confidential, his thick paw at the side of
+his mouth: &ldquo;We are among ourselves; well, gentlemen, all I can
+say is, I don&rsquo;t you ever get mixed up with that Swede.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+you ever get caught in his web.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER THREE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Human nature being what it is, having a silly side to it as well
+as a mean side, there were not a few who pretended to be indignant on
+no better authority than a general propensity to believe every evil
+report; and a good many others who found it simply funny to call Heyst
+the Spider - behind his back, of course.&nbsp; He was as serenely unconscious
+of this as of his several other nicknames.&nbsp; But soon people found
+other things to say of Heyst; not long afterwards he came very much
+to the fore in larger affairs.&nbsp; He blossomed out into something
+definite.&nbsp; He filled the public eye as the manager on the spot
+of the Tropical Belt Coal Company with offices in London and Amsterdam,
+and other things about it that sounded and looked grandiose.&nbsp; The
+offices in the two capitals may have consisted - and probably did -
+of one room in each; but at that distance, out East there, all this
+had an air.&nbsp; We were more puzzled than dazzled, it is true; but
+even the most sober-minded among us began to think that there was something
+in it.&nbsp; The Tesmans appointed agents, a contract for government
+mail-boats secured, the era of steam beginning for the islands - a great
+stride forward - Heyst&rsquo;s stride!</p>
+<p>And all this sprang from the meeting of the cornered Morrison and
+of the wandering Heyst, which may or may not have been the direct outcome
+of a prayer.&nbsp; Morrison was not an imbecile, but he seemed to have
+got himself into a state of remarkable haziness as to his exact position
+towards Heyst.&nbsp; For, if Heyst had been sent with money in his pocket
+by a direct decree of the Almighty in answer to Morrison&rsquo;s prayer
+then there was no reason for special gratitude, since obviously he could
+not help himself.&nbsp; But Morrison believed both, in the efficacy
+of prayer and in the infinite goodness of Heyst.&nbsp; He thanked God
+with awed sincerity for his mercy, and could not thank Heyst enough
+for the service rendered as between man and man.&nbsp; In this (highly
+creditable) tangle of strong feelings Morrison&rsquo;s gratitude insisted
+on Heyst&rsquo;s partnership in the great discovery.&nbsp; Ultimately
+we heard that Morrison had gone home through the Suez Canal in order
+to push the magnificent coal idea personally in London.&nbsp; He parted
+from his brig and disappeared from our ken; but we heard that he had
+written a letter or letters to Heyst, saying that London was cold and
+gloomy; that he did not like either the men or things, that he was &ldquo;as
+lonely as a crow in a strange country.&rdquo;&nbsp; In truth, he pined
+after the <i>Capricorn</i> - I don&rsquo;t mean only the tropic; I mean
+the ship too.&nbsp; Finally he went into Dorsetshire to see his people,
+caught a bad cold, and died with extraordinary precipitation in the
+bosom of his appalled family.&nbsp; Whether his exertions in the City
+of London had enfeebled his vitality I don&rsquo;t know; but I believe
+it was this visit which put life into the coal idea.&nbsp; Be it as
+it may, the Tropical Belt Coal Company was born very shortly after Morrison,
+the victim of gratitude and his native climate, had gone to join his
+forefathers in a Dorsetshire churchyard.</p>
+<p>Heyst was immensely shocked.&nbsp; He got the news in the Moluccas
+through the Tesmans, and then disappeared for a time.&nbsp; It appears
+that he stayed with a Dutch government doctor in Amboyna, a friend of
+his who looked after him for a bit in his bungalow.&nbsp; He became
+visible again rather suddenly, his eyes sunk in his head, and with a
+sort of guarded attitude, as if afraid someone would reproach him with
+the death of Morrison.</p>
+<p>Na&iuml;ve Heyst!&nbsp; As if anybody would . . . Nobody amongst
+us had any interest in men who went home.&nbsp; They were all right;
+they did not count any more.&nbsp; Going to Europe was nearly as final
+as going to Heaven.&nbsp; It removed a man from the world of hazard
+and adventure.</p>
+<p>As a matter of fact, many of us did not hear of this death till months
+afterwards - from Schomberg, who disliked Heyst gratuitously and made
+up a piece of sinister whispered gossip:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what comes of having anything to do with that
+fellow.&nbsp; He squeezes you dry like a lemon, then chucks you out
+- sends you home to die.&nbsp; Take warning by Morrison!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Of course, we laughed at the innkeeper&rsquo;s suggestions of black
+mystery.&nbsp; Several of us heard that Heyst was prepared to go to
+Europe himself, to push on his coal enterprise personally; but he never
+went.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t necessary.&nbsp; The company was formed
+without him, and his nomination of manager in the tropics came out to
+him by post.</p>
+<p>From the first he had selected Samburan, or Round Island, for the
+central station.&nbsp; Some copies of the prospectus issued in Europe,
+having found their way out East, were passed from hand to hand.&nbsp;
+We greatly admired the map which accompanied them for the edification
+of the shareholders.&nbsp; On it Samburan was represented as the central
+spot of the Eastern Hemisphere with its name engraved in enormous capitals.&nbsp;
+Heavy lines radiated from it in all directions through the tropics,
+figuring a mysterious and effective star - lines of influence or lines
+of distance, or something of that sort.&nbsp; Company promoters have
+an imagination of their own.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s no more romantic temperament
+on earth than the temperament of a company promoter.&nbsp; Engineers
+came out, coolies were imported, bungalows were put up on Samburan,
+a gallery driven into the hillside, and actually some coal got out.</p>
+<p>These manifestations shook the soberest minds.&nbsp; For a time everybody
+in the islands was talking of the Tropical Belt Coal, and even those
+who smiled quietly to themselves were only hiding their uneasiness.&nbsp;
+Oh, yes; it had come, and anybody could see what would be the consequences
+- the end of the individual trader, smothered under a great invasion
+of steamers.&nbsp; We could not afford to buy steamers.&nbsp; Not we.&nbsp;
+And Heyst was the manager.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know, Heyst, enchanted Heyst.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, come!&nbsp; He has been no better than a loafer around
+here as far back as any of us can remember.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, he said he was looking for facts.&nbsp; Well, he&rsquo;s
+got hold of one that will do for all of us,&rdquo; commented a bitter
+voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what they call development - and be hanged to
+it!&rdquo; muttered another.</p>
+<p>Never was Heyst talked about so much in the tropical belt before.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t he a Swedish baron or something?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He, a baron?&nbsp; Get along with you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For my part I haven&rsquo;t the slightest doubt that he was.&nbsp;
+While he was still drifting amongst the islands, enigmatical and disregarded
+like an insignificant ghost, he told me so himself on a certain occasion.&nbsp;
+It was a long time before he materialized in this alarming way into
+the destroyer of our little industry - Heyst the Enemy.</p>
+<p>It became the fashion with a good many to speak of Heyst as the Enemy.&nbsp;
+He was very concrete, very visible now.&nbsp; He was rushing all over
+the Archipelago, jumping in and out of local mail-packets as if they
+had been tram-cars, here, there, and everywhere - organizing with all
+his might.&nbsp; This was no mooning about.&nbsp; This was business.&nbsp;
+And this sudden display of purposeful energy shook the incredulity of
+the most sceptical more than any scientific demonstration of the value
+of these coal-outcrops could have done.&nbsp; It was impressive.&nbsp;
+Schomberg was the only one who resisted the infection.&nbsp; Big, manly
+in a portly style, and profusely bearded, with a glass of beer in his
+thick paw, he would approach some table where the topic of the hour
+was being discussed, would listen for a moment, and then come out with
+his invariable declaration:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All this is very well, gentlemen; but he can&rsquo;t throw
+any of his coal-dust in my eyes.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s nothing in it.&nbsp;
+Why, there can&rsquo;t be anything in it.&nbsp; A fellow like that for
+manager?&nbsp; Phoo!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Was it the clairvoyance of imbecile hatred, or mere stupid tenacity
+of opinion, which ends sometimes by scoring against the world in a most
+astonishing manner?&nbsp; Most of us can remember instances of triumphant
+folly; and that ass Schomberg triumphed.&nbsp; The T.B.C. Company went
+into liquidation, as I began by telling you.&nbsp; The Tesmans washed
+their hands of it.&nbsp; The Government cancelled those famous contracts,
+the talk died out, and presently it was remarked here and there that
+Heyst had faded completely away.&nbsp; He had become invisible, as in
+those early days when he used to make a bolt clear out of sight in his
+attempts to break away from the enchantment of &ldquo;these isles,&rdquo;
+either in the direction of New Guinea or in the direction of Saigon
+- to cannibals or to caf&eacute;s.&nbsp; The enchanted Heyst!&nbsp;
+Had he at last broken the spell?&nbsp; Had he died?&nbsp; We were too
+indifferent to wonder overmuch.&nbsp; You see we had on the whole liked
+him well enough.&nbsp; And liking is not sufficient to keep going the
+interest one takes in a human being.&nbsp; With hatred, apparently,
+it is otherwise.&nbsp; Schomberg couldn&rsquo;t forget Heyst.&nbsp;
+The keen, manly Teutonic creature was a good hater.&nbsp; A fool often
+is.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good evening, gentlemen.&nbsp; Have you got everything you
+want?&nbsp; So!&nbsp; Good!&nbsp; You see?&nbsp; What was I always telling
+you?&nbsp; Aha!&nbsp; There was nothing in it.&nbsp; I knew it.&nbsp;
+But what I would like to know is what became of that - Swede.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He put a stress on the word Swede as if it meant scoundrel.&nbsp;
+He detested Scandinavians generally.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Goodness only
+knows.&nbsp; A fool like that is unfathomable.&nbsp; He continued:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s five months or more since I have spoken to anybody
+who has seen him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As I have said, we were not much interested; but Schomberg, of course,
+could not understand that.&nbsp; He was grotesquely dense.&nbsp; Whenever
+three people came together in his hotel, he took good care that Heyst
+should be with them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope the fellow did not go and drown himself,&rdquo; he
+would add with a comical earnestness that ought to have made us shudder;
+only our crowd was superficial, and did not apprehend the psychology
+of this pious hope.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why?&nbsp; Heyst isn&rsquo;t in debt to you for drinks is
+he?&rdquo; somebody asked him once with shallow scorn.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Drinks!&nbsp; Oh, dear no!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The innkeeper was not mercenary.&nbsp; Teutonic temperament seldom
+is.&nbsp; But he put on a sinister expression to tell us that Heyst
+had not paid perhaps three visits altogether to his &ldquo;establishment.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+This was Heyst&rsquo;s crime, for which Schomberg wished him nothing
+less than a long and tormented existence.&nbsp; Observe the Teutonic
+sense of proportion and nice forgiving temper.</p>
+<p>At last, one afternoon, Schomberg was seen approaching a group of
+his customers.&nbsp; He was obviously in high glee.&nbsp; He squared
+his manly chest with great importance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Gentlemen, I have news of him.&nbsp; Who? why, that Swede.&nbsp;
+He is still on Samburan.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s never been away from it.&nbsp;
+The company is gone, the engineers are gone, the clerks are gone, the
+coolies are gone, everything&rsquo;s gone; but there he sticks.&nbsp;
+Captain Davidson, coming by from the westward, saw him with his own
+eyes.&nbsp; Something white on the wharf, so he steamed in and went
+ashore in a small boat.&nbsp; Heyst, right enough.&nbsp; Put a book
+into his pocket, always very polite.&nbsp; Been strolling on the wharf
+and reading.&nbsp; &lsquo;I remain in possession here,&rsquo; he told
+Captain Davidson.&nbsp; What I want to know is what he gets to eat there.&nbsp;
+A piece of dried fish now and then - what?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s coming
+down pretty low for a man who turned up his nose at my table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He winked with immense malice.&nbsp; A bell started ringing, and
+he led the way to the dining-room as if into a temple, very grave, with
+the air of a benefactor of mankind.&nbsp; His ambition was to feed it
+at a profitable price, and his delight was to talk of it behind its
+back.&nbsp; It was very characteristic of him to gloat over the idea
+of Heyst having nothing decent to eat.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FOUR</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>A few of us who were sufficiently interested went to Davidson for
+details.&nbsp; These were not many.&nbsp; He told us that he passed
+to the north of Samburan on purpose to see what was going on.&nbsp;
+At first, it looked as if that side of the island had been altogether
+abandoned.&nbsp; This was what he expected.&nbsp; Presently, above the
+dense mass of vegetation that Samburan presents to view, he saw the
+head of the flagstaff without a flag.&nbsp; Then, while steaming across
+the slight indentation which for a time was known officially as Black
+Diamond Bay, he made out with his glass the white figure on the coaling-wharf.&nbsp;
+It could be no one but Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought for certain he wanted to be taken off, so I steamed
+in.&nbsp; He made no signs.&nbsp; However, I lowered a boat.&nbsp; I
+could not see another living being anywhere.&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; He had
+a book in his hand.&nbsp; He looked exactly as we have always seen him
+- very neat, white shoes, cork helmet.&nbsp; He explained to me that
+he had always had a taste for solitude.&nbsp; It was the first I ever
+heard of it, I told him.&nbsp; He only smiled.&nbsp; What could I say?&nbsp;
+He isn&rsquo;t the sort of man one can speak familiarly to.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s
+something in him.&nbsp; One doesn&rsquo;t care to.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;But what&rsquo;s the object?&nbsp; Are you thinking
+of keeping possession of the mine?&rsquo; I asked him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Something of the sort,&rsquo; he says.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+am keeping hold.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;But all this is as dead as Julius C&aelig;sar,&rsquo;
+I cried.&nbsp; &lsquo;In fact, you have nothing worth holding on to,
+Heyst.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, I am done with facts,&rsquo; says he, putting his
+hand to his helmet sharply with one of his short bows.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thus dismissed, Davidson went on board his ship, swung her out, and
+as he was steaming away he watched from the bridge Heyst walking shoreward
+along the wharf.&nbsp; He marched into the long grass and vanished -
+all but the top of his white cork helmet, which seemed to swim in a
+green sea.&nbsp; Then that too disappeared, as if it had sunk into the
+living depths of the tropical vegetation, which is more jealous of men&rsquo;s
+conquests than the ocean, and which was about to close over the last
+vestiges of the liquidated Tropical Belt Coal Company - A. Heyst, manager
+in the East.</p>
+<p>Davidson, a good, simple fellow in his way, was strangely affected.&nbsp;
+It is to be noted that he knew very little of Heyst.&nbsp; He was one
+of those whom Heyst&rsquo;s finished courtesy of attitude and intonation
+most strongly disconcerted.&nbsp; He himself was a fellow of fine feeling,
+I think, though of course he had no more polish than the rest of us.&nbsp;
+We were naturally a hail-fellow-well-met crowd, with standards of our
+own - no worse, I daresay, than other people&rsquo;s; but polish was
+not one of them.&nbsp; Davidson&rsquo;s fineness was real enough to
+alter the course of the steamer he commanded.&nbsp; Instead of passing
+to the south of Samburan, he made it his practice to take the passage
+along the north shore, within about a mile of the wharf.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He can see us if he likes to see us,&rdquo; remarked Davidson.&nbsp;
+Then he had an afterthought: &ldquo;I say!&nbsp; I hope he won&rsquo;t
+think I am intruding, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We reassured him on the point of correct behaviour.&nbsp; The sea
+is open to all.</p>
+<p>This slight deviation added some ten miles to Davidson&rsquo;s round
+trip, but as that was sixteen hundred miles it did not matter much.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have told my owner of it,&rdquo; said the conscientious
+commander of the <i>Sissie</i>.</p>
+<p>His owner had a face like an ancient lemon.&nbsp; He was small and
+wizened - which was strange, because generally a Chinaman, as he grows
+in prosperity, puts on inches of girth and stature.&nbsp; To serve a
+Chinese firm is not so bad.&nbsp; Once they become convinced you deal
+straight by them, their confidence becomes unlimited.&nbsp; You can
+do no wrong.&nbsp; So Davidson&rsquo;s old Chinaman squeaked hurriedly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right, all right, all right.&nbsp; You do what you like,
+captain - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>And there was an end of the matter; not altogether, though.&nbsp;
+From time to time the Chinaman used to ask Davidson about the white
+man.&nbsp; He was still there, eh?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never see him,&rdquo; Davidson had to confess to his owner,
+who would peer at him silently through round, horn-rimmed spectacles,
+several sizes too large for his little old face.&nbsp; &ldquo;I never
+see him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To me, on occasions he would say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t a doubt he&rsquo;s there.&nbsp; He hides.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s very unpleasant.&rdquo;&nbsp; Davidson was a little vexed
+with Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;Funny thing,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of
+all the people I speak to, nobody ever asks after him but that Chinaman
+of mine - and Schomberg,&rdquo; he added after a while.</p>
+<p>Yes, Schomberg, of course.&nbsp; He was asking everybody about everything,
+and arranging the information into the most scandalous shape his imagination
+could invent.&nbsp; From time to time he would step up, his blinking,
+cushioned eyes, his thick lips, his very chestnut beard, looking full
+of malice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Evening, gentlemen.&nbsp; Have you got all you want?&nbsp;
+So!&nbsp; Good!&nbsp; Well, I am told the jungle has choked the very
+sheds in Black Diamond Bay.&nbsp; Fact.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a hermit in
+the wilderness now.&nbsp; But what can this manager get to eat there?&nbsp;
+It beats me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Sometimes a stranger would inquire with natural curiosity:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who?&nbsp; What manager?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, a certain Swede,&rdquo; - with a sinister emphasis, as
+if he were saying &ldquo;a certain brigand.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Well
+known here.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s turned hermit from shame.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+what the devil does when he&rsquo;s found out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Hermit.&nbsp; This was the latest of the more or less witty labels
+applied to Heyst during his aimless pilgrimage in this section of the
+tropical belt, where the inane clacking of Schomberg&rsquo;s tongue
+vexed our ears.</p>
+<p>But apparently Heyst was not a hermit by temperament.&nbsp; The sight
+of his land was not invincibly odious to him.&nbsp; We must believe
+this, since for some reason or other he did come out from his retreat
+for a while.&nbsp; Perhaps it was only to see whether there were any
+letters for him at the Tesmans.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; No one
+knows.&nbsp; But this reappearance shows that his detachment from the
+world was not complete.&nbsp; And incompleteness of any sort leads to
+trouble.&nbsp; Axel Heyst ought not to have cared for his letters -
+or whatever it was that brought him out after something more than a
+year and a half in Samburan.&nbsp; But it was of no use.&nbsp; He had
+not the hermit&rsquo;s vocation!&nbsp; That was the trouble, it seems.</p>
+<p>Be this as it may, he suddenly reappeared in the world, broad chest,
+bald forehead, long moustaches, polite manner, and all - the complete
+Heyst, even to the kindly sunken eyes on which there still rested the
+shadow of Morrison&rsquo;s death.&nbsp; Naturally, it was Davidson who
+had given him a lift out of his forsaken island.&nbsp; There were no
+other opportunities, unless some native craft were passing by - a very
+remote and unsatisfactory chance to wait for.&nbsp; Yes, he came out
+with Davidson, to whom he volunteered the statement that it was only
+for a short time - a few days, no more.&nbsp; He meant to go back to
+Samburan.</p>
+<p>Davidson expressing his horror and incredulity of such foolishness,
+Heyst explained that when the company came into being he had his few
+belongings sent out from Europe.</p>
+<p>To Davidson, as to any of us, the idea of Heyst, the wandering drifting,
+unattached Heyst, having any belongings of the sort that can furnish
+a house was startlingly novel.&nbsp; It was grotesquely fantastic.&nbsp;
+It was like a bird owning real property.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Belongings?&nbsp; Do you mean chairs and tables?&rdquo; Davidson
+asked with unconcealed astonishment.</p>
+<p>Heyst did mean that.&nbsp; &ldquo;My poor father died in London.&nbsp;
+It has been all stored there ever since,&rdquo; he explained.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For all these years?&rdquo; exclaimed Davidson, thinking how
+long we all had known Heyst flitting from tree to tree in a wilderness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Even longer,&rdquo; said Heyst, who had understood very well.</p>
+<p>This seemed to imply that he had been wandering before he came under
+our observation.&nbsp; In what regions?&nbsp; And what early age?&nbsp;
+Mystery.&nbsp; Perhaps he was a bird that had never had a nest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I left school early,&rdquo; he remarked once to Davidson,
+on the passage.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was in England.&nbsp; A very good school.&nbsp;
+I was not a shining success there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The confessions of Heyst.&nbsp; Not one of us - with the probable
+exception of Morrison, who was dead - had ever heard so much of his
+history.&nbsp; It looks as if the experience of hermit life had the
+power to loosen one&rsquo;s tongue, doesn&rsquo;t it?</p>
+<p>During that memorable passage, in the <i>Sissie</i>, which took about
+two days, he volunteered other hints - for you could not call it information
+- about his history.&nbsp; And Davidson was interested.&nbsp; He was
+interested not because the hints were exciting but because of that innate
+curiosity about our fellows which is a trait of human nature.&nbsp;
+Davidson&rsquo;s existence, too, running the <i>Sissie</i> along the
+Java Sea and back again, was distinctly monotonous and, in a sense,
+lonely.&nbsp; He never had any sort of company on board.&nbsp; Native
+deck-passengers in plenty, of course, but never a white man, so the
+presence of Heyst for two days must have been a godsend.&nbsp; Davidson
+was telling us all about it afterwards.&nbsp; Heyst said that his father
+had written a lot of books.&nbsp; He was a philosopher.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Seems to me he must have been something of a crank, too,&rdquo;
+was Davidson&rsquo;s comment.&nbsp; &ldquo;Apparently he had quarrelled
+with his people in Sweden.&nbsp; Just the sort of father you would expect
+Heyst to have.&nbsp; Isn&rsquo;t he a bit of a crank himself?&nbsp;
+He told me that directly his father died he lit out into the wide world
+on his own, and had been on the move till he fetched up against this
+famous coal business.&nbsp; Fits the son of the father somehow, don&rsquo;t
+you think?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For the rest, Heyst was as polite as ever.&nbsp; He offered to pay
+for his passage; but when Davidson refused to hear of it he seized him
+heartily by the hand, gave one of his courtly bows, and declared that
+he was touched by his friendly proceedings.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not alluding to this trifling amount which you decline
+to take,&rdquo; he went on, giving a shake to Davidson&rsquo;s hand.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But I am touched by your humanity.&rdquo;&nbsp; Another shake.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Believe me, I am profoundly aware of having been an object of
+it.&rdquo;&nbsp; Final shake of the hand.&nbsp; All this meant that
+Heyst understood in a proper sense the little <i>Sissie&rsquo;s</i>
+periodic appearance in sight of his hermitage.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a genuine gentleman,&rdquo; Davidson said to us.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I was really sorry when he went ashore.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We asked him where he had left Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, in Sourabaya - where else?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Tesmans had their principal counting-house in Sourabaya.&nbsp;
+There had long existed a connection between Heyst and the Tesmans.&nbsp;
+The incongruity of a hermit having agents did not strike us, nor yet
+the absurdity of a forgotten cast-off, derelict manager of a wrecked,
+collapsed, vanished enterprise, having business to attend to.&nbsp;
+We said Sourabaya, of course, and took it for granted that he would
+stay with one of the Tesmans.&nbsp; One of us even wondered what sort
+of reception he would get; for it was known that Julius Tesman was unreasonably
+bitter about the Tropical Belt Coal fiasco.&nbsp; But Davidson set us
+right.&nbsp; It was nothing of the kind.&nbsp; Heyst went to stay in
+Schomberg&rsquo;s hotel, going ashore in the hotel launch.&nbsp; Not
+that Schomberg would think of sending his launch alongside a mere trader
+like the <i>Sissie</i>.&nbsp; But she had been meeting a coastal mail-packet,
+and had been signalled to.&nbsp; Schomberg himself was steering her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You should have seen Schomberg&rsquo;s eyes bulge out when
+Heyst jumped in with an ancient brown leather bag!&rdquo; said Davidson.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He pretended not to know who it was - at first, anyway.&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t go ashore with them.&nbsp; We didn&rsquo;t stay more
+than a couple of hours altogether.&nbsp; Landed two thousand coconuts
+and cleared out.&nbsp; I have agreed to pick him up again on my next
+trip in twenty days&rsquo; time.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FIVE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Davidson happened to be two days late on his return trip; no great
+matter, certainly, but he made a point of going ashore at once, during
+the hottest hour of the afternoon, to look for Heyst.&nbsp; Schomberg&rsquo;s
+hotel stood back in an extensive enclosure containing a garden, some
+large trees, and, under their spreading boughs, a detached &ldquo;hall
+available for concerts and other performances,&rdquo; as Schomberg worded
+it in his advertisements.&nbsp; Torn, and fluttering bills, intimating
+in heavy red capitals CONCERTS EVERY NIGHT, were stuck on the brick
+pillars on each side of the gateway.</p>
+<p>The walk had been long and confoundedly sunny.&nbsp; Davidson stood
+wiping his wet neck and face on what Schomberg called &ldquo;the piazza.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Several doors opened on to it, but all the screens were down.&nbsp;
+Not a soul was in sight, not even a China boy - nothing but a lot of
+painted iron chairs and tables.&nbsp; Solitude, shade, and gloomy silence
+- and a faint, treacherous breeze which came from under the trees and
+quite unexpectedly caused the melting Davidson to shiver slightly -
+the little shiver of the tropics which in Sourabaya, especially, often
+means fever and the hospital to the incautious white man.</p>
+<p>The prudent Davidson sought shelter in the nearest darkened room.&nbsp;
+In the artificial dusk, beyond the levels of shrouded billiard-tables,
+a white form heaved up from two chairs on which it had been extended.&nbsp;
+The middle of the day, table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te tiffin once over, was
+Schomberg&rsquo;s easy time.&nbsp; He lounged out, portly, deliberate,
+on the defensive, the great fair beard like a cuirass over his manly
+chest.&nbsp; He did not like Davidson, never a very faithful client
+of his.&nbsp; He hit a bell on one of the tables as he went by, and
+asked in a distant, Officer-in-Reserve manner:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You desire?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The good Davidson, still sponging his wet neck, declared with simplicity
+that he had come to fetch away Heyst, as agreed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not here!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A Chinaman appeared in response to the bell.&nbsp; Schomberg turned
+to him very severely:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Take the gentleman&rsquo;s order.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson had to be going.&nbsp; Couldn&rsquo;t wait - only begged
+that Heyst should be informed that the <i>Sissie</i> would leave at
+midnight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not - here, I am telling you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson slapped his thigh in concern.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dear me!&nbsp; Hospital, I suppose.&rdquo;&nbsp; A natural
+enough surmise in a very feverish locality.</p>
+<p>The Lieutenant of the Reserve only pursed up his mouth and raised
+his eyebrows without looking at him.&nbsp; It might have meant anything,
+but Davidson dismissed the hospital idea with confidence.&nbsp; However,
+he had to get hold of Heyst between this and midnight:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He has been staying here?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, he was staying here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can you tell me where he is now?&rdquo; Davidson went on placidly.&nbsp;
+Within himself he was beginning to grow anxious, having developed the
+affection of a self-appointed protector towards Heyst.&nbsp; The answer
+he got was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t tell.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s none of my business,&rdquo;
+accompanied by majestic oscillations of the hotel-keeper&rsquo;s head,
+hinting at some awful mystery.</p>
+<p>Davidson was placidity itself.&nbsp; It was his nature.&nbsp; He
+did not betray his sentiments, which were not favourable to Schomberg.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am sure to find out at the Tesmans&rsquo; office,&rdquo;
+he thought.&nbsp; But it was a very hot hour, and if Heyst was down
+at the port he would have learned already that the <i>Sissie</i> was
+in.&nbsp; It was even possible that Heyst had already gone on board,
+where he could enjoy a coolness denied to the town.&nbsp; Davidson,
+being stout, was much preoccupied with coolness and inclined to immobility.&nbsp;
+He lingered awhile, as if irresolute.&nbsp; Schomberg, at the door,
+looking out, affected perfect indifference.&nbsp; He could not keep
+it up, though.&nbsp; Suddenly he turned inward and asked with brusque
+rage:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You wanted to see him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, yes,&rdquo; said Davidson.&nbsp; &ldquo;We agreed to
+meet - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you bother.&nbsp; He doesn&rsquo;t care about
+that now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you can judge for yourself.&nbsp; He isn&rsquo;t here,
+is he?&nbsp; You take my word for it.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you bother about
+him.&nbsp; I am advising you as a friend.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; said, Davidson, inwardly startled at the
+savage tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think I will sit down for a moment and have
+a drink, after all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was not what Schomberg had expected to hear.&nbsp; He called
+brutally:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Boy!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Chinaman approached, and after referring him to the white man
+by a nod the hotel-keeper departed, muttering to himself.&nbsp; Davidson
+heard him gnash his teeth as he went.</p>
+<p>Davidson sat alone with the billiard-tables as if there had been
+not a soul staying in the hotel.&nbsp; His placidity was so genuine
+that he was not unduly, fretting himself over the absence of Heyst,
+or the mysterious manners Schomberg had treated him to.&nbsp; He was
+considering these things in his own fairly shrewd way.&nbsp; Something
+had happened; and he was loath to go away to investigate, being restrained
+by a presentiment that somehow enlightenment would come to him there.&nbsp;
+A poster of CONCERTS EVERY EVENING, like those on the gate, but in a
+good state of preservation, hung on the wall fronting him.&nbsp; He
+looked at it idly and was struck by the fact - then not so very common
+- that it was a ladies&rsquo; orchestra; &ldquo;Zangiacomo&rsquo;s eastern
+tour - eighteen performers.&rdquo;&nbsp; The poster stated that they
+had had the honour of playing their select repertoire before various
+colonial excellencies, also before pashas, sheiks, chiefs, H. H. the
+Sultan of Mascate, etc., etc.</p>
+<p>Davidson felt sorry for the eighteen lady-performers.&nbsp; He knew
+what that sort of life was like, the sordid conditions and brutal incidents
+of such tours led by such Zangiacomos who often were anything but musicians
+by profession.&nbsp; While he was staring at the poster, a door somewhere
+at his back opened, and a woman came in who was looked upon as Schomberg&rsquo;s
+wife, no doubt with truth.&nbsp; As somebody remarked cynically once,
+she was too unattractive to be anything else.&nbsp; The opinion that
+he treated her abominably was based on her frightened expression.&nbsp;
+Davidson lifted his hat to her.&nbsp; Mrs. Schomberg gave him an inclination
+of her sallow head and incontinently sat down behind a sort of raised
+counter, facing the door, with a mirror and rows of bottles at her back.&nbsp;
+Her hair was very elaborately done with two ringlets on the left side
+of her scraggy neck; her dress was of silk, and she had come on duty
+for the afternoon.&nbsp; For some reason or other Schomberg exacted
+this from her, though she added nothing to the fascinations of the place.&nbsp;
+She sat there in the smoke and noise, like an enthroned idol, smiling
+stupidly over the billiards from time to time, speaking to no one, and
+no one speaking to her.&nbsp; Schomberg himself took no more interest
+in her than may be implied in a sudden and totally unmotived scowl.&nbsp;
+Otherwise the very Chinamen ignored her existence.</p>
+<p>She had interrupted Davidson in his reflections.&nbsp; Being alone
+with her, her silence and open-mouthed immobility made him uncomfortable.&nbsp;
+He was easily sorry for people.&nbsp; It seemed rude not to take any
+notice of her.&nbsp; He said, in allusion to the poster:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you having these people in the house?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was so unused to being addressed by customers that at the sound
+of his voice she jumped in her seat.&nbsp; Davidson was telling us afterwards
+that she jumped exactly like a figure made of wood, without losing her
+rigid immobility.&nbsp; She did not even move her eyes; but she answered
+him freely, though her very lips seemed made of wood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They stayed here over a month.&nbsp; They are gone now.&nbsp;
+They played every evening.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pretty good, were they?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To this she said nothing; and as she kept on staring fixedly in front
+of her, her silence disconcerted Davidson.&nbsp; It looked as if she
+had not heard him - which was impossible.&nbsp; Perhaps she drew the
+line of speech at the expression of opinions.&nbsp; Schomberg might
+have trained her, for domestic reasons, to keep them to herself.&nbsp;
+But Davidson felt in honour obliged to converse; so he said, putting
+his own interpretation on this surprising silence:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see - not much account.&nbsp; Such bands hardly ever are.&nbsp;
+An Italian lot, Mrs. Schomberg, to judge by the name of the boss?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head negatively.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; He is a German really; only he dyes his hair and
+beard black for business.&nbsp; Zangiacomo is his business name.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a curious fact,&rdquo; said Davidson.&nbsp; His
+head being full of Heyst, it occurred to him that she might be aware
+of other facts.&nbsp; This was a very amazing discovery to anyone who
+looked at Mrs. Schomberg.&nbsp; Nobody had ever suspected her of having
+a mind.&nbsp; I mean even a little of it, I mean any at all.&nbsp; One
+was inclined to think of her as an It - an automaton, a very plain dummy,
+with an arrangement for bowing the head at times and smiling stupidly
+now and then.&nbsp; Davidson viewed her profile with a flattened nose,
+a hollow cheek, and one staring, unwinking, goggle eye.&nbsp; He asked
+himself: Did that speak just now?&nbsp; Will it speak again?&nbsp; It
+was as exciting, for the mere wonder of it, as trying to converse with
+a mechanism.&nbsp; A smile played about the fat features of Davidson;
+the smile of a man making an amusing experiment.&nbsp; He spoke again
+to her:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But the other members of that orchestra were real Italians,
+were they not?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Of course, he didn&rsquo;t care.&nbsp; He wanted to see whether the
+mechanism would work again.&nbsp; It did.&nbsp; It said they were not.&nbsp;
+They were of all sorts, apparently.&nbsp; It paused, with the one goggle
+eye immovably gazing down the whole length of the room and through the
+door opening on to the &ldquo;piazza.&rdquo;&nbsp; It paused, then went
+on in the same low pitch:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There was even one English girl.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor devil!&rdquo; - said Davidson, &ldquo;I suppose these
+women are not much better than slaves really.&nbsp; Was that fellow
+with the dyed beard decent in his way?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The mechanism remained silent.&nbsp; The sympathetic soul of Davidson
+drew its own conclusions.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Beastly life for these women!&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;When
+you say an English girl, Mrs. Schomberg, do you really mean a young
+girl?&nbsp; Some of these orchestra girls are no chicks.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Young enough,&rdquo; came the low voice out of Mrs. Schomberg&rsquo;s
+unmoved physiognomy.</p>
+<p>Davidson, encouraged, remarked that he was sorry for her.&nbsp; He
+was easily sorry for people.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where did they go to from here?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She did not go with them.&nbsp; She ran away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was the pronouncement Davidson obtained next.&nbsp; It introduced
+a new sort of interest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well!&nbsp; Well!&rdquo; he exclaimed placidly; and then,
+with the air of a man who knows life: &ldquo;Who with?&rdquo; he inquired
+with assurance.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Schomberg&rsquo;s immobility gave her an appearance of listening
+intently.&nbsp; Perhaps she was really listening; but Schomberg must
+have been finishing his sleep in some distant part of the house.&nbsp;
+The silence was profound, and lasted long enough to become startling.&nbsp;
+Then, enthroned above Davidson, she whispered at last:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That friend of yours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you know I am here looking for a friend,&rdquo; said Davidson
+hopefully.&nbsp; &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you tell me - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve told you&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A mist seemed to roll away from before Davidson&rsquo;s eyes, disclosing
+something he could not believe.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t mean it!&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s
+not the man for it.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the last words came out in a faint
+voice.&nbsp; Mrs. Schomberg never moved her head the least bit.&nbsp;
+Davidson, after the shock which made him sit up, went slack all over.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heyst!&nbsp; Such a perfect gentleman!&rdquo; he exclaimed
+weakly.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Schomberg did not seem to have heard him.&nbsp; This startling
+fact did not tally somehow with the idea Davidson had of Heyst.&nbsp;
+He never talked of women, he never seemed to think of them, or to remember
+that they existed; and then all at once - like this!&nbsp; Running off
+with a casual orchestra girl!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You might have knocked me down with a feather,&rdquo; Davidson
+told us some time afterwards.</p>
+<p>By then he was taking an indulgent view of both the parties to that
+amazing transaction.&nbsp; First of all, on reflection, he was by no
+means certain that it prevented Heyst from being a perfect gentleman,
+as before.&nbsp; He confronted our open grins or quiet smiles with a
+serious round face.&nbsp; Heyst had taken the girl away to Samburan;
+and that was no joking matter.&nbsp; The loneliness, the ruins of the
+spot, had impressed Davidson&rsquo;s simple soul.&nbsp; They were incompatible
+with the frivolous comments of people who had not seen it.&nbsp; That
+black jetty, sticking out of the jungle into the empty sea; these roof-ridges
+of deserted houses peeping dismally above the long grass!&nbsp; Ough!&nbsp;
+The gigantic and funeral blackboard sign of the Tropical Belt Coal Company,
+still emerging from a wild growth of bushes like an inscription stuck
+above a grave figured by the tall heap of unsold coal at the shore end
+of the wharf, added to the general desolation.</p>
+<p>Thus the sensitive Davidson.&nbsp; The girl must have been miserable
+indeed to follow such a strange man to such a spot.&nbsp; Heyst had,
+no doubt, told her the truth.&nbsp; He was a gentleman.&nbsp; But no
+words could do justice to the conditions of life on Samburan.&nbsp;
+A desert island was nothing to it.&nbsp; Moreover, when you were cast
+away on a desert island - why, you could not help yourself; but to expect
+a fiddle-playing girl out of an ambulant ladies&rsquo; orchestra to
+remain content there for a day, for one single day, was inconceivable.&nbsp;
+She would be frightened at the first sight of it.&nbsp; She would scream.</p>
+<p>The capacity for sympathy in these stout, placid men!&nbsp; Davidson
+was stirred to the depths; and it was easy to see that it was about
+Heyst that he was concerned.&nbsp; We asked him if he had passed that
+way lately.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes.&nbsp; I always do - about half a mile off.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Seen anybody about?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, not a soul.&nbsp; Not a shadow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you blow your whistle?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Blow the whistle?&nbsp; You think I would do such a thing?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He rejected the mere possibility of such an unwarrantable intrusion.&nbsp;
+Wonderfully delicate fellow, Davidson!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, but how do you know that they are there?&rdquo; he was
+naturally asked.</p>
+<p>Heyst had entrusted Mrs. Schomberg with a message for Davidson -
+a few lines in pencil on a scrap of crumpled paper.&nbsp; It was to
+the effect: that an unforeseen necessity was driving him away before
+the appointed time.&nbsp; He begged Davidson&rsquo;s indulgence for
+the apparent discourtesy.&nbsp; The woman of the house - meaning Mrs.
+Schomberg - would give him the facts, though unable to explain them,
+of course.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was there to explain?&rdquo; wondered Davidson dubiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He took a fancy to that fiddle-playing girl, and - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And she to him, apparently,&rdquo; I suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wonderfully quick work,&rdquo; reflected Davidson.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+do you think will come of it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Repentance, I should say.&nbsp; But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg
+has been selected for a confidante?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that
+woman whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the
+two billiard-tables - without expression, without movement, without
+voice, without sight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, she helped the girl to bolt,&rdquo; said Davidson turning
+at me his innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement
+in which this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow
+which sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling.&nbsp;
+It looked as though he would never get over it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst&rsquo;s note, twisted like a pipe-light,
+into my lap while I sat there unsuspecting,&rdquo; Davidson went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Directly I had recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth
+she had to do with it that Heyst should leave it with her.&nbsp; And
+then, behaving like a painted image rather than a live woman, she whispered,
+just loud enough for me to hear:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I helped them.&nbsp; I got her things together, tied them
+up in my own shawl, and threw them into the compound out of a back window.&nbsp;
+I did it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That woman that you would say hadn&rsquo;t the pluck to lift
+her little finger!&rdquo; marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly
+panting voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;What do you think of that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I thought she must have had some interest of her own to serve.&nbsp;
+She was too lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion.&nbsp;
+It was impossible to think that Heyst had bribed her.&nbsp; Whatever
+means he had, he had not the means to do that.&nbsp; Or could it be
+that she was moved by that disinterested passion for delivering a woman
+to a man which in respectable spheres is called matchmaking? - a highly
+irregular example of it!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It must have been a very small bundle,&rdquo; remarked Davidson
+further.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I imagine the girl must have been specially attractive,&rdquo;
+I said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; She was miserable.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+suppose it was more than a little linen and a couple of those white
+frocks they wear on the platform.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson pursued his own train of thought.&nbsp; He supposed that
+such a thing had never been heard of in the history of the tropics.&nbsp;
+For where could you find anyone to steal a girl out of an orchestra?&nbsp;
+No doubt fellows here and there took a fancy to some pretty one - but
+it was not for running away with her.&nbsp; Oh dear no!&nbsp; It needed
+a lunatic like Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only think what it means,&rdquo; wheezed Davidson, imaginative
+under his invincible placidity.&nbsp; &ldquo;Just only try to think!&nbsp;
+Brooding alone on Samburan has upset his brain.&nbsp; He never stopped
+to consider, or he couldn&rsquo;t have done it.&nbsp; No sane man .
+. . How is a thing like that to go on?&nbsp; What&rsquo;s he going to
+do with her in the end?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s madness.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You say that he&rsquo;s mad.&nbsp; Schomberg tells us that
+he must be starving on his island; so he may end yet by eating her,&rdquo;
+I suggested.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Schomberg had had no time to enter into details, Davidson told
+us.&nbsp; Indeed, the wonder was that they had been left alone so long.&nbsp;
+The drowsy afternoon was slipping by.&nbsp; Footsteps and voices resounded
+on the veranda - I beg pardon, the piazza; the scraping of chairs, the
+ping of a smitten bell.&nbsp; Customers were turning up.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Schomberg was begging Davidson hurriedly, but without looking at him,
+to say nothing to anyone, when on a half-uttered word her nervous whisper
+was cut short.&nbsp; Through a small inner door Schomberg came in, his
+hair brushed, his beard combed neatly, but his eyelids still heavy from
+his nap.&nbsp; He looked with suspicion at Davidson, and even glanced
+at his wife; but he was baffled by the natural placidity of the one
+and the acquired habit of immobility in the other.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you sent out the drinks?&rdquo; he asked surlily.</p>
+<p>She did not open her lips, because just then the head boy appeared
+with a loaded tray, on his way out.&nbsp; Schomberg went to the door
+and greeted the customers outside, but did not join them.&nbsp; He remained
+blocking half the doorway, with his back to the room, and was still
+there when Davidson, after sitting still for a while, rose to go.&nbsp;
+At the noise he made Schomberg turned his head, watched him lift his
+hat to Mrs. Schomberg and receive her wooden bow accompanied by a stupid
+grin, and then looked away.&nbsp; He was loftily dignified.&nbsp; Davidson
+stopped at the door, deep in his simplicity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am sorry you won&rsquo;t tell me anything about my friend&rsquo;s
+absence,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;My friend Heyst, you know.&nbsp;
+I suppose the only course for me now is to make inquiries down at the
+port.&nbsp; I shall hear something there, I don&rsquo;t doubt.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Make inquiries of the devil!&rdquo; replied Schomberg in a
+hoarse mutter.</p>
+<p>Davidson&rsquo;s purpose in addressing the hotel-keeper had been
+mainly to make Mrs. Schomberg safe from suspicion; but he would fain
+have heard something more of Heyst&rsquo;s exploit from another point
+of view.&nbsp; It was a shrewd try.&nbsp; It was successful in a rather
+startling way, because the hotel-keeper&rsquo;s point of view was horribly
+abusive.&nbsp; All of a sudden, in the same hoarse sinister tone, he
+proceeded to call Heyst many names, of which &ldquo;pig-dog&rdquo; was
+not the worst, with such vehemence that he actually choked himself.&nbsp;
+Profiting from the pause, Davidson, whose temperament could withstand
+worse shocks, remonstrated in an undertone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s unreasonable to get so angry as that.&nbsp; Even
+if he had run off with your cash-box - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>The big hotel-keeper bent down and put his infuriated face close
+to Davidson&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My cash-box!&nbsp; My - he - look here, Captain Davidson!&nbsp;
+He ran off with a girl.&nbsp; What do I care for the girl?&nbsp; The
+girl is nothing to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shot out an infamous word which made Davidson start.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+what the girl was; and he reiterated the assertion that she was nothing
+to him.&nbsp; What he was concerned for was the good name of his house.&nbsp;
+Wherever he had been established, he had always had &ldquo;artist parties&rdquo;
+staying in his house.&nbsp; One recommended him to the others; but what
+would happen now, when it got about that leaders ran the risk in his
+house - his house - of losing members of their troupe?&nbsp; And just
+now, when he had spent seven hundred and thirty-four guilders in building
+a concert-hall in his compound.&nbsp; Was that a thing to do in a respectable
+hotel?&nbsp; The cheek, the indecency, the impudence, the atrocity!&nbsp;
+Vagabond, impostor, swindler, ruffian, <i>schwein-hund</i>!</p>
+<p>He had seized Davidson by a button of his coat, detaining him in
+the doorway, and exactly in the line of Mrs. Schomberg&rsquo;s stony
+gaze.&nbsp; Davidson stole a glance in that direction and thought of
+making some sort of reassuring sign to her, but she looked so bereft
+of senses, and almost of life, perched up there, that it seemed not
+worth while.&nbsp; He disengaged his button with firm placidity.&nbsp;
+Thereupon, with a last stifled curse, Schomberg vanished somewhere within,
+to try and compose his spirits in solitude.&nbsp; Davidson stepped out
+on the veranda.&nbsp; The party of customers there had become aware
+of the explosive interlude in the doorway.&nbsp; Davidson knew one of
+these men, and nodded to him in passing; but his acquaintance called
+out:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t he in a filthy temper?&nbsp; He&rsquo;s been like
+that ever since.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The speaker laughed aloud, while all the others sat smiling.&nbsp;
+Davidson stopped.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, rather.&rdquo;&nbsp; His feelings were, he told us, those
+of bewildered resignation; but of course that was no more visible to
+the others than the emotions of a turtle when it withdraws into its
+shell.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It seems unreasonable,&rdquo; he murmured thoughtfully.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, but they had a scrap!&rdquo; the other said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean?&nbsp; Was there a fight! - a fight with
+Heyst?&rdquo; asked Davidson, much perturbed, if somewhat incredulous.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heyst?&nbsp; No, these two - the bandmaster, the fellow who&rsquo;s
+taking these women about and our Schomberg.&nbsp; Signor Zangiacomo
+ran amuck in the morning, and went for our worthy friend.&nbsp; I tell
+you, they were rolling on the floor together on this very veranda, after
+chasing each other all over the house, doors slamming, women screaming,
+seventeen of them, in the dining-room; Chinamen up the trees.&nbsp;
+Hey, John?&nbsp; You climb tree to see the fight, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The boy, almond-eyed and impassive, emitted a scornful grunt, finished
+wiping the table, and withdrew.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what it was - a real, go-as-you-please scrap.&nbsp;
+And Zangiacomo began it.&nbsp; Oh, here&rsquo;s Schomberg.&nbsp; Say,
+Schomberg, didn&rsquo;t he fly at you, when the girl was missed, because
+it was you who insisted that the artists should go about the audience
+during the interval?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg had reappeared in the doorway.&nbsp; He advanced.&nbsp;
+His bearing was stately, but his nostrils were extraordinarily expanded,
+and he controlled his voice with apparent effort.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly.&nbsp; That was only business.&nbsp; I quoted him
+special terms and all for your sake, gentlemen.&nbsp; I was thinking
+of my regular customers.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s nothing to do in the evenings
+in this town.&nbsp; I think, gentlemen, you were all pleased at the
+opportunity of hearing a little good music; and where&rsquo;s the harm
+of offering a grenadine, or what not, to a lady artist?&nbsp; But that
+fellow - that Swede - he got round the girl.&nbsp; He got round all
+the people out here.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been watching him for years.&nbsp;
+You remember how he got round Morrison.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He changed front abruptly, as if on parade, and marched off.&nbsp;
+The customers at the table exchanged glances silently.&nbsp; Davidson&rsquo;s
+attitude was that of a spectator.&nbsp; Schomberg&rsquo;s moody pacing
+of the billiard-room could be heard on the veranda.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And the funniest part is,&rdquo; resumed the man who had been
+speaking before - an English clerk in a Dutch house - &ldquo;the funniest
+part is that before nine o&rsquo;clock that same morning those two were
+driving together in a gharry down to the port, to look for Heyst and
+the girl.&nbsp; I saw them rushing around making inquiries.&nbsp; I
+don&rsquo;t know what they would have done to the girl, but they seemed
+quite ready to fall upon your Heyst, Davidson, and kill him on the quay.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had never, he said, seen anything so queer.&nbsp; Those two investigators
+working feverishly to the same end were glaring at each other with surprising
+ferocity.&nbsp; In hatred and mistrust they entered a steam-launch,
+and went flying from ship to ship all over the harbour, causing no end
+of sensation.&nbsp; The captains of vessels, coming on shore later in
+the day, brought tales of a strange invasion, and wanted to know who
+were the two offensive lunatics in a steam-launch, apparently after
+a man and a girl, and telling a story of which one could make neither
+head nor tail.&nbsp; Their reception by the roadstead was generally
+unsympathetic, even to the point of the mate of an American ship bundling
+them out over the rail with unseemly precipitation.</p>
+<p>Meantime Heyst and the girl were a good few miles away, having gone
+in the night on board one of the Tesman schooners bound to the eastward.&nbsp;
+This was known afterwards from the Javanese boatmen whom Heyst hired
+for the purpose at three o&rsquo;clock in the morning.&nbsp; The Tesman
+schooner had sailed at daylight with the usual land breeze, and was
+probably still in sight in the offing at the time.&nbsp; However, the
+two pursuers after their experience with the American mate, made for
+the shore.&nbsp; On landing, they had another violent row in the German
+language.&nbsp; But there was no second fight; and finally, with looks
+of fierce animosity, they got together into a gharry - obviously with
+the frugal view of sharing expenses - and drove away, leaving an astonished
+little crowd of Europeans and natives on the quay.</p>
+<p>After hearing this wondrous tale, Davidson went away from the hotel
+veranda, which was filling with Schomberg&rsquo;s regular customers.&nbsp;
+Heyst&rsquo;s escapade was the general topic of conversation.&nbsp;
+Never before had that unaccountable individual been the cause of so
+much gossip, he judged.&nbsp; No!&nbsp; Not even in the beginnings of
+the Tropical Belt Coal Company when becoming for a moment a public character
+was he the object of a silly criticism and unintelligent envy for every
+vagabond and adventurer in the islands.&nbsp; Davidson concluded that
+people liked to discuss that sort of scandal better than any other.</p>
+<p>I asked him if he believed that this was such a great scandal after
+all.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heavens, no!&rdquo; said that excellent man who, himself,
+was incapable of any impropriety of conduct.&nbsp; &ldquo;But it isn&rsquo;t
+a thing I would have done myself; I mean even if I had not been married.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was no implied condemnation in the statement; rather something
+like regret.&nbsp; Davidson shared my suspicion that this was in its
+essence the rescue of a distressed human being.&nbsp; Not that we were
+two romantics, tingeing the world to the hue of our temperament, but
+that both of us had been acute enough to discover a long time ago that
+Heyst was.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t have had the pluck,&rdquo; he continued.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I see a thing all round, as it were; but Heyst doesn&rsquo;t,
+or else he would have been scared.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t take a woman
+into a desert jungle without being made sorry for it sooner or later,
+in one way or another; and Heyst being a gentleman only makes it worse.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER SIX</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>We said no more about Heyst on that occasion, and it so happened
+that I did not meet Davidson again for some three months.&nbsp; When
+we did come together, almost the first thing he said to me was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty,
+that he had not intruded.&nbsp; He was called in.&nbsp; Otherwise he
+would not have dreamed of breaking in upon Heyst&rsquo;s privacy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am certain you wouldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; I assured him, concealing
+my amusement at his wonderful delicacy.&nbsp; He was the most delicate
+man that ever took a small steamer to and fro among the islands.&nbsp;
+But his humanity, which was not less strong and praiseworthy, had induced
+him to take his steamer past Samburan wharf (at an average distance
+of a mile) every twenty-three days - exactly.&nbsp; Davidson was delicate,
+humane, and regular.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heyst called you in?&rdquo; I asked, interested.</p>
+<p>Yes, Heyst had called him in as he was going by on his usual date.&nbsp;
+Davidson was examining the shore through his glasses with his unwearied
+and punctual humanity as he steamed past Samburan.</p>
+<p>I saw a man in white.&nbsp; It could only have been Heyst.&nbsp;
+He had fastened some sort of enormous flag to a bamboo pole, and was
+waving it at the end of the old wharf.</p>
+<p>Davidson didn&rsquo;t like to take his steamer alongside - for fear
+of being indiscreet, I suppose; but he steered close inshore, stopped
+his engines, and lowered a boat.&nbsp; He went himself in that boat,
+which was manned, of course, by his Malay seamen.</p>
+<p>Heyst, when he saw the boat pulling towards him, dropped his signalling-pole;
+and when Davidson arrived, he was kneeling down engaged busily in unfastening
+the flag from it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Was there anything wrong?&rdquo; I inquired, Davidson having
+paused in his narrative and my curiosity being naturally aroused.&nbsp;
+You must remember that Heyst as the Archipelago knew him was not - what
+shall I say - was not a signalling sort of man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The very words that came out of my mouth,&rdquo; said Davidson,
+&ldquo;before I laid the boat against the piles.&nbsp; I could not help
+it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst got up from his knees and began carefully folding up the flag
+thing, which struck Davidson as having the dimensions of a blanket.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, nothing wrong,&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; His white teeth
+flashed agreeably below the coppery horizontal bar of his long moustaches.</p>
+<p>I don&rsquo;t know whether it was his delicacy or his obesity which
+prevented Davidson from clambering upon the wharf.&nbsp; He stood up
+in the boat, and, above him, Heyst stooped low with urbane smiles, thanking
+him and apologizing for the liberty, exactly in his usual manner.&nbsp;
+Davidson had expected some change in the man, but there was none.&nbsp;
+Nothing in him betrayed the momentous fact that within that jungle there
+was a girl, a performer in a ladies&rsquo; orchestra, whom he had carried
+straight off the concert platform into the wilderness.&nbsp; He was
+not ashamed or defiant or abashed about it.&nbsp; He might have been
+a shade confidential when addressing Davidson.&nbsp; And his words were
+enigmatical.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I took this course of signalling to you,&rdquo; he said to
+Davidson, &ldquo;because to preserve appearances might be of the utmost
+importance.&nbsp; Not to me, of course.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t care what
+people may say, and of course no one can hurt me.&nbsp; I suppose I
+have done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed myself to be tempted
+into action.&nbsp; It seemed innocent enough, but all action is bound
+to be harmful.&nbsp; It is devilish.&nbsp; That is why this world is
+evil upon the whole.&nbsp; But I have done with it!&nbsp; I shall never
+lift a little finger again.&nbsp; At one time I thought that intelligent
+observation of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is
+allotted to us whether we want it or not; but now I, have done with
+observation, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Imagine poor, simple Davidson being addressed in such terms alongside
+an abandoned, decaying wharf jutting out of tropical bush.&nbsp; He
+had never heard anybody speak like this before; certainly not Heyst,
+whose conversation was concise, polite, with a faint ring of playfulness
+in the cultivated tones of his voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s gone mad,&rdquo; Davidson thought to himself.</p>
+<p>But, looking at the physiognomy above him on the wharf, he was obliged
+to dismiss the notion of common, crude lunacy.&nbsp; It was truly most
+unusual talk.&nbsp; Then he remembered - in his surprise he had lost
+sight of it - that Heyst now had a girl there.&nbsp; This bizarre discourse
+was probably the effect of the girl.&nbsp; Davidson shook off the absurd
+feeling, and asked, wishing to make clear his friendliness, and not
+knowing what else to say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t run short of stores or anything like that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst smiled and shook his head:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, no.&nbsp; Nothing of the kind.&nbsp; We are fairly well
+off here.&nbsp; Thanks, all the same.&nbsp; If I have taken the liberty
+to detain you, it is I not from any uneasiness for myself and my - companion.&nbsp;
+The person I was thinking of when I made up my mind to invoke your assistance
+is Mrs. Schomberg.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have talked with her,&rdquo; interjected Davidson.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; You?&nbsp; Yes, I hoped she would find means to
+- &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But she didn&rsquo;t tell me much,&rdquo; interrupted Davidson,
+who was not averse from hearing something - he hardly knew what.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;H&rsquo;m - Yes.&nbsp; But that note of mine?&nbsp; Yes?&nbsp;
+She found an opportunity to give it to you?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s good,
+very good.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s more resourceful than one would give her
+credit for.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Women often are - &rdquo; remarked Davidson.&nbsp; The strangeness
+from which he had suffered, merely because his interlocutor had carried
+off a girl, wore off as the minutes went by.&nbsp; &ldquo;There&rsquo;s
+a lot of unexpectedness about women,&rdquo; he generalized with a didactic
+aim which seemed to miss its mark; for the next thing Heyst said was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is Mrs. Schomberg&rsquo;s shawl.&rdquo;&nbsp; He touched
+the stuff hanging over his arm.&nbsp; &ldquo;An Indian thing, I believe,&rdquo;
+he added, glancing at his arm sideways.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t of particular value,&rdquo; said Davidson truthfully.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very likely.&nbsp; The point is that it belongs to Schomberg&rsquo;s
+wife.&nbsp; That Schomberg seems to be an unconscionable ruffian - don&rsquo;t
+you think so?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson smiled faintly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We out here have got used to him,&rdquo; he said, as if excusing
+a universal and guilty toleration of a manifest nuisance.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;d
+hardly call him that.&nbsp; I only know him as a hotel-keeper.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never knew him even as that - not till this time, when you
+were so obliging as to take me to Sourabaya, I went to stay there from
+economy.&nbsp; The Netherlands House is very expensive, and they expect
+you to bring your own servant with you.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a nuisance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, of course,&rdquo; protested Davidson hastily.</p>
+<p>After a short silence Heyst returned to the matter of the shawl.&nbsp;
+He wanted to send it back to Mrs. Schomberg.&nbsp; He said that it might
+be very awkward for her if she were unable, if asked, to produce it.&nbsp;
+This had given him, Heyst, much uneasiness.&nbsp; She was terrified
+of Schomberg.&nbsp; Apparently she had reason to be.</p>
+<p>Davidson had remarked that, too.&nbsp; Which did not prevent her,
+he pointed out, from making a fool of him, in a way, for the sake of
+a stranger.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; You know!&rdquo; said Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, she
+helped me - us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She told me so.&nbsp; I had quite a talk with her,&rdquo;
+Davidson informed him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Fancy anyone having a talk with
+Mrs. Schomberg!&nbsp; If I were to tell the fellows they wouldn&rsquo;t
+believe me.&nbsp; How did you get round her, Heyst?&nbsp; How did you
+think of it?&nbsp; Why, she looks too stupid to understand human speech
+and too scared to shoo a chicken away.&nbsp; Oh, the women, the women!&nbsp;
+You don&rsquo;t know what there may be in the quietest of them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life,&rdquo;
+said Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a very respectable task.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is that it?&nbsp; I had some idea it was that,&rdquo; confessed
+Davidson.</p>
+<p>He then imparted to Heyst the story of the violent proceedings following
+on the discovery of his flight.&nbsp; Heyst&rsquo;s polite attention
+to the tale took on a sombre cast; but he manifested no surprise, and
+offered no comment.&nbsp; When Davidson had finished he handed down
+the shawl into the boat, and Davidson promised to do his best to return
+it to Mrs. Schomberg in some secret fashion.&nbsp; Heyst expressed his
+thanks in a few simple words, set off by his manner of finished courtesy.&nbsp;
+Davidson prepared to depart.&nbsp; They were not looking at each other.&nbsp;
+Suddenly Heyst spoke:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You understand that this was a case of odious persecution,
+don&rsquo;t you?&nbsp; I became aware of it and - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was a view which the sympathetic Davidson was capable of appreciating.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not surprised to hear it,&rdquo; he said placidly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Odious enough, I dare say.&nbsp; And you, of course - not being
+a married man - were free to step in.&nbsp; Ah, well!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He sat down in the stern-sheets, and already had the steering lines
+in his hands when Heyst observed abruptly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The world is a bad dog.&nbsp; It will bite you if you give
+it a chance; but I think that here we can safely defy the fates.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When relating all this to me, Davidson&rsquo;s only comment was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Funny notion of defying the fates - to take a woman in tow!&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER SEVEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Some considerable time afterwards - we did not meet very often -
+I asked Davidson how he had managed about the shawl and heard that he
+had tackled his mission in a direct way, and had found it easy enough.&nbsp;
+At the very first call he made in Samarang he rolled the shawl as tightly
+as he could into the smallest possible brown-paper parcel, which he
+carried ashore with him.&nbsp; His business in the town being transacted,
+he got into a gharry with the parcel and drove to the hotel.&nbsp; With
+his precious experience, he timed his arrival accurately for the hour
+of Schomberg&rsquo;s siesta.&nbsp; Finding the place empty as on the
+former occasion, he marched into the billiard-room, took a seat at the
+back, near the sort of dais which Mrs. Schomberg would in due course
+come to occupy, and broke the slumbering silence of the house by thumping
+a bell vigorously.&nbsp; Of course a Chinaman appeared promptly.&nbsp;
+Davidson ordered a drink and sat tight.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I would have ordered twenty drinks one after another, if necessary,&rdquo;
+he said - Davidson&rsquo;s a very abstemious man - &ldquo;rather than
+take that parcel out of the house again.&nbsp; Couldn&rsquo;t leave
+it in a corner without letting the woman know it was there.&nbsp; It
+might have turned out worse for her than not bringing the thing back
+at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so he waited, ringing the bell again and again, and swallowing
+two or three iced drinks which he did not want.&nbsp; Presently, as
+he hoped it would happen, Mrs. Schomberg came in, silk dress, long neck,
+ringlets, scared eyes, and silly grin - all complete.&nbsp; Probably
+that lazy beast had sent her out to see who was the thirsty customer
+waking up the echoes of the house at this quiet hour.&nbsp; Bow, nod
+- and she clambered up to her post behind the raised counter, looking
+so helpless, so inane, as she sat there, that if it hadn&rsquo;t been
+for the parcel, Davidson declared, he would have thought he had merely
+dreamed all that had passed between them.&nbsp; He ordered another drink,
+to get the Chinaman out of the room, and then seized the parcel, which
+was reposing on a chair near him, and with no more than a mutter - &ldquo;this
+is something of yours&rdquo; - he rammed it swiftly into a recess in
+the counter, at her feet.&nbsp; There!&nbsp; The rest was her affair.&nbsp;
+And just in time, too.&nbsp; Schomberg turned up, yawning affectedly,
+almost before Davidson had regained his seat.&nbsp; He cast about suspicious
+and irate glances.&nbsp; An invincible placidity of expression helped
+Davidson wonderfully at the moment, and the other, of course, could
+have no grounds for the slightest suspicion of any sort of understanding
+between his wife and this customer.</p>
+<p>As to Mrs. Schomberg, she sat there like a joss.&nbsp; Davidson was
+lost in admiration.&nbsp; He believed, now, that the woman had been
+putting it on for years.&nbsp; She never even winked.&nbsp; It was immense!&nbsp;
+The insight he had obtained almost frightened him; he couldn&rsquo;t
+get over his wonder at knowing more of the real Mrs. Schomberg than
+anybody in the Islands, including Schomberg himself.&nbsp; She was a
+miracle of dissimulation.&nbsp; No wonder Heyst got the girl away from
+under two men&rsquo;s noses, if he had her to help with the job!</p>
+<p>The greatest wonder, after all, was Heyst getting mixed up with petticoats.&nbsp;
+The fellow&rsquo;s life had been open to us for years and nothing could
+have been more detached from feminine associations.&nbsp; Except that
+he stood drinks to people on suitable occasions, like any other man,
+this observer of facts seemed to have no connection with earthly affairs
+and passions.&nbsp; The very courtesy of his manner, the flavour of
+playfulness in the voice set him apart.&nbsp; He was like a feather
+floating lightly in the workaday atmosphere which was the breath of
+our nostrils.&nbsp; For this reason whenever this looker-on took contact
+with things he attracted attention.&nbsp; First, it was the Morrison
+partnership of mystery, then came the great sensation of the Tropical
+Belt Coal where indeed varied interests were involved: a real business
+matter.&nbsp; And then came this elopement, this incongruous phenomenon
+of self-assertion, the greatest wonder of all, astonishing and amusing.</p>
+<p>Davidson admitted to me that, the hubbub was subsiding; and the affair
+would have been already forgotten, perhaps, if that ass Schomberg had
+not kept on gnashing his teeth publicly about it.&nbsp; It was really
+provoking that Davidson should not be able to give one some idea of
+the girl.&nbsp; Was she pretty?&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; He
+had stayed the whole afternoon in Schomberg&rsquo;s hotel, mainly for
+the purpose of finding out something about her.&nbsp; But the story
+was growing stale.&nbsp; The parties at the tables on the veranda had
+other, fresher, events to talk about and Davidson shrank from making
+direct inquiries.&nbsp; He sat placidly there, content to be disregarded
+and hoping for some chance word to turn up.&nbsp; I shouldn&rsquo;t
+wonder if the good fellow hadn&rsquo;t been dozing.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+difficult to give you an adequate idea of Davidson&rsquo;s placidity.</p>
+<p>Presently Schomberg, wandering about, joined a party that had taken
+the table next to Davidson&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A man like that Swede, gentlemen, is a public danger,&rdquo;
+he began.&nbsp; &ldquo;I remember him for years.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t
+say anything of his spying - well, he used to say himself he was looking
+for out-of-the-way facts and what is that if not spying?&nbsp; He was
+spying into everybody&rsquo;s business.&nbsp; He got hold of Captain
+Morrison, squeezed him dry, like you would an orange, and scared him
+off to Europe to die there.&nbsp; Everybody knows that Captain Morrison
+had a weak chest.&nbsp; Robbed first and murdered afterwards!&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t mince words - not I.&nbsp; Next he gets up that swindle
+of the Belt Coal.&nbsp; You know all about it.&nbsp; And now, after
+lining his pockets with other people&rsquo;s money, he kidnaps a white
+girl belonging to an orchestra which is performing in my public room
+for the benefit of my patrons, and goes off to live like a prince on
+that island, where nobody can get at him.&nbsp; A damn silly girl .
+. . It&rsquo;s disgusting - tfui!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He spat.&nbsp; He choked with rage - for he saw visions, no doubt.&nbsp;
+He jumped up from his chair, and went away to flee from them - perhaps.&nbsp;
+He went into the room where Mrs. Schomberg sat.&nbsp; Her aspect could
+not have been very soothing to the sort of torment from which he was
+suffering.</p>
+<p>Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst.&nbsp; His proceeding
+was to enter into conversation with one and another, casually, and showing
+no particular knowledge of the affair, in order to discover something
+about the girl.&nbsp; Was she anything out of the way?&nbsp; Was she
+pretty?&nbsp; She couldn&rsquo;t have been markedly so.&nbsp; She had
+not attracted special notice.&nbsp; She was young - on that everybody
+agreed.&nbsp; The English clerk of Tesmans remembered that she had a
+sallow face.&nbsp; He was respectable and highly proper.&nbsp; He was
+not the sort to associate with such people.&nbsp; Most of these women
+were fairly battered specimens.&nbsp; Schomberg had them housed in what
+he called the Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending
+and washing their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out
+to dry between the trees, like a lot of washerwomen.&nbsp; They looked
+very much like middle-aged washerwomen on the platform, too.&nbsp; But
+the girl had been living in the main building along with the boss, the
+director, the fellow with the black beard, and a hard-bitten, oldish
+woman who took the piano and was understood to be the fellow&rsquo;s
+wife.</p>
+<p>This was not a very satisfactory result.&nbsp; Davidson stayed on,
+and even joined the table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te dinner, without gleaning
+any more information.&nbsp; He was resigned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he wheezed placidly, &ldquo;I am bound to
+see her some day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He meant to take the Samburan channel every trip, as before of course.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said.&nbsp; &ldquo;No doubt you will.&nbsp;
+Some day Heyst will be signalling to you again; and I wonder what it
+will be for.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson made no reply.&nbsp; He had his own ideas about that, and
+his silence concealed a good deal of thought.&nbsp; We spoke no more
+of Heyst&rsquo;s girl.&nbsp; Before we separated, he gave me a piece
+of unrelated observation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s funny,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I fancy there&rsquo;s
+some gambling going on in the evening at Schomberg&rsquo;s place, on
+the quiet.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve noticed men strolling away in twos and threes
+towards that hall where the orchestra used to play.&nbsp; The windows
+must be specially well shuttered, because I could not spy the smallest
+gleam of light from that direction; but I can&rsquo;t believe that those
+beggars would go in there only to sit and think of their sins in the
+dark.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s strange.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s incredible that Schomberg
+should risk that sort of thing,&rdquo; I said.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART TWO</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER ONE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>As we know, Heyst had gone to stay in Schomberg&rsquo;s hotel in
+complete ignorance that his person was odious to that worthy.&nbsp;
+When he arrived, Zangiacomo&rsquo;s Ladies&rsquo; Orchestra had been
+established there for some time.</p>
+<p>The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost
+corner of the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had something
+to do with money.&nbsp; He transacted it quickly, and then found himself
+with nothing to do while he awaited Davidson, who was to take him back
+to his solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst meant to go.&nbsp; He
+whom we used to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was suffering from thorough
+disenchantment.&nbsp; Not with the islands, however.&nbsp; The Archipelago
+has a lasting fascination.&nbsp; It is not easy to shake off the spell
+of island life.&nbsp; Heyst was disenchanted with life as a whole.&nbsp;
+His scornful temperament, beguiled into action, suffered from failure
+in a subtle way unknown to men accustomed to grapple with the realities
+of common human enterprise.&nbsp; It was like the gnawing pain of useless
+apostasy, a sort of shame before his own betrayed nature; and in addition,
+he also suffered from plain, downright remorse.&nbsp; He deemed himself
+guilty of Morrison&rsquo;s death.&nbsp; A rather absurd feeling, since
+no one could possibly have foreseen the horrors of the cold, wet summer
+lying in wait for poor Morrison at home.</p>
+<p>It was not in Heyst&rsquo;s character to turn morose; but his mental
+state was not compatible with a sociable mood.&nbsp; He spent his evenings
+sitting apart on the veranda of Schomberg&rsquo;s hotel.&nbsp; The lamentations
+of string instruments issued from the building in the hotel compound,
+the approaches to which were decorated with Japanese paper lanterns
+strung up between the trunks of several big trees.&nbsp; Scraps of tunes
+more or less plaintive reached his ears.&nbsp; They pursued him even
+into his bedroom, which opened into an upstairs veranda.&nbsp; The fragmentary
+and rasping character of these sounds made their intrusion inexpressibly
+tedious in the long run.&nbsp; Like most dreamers, to whom it is given
+sometimes to hear the music of the spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the
+Archipelago, had a taste for silence which he had been able to gratify
+for years.&nbsp; The islands are very quiet.&nbsp; One sees them lying
+about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of
+silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring
+of magic stillness.&nbsp; A sort of smiling somnolence broods over them;
+the very voices of their people are soft and subdued, as if afraid to
+break some protecting spell.</p>
+<p>Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the
+early days.&nbsp; For him, however, that was broken.&nbsp; He was no
+longer enchanted, though he was still a captive of the islands.&nbsp;
+He had no intention to leave them ever.&nbsp; Where could he have gone
+to, after all these years?&nbsp; Not a single soul belonging to him
+lived anywhere on earth.&nbsp; Of this fact - not such a remote one,
+after all - he had only lately become aware; for it is failure that
+makes a man enter into himself and reckon up his resources.&nbsp; And
+though he had made up his mind to retire from the world in hermit fashion,
+yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of loneliness which had
+come to him in the hour of renunciation.&nbsp; It hurt him.&nbsp; Nothing
+is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate
+our intelligence and our feelings.</p>
+<p>Meantime Schomberg watched Heyst out of the comer of his eye.&nbsp;
+Towards the unconscious object of his enmity he preserved a distant
+lieutenant-of-the-Reserve demeanour.&nbsp; Nudging certain of his customers
+with his elbow, he begged them to observe what airs &ldquo;that Swede&rdquo;
+was giving himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I really don&rsquo;t know why he has come to stay in my house.&nbsp;
+This place isn&rsquo;t good enough for him.&nbsp; I wish to goodness
+he had gone somewhere else to show off his superiority.&nbsp; Here I
+have got up this series of concerts for you gentlemen, just to make
+things a little brighter generally; and do you think he&rsquo;ll condescend
+to step in and listen to a piece or two of an evening?&nbsp; Not he.&nbsp;
+I know him of old.&nbsp; There he sits at the dark end of the piazza,
+all the evening long - planning some new swindle, no doubt.&nbsp; For
+two-pence I would ask him to go and look for quarters somewhere else;
+only one doesn&rsquo;t like to treat a white man like that out in the
+tropics.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know how long he means to stay, but I&rsquo;m
+willing to bet a trifle that he&rsquo;ll never work himself up to the
+point of spending the fifty cents of entrance money for the sake of
+a little good music.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nobody cared to bet, or the hotel-keeper would have lost.&nbsp; One
+evening Heyst was driven to desperation by the rasped, squeaked, scraped
+snatches of tunes pursuing him even to his hard couch, with a mattress
+as thin as a pancake and a diaphanous mosquito net.&nbsp; He descended
+among the trees, where the soft glow of Japanese lanterns picked out
+parts of their great rugged trunks, here and there, in the great mass
+of darkness under the lofty foliage.&nbsp; More lanterns, of the shape
+of cylindrical concertinas, hanging in a row from a slack string, decorated
+the doorway of what Schomberg called grandiloquently &ldquo;my concert-hall.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+In his desperate mood Heyst ascended three steps, lifted a calico curtain,
+and went in.</p>
+<p>The uproar in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported
+pine boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning.&nbsp;
+An instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing, scraping,
+squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano, operated upon
+by a bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered nostrils, rained hard notes
+like hail through the tempest of fiddles.&nbsp; The small platform was
+filled with white muslin dresses and crimson sashes slanting from shoulders
+provided with bare arms, which sawed away without respite.&nbsp; Zangiacomo
+conducted.&nbsp; He wore a white mess-jacket, a black dress waistcoat,
+and white trousers.&nbsp; His longish, tousled hair and his great beard
+were purple-black.&nbsp; He was horrible.&nbsp; The heat was terrific.&nbsp;
+There were perhaps thirty people having drinks at several little tables.&nbsp;
+Heyst, quite overcome by the volume of noise, dropped into a chair.&nbsp;
+In the quick time of that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of
+the strings, in the movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses,
+the coarse faces, the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion
+of brutality - something cruel, sensual and repulsive.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is awful!&rdquo; Heyst murmured to himself.</p>
+<p>But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise.&nbsp; He
+did not flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to
+do.&nbsp; He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing
+could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses,
+and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition
+of vigour.&nbsp; The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply
+murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy.&nbsp; One felt as
+if witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong
+that it seemed marvellous to see the people sitting so quietly on their
+chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs
+of distress, anger, or fear.&nbsp; Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural
+spectacle of their indifference.</p>
+<p>When the piece of music came to an end the relief was so great that
+he felt slightly dizzy, as if a chasm of silence had yawned at his feet.&nbsp;
+When he raised his eyes, the audience, most perversely, was exhibiting
+signs of animation and interest in their faces, and the women in white
+muslin dresses were coming down in pairs from the platform into the
+body of Schomberg&rsquo;s &ldquo;concert-hall.&rdquo;&nbsp; They dispersed
+themselves all over the place.&nbsp; The male creature with the hooked
+nose and purple-black beard disappeared somewhere.&nbsp; This was the
+interval during which, as the astute Schomberg had stipulated, the members
+of the orchestra were encouraged to favour the members of the audience
+with their company - that is, such members as seemed inclined to fraternize
+with the arts in a familiar and generous manner; the symbol of familiarity
+and generosity consisting in offers of refreshment.</p>
+<p>The procedure struck Heyst as highly incorrect.&nbsp; However, the
+impropriety of Schomberg&rsquo;s ingenious scheme was defeated by the
+circumstance that most of the women were no longer young, and that none
+of them had ever been beautiful.&nbsp; Their more or less worn checks
+were slightly rouged, but apart from that fact, which might have been
+simply a matter of routine, they did not seem to take the success of
+the scheme unduly to heart.&nbsp; The impulse to fraternize with the
+arts being obviously weak in the audience, some of the musicians sat
+down listlessly at unoccupied tables, while others went on perambulating
+the central passage: arm in arm, glad enough, no doubt, to stretch their
+legs while resting their arms.&nbsp; Their crimson sashes gave a factitious
+touch of gaiety to the smoky atmosphere of the concert-hall; and Heyst
+felt a sudden pity for these beings, exploited, hopeless, devoid of
+charm and grace, whose fate of cheerless dependence invested their coarse
+and joyless features with a touch of pathos.</p>
+<p>Heyst was temperamentally sympathetic.&nbsp; To have them passing
+and repassing close to his little table was painful to him.&nbsp; He
+was preparing to rise and go out when he noticed that two white muslin
+dresses and crimson sashes had not yet left the platform.&nbsp; One
+of these dresses concealed the raw-boned frame of the woman with the
+bad-tempered curve to her nostrils.&nbsp; She was no less a personage
+than Mrs. Zangiacomo.&nbsp; She had left the piano, and, with her back
+to the hall, was preparing the parts for the second half of the concert,
+with a brusque, impatient action of her ugly elbow.&nbsp; This task
+done, she turned, and, perceiving the other white muslin dress motionless
+on a chair in the second row, she strode towards it between the music-stands
+with an aggressive and masterful gait.&nbsp; On the lap of that dress
+there lay, unclasped and idle, a pair of small hands, not very white,
+attached to well-formed arms.&nbsp; The next detail Heyst was led to
+observe was the arrangement of the hair - two thick, brown tresses rolled
+round an attractively shaped head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A girl, by Jove!&rdquo; he exclaimed mentally.</p>
+<p>It was evident that she was a girl.&nbsp; It was evident in the outline
+of the shoulders, in the slender white bust springing up, barred slantwise
+by the crimson sash, from the bell-shaped spread of muslin skirt hiding
+the chair on which she sat averted a little from the body of the hall.&nbsp;
+Her feet, in low white shoes, were crossed prettily.</p>
+<p>She had captured Heyst&rsquo;s awakened faculty of observation; he
+had the sensation of a new experience.&nbsp; That was because his faculty
+of observation had never before been captured by any feminine creature
+in that marked and exclusive fashion.&nbsp; He looked at her anxiously,
+as no man ever looks at another man; and he positively forgot where
+he was.&nbsp; He had lost touch with his surroundings.&nbsp; The big
+woman, advancing, concealed the girl from his sight for a moment.&nbsp;
+She bent over the seated youthful figure, in passing it very close,
+as if to drop a word into its ear.&nbsp; Her lips did certainly move.&nbsp;
+But what sort of word could it have been to make the girl jump up so
+swiftly?&nbsp; Heyst, at his table, was surprised into a sympathetic
+start.&nbsp; He glanced quickly round.&nbsp; Nobody was looking towards
+the platform; and when his eyes swept back there again, the girl, with
+the big woman treading at her heels, was coming down the three steps
+from the platform to the floor of the hall.&nbsp; There she paused,
+stumbled one pace forward, and stood still again, while the other -
+the escort, the dragoon, the coarse big woman of the piano - passed
+her roughly, and, marching truculently down the centre aisle between
+the chairs and tables, went out to rejoin the hook-nosed Zangiacomo
+somewhere outside.&nbsp; During her extraordinary transit, as if everything
+in the hall were dirt under her feet, her scornful eyes met the upward
+glance of Heyst, who looked away at once towards the girl.&nbsp; She
+had not moved.&nbsp; Her arms hung down; her eyelids were lowered.</p>
+<p>Heyst laid down his half-smoked cigar and compressed his lips.&nbsp;
+Then he got up.&nbsp; It was the same sort of impulse which years ago
+had made him cross the sandy street of the abominable town of Delli
+in the island of Timor and accost Morrison, practically a stranger to
+him then, a man in trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely.</p>
+<p>It was the same impulse.&nbsp; But he did not recognize it.&nbsp;
+He was not thinking of Morrison then.&nbsp; It may be said that, for
+the first time since the final abandonment of the Samburan coal mine,
+he had completely forgotten the late Morrison.&nbsp; It is true that
+to a certain extent he had forgotten also where he was.&nbsp; Thus,
+unchecked by any sort of self consciousness, Heyst walked up the central
+passage.</p>
+<p>Several of the women, by this time, had found anchorage here and
+there among the occupied tables.&nbsp; They talked to the men, leaning
+on their elbows, and suggesting funnily - if it hadn&rsquo;t been for
+the crimson sashes - in their white dresses an assembly of middle-aged
+brides with free and easy manners and hoarse voices.&nbsp; The murmuring
+noise of conversations carried on with some spirit filled Schomberg&rsquo;s
+concert-room.&nbsp; Nobody remarked Heyst&rsquo;s movements; for indeed
+he was not the only man on his legs there.&nbsp; He had been confronting
+the girl for some time before she became aware of his presence.&nbsp;
+She was looking down, very still, without colour, without glances, without
+voice, without movement.&nbsp; It was only when Heyst addressed her
+in his courteous tone that she raised her eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Excuse me,&rdquo; he said in English, &ldquo;but that horrible
+female has done something to you.&nbsp; She has pinched you, hasn&rsquo;t
+she?&nbsp; I am sure she pinched you just now, when she stood by your
+chair.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl received this overture with the wide, motionless stare of
+profound astonishment.&nbsp; Heyst, vexed with himself, suspected that
+she did not understand what he said.&nbsp; One could not tell what nationality
+these women were, except that they were of all sorts.&nbsp; But she
+was astonished almost more by the near presence of the man himself,
+by his largely bald head, by the white brow, the sunburnt cheeks, the
+long, horizontal moustaches of crinkly bronze hair, by the kindly expression
+of the man&rsquo;s blue eyes looking into her own.&nbsp; He saw the
+stony amazement in hers give way to a momentary alarm, which was succeeded
+by an expression of resignation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am sure she pinched your arm most cruelly,&rdquo; he murmured,
+rather disconcerted now at what he had done.</p>
+<p>It was a great comfort to hear her say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It wouldn&rsquo;t have been the first time.&nbsp; And suppose
+she did - what are you going to do about it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; he said with a faint, remote playfulness
+in his tone which had not been heard in it lately, and which seemed
+to catch her ear pleasantly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am grieved to say that I
+don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; But can I do anything?&nbsp; What would you
+wish me to do?&nbsp; Pray command me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Again, the greatest astonishment became visible in her face; for
+she now perceived how different he was from the other men in the room.&nbsp;
+He was as different from them as she was different from the other members
+of the ladies&rsquo; orchestra.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Command you?&rdquo; she breathed, after a time, in a bewildered
+tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;Who are you?&rdquo; she asked a little louder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am staying in this hotel for a few days.&nbsp; I just dropped
+in casually here.&nbsp; This outrage - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you try to interfere,&rdquo; she said so earnestly
+that Heyst asked, in his faintly playful tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it your wish that I should leave you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t said that,&rdquo; the girl answered.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;She pinched me because I didn&rsquo;t get down here quick enough
+- &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t tell you how indignant I am - &rdquo; said Heyst.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But since you are down here now,&rdquo; he went on, with the
+ease of a man of the world speaking to a young lady in a drawing-room,
+&ldquo;hadn&rsquo;t we better sit down?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She obeyed his inviting gesture, and they sat down on the nearest
+chairs.&nbsp; They looked at each other across a little round table
+with a surprised, open gaze, self-consciousness growing on them so slowly
+that it was a long time before they averted their eyes; and very soon
+they met again, temporarily, only to rebound, as it were.&nbsp; At last
+they steadied in contact, but by that time, say some fifteen minutes
+from the moment when they sat down, the &ldquo;interval&rdquo; came
+to an end.</p>
+<p>So much for their eyes.&nbsp; As to the conversation, it had been
+perfectly insignificant because naturally they had nothing to say to
+each other.&nbsp; Heyst had been interested by the girl&rsquo;s physiognomy.&nbsp;
+Its expression was neither simple nor yet very clear.&nbsp; It was not
+distinguished - that could not be expected - but the features had more
+fineness than those of any other feminine countenance he had ever had
+the opportunity to observe so closely.&nbsp; There was in it something
+indefinably audacious and infinitely miserable - because the temperament
+and the existence of that girl were reflected in it.&nbsp; But her voice!&nbsp;
+It seduced Heyst by its amazing quality.&nbsp; It was a voice fit to
+utter the most exquisite things, a voice which would have made silly
+chatter supportable and the roughest talk fascinating.&nbsp; Heyst drank
+in its charm as one listens to the tone of some instrument without heeding
+the tune.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you sing as well as play?&rdquo; he asked her abruptly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Never sang a note in my life,&rdquo; she said, obviously surprised
+by the irrelevant question; for they had not been discoursing of sweet
+sounds.&nbsp; She was clearly unaware of her voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+remember that I ever had much reason to sing since I was little,&rdquo;
+she added.</p>
+<p>That inelegant phrase, by the mere vibrating, warm nobility of the
+sound, found its way into Heyst&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; His mind, cool,
+alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity
+of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our
+unexpressed longings lie.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are English, of course?&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you think?&rdquo; she answered in the most charming
+accents.&nbsp; Then, as if thinking that it was her turn to place a
+question: &ldquo;Why do you always smile when you speak?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was enough to make anyone look grave, but her good faith was so
+evident that Heyst recovered himself at once.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s my unfortunate manner - &rdquo; he said with his
+delicate, polished playfulness.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is very objectionable
+to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was very serious.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; I only noticed it.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t come across
+so many pleasant people as all that, in my life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s certain that this woman who plays the piano is
+infinitely more disagreeable than any cannibal I have ever had to do
+with.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I believe you!&rdquo;&nbsp; She shuddered.&nbsp; &ldquo;How
+did you come to have anything to do with cannibals?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be too long a tale,&rdquo; said Heyst with a faint
+smile.&nbsp; Heyst&rsquo;s smiles were rather melancholy, and accorded
+badly with his great moustaches, under which his mere playfulness lurked
+as comfortable as a shy bird in its native thicket.&nbsp; &ldquo;Much
+too long.&nbsp; How did you get amongst this lot here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bad luck,&rdquo; she answered briefly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No doubt, no doubt,&rdquo; Heyst assented with slight nods.&nbsp;
+Then, still indignant at the pinch which he had divined rather than
+actually seen inflicted: &ldquo;I say, couldn&rsquo;t you defend yourself
+somehow?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had risen already.&nbsp; The ladies of the orchestra were slowly
+regaining their places.&nbsp; Some were already seated, idle stony-eyed,
+before the music-stands.&nbsp; Heyst was standing up, too.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They are too many for me,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>These few words came out of the common experience of mankind; yet
+by virtue of her voice, they thrilled Heyst like a revelation.&nbsp;
+His feelings were in a state of confusion, but his mind was clear.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s bad.&nbsp; But it isn&rsquo;t actual ill-usage
+that this girl is complaining of,&rdquo; he thought lucidly after she
+left him.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER TWO</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>That was how it began.&nbsp; How it was that it ended, as we know
+it did end, is not so easy to state precisely.&nbsp; It is very clear
+that Heyst was not indifferent, I won&rsquo;t say to the girl, but to
+the girl&rsquo;s fate.&nbsp; He was the same man who had plunged after
+the submerged Morrison whom he hardly knew otherwise than by sight and
+through the usual gossip of the islands.&nbsp; But this was another
+sort of plunge altogether, and likely to lead to a very different kind
+of partnership.</p>
+<p>Did he reflect at all?&nbsp; Probably.&nbsp; He was sufficiently
+reflective.&nbsp; But if he did, it was with insufficient knowledge.&nbsp;
+For there is no evidence that he paused at any time between the date
+of that evening and the morning of the flight.&nbsp; Truth to say, Heyst
+was not one of those men who pause much.&nbsp; Those dreamy spectators
+of the world&rsquo;s agitation are terrible once the desire to act gets
+hold of them.&nbsp; They lower their heads and charge a wall with an
+amazing serenity which nothing but an indisciplined imagination can
+give.</p>
+<p>He was not a fool.&nbsp; I suppose he knew - or at least he felt
+- where this was leading him.&nbsp; But his complete inexperience gave
+him the necessary audacity.&nbsp; The girl&rsquo;s voice was charming
+when she spoke to him of her miserable past, in simple terms, with a
+sort of unconscious cynicism inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions
+of poverty.&nbsp; And whether because he was humane or because her voice
+included all the modulations of pathos, cheerfulness, and courage in
+its compass, it was not disgust that the tale awakened in him, but the
+sense of an immense sadness.</p>
+<p>On a later evening, during the interval between the two parts of
+the concert, the girl told Heyst about herself.&nbsp; She was almost
+a child of the streets.&nbsp; Her father was a musician in the orchestras
+of small theatres.&nbsp; Her mother ran away from him while she was
+little, and the landladies of various poor lodging-houses had attended
+casually to her abandoned childhood.&nbsp; It was never positive starvation
+and absolute rags, but it was the hopeless grip of poverty all the time.&nbsp;
+It was her father who taught her to play the violin.&nbsp; It seemed
+that he used to get drunk sometimes, but without pleasure, and only
+because he was unable to forget his fugitive wife.&nbsp; After he had
+a paralytic stroke, falling over with a crash in the well of a music-hall
+orchestra during the performance, she had joined the Zangiacomo company.&nbsp;
+He was now in a home for incurables.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I am here,&rdquo; she finished, &ldquo;with no one to
+care if I make a hole in the water the next chance I get or not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst told her that he thought she could do a little better than
+that, if it was only a question of getting out of the world.&nbsp; She
+looked at him with special attention, and with a puzzled expression
+which gave to her face an air of innocence.</p>
+<p>This was during one of the &ldquo;intervals&rdquo; between the two
+parts of the concert.&nbsp; She had come down that time without being
+incited thereto by a pinch from the awful Zangiacomo woman.&nbsp; It
+is difficult to suppose that she was seduced by the uncovered intellectual
+forehead and the long reddish moustaches of her new friend.&nbsp; New
+is not the right word.&nbsp; She had never had a friend before; and
+the sensation of this friendliness going out to her was exciting by
+its novelty alone.&nbsp; Besides, any man who did not resemble Schomberg
+appeared for that very reason attractive.&nbsp; She was afraid of the
+hotel-keeper, who, in the daytime, taking advantage of the fact that
+she lived in the hotel itself, and not in the Pavilion with the other
+&ldquo;artists&rdquo; prowled round her, mute, hungry, portentous behind
+his great beard, or else assailed her in quiet corners and empty passages
+with deep, mysterious murmurs from behind, which, not withstanding their
+clear import, sounded horribly insane somehow.</p>
+<p>The contrast of Heyst&rsquo;s quiet, polished manner gave her special
+delight and filled her with admiration.&nbsp; She had never seen anything
+like that before.&nbsp; If she had, perhaps, known kindness in her life,
+she had never met the forms of simple courtesy.&nbsp; She was interested
+by it as a very novel experience, not very intelligible, but distinctly
+pleasurable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I tell you they are too many for me,&rdquo; she repeated,
+sometimes recklessly, but more often shaking her head with ominous dejection.</p>
+<p>She had, of course, no money at all.&nbsp; The quantities of &ldquo;black
+men&rdquo; all about frightened her.&nbsp; She really had no definite
+idea where she was on the surface of the globe.&nbsp; The orchestra
+was generally taken from the steamer to some hotel, and kept shut up
+there till it was time to go on board another steamer.&nbsp; She could
+not remember the names she heard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you call this place again?&rdquo; she used to ask Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sourabaya,&rdquo; he would say distinctly, and would watch
+the discouragement at the outlandish sound coming into her eyes, which
+were fastened on his face.</p>
+<p>He could not defend himself from compassion.&nbsp; He suggested that
+she might go to the consul, but it was his conscience that dictated
+this advice, not his conviction.&nbsp; She had never heard of the animal
+or of its uses.&nbsp; A consul!&nbsp; What was it?&nbsp; Who was he?&nbsp;
+What could he do?&nbsp; And when she learned that perhaps he could be
+induced to send her home, her head dropped on her breast.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What am I to do when I get there?&rdquo; she murmured with
+an intonation so just, with an accent so penetrating - the charm of
+her voice did not fail her even in whispering - that Heyst seemed to
+see the illusion of human fellowship on earth vanish before the naked
+truth of her existence, and leave them both face to face in a moral
+desert as arid as the sands of Sahara, without restful shade, without
+refreshing water.</p>
+<p>She leaned slightly over the little table, the same little table
+at which they had sat when they first met each other; and with no other
+memories but of the stones in the streets her childhood had known, in
+the distress of the incoherent, confused, rudimentary impressions of
+her travels inspiring her with a vague terror of the world she said
+rapidly, as one speaks in desperation:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>You</i> do something!&nbsp; You are a gentleman.&nbsp;
+It wasn&rsquo;t I who spoke to you first, was it?&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+begin, did I?&nbsp; It was you who came along and spoke to me when I
+was standing over there.&nbsp; What did you want to speak to me for?&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t care what it is, but you must do something.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her attitude was fierce and entreating at the same time - clamorous,
+in fact though her voice had hardly risen above a breath.&nbsp; It was
+clamorous enough to be noticed.&nbsp; Heyst, on purpose, laughed aloud.&nbsp;
+She nearly choked with indignation at this brutal heartlessness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What did you mean, then, by saying &lsquo;command me!&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+she almost hissed.</p>
+<p>Something hard in his mirthless stare, and a quiet final &ldquo;All
+right,&rdquo; steadied her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not rich enough to buy you out,&rdquo; he went on, speaking
+with an extraordinary detached grin, &ldquo;even if it were to be done;
+but I can always steal you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked at him profoundly, as though these words had a hidden
+and very complicated meaning.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Get away now,&rdquo; he said rapidly, &ldquo;and try to smile
+as you go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She obeyed with unexpected readiness; and as she had a set of very
+good white teeth, the effect of the mechanical, ordered smile was joyous,
+radiant.&nbsp; It astonished Heyst.&nbsp; No wonder, it flashed through
+his mind, women can deceive men so completely.&nbsp; The faculty was
+inherent in them; they seemed to be created with a special aptitude.&nbsp;
+Here was a smile the origin of which was well known to him; and yet
+it had conveyed a sensation of warmth, had given him a sort of ardour
+to live which was very new to his experience.</p>
+<p>By this time she was gone from the table, and had joined the other
+&ldquo;ladies of the orchestra.&rdquo;&nbsp; They trooped towards the
+platform, driven in truculently by the haughty mate of Zangiacomo, who
+looked as though she were restraining herself with difficulty from punching
+their backs.&nbsp; Zangiacomo followed, with his great, pendulous dyed
+beard and short mess-jacket, with an aspect of hang-dog concentration
+imparted by his drooping head and the uneasiness of his eyes, which
+were set very close together.&nbsp; He climbed the steps last of all,
+turned about, displaying his purple beard to the hall, and tapped with
+his bow.&nbsp; Heyst winced in anticipation of the horrible racket.&nbsp;
+It burst out immediately unabashed and awful.&nbsp; At the end of the
+platform the woman at the piano, presenting her cruel profile, her head
+tilted back, banged the keys without looking at the music.</p>
+<p>Heyst could not stand the uproar for more than a minute.&nbsp; He
+went out, his brain racked by the rhythm of some more or less Hungarian
+dance music.&nbsp; The forests inhabited by the New Guinea cannibals
+where he had encountered the most exciting of his earlier futile adventures
+were silent.&nbsp; And this adventure, not in its execution, perhaps,
+but in its nature, required even more nerve than anything he had faced
+before.&nbsp; Walking among the paper lanterns suspended to trees he
+remembered with regret the gloom and the dead stillness of the forests
+at the back of Geelvink Bay, perhaps the wildest, the unsafest, the
+most deadly spot on earth from which the sea can be seen.&nbsp; Oppressed
+by his thoughts, he sought the obscurity and peace of his bedroom; but
+they were not complete.&nbsp; The distant sounds of the concert reached
+his ear, faint indeed, but still disturbing.&nbsp; Neither did he feel
+very safe in there; for that sentiment depends not on extraneous circumstances
+but on our inward conviction.&nbsp; He did not attempt to go to sleep;
+he did not even unbutton the top button of his tunic.&nbsp; He sat in
+a chair and mused.&nbsp; Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had
+been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life
+outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional
+self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness.&nbsp; But now he was
+troubled; a light veil seemed to hang before his mental vision; the
+awakening of a tenderness, indistinct and confused as yet, towards an
+unknown woman.</p>
+<p>Gradually silence, a real silence, had established itself round him.&nbsp;
+The concert was over; the audience had gone; the concert-hall was dark;
+and even the Pavilion, where the ladies&rsquo; orchestra slept after
+its noisy labours, showed not a gleam of light.&nbsp; Heyst suddenly
+felt restless in all his limbs, as this reaction from the long immobility
+would not be denied, he humoured it by passing quietly along the back
+veranda and out into the grounds at the side of the house, into the
+black shadows under the trees, where the extinguished paper lanterns
+were gently swinging their globes like withered fruit.</p>
+<p>He paced there to and fro for a long time, a calm, meditative ghost
+in his white drill-suit, revolving in his head thoughts absolutely novel,
+disquieting, and seductive; accustoming his mind to the contemplation
+of his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily it should appear
+praiseworthy and wise.&nbsp; For the use of reason is to justify the
+obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices,
+and follies, and also our fears.</p>
+<p>He felt that he had engaged himself by a rash promise to an action
+big with incalculable consequences.&nbsp; And then he asked himself
+if the girl had understood what he meant.&nbsp; Who could tell?&nbsp;
+He was assailed by all sorts of doubts.&nbsp; Raising his head, he perceived
+something white flitting between the trees.&nbsp; It vanished almost
+at once; but there could be no mistake.&nbsp; He was vexed at being
+detected roaming like this in the middle of the night.&nbsp; Who could
+that be?&nbsp; It never occurred to him that perhaps the girl, too,
+would not be able to sleep.&nbsp; He advanced prudently.&nbsp; Then
+he saw the white, phantom-like apparition again; and the next moment
+all his doubts as to the state of her mind were laid at rest, because
+he felt her clinging to him after the manner of supplicants all the
+world over.&nbsp; Her whispers were so incoherent that he could not
+understand anything; but this did not prevent him from being profoundly
+moved.&nbsp; He had no illusions about her; but his sceptical mind was
+dominated by the fulness of his heart.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Calm yourself, calm yourself,&rdquo; he murmured in her ear,
+returning her clasp at first mechanically, and afterwards with a growing
+appreciation of her distressed humanity.&nbsp; The heaving of her breast
+and the trembling of all her limbs, in the closeness of his embrace,
+seemed to enter his body, to infect his very heart.&nbsp; While she
+was growing quieter in his arms, he was becoming more agitated, as if
+there were only a fixed quantity of violent emotion on this earth.&nbsp;
+The very night seemed more dumb, more still, and the immobility of the
+vague, black shapes, surrounding him more perfect.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It will be all right,&rdquo; he tried to reassure her, with
+a tone of conviction, speaking into her ear, and of necessity clasping
+her more closely than before.</p>
+<p>Either the words or the action had a very good effect.&nbsp; He heard
+a light sigh of relief.&nbsp; She spoke with a calmed ardour.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I knew it would be all right from the first time you spoke
+to me!&nbsp; Yes, indeed, I knew directly you came up to me that evening.&nbsp;
+I knew it would be all right, if you only cared to make it so; but of
+course I could not tell if you meant it.&nbsp; &lsquo;Command me,&rsquo;
+you said.&nbsp; Funny thing for a man like you to say.&nbsp; Did you
+really mean it?&nbsp; You weren&rsquo;t making fun of me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He protested that he had been a serious person all his life.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I believe you,&rdquo; she said ardently.&nbsp; He was touched
+by this declaration.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the way you have of speaking
+as if you were amused with people,&rdquo; she went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+I wasn&rsquo;t deceived.&nbsp; I could see you were angry with that
+beast of a woman.&nbsp; And you are clever.&nbsp; You spotted something
+at once.&nbsp; You saw it in my face, eh?&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t a bad
+face - say?&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll never be sorry.&nbsp; Listen - I&rsquo;m
+not twenty yet.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the truth, and I can&rsquo;t be so
+bad looking, or else - I will tell you straight that I have been worried
+and pestered by fellows like this before.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what
+comes to them - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was speaking hurriedly.&nbsp; She choked, and then exclaimed,
+with an accent of despair:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is it?&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst had removed his arms from her suddenly, and had recoiled a
+little.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is it my fault?&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t even look
+at them, I tell you straight.&nbsp; Never!&nbsp; Have I looked at you?&nbsp;
+Tell me.&nbsp; It was you that began it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In truth, Heyst had shrunk from the idea of competition with fellows
+unknown, with Schomberg the hotel-keeper.&nbsp; The vaporous white figure
+before him swayed pitifully in the darkness.&nbsp; He felt ashamed of
+his fastidiousness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am afraid we have been detected,&rdquo; he murmured.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I think I saw somebody on the path between the house and the
+bushes behind you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had seen no one.&nbsp; It was a compassionate lie, if there ever
+was one.&nbsp; His compassion was as genuine as his shrinking had been,
+and in his judgement more honourable.</p>
+<p>She didn&rsquo;t turn her head.&nbsp; She was obviously relieved.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would it be that brute?&rdquo; she breathed out, meaning Schomberg,
+of course.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s getting too forward with me now.&nbsp;
+What can you expect?&nbsp; Only this evening, after supper, he - but
+I slipped away.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t mind him, do you?&nbsp; Why, I
+could face him myself now that I know you care for me.&nbsp; A girl
+can always put up a fight.&nbsp; You believe me?&nbsp; Only it isn&rsquo;t
+easy to stand up for yourself when you feel there&rsquo;s nothing and
+nobody at your back.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s nothing so lonely in the world
+as a girl who has got to look after herself.&nbsp; When I left poor
+dad in that home - it was in the country, near a village - I came out
+of the gates with seven shillings and threepence in my old purse, and
+my railway ticket.&nbsp; I tramped a mile, and got into a train - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>She broke off, and was silent for a moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you throw me over now,&rdquo; she went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If you did, what should I do?&nbsp; I should have to live, to
+be sure, because I&rsquo;d be afraid to kill myself, but you would have
+done a thousand times worse than killing a body.&nbsp; You told me you
+had been always alone, you had never had a dog even.&nbsp; Well, then,
+I won&rsquo;t be in anybody&rsquo;s way if I live with you - not even
+a dog&rsquo;s.&nbsp; And what else did you mean when you came up and
+looked at me so close?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Close?&nbsp; Did I?&rdquo; he murmured unstirring before her
+in the profound darkness.&nbsp; &ldquo;So close as that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had an outbreak of anger and despair in subdued tones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you forgotten, then?&nbsp; What did you expect to find?&nbsp;
+I know what sort of girl I am; but all the same I am not the sort that
+men turn their backs on - and you ought to know it, unless you aren&rsquo;t
+made like the others.&nbsp; Oh, forgive me!&nbsp; You aren&rsquo;t like
+the others; you are like no one in the world I ever spoke to.&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t you care for me?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you see - ?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>What he saw was that, white and spectral, she was putting out her
+arms to him out of the black shadows like an appealing ghost.&nbsp;
+He took her hands, and was affected, almost surprised, to find them
+so warm, so real, so firm, so living in his grasp.&nbsp; He drew her
+to him, and she dropped her head on his shoulder with a deep-sigh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am dead tired,&rdquo; she whispered plaintively.</p>
+<p>He put his arms around her, and only by the convulsive movements
+of her body became aware that she was sobbing without a sound.&nbsp;
+Sustaining her, he lost himself in the profound silence of the night.&nbsp;
+After a while she became still, and cried quietly.&nbsp; Then, suddenly,
+as if waking up, she asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t seen any more of that somebody you thought
+was spying about?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He started at her quick, sharp whisper, and answered that very likely
+he had been mistaken.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If it was anybody at all,&rdquo; she reflected aloud, &ldquo;it
+wouldn&rsquo;t have been anyone but that hotel woman - the landlord&rsquo;s
+wife.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mrs. Schomberg,&rdquo; Heyst said, surprised.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; Another one that can&rsquo;t sleep o&rsquo; nights.&nbsp;
+Why?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you see why?&nbsp; Because, of course, she sees
+what&rsquo;s going on.&nbsp; That beast doesn&rsquo;t even try to keep
+it from her.&nbsp; If she had only the least bit of spirit!&nbsp; She
+knows how I feel, too, only she&rsquo;s too frightened even to look
+him in the face, let alone open her mouth.&nbsp; He would tell her to
+go hang herself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For some time Heyst said nothing.&nbsp; A public, active contest
+with the hotel-keeper was not to be thought of.&nbsp; The idea was horrible.&nbsp;
+Whispering gently to the girl, he tried to explain to her that as things
+stood, an open withdrawal from the company would be probably opposed.&nbsp;
+She listened to his explanation anxiously, from time to time pressing
+the hand she had sought and got hold of in the dark.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As I told you, I am not rich enough to buy you out so I shall
+steal you as soon as I can arrange some means of getting away from here.&nbsp;
+Meantime it would be fatal to be seen together at night.&nbsp; We mustn&rsquo;t
+give ourselves away.&nbsp; We had better part at once.&nbsp; I think
+I was mistaken just now; but if, as you say, that poor Mrs. Schomberg
+can&rsquo;t sleep of nights, we must be more careful.&nbsp; She would
+tell the fellow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl had disengaged herself from his loose hold while he talked,
+and now stood free of him, but still clasping his hand firmly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; she said with perfect assurance.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+tell you she daren&rsquo;t open her mouth to him.&nbsp; And she isn&rsquo;t
+as silly as she looks.&nbsp; She wouldn&rsquo;t give us away.&nbsp;
+She knows a trick worth two of that.&nbsp; She&rsquo;ll help - that&rsquo;s
+what she&rsquo;ll do, if she dares do anything at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You seem to have a very clear view of the situation,&rdquo;
+said Heyst, and received a warm, lingering kiss for this commendation.</p>
+<p>He discovered that to-part from her was not such an easy matter as
+he had supposed it would be.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Upon my word,&rdquo; he said before they separated, &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t even know your name.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you?&nbsp; They call me Alma.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+know why.&nbsp; Silly name!&nbsp; Magdalen too.&nbsp; It doesn&rsquo;t
+matter; you can call me by whatever name you choose.&nbsp; Yes, you
+give me a name.&nbsp; Think of one you would like the sound of - something
+quite new.&nbsp; How I should like to forget everything that has gone
+before, as one forgets a dream that&rsquo;s done with, fright and all!&nbsp;
+I would try.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would you really?&rdquo; he asked in a murmur.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+that&rsquo;s not forbidden.&nbsp; I understand that women easily forget
+whatever in their past diminishes them in their eyes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s your eyes that I was thinking of, for I&rsquo;m
+sure I&rsquo;ve never wished to forget anything till you came up to
+me that night and looked me through and through.&nbsp; I know I&rsquo;m
+not much account; but I know how to stand by a man.&nbsp; I stood by
+father ever since I could understand.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t a bad chap.&nbsp;
+Now that I can&rsquo;t be of any use to him, I would just as soon forget
+all that and make a fresh start.&nbsp; But these aren&rsquo;t things
+that I could talk to you about.&nbsp; What could I ever talk to you
+about?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let it trouble you,&rdquo; Heyst said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your
+voice is enough.&nbsp; I am in love with it, whatever it says.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She remained silent for a while, as if rendered breathless by this
+quiet statement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; I wanted to ask you - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected
+the question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation
+she went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-room
+there - you remember?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought we were being observed.&nbsp; A smile is the best
+of masks.&nbsp; Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking
+with some Dutch clerks from the town.&nbsp; No doubt he was watching
+us - watching you, at least.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s why I asked you to smile.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, that&rsquo;s why.&nbsp; It never came into my head!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you did it very well, too - very readily, as if you had
+understood my intention.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Readily!&rdquo; she repeated.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, I was ready
+enough to smile then.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the truth.&nbsp; It was the
+first time for years I may say that I felt disposed to smile.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;ve not had many chances to smile in my life, I can tell you;
+especially of late.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you do it most charmingly - in a perfectly fascinating
+way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He paused.&nbsp; She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness
+of extreme delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It astonished me,&rdquo; he added.&nbsp; &ldquo;It went as
+straight to my heart as though you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling
+me.&nbsp; I felt as if I had never seen a smile before in my life.&nbsp;
+I thought of it after I left you.&nbsp; It made me restless.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It did all that?&rdquo; came her voice, unsteady, gentle,
+and incredulous.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have
+come out here tonight,&rdquo; he said, with his playful earnestness
+of tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was your triumph.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He felt her lips touch his lightly, and the next moment she was gone.&nbsp;
+Her white dress gleamed in the distance, and then the opaque darkness
+of the house seemed to swallow it.&nbsp; Heyst waited a little before
+he went the same way, round the comer, up the steps of the veranda,
+and into his room, where he lay down at last - not to sleep, but to
+go over in his mind all that had been said at their meeting.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s exactly true about that smile,&rdquo; he thought.&nbsp;
+There he had spoken the truth to her; and about her voice, too.&nbsp;
+For the rest - what must be must be.</p>
+<p>A great wave of heat passed over him.&nbsp; He turned on his back,
+flung his arms crosswise on the broad, hard bed, and lay still, open-eyed
+under the mosquito net, till daylight entered his room, brightened swiftly,
+and turned to unfailing sunlight.&nbsp; He got up then, went to a small
+looking-glass hanging on the wall, and stared at himself steadily.&nbsp;
+It was not a new-born vanity which induced this long survey.&nbsp; He
+felt so strange that he could not resist the suspicion of his personal
+appearance having changed during the night.&nbsp; What he saw in the
+glass, however, was the man he knew before.&nbsp; It was almost a disappointment
+- a belittling of his recent experience.&nbsp; And then he smiled at
+his na&iuml;veness; for, being over five and thirty years of age, he
+ought to have known that in most cases the body is the unalterable mask
+of the soul, which even death itself changes but little, till it is
+put out of sight where no changes matter any more, either to our friends
+or to our enemies.</p>
+<p>Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies.&nbsp; It
+was the very essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished
+not by hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by
+a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent
+dweller amongst changing scenes.&nbsp; In this scheme he had perceived
+the means of passing through life without suffering and almost without
+a single care in the world - invulnerable because elusive.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER THREE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and unapproachable,
+and in return was generally considered a &ldquo;queer chap.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He had started off on these travels of his after the death of his father,
+an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his country
+and angry with all the world, which had instinctively rejected his wisdom.</p>
+<p>Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst
+had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of
+the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages.&nbsp; For more
+than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most
+weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to
+its ends of disillusion and regret.&nbsp; One could not refuse him a
+measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre
+souls.&nbsp; His mother Heyst had never known, but he kept his father&rsquo;s
+pale, distinguished face in affectionate memory.&nbsp; He remembered
+him mainly in an ample blue dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet
+London suburb.&nbsp; For three years, after leaving school at the age
+of eighteen, he had lived with the elder Heyst, who was then writing
+his last book.&nbsp; In this work, at the end of his life, he claimed
+for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of
+which he no longer believed them worthy.</p>
+<p>Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable
+age were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life.&nbsp;
+The young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a
+reckoning of the cost.&nbsp; It is not the clear-sighted who lead the
+world.&nbsp; Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm
+mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father&rsquo;s analysis
+had blown away from the son.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll drift,&rdquo; Heyst had said to himself deliberately.</p>
+<p>He did not mean intellectually or sentimentally or morally.&nbsp;
+He meant to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached
+leaf drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable trees of a forest
+glade; to drift without ever catching on to anything.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This shall be my defence against life,&rdquo; he had said
+to himself with a sort of inward consciousness that for the son of his
+father there was no other worthy alternative.</p>
+<p>He became a waif and stray, austerely, from conviction, as others
+do through drink, from vice, from some weakness of character - with
+deliberation, as others do in despair.&nbsp; This, stripped of its facts,
+had been Heyst&rsquo;s life up to that disturbing night.&nbsp; Next
+day, when he saw the girl called Alma, she managed to give him a glance
+of frank tenderness, quick as lightning and leaving a profound impression,
+a secret touch on the heart.&nbsp; It was in the grounds of the hotel,
+about tiffin time, while the Ladies of the orchestra were strolling
+back to their pavilion after rehearsal, or practice, or whatever they
+called their morning musical exercises in the hall.&nbsp; Heyst, returning
+from the town, where he had discovered that there would be difficulties
+in the way of getting away at once, was crossing the compound, disappointed
+and worried.&nbsp; He had walked almost unwittingly into the straggling
+group of Zangiacomo&rsquo;s performers.&nbsp; It was a shock to him,
+on coming out of his brown study, to find the girl so near to him, as
+if one waking suddenly should see the figure of his dream turned into
+flesh and blood.&nbsp; She did not raise her shapely head, but her glance
+was no dream thing.&nbsp; It was real, the most real impression of his
+detached existence - so far.</p>
+<p>Heyst had not acknowledged it in any way, though it seemed to him
+impossible that its effect on him should not be visible to anyone who
+happened to be looking on.&nbsp; And there were several men on the veranda,
+steady customers of Schomberg&rsquo;s table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te, gazing
+in his direction - at the ladies of the orchestra, in fact.&nbsp; Heyst&rsquo;s
+dread arose, not out of shame or timidity, but from his fastidiousness.&nbsp;
+On getting amongst them, however, he noticed no signs of interest or
+astonishment in their faces, any more than if they had been blind men.&nbsp;
+Even Schomberg himself, who had to make way for him at the top of the
+stairs, was completely unperturbed, and continued the conversation he
+was carrying on with a client.</p>
+<p>Schomberg, indeed, had observed &ldquo;that Swede&rdquo; talking
+with the girl in the intervals.&nbsp; A crony of his had nudged him;
+and he had thought that it was so much the better; the silly fellow
+would keep everybody else off.&nbsp; He was rather pleased than otherwise
+and watched them out of the corner of his eye with a malicious enjoyment
+of the situation - a sort of Satanic glee.&nbsp; For he had little doubt
+of his personal fascination, and still less of his power to get hold
+of the girl, who seemed too ignorant to know how to help herself, and
+who was worse than friendless, since she had for some reason incurred
+the animosity of Mrs. Zangiacomo, a woman with no conscience.&nbsp;
+The aversion she showed him as far as she dared (for it is not always
+safe for the helpless to display the delicacy of their sentiments),
+Schomberg pardoned on the score of feminine conventional silliness.&nbsp;
+He had told Alma, as an argument, that she was a clever enough girl
+to see that she could do no better than to put her trust in a man of
+substance, in the prime of life, who knew his way about.&nbsp; But for
+the excited trembling of his voice, and the extraordinary way in which
+his eyes seemed to be starting out of his crimson, hirsute countenance,
+such speeches had every character of calm, unselfish advice - which,
+after the manner of lovers, passed easily into sanguine plans for the
+future.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll soon get rid of the old woman,&rdquo; he whispered
+to her hurriedly, with panting ferocity.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hang her!&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;ve never cared for her.&nbsp; The climate don&rsquo;t suit her;
+I shall tell her to go to her people in Europe.&nbsp; She will have
+to go, too!&nbsp; I will see to it.&nbsp; <i>Eins</i>, <i>zwei</i>,
+march!&nbsp; And then we shall sell this hotel and start another somewhere
+else.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He assured her that he didn&rsquo;t care what he did for her sake;
+and it was true.&nbsp; Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many
+men, as if in defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms
+in the sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill.&nbsp; Her
+shrinking form, her downcast eyes, when she had to listen to him, cornered
+at the end of an empty corridor, he regarded as signs of submission
+to the overpowering force of his will, the recognition of his personal
+fascinations.&nbsp; For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should
+renounce life early and the human race come to an end.</p>
+<p>It&rsquo;s easy to imagine Schomberg&rsquo;s humiliation, his shocked
+fury, when he discovered that the girl who had for weeks resisted his
+attacks, his prayers, and his fiercest protestations, had been snatched
+from under his nose by &ldquo;that Swede,&rdquo; apparently without
+any trouble worth speaking of.&nbsp; He refused to believe the fact.&nbsp;
+He would have it, at first, that the Zangiacomos, for some unfathomable
+reason, had played him a scurvy trick, but when no further doubt was
+possible, he changed his view of Heyst.&nbsp; The despised Swede became
+for Schomberg the deepest, the most dangerous, the most hateful of scoundrels.&nbsp;
+He could not believe that the creature he had coveted with so much force
+and with so little effect, was in reality tender, docile to her impulse,
+and had almost offered herself to Heyst without a sense of guilt, in
+a desire of safety, and from a profound need of placing her trust where
+her woman&rsquo;s instinct guided her ignorance.&nbsp; Nothing would
+serve Schomberg but that she must have been circumvented by some occult
+exercise of force or craft, by the laying of some subtle trap.&nbsp;
+His wounded vanity wondered ceaselessly at the means &ldquo;that Swede&rdquo;
+had employed to seduce her away from a man like him - Schomberg - as
+though those means were bound to have been extraordinary, unheard of,
+inconceivable.&nbsp; He slapped his forehead openly before his customers;
+he would sit brooding in silence or else would burst out unexpectedly
+declaiming against Heyst without measure, discretion, or prudence, with
+swollen features and an affectation of outraged virtue which could not
+have deceived the most childlike of moralists for a moment - and greatly
+amused his audience.</p>
+<p>It became a recognized entertainment to go and hear his abuse of
+Heyst, while sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the hotel.&nbsp;
+It was, in a manner, a more successful draw than the Zangiacomo concerts
+had ever been - intervals and all.&nbsp; There was never any difficulty
+in starting the performer off.&nbsp; Anybody could do it, by almost
+any distant allusion.&nbsp; As likely as not he would start his endless
+denunciations in the very billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg sat enthroned
+as usual, swallowing her sobs, concealing her tortures of abject humiliation
+and terror under her stupid, set, everlasting grin, which, having been
+provided for her by nature, was an excellent mask, in as much as nothing
+- not even death itself, perhaps - could tear it away.</p>
+<p>But nothing lasts in this world, at least without changing its physiognomy.&nbsp;
+So, after a few weeks, Schomberg regained his outward calm, as if his
+indignation had dried up within him.&nbsp; And it was time.&nbsp; He
+was becoming a bore with his inability to talk of anything else but
+Heyst&rsquo;s unfitness to be at large, Heyst&rsquo;s wickedness, his
+wiles, his astuteness, and his criminality.&nbsp; Schomberg no longer
+pretended to despise him.&nbsp; He could not have done it.&nbsp; After
+what had happened he could not pretend, even to himself.&nbsp; But his
+bottled-up indignation was fermenting venomously.&nbsp; At the time
+of his immoderate loquacity one of his customers, an elderly man, had
+remarked one evening:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If that ass keeps on like this, he will end by going crazy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And this belief was less than half wrong.&nbsp; Schomberg had Heyst
+on the brain.&nbsp; Even the unsatisfactory state of his affairs, which
+had never been so unpromising since he came out East directly after
+the Franco-Prussian War, he referred to some subtly noxious influence
+of Heyst.&nbsp; It seemed to him that he could never be himself again
+till he had got even with that artful Swede.&nbsp; He was ready to swear
+that Heyst had ruined his life.&nbsp; The girl so unfairly, craftily,
+basely decoyed away would have inspired him to success in a new start.&nbsp;
+Obviously Mrs. Schomberg, whom he terrified by savagely silent moods
+combined with underhand, poisoned glances, could give him no inspiration.&nbsp;
+He had grown generally neglectful, but with a partiality for reckless
+expedients, as if he did not care when and how his career as a hotel-keeper
+was to be brought to an end.&nbsp; This demoralized state accounted
+for what Davidson had observed on his last visit to the Schomberg establishment,
+some two months after Heyst&rsquo;s secret departure with the girl to
+the solitude of Samburan.</p>
+<p>The Schomberg of a few years ago - the Schomberg of the Bangkok days,
+for instance, when he started the first of his famed table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te
+dinners - would never have risked anything of the sort.&nbsp; His genius
+ran to catering, &ldquo;white man for white men&rdquo; and to the inventing,
+elaborating, and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction
+and impudent delight.&nbsp; But now his mind was perverted by the pangs
+of wounded vanity and of thwarted passion.&nbsp; In this state of moral
+weakness Schomberg allowed himself to be corrupted.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FOUR</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The business was done by a guest who arrived one fine morning by
+mail-boat - immediately from Celebes, having boarded her in Macassar,
+but generally, Schomberg understood, from up China Sea way; a wanderer
+clearly, even as Heyst was, but not alone and of quite another kind.</p>
+<p>Schomberg, looking up from the stern-sheets of his steam-launch,
+which he used for boarding passenger ships on arrival, discovered a
+dark sunken stare plunging down on him over the rail of the first-class
+part of the deck.&nbsp; He was no great judge of physiognomy.&nbsp;
+Human beings, for him, were either the objects of scandalous gossip
+or else recipients of narrow strips of paper, with proper bill-heads
+stating the name of his hotel - &ldquo;W. Schomberg, proprietor, accounts
+settled weekly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So in the clean-shaven, extremely thin face hanging over the mail-boat&rsquo;s
+rail Schomberg saw only the face of a possible &ldquo;account.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The steam-launches of other hotels were also alongside, but he obtained
+the preference.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are Mr. Schomberg, aren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; the face asked
+quite unexpectedly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am at your service,&rdquo; he answered from below; for business
+is business, and its forms and formulas must be observed, even if one&rsquo;s
+manly bosom is tortured by that dull rage which succeeds the fury of
+baffled passion, like the glow of embers after a fierce blaze.</p>
+<p>Presently the possessor of the handsome but emaciated face was seated
+beside Schomberg in the stern-sheets of the launch.&nbsp; His body was
+long and loose-jointed, his slender fingers, intertwined, clasped the
+leg resting on the knee, as he lolled back in a careless yet tense attitude.&nbsp;
+On the other side of Schomberg sat another passenger, who was introduced
+by the clean-shaven man as -</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My secretary.&nbsp; He must have the room next to mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We can manage that easily for you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg steered with dignity, staring straight ahead, but very
+much interested by these two promising &ldquo;accounts.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Their belongings, a couple of large leather trunks browned by age and
+a few smaller packages, were piled up in the bows.&nbsp; A third individual
+- a nondescript, hairy creature - had modestly made his way forward
+and had perched himself on the luggage.&nbsp; The lower part of his
+physiognomy was over-developed; his narrow and low forehead, unintelligently
+furrowed by horizontal wrinkles, surmounted wildly hirsute cheeks and
+a flat nose with wide, baboon-like nostrils.&nbsp; There was something
+equivocal in the appearance of his shaggy, hair-smothered humanity.&nbsp;
+He, too, seemed to be a follower of the clean-shaven man, and apparently
+had travelled on deck with native passengers, sleeping under the awnings.&nbsp;
+His broad, squat frame denoted great strength.&nbsp; Grasping the gunwales
+of the launch, he displayed a pair of remarkably long arms, terminating
+in thick, brown hairy paws of simian aspect.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What shall we do with the fellow of mine?&rdquo; the chief
+of the party asked Schomberg.&nbsp; &ldquo;There must be a boarding-house
+somewhere near the port - some grog-shop where they could let him have
+a mat to sleep on?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg said there was a place kept by a Portuguese half-caste.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A servant of yours?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, he hangs on to me.&nbsp; He is an alligator-hunter.&nbsp;
+I picked him up in Colombia, you know.&nbsp; Ever been in Colombia?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Schomberg, very much surprised.&nbsp; &ldquo;An
+alligator-hunter?&nbsp; Funny trade!&nbsp; Are you coming from Colombia,
+then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, but I have been coming for a long time.&nbsp; I come
+from a good many places.&nbsp; I am travelling west, you see.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For sport, perhaps?&rdquo; suggested Schomberg.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; Sort of sport.&nbsp; What do you say to chasing
+the sun?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see - a gentleman at large,&rdquo; said Schomberg, watching
+a sailing canoe about to cross his bow, and ready to clear it by a touch
+of the helm.</p>
+<p>The other passenger made himself heard suddenly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hang these native craft!&nbsp; They always get in the way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked,
+a harsh voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by
+a thin, dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of
+a rigid nose.&nbsp; Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing
+secretarial about him.&nbsp; Both he and his long, lank principal wore
+the usual white suit of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white
+shoes - all correct.&nbsp; The hairy nondescript creature perched on
+their luggage in the bow had a check shirt and blue dungaree trousers.&nbsp;
+He gazed in their direction from forward in an expectant, trained-animal
+manner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You spoke to me first,&rdquo; said Schomberg in his manly
+tones.&nbsp; &ldquo;You were acquainted with my name.&nbsp; Where did
+you hear of me, gentlemen, may I ask?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In Manila,&rdquo; answered the gentleman at large, readily.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;From a man with whom I had a game of cards one evening in the
+Hotel Castille.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What man?&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve no friends in Manila that I know
+of,&rdquo; wondered Schomberg with a severe frown.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t tell you his name.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve clean forgotten
+it; but don&rsquo;t you worry.&nbsp; He was anything but a friend of
+yours.&nbsp; He called you all the names he could think of.&nbsp; He
+said you set a lot of scandal going about him once, somewhere - in Bangkok,
+I think.&nbsp; Yes, that&rsquo;s it.&nbsp; You were running a table
+d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te in Bangkok at one time, weren&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only throw
+out his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve
+manner.&nbsp; A table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te?&nbsp; Yes, certainly.&nbsp;
+He always - for the sake of white men.&nbsp; And here in this place,
+too?&nbsp; Yes, in this place, too.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, then.&rdquo;&nbsp; The stranger turned
+his black, cavernous, mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg,
+who sat gripping the brass tiller in a sweating palm.&nbsp; &ldquo;Many
+people in the evening at your place?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg had recovered somewhat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Twenty covers or so, take one day with another,&rdquo; he
+answered feelingly, as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Ought to be more, if only people would see that it&rsquo;s for
+their own good.&nbsp; Precious little profit I get out of it.&nbsp;
+You are partial to tables d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te, gentlemen?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The new guest made answer that he liked a hotel where one could find
+some local people in the evening.&nbsp; It was infernally dull otherwise.&nbsp;
+The secretary, in sign of approval, emitted a grunt of astonishing ferocity,
+as if proposing to himself to eat the local people.&nbsp; All this sounded
+like a longish stay, thought Schomberg, satisfied under his grave air;
+till, remembering the girl snatched away from him by the last guest
+who had made a prolonged stay in his hotel, he ground his teeth so audibly
+that the other two looked at him in wonder.&nbsp; The momentary convulsion
+of his florid physiognomy seemed to strike them dumb.&nbsp; They exchanged
+a quick glance.&nbsp; Presently the clean-shaven man fired out another
+question in his curt, unceremonious manner:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have no women in your hotel, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Women!&rdquo; Schomberg exclaimed indignantly, but also as
+if a little frightened.&nbsp; &ldquo;What on earth do you mean by women?&nbsp;
+What women?&nbsp; There&rsquo;s Mrs. Schomberg, of course,&rdquo; he
+added, suddenly appeased, with lofty indifference.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If she knows how to keep her place, then it will do.&nbsp;
+I can&rsquo;t stand women near me.&nbsp; They give me the horrors,&rdquo;
+declared the other.&nbsp; &ldquo;They are a perfect curse!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>During this outburst the secretary wore a savage grin.&nbsp; The
+chief guest closed his sunken eyes, as if exhausted, and leaned the
+back of his head against the stanchion of the awning.&nbsp; In this
+pose, his long, feminine eyelashes were very noticeable, and his regular
+features, sharp line of the jaw, and well-cut chin were brought into
+prominence, giving him a used-up, weary, depraved distinction.&nbsp;
+He did not open his eyes till the steam-launch touched the quay.&nbsp;
+Then he and the other man got ashore quickly, entered a carriage, and
+drove away to the hotel, leaving Schomberg to look after their luggage
+and take care of their strange companion.&nbsp; The latter, looking
+more like a performing bear abandoned by his show men than a human being,
+followed all Schomberg&rsquo;s movements step by step, close behind
+his back, muttering to himself in a language that sounded like some
+sort of uncouth Spanish.&nbsp; The hotel-keeper felt uncomfortable till
+at last he got rid of him at an obscure den where a very clean, portly
+Portuguese half-caste, standing serenely in the doorway, seemed to understand
+exactly how to deal with clients of every kind.&nbsp; He took from the
+creature the strapped bundle it had been hugging closely through all
+its peregrinations in that strange town, and cut short Schomberg&rsquo;s
+attempts at explanation by a most confident -</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I comprehend very well, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s more than I do,&rdquo; thought Schomberg, going
+away thankful at being relieved of the alligator-hunter&rsquo;s company.&nbsp;
+He wondered what these fellows were, without being able to form a guess
+of sufficient probability.&nbsp; Their names he learned that very day
+by direct inquiry &ldquo;to enter in my books,&rdquo; he explained in
+his formal military manner, chest thrown out, beard very much in evidence.</p>
+<p>The shaven man, sprawling in a long chair, with his air of withered
+youth, raised his eyes languidly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My name?&nbsp; Oh, plain Mr. Jones - put that down - a gentleman
+at large.&nbsp; And this is Ricardo.&rdquo;&nbsp; The pock-marked man,
+lying prostrate in another long chair, made a grimace, as if something
+had tickled the end of his nose, but did not come out of his supineness.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Martin Ricardo, secretary.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t want any more
+of our history, do you?&nbsp; Eh, what?&nbsp; Occupation?&nbsp; Put
+down, well - tourists.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve been called harder names before
+now; it won&rsquo;t hurt our feelings.&nbsp; And that fellow of mine
+- where did you tuck him away?&nbsp; Oh, he will be all right.&nbsp;
+When he wants anything he&rsquo;ll take it.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s Peter.&nbsp;
+Citizen of Colombia.&nbsp; Peter, Pedro - I don&rsquo;t know that he
+ever had any other name.&nbsp; Pedro, alligator hunter.&nbsp; Oh, yes
+- I&rsquo;ll pay his board with the half-caste.&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t help
+myself.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s so confoundedly devoted to me that if I were
+to give him the sack he would be at my throat.&nbsp; Shall I tell you
+how I killed his brother in the wilds of Colombia?&nbsp; Well, perhaps
+some other time - it&rsquo;s a rather long story.&nbsp; What I shall
+always regret is that I didn&rsquo;t kill him, too.&nbsp; I could have
+done it without any extra trouble then; now it&rsquo;s too late.&nbsp;
+Great nuisance; but he&rsquo;s useful sometimes.&nbsp; I hope you are
+not going to put all this in your book?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The offhand, hard manner and the contemptuous tone of &ldquo;plain
+Mr. Jones&rdquo; disconcerted Schomberg utterly.&nbsp; He had never
+been spoken to like this in his life.&nbsp; He shook his head in silence
+and withdrew, not exactly scared - though he was in reality of a timid
+disposition under his manly exterior - but distinctly mystified and
+impressed.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FIVE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Three weeks later, after putting his cash-box away in the safe which
+filled with its iron bulk a corner of their room, Schomberg turned towards
+his wife, but without looking at her exactly, and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must get rid of these two.&nbsp; It won&rsquo;t do!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Schomberg had entertained that very opinion from the first;
+but she had been broken years ago into keeping her opinions to herself.&nbsp;
+Sitting in her night attire in the light of a single candle, she was
+careful not to make a sound, knowing from experience that her very assent
+would be resented.&nbsp; With her eyes she followed the figure of Schomberg,
+clad in his sleeping suit, and moving restlessly about the room.</p>
+<p>He never glanced her way, for the reason that Mrs. Schomberg, in
+her night attire, looked the most unattractive object in existence -
+miserable, insignificant, faded, crushed, old.&nbsp; And the contrast
+with the feminine form he had ever in his mind&rsquo;s eye made his
+wife&rsquo;s appearance painful to his aesthetic sense.</p>
+<p>Schomberg walked about swearing and fuming for the purpose of screwing
+his courage up to the sticking point.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hang me if I ought not to go now, at once, this minute, into
+his bedroom, and tell him to be off - him and that secretary of his
+- early in the morning.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t mind a round game of cards,
+but to make a decoy of my table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te - my blood boils!&nbsp;
+He came here because some lying rascal in Manila told him I kept a table
+d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He said these things, not for Mrs. Schomberg&rsquo;s information,
+but simply thinking aloud, and trying to work his fury up to a point
+where it would give him courage enough to face &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Impudent overbearing, swindling sharper,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I have a good mind to - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was beside himself in his lurid, heavy, Teutonic manner, so unlike
+the picturesque, lively rage of the Latin races; and though his eyes
+strayed about irresolutely, yet his swollen, angry features awakened
+in the miserable woman over whom he had been tyrannizing for years a
+fear for his precious carcass, since the poor creature had nothing else
+but that to hold on to in the world.&nbsp; She knew him well; but she
+did not know him altogether.&nbsp; The last thing a woman will consent
+to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends,
+is want of courage.&nbsp; And, timid in her comer, she ventured to say
+pressingly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Be careful, Wilhelm!&nbsp; Remember the knives and revolvers
+in their trunks.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In guise of thanks for that anxious reminder, he swore horribly in
+the direction of her shrinking person.&nbsp; In her scanty nightdress,
+and barefooted, she recalled a medi&aelig;val penitent being reproved
+for her sins in blasphemous terms.&nbsp; Those lethal weapons were always
+present to Schomberg&rsquo;s mind.&nbsp; Personally, he had never seen
+them.&nbsp; His part, ten days after his guests&rsquo; arrival, had
+been to lounge in manly, careless attitudes on the veranda - keeping
+watch - while Mrs. Schomberg, provided with a bunch of assorted keys,
+her discoloured teeth chattering and her globular eyes absolutely idiotic
+with fright, was &ldquo;going through&rdquo; the luggage of these strange
+clients.&nbsp; Her terrible Wilhelm had insisted on it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be on the look-out, I tell you,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I shall give you a whistle when I see them coming back.&nbsp;
+You couldn&rsquo;t whistle.&nbsp; And if he were to catch you at it,
+and chuck you out by the scruff of the neck, it wouldn&rsquo;t hurt
+you much; but he won&rsquo;t touch a woman.&nbsp; Not he!&nbsp; He has
+told me so.&nbsp; Affected beast.&nbsp; I must find out something about
+their little game, and so there&rsquo;s an end of it.&nbsp; Go in!&nbsp;
+Go now!&nbsp; Quick march!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It had been an awful job; but she did go in, because she was much
+more afraid of Schomberg than of any possible consequences of the act.&nbsp;
+Her greatest concern was lest no key of the bunch he had provided her
+with should fit the locks.&nbsp; It would have been such a disappointment
+for Wilhelm.&nbsp; However, the trunks, she found, had been left open;
+but her investigation did not last long.&nbsp; She was frightened of
+firearms, and generally of all weapons, not from personal cowardice,
+but as some women are, almost superstitiously, from an abstract horror
+of violence and murder.&nbsp; She was out again on the veranda long
+before Wilhelm had any occasion for a warning whistle.&nbsp; The instinctive,
+motiveless fear being the most difficult to overcome, nothing could
+induce her to return to her investigations, neither threatening growls
+nor ferocious hisses, nor yet a poke or two in the ribs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stupid female!&rdquo; muttered the hotel-keeper, perturbed
+by the notion of that armoury in one of his bedrooms.&nbsp; This was
+from no abstract sentiment, with him it was constitutional.&nbsp; &ldquo;Get
+out of my sight,&rdquo; he snarled.&nbsp; &ldquo;Go and dress yourself
+for the table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Left to himself, Schomberg had meditated.&nbsp; What the devil did
+this mean?&nbsp; His thinking processes were sluggish and spasmodic;
+but suddenly the truth came to him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By heavens, they are desperadoes!&rdquo; he thought.</p>
+<p>Just then he beheld &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo; and his secretary
+with the ambiguous name of Ricardo entering the grounds of the hotel.&nbsp;
+They had been down to the port on some business, and now were returning;
+Mr. Jones lank, spare, opening his long legs with angular regularity
+like a pair of compasses, the other stepping out briskly by his side.&nbsp;
+Conviction entered Schomberg&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; They <i>were</i> two
+desperadoes - no doubt about it.&nbsp; But as the funk which he experienced
+was merely a general sensation, he managed to put on his most severe
+Officer-of-the-Reserve manner, long before they had closed with him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good morning, gentlemen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Being answered with derisive civility, he became confirmed in his
+sudden conviction of their desperate character.&nbsp; The way Mr. Jones
+turned his hollow eyes on one, like an incurious spectre, and the way
+the other, when addressed, suddenly retracted his lips and exhibited
+his teeth without looking round - here was evidence enough to settle
+that point.&nbsp; Desperadoes!&nbsp; They passed through the billiard-room,
+inscrutably mysterious, to the back of the house, to join their violated
+trunks.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tiffin bell will ring in five minutes, gentlemen.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Schomberg called after them, exaggerating the deep manliness of his
+tone.</p>
+<p>He had managed to upset himself very much.&nbsp; He expected to see
+them come back infuriated and begin to bully him with an odious lack
+of restraint.&nbsp; Desperadoes!&nbsp; However they didn&rsquo;t; they
+had not noticed anything unusual about their trunks and Schomberg recovered
+his composure and said to himself that he must get rid of this deadly
+incubus as soon as practicable.&nbsp; They couldn&rsquo;t possibly want
+to stay very long; this was not the town - the colony - for desperate
+characters.&nbsp; He shrank from action.&nbsp; He dreaded any kind of
+disturbance - &ldquo;fracas&rdquo; he called it - in his hotel.&nbsp;
+Such things were not good for business.&nbsp; Of course, sometimes one
+had to have a &ldquo;fracas;&rdquo; but it had been a comparatively
+trifling task to seize the frail Zangiacomo - whose bones were no larger
+than a chicken&rsquo;s - round the ribs, lift him up bodily, dash him
+to the ground, and fall on him.&nbsp; It had been easy.&nbsp; The wretched,
+hook-nosed creature lay without movement, buried under its purple beard.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, remembering the occasion of that &ldquo;fracas,&rdquo;
+Schomberg groaned with the pain as of a hot coal under his breastbone,
+and gave himself up to desolation.&nbsp; Ah, if he only had that girl
+with him he would have been masterful and resolute and fearless - fight
+twenty desperadoes - care for nobody on earth!&nbsp; Whereas the possession
+of Mrs. Schomberg was no incitement to a display of manly virtues.&nbsp;
+Instead of caring for no one, he felt that he cared for nothing.&nbsp;
+Life was a hollow sham; he wasn&rsquo;t going to risk a shot through
+his lungs or his liver in order to preserve its integrity.&nbsp; It
+had no savour - damn it!</p>
+<p>In his state of moral decomposition, Schomberg, master as he was
+of the art of hotel-keeping, and careful of giving no occasion for criticism
+to the powers regulating that branch of human activity, let things take
+their course; though he saw very well where that course was tending.&nbsp;
+It began first with a game or two after dinner - for the drinks, apparently
+- with some lingering customer, at one of the little tables ranged against
+the walls of the billiard-room.&nbsp; Schomberg detected the meaning
+of it at once.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what it was!&nbsp; This was
+what they were!&nbsp; And, moving about restlessly (at that time his
+morose silent period had set in), he cast sidelong looks at the game;
+but he said nothing.&nbsp; It was not worth while having a row with
+men who were so overbearing.&nbsp; Even when money appeared in connection
+with these postprandial games, into which more and more people were
+being drawn, he still refrained from raising the question; he was reluctant
+to draw unduly the attention of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo; and of
+the equivocal Ricardo, to his person.&nbsp; One evening, however, after
+the public rooms of the hotel had become empty, Schomberg made an attempt
+to grapple with the problem in an indirect way.</p>
+<p>In a distant corner the tired China boy dozed on his heels, his back
+against the wall.&nbsp; Mrs. Schomberg had disappeared, as usual, between
+ten and eleven.&nbsp; Schomberg walked about slowly in and out of the
+room and the veranda, thoughtful, waiting for his two guests to go to
+bed.&nbsp; Then suddenly he approached them, militarily, his chest thrown
+out, his voice curt and soldierly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hot night, gentlemen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones, lolling back idly in a chair, looked up.&nbsp; Ricardo,
+as idle, but more upright, made no sign.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you have a drink with me before retiring?&rdquo;
+went on Schomberg, sitting down by the little table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By all means,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones lazily.</p>
+<p>Ricardo showed his teeth in a strange, quick grin.&nbsp; Schomberg
+felt painfully how difficult it was to get in touch with these men,
+both so quiet, so deliberate, so menacingly unceremonious.&nbsp; He
+ordered the Chinaman to bring in the drinks.&nbsp; His purpose was to
+discover how long these guests intended to stay.&nbsp; Ricardo displayed
+no conversational vein, but Mr. Jones appeared communicative enough.&nbsp;
+His voice somehow matched his sunken eyes.&nbsp; It was hollow without
+being in the least mournful; it sounded distant, uninterested, as though
+he were speaking from the bottom of a well.&nbsp; Schomberg learned
+that he would have the privilege of lodging and boarding these gentlemen
+for at least a month more.&nbsp; He could not conceal his discomfiture
+at this piece of news.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you like to have
+people in your house?&rdquo; asked plain Mr. Jones languidly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I should have thought the owner of a hotel would be pleased.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He lifted his delicate and beautifully pencilled eyebrows.&nbsp;
+Schomberg muttered something about the locality being dull and uninteresting
+to travellers - nothing going on - too quiet altogether, but he only
+provoked the declaration that quiet had its charm sometimes, and even
+dullness was welcome as a change.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We haven&rsquo;t had time to be dull for the last three years,&rdquo;
+added plain Mr. Jones, his eyes fixed darkly on Schomberg whom he further
+more invited to have another drink, this time with him, and not to worry
+himself about things he did not understand; and especially not to be
+inhospitable - which in a hotel-keeper is highly unprofessional.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; grumbled Schomberg.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Oh, yes, I understand perfectly well.&nbsp; I - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are frightened,&rdquo; interrupted Mr. Jones.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+is the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want any scandal in my place.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+what&rsquo;s the matter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg tried to face the situation bravely, but that steady, black
+stare affected him.&nbsp; And when he glanced aside uncomfortably, he
+met Ricardo&rsquo;s grin uncovering a lot of teeth, though the man seemed
+absorbed in his thoughts all the time.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And, moreover,&rdquo; went on Mr. Jones in that distant tone
+of his, &ldquo;you can&rsquo;t help yourself.&nbsp; Here we are and
+here we stay.&nbsp; Would you try to put us out?&nbsp; I dare say you
+could do it; but you couldn&rsquo;t do it without getting hurt - very
+badly hurt.&nbsp; We can promise him that, can&rsquo;t we, Martin?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The secretary retracted his lips and looked up sharply at Schomberg,
+as if only too anxious to leap upon him with teeth and claws.</p>
+<p>Schomberg managed to produce a deep laugh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha! Ha! Ha!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones closed his eyes wearily, as if the light hurt them, and
+looked remarkably like a corpse for a moment.&nbsp; This was bad enough;
+but when he opened them again, it was almost a worse trial for Schomberg&rsquo;s
+nerves.&nbsp; The spectral intensity of that glance, fixed on the hotel-keeper
+(and this was most frightful) without any definite expression, seemed
+to dissolve the last grain of resolution in his character.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t think, by any chance, that you have to do
+with ordinary people, do you?&rdquo; inquired Mr. Jones, in his lifeless
+manner, which seemed to imply some sort of menace from beyond the grave.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a gentleman,&rdquo; testified Martin Ricardo with
+a sudden snap of the lips, after which his moustaches stirred by themselves
+in an odd, feline manner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I wasn&rsquo;t thinking of that,&rdquo; said plain Mr.
+Jones, while Schomberg, dumb and planted heavily in his chair looked
+from one to the other, leaning forward a little.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of course
+I am that; but Ricardo attaches too much importance to a social advantage.&nbsp;
+What I mean, for instance, is that he, quiet and inoffensive as you
+see him sitting here, would think nothing of setting fire to this house
+of entertainment of yours.&nbsp; It would blaze like a box of matches.&nbsp;
+Think of that!&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t advance your affairs much, would
+it? - whatever happened to us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come, come gentlemen,&rdquo; remonstrated Schomberg, in a
+murmur.&nbsp; &ldquo;This is very wild talk!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you have been used to deal with tame people, haven&rsquo;t
+you?&nbsp; But we aren&rsquo;t tame.&nbsp; We once kept a whole angry
+town at bay for two days, and then we got away with our plunder.&nbsp;
+It was in Venezuela.&nbsp; Ask Martin here - he can tell you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Instinctively Schomberg looked at Ricardo, who only passed the tip
+of his tongue over his lips with an uncanny sort of gusto, but did not
+offer to begin.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, perhaps it would be a rather long story,&rdquo; Mr.
+Jones conceded after a short silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have no desire to hear it, I am sure,&rdquo; said Schomberg.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;This isn&rsquo;t Venezuela.&nbsp; You wouldn&rsquo;t get away
+from here like that.&nbsp; But all this is silly talk of the worst sort.&nbsp;
+Do you mean to say you would make deadly trouble for the sake of a few
+guilders that you and that other&rdquo; - eyeing Ricardo suspiciously,
+as one would look at a strange animal - &ldquo;gentleman can win of
+an evening?&nbsp; Isn&rsquo;t as if my customers were a lot of rich
+men with pockets full of cash.&nbsp; I wonder you take so much trouble
+and risk for so little money.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg&rsquo;s argument was met by Mr. Jones&rsquo;s statement
+that one must do something to kill time.&nbsp; Killing time was not
+forbidden.&nbsp; For the rest, being in a communicative mood, Mr. Jones
+said languidly and in a voice indifferent, as if issuing from a tomb,
+that he depended on himself, as if the world were still one great, wild
+jungle without law.&nbsp; Martin was something like that, too - for
+reasons of his own.</p>
+<p>All these statements Ricardo confirmed by short, inhuman grins.&nbsp;
+Schomberg lowered his eyes, for the sight of these two men intimidated
+him; but he was losing patience.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, I could see at once that you were two desperate
+characters - something like what you say.&nbsp; But what would you think
+if I told you that I am pretty near as desperate as you two gentlemen?&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Here&rsquo;s that Schomberg has an easy time running his hotel,&rsquo;
+people think; and yet it seems to me I would just as soon let you rip
+me open and burn the whole show as not.&nbsp; There!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A low whistle was heard.&nbsp; It came from Ricardo, and was derisive.&nbsp;
+Schomberg, breathing heavily, looked on the floor.&nbsp; He was really
+desperate.&nbsp; Mr. Jones remained languidly sceptical.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tut, tut!&nbsp; You have a tolerable business.&nbsp; You are
+perfectly tame; you - &rdquo;&nbsp; He paused, then added in a tone
+of disgust: &ldquo;You have a wife.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg tapped the floor angrily with his foot and uttered an indistinct,
+laughing curse.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean by flinging that damned trouble at my head?&rdquo;
+he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;I wish you would carry her off with you some
+where to the devil!&nbsp; I wouldn&rsquo;t run after you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The unexpected outburst affected Mr. Jones strangely.&nbsp; He had
+a horrified recoil, chair and all, as if Schomberg had thrust a wriggling
+viper in his face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s this infernal nonsense?&rdquo; he muttered thickly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;What do you mean?&nbsp; How dare you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo chuckled audibly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I tell you I am desperate,&rdquo; Schomberg repeated.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I am as desperate as any man ever was.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t care
+a hang what happens to me!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, then&rdquo; - Mr. Jones began to speak with a quietly
+threatening effect, as if the common words of daily use had some other
+deadly meaning to his mind - &ldquo;well, then, why should you make
+yourself ridiculously disagreeable to us?&nbsp; If you don&rsquo;t care,
+as you say, you might just as well let us have the key of that music-shed
+of yours for a quiet game; a modest bank - a dozen candles or so.&nbsp;
+It would be greatly appreciated by your clients, as far as I can judge
+from the way they betted on a game of &eacute;cart&eacute; I had with
+that fair, baby-faced man - what&rsquo;s his name?&nbsp; They just yearn
+for a modest bank.&nbsp; And I am afraid Martin here would take it badly
+if you objected; but of course you won&rsquo;t.&nbsp; Think of the calls
+for drinks!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg, raising his eyes, at last met the gleams in two dark caverns
+under Mr. Jones&rsquo;s devilish eyebrows, directed upon him impenetrably.&nbsp;
+He shuddered as if horrors worse than murder had been lurking there,
+and said, nodding towards Ricardo:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I dare say he wouldn&rsquo;t think twice about sticking me,
+if he had you at his back!&nbsp; I wish I had sunk my launch, and gone
+to the bottom myself in her, before I boarded the steamer you came by.&nbsp;
+Ah, well, I&rsquo;ve been already living in hell for weeks, so you don&rsquo;t
+make much difference.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll let you have the concert-room
+- and hang the consequences.&nbsp; But what about the boy on late duty?&nbsp;
+If he sees the cards and actual money passing, he will be sure to blab,
+and it will be all over the town in no time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A ghastly smile stirred the lips of Mr. Jones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, I see you want to make a success of it.&nbsp; Very good.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s the way to get on.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t let it disturb you.&nbsp;
+You chase all the Chinamen to bed early, and we&rsquo;ll get Pedro here
+every evening.&nbsp; He isn&rsquo;t the conventional waiter&rsquo;s
+cut, but he will do to run to and fro with the tray, while you sit here
+from nine to eleven serving out drinks and gathering the money.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There will be three of them now,&rdquo; thought the unlucky
+Schomberg.</p>
+<p>But Pedro, at any rate, was just a simple, straightforward brute,
+if a murderous one.&nbsp; There was no mystery about him, nothing uncanny,
+no suggestion of a stealthy, deliberate wildcat turned into a man, or
+of an insolent spectre on leave from Hades, endowed with skin and bones
+and a subtle power of terror.&nbsp; Pedro with his fangs, his tangled
+beard, and queer stare of his little bear&rsquo;s eyes was, by comparison,
+delightfully natural.&nbsp; Besides, Schomberg could no longer help
+himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That will do very well,&rdquo; he asserted mournfully.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But if you gentlemen, if you had turned up here only three months
+ago - ay, less than three months ago - you would have found somebody
+very different from what I am now to talk to you.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s true.&nbsp;
+What do you think of that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I scarcely know what to think.&nbsp; I should think it was
+a lie.&nbsp; You were probably as tame three months ago as you are now.&nbsp;
+You were born tame, like most people in the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones got up spectrally, and Ricardo imitated him with a snarl
+and a stretch.&nbsp; Schomberg, in a brown study, went on, as if to
+himself:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There has been an orchestra here - eighteen women.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones let out an exclamation of dismay, and looked about as if
+the walls around him and the whole house had been infected with plague.&nbsp;
+Then he became very angry, and swore violently at Schomberg for daring
+to bring up such subjects.&nbsp; The hotel-keeper was too much surprised
+to get up.&nbsp; He gazed from his chair at Mr. Jones&rsquo;s anger,
+which had nothing spectral in it but was not the more comprehensible
+for that.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; he stammered out.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+subject?&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t you hear me say it was an orchestra?&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s nothing wrong in that.&nbsp; Well, there was a girl amongst
+them - &rdquo;&nbsp; Schomberg&rsquo;s eyes went stony; he clasped his
+hands in front of his breast with such force that his knuckles came
+out white.&nbsp; &ldquo;Such a girl!&nbsp; Tame, am I?&nbsp; I would
+have kicked everything to pieces about me for her.&nbsp; And she, of
+course . . . I am in the prime of life . . . then a fellow bewitched
+her - a vagabond, a false, bring, swindling, underhand, stick-at-nothing
+brute.&nbsp; Ah!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His entwined fingers cracked as he tore his hands apart, flung out
+his arms, and leaned his forehead on them in a passion of fury.&nbsp;
+The other two looked at his shaking back - the attenuated Mr. Jones
+with mingled scorn and a sort of fear, Ricardo with the expression of
+a cat which sees a piece of fish in the pantry out of reach.&nbsp; Schomberg
+flung himself backwards.&nbsp; He was dry-eyed, but he gulped as if
+swallowing sobs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No wonder you can do with me what you like.&nbsp; You have
+no idea - just let me tell you of my trouble - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want to know anything of your beastly trouble,&rdquo;
+said Mr. Jones, in his most lifelessly positive voice.</p>
+<p>He stretched forth an arresting hand, and, as Schomberg remained
+open-mouthed, he walked out of the billiard-room in all the uncanniness
+of his thin shanks.&nbsp; Ricardo followed at his leader&rsquo;s heels;
+but he showed his teeth to Schomberg over his shoulder.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER SIX</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>From that evening dated those mysterious but significant phenomena
+in Schomberg&rsquo;s establishment which attracted Captain Davidson&rsquo;s
+casual notice when he dropped in, placid yet astute, in order to return
+Mrs. Schomberg&rsquo;s Indian shawl.&nbsp; And strangely enough, they
+lasted some considerable time.&nbsp; It argued either honesty and bad
+luck or extraordinary restraint on the part of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones
+and Co.&rdquo; in their discreet operations with cards.</p>
+<p>It was a curious and impressive sight, the inside of Schomberg&rsquo;s
+concert-hall, encumbered at one end by a great stack of chairs piled
+up on and about the musicians&rsquo; platform, and lighted at the other
+by two dozen candles disposed about a long trestle table covered with
+green cloth.&nbsp; In the middle, Mr. Jones, a starved spectre turned
+into a banker, faced Ricardo, a rather nasty, slow-moving cat turned
+into a croupier.&nbsp; By contrast, the other faces round that table,
+anything between twenty and thirty, must have looked like collected
+samples of intensely artless, helpless humanity - pathetic in their
+innocent watch for the small turns of luck which indeed might have been
+serious enough for them.&nbsp; They had no notice to spare for the hairy
+Pedro, carrying a tray with the clumsiness of a creature caught in the
+woods and taught to walk on its hind legs.</p>
+<p>As to Schomberg, he kept out of the way.&nbsp; He remained in the
+billiard-room, serving out drinks to the unspeakable Pedro with an air
+of not seeing the growling monster, of not knowing where the drinks
+went, of ignoring that there was such a thing as a music-room over there
+under the trees within fifty yards of the hotel.&nbsp; He submitted
+himself to the situation with a low-spirited stoicism compounded of
+fear and resignation.&nbsp; Directly the party had broken up, (he could
+see dark shapes of the men drifting singly and in knots through the
+gate of the compound), he would withdraw out of sight behind a door
+not quit closed, in order to avoid meeting his two extraordinary guests;
+but he would watch through the crack their contrasted forms pass through
+the billiard-room and disappear on their way to bed.&nbsp; Then he would
+hear doors being slammed upstairs; and a profound silence would fall
+upon the whole house, upon his hotel appropriated, haunted by those
+insolently outspoken men provided with a whole armoury of weapons in
+their trunks.&nbsp; A profound silence.&nbsp; Schomberg sometimes could
+not resist the notion that he must be dreaming.&nbsp; Shuddering, he
+would pull himself together, and creep out, with movements strangely
+inappropriate to the Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve bearing by which he tried
+to keep up his self-respect before the world.</p>
+<p>A great loneliness oppressed him.&nbsp; One after another he would
+extinguish the lamps, and move softly towards his bedroom, where Mrs.
+Schomberg waited for him - no fit companion for a man of his ability
+and &ldquo;in the prime of life.&rdquo;&nbsp; But that life, alas, was
+blighted.&nbsp; He felt it; and never with such force as when on opening
+the door he perceived that woman sitting patiently in a chair, her toes
+peeping out under the edge of her night-dress, an amazingly small amount
+of hair on her head drooping on the long stalk of scraggy neck, with
+that everlasting scared grin showing a blue tooth and meaning nothing
+- not even real fear.&nbsp; For she was used to him.</p>
+<p>Sometimes he was tempted to screw the head off the stalk.&nbsp; He
+imagined himself doing it - with one hand, a twisting movement.&nbsp;
+Not seriously, of course.&nbsp; Just a simple indulgence for his exasperated
+feelings.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t capable of murder.&nbsp; He was certain
+of that.&nbsp; And, remembering suddenly the plain speeches of Mr. Jones,
+he would think: &ldquo;I suppose I am too tame for that&rdquo; - quite
+unaware that he had murdered the poor woman morally years ago.&nbsp;
+He was too unintelligent to have the notion of such a crime.&nbsp; Her
+bodily presence was bitterly offensive, because of its contrast with
+a very different feminine image.&nbsp; And it was no use getting rid
+of her.&nbsp; She was a habit of years, and there would be nothing to
+put in her place.&nbsp; At any rate, he could talk to that idiot half
+the night if he chose.</p>
+<p>That night he had been vapouring before her as to his intention to
+face his two guests and, instead of that inspiration he needed, had
+merely received the usual warning: &ldquo;Be careful, Wilhelm.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He did not want to be told to be careful by an imbecile female.&nbsp;
+What he needed was a pair of woman&rsquo;s arms which, flung round his
+neck, would brace him up for the encounter.&nbsp; Inspire him, he called
+it to himself.</p>
+<p>He lay awake a long time; and his slumbers, when they came, were
+unsatisfactory and short.&nbsp; The morning light had no joy for his
+eyes.&nbsp; He listened dismally to the movements in the house.&nbsp;
+The Chinamen were unlocking and flinging wide the doors of the public
+rooms which opened on the veranda.&nbsp; Horrors!&nbsp; Another poisoned
+day to get through somehow!&nbsp; The recollection of his resolve made
+him feel actually sick for a moment.&nbsp; First of all the lordly,
+abandoned attitudes of Mr. Jones disconcerted him.&nbsp; Then there
+was his contemptuous silence.&nbsp; Mr. Jones never addressed himself
+to Schomberg with any general remarks, never opened his lips to him
+unless to say &ldquo;Good morning&rdquo; - two simple words which, uttered
+by that man, seemed a mockery of a threatening character.&nbsp; And,
+lastly, it was not a frank physical fear he inspired - for as to that,
+even a cornered rat will fight - but a superstitious shrinking awe,
+something like an invincible repugnance to seek speech with a wicked
+ghost.&nbsp; That it was a daylight ghost surprisingly angular in his
+attitudes, and for the most part spread out on three chairs, did not
+make it any easier.&nbsp; Daylight only made him a more weird, a more
+disturbing and unlawful apparition.&nbsp; Strangely enough in the evening
+when he came out of his mute supineness, this unearthly side of him
+was less obtrusive.&nbsp; At the gaming-table, when actually handling
+the cards, it was probably sunk quite out of sight; but Schomberg, having
+made up his mind in ostrich-like fashion to ignore what was going on,
+never entered the desecrated music-room.&nbsp; He had never seen Mr.
+Jones in the exercise of his vocation - or perhaps it was only his trade.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I will speak to him tonight,&rdquo; Schomberg said to himself,
+while he drank his morning tea, in pyjamas, on the veranda, before the
+rising sun had topped the trees of the compound, and while the undried
+dew still lay silvery on the grass, sparkled on the blossoms of the
+central flower-bed, and darkened the yellow gravel of the drive.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;ll do.&nbsp; I won&rsquo;t keep out
+of sight tonight.&nbsp; I shall come out and catch him as he goes to
+bed carrying the cash-box.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>After all, what was the fellow but common desperado?&nbsp; Murderous?&nbsp;
+Oh, yes; murderous enough, perhaps - and the muscles of Schomberg&rsquo;s
+stomach had a quivering contraction under his airy attire.&nbsp; But
+even a common desperado would think twice or, more likely, a hundred
+times, before openly murdering an inoffensive citizen in a civilized,
+European-ruled town.&nbsp; He jerked his shoulders.&nbsp; Of course!&nbsp;
+He shuddered again, and paddled back to his room to dress himself.&nbsp;
+His mind was made up, and he would think no more about it; but still
+he had his doubts.&nbsp; They grew and unfolded themselves with the
+progress of the day, as some plants do.&nbsp; At times they made him
+perspire more than usual, and they did away with the possibility of
+his afternoon siesta.&nbsp; After turning over on his couch more than
+a dozen times, he gave up this mockery of repose, got up, and went downstairs.</p>
+<p>It was between three and four o&rsquo;clock, the hour of profound
+peace.&nbsp; The very flowers seemed to doze on their stalks set with
+sleepy leaves.&nbsp; Not even the air stirred, for the sea-breeze was
+not due till later.&nbsp; The servants were out of sight, catching naps
+in the shade somewhere behind the house.&nbsp; Mrs. Schomberg in a dim
+up-stair room with closed jalousies, was elaborating those two long
+pendant ringlets which were such a feature of her hairdressing for her
+afternoon duties.&nbsp; At that time no customers ever troubled the
+repose of the establishment.&nbsp; Wandering about his premises in profound
+solitude, Schomberg recoiled at the door of the billiard-room, as if
+he had seen a snake in his path.&nbsp; All alone with the billiards,
+the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs, Mr. Secretary
+Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning rapidity something
+that looked like tricks with his own personal pack of cards, which he
+always carried about in his pocket.&nbsp; Schomberg would have backed
+out quietly if Ricardo had not turned his head.&nbsp; Having been seen,
+the hotel-keeper elected to walk in as the lesser risk of the two.&nbsp;
+The consciousness of his inwardly abject attitude towards these men
+caused him always to throw his chest out and assume a severe expression.&nbsp;
+Ricardo watched his approach, clasping the pack of cards in both hands.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You want something, perhaps?&rdquo; suggested Schomberg in
+his lieutenant-of-the-Reserve voice.</p>
+<p>Ricardo shook his head in silence and looked expectant.&nbsp; With
+him Schomberg exchanged at least twenty words every day.&nbsp; He was
+infinitely more communicative than his patron.&nbsp; At times he looked
+very much like an ordinary human being of his class; and he seemed to
+be in an amiable mood at that moment.&nbsp; Suddenly spreading some
+ten cards face downward in the form of a fan, he thrust them towards
+Schomberg.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come, man, take one quick!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg was so surprised that he took one hurriedly, after a very
+perceptible start.&nbsp; The eyes of Martin Ricardo gleamed phosphorescent
+in the half-light of the room screened from the heat and glare of the
+tropics.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the king of hearts you&rsquo;ve got,&rdquo; he
+chuckled, showing his teeth in a quick flash.</p>
+<p>Schomberg, after looking at the card, admitted that it was, and laid
+it down on the table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can make you take any card I like nine times out of ten,&rdquo;
+exulted the secretary, with a strange curl of his lips and a green flicker
+in his raised eyes.</p>
+<p>Schomberg looked down at him dumbly.&nbsp; For a few seconds neither
+of them stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his fingers,
+let the whole pack fall on the table.&nbsp; Schomberg sat down.&nbsp;
+He sat down because of the faintness in his legs, and for no other reason.&nbsp;
+His mouth was dry.&nbsp; Having sat down, he felt that he must speak.&nbsp;
+He squared his shoulders in parade style.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are pretty good at that sort of thing,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Practice makes perfect,&rdquo; replied the secretary.</p>
+<p>His precarious amiability made it impossible for Schomberg to get
+away.&nbsp; Thus, from his very timidity, the hotel-keeper found himself
+engaged in a conversation the thought of which filled him with apprehension.&nbsp;
+It must be said, in justice to Schomberg, that he concealed his funk
+very creditably.&nbsp; The habit of throwing out his chest and speaking
+in a severe voice stood him in good stead.&nbsp; With him, too, practice
+made perfect; and he would probably have kept it up to the end, to the
+very last moment, to the ultimate instant of breaking strain which would
+leave him grovelling on the floor.&nbsp; To add to his secret trouble,
+he was at a loss what to say.&nbsp; He found nothing else but the remark:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose you are fond of cards.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What would you expect?&rdquo; asked Ricardo in a simple, philosophical
+tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is likely I should not be?&rdquo;&nbsp; Then,
+with sudden fire: &ldquo;Fond of cards?&nbsp; Ay, passionately!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The effect of this outburst was augmented by the quiet lowering of
+the eyelids, by a reserved pause as though this had been a confession
+of another kind of love.&nbsp; Schomberg cudgelled his brains for a
+new topic, but he could not find one.&nbsp; His usual scandalous gossip
+would not serve this turn.&nbsp; That desperado did not know anyone
+anywhere within a thousand miles.&nbsp; Schomberg was almost compelled
+to keep to the subject.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ve always been so - from your early youth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo&rsquo;s eyes remained cast down.&nbsp; His fingers toyed
+absently with the pack on the table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know that it was so early.&nbsp; I first got
+in the way of it playing for tobacco - in forecastles of ships, you
+know - common sailor games.&nbsp; We used to spend whole watches below
+at it, round a chest, under a slush lamp.&nbsp; We would hardly spare
+the time to get a bite of salt horse - neither eat nor sleep.&nbsp;
+We could hardly stand when the watches were mustered on deck.&nbsp;
+Talk of gambling!&rdquo;&nbsp; He dropped the reminiscent tone to add
+the information, &ldquo;I was bred to the sea from a boy, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg had fallen into a reverie, but without losing the sense
+of impending calamity.&nbsp; The next words he heard were:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I got on all right at sea, too.&nbsp; Worked up to be mate.&nbsp;
+I was mate of a schooner - a yacht, you might call her - a special good
+berth too, in the Gulf of Mexico, a soft job that you don&rsquo;t run
+across more than once in a lifetime.&nbsp; Yes, I was mate of her when
+I left the sea to follow him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo tossed up his chin to indicate the room above; from which
+Schomberg, his wits painfully aroused by this reminder of Mr. Jones&rsquo;s
+existence, concluded that the latter had withdrawn into his bedroom.&nbsp;
+Ricardo, observing him from under lowered eyelids, went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It so happened that we were shipmates.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr Jones, you mean?&nbsp; Is he a sailor too?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo raised his eyelids at that.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s no more Mr. Jones than you are,&rdquo; he said
+with obvious pride.&nbsp; &ldquo;He a sailor!&nbsp; That just shows
+your ignorance.&nbsp; But there!&nbsp; A foreigner can&rsquo;t be expected
+to know any better.&nbsp; I am an Englishman, and I know a gentleman
+at sight.&nbsp; I should know one drunk, in the gutter, in jail, under
+the gallows.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s a something - it isn&rsquo;t exactly
+the appearance, it&rsquo;s a - no use me trying to tell you.&nbsp; You
+ain&rsquo;t an Englishman, and if you were, you wouldn&rsquo;t need
+to be told.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>An unsuspected stream of loquacity had broken its dam somewhere deep
+within the man, had diluted his fiery blood and softened his pitiless
+fibre.&nbsp; Schomberg experienced mingled relief and apprehension,
+as if suddenly an enormous savage cat had begun to wind itself about
+his legs in inexplicable friendliness.&nbsp; No prudent man under such
+circumstances would dare to stir.&nbsp; Schomberg didn&rsquo;t stir.&nbsp;
+Ricardo assumed an easy attitude, with an elbow on the table.&nbsp;
+Schomberg squared his shoulders afresh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was employed, in that there yacht - schooner, whatever you
+call it - by ten gentlemen at once.&nbsp; That surprises you, eh?&nbsp;
+Yes, yes, ten.&nbsp; Leastwise there were nine of them gents good enough
+in their way, and one downright gentleman, and that was . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo gave another upward jerk of his chin as much as to say: He!&nbsp;
+The only one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And no mistake,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;I spotted
+him from the first day.&nbsp; How?&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Ay, you may ask.&nbsp;
+Hadn&rsquo;t seen that many gentlemen in my life.&nbsp; Well, somehow
+I did.&nbsp; If you were an Englishman, you would - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was your yacht?&rdquo; Schomberg interrupted as impatiently
+as he dared; for this harping on nationality jarred on his already tried
+nerves.&nbsp; &ldquo;What was the game?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have a headpiece on you!&nbsp; Game!&nbsp; &rsquo;Xactly.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s what it was - the sort of silliness gentlemen will get
+up among themselves to play at adventure.&nbsp; A treasure-hunting expedition.&nbsp;
+Each of them put down so much money, you understand, to buy the schooner.&nbsp;
+Their agent in the city engaged me and the skipper.&nbsp; The greatest
+secrecy and all that.&nbsp; I reckon he had a twinkle in his eye all
+the time - and no mistake.&nbsp; But that wasn&rsquo;t our business.&nbsp;
+Let them bust their money as they like.&nbsp; The pity of it was that
+so little of it came our way.&nbsp; Just fair pay and no more.&nbsp;
+And damn any pay, much or little, anyhow - that&rsquo;s what I say!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He blinked his eyes greenishly in the dim light.&nbsp; The heat seemed
+to have stilled everything in the world but his voice.&nbsp; He swore
+at large, abundantly, in snarling undertones, it was impossible to say
+why, then calmed down as inexplicably, and went on, as a sailor yarns.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At first there were only nine of them adventurous sparks,
+then, just a day or two before the sailing date, he turned up.&nbsp;
+Heard of it somehow, somewhere - I would say from some woman, if I didn&rsquo;t
+know him as I do.&nbsp; He would give any woman a ten-mile berth.&nbsp;
+He can&rsquo;t stand them.&nbsp; Or maybe in a flash bar.&nbsp; Or maybe
+in one of them grand clubs in Pall Mall.&nbsp; Anyway, the agent netted
+him in all right - cash down, and only about four and twenty hours for
+him to get ready; but he didn&rsquo;t miss his ship.&nbsp; Not he!&nbsp;
+You might have called it a pier-head jump - for a gentleman.&nbsp; I
+saw him come along.&nbsp; Know the West India Docks, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg did not know the West India Docks.&nbsp; Ricardo looked
+at him pensively for a while, and then continued, as if such ignorance
+had to be disregarded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our tug was already alongside.&nbsp; Two loafers were carrying
+his dunnage behind him.&nbsp; I told the dockman at our moorings to
+keep all fast for a minute.&nbsp; The gangway was down already; but
+he made nothing of it.&nbsp; Up he jumps, one leap, swings his long
+legs over the rail, and there he is on board.&nbsp; They pass up his
+swell dunnage, and he puts his hand in his trousers pocket and throws
+all his small change on the wharf for them chaps to pick up.&nbsp; They
+were still promenading that wharf on all fours when we cast off.&nbsp;
+It was only then that he looked at me - quietly, you know; in a slow
+way.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t so thin then as he is now; but I noticed
+he wasn&rsquo;t so young as he looked - not by a long chalk.&nbsp; He
+seemed to touch me inside somewhere.&nbsp; I went away pretty quick
+from there; I was wanted forward anyhow.&nbsp; I wasn&rsquo;t frightened.&nbsp;
+What should I be frightened for?&nbsp; I only felt touched - on the
+very spot.&nbsp; But Jee-miny, if anybody had told me we should be partners
+before the year was out - well, I would have - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He swore a variety of strange oaths, some common, others quaintly
+horrible to Schomberg&rsquo;s ears, and all mere innocent exclamations
+of wonder at the shifts and changes of human fortune.&nbsp; Schomberg
+moved slightly in his chair.&nbsp; But the admirer and partner of &ldquo;plain
+Mr. Jones&rdquo; seemed to have forgotten Schomberg&rsquo;s existence
+for the moment.&nbsp; The stream of ingenuous blasphemy - some of it
+in bad Spanish - had run dry, and Martin Ricardo, connoisseur in gentlemen,
+sat dumb with a stony gaze as if still marvelling inwardly at the amazing
+elections, conjunctions, and associations of events which influence
+man&rsquo;s pilgrimage on this earth.</p>
+<p>At last Schomberg spoke tentatively:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And so the - the gentleman, up there, talked you over into
+leaving a good berth?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo started.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Talked me over!&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t need to talk me over.&nbsp;
+Just beckoned to me, and that was enough.&nbsp; By that time we were
+in the Gulf of Mexico.&nbsp; One night we were lying at anchor, close
+to a dry sandbank - to this day I am not sure where it was - off the
+Colombian coast or thereabouts.&nbsp; We were to start digging the next
+morning, and all hands had turned in early, expecting a hard day with
+the shovels.&nbsp; Up he comes, and in his quiet, tired way of speaking
+- you can tell a gentleman by that as much as by anything else almost
+- up he comes behind me and says, just like that into my ear, in a manner:
+&lsquo;Well, what do you think of our treasure hunt now?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t even turn my head; &rsquo;xactly as I stood,
+I remained, and I spoke no louder than himself:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;If you want to know, sir, it&rsquo;s nothing but just
+damned tom-foolery.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had, of course, been having short talks together at one
+time or another during the passage.&nbsp; I dare say he had read me
+like a book.&nbsp; There ain&rsquo;t much to me, except that I have
+never been tame, even when walking the pavement and cracking jokes and
+standing drinks to chums - ay, and to strangers, too.&nbsp; I would
+watch them lifting their elbows at my expense, or splitting their side
+at my fun - I <i>can</i> be funny when I like, you bet!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A pause for self-complacent contemplation of his own fun and generosity
+checked the flow of Ricardo&rsquo;s speech.&nbsp; Schomberg was concerned
+to keep within bounds the enlargement of his eyes, which he seemed to
+feel growing bigger in his head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he whispered hastily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I would watch them and think: &lsquo;You boys don&rsquo;t
+know who I am.&nbsp; If you did - !&rsquo;&nbsp; With girls, too.&nbsp;
+Once I was courting a girl.&nbsp; I used to kiss her behind the ear
+and say to myself: &lsquo;If you only knew who&rsquo;s kissing you,
+my dear, you would scream and bolt!&rsquo;&nbsp; Ha! ha!&nbsp; Not that
+I wanted to do them any harm; but I felt the power in myself.&nbsp;
+Now, here we sit, friendly like, and that&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; You
+aren&rsquo;t in my way.&nbsp; But I am not friendly to you.&nbsp; I
+just don&rsquo;t care.&nbsp; Some men do say that; but I really don&rsquo;t.&nbsp;
+You are no more to me one way or another than that fly there.&nbsp;
+Just so.&nbsp; I&rsquo;d squash you or leave you alone.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+care what I do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>If real force of character consists in overcoming our sudden weaknesses,
+Schomberg displayed plenty of that quality.&nbsp; At the mention of
+the fly, he re-enforced the severe dignity of his attitude as one inflates
+a collapsing toy balloon with a great effort of breath.&nbsp; The easy-going,
+relaxed attitude of Ricardo was really appalling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s so,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am that
+sort of fellow.&nbsp; You wouldn&rsquo;t think it, would you?&nbsp;
+No.&nbsp; You have to be told.&nbsp; So I am telling you, and I dare
+say you only half believe it.&nbsp; But you can&rsquo;t say to yourself
+that I am drunk, stare at me as you may.&nbsp; I haven&rsquo;t had anything
+stronger than a glass of iced water all day.&nbsp; Takes a real gentleman
+to see through a fellow.&nbsp; Oh, yes - he spotted me.&nbsp; I told
+you we had a few talks at sea about one thing or another.&nbsp; And
+I used to watch him down the skylight, playing cards in the cuddy with
+the others.&nbsp; They had to pass the time away somehow.&nbsp; By the
+same token he caught me at it once, and it was then that I told him
+I was fond of cards - and generally lucky in gambling, too.&nbsp; Yes,
+he had sized me up.&nbsp; Why not?&nbsp; A gentleman&rsquo;s just like
+any other man - and something more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It flashed through Schomberg&rsquo;s mind: that these two were indeed
+well matched in their enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in different
+disguises.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Says he to me&rdquo; - Ricardo started again in a gossiping
+manner - &lsquo;I&rsquo;m packed up.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s about time to
+go, Martin.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was the first time he called me Martin.&nbsp; Says I:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Is that it, sir?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;You didn&rsquo;t think I was after that sort of treasure,
+did you?&nbsp; I wanted to clear out from home quietly.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+a pretty expensive way of getting a passage across, but it has served
+my turn.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I let him know very soon that I was game for anything, from
+pitch and toss to wilful murder, in his company.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Wilful murder?&rsquo; says he in his quiet way.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;What the deuce is that?&nbsp; What are you talking about?&nbsp;
+People do get killed sometimes when they get in one&rsquo;s way, but
+that&rsquo;s self-defence - you understand?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I told him I did.&nbsp; And then I said I would run below
+for a minute, to ram a few of my things into a sailor&rsquo;s bag I
+had.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve never cared for a lot of dunnage; I believed in
+going about flying light when I was at sea.&nbsp; I came back and found
+him strolling up and down the deck, as if he were taking a breath of
+fresh air before turning in, like any other evening.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Ready?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Yes, sir.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He didn&rsquo;t even look at me.&nbsp; We had had a boat in
+the water astern ever since we came to anchor in the afternoon.&nbsp;
+He throws the stump of his cigar overboard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Can you get the captain out on deck?&rsquo; he asks.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That was the last thing in the world I should have thought
+of doing.&nbsp; I lost my tongue for a moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I can try,&rsquo; says I.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Well, then, I am going below.&nbsp; You get him up
+and keep him with you till I come back on deck.&nbsp; Mind!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+let him go below till I return.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could not help asking why he told me to rouse a sleeping
+man, when we wanted everybody on board to sleep sweetly till we got
+clear of the schooner.&nbsp; He laughs a little and says that I didn&rsquo;t
+see all the bearings of this business.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Mind,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;don&rsquo;t let him leave
+you till you see me come up again.&rsquo;&nbsp; He puts his eyes close
+to mine.&nbsp; &lsquo;Keep him with you at all costs.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;And that means?&rsquo; says I.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;All costs to him - by every possible or impossible
+means.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t want to be interrupted in my business down
+below.&nbsp; He would give me lots of trouble.&nbsp; I take you with
+me to save myself trouble in various circumstances; and you&rsquo;ve
+got to enter on your work right away.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Just so, sir,&rsquo; says I; and he slips down the
+companion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With a gentleman you know at once where you are; but it was
+a ticklish job.&nbsp; The skipper was nothing to me one way or another,
+any more than you are at this moment, Mr. Schomberg.&nbsp; You may light
+your cigar or blow your brains out this minute, and I don&rsquo;t care
+a hang which you do, both or neither.&nbsp; To bring the skipper up
+was easy enough.&nbsp; I had only to stamp on the deck a few times over
+his head.&nbsp; I stamped hard.&nbsp; But how to keep him up when he
+got there?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Anything the matter; Mr. Ricardo?&rsquo; I heard his
+voice behind me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There he was, and I hadn&rsquo;t thought of anything to say
+to him; so I didn&rsquo;t turn round.&nbsp; The moonlight was brighter
+than many a day I could remember in the North Sea.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Why did you call me?&nbsp; What are you staring at
+out there, Mr. Ricardo?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He was deceived by my keeping my back to him.&nbsp; I wasn&rsquo;t
+staring at anything, but his mistake gave me a notion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I am staring at something that looks like a canoe over
+there,&rsquo; I said very slowly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The skipper got concerned at once.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t any
+danger from the inhabitants, whoever they were.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, hang it!&rsquo; says he.&nbsp; &lsquo;That&rsquo;s
+very unfortunate.&rsquo;&nbsp; He had hoped that the schooner being
+on the coast would not get known so very soon.&nbsp; &lsquo;Dashed awkward,
+with the business we&rsquo;ve got in hand, to have a lot of niggers
+watching operations.&nbsp; But are you certain this is a canoe?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;It may be a drift-log,&rsquo; I said; &lsquo;but I
+thought you had better have a look with your own eyes.&nbsp; You may
+make it out better than I can.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;His eyes weren&rsquo;t anything as good as mine.&nbsp; But
+he says:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Certainly.&nbsp; Certainly.&nbsp; You did quite right.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s a fact I had seen some drift-logs at sunset.&nbsp;
+I saw what they were then and didn&rsquo;t trouble my head about them,
+forgot all about it till that very moment.&nbsp; Nothing strange in
+seeing drift-logs off a coast like that; and I&rsquo;m hanged if the
+skipper didn&rsquo;t make one out in the wake of the moon.&nbsp; Strange
+what a little thing a man&rsquo;s life hangs on sometimes - a single
+word!&nbsp; Here you are, sitting unsuspicious before me, and you may
+let out something unbeknown to you that would settle your hash.&nbsp;
+Not that I have any ill-feeling.&nbsp; I have no feelings.&nbsp; If
+the skipper had said, &lsquo;O, bosh!&rsquo; and had turned his back
+on me, he would not have gone three steps towards his bed; but he stood
+there and stared.&nbsp; And now the job was to get him off the deck
+when he was no longer wanted there.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;We are just trying to make out if that object there
+is a canoe or a log,&rsquo; says he to Mr. Jones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr Jones had come up, lounging as carelessly as when he went
+below.&nbsp; While the skipper was jawing about boats and drifting logs.&nbsp;
+I asked by signs, from behind, if I hadn&rsquo;t better knock him on
+the head and drop him quietly overboard.&nbsp; The night was slipping
+by, and we had to go.&nbsp; It couldn&rsquo;t be put off till next night
+no more.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; No more.&nbsp; And do you know why?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg made a slight negative sign with his head.&nbsp; This direct
+appeal annoyed him, jarred on the induced quietude of a great talker
+forced into the part of a listener and sunk in it as a man sinks into
+slumber.&nbsp; Mr. Ricardo struck a note of scorn.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t know why?&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t you guess?&nbsp; No?&nbsp;
+Because the boss had got hold of the skipper&rsquo;s cash-box by then.&nbsp;
+See?&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER SEVEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;A common thief!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg bit his tongue just too late, and woke up completely as
+he saw Ricardo retract his lips in a cat-like grin; but the companion
+of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo; didn&rsquo;t alter his comfortable,
+gossiping attitude.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Garn!&nbsp; What if he did want to see his money back, like
+any tame shopkeeper, hash-seller, gin-slinger, or ink-spewer does?&nbsp;
+Fancy a mud turtle like you trying to pass an opinion on a gentleman!&nbsp;
+A gentleman isn&rsquo;t to be sized up so easily.&nbsp; Even I ain&rsquo;t
+up to it sometimes.&nbsp; For instance, that night, all he did was to
+waggle his finger at me.&nbsp; The skipper stops his silly chatter,
+surprised.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Eh?&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the matter?&rsquo; asks he.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The matter!&nbsp; It was his reprieve - that&rsquo;s what
+was the matter.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;O, nothing, nothing,&rsquo; says my gentleman.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;You are perfectly right.&nbsp; A log - nothing but a log.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha, ha!&nbsp; Reprieve, I call it, because if the skipper
+had gone on with his silly argument much longer he would have had to
+be knocked out of the way.&nbsp; I could hardly hold myself in on account
+of the precious minutes.&nbsp; However, his guardian angel put it into
+his head to shut up and go back to his bed.&nbsp; I was ramping mad
+about the lost time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you let me give him one on his silly
+coconut sir?&rsquo; I asks.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;No ferocity, no ferocity,&rsquo; he says, raising his
+finger at me as calm as you please.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t tell how a gentleman takes that sort of thing.&nbsp;
+They don&rsquo;t lost their temper.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s bad form.&nbsp;
+You&rsquo;ll never see him lose his temper - not for anybody to see
+anyhow.&nbsp; Ferocity ain&rsquo;t good form, either - that much I&rsquo;ve
+learned by this time, and more, too.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve had that schooling
+that you couldn&rsquo;t tell by my face if I meant to rip you up the
+next minute - as of course I could do in less than a jiffy.&nbsp; I
+have a knife up the leg of my trousers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t!&rdquo; exclaimed Schomberg incredulously.</p>
+<p>Mr Ricardo was as quick as lightning in changing his lounging, idle
+attitude for a stooping position, and exhibiting the weapon with one
+jerk at the left leg of his trousers.&nbsp; Schomberg had just a view
+of it, strapped to a very hairy limb, when Mr. Ricardo, jumping up,
+stamped his foot to get the trouser-leg down, and resumed his careless
+pose with one elbow on the table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a more handy way to carry a tool than you would
+think,&rdquo; he went on, gazing abstractedly into Schomberg&rsquo;s
+wide-open eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;Suppose some little difference comes up
+during a game.&nbsp; Well, you stoop to pick up a dropped card, and
+when you come up - there you are ready to strike, or with the thing
+up you sleeve ready to throw.&nbsp; Or you just dodge under the table
+when there&rsquo;s some shooting coming.&nbsp; You wouldn&rsquo;t believe
+the damage a fellow with a knife under the table can do to ill-conditioned
+skunks that want to raise trouble, before they begin to understand what
+the screaming&rsquo;s about, and make a bolt - those that can, that
+is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The roses of Schomberg&rsquo;s cheek at the root of his chestnut
+beard faded perceptibly.&nbsp; Ricardo chuckled faintly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But no ferocity - no ferocity!&nbsp; A gentleman knows.&nbsp;
+What&rsquo;s the good of getting yourself into a state?&nbsp; And no
+shirking necessity, either.&nbsp; No gentleman ever shirks.&nbsp; What
+I learn I don&rsquo;t forget.&nbsp; Why!&nbsp; We gambled on the plains,
+with a damn lot of cattlemen in ranches; played fair, mind - and then
+had to fight for our winnings afterwards as often as not.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve
+gambled on the hills and in the valleys and on the sea-shore, and out
+of sight of land - mostly fair.&nbsp; Generally it&rsquo;s good enough.&nbsp;
+We began in Nicaragua first, after we left that schooner and her fool
+errand.&nbsp; There were one hundred and twenty-seven sovereigns and
+some Mexican dollars in that skipper&rsquo;s cash-box.&nbsp; Hardly
+enough to knock a man on the head for from behind, I must confess; but
+that the skipper had a narrow escape the governor himself could not
+deny afterwards.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Do you want me to understand, sir, that you mind there
+being one life more or less on this earth?&rsquo; I asked him, a few
+hours after we got away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Certainly not,&rsquo; says he.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Well, then, why did you stop me?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;There&rsquo;s a proper way of doing things.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll
+have to learn to be correct.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s also unnecessary exertion.&nbsp;
+That must be avoided, too - if only for the look of the thing.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+A gentleman&rsquo;s way of putting things to you - and no mistake!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At sunrise we got into a creek, to lie hidden in case the
+treasure hunt party had a mind to take a spell hunting for us.&nbsp;
+And dash me if they didn&rsquo;t!&nbsp; We saw the schooner away out,
+running to leeward, with ten pairs of binoculars sweeping the sea, no
+doubt on all sides.&nbsp; I advised the governor to give her time to
+beat back again before we made a start.&nbsp; So we stayed up that creek
+something like ten days, as snug as can be.&nbsp; On the seventh day
+we had to kill a man, though - the brother of this Pedro here.&nbsp;
+They were alligator-hunters, right enough.&nbsp; We got our lodgings
+in their hut.&nbsp; Neither the boss nor I could <i>habla Espa&ntilde;ol</i>
+- speak Spanish, you know - much then.&nbsp; Dry bank, nice shade, jolly
+hammocks, fresh fish, good game, everything lovely.&nbsp; The governor
+chucked them a few dollars to begin with; but it was like boarding with
+a pair of savage apes, anyhow.&nbsp; By and by we noticed them talking
+a lot together.&nbsp; They had twigged the cash-box, and the leather
+portmanteaus, and my bag - a jolly lot of plunder to look at.&nbsp;
+They must have been saying to each other:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;No one&rsquo;s ever likely to come looking for these
+two fellows, who seem to have fallen from the moon.&nbsp; Let&rsquo;s
+cut their throats.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, of course!&nbsp; Clear as daylight.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+need to spy one of them sharpening a devilish long knife behind some
+bushes, while glancing right and left with his wild eyes, to know what
+was in the wind.&nbsp; Pedro was standing by, trying the edge of another
+long knife.&nbsp; They thought we were away on our lookout at the mouth
+of the river, as was usual with us during the day.&nbsp; Not that we
+expected to see much of the schooner, but it was just as well to make
+certain, if possible; and then it was cooler out of the woods, in the
+breeze.&nbsp; Well, the governor was there right enough, lying comfortable
+on a rug, where he could watch the offing, but I had gone back to the
+hut to get a chew of tobacco out of my bag.&nbsp; I had not broken myself
+of the habit then, and I couldn&rsquo;t be happy unless I had a lump
+as big as a baby&rsquo;s fist in my cheek.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At the cannibalistic comparison, Schomberg muttered a faint, sickly
+&ldquo;don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo hitched himself up in his seat
+and glanced down his outstretched legs complacently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am tolerably light on my feet, as a general thing,&rdquo;
+he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;Dash me if I don&rsquo;t think I could drop
+a pinch of salt on a sparrow&rsquo;s tail, if I tried.&nbsp; Anyhow,
+they didn&rsquo;t hear me.&nbsp; I watched them two brown, hairy brutes
+not ten yards off.&nbsp; All they had on was white linen drawers rolled
+up on their thighs.&nbsp; Not a word they said to each other.&nbsp;
+Antonio was down on his thick hams, busy rubbing a knife on a flat stone;
+Pedro was leaning against a small tree and passing his thumb along the
+edge of his blade.&nbsp; I got away quieter than a mouse, you bet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t say anything to the boss then.&nbsp; He was
+leaning on his elbow on his rug, and didn&rsquo;t seem to want to be
+spoken to.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s like that - sometimes that familiar you
+might think he would eat out of your hand, and at others he would snub
+you sharper than a devil - but always quiet.&nbsp; Perfect gentleman,
+I tell you.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t bother him, then; but I wasn&rsquo;t
+likely to forget them two fellows, so businesslike with their knives.&nbsp;
+At that time we had only one revolver between us two - the governor&rsquo;s
+six-shooter, but loaded only in five chambers; and we had no more cartridges.&nbsp;
+He had left the box behind in a drawer in his cabin.&nbsp; Awkward!&nbsp;
+I had nothing but an old clasp-knife - no good at all for anything serious.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In the evening we four sat round a bit of fire outside the
+sleeping-shed, eating broiled fish off plantain leaves, with roast yams
+for bread - the usual thing.&nbsp; The governor and I were on one side,
+and these two beauties cross-legged on the other, grunting a word or
+two to each other, now and then, hardly human speech at all, and their
+eyes down, fast on the ground.&nbsp; For the last three days we couldn&rsquo;t
+get them to look us in the face.&nbsp; Presently I began to talk to
+the boss quietly, just as I am talking to you now, careless like, and
+I told him all I had observed.&nbsp; He goes on picking up pieces of
+fish and putting them into his mouth as calm as anything.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+a pleasure to have anything to do with a gentleman.&nbsp; Never looked
+across at them once.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;And now,&rsquo; says I, yawning on purpose, &lsquo;we&rsquo;ve
+got to stand watch at night, turn about, and keep our eyes skinned all
+day, too, and mind we don&rsquo;t get jumped upon suddenly.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s perfectly intolerable,&rsquo; says the governor.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;And you with no weapon of any sort!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I mean to stick pretty close to you, sir, from this
+on, if you don&rsquo;t mind,&rsquo; says I.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He just nods the least bit, wipes his fingers on the plantain
+leaf, puts his hand behind his back, as if to help himself to rise from
+the ground, snatches his revolver from under his jacket and plugs a
+bullet plumb centre into Mr. Antonio&rsquo;s chest.&nbsp; See what it
+is to have to do with a gentleman.&nbsp; No confounded fuss, and things
+done out of hand.&nbsp; But he might have tipped me a wink or something.&nbsp;
+I nearly jumped out of my skin.&nbsp; Scared ain&rsquo;t in it!&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t even know who had fired.&nbsp; Everything had been so
+still just before that the bang of the shot seemed the loudest noise
+I had ever heard.&nbsp; The honourable Antonio pitches forward - they
+always do, towards the shot; you must have noticed that yourself - yes,
+he pitches forward on to the embers, and all that lot of hair on his
+face and head flashes up like a pinch of gunpowder.&nbsp; Greasy, I
+expect; always scraping the fat off them alligators&rsquo; hides - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; exclaimed Schomberg violently, as if trying
+to burst some invisible bonds, &ldquo;do you mean to say that all this
+happened?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Ricardo coolly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am making it
+all up as I go along, just to help you through the hottest part of the
+afternoon.&nbsp; So down he pitches his nose on the red embers, and
+up jumps our handsome Pedro and I at the same time, like two Jacks-in-the-box.&nbsp;
+He starts to bolt away, with his head over his shoulder, and I, hardly
+knowing what I was doing, spring on his back.&nbsp; I had the sense
+to get my hands round his neck at once, and it&rsquo;s about all I could
+do to lock my fingers tight under his jaw.&nbsp; You saw the beauty&rsquo;s
+neck, didn&rsquo;t you?&nbsp; Hard as iron, too.&nbsp; Down we both
+went.&nbsp; Seeing this the governor puts his revolver in his pocket.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Tie his legs together, sir,&rsquo; I yell.&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+trying to strangle him.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There was a lot of their fibre-lines lying about.&nbsp; I
+gave him a last squeeze and then got up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I might have shot you,&rsquo; says the governor, quite
+concerned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;But you are glad to have saved a cartridge, sir,&rsquo;
+I tell him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My jump did save it.&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t have done to
+let him get away in the dark like that, and have the beauty dodging
+around in the bushes, perhaps, with the rusty flint-lock gun they had.&nbsp;
+The governor owned up that the jump was the correct thing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;But he isn&rsquo;t dead,&rsquo; says he, bending over
+him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Might as well hope to strangle an ox.&nbsp; We made haste
+to tie his elbows back, and then, before he came to himself, we dragged
+him to a small tree, sat him up, and bound him to it, not by the waist
+but by the neck - some twenty turns of small line round his throat and
+the trunk, finished off with a reef-knot under his ear.&nbsp; Next thing
+we did was to attend to the honourable Antonio, who was making a great
+smell frizzling his face on the red coals.&nbsp; We pushed and rolled
+him into the creek, and left the rest to the alligators.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was tired.&nbsp; That little scrap took it out of me something
+awful.&nbsp; The governor hadn&rsquo;t turned a hair.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+where a gentleman has the pull of you.&nbsp; He don&rsquo;t get excited.&nbsp;
+No gentleman does - or hardly ever.&nbsp; I fell asleep all of a sudden
+and left him smoking by the fire I had made up, his railway rug round
+his legs, as calm as if he were sitting in a first-class carriage.&nbsp;
+We hardly spoke ten words to each other after it was over, and from
+that day to this we have never talked of the business.&nbsp; I wouldn&rsquo;t
+have known he remembered it if he hadn&rsquo;t alluded to it when talking
+with you the other day - you know, with regard to Pedro.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It surprised you, didn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s why
+I am giving you this yarn of how he came to be with us, like a sort
+of dog - dashed sight more useful, though.&nbsp; You know how he can
+trot around with trays?&nbsp; Well, he could bring down an ox with his
+fist, at a word from the boss, just as cleverly.&nbsp; And fond of the
+governor!&nbsp; Oh, my word!&nbsp; More than any dog is of any man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg squared his chest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, and that&rsquo;s one of the things I wanted to mention
+to Mr. Jones,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s unpleasant to
+have that fellow round the house so early.&nbsp; He sits on the stairs
+at the back for hours before he is needed here, and frightens people
+so that the service suffers.&nbsp; The Chinamen - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo nodded and raised his hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;When I first saw him he was fit to frighten a grizzly bear,
+let alone a Chinaman.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s become civilized now to what
+he once was.&nbsp; Well, that morning, first thing on opening my eyes,
+I saw him sitting there, tied up by the neck to the tree.&nbsp; He was
+blinking.&nbsp; We spend the day watching the sea, and we actually made
+out the schooner working to windward, which showed that she had given
+us up.&nbsp; Good!&nbsp; When the sun rose again, I took a squint at
+our Pedro.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t blinking.&nbsp; He was rolling his
+eyes, all white one minute and black the next, and his tongue was hanging
+out a yard.&nbsp; Being tied up short by the neck like this would daunt
+the arch devil himself - in time - in time, mind!&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+know but that even a real gentleman would find it difficult to keep
+a stiff lip to the end.&nbsp; Presently we went to work getting our
+boat ready.&nbsp; I was busying myself setting up the mast, when the
+governor passes the remark:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I think he wants to say something.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had heard a sort of croaking going on for some time, only
+I wouldn&rsquo;t take any notice; but then I got out of the boat and
+went up to him, with some water.&nbsp; His eyes were red - red and black
+and half out of his head.&nbsp; He drank all the water I gave him, but
+he hadn&rsquo;t much to say for himself.&nbsp; I walked back to the
+governor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;He asks for a bullet in his head before we go,&rsquo;
+I said.&nbsp; I wasn&rsquo;t at all pleased.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, that&rsquo;s out of the question altogether,&rsquo;
+says the governor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He was right there.&nbsp; Only four shots left, and ninety
+miles of wild coast to put behind us before coming to the first place
+where you could expect to buy revolver cartridges.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Anyhow,&rsquo; I tells him, &lsquo;he wants to be killed
+some way or other, as a favour.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then I go on setting up the boat&rsquo;s mast.&nbsp; I
+didn&rsquo;t care much for the notion of butchering a man bound hand
+and foot and fastened by the neck besides.&nbsp; I had a knife then
+- the honourable Antonio&rsquo;s knife; and that knife is this knife.</p>
+<p>Ricardo gave his leg a resounding slap.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;First spoil in my new life,&rdquo; he went on with harsh joviality.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The dodge of carrying it down there I learned later.&nbsp; I
+carried it stuck in my belt that day.&nbsp; No, I hadn&rsquo;t much
+stomach for the job; but when you work with a gentleman of the real
+right sort you may depend on your feelings being seen through your skin.&nbsp;
+Says the governor suddenly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;It may even be looked upon as his right&rsquo; - you
+hear a gentleman speaking there? - &lsquo;but what do you think of taking
+him with us in the boat?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And the governor starts arguing that the beggar would be useful
+in working our way along the coast.&nbsp; We could get rid of him before
+coming to the first place that was a little civilized.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+want much talking over.&nbsp; Out I scrambled from the boat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Ay, but will he be manageable, sir?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, yes.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s daunted.&nbsp; Go on, cut
+him loose - I take the responsibility.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Right you are, sir.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He sees me come along smartly with his brother&rsquo;s knife
+in my hand - I wasn&rsquo;t thinking how it looked from his side of
+the fence, you know - and jiminy, it nearly killed him!&nbsp; He stared
+like a crazed bullock and began to sweat and twitch all over, something
+amazing.&nbsp; I was so surprised, that I stopped to look at him.&nbsp;
+The drops were pouring over his eyebrows, down his beard, off his nose
+- and he gurgled.&nbsp; Then it struck me that he couldn&rsquo;t see
+what was in my mind.&nbsp; By favour or by right he didn&rsquo;t like
+to die when it came to it; not in that way, anyhow.&nbsp; When I stepped
+round to get at the lashing, he let out a sort of soft bellow.&nbsp;
+Thought I was going to stick him from behind, I guess.&nbsp; I cut all
+the turns with one slash, and he went over on his side, flop, and started
+kicking with his tied legs.&nbsp; Laugh!&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what
+there was so funny about it, but I fairly shouted.&nbsp; What between
+my laughing and his wriggling, I had a job in cutting him free.&nbsp;
+As soon as he could feel his limbs he makes for the bank, where the
+governor was standing, crawls up to him on his hands and knees, and
+embraces his legs.&nbsp; Gratitude, eh?&nbsp; You could see that being
+allowed to live suited that chap down to the ground.&nbsp; The governor
+gets his legs away from him gently and just mutters to me:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Let&rsquo;s be off.&nbsp; Get him into the boat.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was not difficult,&rdquo; continued Ricardo, after eyeing
+Schomberg fixedly for a moment.&nbsp; &ldquo;He was ready enough to
+get into the boat, and - here he is.&nbsp; He would let himself be chopped
+into small pieces - with a smile, mind; with a smile! - for the governor.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t know about him doing that much for me; but pretty near,
+pretty near.&nbsp; I did the tying up and the untying, but he could
+see who was the boss.&nbsp; And then he knows a gentleman.&nbsp; A dog
+knows a gentleman - any dog.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s only some foreigners that
+don&rsquo;t know; and nothing can teach them, either.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you mean to say,&rdquo; asked Schomberg, disregarding
+what might have been annoying for himself in the emphasis of the final
+remark, &ldquo;you mean to say that you left steady employment at good
+wages for a life like this?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There!&rdquo; began Ricardo quietly.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s
+just what a man like you would say.&nbsp; You are that tame!&nbsp; I
+follow a gentleman.&nbsp; That ain&rsquo;t the same thing as to serve
+an employer.&nbsp; They give you wages as they&rsquo;d fling a bone
+to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s worse
+than slavery.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t expect a slave that&rsquo;s bought
+for money to be grateful.&nbsp; And if you sell your work - what is
+it but selling your own self?&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve got so many days to
+live and you sell them one after another.&nbsp; Hey?&nbsp; Who can pay
+me enough for my life?&nbsp; Ay!&nbsp; But they throw at you your week&rsquo;s
+money and expect you to say &lsquo;thank you&rsquo; before you pick
+it up.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He mumbled some curses, directed at employers generally, as it seemed,
+then blazed out:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Work be damned!&nbsp; I ain&rsquo;t a dog walking on its hind
+legs for a bone; I am a man who&rsquo;s following a gentleman.&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s a difference which you will never understand, Mr. Tame
+Schomberg.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He yawned slightly.&nbsp; Schomberg, preserving a military stiffness
+reinforced by a slight frown, had allowed his thoughts to stray away.&nbsp;
+They were busy detailing the image of a young girl - absent - gone -
+stolen from him.&nbsp; He became enraged.&nbsp; There was that rascal
+looking at him insolently.&nbsp; If the girl had not been shamefully
+decoyed away from him, he would not have allowed anyone to look at him
+insolently.&nbsp; He would have made nothing of hitting that rogue between
+the eyes.&nbsp; Afterwards he would have kicked the other without hesitation.&nbsp;
+He saw himself doing it; and in sympathy with this glorious vision Schomberg&rsquo;s
+right foot, and arm moved convulsively.</p>
+<p>At this moment he came out of his sudden reverie to note with alarm
+the wide-awake curiosity of Mr. Ricardo&rsquo;s stare.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And so you go like this about the world, gambling,&rdquo;
+he remarked inanely, to cover his confusion.&nbsp; But Ricardo&rsquo;s
+stare did not change its character, and he continued vaguely:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here and there and everywhere.&rdquo;&nbsp; He pulled himself
+together, squared his shoulders.&nbsp; &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it very precarious?&rdquo;
+he said firmly.</p>
+<p>The word precarious - seemed to be effective, because Ricardo&rsquo;s
+eyes lost their dangerously interested expression.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, not so bad,&rdquo; Ricardo said, with indifference.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s my opinion that men will gamble as long as they have
+anything to put on a card.&nbsp; Gamble?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s nature.&nbsp;
+What&rsquo;s life itself?&nbsp; You never know what may turn up.&nbsp;
+The worst of it is that you never can tell exactly what sort of cards
+you are holding yourself.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s trumps? - that is the question.&nbsp;
+See?&nbsp; Any man will gamble if only he&rsquo;s given a chance, for
+anything or everything.&nbsp; You too - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t touched a card now for twenty years,&rdquo;
+said Schomberg in an austere tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, if you got your living that way you would be no worse
+than you are now, selling drinks to people - beastly beer and spirits,
+rotten stuff fit to make an old he-goat yell if you poured it down its
+throat.&nbsp; Pooh!&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t stand the confounded liquor.&nbsp;
+Never could.&nbsp; A whiff of neat brandy in a glass makes me feel sick.&nbsp;
+Always did.&nbsp; If everybody was like me, liquor would be going a-begging.&nbsp;
+You think it&rsquo;s funny in a man, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg made a vague gesture of toleration.&nbsp; Ricardo hitched
+up his chair and settled his elbow afresh on the table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;French siros I must say I do like.&nbsp; Saigon&rsquo;s the
+place for them.&nbsp; I see you have siros in the bar.&nbsp; Hang me
+if I ain&rsquo;t getting dry, conversing like this with you.&nbsp; Come,
+Mr. Schomberg, be hospitable, as the governor says.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg rose and walked with dignity to the counter.&nbsp; His
+footsteps echoed loudly on the floor of polished boards.&nbsp; He took
+down a bottle, labelled &ldquo;<i>Sirop de Groseille</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The little sounds he made, the clink of glass, the gurgling of the liquid,
+the pop of the soda-water cork had a preternatural sharpness.&nbsp;
+He came back carrying a pink and glistening tumbler.&nbsp; Mr. Ricardo
+had followed his movements with oblique, coyly expectant yellow eyes,
+like a cat watching the preparation of a saucer of milk, and the satisfied
+sound after he had drunk might have been a slightly modified form of
+purring, very soft and deep in his throat.&nbsp; It affected Schomberg
+unpleasantly as another example of something inhuman in those men wherein
+lay the difficulty of dealing with them.&nbsp; A spectre, a cat, an
+ape - there was a pretty association for a mere man to remonstrate with,
+he reflected with an inward shudder; for Schomberg had been overpowered,
+as it were, by his imagination, and his reason could not react against
+that fanciful view of his guests.&nbsp; And it was not only their appearance.&nbsp;
+The morals of Mr. Ricardo seemed to him to be pretty much the morals
+of a cat.&nbsp; Too much.&nbsp; What sort of argument could a mere man
+offer to a . . . or to a spectre, either!&nbsp; What the morals of a
+spectre could be, Schomberg had no idea.&nbsp; Something dreadful, no
+doubt.&nbsp; Compassion certainly had no place in them.&nbsp; As to
+the ape - well, everybody knew what an ape was.&nbsp; It had no morals.&nbsp;
+Nothing could be more hopeless.</p>
+<p>Outwardly, however, having picked up the cigar which he had laid
+aside to get the drink, with his thick fingers, one of them ornamented
+by a gold ring, Schomberg smoked with moody composure.&nbsp; Facing
+him, Ricardo blinked slowly for a time, then closed his eyes altogether,
+with the placidity of the domestic cat dozing on the hearth-rug.&nbsp;
+In another moment he opened them very wide, and seemed surprised to
+see Schomberg there.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re having a very slack time today, aren&rsquo;t
+you?&rdquo; he observed.&nbsp; &ldquo;But then this whole town is confoundedly
+slack, anyhow; and I&rsquo;ve never faced such a slack party at a table
+before.&nbsp; Come eleven o&rsquo;clock, they begin to talk of breaking
+up.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the matter with them?&nbsp; Want to go to bed
+so early, or what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I reckon you don&rsquo;t lose a fortune by their wanting to
+go to bed,&rdquo; said Schomberg, with sombre sarcasm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; admitted Ricardo, with a grin that stretched his
+thin mouth from ear to ear, giving a sudden glimpse of his white teeth.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Only, you see, when I once start, I would play for nuts, for
+parched peas, for any rubbish.&nbsp; I would play them for their souls.&nbsp;
+But these Dutchmen aren&rsquo;t any good.&nbsp; They never seem to get
+warmed up properly, win or lose.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve tried them both ways,
+too.&nbsp; Hang them for a beggarly, bloodless lot of animated cucumbers!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And if anything out of the way was to happen, they would be
+just as cool in locking you and your gentleman up,&rdquo; Schomberg
+snarled unpleasantly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo; said Ricardo slowly, taking Schomberg&rsquo;s
+measure with his eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;And what about you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You talk mighty big,&rdquo; burst out the hotel-keeper.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You talk of ranging all over the world, and doing great things,
+and taking fortune by the scruff of the neck, but here you stick at
+this miserable business!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t much of a lay - that&rsquo;s a fact,&rdquo;
+admitted Ricardo unexpectedly.</p>
+<p>Schomberg was red in the face with audacity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I call it paltry,&rdquo; he spluttered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s how it looks.&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t call it anything
+else.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo seemed to be in an accommodating mood.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I should be ashamed of it myself, only you see the governor is
+subject to fits - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fits!&rdquo; Schomberg cried out, but in a low tone.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t say so!&rdquo;&nbsp; He exulted inwardly, as
+if this disclosure had in some way diminished the difficulty of the
+situation.&nbsp; &ldquo;Fits!&nbsp; That&rsquo;s a serious thing, isn&rsquo;t
+it?&nbsp; You ought to take him to the civil hospital - a lovely place.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo nodded slightly, with a faint grin.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Serious enough.&nbsp; Regular fits of laziness, I call them.&nbsp;
+Now and then he lays down on me like this, and there&rsquo;s no moving
+him.&nbsp; If you think I like it, you&rsquo;re a long way out.&nbsp;
+Generally speaking, I can talk him over.&nbsp; I know how to deal with
+a gentleman.&nbsp; I am no daily-bread slave.&nbsp; But when he has
+said, &lsquo;Martin, I am bored,&rsquo; then look out!&nbsp; There&rsquo;s
+nothing to do but to shut up, confound it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg, very much cast down, had listened open-mouthed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the cause of it?&rdquo; he asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why
+is he like this?&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I do,&rdquo; said Ricardo.&nbsp; &ldquo;A gentleman,
+you know, is not such a simple person as you or I; and not so easy to
+manage, either.&nbsp; If only I had something to lever him out with!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean, to lever him out with?&rdquo; muttered Schomberg
+hopelessly.</p>
+<p>Ricardo was impatient with this denseness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you understand English?&nbsp; Look here!&nbsp;
+I couldn&rsquo;t make this billiard table move an inch if I talked to
+it from now till the end of days - could I?&nbsp; Well, the governor
+is like that, too, when the fits are on him.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s bored.&nbsp;
+Nothing&rsquo;s worthwhile, nothing&rsquo;s good enough, that&rsquo;s
+mere sense.&nbsp; But if I saw a capstan bar lying about here, I would
+soon manage to shift that billiard table of yours a good many inches.&nbsp;
+And that&rsquo;s all there is to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He rose noiselessly, stretched himself, supple and stealthy, with
+curious sideways movements of his head and unexpected elongations of
+his thick body, glanced out of the corners of his eyes in the direction
+of the door, and finally leaned back against the table, folding his
+arms on his breast comfortably, in a completely human attitude.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s another thing you can tell a gentleman by - his
+freakishness.&nbsp; A gentleman ain&rsquo;t accountable to nobody, any
+more than a tramp on the roads.&nbsp; He ain&rsquo;t got to keep time.&nbsp;
+The governor got like this once in a one-horse Mexican pueblo on the
+uplands, away from everywhere.&nbsp; He lay all day long in a dark room
+- &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Drunk?&rdquo;&nbsp; This word escaped Schomberg by inadvertence
+at which he became frightened.&nbsp; But the devoted secretary seemed
+to find it natural.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, that never comes on together with this kind of fit.&nbsp;
+He just lay there full length on a mat, while a ragged, bare-legged
+boy that he had picked up in the street sat in the <i>patio</i>, between
+two oleanders near the open door of his room, strumming on a guitar
+and singing <i>tristes</i> to him from morning to night.&nbsp; You know
+<i>tristes</i> - twang, twang, twang, aouh, hoo!&nbsp; Chroo, yah!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg uplifted his hands in distress.&nbsp; This tribute seemed
+to flatter Ricardo.&nbsp; His mouth twitched grimly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Like that - enough to give colic to an ostrich, eh?&nbsp;
+Awful.&nbsp; Well, there was a cook there who loved me - an old fat,
+Negro woman with spectacles.&nbsp; I used to hide in the kitchen and
+turn her to, to make me <i>dulces</i> - sweet things, you know, mostly
+eggs and sugar - to pass the time away.&nbsp; I am like a kid for sweet
+things.&nbsp; And, by the way, why don&rsquo;t you ever have a pudding
+at your tablydott, Mr. Schomberg?&nbsp; Nothing but fruit, morning,
+noon, and night.&nbsp; Sickening!&nbsp; What do you think a fellow is
+- a wasp?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg disregarded the injured tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And how long did that fit, as you call it, last?&rdquo; he
+asked anxiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Weeks, months, years, centuries, it seemed to me,&rdquo; returned
+Mr. Ricardo with feeling.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of an evening the governor would
+stroll out into the <i>sala</i> and fritter his life away playing cards
+with the <i>juez</i> of the place - a little Dago with a pair of black
+whiskers - ekarty, you know, a quick French game, for small change.&nbsp;
+And the <i>comandante</i>, a one-eyed, half-Indian, flat-nosed ruffian,
+and I, we had to stand around and bet on their hands.&nbsp; It was awful!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Awful,&rdquo; echoed Schomberg, in a Teutonic throaty tone
+of despair.&nbsp; &ldquo;Look here, I need your rooms.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To be sure.&nbsp; I have been thinking that for some time
+past,&rdquo; said Ricardo indifferently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was mad when I listened to you.&nbsp; This must end!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think you are mad yet,&rdquo; said Ricardo, not even unfolding
+his arms or shifting his attitude an inch.&nbsp; He lowered his voice
+to add: &ldquo;And if I thought you had been to the police, I would
+tell Pedro to catch you round the waist and break your fat neck by jerking
+your head backward - snap!&nbsp; I saw him do it to a big buck nigger
+who was flourishing a razor in front of the governor.&nbsp; It can be
+done.&nbsp; You hear a low crack, that&rsquo;s all - and the man drops
+down like a limp rag.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Not even Ricardo&rsquo;s head, slightly inclined on the left shoulder,
+had moved; but when he ceased the greenish irises which had been staring
+out of doors glided into the corners of his eyes nearest to Schomberg
+and stayed there with a coyly voluptuous expression.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER EIGHT</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Schomberg felt desperation, that lamentable substitute for courage,
+ooze out of him.&nbsp; It was not so much the threat of death as the
+weirdly circumstantial manner of its declaration which affected him.&nbsp;
+A mere &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll murder you,&rdquo; however ferocious in tone,
+and earnest, in purpose, he could have faced; but before this novel
+mode of speech and procedure, his imagination being very sensitive to
+the unusual, he collapsed as if indeed his moral neck had been broken
+- snap!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go to the police?&nbsp; Of course not.&nbsp; Never dreamed
+of it.&nbsp; Too late now.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve let myself be mixed up in
+this.&nbsp; You got my consent while I wasn&rsquo;t myself.&nbsp; I
+explained it to you at the time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo&rsquo;s eye glided gently off Schomberg to stare far away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay!&nbsp; Some trouble with a girl.&nbsp; But that&rsquo;s
+nothing to us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naturally.&nbsp; What I say is, what&rsquo;s the good of all
+that savage talk to me?&rdquo;&nbsp; A bright argument occurred to him.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s out of proportion; for even if I were fool enough
+to go to the police now, there&rsquo;s nothing serious to complain about.&nbsp;
+It would only mean deportation for you.&nbsp; They would put you on
+board the first west-bound steamer to Singapore.&rdquo;&nbsp; He had
+become animated.&nbsp; &ldquo;Out of this to the devil,&rdquo; he added
+between his teeth for his own private satisfaction.</p>
+<p>Ricardo made no comment, and gave no sign of having heard a single
+word.&nbsp; This discouraged Schomberg, who had looked up hopefully.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why do you want to stick here?&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+can&rsquo;t pay you people to fool around like this.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t
+you worry just now about moving your governor?&nbsp; Well, the police
+would move him for you; and from Singapore you can go on to the east
+coast of Africa.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be hanged if the fellow isn&rsquo;t up to that
+silly trick!&rdquo; was Ricardo&rsquo;s comment, spoken in an ominous
+tone which recalled Schomberg to the realities of his position.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; No!&rdquo; he protested.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+a manner of speaking.&nbsp; Of course I wouldn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think that trouble about the girl has really muddled your
+brains, Mr. Schomberg.&nbsp; Believe me, you had better part friends
+with us; for, deportation or no deportation, you&rsquo;ll be seeing
+one of us turning up before long to pay you off for any nasty dodge
+you may be hatching in that fat head of yours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Gott im Himmel</i>!&rdquo; groaned Schomberg.&nbsp; &ldquo;Will
+nothing move him out?&nbsp; Will he stop here immer - I mean always?&nbsp;
+Suppose I were to make it worth your while, couldn&rsquo;t you - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; Ricardo interrupted.&nbsp; &ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t,
+unless I had something to lever him out with.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve told
+you that before.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;An inducement?&rdquo; muttered Schomberg.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay.&nbsp; The east coast of Africa isn&rsquo;t good enough.&nbsp;
+He told me the other day that it will have to wait till he is ready
+for it; and he may not be ready for a long time, because the east coast
+can&rsquo;t run away, and no one is likely to run off with it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These remarks, whether considered as truisms or as depicting Mr.
+Jones&rsquo;s mental state, were distinctly discouraging to the long-suffering
+Schomberg; but there is truth in the well-known saying that places the
+darkest hour before the dawn.&nbsp; The sound of words, apart from the
+context, has its power; and these two words, &lsquo;run off,&rsquo;
+had a special affinity to the hotel-keeper&rsquo;s, haunting idea.&nbsp;
+It was always present in his brain, and now it came forward evoked by
+a purely fortuitous expression.&nbsp; No, nobody could run off with
+a continent; but Heyst had run off with the girl!</p>
+<p>Ricardo could have had no conception of the cause of Schomberg&rsquo;s
+changed expression.&nbsp; Yet it was noticeable enough to interest him
+so much that he stopped the careless swinging of his leg and said, looking
+at the hotel-keeper:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s not much use arguing against that sort of talk
+- is there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg was not listening.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could put you on another track,&rdquo; he said slowly, and
+stopped, as if suddenly choked by an unholy emotion of intense eagerness
+combined with fear of failure.&nbsp; Ricardo waited, attentive, yet
+not without a certain contempt.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On the track of a man!&rdquo; Schomberg uttered convulsively,
+and paused again, consulting his rage and his conscience.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The man in the moon, eh?&rdquo; suggested Ricardo, in a jeering
+murmur.</p>
+<p>Schomberg shook his head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be nearly as safe to rook him as if he were the Man
+in the moon.&nbsp; You go and try.&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t so very far.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He reflected.&nbsp; These men were thieves and murderers as well
+as gamblers.&nbsp; Their fitness for purposes of vengeance was appallingly
+complete.&nbsp; But he preferred not to think of it in detail.&nbsp;
+He put it to himself summarily that he would be paying Heyst out and
+would, at the same time, relieve himself of these men&rsquo;s oppression.&nbsp;
+He had only to let loose his natural gift for talking scandalously about
+his fellow creatures.&nbsp; And in this case his great practice in it
+was assisted by hate, which, like love, has an eloquence of its own.&nbsp;
+With the utmost ease he portrayed for Ricardo, now seriously attentive,
+a Heyst fattened by years of private and public rapines, the murderer
+of Morrison, the swindler of many shareholders, a wonderful mixture
+of craft and impudence, of deep purposes and simple wiles, of mystery
+and futility.&nbsp; In this exercise of his natural function Schomberg
+revived, the colour coming back to his face, loquacious, florid, eager,
+his manliness set off by the military bearing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the exact story.&nbsp; He was seen hanging about
+this part of the world for years, spying into everybody&rsquo;s business:
+but I am the only one who has seen through him from the first - contemptible,
+double-faced, stick-at-nothing, dangerous fellow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dangerous, is he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg came to himself at the sound of Ricardo&rsquo;s voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you know what I mean,&rdquo; he said uneasily.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;A lying, circumventing, soft-spoken, polite, stuck-up rascal.&nbsp;
+Nothing open about him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Ricardo had slipped off the table, and was prowling about the
+room in an oblique, noiseless manner.&nbsp; He flashed a grin at Schomberg
+in passing, and a snarling:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; H&rsquo;m!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, what more dangerous do you want?&rdquo; argued Schomberg.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s in no way a fighting man, I believe,&rdquo; he added
+negligently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you say he has been living alone there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Like the man in the moon,&rdquo; answered Schomberg readily.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no one that cares a rap what becomes of him.&nbsp;
+He has been lying low, you understand, after bagging all that plunder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Plunder, eh?&nbsp; Why didn&rsquo;t he go home with it?&rdquo;
+inquired Ricardo.</p>
+<p>The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this
+was something worth looking into.&nbsp; And he was pursuing truth in
+the manner of men of sounder morality and purer intentions than his
+own; that is he pursued it in the light of his own experience and prejudices.&nbsp;
+For facts, whatever their origin (and God only knows where they come
+from), can be only tested by our own particular suspicions.&nbsp; Ricardo
+was suspicious all round.&nbsp; Schomberg, such is the tonic of recovered
+self-esteem, Schomberg retorted fearlessly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go home?&nbsp; Why don&rsquo;t you go home?&nbsp; To hear
+your talk, you must have made a pretty considerable pile going round
+winning people&rsquo;s money.&nbsp; You ought to be ready by this time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo stopped to look at Schomberg with surprise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You think yourself very clever, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; he
+said.</p>
+<p>Schomberg just then was so conscious of being clever that the snarling
+irony left him unmoved.&nbsp; There was positively a smile in his noble
+Teutonic beard, the first smile for weeks.&nbsp; He was in a felicitous
+vein.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you know that he wasn&rsquo;t thinking of going home?&nbsp;
+As a matter of fact, he was on his way home.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And how do I know that you are not amusing yourself by spinning
+out a blamed fairy tale?&rdquo; interrupted Ricardo roughly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+wonder at myself listening to the silly rot!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg received this turn of temper unmoved.&nbsp; He did not
+require to be very subtly observant to notice that he had managed to
+arouse some sort of feeling, perhaps of greed, in Ricardo&rsquo;s breast.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t believe me?&nbsp; Well!&nbsp; You can ask
+anybody that comes here if that - that Swede hadn&rsquo;t got as far
+as this house on his way home.&nbsp; Why should he turn up here if not
+for that?&nbsp; You ask anybody.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ask, indeed!&rdquo; returned the other.&nbsp; &ldquo;Catch
+me asking at large about a man I mean to drop on!&nbsp; Such jobs must
+be done on the quiet - or not at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The peculiar intonation of the last phrase touched the nape of Schomberg&rsquo;s
+neck with a chill.&nbsp; He cleared his throat slightly and looked away
+as though he had heard something indelicate.&nbsp; Then, with a jump
+as it were:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course he didn&rsquo;t tell me.&nbsp; Is it likely?&nbsp;
+But haven&rsquo;t I got eyes?&nbsp; Haven&rsquo;t I got my common sense
+to tell me?&nbsp; I can see through people.&nbsp; By the same token,
+he called on the Tesmans.&nbsp; Why did he call on the Tesmans two days
+running, eh?&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t know?&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t tell?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He waited complacently till Ricardo had finished swearing quite openly
+at him for a confounded chatterer, and then went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A fellow doesn&rsquo;t go to a counting-house in business
+hours for a chat about the weather, two days running.&nbsp; Then why?&nbsp;
+To close his account with them one day, and to get his money out the
+next!&nbsp; Clear, what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo, with his trick of looking one way and moving another approached
+Schomberg slowly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To get his money?&rdquo; he purred.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Gewiss</i>,&rdquo; snapped Schomberg with impatient superiority.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;What else?&nbsp; That is, only the money he had with the Tesmans.&nbsp;
+What he has buried or put away on the island, devil only knows.&nbsp;
+When you think of the lot of hard cash that passed through that man&rsquo;s
+hands, for wages and stores and all that - and he&rsquo;s just a cunning
+thief, I tell you.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo&rsquo;s hard stare discomposed
+the hotel-keeper, and he added in an embarrassed tone: &ldquo;I mean
+a common, sneaking thief - no account at all.&nbsp; And he calls himself
+a Swedish baron, too!&nbsp; Tfui!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a baron, is he?&nbsp; That foreign nobility ain&rsquo;t
+much,&rdquo; commented Mr. Ricardo seriously.&nbsp; &ldquo;And then
+what?&nbsp; He hung about here!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, he hung about,&rdquo; said Schomberg, making a wry mouth.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He - hung about.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s it.&nbsp; Hung - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>His voice died out.&nbsp; Curiosity was depicted in Ricardo&rsquo;s
+countenance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Just like that; for nothing?&nbsp; And then turned about and
+went back to that island again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And went back to that island again,&rdquo; Schomberg echoed
+lifelessly, fixing his gaze on the floor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with you?&rdquo; asked Ricardo with
+genuine surprise.&nbsp; &ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg, without looking up, made an impatient gesture.&nbsp; His
+face was crimson, and he kept it lowered.&nbsp; Ricardo went back to
+the point.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, but how do you account for it?&nbsp; What was his reason?&nbsp;
+What did he go back to the island for?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Honeymoon!&rdquo; spat out Schomberg viciously.</p>
+<p>Perfectly still, his eyes downcast, he suddenly, with no preliminary
+stir, hit the table with his fist a blow which caused the utterly unprepared
+Ricardo to leap aside.&nbsp; And only then did Schomberg look up with
+a dull, resentful expression.</p>
+<p>Ricardo stared hard for a moment, spun on his heel, walked to the
+end of the room, came back smartly, and muttered a profound &ldquo;Ay!
+Ay!&rdquo; above Schomberg&rsquo;s rigid head.&nbsp; That the hotel-keeper
+was capable of a great moral effort was proved by a gradual return of
+his severe, Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, ay!&rdquo; repeated Ricardo more deliberately than before,
+and as if after a further survey of the circumstances, &ldquo;I wish
+I hadn&rsquo;t asked you, or that you had told me a lie.&nbsp; It don&rsquo;t
+suit me to know that there&rsquo;s a woman mixed up in this affair.&nbsp;
+What&rsquo;s she like?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the girl you - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Leave off!&rdquo; muttered Schomberg, utterly pitiful behind
+his stiff military front.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, ay!&rdquo; Ricardo ejaculated for the third time, more
+and more enlightened and perplexed.&nbsp; &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t bear to
+talk about it - so bad as that?&nbsp; And yet I would bet she isn&rsquo;t
+a miracle to look at.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg made a gesture as if he didn&rsquo;t know, as if he didn&rsquo;t
+care.&nbsp; Then he squared his shoulders and frowned at vacancy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Swedish baron - h&rsquo;m!&rdquo; Ricardo continued meditatively.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I believe the governor would think that business worth looking
+up, quite, if I put it to him properly.&nbsp; The governor likes a duel,
+if you will call it so; but I don&rsquo;t know a man that can stand
+up to him on the square.&nbsp; Have you ever seen a cat play with a
+mouse?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a pretty sight!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo, with his voluptuously gleaming eyes and the coy expression,
+looked so much like a cat that Schomberg would have felt all the alarm
+of a mouse if other feelings had not had complete possession of his
+breast.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are no lies between you and me,&rdquo; he said, more
+steadily than he thought he could speak.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the good now?&nbsp; He funks women.&nbsp; In
+that Mexican pueblo where we lay grounded on our beef-bones, so to speak,
+I used to go to dances of an evening.&nbsp; The girls there would ask
+me if the English <i>caballero</i> in the <i>posada</i> was a monk in
+disguise, or if he had taken a vow to the <i>sancissima madre</i> not
+to speak to a woman, or whether - You can imagine what fairly free-spoken
+girls will ask when they come to the point of not caring what they say;
+and it used to vex me.&nbsp; Yes, the governor funks facing women.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One woman?&rdquo; interjected Schomberg in guttural tones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One may be more awkward to deal with than two, or two hundred,
+for that matter.&nbsp; In a place that&rsquo;s full of women you needn&rsquo;t
+look at them unless you like; but if you go into a room where there
+is only one woman, young or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face
+her.&nbsp; And, unless you are after her, then - the governor is right
+enough - she&rsquo;s in the way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why notice them?&rdquo; muttered Schomberg.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+can they do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Make a noise, if nothing else,&rdquo; opined Mr. Ricardo curtly,
+with the distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed,
+nothing is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty
+and absorbing card game.&nbsp; &ldquo;Noise, noise, my friend,&rdquo;
+he went on forcibly; &ldquo;confounded screeching about something or
+other, and I like it no more than the governor does.&nbsp; But with
+the governor there&rsquo;s something else besides.&nbsp; He can&rsquo;t
+stand them at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He paused to reflect on this psychological phenomenon, and as no
+philosopher was at hand to tell him that there is no strong sentiment
+without some terror, as there is no real religion without a little fetishism,
+he emitted his own conclusion, which surely could not go to the root
+of the matter.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m hanged if I don&rsquo;t think they are to him what
+liquor is to me.&nbsp; Brandy - pah!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He made a disgusted face, and produced a genuine shudder.&nbsp; Schomberg
+listened to him in wonder.&nbsp; It looked as if the very scoundrelism,
+of that - that Swede would protect him; the spoil of his iniquity standing
+between the thief and the retribution.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s so, old buck.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo broke the
+silence after contemplating Schomberg&rsquo;s mute dejection with a
+sort of sympathy.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think this trick will work.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But that&rsquo;s silly,&rdquo; whispered the man deprived
+of the vengeance which he had seemed already to hold in his hand, by
+a mysterious and exasperating idiosyncrasy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you set yourself to judge a gentleman.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Ricardo without anger administered a moody rebuke.&nbsp; &ldquo;Even
+I can&rsquo;t understand the governor thoroughly.&nbsp; And I am an
+Englishman and his follower.&nbsp; No, I don&rsquo;t think I care to
+put it before him, sick as I am of staying here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo could not be more sick of staying than Schomberg was of seeing
+him stay.&nbsp; Schomberg believed so firmly in the reality of Heyst
+as created by his own power of false inferences, of his hate, of his
+love of scandal, that he could not contain a stifled cry of conviction
+as sincere as most of our convictions, the disguised servants of our
+passions, can appear at a supreme moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would have been like going to pick up a nugget of a thousand
+pounds, or two or three times as much, for all I know.&nbsp; No trouble,
+no - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The petticoat&rsquo;s the trouble,&rdquo; Ricardo struck in.</p>
+<p>He had resumed his noiseless, feline, oblique prowling, in which
+an observer would have detected a new character of excitement, such
+as a wild animal of the cat species, anxious to make a spring, might
+betray.&nbsp; Schomberg saw nothing.&nbsp; It would probably have cheered
+his drooping spirits; but in a general way he preferred not to look
+at Ricardo.&nbsp; Ricardo, however, with one of his slanting, gliding,
+restless glances, observed the bitter smile on Schomberg&rsquo;s bearded
+lips - the unmistakable smile of ruined hopes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are a pretty unforgiving sort of chap,&rdquo; he said,
+stopping for a moment with an air of interest.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hang me
+if I ever saw anybody look so disappointed!&nbsp; I bet you would send
+black plague to that island if you only knew how - eh, what?&nbsp; Plague
+too good for them?&nbsp; Ha, ha, ha!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He bent down to stare at Schomberg who sat unstirring with stony
+eyes and set features, and apparently deaf to the rasping derision of
+that laughter so close to his red fleshy ear.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Black plague too good for them, ha, ha!&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo
+pressed the point on the tormented hotel-keeper.&nbsp; Schomberg kept
+his eyes down obstinately.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t wish any harm to the girl - &rdquo; he muttered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But did she bolt from you?&nbsp; A fair bilk?&nbsp; Come!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Devil only knows what that villainous Swede had done to her
+- what he promised her, how he frightened her.&nbsp; She couldn&rsquo;t
+have cared for him, I know.&rdquo;&nbsp; Schomberg&rsquo;s vanity clung
+to the belief in some atrocious, extraordinary means of seduction employed
+by Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;Look how he bewitched that poor Morrison,&rdquo;
+he murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, Morrison - got all his money, what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes - and his life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Terrible fellow, that Swedish baron!&nbsp; How is one to get
+at him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg exploded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Three against one!&nbsp; Are you shy?&nbsp; Do you want me
+to give you a letter of introduction?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You ought to look at yourself in a glass,&rdquo; Ricardo said
+quietly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Dash me if you don&rsquo;t get a stroke of some
+kind presently.&nbsp; And this is the fellow who says women can do nothing!&nbsp;
+That one will do for you, unless you manage to forget her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish I could,&rdquo; Schomberg admitted earnestly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s all the doing of that Swede.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+get enough sleep, Mr. Ricardo.&nbsp; And then, to finish me off, you
+gentlemen turn up . . . as if I hadn&rsquo;t enough worry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s done you good,&rdquo; suggested the secretary
+with ironic seriousness.&nbsp; &ldquo;Takes your mind off that silly
+trouble.&nbsp; At your age too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He checked himself, as if in pity, and changing his tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I would really like to oblige you while doing a stroke of
+business at the same time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A good stroke,&rdquo; insisted Schomberg, as if it were mechanically.&nbsp;
+In his simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered
+his head.&nbsp; An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with
+Schomberg ideas were rare and therefore tenacious.&nbsp; &ldquo;Minted
+gold,&rdquo; he murmured with a sort of anguish.</p>
+<p>Such an expressive combination of words was not without effect upon
+Ricardo.&nbsp; Both these men were amenable to the influence of verbal
+suggestions.&nbsp; The secretary of &ldquo;plain Mr. Jones&rdquo; sighed
+and murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; But how is one to get at it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Being three to one,&rdquo; said Schomberg, &ldquo;I suppose
+you could get it for the asking.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One would think the fellow lived next door,&rdquo; Ricardo
+growled impatiently.&nbsp; &ldquo;Hang it all, can&rsquo;t you understand
+a plain question?&nbsp; I have asked you the way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg seemed to revive.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The way?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The torpor of deceived hopes underlying his superficial changes of
+mood had been pricked by these words which seemed pointed with purpose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The way is over the water, of course,&rdquo; said the hotel-keeper.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;For people like you, three days in a good, big boat is nothing.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s no more than a little outing, a bit of a change.&nbsp; At
+this season the Java Sea is a pond.&nbsp; I have an excellent, safe
+boat - a ship&rsquo;s life-boat - carry thirty, let alone three, and
+a child could handle her.&nbsp; You wouldn&rsquo;t get a wet face at
+this time of the year.&nbsp; You might call it a pleasure-trip.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And yet, having this boat, you didn&rsquo;t go after her yourself
+- or after him?&nbsp; Well, you are a fine fellow for a disappointed
+lover.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg gave a start at the suggestion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not three men,&rdquo; he said sulkily, as the shortest
+answer of the several he could have given.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I know your sort,&rdquo; Ricardo let fall negligently.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You are like most people - or perhaps just a little more peaceable
+than the rest of the buying and selling gang that bosses this rotten
+show.&nbsp; Well, well, you respectable citizen,&rdquo; he went on,
+&ldquo;let us go thoroughly into the matter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones&rsquo;s
+henchman was ready to discuss, in his own words, &ldquo;this boat of
+yours, with courses and distances,&rdquo; and such concrete matters
+of no good augury to that villainous Swede, he recovered his soldierly
+bearing, squared his shoulders, and asked in his military manner:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You wish, then, to proceed with the business?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo nodded.&nbsp; He had a great mind to, he said.&nbsp; A gentleman
+had to be humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too,
+on occasions, for his own good.&nbsp; And it was the business of the
+right sort of &ldquo;follower&rdquo; to know the proper time and the
+proper methods of that delicate part of his duty.&nbsp; Having exposed
+this theory Ricardo proceeded to the application.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never actually lied to him,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and
+I ain&rsquo;t going to now.&nbsp; I shall just say nothing about the
+girl.&nbsp; He will have to get over the shock the best he can.&nbsp;
+Hang it all!&nbsp; Too much humouring won&rsquo;t do here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Funny thing,&rdquo; Schomberg observed crisply.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it?&nbsp; Ay, you wouldn&rsquo;t mind taking a woman by
+the throat in some dark corner and nobody by, I bet!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo&rsquo;s dreadful, vicious, cat-like readiness to get his
+claws out at any moment startled Schomberg as usual.&nbsp; But it was
+provoking too.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you?&rdquo; he defended himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t
+you want me to believe you are up to anything?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I, my boy?&nbsp; Oh, yes.&nbsp; I am not that gentleman; neither
+are you.&nbsp; Take &rsquo;em by the throat or chuck &rsquo;em under
+the chin is all one to me - almost,&rdquo; affirmed Ricardo, with something
+obscurely ironical in his complacency.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now, as to this
+business.&nbsp; A three days&rsquo; jaunt in a good boat isn&rsquo;t
+a thing to frighten people like us.&nbsp; You are right, so far; but
+there are other details.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg was ready enough to enter into details.&nbsp; He explained
+that he had a small plantation, with a fairly habitable hut on it, on
+Madura.&nbsp; He proposed that his guest should start from town in his
+boat, as if going for an excursion to that rural spot.&nbsp; The custom-house
+people on the quay were used to see his boat go off on such trips.</p>
+<p>From Madura, after some repose and on a convenient day, Mr. Jones
+and party would make the real start.&nbsp; It would all be plain sailing.&nbsp;
+Schomberg undertook to provision the boat.&nbsp; The greatest hardship
+the voyagers need apprehend would be a mild shower of rain.&nbsp; At
+that season of the year there were no serious thunderstorms.</p>
+<p>Schomberg&rsquo;s heart began to thump as he saw himself nearing
+his vengeance.&nbsp; His speech was thick but persuasive.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No risk at all - none whatever.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo dismissed these assurances of safety with an impatient gesture.&nbsp;
+He was thinking of other risks.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The getting away from here is all right; but we may be sighted
+at sea, and that may bring awkwardness later on.&nbsp; A ship&rsquo;s
+boat with three white men in her, knocking about out of sight of land,
+is bound to make talk.&nbsp; Are we likely to be seen on our way?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, unless by native craft,&rdquo; said Schomberg.</p>
+<p>Ricardo nodded, satisfied.&nbsp; Both these white men looked on native
+life as a mere play of shadows.&nbsp; A play of shadows the dominant
+race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of
+its incomprehensible aims and needs.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; Native craft did
+not count, of course.&nbsp; It was an empty, solitary part of the sea,
+Schomberg expounded further.&nbsp; Only the Ternate mail-boat crossed
+that region about the eighth of every month, regularly - nowhere near
+the island though.&nbsp; Rigid, his voice hoarse, his heart thumping,
+his mind concentrated on the success of his plan, the hotel-keeper multiplied
+words, as if to keep as many of them as possible between himself and
+the murderous aspect of his purpose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So, if you gentlemen depart from my plantation quietly at
+sunset on the eighth - always best to make a start at night, with a
+land breeze - it&rsquo;s a hundred to one - What am I saying? - it&rsquo;s
+a thousand to one that no human eye will see you on the passage.&nbsp;
+All you&rsquo;ve got to do is keep her heading north-east for, say,
+fifty hours; perhaps not quite so long.&nbsp; There will always be draft
+enough to keep a boat moving; you may reckon on that; and then - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>The muscles about his waist quivered under his clothes with eagerness,
+with impatience, and with something like apprehension, the true nature
+of which was not clear to him.&nbsp; And he did not want to investigate
+it.&nbsp; Ricardo regarded him steadily, with those dry eyes of his
+shining more like polished stones than living tissue.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then what?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then - why, you will astonish <i>der herr baron</i> -
+ha, ha!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg seemed to force the words and the laugh out of himself
+in a hoarse bass.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you believe he has all that plunder by him?&rdquo; asked
+Ricardo, rather perfunctorily, because the fact seemed to him extremely
+probable when looked at all round by his acute mind.</p>
+<p>Schomberg raised his hands and lowered them slowly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How can it be otherwise?&nbsp; He was going home, he was on
+his way, in this hotel.&nbsp; Ask people.&nbsp; Was it likely he would
+leave it behind him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo was thoughtful.&nbsp; Then, suddenly raising his head, he
+remarked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Steer north-east for fifty hours, eh?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s not
+much of a sailing direction.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve heard of a port being
+missed before on better information.&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t you say what
+sort of landfall a fellow may expect?&nbsp; But I suppose you have never
+seen that island yourself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Schomberg admitted that he had not seen it, in a tone in which a
+man congratulates himself on having escaped the contamination of an
+unsavoury experience.&nbsp; No, certainly not.&nbsp; He had never had
+any business to call there.&nbsp; But what of that?&nbsp; He could give
+Mr. Ricardo as good a sea-mark as anybody need wish for.&nbsp; He laughed
+nervously.&nbsp; Miss it!&nbsp; He defied anyone that came within forty
+miles of it to miss the retreat of that villainous Swede.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you think of a pillar of smoke by day and a loom of
+fire at night?&nbsp; There&rsquo;s a volcano in full blast near that
+island - enough to guide almost a blind man.&nbsp; What more do you
+want?&nbsp; An active volcano to steer by?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These last words he roared out exultingly, then jumped up and glared.&nbsp;
+The door to the left of the bar had swung open, and Mrs. Schomberg,
+dressed for duty, stood facing him down the whole length of the room.&nbsp;
+She clung to the handle for a moment, then came in and glided to her
+place, where she sat down to stare straight before her, as usual.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART THREE</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER ONE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Tropical nature had been kind to the failure of the commercial enterprise.&nbsp;
+The desolation of the headquarters of the Tropical Belt Coal Company
+had been screened from the side of the sea; from the side where prying
+eyes - if any were sufficiently interested, either in malice or in sorrow
+- could have noted the decaying bones of that once sanguine enterprise.</p>
+<p>Heyst had been sitting among the bones buried so kindly in the grass
+of two wet seasons&rsquo; growth.&nbsp; The silence of his surroundings,
+broken only by such sounds as a distant roll of thunder, the lash of
+rain through the foliage of some big trees, the noise of the wind tossing
+the leaves of the forest, and of the short seas breaking against the
+shore, favoured rather than hindered his solitary meditation.</p>
+<p>A meditation is always - in a white man, at least - more or less
+an interrogative exercise.&nbsp; Heyst meditated in simple terms on
+the mystery of his actions; and he answered himself with the honest
+reflection:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He reflected, too, with the sense of making a discovery, that his
+primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed.&nbsp; The oldest voice in
+the world is just the one that never ceases to speak.&nbsp; If anybody
+could have silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst&rsquo;s
+father, with his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but
+apparently he could not.&nbsp; There was in the son a lot of that first
+ancestor who, as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from the celestial
+mould, started inspecting and naming the animals of that paradise which
+he was so soon to lose.</p>
+<p>Action - the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth!&nbsp;
+The barbed hook, baited with the illusions of progress, to bring out
+of the lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the
+silliest fish of them all.&rdquo;&nbsp; Heyst said to himself.</p>
+<p>He suffered.&nbsp; He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which
+ought to have been a masterpiece of aloofness.&nbsp; He remembered always
+his last evening with his father.&nbsp; He remembered the thin features,
+the great mass of white hair, and the ivory complexion.&nbsp; A five-branched
+candlestick stood on a little table by the side of the easy chair.&nbsp;
+They had been talking a long time.&nbsp; The noises of the street had
+died out one by one, till at last, in the moonlight, the London houses
+began to look like the tombs of an unvisited, unhonoured, cemetery of
+hopes.</p>
+<p>He had listened.&nbsp; Then, after a silence, he had asked - for
+he was really young then:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is there no guidance?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His father was in an unexpectedly soft mood on that night, when the
+moon swam in a cloudless sky over the begrimed shadows of the town.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You still believe in something, then?&rdquo; he said in a
+clear voice, which had been growing feeble of late.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+believe in flesh and blood, perhaps?&nbsp; A full and equable contempt
+would soon do away with that, too.&nbsp; But since you have not attained
+to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of contempt which is called
+pity.&nbsp; It is perhaps the least difficult - always remembering that
+you, too, if you are anything, are as pitiful as the rest, yet never
+expecting any pity for yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is one to do, then?&rdquo; sighed the young man, regarding
+his father, rigid in the high-backed chair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Look on - make no sound,&rdquo; were the last words of the
+man who had spent his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet
+which filled heaven and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its
+way unheeding.</p>
+<p>That very night he died in his bed, so quietly that they found him
+in his usual attitude of sleep, lying on his side, one hand under his
+cheek, and his knees slightly bent.&nbsp; He had not even straightened
+his legs.</p>
+<p>His son buried the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of beliefs.&nbsp;
+He observed that the death of that bitter contemner of life did not
+trouble the flow of life&rsquo;s stream, where men and women go by thick
+as dust, revolving and jostling one another like figures cut out of
+cork and weighted with lead just sufficiently to keep them in their
+proudly upright posture.</p>
+<p>After the funeral, Heyst sat alone, in the dusk, and his meditation
+took the form of a definite vision of the stream, of the fatuously jostling,
+nodding, spinning figures hurried irresistibly along, and giving no
+sign of being aware that the voice on the bank had been suddenly silenced
+. . . Yes.&nbsp; A few obituary notices generally insignificant and
+some grossly abusive.&nbsp; The son had read them all with mournful
+detachment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is the hate and rage of their fear,&rdquo; he thought
+to himself, &ldquo;and also of wounded vanity.&nbsp; They shriek their
+little shriek as they fly past.&nbsp; I suppose I ought to hate him
+too . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He became aware of his eyes being wet.&nbsp; It was not that the
+man was his father.&nbsp; For him it was purely a matter of hearsay
+which could not in itself cause this emotion.&nbsp; No!&nbsp; It was
+because he had looked at him so long that he missed him so much.&nbsp;
+The dead man had kept him on the bank by his side.&nbsp; And now Heyst
+felt acutely that he was alone on the bank of the stream.&nbsp; In his
+pride he determined not to enter it.</p>
+<p>A few slow tears rolled down his face.&nbsp; The rooms, filling with
+shadows, seemed haunted by a melancholy, uneasy presence which could
+not express itself.&nbsp; The young man got up with a strange sense
+of making way for something impalpable that claimed possession, went
+out of the house, and locked the door.&nbsp; A fortnight later he started
+on his travels - to &ldquo;look on and never make a sound.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain
+quantity of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and pictures,
+which might have complained of heartless desertion after many years
+of faithful service; for there is a soul in things.&nbsp; Heyst, our
+Heyst, had often thought of them, reproachful and mute, shrouded and
+locked up in those rooms, far away in London with the sounds of the
+street reaching them faintly, and sometimes a little sunshine, when
+the blinds were pulled up and the windows opened from time to time in
+pursuance of his original instructions and later reminders.&nbsp; It
+seemed as if in his conception of a world not worth touching, and perhaps
+not substantial enough to grasp, these objects familiar to his childhood
+and his youth, and associated with the memory of an old man, were the
+only realities, something having an absolute existence.&nbsp; He would
+never have them sold, or even moved from the places they occupied when
+he looked upon them last.&nbsp; When he was advised from London that
+his lease had expired, and that the house, with some others as like
+it as two peas, was to be demolished, he was surprisingly distressed.</p>
+<p>He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies.&nbsp;
+Already the Tropical Belt Coal Company was in existence.&nbsp; He sent
+instructions to have some of the things sent out to him at Samburan,
+just as any ordinary, credulous person would have done.&nbsp; They came,
+torn out from their long repose - a lot of books, some chairs and tables,
+his father&rsquo;s portrait in oils, which surprised Heyst by its air
+of youth, because he remembered his father as a much older man; a lot
+of small objects, such as candlesticks, inkstands, and statuettes from
+his father&rsquo;s study, which surprised him because they looked so
+old and so much worn.</p>
+<p>The manager of the Tropical Belt Coal Company, unpacking them on
+the veranda in the shade besieged by a fierce sunshine, must have felt
+like a remorseful apostate before these relics.&nbsp; He handled them
+tenderly; and it was perhaps their presence there which attached him
+to the island when he woke up to the failure of his apostasy.&nbsp;
+Whatever the decisive reason, Heyst had remained where another would
+have been glad to be off.&nbsp; The excellent Davidson had discovered
+the fact without discovering the reason, and took a humane interest
+in Heyst&rsquo;s strange existence, while at the same time his native
+delicacy kept him from intruding on the other&rsquo;s whim of solitude.&nbsp;
+He could not possibly guess that Heyst, alone on the island, felt neither
+more nor less lonely than in any other place, desert or populous.&nbsp;
+Davidson&rsquo;s concern was, if one may express it so, the danger of
+spiritual starvation; but this was a spirit which had renounced all
+outside nourishment, and was sustaining itself proudly on its own contempt
+of the usual coarse ailments which life offers to the common appetites
+of men.</p>
+<p>Neither was Heyst&rsquo;s body in danger of starvation, as Schomberg
+had so confidently asserted.&nbsp; At the beginning of the company&rsquo;s
+operations the island had been provisioned in a manner which had outlasted
+the need.&nbsp; Heyst did not need to fear hunger; and his very loneliness
+had not been without some alleviation.&nbsp; Of the crowd of imported
+Chinese labourers, one at least had remained in Samburan, solitary and
+strange, like a swallow left behind at the migrating season of his tribe.</p>
+<p>Wang was not a common coolie.&nbsp; He had been a servant to white
+men before.&nbsp; The agreement between him and Heyst consisted in the
+exchange of a few words on the day when the last batch of the mine coolies
+was leaving Samburan.&nbsp; Heyst, leaning over the balustrade of the
+veranda, was looking on, as calm in appearance as though he had never
+departed from the doctrine that this world, for the wise, is nothing
+but an amusing spectacle.&nbsp; Wang came round the house, and standing
+below, raised up his yellow, thin face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All finished?&rdquo; he asked.&nbsp; Heyst nodded slightly
+from above, glancing towards the jetty.&nbsp; A crowd of blue-clad figures
+with yellow faces and calves was being hustled down into the boats of
+the chartered steamer lying well out, like a painted ship on a painted
+sea; painted in crude colours, without shadows, without feeling, with
+brutal precision.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You had better hurry up if you don&rsquo;t want to be left
+behind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But the Chinaman did not move.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We stop,&rdquo; he declared.&nbsp; Heyst looked down at him
+for the first time.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You want to stop here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What were you?&nbsp; What was your work here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mess-loom boy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you want to stay with me here as my boy?&rdquo; inquired
+Heyst, surprised.</p>
+<p>The Chinaman unexpectedly put on a deprecatory expression, and said,
+after a marked pause:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Heyst, &ldquo;unless you like.&nbsp;
+I propose to stay on here - it may be for a very long time.&nbsp; I
+have no power to make you go if you wish to remain, but I don&rsquo;t
+see why you should.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Catchee one piecee wife,&rdquo; remarked Wang unemotionally,
+and marched off, turning his back on the wharf and the great world beyond,
+represented by the steamer waiting for her boats.</p>
+<p>Heyst learned presently that Wang had persuaded one of the women
+of Alfuro village, on the west shore of the island, beyond the central
+ridge, to come over to live with him in a remote part of the company&rsquo;s
+clearing.&nbsp; It was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros, having
+been frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had blocked the
+path over the ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept strictly on
+their own side.&nbsp; The coolies, as a body, mistrusting the manifest
+mildness of these harmless fisher-folk, had kept to their lines, without
+attempting to cross the island.&nbsp; Wang was the brilliant exception.&nbsp;
+He must have been uncommonly fascinating, in a way that was not apparent
+to Heyst, or else uncommonly persuasive.&nbsp; The woman&rsquo;s services
+to Heyst were limited to the fact that she had anchored Wang to the
+spot by her charms, which remained unknown to the white man, because
+she never came near the houses.&nbsp; The couple lived at the edge of
+the forest, and she could sometimes be seen gazing towards the bungalow
+shading her eyes with her hand.&nbsp; Even from a distance she appeared
+to be a shy, wild creature, and Heyst, anxious not to try her primitive
+nerves unduly, scrupulously avoided that side of the clearing in his
+strolls.</p>
+<p>The day - or rather the first night - after his hermit life began,
+he was aware of vague sounds of revelry in that direction.&nbsp; Emboldened
+by the departure of the invading strangers, some Alfuros, the woman&rsquo;s
+friends and relations, had ventured over the ridge to attend something
+in the nature of a wedding feast.&nbsp; Wang had invited them.&nbsp;
+But this was the only occasion when any sound louder than the buzzing
+of insects had troubled the profound silence of the clearing.&nbsp;
+The natives were never invited again.&nbsp; Wang not, only knew how
+to live according to conventional proprieties, but had strong personal
+views as to the manner of arranging his domestic existence.&nbsp; After
+a time Heyst perceived that Wang had annexed all the keys.&nbsp; Any
+keys left lying about vanished after Wang had passed that way.&nbsp;
+Subsequently some of them - those that did not belong to the store-rooms
+and the empty bungalows, and could not be regarded as the common property
+of this community of two - were returned to Heyst, tied in a bunch with
+a piece of string.&nbsp; He found them one morning lying by the side
+of his plate.&nbsp; He had not been inconvenienced by their absence,
+because he never locked up anything in the way of drawers and boxes.&nbsp;
+Heyst said nothing.&nbsp; Wang also said nothing.&nbsp; Perhaps he had
+always been a taciturn man; perhaps he was influenced by the genius
+of the locality, which was certainly that of silence.&nbsp; Till Heyst
+and Morrison had landed in Black Diamond Bay, and named it, that side
+of Samburan had hardly ever heard the sound of human speech.&nbsp; It
+was easy to be taciturn with Heyst, who had plunged himself into an
+abyss of meditation over books, and remained in it till the shadow of
+Wang falling across the page, and the sound of a rough, low voice uttering
+the Malay word &ldquo;<i>makan</i>,&rdquo; would force him to climb
+out to a meal.</p>
+<p>Wang in his native province in China might have been an aggressively,
+sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in
+a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to
+except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen
+per day.&nbsp; And he gave no more than he got.&nbsp; It is to be presumed
+that if he suffered he made up for it with the Alfuro woman.&nbsp; He
+always went back to her at the first fall of dusk, vanishing from the
+bungalow suddenly at this hour, like a sort of topsy-turvy, day-hunting,
+Chinese ghost with a white jacket and a pigtail.&nbsp; Presently, giving
+way to a Chinaman&rsquo;s ruling passion, he could be observed breaking
+the ground near his hut, between the mighty stumps of felled trees,
+with a miner&rsquo;s pickaxe.&nbsp; After a time, he discovered a rusty
+but serviceable spade in one of the empty store-rooms, and it is to
+be supposed that he got on famously; but nothing of it could be seen,
+because he went to the trouble of pulling to pieces one of the company&rsquo;s
+sheds in order to get materials for making a high and very close fence
+round his patch, as if the growing of vegetables were a patented process,
+or an awful and holy mystery entrusted to the keeping of his race.</p>
+<p>Heyst, following from a distance the progress of Wang&rsquo;s gardening
+and of these precautions - there was nothing else to look at - was amused
+at the thought that he, in his own person, represented the market for
+its produce.&nbsp; The Chinaman had found several packets of seeds in
+the store-rooms, and had surrendered to an irresistible impulse to put
+them into the ground.&nbsp; He would make his master pay for the vegetables
+which he was raising to satisfy his instinct.&nbsp; And, looking silently
+at the silent Wang going about his work in the bungalow in his unhasty,
+steady way; Heyst envied the Chinaman&rsquo;s obedience to his instincts,
+the powerful simplicity of purpose which made his existence appear almost
+automatic in the mysterious precision of its facts.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER TWO</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>During his master&rsquo;s absence at Sourabaya, Wang had busied himself
+with the ground immediately in front of the principal bungalow.&nbsp;
+Emerging from the fringe of grass growing across the shore end of the
+coal-jetty, Heyst beheld a broad, clear space, black and level, with
+only one or two clumps of charred twigs, where the flame had swept from
+the front of his house to the nearest trees of the forest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You took the risk of firing the grass?&rdquo; Heyst asked.</p>
+<p>Wang nodded.&nbsp; Hanging on the arm of the white man before whom
+he stood was the girl called Alma; but neither from the Chinaman&rsquo;s
+eyes nor from his expression could anyone have guessed that he was in
+the slightest degree aware of the fact.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He has been tidying the place in his labour-saving way,&rdquo;
+explained Heyst, without looking at the girl, whose hand rested on his
+forearm.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s the whole establishment, you see.&nbsp;
+I told you I hadn&rsquo;t even a dog to keep me company here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wang had marched off towards the wharf.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s like those waiters in that place,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
+That place was Schomberg&rsquo;s hotel.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One Chinaman looks very much like another,&rdquo; Heyst remarked.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;We shall find it useful to have him here.&nbsp; This is the house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They faced, at some distance, the six shallow steps leading up to
+the veranda.&nbsp; The girl had abandoned Heyst&rsquo;s arm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is the house,&rdquo; he repeated.</p>
+<p>She did not offer to budge away from his side, but stood staring
+fixedly at the steps, as if they had been something unique and impracticable.&nbsp;
+He waited a little, but she did not move.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you want to go in?&rdquo; he asked, without turning
+his head to look at her.&nbsp; &ldquo;The sun&rsquo;s too heavy to stand
+about here.&rdquo;&nbsp; He tried to overcome a sort of fear, a sort
+of impatient faintness, and his voice sounded rough.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+had better go in,&rdquo; he concluded.</p>
+<p>They both moved then, but at the foot of the stairs Heyst stopped,
+while the girl went on rapidly, as if nothing could stop her now.&nbsp;
+She crossed the veranda swiftly, and entered the twilight of the big
+central room opening upon it, and then the deeper twilight of the room
+beyond.&nbsp; She stood still in the dusk, in which her dazzled eyes
+could scarcely make out the forms of objects, and sighed a sigh of relief.&nbsp;
+The impression of the sunlight, of sea and sky, remained with her like
+a memory of a painful trial gone through - done with at last!</p>
+<p>Meanwhile Heyst had walked back slowly towards the jetty; but he
+did not get so far as that.&nbsp; The practical and automatic Wang had
+got hold of one of the little trucks that had been used for running
+baskets of coal alongside ships.&nbsp; He appeared pushing it before
+him, loaded lightly with Heyst&rsquo;s bag and the bundle of the girl&rsquo;s
+belongings, wrapped in Mrs. Schomberg&rsquo;s shawl.&nbsp; Heyst turned
+about and walked by the side of the rusty rails on which the truck ran.&nbsp;
+Opposite the house Wang stopped, lifted the bag to his shoulder, balanced
+it carefully, and then took the bundle in his hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Leave those things on the table in the big room - understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Me savee,&rdquo; grunted Wang, moving off.</p>
+<p>Heyst watched the Chinaman disappear from the veranda.&nbsp; It was
+not till he had seen Wang come out that he himself entered the twilight
+of the big room.&nbsp; By that time Wang was out of sight at the back
+of the house, but by no means out of hearing.&nbsp; The Chinaman could
+hear the voice of him who, when there were many people there, was generally
+referred to as &ldquo;Number One.&rdquo;&nbsp; Wang was not able to
+understand the words, but the tone interested him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where are you?&rdquo; cried Number One.</p>
+<p>Then Wang heard, much more faint, a voice he had never heard before
+- a novel impression which he acknowledged by cocking his head slightly
+to one side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am here - out of the sun.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The new voice sounded remote and uncertain.&nbsp; Wang heard nothing
+more, though he waited for some time, very still, the top of his shaven
+poll exactly level with the floor of the back veranda.&nbsp; His face
+meanwhile preserved an inscrutable immobility.&nbsp; Suddenly he stooped
+to pick up the lid of a deal candle-box which was lying on the ground
+by his foot.&nbsp; Breaking it up with his fingers, he directed his
+steps towards the cook-shed, where, squatting on his heels, he proceeded
+to kindle a small fire under a very sooty kettle, possibly to make tea.&nbsp;
+Wang had some knowledge of the more superficial rites and ceremonies
+of white men&rsquo;s existence, otherwise so enigmatically remote to
+his mind, and containing unexpected possibilities of good and evil,
+which had to be watched for with prudence and care.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER THREE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>That morning, as on all the others of the full tale of mornings since
+his return with the girl to Samburan, Heyst came out on the veranda
+and spread his elbows on the railing, in an easy attitude of proprietorship.&nbsp;
+The bulk of the central ridge of the island cut off the bungalow from
+sunrises, whether glorious or cloudy, angry or serene.&nbsp; The dwellers
+therein were debarred from reading early the fortune of the new-born
+day.&nbsp; It sprang upon them in its fulness with a swift retreat of
+the great shadow when the sun, clearing the ridge, looked down, hot
+and dry, with a devouring glare like the eye of an enemy.&nbsp; But
+Heyst, once the Number One of this locality, while it was comparatively
+teeming with mankind, appreciated the prolongation of early coolness,
+the subdued, lingering half-light, the faint ghost of the departed night,
+the fragrance of its dewy, dark soul captured for a moment longer between
+the great glow of the sky and the intense blaze of the uncovered sea.</p>
+<p>It was naturally difficult for Heyst to keep his mind from dwelling
+on the nature and consequences of this, his latest departure from the
+part of an unconcerned spectator.&nbsp; Yet he had retained enough of
+his wrecked philosophy to prevent him from asking himself consciously
+how it would end.&nbsp; But at the same time he could not help being
+temperamentally, from long habit and from set purpose, a spectator still,
+perhaps a little less na&iuml;ve but (as he discovered with some surprise)
+not much more far sighted than the common run of men.&nbsp; Like the
+rest of us who act, all he could say to himself, with a somewhat affected
+grimness, was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We shall see!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This mood of grim doubt intruded on him only when he was alone.&nbsp;
+There were not many such moments in his day now; and he did not like
+them when they came.&nbsp; On this morning he had no time to grow uneasy.&nbsp;
+Alma came out to join him long before the sun, rising above the Samburan
+ridge, swept the cool shadow of the early morning and the remnant of
+the night&rsquo;s coolness clear off the roof under which they had dwelt
+for more than three months already.&nbsp; She came out as on other mornings.&nbsp;
+He had heard her light footsteps in the big room - the room where he
+had unpacked the cases from London; the room now lined with the backs
+of books halfway up on its three sides.&nbsp; Above the cases the fine
+matting met the ceiling of tightly stretched white calico.&nbsp; In
+the dusk and coolness nothing gleamed except the gilt frame of the portrait
+of Heyst&rsquo;s father, signed by a famous painter, lonely in the middle
+of a wall.</p>
+<p>Heyst did not turn round.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you know what I was thinking of?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; Her tone betrayed always a shade
+of anxiety, as though she were never certain how a conversation with
+him would end.&nbsp; She leaned on the guard-rail by his side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she repeated.&nbsp; &ldquo;What was it?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+She waited.&nbsp; Then, rather with reluctance than shyness, she asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Were you thinking of me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was wondering when you would come out,&rdquo; said Heyst,
+still without looking at the girl - to whom, after several experimental
+essays in combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given
+the name of Lena.</p>
+<p>She remarked after a pause:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was not very far from you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Apparently you were not near enough for me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You could have called if you wanted me,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And I wasn&rsquo;t so long doing my hair.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Apparently it was too long for me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you were thinking of me, anyhow.&nbsp; I am glad of
+it.&nbsp; Do you know, it seems to me, somehow, that if you were to
+stop thinking of me I shouldn&rsquo;t be in the world at all!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He turned round and looked at her.&nbsp; She often said things which
+surprised him.&nbsp; A vague smile faded away on her lips before his
+scrutiny.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo; he asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is a reproach?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A reproach!&nbsp; Why, how could it be?&rdquo; she defended
+herself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, what did it mean?&rdquo; he insisted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What I said - just what I said.&nbsp; Why aren&rsquo;t you
+fair?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, this is at least a reproach!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She coloured to the roots of her hair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It looks as if you were trying to make out that I am disagreeable,&rdquo;
+she murmured.&nbsp; &ldquo;Am I?&nbsp; You will make me afraid to open
+my mouth presently.&nbsp; I shall end by believing I am no good.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her head drooped a little.&nbsp; He looked at her smooth, low brow,
+the faintly coloured checks, and the red lips parted slightly, with
+the gleam of her teeth within.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then I won&rsquo;t be any good,&rdquo; she added with
+conviction.&nbsp; &ldquo;That I won&rsquo;t!&nbsp; I can only be what
+you think I am.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He made a slight movement.&nbsp; She put her hand on his arm, without
+raising her head, and went on, her voice animated in the stillness of
+her body:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is so.&nbsp; It couldn&rsquo;t be any other way with a
+girl like me and a man like you.&nbsp; Here we are, we two alone, and
+I can&rsquo;t even tell where we are.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A very well-known spot of the globe,&rdquo; Heyst uttered
+gently.&nbsp; &ldquo;There must have been at least fifty thousand circulars
+issued at the time - a hundred and fifty thousand, more likely.&nbsp;
+My friend was looking after that, and his ideas were large and his belief
+very strong.&nbsp; Of us two it was he who had the faith.&nbsp; A hundred
+and fifty thousand, certainly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is it you mean?&rdquo; she asked in a low tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What should I find fault with you for?&rdquo; Heyst went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;For being amiable, good, gracious - and pretty?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A silence fell.&nbsp; Then she said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all right that you should think that of me.&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s no one here to think anything of us, good or bad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she uttered.&nbsp;
+The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave him, he was aware,
+was more physical than moral.&nbsp; Every time she spoke to him she
+seemed to abandon to him something of herself - something excessively
+subtle and inexpressible, to which he was infinitely sensible, which
+he would have missed horribly if she were to go away.&nbsp; While he
+was looking into her eyes she raised her bare forearm, out of the short
+sleeve, and held it in the air till he noticed it and hastened to pose
+his great bronze moustaches on the whiteness of the skin.&nbsp; Then
+they went in.</p>
+<p>Wang immediately appeared in front, and, squatting on his heels,
+began to potter mysteriously about some plants at the foot of the veranda.&nbsp;
+When Heyst and the girl came out again, the Chinaman had gone in his
+peculiar manner, which suggested vanishing out of existence rather than
+out of sight, a process of evaporation rather than of movement.&nbsp;
+They descended the steps, looking at each other, and started off smartly
+across the cleared ground; but they were not ten yards away when, without
+perceptible stir or sound, Wang materialized inside the empty room.&nbsp;
+The Chinaman stood still with roaming eyes, examining the walls as if
+for signs, for inscriptions; exploring the floor as if for pitfalls,
+for dropped coins.&nbsp; Then he cocked his head slightly at the profile
+of Heyst&rsquo;s father, pen in hand above a white sheet of paper on
+a crimson tablecloth; and, moving forward noiselessly, began to clear
+away the breakfast things.</p>
+<p>Though he proceeded without haste, the unerring precision of his
+movements, the absolute soundlessness of the operation, gave it something
+of the quality of a conjuring trick.&nbsp; And, the trick having been
+performed, Wang vanished from the scene, to materialize presently in
+front of the house.&nbsp; He materialized walking away from it, with
+no visible or guessable intention; but at the end of some ten paces
+he stopped, made a half turn, and put his hand up to shade his eyes.&nbsp;
+The sun had topped the grey ridge of Samburan.&nbsp; The great morning
+shadow was gone; and far away in the devouring sunshine Wang was in
+time to see Number One and the woman, two remote white specks against
+the sombre line of the forest.&nbsp; In a moment they vanished.&nbsp;
+With the smallest display of action, Wang also vanished from the sunlight
+of the clearing.</p>
+<p>Heyst and Lena entered the shade of the forest path which crossed
+the island, and which, near its highest point had been blocked by felled
+trees.&nbsp; But their intention was not to go so far.&nbsp; After keeping
+to the path for some distance, they left it at a point where the forest
+was bare of undergrowth, and the trees, festooned with creepers, stood
+clear of one another in the gloom of their own making.&nbsp; Here and
+there great splashes of light lay on the ground.&nbsp; They moved, silent
+in the great stillness, breathing the calmness, the infinite isolation,
+the repose of a slumber without dreams.&nbsp; They emerged at the upper
+limit of vegetation, among some rocks; and in a depression of the sharp
+slope, like a small platform, they turned about and looked from on high
+over the sea, lonely, its colour effaced by sunshine, its horizon a
+heat mist, a mere unsubstantial shimmer in the pale and blinding infinity
+overhung by the darker blaze of the sky.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It makes my head swim,&rdquo; the girl murmured, shutting
+her eyes and putting her hand on his shoulder.</p>
+<p>Heyst, gazing fixedly to the southward, exclaimed:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sail ho!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A moment of silence ensued.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It must be very far away,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t think you could see it.&nbsp; Some native craft making for
+the Moluccas, probably.&nbsp; Come, we mustn&rsquo;t stay here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With his arm round her waist, he led her down a little distance,
+and they settled themselves in the shade; she, seated on the ground,
+he a little lower, reclining at her feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t like to look at the sea from up there?&rdquo;
+he said after a time.</p>
+<p>She shook her head.&nbsp; That empty space was to her the abomination
+of desolation.&nbsp; But she only said again:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It makes my head swim.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Too big?&rdquo; he inquired.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Too lonely.&nbsp; It makes my heart sink, too,&rdquo; she
+added in a low voice, as if confessing a secret.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m am afraid,&rdquo; said Heyst, &ldquo;that you would
+be justified in reproaching me for these sensations.&nbsp; But what
+would you have?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His tone was playful, but his eyes, directed at her face, were serious.&nbsp;
+She protested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not feeling lonely with you - not a bit.&nbsp; It is
+only when we come up to that place, and I look at all that water and
+all that light - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We will never come here again, then,&rdquo; he interrupted
+her.</p>
+<p>She remained silent for a while, returning his gaze till he removed
+it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It seems as if everything that there is had gone under,&rdquo;
+she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Reminds you of the story of the deluge,&rdquo; muttered the
+man, stretched at her feet and looking at them.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are you
+frightened at it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone.&nbsp;
+When I say, I, of course I mean we.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you?&rdquo; . . . Heyst remained silent for a while.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The vision of a world destroyed,&rdquo; he mused aloud.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Would you be sorry for it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should be sorry for the happy people in it,&rdquo; she said
+simply.</p>
+<p>His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he seemed
+to detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a glimpse of
+the sun through the clouds.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should have thought it&rsquo;s they specially who ought
+to have been congratulated.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes - I understand what you mean; but there were forty
+days before it was all over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You seem to be in possession of all the details.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in silence.&nbsp;
+She was not looking at him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sunday school,&rdquo; she murmured.&nbsp; &ldquo;I went regularly
+from the time I was eight till I was thirteen.&nbsp; We lodged in the
+north of London, off Kingsland Road.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t a bad time.&nbsp;
+Father was earning good money then.&nbsp; The woman of the house used
+to pack me off in the afternoon with her own girls.&nbsp; She was a
+good woman.&nbsp; Her husband was in the post office.&nbsp; Sorter or
+something.&nbsp; Such a quiet man.&nbsp; He used to go off after supper
+for night-duty, sometimes.&nbsp; Then one day they had a row, and broke
+up the home.&nbsp; I remember I cried when we had to pack up all of
+a sudden and go into other lodgings.&nbsp; I never knew what it was,
+though - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The deluge,&rdquo; muttered Heyst absently.</p>
+<p>He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the first
+moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had come together.&nbsp;
+The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of audacity and
+sadness, would have given interest to the most inane chatter.&nbsp;
+But she was no chatterer.&nbsp; She was rather silent, with a capacity
+for immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the concert
+platform between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her hands reposing
+on her lap.&nbsp; But in the intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed
+gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable reposing
+within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force - or simply
+an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of complete
+surrender.</p>
+<p>During a long pause she did not look at him.&nbsp; Then suddenly,
+as if the word &ldquo;deluge&rdquo; had stuck in her mind, she asked,
+looking up at the cloudless sky:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Does it ever rain here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is a season when it rains almost every day,&rdquo; said
+Heyst, surprised.&nbsp; &ldquo;There are also thunderstorms.&nbsp; We
+once had a &lsquo;mud-shower.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mud-shower?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our neighbour there was shooting up ashes.&nbsp; He sometimes
+clears his red-hot gullet like that; and a thunderstorm came along at
+the same time.&nbsp; It was very messy; but our neighbour is generally
+well behaved - just smokes quietly, as he did that day when I first
+showed you the smudge in the sky from the schooner&rsquo;s deck.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;s a good-natured, lazy fellow of a volcano.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I saw a mountain smoking like that before,&rdquo; she said,
+staring at the slender stem of a tree-fern some dozen feet in front
+of her.&nbsp; &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t very long after we left England
+- some few days, though.&nbsp; I was so ill at first that I lost count
+of days.&nbsp; A smoking mountain - I can&rsquo;t think how they called
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Vesuvius, perhaps,&rdquo; suggested Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the name.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I saw it, too, years, ages ago,&rdquo; said Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On your way here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, long before I ever thought of coming into this part of
+the world.&nbsp; I was yet a boy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She turned and looked at him attentively, as if seeking to discover
+some trace of that boyhood in the mature face of the man with the hair
+thin at the top and the long, thick moustaches.&nbsp; Heyst stood the
+frank examination with a playful smile, hiding the profound effect these
+veiled grey eyes produced - whether on his heart or on his nerves, whether
+sensuous or spiritual, tender or irritating, he was unable to say.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, princess of Samburan,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;have
+I found favour in your sight?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She seemed to wake up, and shook her head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was thinking,&rdquo; she murmured very low.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thought, action - so many snares!&nbsp; If you begin to think
+you will be unhappy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wasn&rsquo;t thinking of myself!&rdquo; she declared with
+a simplicity which took Heyst aback somewhat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On the lips of a moralist this would sound like a rebuke,&rdquo;
+he said, half seriously; &ldquo;but I won&rsquo;t suspect you of being
+one.&nbsp; Moralists and I haven&rsquo;t been friends for many years.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had listened with an air of attention.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I understood you had no friends,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+am pleased that there&rsquo;s nobody to find fault with you for what
+you have done.&nbsp; I like to think that I am in no one&rsquo;s way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst would have said something, but she did not give him time.&nbsp;
+Unconscious of the movement he made she went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What I was thinking to myself was, why are you here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst let himself sink on his elbow again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If by &lsquo;you&rsquo; you mean &lsquo;we&rsquo; - well,
+you know why we are here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She bent her gaze down at him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, it isn&rsquo;t that.&nbsp; I meant before - all that time
+before you came across me and guessed at once that I was in trouble,
+with no one to turn to.&nbsp; And you know it was desperate trouble
+too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her voice fell on the last words, as if she would end there; but
+there was something so expectant in Heyst&rsquo;s attitude as he sat
+at her feet, looking up at her steadily, that she continued, after drawing
+a short, quick breath:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was, really.&nbsp; I told you I had been worried before
+by bad fellows.&nbsp; It made me unhappy, disturbed - angry, too.&nbsp;
+But oh, how I hated, hated, <i>hated</i> that man!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That man&rdquo; was the florid Schomberg with the military
+bearing, benefactor of white men (&lsquo;decent food to eat in decent
+company&rsquo;) - mature victim of belated passion.&nbsp; The girl shuddered.&nbsp;
+The characteristic harmoniousness of her face became, as it were, decomposed
+for an instant.&nbsp; Heyst was startled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why think of it now?&rdquo; he cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s because I was cornered that time.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t
+as before.&nbsp; It was worse, ever so much.&nbsp; I wished I could
+die of my fright - and yet it&rsquo;s only now that I begin to understand
+what a horror it might have been.&nbsp; Yes, only now, since we - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst stirred a little.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Came here,&rdquo; he finished.</p>
+<p>Her tenseness relaxed, her flushed face went gradually back to its
+normal tint.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said indifferently, but at the same time she
+gave him a stealthy glance of passionate appreciation; and then her
+face took on a melancholy cast, her whole figure drooped imperceptibly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you were coming back here anyhow?&rdquo; she asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; I was only waiting for Davidson.&nbsp; Yes, I was
+coming back here, to these ruins - to Wang, who perhaps did not expect
+to see me again.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s impossible to guess at the way that
+Chinaman draws his conclusions, and how he looks upon one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t talk about him.&nbsp; He makes me feel uncomfortable.&nbsp;
+Talk about yourself!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;About myself?&nbsp; I see you are still busy with the mystery
+of my existence here; but it isn&rsquo;t at all mysterious.&nbsp; Primarily
+the man with the quill pen in his hand in that picture you so often
+look at is responsible for my existence.&nbsp; He is also responsible
+for what my existence is, or rather has been.&nbsp; He was a great man
+in his way.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know much of his history.&nbsp; I suppose
+he began like other people; took fine words for good, ringing coin and
+noble ideals for valuable banknotes.&nbsp; He was a great master of
+both, himself, by the way.&nbsp; Later he discovered - how am I to explain
+it to you?&nbsp; Suppose the world were a factory and all mankind workmen
+in it.&nbsp; Well, he discovered that the wages were not good enough.&nbsp;
+That they were paid in counterfeit money.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see!&rdquo; the girl said slowly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst, who had been speaking as if to himself, looked up curiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t a new discovery, but he brought his capacity
+for scorn to bear on it.&nbsp; It was immense.&nbsp; It ought to have
+withered this globe.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know how many minds he convinced.&nbsp;
+But my mind was very young then, and youth I suppose can be easily seduced
+- even by a negation.&nbsp; He was very ruthless, and yet he was not
+without pity.&nbsp; He dominated me without difficulty.&nbsp; A heartless
+man could not have done so.&nbsp; Even to fools he was not utterly merciless.&nbsp;
+He could be indignant, but he was too great for flouts and jeers.&nbsp;
+What he said was not meant for the crowd; it could not be; and I was
+flattered to find myself among the elect.&nbsp; They read his books,
+but I have heard his living word.&nbsp; It was irresistible.&nbsp; It
+was as if that mind were taking me into its confidence, giving me a
+special insight into its mastery of despair.&nbsp; Mistake, no doubt.&nbsp;
+There is something of my father in every man who lives long enough.&nbsp;
+But they don&rsquo;t say anything.&nbsp; They can&rsquo;t.&nbsp; They
+wouldn&rsquo;t know how, or perhaps, they wouldn&rsquo;t speak if they
+could.&nbsp; Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does
+not stand close investigation.&nbsp; However, that particular man died
+as quietly as a child goes to sleep.&nbsp; But, after listening to him,
+I could not take my soul down into the street to fight there.&nbsp;
+I started off to wander about, an independent spectator - if that is
+possible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For a long time the girl&rsquo;s grey eyes had been watching his
+face.&nbsp; She discovered that, addressing her, he was really talking
+to himself.&nbsp; Heyst looked up, caught sight of her as it were, and
+caught himself up, with a low laugh and a change of tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All this does not tell you why I ever came here.&nbsp; Why,
+indeed?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s like prying into inscrutable mysteries which
+are not worth scrutinizing.&nbsp; A man drifts.&nbsp; The most successful
+men have drifted into their successes.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t want to tell
+you that this is a success.&nbsp; You wouldn&rsquo;t believe me if I
+did.&nbsp; It isn&rsquo;t; neither is it the ruinous failure it looks.&nbsp;
+It proves nothing, unless perhaps some hidden weakness in my character
+- and even that is not certain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked fixedly at her, and with such grave eyes that she felt
+obliged to smile faintly at him, since she did not understand what he
+meant.&nbsp; Her smile was reflected, still fainter, on his lips.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This does not advance you much in your inquiry,&rdquo; he
+went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;And in truth your question is unanswerable; but
+facts have a certain positive value, and I will tell you a fact.&nbsp;
+One day I met a cornered man.&nbsp; I use the word because it expresses
+the man&rsquo;s situation exactly, and because you just used it yourself.&nbsp;
+You know what that means?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you say?&rdquo; she whispered, astounded.&nbsp; &ldquo;A
+man!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst laughed at her wondering eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; No!&nbsp; I mean in his own way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I knew very well it couldn&rsquo;t be anything like that,&rdquo;
+she observed under her breath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t bother you with the story.&nbsp; It was a custom-house
+affair, strange as it may sound to you.&nbsp; He would have preferred
+to be killed outright - that is, to have his soul dispatched to another
+world, rather than to be robbed of his substance, his very insignificant
+substance, in this.&nbsp; I saw that he believed in another world because,
+being cornered, as I have told you, he went down on his knees and prayed.&nbsp;
+What do you think of that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst paused.&nbsp; She looked at him earnestly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t make fun of him for that?&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>Heyst made a brusque movement of protest</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear girl, I am not a ruffian,&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; Then,
+returning to his usual tone: &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t even have to conceal
+a smile.&nbsp; Somehow it didn&rsquo;t look a smiling matter.&nbsp;
+No, it was not funny; it was rather pathetic; he was so representative
+of an the past victims of the Great Joke.&nbsp; But it is by folly alone
+that the world moves, and so it is a respectable thing upon the whole.&nbsp;
+And besides, he was what one would call a good man.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+mean especially because he had offered up a prayer.&nbsp; No!&nbsp;
+He was really a decent fellow, he was quite unfitted for this world,
+he was a failure, a good man cornered - a sight for the gods; for no
+decent mortal cares to look at that sort.&rdquo;&nbsp; A thought seemed
+to occur to him.&nbsp; He turned his face to the girl.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+you, who have been cornered too - did you think of offering a prayer?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Neither her eyes nor a single one of her features moved the least
+bit.&nbsp; She only let fall the words:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not what they call a good girl.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That sounds evasive,&rdquo; said Heyst after a short silence.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Well, the good fellow did pray and after he had confessed to
+it I was struck by the comicality of the situation.&nbsp; No, don&rsquo;t
+misunderstand me - I am not alluding to his act, of course.&nbsp; And
+even the idea of Eternity, Infinity, Omnipotence, being called upon
+to defeat the conspiracy of two miserable Portuguese half-castes did
+not move my mirth.&nbsp; From the point of view of the supplicant, the
+danger to be conjured was something like the end of the world, or worse.&nbsp;
+No!&nbsp; What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel Heyst, the most
+detached of creatures in this earthly captivity, the veriest tramp on
+this earth, an indifferent stroller going through the world&rsquo;s
+bustle - that I should have been there to step into the situation of
+an agent of Providence.&nbsp; <i>I</i>, a man of universal scorn and
+unbelief . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are putting it on,&rdquo; she interrupted in her seductive
+voice, with a coaxing intonation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; I am not like that, born or fashioned, or both.&nbsp;
+I am not for nothing the son of my father, of that man in the painting.&nbsp;
+I am he, all but the genius.&nbsp; And there is even less in me than
+I make out, because the very scorn is falling away from me year after
+year.&nbsp; I have never been so amused as by that episode in which
+I was suddenly called to act such an incredible part.&nbsp; For a moment
+I enjoyed it greatly.&nbsp; It got him out of his corner, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You saved a man for fun - is that what you mean?&nbsp; Just
+for fun?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why this tone of suspicion?&rdquo; remonstrated Heyst.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I suppose the sight of this particular distress was disagreeable
+to me.&nbsp; What you call fun came afterwards, when it dawned on me
+that I was for him a walking, breathing, incarnate proof of the efficacy
+of prayer.&nbsp; I was a little fascinated by it - and then, could I
+have argued with him?&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t argue against such evidence,
+and besides it would have looked as if I had wanted to claim all the
+merit.&nbsp; Already his gratitude was simply frightful.&nbsp; Funny
+position, wasn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; The boredom came later, when we lived
+together on board his ship.&nbsp; I had, in a moment of inadvertence,
+created for myself a tie.&nbsp; How to define it precisely I don&rsquo;t
+know.&nbsp; One gets attached in a way to people one has done something
+for.&nbsp; But is that friendship?&nbsp; I am not sure what it was.&nbsp;
+I only know that he who forms a tie is lost.&nbsp; The germ of corruption
+has entered into his soul.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst&rsquo;s tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which
+seasoned all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of his
+thoughts.&nbsp; The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed
+himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did
+not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so strange,
+gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in
+all his life.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FOUR</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held
+her head in both her hands.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you tired of sitting here?&rdquo; Heyst asked.</p>
+<p>An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the
+answer she made.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why are you looking so serious?&rdquo; he pursued, and immediately
+thought that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more bearable
+than constant gaiety.&nbsp; &ldquo;However, this expression suits you
+exceedingly,&rdquo; he added, not diplomatically, but because, by the
+tendency of his taste, it was a true statement.&nbsp; &ldquo;And as
+long as I can be certain that it is not boredom which gives you this
+severe air, I am willing to sit here and look at you till you are ready
+to go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And this was true.&nbsp; He was still under the fresh sortilege of
+their common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of
+his possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has
+ceased to be masculine.&nbsp; Her eyes moved in his direction, rested
+on him, then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot
+of the straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly withdrawing
+their shade.&nbsp; The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless
+head.&nbsp; She would not look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying
+herself.&nbsp; She felt in her innermost depths an irresistible desire
+to give herself up to him more completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice.&nbsp;
+This was something of which he did not seem to have an idea.&nbsp; He
+was a strange being without needs.&nbsp; She felt his eyes fixed upon
+her; and as he kept silent, she said uneasily - for she didn&rsquo;t
+know what his silences might mean:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And so you lived with that friend - that good man?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Excellent fellow,&rdquo; Heyst responded, with a readiness
+that she did not expect.&nbsp; &ldquo;But it was a weakness on my part.&nbsp;
+I really didn&rsquo;t want to, only he wouldn&rsquo;t let me off, and
+I couldn&rsquo;t explain.&nbsp; He was the sort of man to whom you can&rsquo;t
+explain anything.&nbsp; He was extremely sensitive, and it would have
+been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings by the sort
+of plain speaking that would have been necessary.&nbsp; His mind was
+like a white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six straw-bottomed
+chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them in various combinations.&nbsp;
+But they were always the same chairs.&nbsp; He was extremely easy to
+live with; but then he got hold of this coal idea - or, rather, the
+idea got hold of him, it entered into that scantily furnished chamber
+of which I have just spoken, and sat on all the chairs.&nbsp; There
+was no dislodging it, you know!&nbsp; It was going to make his fortune,
+my fortune, everybody&rsquo;s fortune.&nbsp; In past years, in moments
+of doubt that will come to a man determined to remain free from absurdities
+of existence, I often asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what
+way would life try to get hold of me?&nbsp; And this was the way.&nbsp;
+He got it into his head that he could do nothing without me.&nbsp; And
+was I now, he asked me, to spurn and ruin him?&nbsp; Well, one morning
+- I wonder if he had gone down on his knees to pray that night! - one
+morning I gave in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away
+from him with a nervous gesture.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I gave in,&rdquo; he repeated.</p>
+<p>Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl noticed
+the strong feeling on his face with that intense interest which his
+person awakened in her mind and in her heart.&nbsp; But it soon passed
+away, leaving only a moody expression.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s difficult to resist where nothing matters,&rdquo;
+he observed.&nbsp; &ldquo;And perhaps there is a grain of freakishness
+in my nature.&nbsp; It amused me to go about uttering silly, commonplace
+phrases.&nbsp; I was never so well thought of in the islands till I
+began to jabber commercial gibberish like the veriest idiot.&nbsp; Upon
+my word, I believe that I was actually respected for a time.&nbsp; I
+was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be loyal to the man.&nbsp;
+I have been, from first to last, completely, utterly loyal to the best
+of my ability.&nbsp; I thought he understood something about coal.&nbsp;
+And if I had been aware that he knew nothing of it, as in fact he didn&rsquo;t,
+well - I don&rsquo;t know what I could have done to stop him.&nbsp;
+In one way or another I should have had to be loyal.&nbsp; Truth, work,
+ambition, love itself, may be only counters in the lamentable or despicable
+game of life, but when one takes a hand one must play the game.&nbsp;
+No, the shade of Morrison needn&rsquo;t haunt me.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s
+the matter?&nbsp; I say, Lena, why are you staring like that?&nbsp;
+Do you feel ill?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst made as if to get on his feet.&nbsp; The girl extended her
+arm to arrest him, and he remained staring in a sitting posture, propped
+on one arm, observing her indefinable expression of anxiety, as if she
+were unable to draw breath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What has come to you?&rdquo; he insisted, feeling strangely
+unwilling to move, to touch her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing!&rdquo;&nbsp; She swallowed painfully.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of
+course it can&rsquo;t be.&nbsp; What name did you say?&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+hear it properly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Name?&rdquo; repeated Heyst dazedly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I only mentioned
+Morrison.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the name of that man of whom I&rsquo;ve been
+speaking.&nbsp; What of it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you mean to say that he was your friend?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have heard enough to judge for yourself.&nbsp; You know
+as much of our connection as I know myself.&nbsp; The people in this
+part of the world went by appearances, and called us friends, as far
+as I can remember.&nbsp; Appearances - what more, what better can you
+ask for?&nbsp; In fact you can&rsquo;t have better.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t
+have anything else.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are trying to confuse me with your talk,&rdquo; she cried.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t make fun of this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t?&nbsp; Well, no I can&rsquo;t.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+a pity.&nbsp; Perhaps it would have been the best way,&rdquo; said Heyst,
+in a tone which for him could be called gloomy.&nbsp; &ldquo;Unless
+one could forget the silly business altogether.&rdquo;&nbsp; His faint
+playfulness of manner and speech returned, like a habit one has schooled
+oneself into, even before his forehead had cleared completely.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But why are you looking so hard at me?&nbsp; Oh, I don&rsquo;t
+object, and I shall try not to flinch.&nbsp; Your eyes - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was looking straight into them, and as a matter of fact had forgotten
+all about the late Morrison at that moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; he exclaimed suddenly.&nbsp; &ldquo;What an impenetrable
+girl you are Lena, with those grey eyes of yours!&nbsp; Windows of the
+soul, as some poet has said.&nbsp; The fellow must have been a glazier
+by vocation.&nbsp; Well, nature has provided excellently for the shyness
+of your soul.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When he ceased speaking, the girl came to herself with a catch of
+her breath.&nbsp; He heard her voice, the varied charm of which he thought
+he knew so well, saying with an unfamiliar intonation:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And that partner of yours is dead?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Morrison?&nbsp; Oh, yes, as I&rsquo;ve told you, he - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You never told me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t I?&nbsp; I thought I did; or, rather, I thought
+you must know.&nbsp; It seems impossible that anybody with whom I speak
+should not know that Morrison is dead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She lowered her eyelids, and Heyst was startled by something like
+an expression of horror on her face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Morrison!&rdquo; she whispered in an appalled tone.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Morrison!&rdquo;&nbsp; Her head drooped.&nbsp; Unable to see
+her features, Heyst could tell from her voice that for some reason or
+other she was profoundly moved by the syllables of that unromantic name.&nbsp;
+A thought flashed through his head - could she have known Morrison?&nbsp;
+But the mere difference of their origins made it wildly improbable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is very extraordinary!&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Have
+you ever heard the name before?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her head moved quickly several times in tiny affirmative nods, as
+if she could not trust herself to speak, or even to look at him.&nbsp;
+She was biting her lower lip.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you ever know anybody of that name?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>The girl answered by a negative sign; and then at last she spoke,
+jerkily, as if forcing herself against some doubt or fear.&nbsp; She
+had heard of that very man, she told Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Impossible!&rdquo; he said positively.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are
+mistaken.&nbsp; You couldn&rsquo;t have heard of him, it&rsquo;s - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stopped short, with the thought that to talk like this was perfectly
+useless; that one doesn&rsquo;t argue against thin air.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I did hear of him; only I didn&rsquo;t know then, I couldn&rsquo;t
+guess, that it was your partner they were talking about.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Talking about my partner?&rdquo; repeated Heyst slowly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;&nbsp; Her mind seemed almost as bewildered, as
+full of incredulity, as his.&nbsp; &ldquo;No.&nbsp; They were talking
+of you really; only I didn&rsquo;t know it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who were they?&rdquo; Heyst raised his voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Who
+was talking of me?&nbsp; Talking where?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>With the first question he had lifted himself from his reclining
+position; at the last he was on his knees before her, their heads on
+a level.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, in that town, in that hotel.&nbsp; Where else could it
+have been?&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>The idea of being talked about was always novel to Heyst&rsquo;s
+simplified conception of himself.&nbsp; For a moment he was as much
+surprised as if he had believed himself to be a mere gliding shadow
+among men.&nbsp; Besides, he had in him a half-unconscious notion that
+he was above the level of island gossip.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you said first that it was of Morrison they talked,&rdquo;
+he remarked to the girl, sinking on his heels, and no longer much interested.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Strange that you should have the opportunity to hear any talk
+at all!&nbsp; I was rather under the impression that you never saw anybody
+belonging to the town except from the platform.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You forget that I was not living with the other girls,&rdquo;
+she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;After meals they used to go back to the Pavilion,
+but I had to stay in the hotel and do my sewing, or what not, in the
+room where they talked.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t think of that.&nbsp; By the by, you never told
+me who they were.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, that horrible red-faced beast,&rdquo; she said, with
+all the energy of disgust which the mere thought of the hotel-keeper
+provoked in her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Schomberg!&rdquo; Heyst murmured carelessly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He talked to the boss - to Zangiacomo, I mean.&nbsp; I had
+to sit there.&nbsp; That devil-woman sometimes wouldn&rsquo;t let me
+go away.&nbsp; I mean Mrs. Zangiacomo.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I guessed,&rdquo; murmured Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;She liked to
+torment you in a variety of ways.&nbsp; But it is really strange that
+the hotel-keeper should talk of Morrison to Zangiacomo.&nbsp; As far
+as I can remember he saw very little of Morrison professionally.&nbsp;
+He knew many others much better.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl shuddered slightly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That was the only name I ever overheard.&nbsp; I would get
+as far away from them as I could, to the other end of the room, but
+when that beast started shouting I could not help hearing.&nbsp; I wish
+I had never heard anything.&nbsp; If I had got up and gone out of the
+room I don&rsquo;t suppose the woman would have killed me for it; but
+she would have rowed me in a nasty way.&nbsp; She would have threatened
+me and called me names.&nbsp; That sort, when they know you are helpless,
+there&rsquo;s nothing to stop them.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know how it
+is, but bad people, real bad people that you can see are bad, they get
+over me somehow.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the way they set about downing one.&nbsp;
+I am afraid of wickedness.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst watched the changing expressions of her face.&nbsp; He encouraged
+her, profoundly sympathetic, a little amused.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I quite understand.&nbsp; You needn&rsquo;t apologize for
+your great delicacy in the perception of inhuman evil.&nbsp; I am a
+little like you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not very plucky,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well!&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know myself what I would do, what
+countenance I would have before a creature which would strike me as
+being evil incarnate.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you be ashamed!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She sighed, looked up with her pale, candid gaze and a timid expression
+on her face, and murmured:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t seem to want to know what he was saying.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;About poor Morrison?&nbsp; It couldn&rsquo;t have been anything
+bad, for the poor fellow was innocence itself.&nbsp; And then, you know,
+he is dead, and nothing can possibly matter to him now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I tell you that it was of you he was talking!&rdquo; she
+cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He was saying that Morrison&rsquo;s partner first got all
+there was to get out of him, and then, and then - well, as good as murdered
+him - sent him out to die somewhere!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You believe that of me?&rdquo; said Heyst, after a moment
+of perfect silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know it had anything to do with you.&nbsp;
+Schomberg was talking of some Swede.&nbsp; How was I to know?&nbsp;
+It was only when you began telling me about how you came here - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now you have my version.&rdquo;&nbsp; Heyst forced himself
+to speak quietly.&nbsp; &ldquo;So that&rsquo;s how the business looked
+from outside!&rdquo; he muttered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I remember him saying that everybody in these parts knew the
+story,&rdquo; the girl added breathlessly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Strange that it should hurt me!&rdquo; mused Heyst to himself;
+&ldquo;yet it does.&nbsp; I seem to be as much of a fool as those everybodies
+who know the story and no doubt believe it.&nbsp; Can you remember any
+more?&rdquo; he addressed the girl in a grimly polite tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+often heard of the moral advantages of seeing oneself as others see
+one.&nbsp; Let us investigate further.&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t you recall
+something else that everybody knows?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t laugh!&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did I laugh?&nbsp; I assure you I was not aware of it.&nbsp;
+I won&rsquo;t ask you whether you believe the hotel-keeper&rsquo;s version.&nbsp;
+Surely you must know the value of human judgement!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She unclasped her hands, moved them slightly, and twined her fingers
+as before.&nbsp; Protest?&nbsp; Assent?&nbsp; Was there to be nothing
+more?&nbsp; He was relieved when she spoke in that warm and wonderful
+voice which in itself comforted and fascinated one&rsquo;s heart, which
+made her lovable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I heard this before you and I ever spoke to each other.&nbsp;
+It went out of my memory afterwards.&nbsp; Everything went out of my
+memory then; and I was glad of it.&nbsp; It was a fresh start for me,
+with you - and you know it.&nbsp; I wish I had forgotten who I was -
+that would have been best; and I very nearly did forget.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was moved by the vibrating quality of the last words.&nbsp; She
+seemed to be talking low of some wonderful enchantment, in mysterious
+terms of special significance.&nbsp; He thought that if she only could
+talk to him in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether
+by the sheer beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom
+and feeling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But,&rdquo; she went on, &ldquo;the name stuck in my head,
+it seems; and when you mentioned it - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It broke the spell,&rdquo; muttered Heyst in angry disappointment
+as if he had been deceived in some hope.</p>
+<p>The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still
+eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with
+a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before, because,
+till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the abysses of
+earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm.&nbsp; What if he should grow
+weary of the burden?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open
+her steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise.&nbsp; It
+was a purely mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor
+puzzled.&nbsp; In fact, she could understand him better then than at
+any moment since she first set eyes on him.</p>
+<p>He laughed scornfully.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What am I thinking of?&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;As if
+it could matter to me what anybody had ever said or believed, from the
+beginning of the world till the crack of doom!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never heard you laugh till today,&rdquo; she observed.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;This is the second time!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s because, when one&rsquo;s heart has been broken
+into in the way you have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are
+free to enter - shame, anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears - stupid
+laughter, too.&nbsp; I wonder what interpretation you are putting on
+it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t gay, certainly,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+why are you angry with me?&nbsp; Are you sorry you took me away from
+those beasts?&nbsp; I told you who I was.&nbsp; You could see it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; he muttered.&nbsp; He had regained his command
+of himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;I assure you I could see much more than you
+could tell me.&nbsp; I could see quite a lot that you don&rsquo;t even
+suspect yet, but you can&rsquo;t be seen quite through.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He sank to the ground by her side and took her hand.&nbsp; She asked
+gently:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What more do you want from me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He made no sound for a time.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The impossible, I suppose,&rdquo; he said very low, as one
+makes a confidence, and pressing the hand he grasped.</p>
+<p>It did not return the pressure.&nbsp; He shook his head as if to
+drive away the thought of this, and added in a louder, light tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing less.&nbsp; And it isn&rsquo;t because I think little
+of what I&rsquo;ve got already.&nbsp; Oh, no!&nbsp; It is because I
+think so much of this possession of mine that I can&rsquo;t have it
+complete enough.&nbsp; I know it&rsquo;s unreasonable.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t
+hold back anything - now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed I couldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she whispered, letting her
+hand lie passive in his tight grasp.&nbsp; &ldquo;I only wish I could
+give you something more, or better, or whatever it is you want.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was touched by the sincere accent of these simple words.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I tell you what you can do - you can tell me whether you would
+have gone with me like this if you had known of whom that abominable
+idiot of a hotel-keeper was speaking.&nbsp; A murderer - no less!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I didn&rsquo;t know you at all then,&rdquo; she cried.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And I had the sense to understand what he was saying.&nbsp; It
+wasn&rsquo;t murder, really.&nbsp; I never thought it was.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What made him invent such an atrocity?&rdquo; Heyst exclaimed.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;He seems a stupid animal.&nbsp; He <i>is</i> stupid.&nbsp; How
+did he manage to hatch that pretty tale?&nbsp; Have I a particularly
+vile countenance?&nbsp; Is black selfishness written all over my face?&nbsp;
+Or is that sort of thing so universally human that it might be said
+of anybody?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t murder,&rdquo; she insisted earnestly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know.&nbsp; I understand.&nbsp; It was worse.&nbsp; As to
+killing a man, which would be a comparatively decent thing to do, well
+- I have never done that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why should you do it?&rdquo; she asked in a frightened voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear girl, you don&rsquo;t know the sort of life I have
+been leading in unexplored countries, in the wilds; it&rsquo;s difficult
+to give you an idea.&nbsp; There are men who haven&rsquo;t been in such
+tight places as I have found myself in who have had to - to shed blood,
+as the saying is.&nbsp; Even the wilds hold prizes which tempt some
+people; but I had no schemes, no plans - and not even great firmness
+of mind to make me unduly obstinate.&nbsp; I was simply moving on, while
+the others, perhaps, were going somewhere.&nbsp; An indifference as
+to roads and purposes makes one meeker, as it were.&nbsp; And I may
+say truly, too, that I never did care, I won&rsquo;t say for life -
+I had scorned what people call by that name from the first - but for
+being alive.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know if that is what men call courage,
+but I doubt it very much.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You!&nbsp; You have no courage?&rdquo; she protested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I really don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; Not the sort that always
+itches for a weapon, for I have never been anxious to use one in the
+quarrels that a man gets into in the most innocent way sometimes.&nbsp;
+The differences for which men murder each other are, like everything
+else they do, the most contemptible, the most pitiful things to look
+back upon.&nbsp; No, I&rsquo;ve never killed a man or loved a woman
+- not even in my thoughts, not even in my dreams.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He raised her hand to his lips, and let them rest on it for a space,
+during which she moved a little closer to him.&nbsp; After the lingering
+kiss he did not relinquish his hold.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To slay, to love - the greatest enterprises of life upon a
+man!&nbsp; And I have no experience of either.&nbsp; You must forgive
+me anything that may have appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive
+in my speeches, untimely in my silences.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He moved uneasily, a little disappointed by her attitude, but indulgent
+to it, and feeling, in this moment of perfect quietness, that in holding
+her surrendered hand he had found a closer communion than they had ever
+achieved before.&nbsp; But even then there still lingered in him a sense
+of incompleteness not altogether overcome - which, it seemed, nothing
+ever would overcome - the fatal imperfection of all the gifts of life,
+which makes of them a delusion and a snare.</p>
+<p>All of a sudden he squeezed her hand angrily.&nbsp; His delicately
+playful equanimity, the product of kindness and scorn, had perished
+with the loss of his bitter liberty.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not murder, you say!&nbsp; I should think not.&nbsp; But when
+you led me to talk just now, when the name turned up, when you understood
+that it was of me that these things had been said, you showed a strange
+emotion.&nbsp; I could see it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was a bit startled,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At the baseness of my conduct?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t judge you, not for anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+With her other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one
+movement the earth and the heaven.&nbsp; &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t do
+such a thing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I!&nbsp; I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!&rdquo;
+he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;I, who could not bear to hurt his feelings.&nbsp;
+I, who respected his very madness!&nbsp; Yes, this madness, the wreck
+of which you can see lying about the jetty of Diamond Bay.&nbsp; What
+else could I do?&nbsp; He insisted on regarding me as his saviour; he
+was always restraining the eternal obligation on the tip of his tongue,
+till I was burning with shame at his gratitude.&nbsp; What could I do?&nbsp;
+He was going to repay me with this infernal coal, and I had to join
+him as one joins a child&rsquo;s game in a nursery.&nbsp; One would
+no more have thought of humiliating him than one would think of humiliating
+a child.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the use of talking of all this!&nbsp; Of
+course, the people here could not understand the truth of our relation
+to each other.&nbsp; But what business of theirs was it?&nbsp; Kill
+old Morrison!&nbsp; Well, it is less criminal, less base - I am not
+saying it is less difficult - to kill a man than to cheat him in that
+way.&nbsp; You understand that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction.&nbsp;
+His eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But it was neither one nor the other,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Then, why I your emotion?&nbsp; All you confess is that you wouldn&rsquo;t
+judge me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing
+of her wonder could be read.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I said I couldn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she whispered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!&rdquo;
+the playfulness of tone hardly concealed his irritation.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+power there must be in words, only imperfectly heard - for you did not
+listen with particular care, did you?&nbsp; What were they?&nbsp; What
+evil effort of invention drove them into that idiot&rsquo;s mouth out
+of his lying throat?&nbsp; If you were to try to remember, they would
+perhaps convince me, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t listen,&rdquo; she protested.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+was it to me what they said of anybody?&nbsp; He was saying that there
+never were such loving friends to look at as you two; then, when you
+got all you wanted out of him and got thoroughly tired of him, too,
+you kicked him out to go home and die.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in
+these quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice.&nbsp;
+She ceased abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally
+weary, sick at heart.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course, why shouldn&rsquo;t you get tired of that or any
+other - company?&nbsp; You aren&rsquo;t like anyone else, and - and
+the thought of it made me unhappy suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe
+anything bad of you.&nbsp; I - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>A brusque movement of his arm, flinging her hand away, stopped her
+short.&nbsp; Heyst had again lost control of himself.&nbsp; He would
+have shouted, if shouting had been in his character.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, this earth must be the appointed hatching planet of calumny
+enough to furnish the whole universe.&nbsp; I feel a disgust at my own
+person, as if I had tumbled into some filthy hole.&nbsp; Pah!&nbsp;
+And you - all you can say is that you won&rsquo;t judge me; that you
+- &rdquo;</p>
+<p>She raised her head at this attack, though indeed he had not turned
+to her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe anything bad of you,&rdquo; she repeated.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He made a gesture as if to say:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s sufficient.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In his soul and in his body he experienced a nervous reaction from
+tenderness.&nbsp; All at once, without transition, he detested her.&nbsp;
+But only for a moment.&nbsp; He remembered that she was pretty, and,
+more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life.&nbsp; She
+had the secret of individuality which excites - and escapes.</p>
+<p>He jumped up and began to walk to and fro.&nbsp; Presently his hidden
+fury fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind
+emptiness, desolation, regret.&nbsp; His resentment was not against
+the girl, but against life itself - that commonest of snares, in which
+he felt himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled
+by the lucidity of his mind.</p>
+<p>He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side.&nbsp;
+Before she could make a movement or even turn her head his way, he took
+her in his arms and kissed her lips.&nbsp; He tasted on them the bitterness
+of a tear fallen there.&nbsp; He had never seen her cry.&nbsp; It was
+like another appeal to his tenderness - a new seduction.&nbsp; The girl
+glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face.&nbsp; With
+her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone - a command
+which Heyst did not obey.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FIVE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst scrambled quickly
+to his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had rolled a
+little way off.&nbsp; Meanwhile she busied herself in doing up her hair,
+plaited on the top of her head in two heavy, dark tresses, which had
+come loose.&nbsp; He tendered her the helmet in silence, and waited
+as if unwilling to hear the sound of his own voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had better go down now,&rdquo; he suggested in a low tone.</p>
+<p>He extended his hand to help her up.&nbsp; He had the intention to
+smile, but abandoned it at the nearer sight of her still face, in which
+was depicted the infinite lassitude of her soul.&nbsp; On their way
+to regain the forest path they had to pass through the spot from which
+the view of the sea could be obtained.&nbsp; The flaming abyss of emptiness,
+the liquid, undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light, made
+her long for the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an austere
+spell; for the velvety dark sky and the mysterious great shadow of the
+sea, conveying peace to the day-weary heart.&nbsp; She put her hand
+to her eyes.&nbsp; Behind her back Heyst spoke gently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let us get on, Lena.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She walked ahead in silence.&nbsp; Heyst remarked that they had never
+been out before during the hottest hours.&nbsp; It would do her no good,
+he feared.&nbsp; This solicitude pleased and soothed her.&nbsp; She
+felt more and more like herself - a poor London girl playing in an orchestra,
+and snatched out from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a miserable
+existence, by a man like whom there was not, there could not be, another
+in this world.&nbsp; She felt this with elation, with uneasiness, with
+an intimate pride - and with a peculiar sinking of the heart.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat,&rdquo;
+she said decisively.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, but I don&rsquo;t forget that you&rsquo;re not a tropical
+bird.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You weren&rsquo;t born in these parts, either,&rdquo; she
+returned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, and perhaps I haven&rsquo;t even your physique.&nbsp;
+I am a transplanted being.&nbsp; Transplanted!&nbsp; I ought to call
+myself uprooted - an unnatural state of existence; but a man is supposed
+to stand anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked back at him and received a smile.&nbsp; He told her to
+keep in the shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close,
+full of heat if free from glare.&nbsp; Now and then they had glimpses
+of the company&rsquo;s old clearing blazing with light, in which the
+black stumps of trees stood charred, without shadows, miserable and
+sinister.&nbsp; They crossed the open in a direct line for the bungalow.&nbsp;
+On the veranda they fancied they had a glimpse of the vanishing Wang,
+though the girl was not at all sure that she had seen anything move.&nbsp;
+Heyst had no doubts.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wang has been looking out for us.&nbsp; We are late.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Was he?&nbsp; I thought I saw something white for a moment,
+and then I did not see it any more.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s it - he vanishes.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a very remarkable
+gift in that Chinaman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are they all like that?&rdquo; she asked with na&iuml;ve curiosity
+and uneasiness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not in such perfection,&rdquo; said Heyst, amused.</p>
+<p>He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk.&nbsp;
+The drops of perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool,
+white petal of a flower.&nbsp; He looked at her figure of grace and
+strength, solid and supple, with an ever-growing appreciation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then
+Mr. Wang will give us something to eat,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>They had found the table laid.&nbsp; When they came together again
+and sat down to it, Wang materialized without a sound, unheard, uncalled,
+and did his office.&nbsp; Which being accomplished, at a given moment
+he was not.</p>
+<p>A great silence brooded over Samburan - the silence of the great
+heat that seems pregnant with fatal issues, like the silence of ardent
+thought.&nbsp; Heyst remained alone in the big room.&nbsp; The girl
+seeing him take up a book, had retreated to her chamber.&nbsp; Heyst
+sat down under his father&rsquo;s portrait; and the abominable calumny
+crept back into his recollection.&nbsp; The taste of it came on his
+lips, nauseating and corrosive like some kinds of poison.&nbsp; He was
+tempted to spit on the floor, na&iuml;vely, in sheer unsophisticated
+disgust of the physical sensation.&nbsp; He shook his head, surprised
+at himself.&nbsp; He was not used to receive his intellectual impressions
+in that way - reflected in movements of carnal emotion.&nbsp; He stirred
+impatiently in his chair, and raised the book to his eyes with both
+hands.&nbsp; It was one of his father&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He opened it haphazard,
+and his eyes fell on the middle of the page.&nbsp; The elder Heyst had
+written of everything in many books - of space and of time, of animals
+and of stars; analysing ideas and actions, the laughter and the frowns
+of men, and the grimaces of their agony.&nbsp; The son read, shrinking
+into himself, composing his face as if under the author&rsquo;s eye,
+with a vivid consciousness of the portrait on his right hand, a little
+above his head; a wonderful presence in its heavy frame on the flimsy
+wall of mats, looking exiled and at home, out of place and masterful,
+in the painted immobility of profile.</p>
+<p>And Heyst, the son, read:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love
+- the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>He turned the pages of the little volume, &ldquo;Storm and Dust,&rdquo;
+glancing here and there at the broken text of reflections, maxims, short
+phrases, enigmatical sometimes and sometimes eloquent.&nbsp; It seemed
+to him that he was hearing his father&rsquo;s voice, speaking and ceasing
+to speak again.&nbsp; Startled at first, he ended by finding a charm
+in the illusion.&nbsp; He abandoned himself to the half-belief that
+something of his father dwelt yet on earth - a ghostly voice, audible
+to the ear of his own flesh and blood.&nbsp; With what strange serenity,
+mingled with terrors, had that man considered the universal nothingness!&nbsp;
+He had plunged into it headlong, perhaps to render death, the answer
+that faced one at every inquiry, more supportable.</p>
+<p>Heyst stirred, and the ghostly voice ceased; but his eyes followed
+the words on the last page of the book:</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>Men of tormented conscience, or of a criminal imagination, are aware
+of much that minds of a peaceful, resigned cast do not even suspect.&nbsp;
+It is not poets alone who dare descend into the abyss of infernal regions,
+or even who dream of such a descent.&nbsp; The most inexpressive of
+human beings must have said to himself, at one time or another: &ldquo;Anything
+but this!&rdquo; . . .</p>
+<p>We all have our instants of clairvoyance.&nbsp; They are not very
+helpful.&nbsp; The character of the scheme does not permit that or anything
+else to be helpful.&nbsp; Properly speaking its character, judged by
+the standards established by its victims, is infamous.&nbsp; It excuses
+every violence of protest and at the same time never fails to crush
+it, just as it crushes the blindest assent.&nbsp; The so-called wickedness
+must be, like the so-called virtue, its own reward - to be anything
+at all . . .</p>
+<p>Clairvoyance or no clairvoyance, men love their captivity.&nbsp;
+To the unknown force of negation they prefer the miserably tumbled bed
+of their servitude.&nbsp; Man alone can give one the disgust of pity;
+yet I find it easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in
+its wickedness.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p>These were the last words.&nbsp; Heyst lowered the book to his knees.&nbsp;
+Lena&rsquo;s voice spoke above his drooping head:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You sit there as if you were unhappy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you were asleep,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was lying down right enough, but I never closed my eyes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The rest would have done you good after our walk.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t
+you try?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was lying down, I tell you, but sleep I couldn&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you made no sound!&nbsp; What want of sincerity.&nbsp;
+Or did you want to be alone for a time?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I - alone?&rdquo; she murmured.</p>
+<p>He noticed her eyeing the book, and got up to put it back in the
+bookcase.&nbsp; When he turned round, he saw that she had dropped into
+the chair - it was the one she always used - and looked as if her strength
+had suddenly gone from her, leaving her only her youth, which seemed
+very pathetic, very much at his mercy.&nbsp; He moved quickly towards
+the chair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tired, are you?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s my fault, taking you up so
+high and keeping you out so long.&nbsp; Such a windless day, too!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She watched his concern, her pose languid, her eyes raised to him,
+but as unreadable as ever.&nbsp; He avoided looking into them for that
+very reason.&nbsp; He forgot himself in the contemplation of those passive
+arms, of these defenceless lips, and - yes, one had to go back to them
+- of these wide-open eyes.&nbsp; Something wild in their grey stare
+made him think of sea-birds in the cold murkiness of high latitudes.&nbsp;
+He started when she spoke, all the charm of physical intimacy revealed
+suddenly in that voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You should try to love me!&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>He made a movement of astonishment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Try,&rdquo; he muttered.&nbsp; &ldquo;But it seems to me -
+&rdquo;&nbsp; He broke off, saying to himself that if he loved her,
+he had never told her so in so many words.&nbsp; Simple words!&nbsp;
+They died on his lips.&nbsp; &ldquo;What makes you say that?&rdquo;
+he asked.</p>
+<p>She lowered her eyelids and turned her head a little.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have done nothing,&rdquo; she said in a low voice.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s you who have been good, helpful, and tender to me.&nbsp;
+Perhaps you love me for that - just for that; or perhaps you love me
+for company, and because - well!&nbsp; But sometimes it seems to me
+that you can never love me for myself, only for myself, as people do
+love each other when it is to be for ever.&rdquo;&nbsp; Her head drooped.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Forever,&rdquo; she breathed out again; then, still more faintly,
+she added an entreating: &ldquo;Do try!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These last words went straight to his heart - the sound of them more
+than the sense.&nbsp; He did not know what to say, either from want
+of practice in dealing with women or simply from his innate honesty
+of thought.&nbsp; All his defences were broken now.&nbsp; Life had him
+fairly by the throat.&nbsp; But he managed a smile, though she was not
+looking at him; yes, he did manage it - the well-known Heyst smile of
+playful courtesy, so familiar to all sorts and conditions of men in
+the islands.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My dear Lena,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it looks as if you were
+trying to pick a very unnecessary quarrel with me - of all people!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made no movement.&nbsp; With his elbows spread out he was twisting
+the ends of his long moustaches, very masculine and perplexed, enveloped
+in the atmosphere of femininity as in a cloud, suspecting pitfalls,
+and as if afraid to move.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must admit, though,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;that there is
+no one else; and I suppose a certain amount of quarrelling is necessary
+for existence in this world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like
+a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious, like
+any writing to the illiterate.&nbsp; As far as women went he was altogether
+uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which is fostered
+in the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of the heart fitting
+it for the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much
+on antagonism as on attraction.&nbsp; His mental attitude was that of
+a man looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable
+to decipher, but which may be big with some revelation.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t
+know what to say.&nbsp; All he found to add was:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t even understand what I have done or left undone
+to distress you like this.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense of the
+imperfections of their relations - a sense which made him desire her
+constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand, and which, when
+she was out of his sight, made her so vague, so elusive and illusory,
+a promise that could not be embraced and held.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t see clearly what you mean.&nbsp; Is
+your mind turned towards the future?&rdquo; he interpellated her with
+marked playfulness, because he was ashamed to let such a word pass his
+lips.&nbsp; But all his cherished negations were falling off him one
+by one.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because if it is so there is nothing easier than to dismiss
+it.&nbsp; In our future, as in what people call the other life, there
+is nothing to be frightened of.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She raised her eyes to him; and if nature had formed them to express
+anything else but blank candour he would have learned how terrified
+she was by his talk and the fact that her sinking heart loved him more
+desperately than ever.&nbsp; He smiled at her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dismiss all thought of it,&rdquo; he insisted.&nbsp; &ldquo;Surely
+you don&rsquo;t suspect after what I have heard from you, that I am
+anxious to return to mankind.&nbsp; I!&nbsp; I! murder my poor Morrison!&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s possible that I may be really capable of that which they
+say I have done.&nbsp; The point is that I haven&rsquo;t done it.&nbsp;
+But it is an unpleasant subject to me.&nbsp; I ought to be ashamed to
+confess it - but it is!&nbsp; Let us forget it.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s
+that in you, Lena, which can console me for worse things, for uglier
+passages.&nbsp; And if we forget, there are no voices here to remind
+us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had raised her head before he paused.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing can break in on us here,&rdquo; he went on and, as
+if there had been an appeal or a provocation in her upward glance, he
+bent down and took her under the arms, raising her straight out of the
+chair into a sudden and close embrace.&nbsp; Her alacrity to respond,
+which made her seem as light as a feather, warmed his heart at that
+moment more than closer caresses had done before.&nbsp; He had not expected
+that ready impulse towards himself which had been dormant in her passive
+attitude.&nbsp; He had just felt the clasp of her arms round his neck,
+when, with a slight exclamation - &ldquo;He&rsquo;s here!&rdquo; - she
+disengaged herself and bolted, away into her room.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER SIX</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Heyst was astounded.&nbsp; Looking all round, as if to take the whole
+room to witness of this outrage, he became aware of Wang materialized
+in the doorway.&nbsp; The intrusion was as surprising as anything could
+be, in view of the strict regularity with which Wang made himself visible.&nbsp;
+Heyst was tempted to laugh at first.&nbsp; This practical comment on
+his affirmation that nothing could break in on them relieved the strain
+of his feelings.&nbsp; He was a little vexed, too.&nbsp; The Chinaman
+preserved a profound silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo; asked Heyst sternly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Boat out there,&rdquo; said the Chinaman.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where?&nbsp; What do you mean?&nbsp; Boat adrift in the straits?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Some subtle change in Wang&rsquo;s bearing suggested his being out
+of breath; but he did not pant, and his voice was steady.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No - row.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was Heyst now who was startled and raised his voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Malay man, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wang made a slight negative movement with his head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you hear, Lena?&rdquo; Heyst called out.&nbsp; &ldquo;Wang
+says there is a boat in sight - somewhere near apparently.&nbsp; Where&rsquo;s
+that boat Wang?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Round the point,&rdquo; said Wang, leaping into Malay unexpectedly,
+and in a loud voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;White men three.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So close as that?&rdquo; exclaimed Heyst, moving out on the
+veranda followed by Wang.&nbsp; &ldquo;White men?&nbsp; Impossible!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Over the clearing the shadows were already lengthening.&nbsp; The
+sun hung low; a ruddy glare lay on the burnt black patch in front of
+the bungalow, and slanted on the ground between the straight, tall,
+mast-like trees soaring a hundred feet or more without a branch.&nbsp;
+The growth of bushes cut off all view of the jetty from the veranda.&nbsp;
+Far away to the right Wang&rsquo;s hut, or rather its dark roof of mats,
+could be seen above the bamboo fence which insured the privacy of the
+Alfuro woman.&nbsp; The Chinaman looked that way swiftly.&nbsp; Heyst
+paused, and then stepped back a pace into the room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;White men, Lena, apparently.&nbsp; What are you doing?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am just bathing my eyes a little,&rdquo; the girl&rsquo;s
+voice said from the inner room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes; all right!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you want me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; You had better - I am going down to the jetty.&nbsp;
+Yes, you had better stay in.&nbsp; What an extraordinary thing!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was so extraordinary that nobody could possibly appreciate how
+extraordinary it was but himself.&nbsp; His mind was full of mere exclamations,
+while his feet were carrying him in the direction of the jetty.&nbsp;
+He followed the line of the rails, escorted by Wang.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where were you when you first saw the boat?&rdquo; he asked
+over his shoulder.</p>
+<p>Wang explained in Malay that he had gone to the shore end of the
+wharf, to get a few lumps of coal from the big heap, when, happening
+to raise his eyes from the ground, he saw the boat - a white man boat,
+not a canoe.&nbsp; He had good eyes.&nbsp; He had seen the boat, with
+the men at the oars; and here Wang made a particular gesture over his
+eyes, as if his vision had received a blow.&nbsp; He had turned at once
+and run to the house to report.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No mistake, eh?&rdquo; said Heyst, moving on.&nbsp; At the
+very outer edge of the belt he stopped short.&nbsp; Wang halted behind
+him on the path, till the voice of Number One called him sharply forward
+into the open.&nbsp; He obeyed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s that boat?&rdquo; asked Heyst forcibly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I say - where is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nothing whatever was to be seen between the point and the jetty.&nbsp;
+The stretch of Diamond Bay was like a piece of purple shadow, lustrous
+and empty, while beyond the land, the open sea lay blue and opaque under
+the sun.&nbsp; Heyst&rsquo;s eyes swept all over the offing till they
+met, far off, the dark cone of the volcano, with its faint plume of
+smoke broadening and vanishing everlastingly at the top, without altering
+its shape in the glowing transparency of the evening.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The fellow has been dreaming,&rdquo; he muttered to himself.</p>
+<p>He looked hard at the Chinaman.&nbsp; Wang seemed turned into stone.&nbsp;
+Suddenly, as if he had received a shock, he started, flung his arm out
+with a pointing forefinger, and made guttural noises to the effect that
+there, there, there, he had seen a boat.</p>
+<p>It was very uncanny.&nbsp; Heyst thought of some strange hallucination.&nbsp;
+Unlikely enough; but that a boat with three men in it should have sunk
+between the point and the jetty, suddenly, like a stone, without leaving
+as much on the surface as a floating oar, was still more unlikely.&nbsp;
+The theory of a phantom boat would have been more credible than that.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Confound it!&rdquo; he muttered to himself.</p>
+<p>He was unpleasantly affected by this mystery; but now a simple explanation
+occurred to him.&nbsp; He stepped hastily out on the wharf.&nbsp; The
+boat, if it had existed and had retreated, could perhaps be seen from
+the far end of the long jetty.</p>
+<p>Nothing was to be seen.&nbsp; Heyst let his eyes roam idly over the
+sea.&nbsp; He was so absorbed in his perplexity that a hollow sound,
+as of somebody tumbling about in a boat, with a clatter of oars and
+spars, failed to make him move for a moment.&nbsp; When his mind seized
+its meaning, he had no difficulty in locating the sound.&nbsp; It had
+come from below - under the jetty!</p>
+<p>He ran back for a dozen yards or so, and then looked over.&nbsp;
+His sight plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the
+greater part of which was hidden from him by the planking of the jetty.&nbsp;
+His eyes fell on the thin back of a man doubled up over the tiller in
+a queer, uncomfortable attitude of drooping sorrow.&nbsp; Another man,
+more directly below Heyst, sprawled on his back from gunwale to gunwale,
+half off the after thwart, his head lower than his feet.&nbsp; This
+second man glared wildly upward, and struggled to raise himself, but
+to all appearance was much too drunk to succeed.&nbsp; The visible part
+of the boat contained also a flat, leather trunk, on which the first
+man&rsquo;s long legs were tucked up nervelessly.&nbsp; A large earthenware
+jug, with its wide mouth uncorked, rolled out on the bottom-boards from
+under the sprawling man.</p>
+<p>Heyst had never been so much astonished in his life.&nbsp; He stared
+dumbly at the strange boat&rsquo;s crew.&nbsp; From the first he was
+positive that these men were not sailors.&nbsp; They wore the white
+drill-suit of tropical civilization; but their apparition in a boat
+Heyst could not connect with anything plausible.&nbsp; The civilization
+of the tropics could have had nothing to do with it.&nbsp; It was more
+like those myths, current in Polynesia, of amazing strangers, who arrive
+at an island, gods or demons, bringing good or evil to the innocence
+of the inhabitants - gifts of unknown things, words never heard before.</p>
+<p>Heyst noticed a cork helmet floating alongside the boat, evidently
+fallen from the head of the man doubled over the tiller, who displayed
+a dark, bony poll.&nbsp; An oar, too, had been knocked overboard, probably
+by the sprawling man, who was still struggling, between the thwarts.&nbsp;
+By this time Heyst regarded the visitation no longer with surprise,
+but with the sustained attention demanded by a difficult problem.&nbsp;
+With one foot poised on the string-piece, and leaning on his raised
+knee, he was taking in everything.&nbsp; The sprawling man rolled off
+the thwart, collapsed, and, most unexpectedly, got on his feet.&nbsp;
+He swayed dizzily, spreading his arms out and uttered faintly a hoarse,
+dreamy &ldquo;Hallo!&rdquo;&nbsp; His upturned face was swollen, red,
+peeling all over the nose and cheeks.&nbsp; His stare was irrational.&nbsp;
+Heyst perceived stains of dried blood all over the front of his dirty
+white coat, and also on one sleeve.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&nbsp; Are you wounded?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The other glanced down, reeled - one of his feet was inside a large
+pith hat - and, recovering himself, let out a dismal, grating sound
+in the manner of a grim laugh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Blood - not mine.&nbsp; Thirst&rsquo;s the matter.&nbsp; Exhausted&rsquo;s
+the matter.&nbsp; Done up.&nbsp; Drink, man!&nbsp; Give us water!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thirst was in the very tone of his words, alternating a broken croak
+and a faint, throaty rustle which just reached Heyst&rsquo;s ears.&nbsp;
+The man in the boat raised his hands to be helped up on the jetty, whispering:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I tried.&nbsp; I am too weak.&nbsp; I tumbled down.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wang was coming along the jetty slowly, with intent, straining eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Run back and bring a crowbar here.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s one
+lying by the coal-heap,&rdquo; Heyst shouted to him.</p>
+<p>The man standing in the boat sat down on the thwart behind him.&nbsp;
+A horrible coughing laugh came through his swollen lips.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Crowbar?&nbsp; What&rsquo;s that for?&rdquo; he mumbled, and
+his head dropped on his chest mournfully.</p>
+<p>Meantime, Heyst, as if he had forgotten the boat, started kicking
+hard at a large brass tap projecting above the planks.&nbsp; To accommodate
+ships that came for coal and happened to need water as well, a stream
+had been tapped in the interior and an iron pipe led along the jetty.&nbsp;
+It terminated with a curved end almost exactly where the strangers&rsquo;
+boat had been driven between the piles; but the tap was set fast.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hurry up!&rdquo; Heyst yelled to the Chinaman, who was running
+with the crowbar in his hand.</p>
+<p>Heyst snatched it from him and, obtaining a leverage against the
+string-piece, wrung the stiff tap round with a mighty jerk.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+hope that pipe hasn&rsquo;t got choked!&rdquo; he muttered to himself
+anxiously.</p>
+<p>It hadn&rsquo;t; but it did not yield a strong gush.&nbsp; The sound
+of a thin stream, partly breaking on the gunwale of the boat and partly
+splashing alongside, became at once audible.&nbsp; It was greeted by
+a cry of inarticulate and savage joy.&nbsp; Heyst knelt on the string-piece
+and peered down.&nbsp; The man who had spoken was already holding his
+open mouth under the bright trickle.&nbsp; Water ran over his eyelids
+and over his nose, gurgled down his throat, flowed over his chin.&nbsp;
+Then some obstruction in the pipe gave way, and a sudden thick jet broke
+on his face.&nbsp; In a moment his shoulders were soaked, the front
+of his coat inundated; he streamed and dripped; water ran into his pockets,
+down his legs, into his shoes; but he had clutched the end of the pipe,
+and, hanging on with both hands, swallowed, spluttered, choked, snorted
+with the noises of a swimmer.&nbsp; Suddenly a curious dull roar reached
+Heyst&rsquo;s ears.&nbsp; Something hairy and black flew from under
+the jetty.&nbsp; A dishevelled head, coming on like a cannonball, took
+the man at the pipe in flank, with enough force to tear his grip loose
+and fling him headlong into the stern-sheets.&nbsp; He fell upon the
+folded legs of the man at the tiller, who, roused by the commotion in
+the boat, was sitting up, silent, rigid, and very much like a corpse.&nbsp;
+His eyes were but two black patches, and his teeth glistened with a
+death&rsquo;s head grin between his retracted lips, no thicker than
+blackish parchment glued over the gums.</p>
+<p>From him Heyst&rsquo;s eyes wandered to the creature who had replaced
+the first man at the end of the water-pipe.&nbsp; Enormous brown paws
+clutched it savagely; the wild, big head hung back, and in a face covered
+with a wet mass of hair there gaped crookedly a wide mouth full of fangs.&nbsp;
+The water filled it, welled up in hoarse coughs, ran down on each side
+of the jaws and down the hairy throat, soaked the black pelt of the
+enormous chest, naked under a torn check shirt, heaving convulsively
+with a play of massive muscles carved in red mahogany.</p>
+<p>As soon as the first man had recovered the breath knocked out of
+him by the irresistible charge, a scream of mad cursing issued from
+the stern-sheets.&nbsp; With a rigid, angular crooking of the elbow,
+the man at the tiller put his hand back to his hip.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t shoot him, sir!&rdquo; yelled the first man.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Wait!&nbsp; Let me have that tiller.&nbsp; I will teach him to
+shove himself in front of a <i>caballero</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Martin Ricardo flourished the heavy piece of wood, leaped forward
+with astonishing vigour, and brought it down on Pedro&rsquo;s head with
+a crash that resounded all over the quiet sweep of Black Diamond Bay.&nbsp;
+A crimson patch appeared on the matted hair, red veins appeared in the
+water flowing all over his face, and it dripped in rosy drops off his
+head.&nbsp; But the man hung on.&nbsp; Not till a second furious blow
+descended did the hairy paws let go their grip and the squirming body
+sink limply.&nbsp; Before it could touch the bottom-boards, a tremendous
+kick in the ribs from Ricardo&rsquo;s foot shifted it forward out of
+sight, whence came the noise of a heavy thud, a clatter of spars, and
+a pitiful grunt.&nbsp; Ricardo stooped to look under the jetty.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aha, dog!&nbsp; This will teach you to keep back where you
+belong, you murdering brute, you slaughtering savage, you!&nbsp; You
+infidel, you robber of churches!&nbsp; Next time I will rip you open
+from neck to heel, you carrion-cater!&nbsp; <i>Esclavo</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He backed a little and straightened himself up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mean it really,&rdquo; he remarked to Heyst,
+whose steady eyes met his from above.&nbsp; He ran aft briskly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come along, sir.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s your turn.&nbsp; I oughtn&rsquo;t
+to have drunk first.&nbsp; &rsquo;S truth, I forgot myself!&nbsp; A
+gentleman like you will overlook that, I know.&rdquo;&nbsp; As he made
+these apologies, Ricardo extended his hand.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let me steady
+you, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Slowly Mr. Jones unfolded himself in all his slenderness, rocked,
+staggered, and caught Ricardo&rsquo;s shoulder.&nbsp; His henchman assisted
+him to the pipe, which went on gushing a clear stream of water, sparkling
+exceedingly against the black piles and the gloom under the jetty.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Catch hold, sir,&rdquo; Ricardo advised solicitously.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;All right?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stepped back, and, while Mr. Jones revelled in the abundance of
+water, he addressed himself to Heyst with a sort of justificatory speech,
+the tone of which, reflecting his feelings, partook of purring and spitting.&nbsp;
+They had been thirty hours tugging at the oars, he explained, and they
+had been more than forty hours without water, except that the night
+before they had licked the dew off the gunwales.</p>
+<p>Ricardo did not explain to Heyst how it happened.&nbsp; At that precise
+moment he had no explanation ready for the man on the wharf, who, he
+guessed, must be wondering much more at the presence of his visitors
+than at their plight.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER SEVEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The explanation lay in the two simple facts that the light winds
+and strong currents of the Java Sea had drifted the boat about until
+they partly lost their bearings; and that by some extra-ordinary mistake
+one of the two jars put into the boat by Schomberg&rsquo;s man contained
+salt water.&nbsp; Ricardo tried to put some pathos into his tones.&nbsp;
+Pulling for thirty hours with eighteen-foot oars!&nbsp; And the sun!&nbsp;
+Ricardo relieved his feelings by cursing the sun.&nbsp; They had felt
+their hearts and lungs shrivel within them.&nbsp; And then, as if all
+that hadn&rsquo;t been trouble enough, he complained bitterly, he had
+had to waste his fainting strength in beating their servant about the
+head with a stretcher.&nbsp; The fool had wanted to drink sea water,
+and wouldn&rsquo;t listen to reason.&nbsp; There was no stopping him
+otherwise.&nbsp; It was better to beat him into insensibility than to
+have him go crazy in the boat, and to be obliged to shoot him.&nbsp;
+The preventive, administered with enough force to brain an elephant,
+boasted Ricardo, had to be applied on two occasions - the second time
+all but in sight of the jetty.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have seen the beauty,&rdquo; Ricardo went on expansively,
+hiding his lack of some sort of probable story under this loquacity.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I had to hammer him away from the spout.&nbsp; Opened afresh
+all the old broken spots on his head.&nbsp; You saw how hard I had to
+hit.&nbsp; He has no restraint, no restraint at all.&nbsp; If it wasn&rsquo;t
+that he can be made useful in one way or another, I would just as soon
+have let the governor shoot him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He smiled up at Heyst in his peculiar lip-retracting manner, and
+added by way of afterthought:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what will happen to him in the end, if he doesn&rsquo;t
+learn to restrain himself.&nbsp; But I&rsquo;ve taught him to mind his
+manners for a while, anyhow!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And again he addressed his quick grin up to the man on the wharf.&nbsp;
+His round eyes had never left Heyst&rsquo;s face ever since he began
+to deliver his account of the voyage.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So that&rsquo;s how he looks!&rdquo; Ricardo was saying to
+himself.</p>
+<p>He had not expected Heyst to be like this.&nbsp; He had formed for
+himself a conception containing the helpful suggestion of a vulnerable
+point.&nbsp; These solitary men were often tipplers.&nbsp; But no! -
+this was not a drinking man&rsquo;s face; nor could he detect the weakness
+of alarm, or even the weakness of surprise, on these features, in those
+steady eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We were too far gone to climb out,&rdquo; Ricardo went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I heard you walking along though.&nbsp; I thought I shouted;
+I tried to.&nbsp; You didn&rsquo;t hear me shout?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst made an almost imperceptible negative sign, which the greedy
+eyes of Ricardo - greedy for all signs - did not miss.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Throat too parched.&nbsp; We didn&rsquo;t even care to whisper
+to each other lately.&nbsp; Thirst chokes one.&nbsp; We might have died
+there under this wharf before you found us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t think where you had gone to.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Heyst was heard at last, addressing directly the newcomers from the
+sea.&nbsp; &ldquo;You were seen as soon as you cleared that point.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We were seen, eh?&rdquo; grunted Mr. Ricardo.&nbsp; &ldquo;We
+pulled like machines&nbsp; - daren&rsquo;t stop.&nbsp; The governor
+sat at the tiller, but he couldn&rsquo;t speak to us.&nbsp; She drove
+in between the piles till she hit something, and we all tumbled off
+the thwarts as if we had been drunk.&nbsp; Drunk - ha, ha!&nbsp; Too
+dry, by George!&nbsp; We fetched in here with the very last of our strength,
+and no mistake.&nbsp; Another mile would have done for us.&nbsp; When
+I heard your footsteps, above, I tried to get up, and I fell down.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That was the first sound I heard,&rdquo; said Heyst.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones, the front of his soiled white tunic soaked and plastered
+against his breast-bone, staggered away from the water-pipe.&nbsp; Steadying
+himself on Ricardo&rsquo;s shoulder, he drew a long breath, raised his
+dripping head, and produced a smile of ghastly amiability, which was
+lost upon the thoughtful Heyst.&nbsp; Behind his back the sun, touching
+the water, was like a disc of iron cooled to a dull red glow, ready
+to start rolling round the circular steel plate of the sea, which, under
+the darkening sky, looked more solid than the high ridge of Samburan;
+more solid than the point, whose long outlined slope melted into its
+own unfathomable shadow blurring the dim sheen on the bay.&nbsp; The
+forceful stream from the pipe broke like shattered glass on the boat&rsquo;s
+gunwale.&nbsp; Its loud, fitful, and persistent splashing revealed the
+depths of the world&rsquo;s silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Great notion, to lead the water out here,&rdquo; pronounced
+Ricardo appreciatively.</p>
+<p>Water was life.&nbsp; He felt now as if he could run a mile, scale
+a ten-foot wall, sing a song.&nbsp; Only a few minutes ago he was next
+door to a corpse, done up, unable to stand, to lift a hand; unable to
+groan.&nbsp; A drop of water had done that miracle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Didn&rsquo;t you feel life itself running and soaking into
+you, sir?&rdquo; he asked his principal, with deferential but forced
+vivacity.</p>
+<p>Without a word, Mr. Jones stepped off the thwart and sat down in
+the stern-sheets.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t that man of yours bleeding to death in the bows
+under there?&rdquo; inquired Heyst.</p>
+<p>Ricardo ceased his ecstasies over the life-giving water and answered
+in a tone of innocence:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He?&nbsp; You may call him a man, but his hide is a jolly
+sight tougher than the toughest alligator he ever skinned in the good
+old days.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t know how much he can stand: I do.&nbsp;
+We have tried him a long time ago.&nbsp; Ol&agrave;, there!&nbsp; Pedro!&nbsp;
+Pedro!&rdquo; he yelled, with a force of lung testifying to the regenerative
+virtues of water.</p>
+<p>A weak &ldquo;<i>Se&ntilde;or</i>?&rdquo; came from under the wharf.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What did I tell you?&rdquo; said Ricardo triumphantly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Nothing can hurt him.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s all right.&nbsp; But,
+I say, the boat&rsquo;s getting swamped.&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t you turn
+this water off before you sink her under us?&nbsp; She&rsquo;s half
+full already.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At a sign from Heyst, Wang hammered at the brass tap on the wharf,
+then stood behind Number One, crowbar in hand, motionless as before.&nbsp;
+Ricardo was perhaps not so certain of Pedro&rsquo;s toughness as he
+affirmed; for he stooped, peering under the wharf, then moved forward
+out of sight.&nbsp; The gush of water ceasing suddenly, made a silence
+which became complete when the after-trickle stopped.&nbsp; Afar, the
+sun was reduced to a red spark, glowing very low in the breathless immensity
+of twilight.&nbsp; Purple gleams lingered on the water all round the
+boat.&nbsp; The spectral figure in the stern-sheets spoke in a languid
+tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That - er - companion - er - secretary of mine is a queer
+chap.&nbsp; I am afraid we aren&rsquo;t presenting ourselves in a very
+favourable light.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst listened.&nbsp; It was the conventional voice of an educated
+man, only strangely lifeless.&nbsp; But more strange yet was this concern
+for appearances, expressed, he did not know, whether in jest or in earnest.&nbsp;
+Earnestness was hardly to be supposed under the circumstances, and no
+one had ever jested in such dead tones.&nbsp; It was something which
+could not be answered, and Heyst said nothing.&nbsp; The other went
+on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Travelling as I do, I find a man of his sort extremely useful.&nbsp;
+He has his little weaknesses, no doubt.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo; Heyst was provoked into speaking.&nbsp; &ldquo;Weakness
+of the arm is not one of them; neither is an exaggerated humanity, as
+far as I can judge.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Defects of temper,&rdquo; explained Mr. Jones from the stern-sheets.</p>
+<p>The subject of this dialogue, coming out just then from under the
+wharf into the visible part of the boat, made himself heard in his own
+defence, in a voice full of life, and with nothing languid in his manner
+on the contrary, it was brisk, almost jocose.&nbsp; He begged pardon
+for contradicting.&nbsp; He was never out of temper with &ldquo;our
+Pedro.&rdquo;&nbsp; The fellow was a Dago of immense strength and of
+no sense whatever.&nbsp; This combination made him dangerous, and he
+had to be treated accordingly, in a manner which he could understand.&nbsp;
+Reasoning was beyond him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And so&rdquo; - Ricardo addressed Heyst with animation - &ldquo;you
+mustn&rsquo;t be surprised if - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I assure you,&rdquo; Heyst interrupted, &ldquo;that my wonder
+at your arrival in your boat here is so great that it leaves no room
+for minor astonishments.&nbsp; But hadn&rsquo;t you better land?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the talk, sir!&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo began to
+bustle about the boat, talking all the time.&nbsp; Finding himself unable
+to &ldquo;size up&rdquo; this man, he was inclined to credit him with
+extraordinary powers of penetration, which, it seemed to him, would
+be favoured by silence.&nbsp; Also, he feared some pointblank question.&nbsp;
+He had no ready-made story to tell.&nbsp; He and his patron had put
+off considering that rather important detail too long.&nbsp; For the
+last two days, the horrors of thirst, coming on them unexpectedly, had
+prevented consultation.&nbsp; They had had to pull for dear life.&nbsp;
+But the man on the wharf, were he in league with the devil himself,
+would pay for all their sufferings, thought Ricardo with an unholy joy.</p>
+<p>Meantime, splashing in the water which covered the bottom-boards,
+Ricardo congratulated himself aloud on the luggage being out of the
+way of the wet.&nbsp; He had piled it up forward.&nbsp; He had roughly
+tied up Pedro&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; Pedro had nothing to grumble about.&nbsp;
+On the contrary, he ought to be mighty thankful to him, Ricardo, for
+being alive at all.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, now, let me give you a leg up, sir,&rdquo; he said cheerily
+to his motionless principal in the stern-sheets.&nbsp; &ldquo;All our
+troubles are over - for a time, anyhow.&nbsp; Ain&rsquo;t it luck to
+find a white man on this island?&nbsp; I would have just as soon expected
+to meet an angel from heaven - eh, Mr. Jones?&nbsp; Now then - ready,
+sir? one, two, three, up you go!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Helped from below by Ricardo, and from above by the man more unexpected
+than an angel, Mr. Jones scrambled up and stood on the wharf by the
+side of Heyst.&nbsp; He swayed like a reed.&nbsp; The night descending
+on Samburan turned into dense shadow the point of land and the wharf
+itself, and gave a dark solidity to the unshimmering water extending
+to the last faint trace of light away to the west.&nbsp; Heyst stared
+at the guests whom the renounced world had sent him thus at the end
+of the day.&nbsp; The only other vestige of light left on earth lurked
+in the hollows of the thin man&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; They gleamed, mobile
+and languidly evasive.&nbsp; The eyelids fluttered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are feeling weak,&rdquo; said Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For the moment, a little,&rdquo; confessed the other.</p>
+<p>With loud panting, Ricardo scrambled on his hands and knees upon
+the wharf, energetic and unaided.&nbsp; He rose up at Heyst&rsquo;s
+elbow and stamped his foot on the planks, with a sharp, provocative,
+double beat, such as is heard sometimes in fencing-schools before the
+adversaries engage their foils.&nbsp; Not that the renegade seaman Ricardo
+knew anything of fencing.&nbsp; What he called &ldquo;shooting-irons,&rdquo;
+were his weapons, or the still less aristocratic knife, such as was
+even then ingeniously strapped to his leg.&nbsp; He thought of it, at
+that moment.&nbsp; A swift stooping motion, then, on the recovery, a
+ripping blow, a shove off the wharf, and no noise except a splash in
+the water that would scarcely disturb the silence.&nbsp; Heyst would
+have no time for a cry.&nbsp; It would be quick and neat, and immensely
+in accord with Ricardo&rsquo;s humour.&nbsp; But he repressed this gust
+of savagery.&nbsp; The job was not such a simple one.&nbsp; This piece
+had to be played to another tune, and in much slower time.&nbsp; He
+returned to his note of talkative simplicity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay; and I too don&rsquo;t feel as strong as I thought I was
+when the first drink set me up.&nbsp; Great wonder-worker water is!&nbsp;
+And to get it right here on the spot!&nbsp; It was heaven - hey, sir?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones, being directly addressed, took up his part in the concerted
+piece:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really, when I saw a wharf on what might have been an uninhabited
+island, I couldn&rsquo;t believe my eyes.&nbsp; I doubted its existence.&nbsp;
+I thought it was a delusion till the boat actually drove between the
+piles, as you see her lying now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>While he was speaking faintly, in a voice which did not seem to belong
+to the earth, his henchman, in extremely loud and terrestrial accents,
+was fussing about their belongings in the boat, addressing himself to
+Pedro:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come, now - pass up the dunnage there!&nbsp; Move, yourself,
+<i>hombre</i>, or I&rsquo;ll have to get down again and give you a tap
+on those bandages of yours, you growling bear, you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; You didn&rsquo;t believe in the reality of the wharf?&rdquo;
+Heyst was saying to Mr. Jones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You ought to kiss my hands!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo caught hold of an ancient Gladstone bag and swung it on the
+wharf with a thump.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes!&nbsp; You ought to burn a candle before me as they do
+before the saints in your country.&nbsp; No saint has ever done so much
+for you as I have, you ungrateful vagabond.&nbsp; Now then!&nbsp; Up
+you get!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Helped by the talkative Ricardo, Pedro scrambled up on the wharf,
+where he remained for some time on all fours, swinging to and fro his
+shaggy head tied up in white rags.&nbsp; Then he got up clumsily, like
+a bulky animal in the dusk, balancing itself on its hind legs.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones began to explain languidly to Heyst that they were in a
+pretty bad state that morning, when they caught sight of the smoke of
+the volcano.&nbsp; It nerved them to make an effort for their lives.&nbsp;
+Soon afterwards they made out the island.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had just wits enough left in my baked brain to alter the
+direction of the boat,&rdquo; the ghostly voice went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;As
+to finding assistance, a wharf, a white man - nobody would have dreamed
+of it.&nbsp; Simply preposterous!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I thought when my Chinaman came and told
+me he had seen a boat with white men pulling up,&rdquo; said Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Most extraordinary luck,&rdquo; interjected Ricardo, standing
+by anxiously attentive to every word.&nbsp; &ldquo;Seems a dream,&rdquo;
+he added.&nbsp; &ldquo;A lovely dream!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A silence fell on that group of three, as if everyone had become
+afraid to speak, in an obscure sense of an impending crisis.&nbsp; Pedro
+on one side of them and Wang on the other had the air of watchful spectators.&nbsp;
+A few stars had come out pursuing the ebbing twilight.&nbsp; A light
+draught of air tepid enough in the thickening twilight after the scorching
+day, struck a chill into Mr. Jones in his soaked clothes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I may infer, then, that there is a settlement of white people
+here?&rdquo; he murmured, shivering visibly.</p>
+<p>Heyst roused himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, abandoned, abandoned.&nbsp; I am alone here - practically
+alone; but several empty houses are still standing.&nbsp; No lack of
+accommodation.&nbsp; We may just as well - here, Wang, go back to the
+shore and run the trolley out here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The last words having been spoken in Malay, he explained courteously
+that he had given directions for the transport of the luggage.&nbsp;
+Wang had melted into the night - in his soundless manner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My word!&nbsp; Rails laid down and all,&rdquo; exclaimed Ricardo
+softly, in a tone of admiration.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, I never!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We were working a coal-mine here,&rdquo; said the late manager
+of the Tropical Belt Coal Company.&nbsp; &ldquo;These are only the ghosts
+of things that have been.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones&rsquo;s teeth were suddenly started chattering by another
+faint puff of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her
+rays on the dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above
+the grave of the sun.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We might be moving on,&rdquo; proposed Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;My
+Chinaman and that - ah - ungrateful servant of yours, with the broken
+head, can load the things and come along after us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The suggestion was accepted without words.&nbsp; Moving towards the
+shore, the three men met the trolley, a mere metallic rustle which whisked
+past them, the shadowy Wang running noiselessly behind.&nbsp; Only the
+sound of their footsteps accompanied them.&nbsp; It was a long time
+since so many footsteps had rung together on that jetty.&nbsp; Before
+they stepped on to the path trodden through the grass, Heyst said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am prevented from offering you a share of my own quarters.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The distant courtliness of this beginning arrested the other two suddenly,
+as if amazed by some manifest incongruity.&nbsp; &ldquo;I should regret
+it more,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;if I were not in a position to give
+you the choice of those empty bungalows for a temporary home.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He turned round and plunged into the narrow track, the two others
+following in single file.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Queer start!&rdquo; Ricardo took the opportunity for whispering,
+as he fell behind Mr. Jones, who swayed in the gloom, enclosed by the
+stalks of tropical grass, almost as slender as a stalk of grass himself.</p>
+<p>In this order they emerged into the open space kept clear of vegetation
+by Wang&rsquo;s judicious system of periodic firing.&nbsp; The shapes
+of buildings, unlighted, high-roofed, looked mysteriously extensive
+and featureless against the increasing glitter of the stars.&nbsp; Heyst
+was pleased at the absence of light in his bungalow.&nbsp; It looked
+as uninhabited as the others.&nbsp; He continued to lead the way, inclining
+to the right.&nbsp; His equable voice was heard:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This one would be the best.&nbsp; It was our counting-house.&nbsp;
+There is some furniture in it yet.&nbsp; I am pretty certain that you&rsquo;ll
+find a couple of camp bedsteads in one of the rooms.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The high-pitched roof of the bungalow towered up very close, eclipsing
+the sky.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here we are.&nbsp; Three steps.&nbsp; As you see, there&rsquo;s
+a wide veranda.&nbsp; Sorry to keep you waiting for a moment; the door
+is locked, I think.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was heard trying it.&nbsp; Then he leaned against the rail, saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wang will get the keys.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The others waited, two vague shapes nearly mingled together in the
+darkness of the veranda, from which issued a sudden chattering of Mr.
+Jones&rsquo;s teeth, directly suppressed, and a slight shuffle of Ricardo&rsquo;s
+feet.&nbsp; Their guide and host, his back against the rail, seemed
+to have forgotten their existence.&nbsp; Suddenly he moved, and murmured:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, here&rsquo;s the trolley.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then he raised his voice in Malay, and was answered, &ldquo;<i>Ya
+tuan</i>,&rdquo; from an indistinct group that could be made out in
+the direction of the track.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have sent Wang for the key and a light,&rdquo; he said,
+in a voice that came out without any particular direction - a peculiarity
+which disconcerted Ricardo.</p>
+<p>Wang did not tarry long on his mission.&nbsp; Very soon from the
+distant recesses of obscurity appeared the swinging lantern he carried.&nbsp;
+It cast a fugitive ray on the arrested trolley with the uncouth figure
+of the wild Pedro drooping over the load; then it moved towards the
+bungalow and ascended the stairs.&nbsp; After working at the stiff lock,
+Wang applied his shoulder to the door.&nbsp; It came open with explosive
+suddenness, as if in a passion at being thus disturbed after two years&rsquo;
+repose.&nbsp; From the dark slope of a tall stand-up writing-desk a
+forgotten, solitary sheet of paper flew up and settled gracefully on
+the floor.</p>
+<p>Wang and Pedro came and went through the offended door, bringing
+the things off the trolley, one flitting swiftly in and out, the other
+staggering heavily.&nbsp; Later, directed by a few quiet words from
+Number One, Wang made several journeys with the lantern to the store-rooms,
+bringing in blankets, provisions in tins, coffee, sugar, and a packet
+of candles.&nbsp; He lighted one, and stuck it on the ledge of the stand-up
+desk.&nbsp; Meantime Pedro, being introduced to some kindling-wood and
+a bundle of dry sticks, had busied himself outside in lighting a fire,
+on which he placed a ready-filled kettle handed to him by Wang impassively,
+at arm&rsquo;s length, as if across a chasm.&nbsp; Having received the
+thanks of his guests, Heyst wished them goodnight and withdrew, leaving
+them to their repose.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER EIGHT</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Heyst walked away slowly.&nbsp; There was still no light in his bungalow,
+and he thought that perhaps it was just as well.&nbsp; By this time
+he was much less perturbed.&nbsp; Wang had preceded him with the lantern,
+as if in a hurry to get away from the two white men and their hairy
+attendant.&nbsp; The light was not dancing along any more; it was standing
+perfectly still by the steps of the veranda.</p>
+<p>Heyst, glancing back casually, saw behind him still another light
+- the light of the strangers&rsquo; open fire.&nbsp; A black, uncouth
+form, stooping over it monstrously, staggered away into the outlying
+shadows.&nbsp; The kettle had boiled, probably.</p>
+<p>With that weird vision of something questionably human impressed
+upon his senses, Heyst moved on a pace or two.&nbsp; What could the
+people be who had such a creature for their familiar attendant?&nbsp;
+He stopped.&nbsp; The vague apprehension, of a distant future, in which
+he saw Lena unavoidably separated from him by profound and subtle differences;
+the sceptical carelessness which had accompanied every one of his attempts
+at action, like a secret reserve of his soul, fell away from him.&nbsp;
+He no longer belonged to himself.&nbsp; There was a call far more imperious
+and august.&nbsp; He came up to the bungalow, and at the very limit
+of the lantern&rsquo;s light, on the top step, he saw her feet and the
+bottom part of her dress.&nbsp; The rest of her person was suggested
+dimly as high as her waist.&nbsp; She sat on a chair, and the gloom
+of the low eaves descended upon her head and shoulders.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t
+stir.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t gone to sleep here?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, no!&nbsp; I was waiting for you - in the dark.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst, on the top step, leaned against a wooden pillar, after moving
+the lantern to one side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have been thinking that it is just as well you had no light.&nbsp;
+But wasn&rsquo;t it dull for you to sit in the dark?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t need a light to think of you.&rdquo;&nbsp; Her
+charming voice gave a value to this banal answer, which had also the
+merit of truth.&nbsp; Heyst laughed a little, and said that he had had
+a curios experience.&nbsp; She made no remark.&nbsp; He tried to figure
+to himself the outlines of her easy pose.&nbsp; A spot of dim light
+here and there hinted at the unfailing grace of attitude which was one
+of her natural possessions.</p>
+<p>She had thought of him, but not in connection with the strangers.&nbsp;
+She had admired him from the first; she had been attracted by his warm
+voice, his gentle eye, but she had felt him too wonderfully difficult
+to know.&nbsp; He had given to life a savour, a movement, a promise
+mingled with menaces, which she had not suspected were to be found in
+it - or, at any rate, not by a girl wedded to misery as she was.&nbsp;
+She said to herself that she must not be irritated because he seemed
+too self-contained, and as if shut up in a world of his own.&nbsp; When
+he took her in his arms, she felt that his embrace had a great and compelling
+force, that he was moved deeply, and that perhaps he would not get tired
+of her so very soon.&nbsp; She thought that he had opened to her the
+feelings of delicate joy, that the very uneasiness he caused her was
+delicious in its sadness, and that she would try to hold him as long
+as she could - till her fainting arms, her sinking soul, could cling
+to him no more.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wang&rsquo;s not here, of course?&rdquo; Heyst said suddenly.&nbsp;
+She answered as if in her sleep.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He put this light down here without stopping, and ran.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ran, did he?&nbsp; H&rsquo;m!&nbsp; Well, it&rsquo;s considerably
+later than his usual time to go home to his Alfuro wife; but to be seen
+running is a sort of degradation for Wang, who has mastered the art
+of vanishing.&nbsp; Do you think he was startled out of his perfection
+by something?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why should he be startled?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her voice remained dreamy, a little uncertain.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have been startled,&rdquo; Heyst said.</p>
+<p>She was not listening to him.&nbsp; The lantern at their feet threw
+the shadows of her face upward.&nbsp; Her eyes glistened, as if frightened
+and attentive, above a lighted chin and a very white throat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Upon my word,&rdquo; mused Heyst, &ldquo;now that I don&rsquo;t
+see them, I can hardly believe that those fellows exist!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what about me?&rdquo; she asked, so swiftly that he made
+a movement like somebody pounced upon from an ambush.&nbsp; &ldquo;When
+you don&rsquo;t see me, do you believe that I exist?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Exist?&nbsp; Most charmingly!&nbsp; My dear Lena, you don&rsquo;t
+know your own advantages.&nbsp; Why, your voice alone would be enough
+to make you unforgettable!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I didn&rsquo;t mean forgetting in that way.&nbsp; I dare
+say if I were to die you would remember me right enough.&nbsp; And what
+good would that be to anybody?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s while I am alive that
+I want - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst stood by her chair, a stalwart figure imperfectly lighted.&nbsp;
+The broad shoulders, the martial face that was like a disguise of his
+disarmed soul, were lost in the gloom above the plane of light in which
+his feet were planted.&nbsp; He suffered from a trouble with which she
+had nothing to do.&nbsp; She had no general conception of the conditions
+of the existence he had offered to her.&nbsp; Drawn into its peculiar
+stagnation she remained unrelated to it because of her ignorance.</p>
+<p>For instance, she could never perceive the prodigious improbability
+of the arrival of that boat.&nbsp; She did not seem to be thinking of
+it.&nbsp; Perhaps she had already forgotten the fact herself.&nbsp;
+And Heyst resolved suddenly to say nothing more of it.&nbsp; It was
+not that he shrank from alarming her.&nbsp; Not feeling anything definite
+himself he could not imagine a precise effect being produced on her
+by any amount of explanation.&nbsp; There is a quality in events which
+is apprehended differently by different minds or even by the same mind
+at different times.&nbsp; Any man living at all consciously knows that
+embarrassing truth.&nbsp; Heyst was aware that this visit could bode
+nothing pleasant.&nbsp; In his present soured temper towards all mankind
+he looked upon it as a visitation of a particularly offensive kind.</p>
+<p>He glanced along the veranda in the direction of the other bungalow.&nbsp;
+The fire of sticks in front of it had gone out.&nbsp; No faint glow
+of embers, not the slightest thread of light in that direction, hinted
+at the presence of strangers.&nbsp; The darker shapes in the obscurity,
+the dead silence, betrayed nothing of that strange intrusion.&nbsp;
+The peace of Samburan asserted itself as on any other night.&nbsp; Everything
+was as before, except - Heyst became aware of it suddenly - that for
+a whole minute, perhaps, with his hand on the back of the girl&rsquo;s
+chair and within a foot of her person, he had lost the sense of her
+existence, for the first time since he had brought her over to share
+this invincible, this undefiled peace.&nbsp; He picked up the lantern,
+and the act made a silent stir all along the veranda.&nbsp; A spoke
+of shadow swung swiftly across her face, and the strong light rested
+on the immobility of her features, as of a woman looking at a vision.&nbsp;
+Her eyes were still, her lips serious.&nbsp; Her dress, open at the
+neck, stirred slightly to her even breathing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had better go in, Lena,&rdquo; suggested Heyst, very low,
+as if breaking a spell cautiously.</p>
+<p>She rose without a word.&nbsp; Heyst followed her indoors.&nbsp;
+As they passed through the living-room, he left the lantern burning
+on the centre table.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER NINE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>That night the girl woke up, for the first time in her new experience,
+with the sensation of having been abandoned to her own devices.&nbsp;
+She woke up from a painful dream of separation brought about in a way
+which she could not understand, and missed the relief of the waking
+instant.&nbsp; The desolate feeling of being alone persisted.&nbsp;
+She was really alone.&nbsp; A night-light made it plain enough, in the
+dim, mysterious manner of a dream; but this was reality.&nbsp; It startled
+her exceedingly.</p>
+<p>In a moment she was at the curtain that hung in the doorway, and
+raised it with a steady hand.&nbsp; The conditions of their life in
+Samburan would have made peeping absurd; nor was such a thing in her
+character.&nbsp; This was not a movement of curiosity, but of downright
+alarm - the continued distress and fear of the dream.&nbsp; The night
+could not have been very far advanced.&nbsp; The light of the lantern
+was burning strongly, striping the floor and walls of the room with
+thick black bands.&nbsp; She hardly knew whether she expected to see
+Heyst or not; but she saw him at once, standing by the table in his
+sleeping-suit, his back to the doorway.&nbsp; She stepped in noiselessly
+with her bare feet, and let the curtain fall behind her.&nbsp; Something
+characteristic in Heyst&rsquo;s attitude made her say, almost in a whisper:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are looking for something.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He could not have heard her before; but he didn&rsquo;t start at
+the unexpected whisper.&nbsp; He only pushed the drawer of the table
+in and, without even looking over his shoulder, asked quietly, accepting
+her presence as if he had been aware of all her movements:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I say, are you certain that Wang didn&rsquo;t go through this
+room this evening?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wang?&nbsp; When?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;After leaving the lantern, I mean.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, no.&nbsp; He ran on.&nbsp; I watched him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Or before, perhaps - while I was with these boat people?&nbsp;
+Do you know?&nbsp; Can you tell?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hardly think so.&nbsp; I came out as the sun went down,
+and sat outside till you came back to me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He could have popped in for an instant through the back veranda.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I heard nothing in here,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+is the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Naturally you wouldn&rsquo;t hear.&nbsp; He can be as quiet
+as a shadow, when he likes.&nbsp; I believe he could steal the pillows
+from under our heads.&nbsp; He might have been here ten minutes ago.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What woke you up?&nbsp; Was it a noise?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t say that.&nbsp; Generally one can&rsquo;t tell,
+but is it likely, Lena?&nbsp; You are, I believe, the lighter sleeper
+of us two.&nbsp; A noise loud enough to wake me up would have awakened
+you, too.&nbsp; I tried to be as quiet as I could.&nbsp; What roused
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know - a dream, perhaps.&nbsp; I woke up crying.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What was the dream?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst, with one hand resting on the table, had turned in her direction,
+his round, uncovered head set on a fighter&rsquo;s muscular neck.&nbsp;
+She left his question unanswered, as if she had not heard it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is it you have missed?&rdquo; she asked in her turn,
+very grave.</p>
+<p>Her dark hair, drawn smoothly back, was done in two thick tresses
+for the night.&nbsp; Heyst noticed the good form of her brow, the dignity
+of its width, its unshining whiteness.&nbsp; It was a sculptural forehead.&nbsp;
+He had a moment of acute appreciation intruding upon another order of
+thoughts.&nbsp; It was as if there could be no end of his discoveries
+about that girl, at the most incongruous moments.</p>
+<p>She had on nothing but a hand-woven cotton sarong - one of Heyst&rsquo;s
+few purchases, years ago, in Celebes, where they are made.&nbsp; He
+had forgotten all about it till she came, and then had found it at the
+bottom of an old sandalwood trunk dating back to pre-Morrison days.&nbsp;
+She had quickly learned to wind it up under her armpits with a safe
+twist, as Malay village girls do when going down to bathe in a river.&nbsp;
+Her shoulders and arms were bare; one of her tresses, hanging forward,
+looked almost black against the white skin.&nbsp; As she was taller
+than the average Malay woman, the sarong ended a good way above her
+ankles.&nbsp; She stood poised firmly, half-way between the table and
+the curtained doorway, the insteps of her bare feet gleaming like marble
+on the overshadowed matting of the floor.&nbsp; The fall of her lighted
+shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her arms hanging down her
+sides, her immobility, too, had something statuesque, the charm of art
+tense with life.&nbsp; She was not very big - Heyst used to think of
+her, at first, as &ldquo;that poor little girl,&rdquo; - but revealed
+free from the shabby banality of a white platform dress, in the simple
+drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form and in the proportions
+of her body which suggested a reduction from a heroic size.</p>
+<p>She moved forward a step.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is it you have missed?&rdquo; she asked again.</p>
+<p>Heyst turned his back altogether on the table.&nbsp; The black spokes
+of darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling
+in a path of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them.&nbsp;
+It was his turn to ignore a question.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You woke up in a fright, you say?&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman&rsquo;s
+face and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise,
+but her expression was serious.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; she replied.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was distress, rather.&nbsp;
+You see, you weren&rsquo;t there, and I couldn&rsquo;t tell why you
+had gone away from me.&nbsp; A nasty dream - the first I&rsquo;ve had,
+too, since - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t believe in dreams, do you?&rdquo; asked Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I once knew a woman who did.&nbsp; Leastwise, she used to
+tell people what dreams mean, for a shilling.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?&rdquo;
+inquired Heyst jocularly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She lived in Camberwell.&nbsp; She was a nasty old thing!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst laughed a little uneasily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dreams are madness, my dear.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s things that
+happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad
+to know the meaning of.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have missed something out of this drawer,&rdquo; she said
+positively.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This or some other.&nbsp; I have looked into every single
+one of them and come back to this again, as people do.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+difficult to believe the evidence of my own senses; but it isn&rsquo;t
+there.&nbsp; Now, Lena, are you sure that you didn&rsquo;t - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given
+me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lena!&rdquo; he cried.</p>
+<p>He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he
+had not made.&nbsp; It was what a servant might have said - an inferior
+open to suspicion - or, at any rate, a stranger.&nbsp; He was angry
+at being so wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being
+instinctively aware of the place he had secretly given her in his thoughts.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;After all,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;we are strangers
+to each other.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And then he felt sorry for her.&nbsp; He spoke calmly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think
+that the Chinaman has been in this room tonight?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You suspect him?&rdquo; she asked, knitting her eyebrows.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is no one else to suspect.&nbsp; You may call it a certitude.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to tell me what it is?&rdquo; she inquired,
+in the equable tone in which one takes a fact into account.</p>
+<p>Heyst only smiled faintly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing very precious, as far as value goes,&rdquo; he replied.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought it might have been money,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Money!&rdquo; exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been
+altogether preposterous.&nbsp; She was so visibly surprised that he
+hastened to add: &ldquo;Of course, there is some money in the house
+- there, in that writing-desk, the drawer on the left.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+not locked.&nbsp; You can pull it right out.&nbsp; There is a recess,
+and the board at the back pivots: a very simple hiding-place, when you
+know the way to it.&nbsp; I discovered it by accident, and I keep our
+store of sovereigns in there.&nbsp; The treasure, my dear, is not big
+enough to require a cavern.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always
+kept in that unlocked left drawer.&nbsp; I have no doubt Wang knows
+what there is in it, but he isn&rsquo;t a thief, and that&rsquo;s why
+I - no, Lena, what I&rsquo;ve missed is not gold or jewels; and that&rsquo;s
+what makes the fact interesting - which the theft of money cannot be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money.&nbsp;
+A great curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from pressing
+him with questions.&nbsp; She only gave him one of her deep-gleaming
+smiles.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t me so it must be Wang.&nbsp; You ought to make
+him give it back to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst said nothing to that na&iuml;ve and practical suggestion, for
+the object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.</p>
+<p>It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had never
+used in his life.&nbsp; Ever since the London furniture had arrived
+in Samburan, it had been reposing in the drawer of the table.&nbsp;
+The real dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be repelled
+by swords or bullets.&nbsp; On the other hand neither his manner nor
+his appearance looked sufficiently inoffensive to expose him to light-minded
+aggression.</p>
+<p>He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer
+in the middle of the night.&nbsp; He had started up suddenly - which
+was very unusual with him.&nbsp; He had found himself sitting up and
+extremely wide awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his side,
+lying with her face away from him, a vague, characteristically feminine
+form in the dim light.&nbsp; She was perfectly still.</p>
+<p>At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan,
+and the sides of the mosquito net were looped up.&nbsp; Heyst swung
+his feet to the floor, and found himself standing there, almost before
+he had become aware of his intention to get up.</p>
+<p>Why he did this he did not know.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t wish to wake
+her up, and the slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very
+loud to him.&nbsp; He turned round apprehensively and waited for her
+to move, but she did not stir.&nbsp; While he looked at her, he had
+a vision of himself lying there too, also fast asleep, and - it occurred
+to him for the first time in his life - very defenceless.&nbsp; This
+quite novel impression of the dangers of slumber made him think suddenly
+of his revolver.&nbsp; He left the bedroom with noiseless footsteps.&nbsp;
+The lightness of the curtain he had to lift as he passed out, and the
+outer door, wide open on the blackness of the veranda - for the roof
+eaves came down low, shutting out the starlight - gave him a sense of
+having been dangerously exposed, he could not have said to what.&nbsp;
+He pulled the drawer open.&nbsp; Its emptiness cut his train of self-communion
+short.&nbsp; He murmured to the assertive fact:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Impossible!&nbsp; Somewhere else!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked
+whispers of memory were not encouraging.&nbsp; Foraging in every receptacle
+and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly to the conclusion
+that it was not in that room.&nbsp; Neither was it in the other.&nbsp;
+The whole bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a profuse allowance
+of veranda all round.&nbsp; Heyst stepped out on the veranda.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s Wang, beyond a doubt,&rdquo; he thought, staring
+into the night.&nbsp; &ldquo;He has got hold of it for some reason.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materializing
+suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at any moment, and
+toppling him over with a dead sure shot.&nbsp; The danger was so irremediable
+that it was not worth worrying about, any more than the general precariousness
+of human life.&nbsp; Heyst speculated on this added risk.&nbsp; How
+long had he been at the mercy of a slender yellow finger on the trigger?&nbsp;
+That is, if that was the fellow&rsquo;s reason for purloining the revolver.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shoot and inherit,&rdquo; thought Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;Very
+simple.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet there was in his mind a marked reluctance to
+regard the domesticated grower of vegetables in the light of a murderer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, it wasn&rsquo;t that.&nbsp; For Wang could have done it
+any time this last twelve months or more - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst&rsquo;s mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed
+himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at
+that period of his speculation his point of view changed.&nbsp; It struck
+him with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been
+taken only late in the day, or on that very night.&nbsp; Wang, of course.&nbsp;
+But why?&nbsp; So there had been no danger in the past.&nbsp; It was
+all ahead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He has me at his mercy now,&rdquo; thought Heyst, without
+particular excitement.</p>
+<p>The sentiment he experienced was curiosity.&nbsp; He forgot himself
+in it: it was as if he were considering somebody else&rsquo;s strange
+predicament.&nbsp; But even that sort of interest was dying out when,
+looking to his left, he saw the accustomed shapes of the other bungalows
+looming in the night, and remembered the arrival of the thirsty company
+in the boat.&nbsp; Wang would hardly risk such a crime in the presence
+of other white men.&nbsp; It was a peculiar instance of the &ldquo;safety
+in numbers,&rdquo; principle, which somehow was not much to Heyst&rsquo;s
+taste.</p>
+<p>He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and
+unsatisfactory thought.&nbsp; He had just made up his mind that he must
+breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind
+him.&nbsp; She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse
+to turn round at once under the impression that she might read his trouble
+in his face.&nbsp; Yes, she had taken him by surprise, and for that
+reason the conversation which began was not exactly as he would have
+conducted it if he had been prepared for her pointblank question.&nbsp;
+He ought to have said at once: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve missed nothing.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It was a deplorable thing that he should have let it come so far as
+to have her ask what it was he missed.&nbsp; He closed the conversation
+by saying lightly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s an object of very small value.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+worry about it - it isn&rsquo;t worth while.&nbsp; The best you can
+do is to go and lie down again, Lena.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked: &ldquo;And
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the veranda.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+feel sleepy for the moment.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, don&rsquo;t be long.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He made no answer.&nbsp; She saw him standing there, very still,
+with a frown on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.</p>
+<p>Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the veranda.&nbsp;
+He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the stars how the
+night went on.&nbsp; It was going very slowly.&nbsp; Why it should have
+irked him he did not know, for he had nothing to expect from the dawn;
+but everything round him had become unreasonable, unsettled, and vaguely
+urgent, laying him under an obligation, but giving him no line of action.&nbsp;
+He felt contemptuously irritated with the situation.&nbsp; The outer
+world had broken upon him; and he did not know what wrong he had done
+to bring this on himself, any more than he knew what he had done to
+provoke the horrible calumny about his treatment of poor Morrison.&nbsp;
+For he could not forget this.&nbsp; It had reached the ears of one who
+needed to have the most perfect confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And she only half disbelieves it,&rdquo; he thought, with
+hopeless humiliation.</p>
+<p>This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength
+from him, as a physical wound would have done.&nbsp; He had no desire
+to do anything - neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the
+revolver nor to find out from the strangers who they were, and how their
+predicament had come about.&nbsp; He flung his glowing cigar away into
+the night.&nbsp; But Samburan was no longer a solitude wherein he could
+indulge in all his moods.&nbsp; The fiery parabolic path the cast-out
+stump traced in the air was seen from another veranda at a distant of
+some twenty yards.&nbsp; It was noted as a symptom of importance by
+an observer with his faculties greedy for signs, and in a state of alertness
+tense enough almost to hear the grass grow.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER TEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The observer was Martin Ricardo.&nbsp; To him life was not a matter
+of passive renunciation, but of a particularly active warfare.&nbsp;
+He was not mistrustful of it, he was not disgusted with it, still less
+was he inclined to be suspicious of its disenchantments; but he was
+vividly aware that it held many possibilities of failure.&nbsp; Though
+very far from being a pessimist, he was not a man of foolish illusions.&nbsp;
+He did not like failure, not only because of its unpleasant and dangerous
+consequences, but also because of its damaging effect upon his own appreciation
+of Martin Ricardo.&nbsp; And this was a special job, of his own contriving,
+and of considerable novelty.&nbsp; It was not, so to speak, in his usual
+line of business - except, perhaps, from a moral standpoint, about which
+he was not likely to trouble his head.&nbsp; For these reasons Martin
+Ricardo was unable to sleep.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones, after repeated shivering fits, and after drinking much
+hot tea, had apparently fallen into deep slumber.&nbsp; He had very
+peremptorily discouraged attempts at conversation on the part of his
+faithful follower.&nbsp; Ricardo listened to his regular breathing.&nbsp;
+It was all very well for the governor.&nbsp; He looked upon it as a
+sort of sport.&nbsp; A gentleman naturally would.&nbsp; But this ticklish
+and important job had to be pulled off at all costs, both for honour
+and for safety.&nbsp; Ricardo rose quietly, and made his way on the
+veranda.&nbsp; He could not lie still.&nbsp; He wanted to go out for
+air, and he had a feeling that by the force of his eagerness even the
+darkness and the silence could be made to yield something to his eyes
+and ears.</p>
+<p>He noted the stars, and stepped back again into the dense darkness.&nbsp;
+He resisted the growing impulse to go out and steal towards the other
+bungalow.&nbsp; It would have been madness to start prowling in the
+dark on unknown ground.&nbsp; And for what end?&nbsp; Unless to relieve
+the oppression.&nbsp; Immobility lay on his limbs like a leaden garment.&nbsp;
+And yet he was unwilling to give up.&nbsp; He persisted in his objectless
+vigil.&nbsp; The man of the island was keeping quiet.</p>
+<p>It was at that moment that Ricardo&rsquo;s eyes caught the vanishing
+red trail of light made by the cigar - a startling revelation of the
+man&rsquo;s wakefulness.&nbsp; He could not suppress a low &ldquo;Hallo!&rdquo;
+and began to sidle along towards the door, with his shoulders rubbing
+the wall.&nbsp; For all he knew, the man might have been out in front
+by this time, observing the veranda.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, after
+flinging away the cheroot, Heyst had gone indoors with the feeling of
+a man who gives up an unprofitable occupation.&nbsp; But Ricardo fancied
+he could hear faint footfalls on the open ground, and dodged quickly
+into the room.&nbsp; There he drew breath, and meditated for a while.&nbsp;
+His next step was to feel for the matches on the tall desk, and to light
+the candle.&nbsp; He had to communicate to his governor views and reflections
+of such importance that it was absolutely necessary for him to watch
+their effect on the very countenance of the hearer.&nbsp; At first he
+had thought that these matters could have waited till daylight; but
+Heyst&rsquo;s wakefulness, disclosed in that startling way, made him
+feel suddenly certain that there could be no sleep for him that night.</p>
+<p>He said as much to his governor.&nbsp; When the little dagger-like
+flame had done its best to dispel the darkness, Mr. Jones was to be
+seen reposing on a camp bedstead, in a distant part of the room.&nbsp;
+A railway rug concealed his spare form up to his very head, which rested
+on the other railway rug rolled up for a pillow.&nbsp; Ricardo plumped
+himself down cross-legged on the floor, very close to the low bedstead;
+so that Mr. Jones - who perhaps had not been so very profoundly asleep
+- on opening his eyes found them conveniently levelled at the face of
+his secretary.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Eh?&nbsp; What is it you say?&nbsp; No sleep for you tonight?&nbsp;
+But why can&rsquo;t you let <i>me</i> sleep?&nbsp; Confound your fussiness!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because that there fellow can&rsquo;t sleep - that&rsquo;s
+why.&nbsp; Dash me if he hasn&rsquo;t been doing a think just now!&nbsp;
+What business has he to think in the middle of the night?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you know?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He was out, sir - up in the middle of the night.&nbsp; My
+own eyes saw it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But how do you know that he was up to think?&rdquo; inquired
+Mr. Jones.&nbsp; &ldquo;It might have been anything - toothache, for
+instance.&nbsp; And you may have dreamed it for all I know.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t
+you try to sleep?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t even try to go to sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo informed his patron of his vigil on the veranda, and of the
+revelation which put an end to it.&nbsp; He concluded that a man up
+with a cigar in the middle of the night must be doing a think.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones raised himself on his elbow.&nbsp; This sign of interest
+comforted his faithful henchman.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Seems to me it&rsquo;s time we did a little think ourselves,&rdquo;
+added Ricardo, with more assurance.&nbsp; Long as they had been together
+the moods of his governor were still a source of anxiety to his simple
+soul.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are always making a fuss,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones, in
+a tolerant tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, but not for nothing, am I?&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t say that,
+sir.&nbsp; Mine may not be a gentleman&rsquo;s way of looking round
+a thing, but it isn&rsquo;t a fool&rsquo;s way, either.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve
+admitted that much yourself at odd times.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo was growing warmly argumentative.&nbsp; Mr. Jones interrupted
+him without heat.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t roused me to talk about yourself, I presume?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo remained silent for a minute,
+with the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t think I could tell you anything about myself that you don&rsquo;t
+know,&rdquo; he continued.&nbsp; There was a sort of amused satisfaction
+in his tone which changed completely as he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+that man, over there, that&rsquo;s got to be talked over.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+like him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He, failed to observe the flicker of a ghastly smile on his governor&rsquo;s
+lips.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; murmured Mr. Jones, whose face, as
+he reclined on his elbow, was on a level with the top of his follower&rsquo;s
+head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo; said Ricardo emphatically.&nbsp; The candle
+from the other side of the room threw his monstrous black shadow on
+the wall.&nbsp; &ldquo;He - I don&rsquo;t know how to say it - he isn&rsquo;t
+hearty-like.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones agreed languidly in his own manner:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He seems to be a very self-possessed man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, that&rsquo;s it.&nbsp; Self - &rdquo; Ricardo choked with
+indignation.&nbsp; &ldquo;I would soon let out some of his self-possession
+through a hole between his ribs, if this weren&rsquo;t a special job!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones had been making his own reflections, for he asked:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you think he is suspicious?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see very well what he can be suspicious of,&rdquo;
+pondered Ricardo.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yet there he was doing a think.&nbsp;
+And what could be the object of it?&nbsp; What made him get out of his
+bed in the middle of the night.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tain&rsquo;t fleas, surely.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bad conscience, perhaps,&rdquo; suggested Mr. Jones jocularly.</p>
+<p>His faithful secretary suffered from irritation, and did not see
+the joke.&nbsp; In a fretful tone he declared that there was no such
+thing as conscience.&nbsp; There was such a thing as funk; but there
+was nothing to make that fellow funky in any special way.&nbsp; He admitted,
+however, that the man might have been uneasy at the arrival of strangers,
+because of all that plunder of his put away somewhere.</p>
+<p>Ricardo glanced here and there, as if he were afraid of being overheard
+by the heavy shadows cast by the dim light all over the room.&nbsp;
+His patron, very quiet, spoke in a calm whisper:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And perhaps that hotel-keeper has been lying to you about
+him.&nbsp; He may be a very poor devil indeed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo shook his head slightly.&nbsp; The Schombergian theory of
+Heyst had become in him a profound conviction, which he had absorbed
+as naturally as a sponge takes up water.&nbsp; His patron&rsquo;s doubts
+were a wanton denying of what was self-evident; but Ricardo&rsquo;s
+voice remained as before, a soft purring with a snarling undertone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am sup-prised at you, sir!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the very way
+them tame ones - the common &rsquo;yporcrits of the world - get on.&nbsp;
+When it comes to plunder drifting under one&rsquo;s very nose, there&rsquo;s
+not one of them that would keep his hands off.&nbsp; And I don&rsquo;t
+blame them.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the way they do it that sets my back up.&nbsp;
+Just look at the story of how he got rid of that pal of his!&nbsp; Send
+a man home to croak of a cold on the chest - that&rsquo;s one of your
+tame tricks.&nbsp; And d&rsquo;you mean to say, sir, that a man that&rsquo;s
+up to it wouldn&rsquo;t bag whatever he could lay his hands in his &rsquo;yporcritical
+way?&nbsp; What was all that coal business?&nbsp; Tame citizen dodge;
+&rsquo;yporcrisy - nothing else.&nbsp; No, no, sir!&nbsp; The thing
+is to extract it from him as neatly as possible.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+the job; and it isn&rsquo;t so simple as it looks.&nbsp; I reckon you
+have looked at it all round, sir, before you took up the notion of this
+trip.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Jones was hardly audible, staring far
+away from his couch.&nbsp; &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t think about it much.&nbsp;
+I was bored.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, that you were - bad.&nbsp; I was feeling pretty desperate
+that afternoon, when that bearded softy of a landlord got talking to
+me about this fellow here.&nbsp; Quite accidentally, it was.&nbsp; Well,
+sir, here we are after a mighty narrow squeak.&nbsp; I feel all limp
+yet; but never mind - his swag will pay for the lot!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s all alone here,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones in a
+hollow murmur.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ye-es, in a way.&nbsp; Yes, alone enough.&nbsp; Yes, you may
+say he is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s that Chinaman, though.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, there&rsquo;s the Chink,&rdquo; assented Ricardo rather
+absentmindedly.</p>
+<p>He was debating in his mind the advisability of making a clean breast
+of his knowledge of the girl&rsquo;s existence.&nbsp; Finally he concluded
+he wouldn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; The enterprise was difficult enough without
+complicating it with an upset to the sensibilities of the gentleman
+with whom he had the honour of being associated.&nbsp; Let the discovery
+come of itself, he thought, and then he could swear that he had known
+nothing of that offensive presence.</p>
+<p>He did not need to lie.&nbsp; He had only to hold his tongue.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he muttered reflectively, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s
+that Chink, certainly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At bottom, he felt a certain ambiguous respect for his governor&rsquo;s
+exaggerated dislike of women, as if that horror of feminine presence
+were a sort of depraved morality; but still morality, since he counted
+it as an advantage.&nbsp; It prevented many undesirable complications.&nbsp;
+He did not pretend to understand it.&nbsp; He did not even try to investigate
+this idiosyncrasy of his chief.&nbsp; All he knew was that he himself
+was differently inclined, and that it did not make him any happier or
+safer.&nbsp; He did not know how he would have acted if he had been
+knocking about the world on his own.&nbsp; Luckily he was a subordinate,
+not a wage-slave but a follower - which was a restraint.&nbsp; Yes!&nbsp;
+The other sort of disposition simplified matters in general; it wasn&rsquo;t
+to be gainsaid.&nbsp; But it was clear that it could also complicate
+them - as in this most important and, in Ricardo&rsquo;s view, already
+sufficiently delicate case.&nbsp; And the worst of it was that one could
+not tell exactly in what precise manner it would act.</p>
+<p>It was unnatural, he thought somewhat peevishly.&nbsp; How was one
+to reckon up the unnatural?&nbsp; There were no rules for that.&nbsp;
+The faithful henchman of plain Mr. Jones, foreseeing many difficulties
+of a material order, decided to keep the girl out of the governor&rsquo;s
+knowledge, out of his sight, too, for as long a time as it could be
+managed.&nbsp; That, alas, seemed to be at most a matter of a few hours;
+whereas Ricardo feared that to get the affair properly going would take
+some days.&nbsp; Once well started, he was not afraid of his gentleman
+failing him.&nbsp; As is often the case with lawless natures, Ricardo&rsquo;s
+faith in any given individual was of a simple, unquestioning character.&nbsp;
+For man must have some support in life.</p>
+<p>Cross-legged, his head drooping a little and perfectly still, he
+might have been meditating in a bonze-like attitude upon the sacred
+syllable &ldquo;Om.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was a striking illustration of the
+untruth of appearances, for his contempt for the world was of a severely
+practical kind.&nbsp; There was nothing oriental about Ricardo but the
+amazing quietness of his pose.&nbsp; Mr. Jones was also very quiet.&nbsp;
+He had let his head sink on the rolled-up rug, and lay stretched out
+on his side with his back to the light.&nbsp; In that position the shadows
+gathered in the cavities of his eyes made them look perfectly empty.&nbsp;
+When he spoke, his ghostly voice had only to travel a few inches straight
+into Ricardo&rsquo;s left ear.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you say something, now that you&rsquo;ve got
+me awake?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder if you were sleeping as sound as you are trying to
+make out, sir,&rdquo; said the unmoved Ricardo.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; repeated Mr. Jones.&nbsp; &ldquo;At any rate,
+I was resting quietly!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come, sir!&rdquo; Ricardo&rsquo;s whisper was alarmed.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean to say you&rsquo;re going to be bored?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Quite right!&rdquo;&nbsp; The secretary was very much relieved.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s no occasion to be, I can tell you, sir,&rdquo;
+he whispered earnestly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Anything but that!&nbsp; If I didn&rsquo;t
+say anything for a bit, it ain&rsquo;t because there isn&rsquo;t plenty
+to talk about.&nbsp; Ay, more than enough.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with you?&rdquo; breathed out his
+patron.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are you going to turn pessimist?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Me turn?&nbsp; No, sir!&nbsp; I ain&rsquo;t of those that
+turn.&nbsp; You may call me hard names, if you like, but you know very
+well that I ain&rsquo;t a croaker.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo changed his
+tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;If I said nothing for a while, it was because I was
+meditating over the Chink, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were?&nbsp; Waste of time, my Martin.&nbsp; A Chinaman
+is unfathomable.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo admitted that this might be so.&nbsp; Anyhow, a Chink was
+neither here nor there, as a general thing, unfathomable as he might
+be; but a Swedish baron wasn&rsquo;t - couldn&rsquo;t be!&nbsp; The
+woods were full of such barons.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know that he is so tame,&rdquo; was Mr. Jones&rsquo;s
+remark, in a sepulchral undertone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you mean, sir?&nbsp; He ain&rsquo;t a rabbit, of course.&nbsp;
+You couldn&rsquo;t hypnotize him, as I saw you do to more than one Dago,
+and other kinds of tame citizens, when it came to the point of holding
+them down to a game.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you reckon on that,&rdquo; murmured plain Mr.
+Jones seriously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir, I don&rsquo;t, though you have a wonderful power
+of the eye.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a fact.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have a wonderful patience,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones dryly.</p>
+<p>A dim smile flitted over the lips of the faithful Ricardo who never
+raised his head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want to try you too much, sir, but this is like
+no other job we ever turned our minds to.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps not.&nbsp; At any rate let us think so.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A weariness with the monotony of life was reflected in the tone of
+this qualified assent.&nbsp; It jarred on the nerves of the sanguine
+Ricardo.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let us think of the way to go to work,&rdquo; he retorted
+a little impatiently.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a deep one.&nbsp; Just
+look at the way he treated that chum of his.&nbsp; Did you ever hear
+of anything so low?&nbsp; And the artfulness of the beast - the dirty,
+tame artfulness!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you start moralizing, Martin,&rdquo; said Mr.
+Jones warningly.&nbsp; &ldquo;As far as I can make out the story that
+German hotel-keeper told you, it seems to show a certain amount of character;
+- and independence from common feelings which is not usual.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+very remarkable, if true.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, ay!&nbsp; Very remarkable.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s mighty low
+down, all the same,&rdquo; muttered, Ricardo obstinately.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+must say I am glad to think he will be paid off for it in a way that&rsquo;ll
+surprise him!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The tip of his tongue appeared lively for an instant, as if trying
+for the taste of that ferocious retribution on his compressed lips.&nbsp;
+For Ricardo was sincere in his indignation before the elementary principle
+of loyalty to a chum violated in cold blood, slowly, in a patient duplicity
+of years.&nbsp; There are standards in villainy as in virtue, and the
+act as he pictured it to himself acquired an additional horror from
+the slow pace of that treachery so atrocious and so tame.&nbsp; But
+he understood too the educated judgement of his governor, a gentleman
+looking on all this with the privileged detachment of a cultivated mind,
+of an elevated personality.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, he&rsquo;s deep - he&rsquo;s artful,&rdquo; he mumbled
+between his sharp teeth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Confound you!&rdquo; Mr. Jones&rsquo;s calm whisper crept
+into his ear.&nbsp; &ldquo;Come to the point.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Obedient, the secretary shook off his thoughtfulness.&nbsp; There
+was a similarity of mind between these two - one the outcast of his
+vices, the other inspired by a spirit of scornful defiance, the aggressiveness
+of a beast of prey looking upon all the tame creatures of the earth
+as its natural victim.&nbsp; Both were astute enough, however, and both
+were aware that they had plunged into this adventure without a sufficient
+scrutiny of detail.&nbsp; The figure of a lonely man far from all assistance
+had loomed up largely, fascinating and defenceless in the middle of
+the sea, filling the whole field of their vision.&nbsp; There had not
+seemed to be any need for thinking.&nbsp; As Schomberg had been saying:
+&ldquo;Three to one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But it did not look so simple now in the face of that solitude which
+was like an armour for this man.&nbsp; The feeling voiced by the henchman
+in his own way - &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t seem much forwarder now we are
+here&rdquo; was acknowledged by the silence of the patron.&nbsp; It
+was easy enough to rip a fellow up or drill a hole in him, whether he
+was alone or not, Ricardo reflected in low, confidential tones, but
+-</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He isn&rsquo;t alone,&rdquo; Mr. Jones said faintly, in his
+attitude of a man composed for sleep.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t forget
+that Chinaman.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo started slightly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, ay - the Chink!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo had been on the point of confessing about the girl; but no!&nbsp;
+He wanted his governor to be unperturbed and steady.&nbsp; Vague thoughts,
+which he hardly dared to look in the face, were stirring his brain in
+connection with that girl.&nbsp; She couldn&rsquo;t be much account,
+he thought.&nbsp; She could be frightened.&nbsp; And there were also
+other possibilities.&nbsp; The Chink, however, could be considered openly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What I was thinking about it, sir,&rdquo; he went on earnestly,
+&ldquo;is this - here we&rsquo;ve got a man.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s nothing.&nbsp;
+If he won&rsquo;t be good, he can be made quiet.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+easy.&nbsp; But then there&rsquo;s his plunder.&nbsp; He doesn&rsquo;t
+carry it in his pocket.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hope not,&rdquo; breathed Mr. Jones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Same here.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s too big, we know, but if he were
+alone, he would not feel worried about it overmuch - I mean the safety
+of the pieces.&nbsp; He would just put the lot into any box or drawer
+that was handy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Would he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&nbsp; He would keep it under his eye, as it were.&nbsp;
+Why not?&nbsp; It is natural.&nbsp; A fellow doesn&rsquo;t put his swag
+underground, unless there&rsquo;s a very good reason for it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A very good reason, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&nbsp; What do you think a fellow is - a mole?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>From his experience, Ricardo declared that man was not a burrowing
+beast.&nbsp; Even the misers very seldom buried their hoard, unless
+for exceptional reasons.&nbsp; In the given situation of a man alone
+on an island, the company of a Chink was a very good reason.&nbsp; Drawers
+would not be safe, nor boxes, either, from a prying, slant-eyed Chink.&nbsp;
+No, sir, unless a safe - a proper office safe.&nbsp; But the safe was
+there in the room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is there a safe in this room?&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t notice
+it,&rdquo; whispered Mr. Jones.</p>
+<p>That was because the thing was painted white, like the walls of the
+room; and besides, it was tucked away in the shadows of a corner.&nbsp;
+Mr. Jones had been too tired to observe anything on his first coming
+ashore; but Ricardo had very soon spotted the characteristic form.&nbsp;
+He only wished he could believe that the plunder of treachery, duplicity,
+and all the moral abominations of Heyst had been there.&nbsp; But no;
+the blamed thing was open.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It might have been there at one time or another,&rdquo; he
+commented gloomily, &ldquo;but it isn&rsquo;t there now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The man did not elect to live in this house,&rdquo; remarked
+Mr. Jones.&nbsp; &ldquo;And by the by, what could he have meant by speaking
+of circumstances which prevented him lodging us in the other bungalow?&nbsp;
+You remember what he said, Martin?&nbsp; Sounded cryptic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Martin, who remembered and understood the phrase as directly motived
+by the existence of the girl, waited a little before saying:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Some of his artfulness, sir; and not the worst of it either.&nbsp;
+That manner of his to us, this asking no questions, is some more of
+his artfulness.&nbsp; A man&rsquo;s bound to be curious, and he is;
+yet he goes on as if he didn&rsquo;t care.&nbsp; He does care - or else
+what was he doing up with a cigar in the middle of the night, doing
+a think?&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t like it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He may be outside, observing the light here, and saying the
+very same thing to himself of our own wakefulness,&rdquo; gravely suggested
+Ricardo&rsquo;s governor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He may be, sir; but this is too important to be talked over
+in the dark.&nbsp; And the light is all right, it can be accounted for.&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s a light in this bungalow in the middle of the night because
+- why, because you are not well.&nbsp; Not well, sir - that&rsquo;s
+what&rsquo;s the matter, and you will have to act up to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The consideration had suddenly occurred to the faithful henchman,
+in the light of a felicitous expedient to keep his governor and the
+girl apart as long as possible.&nbsp; Mr. Jones received the suggestion
+without the slightest stir, even in the deep sockets of his eyes, where
+a steady, faint gleam was the only thing telling of life and attention
+in his attenuated body.&nbsp; But Ricardo, as soon as he had enunciated
+his happy thought, perceived in it other possibilities more to the point
+and of greater practical advantage.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With your looks, sir, it will be easy enough,&rdquo; he went
+on evenly, as if no silence had intervened, always respectful, but frank,
+with perfect simplicity of purpose.&nbsp; &ldquo;All you&rsquo;ve got
+to do is just to lie down quietly.&nbsp; I noticed him looking sort
+of surprised at you on the wharf, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At these words, a na&iuml;ve tribute to the aspect of his physique,
+even more suggestive of the grave than of the sick-bed, a fold appeared
+on that side of the governor&rsquo;s face which was exposed to the dim
+light - a deep, shadowy, semicircular fold from the side of the nose
+to bottom of the chin - a silent smile.&nbsp; By a side-glance Ricardo
+had noted this play of features.&nbsp; He smiled, too, appreciative,
+encouraged.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you as hard as nails all the time,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Hang me if anybody would believe you aren&rsquo;t sick, if I
+were to swear myself black in the face!&nbsp; Give us a day or two to
+look into matters and size up that &rsquo;yporcrit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo&rsquo;s eyes remained fixed on his crossed shins.&nbsp; The
+chief, in his lifeless accents, approved.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps it would be a good idea.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The Chink, he&rsquo;s nothing.&nbsp; He can be made quiet
+any time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>One of Ricardo&rsquo;s hands, reposing palm upwards on his folded
+legs, made a swift thrusting gesture, repeated by the enormous darting
+shadow of an arm very low on the wall.&nbsp; It broke the spell of perfect
+stillness in the room.&nbsp; The secretary eyed moodily the wall from
+which the shadow had gone.&nbsp; Anybody could be made quiet, he pointed
+out.&nbsp; It was not anything that the Chink could do; no, it was the
+effect that his company must have produced on the conduct of the doomed
+man.&nbsp; A man!&nbsp; What was a man?&nbsp; A Swedish baron could
+be ripped up, or else holed by a shot, as easily as any other creature;
+but that was exactly what was to be avoided, till one knew where he
+had hidden his plunder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shouldn&rsquo;t think it would be some sort of hole in his
+bungalow,&rdquo; argued Ricardo with real anxiety.</p>
+<p>No.&nbsp; A house can be burnt - set on fire accidentally, or on
+purpose, while a man&rsquo;s asleep.&nbsp; Under the house - or in some
+crack, cranny, or crevice?&nbsp; Something told him it wasn&rsquo;t
+that.&nbsp; The anguish of mental effort contracted Ricardo&rsquo;s
+brow.&nbsp; The skin of his head seemed to move in this travail of vain
+and tormenting suppositions.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What did you think a fellow is, sir - a baby?&rdquo; he said,
+in answer to Mr. Jones&rsquo;s objections.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am trying
+to find out what I would do myself.&nbsp; He wouldn&rsquo;t be likely
+to be cleverer than I am.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what do you know about yourself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones seemed to watch his follower&rsquo;s perplexities with amusement
+concealed in a death-like composure.</p>
+<p>Ricardo disregarded the question.&nbsp; The material vision of the
+spoil absorbed all his faculties.&nbsp; A great vision!&nbsp; He seemed
+to see it.&nbsp; A few small canvas bags tied up with thin cord, their
+distended rotundity showing the inside pressure of the disk-like forms
+of coins - gold, solid, heavy, eminently portable.&nbsp; Perhaps steel
+cash-boxes with a chased design, on the covers; or perhaps a black and
+brass box with a handle on the top, and full of goodness knows what.&nbsp;
+Bank notes?&nbsp; Why not?&nbsp; The fellow had been going home; so
+it was surely something worth going home with.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And he may have put it anywhere outside - anywhere!&rdquo;
+cried Ricardo in a deadened voice, &ldquo;in the forest - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>That was it!&nbsp; A temporary darkness replaced the dim light of
+the room.&nbsp; The darkness of the forest at night and in it the gleam
+of a lantern, by which a figure is digging at the foot of a tree-trunk.&nbsp;
+As likely as not, another figure holding that lantern - ha, feminine!&nbsp;
+The girl!</p>
+<p>The prudent Ricardo stifled a picturesque and profane exclamation,
+partly joy, partly dismay.&nbsp; Had the girl been trusted or mistrusted
+by that man?&nbsp; Whatever it was, it was bound to be wholly!&nbsp;
+With women there could be no half-measures.&nbsp; He could not imagine
+a fellow half-trusting a woman in that intimate relation to himself,
+and in those particular circumstances of conquest and loneliness where
+no confidences could appear dangerous since, apparently, there could
+be no one she could give him away to.&nbsp; Moreover, in nine cases
+out of ten the woman would be trusted.&nbsp; But, trusted or mistrusted,
+was her presence a favourable or unfavourable condition of the problem?&nbsp;
+That was the question!</p>
+<p>The temptation to consult his chief, to talk over the weighty fact,
+and get his opinion on it, was great indeed.&nbsp; Ricardo resisted
+it; but the agony of his solitary mental conflict was extremely sharp.&nbsp;
+A woman in a problem is an incalculable quantity, even if you have something
+to go upon in forming your guess.&nbsp; How much more so when you haven&rsquo;t
+even once caught sight of her.</p>
+<p>Swift as were his mental processes, he felt that a longer silence
+was inadvisable.&nbsp; He hastened to speak:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And do you see us, sir, you and I, with a couple of spades
+having to tackle this whole confounded island?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He allowed himself a slight movement of the arm.&nbsp; The shadow
+enlarged it into a sweeping gesture.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This seems rather discouraging, Martin,&rdquo; murmured the
+unmoved governor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We mustn&rsquo;t be discouraged - that&rsquo;s all!&rdquo;
+retorted his henchman.&nbsp; &ldquo;And after what we had to go through
+in that boat too!&nbsp; Why it would be - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He couldn&rsquo;t find the qualifying words.&nbsp; Very calm, faithful,
+and yet astute, he expressed his new-born hopes darkly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Something&rsquo;s sure to turn up to give us a hint; only
+this job can&rsquo;t be rushed.&nbsp; You may depend on me to pick up
+the least little bit of a hint; but you, sir - you&rsquo;ve got to play
+him very gently.&nbsp; For the rest you can trust me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes; but I ask myself what <i>you</i> are trusting to.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our luck,&rdquo; said the faithful Ricardo.&nbsp; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t
+say a word against that.&nbsp; It might spoil the run of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are a superstitious beggar.&nbsp; No, I won&rsquo;t say
+anything against it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s right, sir.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you even think
+lightly of it.&nbsp; Luck&rsquo;s not to be played with.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, luck&rsquo;s a delicate thing,&rdquo; assented Mr. Jones
+in a dreamy whisper.</p>
+<p>A short silence ensued, which Ricardo ended in a discreet and tentative
+voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Talking of luck, I suppose he could be made to take a hand
+with you, sir - two-handed picket or ekkarty, you being seedy and keeping
+indoors - just to pass the time.&nbsp; For all we know, he may be one
+of them hot ones once they start - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it likely?&rdquo; came coldly from the principal.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Considering what we know of his history - say with his partner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;True, sir.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a cold-blooded beast; a cold-blooded,
+inhuman - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll tell you another thing that isn&rsquo;t likely.&nbsp;
+He would not be likely to let himself be stripped bare.&nbsp; We haven&rsquo;t
+to do with a young fool that can be led on by chaff or flattery, and
+in the end simply overawed.&nbsp; This is a calculating man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo recognized that clearly.&nbsp; What he had in his mind was
+something on a small scale, just to keep the enemy busy while he, Ricardo,
+had time to nose around a bit.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You could even lose a little money to him, sir,&rdquo; he
+suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo was thoughtful for a moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He strikes me, too, as the sort of man to start prancing when
+one didn&rsquo;t expect it.&nbsp; What do you think, sir?&nbsp; Is he
+a man that would prance?&nbsp; That is, if something startled him.&nbsp;
+More likely to prance than to run - what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The answer came at once, because Mr. Jones understood the peculiar
+idiom of his faithful follower.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, without doubt!&nbsp; Without doubt!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It does me good to hear that you think so.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s
+a prancing beast, and so we mustn&rsquo;t startle him - not till I have
+located the stuff.&nbsp; Afterwards - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo paused, sinister in the stillness of his pose.&nbsp; Suddenly
+he got up with a swift movement and gazed down at his chief in moody
+abstraction.&nbsp; Mr. Jones did not stir.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s one thing that&rsquo;s worrying me,&rdquo; began
+Ricardo in a subdued voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only one?&rdquo; was the faint comment from the motionless
+body on the bedstead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean more than all the others put together.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s grave news.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, grave enough.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s this - how do you feel
+in yourself, sir?&nbsp; Are you likely to get bored?&nbsp; I know them
+fits come on you suddenly; but surely you can tell - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Martin, you are an ass.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The moody face of the secretary brightened up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really, sir?&nbsp; Well, I am quite content to be on these
+terms - I mean as long as you don&rsquo;t get bored.&nbsp; It wouldn&rsquo;t
+do, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For coolness, Ricardo had thrown open his shirt and rolled up his
+sleeves.&nbsp; He moved stealthily across the room, bare-footed, towards
+the candle, the shadow of his head and shoulders growing bigger behind
+him on the opposite wall, to which the face of plain Mr. Jones was turned.&nbsp;
+With a feline movement, Ricardo glanced over his shoulder at the thin
+back of the spectre reposing on the bed, and then blew out the candle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In fact, I am rather amused, Martin,&rdquo; Mr. Jones said
+in the dark.</p>
+<p>He heard the sound of a slapped thigh and the jubilant exclamation
+of his henchman:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good!&nbsp; That&rsquo;s the way to talk, sir!&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h2>PART FOUR</h2>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER ONE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Ricardo advanced prudently by short darts from one tree-trunk to
+another, more in the manner of a squirrel than a cat.&nbsp; The sun
+had risen some time before.&nbsp; Already the sparkle of open sea was
+encroaching rapidly on the dark, cool, early-morning blue of Diamond
+Bay; but the deep dusk lingered yet under the mighty pillars of the
+forest, between which the secretary dodged.</p>
+<p>He was watching Number One&rsquo;s bungalow with an animal-like patience,
+if with a very human complexity of purpose.&nbsp; This was the second
+morning of such watching.&nbsp; The first one had not been rewarded
+by success.&nbsp; Well, strictly speaking, there was no hurry.</p>
+<p>The sun, swinging above the ridge all at once, inundated with light
+the space of burnt grass in front of Ricardo and the face of the bungalow,
+on which his eyes were fixed, leaving only the one dark spot of the
+doorway.&nbsp; To his right, to his left, and behind him, splashes of
+gold appeared in the deep shade of the forest, thinning the gloom under
+the ragged roof of leaves.</p>
+<p>This was not a very favourable circumstance for Ricardo&rsquo;s purpose.&nbsp;
+He did not wish to be detected in his patient occupation.&nbsp; For
+what he was watching for was a sight of the girl - that girl! just a
+glimpse across the burnt patch to see what she was like.&nbsp; He had
+excellent eyes, and the distance was not so great.&nbsp; He would be
+able to distinguish her face quite easily if she only came out on the
+veranda; and she was bound to do that sooner or later.&nbsp; He was
+confident that he could form some opinion about her - which, he felt,
+was very necessary, before venturing on some steps to get in touch with
+her behind that Swedish baron&rsquo;s back.&nbsp; His theoretical view
+of the girl was such that he was quite prepared, on the strength of
+that distant examination, to show himself discreetly - perhaps even
+make a sign.&nbsp; It all depended on his reading of the face.&nbsp;
+She couldn&rsquo;t be much.&nbsp; He knew that sort!</p>
+<p>By protruding his head a little he commanded, through the foliage
+of a festooning creeper, a view of the three bungalows.&nbsp; Irregularly
+disposed along a flat curve, over the veranda rail of the farthermost
+one hung a dark rug of a tartan pattern, amazingly conspicuous.&nbsp;
+Ricardo could see the very checks.&nbsp; A brisk fire of sticks was
+burning on the ground in front of the steps, and in the sunlight the
+thin, fluttering flame had paled almost to invisibility - a mere rosy
+stir under a faint wreath of smoke.&nbsp; He could see the white bandage
+on the head of Pedro bending over it, and the wisps of black hair standing
+up weirdly.&nbsp; He had wound that bandage himself, after breaking
+that shaggy and enormous head.&nbsp; The creature balanced it like a
+load, staggering towards the steps.&nbsp; Ricardo could see a small,
+long-handled saucepan at the end of a great hairy paw.</p>
+<p>Yes, he could see all that there was to be seen, far and near.&nbsp;
+Excellent eyes!&nbsp; The only thing they could not penetrate was the
+dark oblong of the doorway on the veranda under the low eaves of the
+bungalow&rsquo;s roof.&nbsp; And that was vexing.&nbsp; It was an outrage.&nbsp;
+Ricardo was easily outraged.&nbsp; Surely she would come out presently!&nbsp;
+Why didn&rsquo;t she?&nbsp; Surely the fellow did not tie her up to
+the bedpost before leaving the house!</p>
+<p>Nothing appeared.&nbsp; Ricardo was as still as the leafy cables
+of creepers depending in a convenient curtain from the mighty limb sixty
+feet above his head.&nbsp; His very eyelids were still, and this unblinking
+watchfulness gave him the dreamy air of a cat posed on a hearth-rug
+contemplating the fire.&nbsp; Was he dreaming?&nbsp; There, in plain
+sight, he had before him a white, blouse-like jacket, short blue trousers,
+a pair of bare yellow calves, a pigtail, long and slender -</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The confounded Chink!&rdquo; he muttered, astounded.</p>
+<p>He was not conscious of having looked away; and yet right there,
+in the middle of the picture, without having come round the right-hand
+corner or the left-hand corner of the house, without falling from the
+sky or surging up from the ground, Wang had become visible, large as
+life, and engaged in the young-ladyish occupation of picking flowers.&nbsp;
+Step by step, stooping repeatedly over the flower-beds at the foot of
+the veranda, the startlingly materialized Chinaman passed off the scene
+in a very commonplace manner, by going up the steps and disappearing
+in the darkness of the doorway.</p>
+<p>Only then the yellow eyes of Martin Ricardo lost their intent fixity.&nbsp;
+He understood that it was time for him to be moving.&nbsp; That bunch
+of flowers going into the house in the hand of a Chinaman was for the
+breakfast-table.&nbsp; What else could it be for?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give you flowers!&rdquo; he muttered threateningly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You wait!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Another moment, just for a glance towards the Jones bungalow, whence
+he expected Heyst to issue on his way to that breakfast so offensively
+decorated, and Ricardo began his retreat.&nbsp; His impulse, his desire,
+was for a rush into the open, face to face with the appointed victim,
+for what he called a &ldquo;ripping up,&rdquo; visualized greedily,
+and always with the swift preliminary stooping movement on his part
+- the forerunner of certain death to his adversary.&nbsp; This was his
+impulse; and as it was, so to speak, constitutional, it was extremely
+difficult to resist when his blood was up.&nbsp; What could be more
+trying than to have to skulk and dodge and restrain oneself, mentally
+and physically, when one&rsquo;s blood was up?&nbsp; Mr. Secretary Ricardo
+began his retreat from his post of observation behind a tree opposite
+Heyst&rsquo;s bungalow, using great care to remain unseen.&nbsp; His
+proceedings were made easier by the declivity of the ground, which sloped
+sharply down to the water&rsquo;s edge.&nbsp; There, his feet feeling
+the warmth of the island&rsquo;s rocky foundation already heated by
+the sun, through the thin soles of his straw slippers he was, as it
+were, sunk out of sight of the houses.&nbsp; A short scramble of some
+twenty feet brought him up again to the upper level, at the place where
+the jetty had its root in the shore.&nbsp; He leaned his back against
+one of the lofty uprights which still held up the company&rsquo;s signboard
+above the mound of derelict coal.&nbsp; Nobody could have guessed how
+much his blood was up.&nbsp; To contain himself he folded his arms tightly
+on his breast.</p>
+<p>Ricardo was not used to a prolonged effort of self-control.&nbsp;
+His craft, his artfulness, felt themselves always at the mercy of his
+nature, which was truly feral and only held in subjection by the influence
+of the &ldquo;governor,&rdquo; the prestige of a gentleman.&nbsp; It
+had its cunning too, but it was being almost too severely tried since
+the feral solution of a growl and a spring was forbidden by the problem.&nbsp;
+Ricardo dared not venture out on the cleared ground.&nbsp; He dared
+not.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I meet the beggar,&rdquo; he thought, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+know what I mayn&rsquo;t do.&nbsp; I daren&rsquo;t trust myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>What exasperated him just now was his inability to understand Heyst.&nbsp;
+Ricardo was human enough to suffer from the discovery of his limitations.&nbsp;
+No, he couldn&rsquo;t size Heyst up.&nbsp; He could kill him with extreme
+ease - a growl and a spring - but that was forbidden!&nbsp; However,
+he could not remain indefinitely under the funereal blackboard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I must make a move,&rdquo; he thought.</p>
+<p>He moved on, his head swimming a little with the repressed desire
+of violence, and came out openly in front of the bungalows, as if he
+had just been down to the jetty to look at the boat.&nbsp; The sunshine
+enveloped him, very brilliant, very still, very hot.&nbsp; The three
+buildings faced him.&nbsp; The one with the rug on the balustrade was
+the most distant; next to it was the empty bungalow; the nearest, with
+the flower-beds at the foot of its veranda, contained that bothersome
+girl, who had managed so provokingly to keep herself invisible.&nbsp;
+That was why Ricardo&rsquo;s eyes lingered on that building.&nbsp; The
+girl would surely be easier to &ldquo;size up&rdquo; than Heyst.&nbsp;
+A sight of her, a mere glimpse, would have been something to go by,
+a step nearer to the goal - the first real move, in fact.&nbsp; Ricardo
+saw no other move.&nbsp; And any time she might appear on that veranda!</p>
+<p>She did not appear; but, like a concealed magnet, she exercised her
+attraction.&nbsp; As he went on, he deviated towards the bungalow.&nbsp;
+Though his movements were deliberate, his feral instincts had such sway
+that if he had met Heyst walking towards him, he would have had to satisfy
+his need of violence.&nbsp; But he saw nobody.&nbsp; Wang was at the
+back of the house, keeping the coffee hot against Number One&rsquo;s
+return for breakfast.&nbsp; Even the simian Pedro was out of sight,
+no doubt crouching on the door-step, his red little eyes fastened with
+animal-like devotion on Mr. Jones, who was in discourse with Heyst in
+the other bungalow - the conversation of an evil spectre with a disarmed
+man, watched by an ape.</p>
+<p>His will having very little to do with it, Ricardo, darting swift
+glances in all directions, found himself at the steps of the Heyst bungalow.&nbsp;
+Once there, falling under an uncontrollable force of attraction, he
+mounted them with a savage and stealthy action of his limbs, and paused
+for a moment under the eaves to listen to the silence.&nbsp; Presently
+he advanced over the threshold one leg - it seemed to stretch itself,
+like a limb of india-rubber - planted his foot within, brought up the
+other swiftly, and stood inside the room, turning his head from side
+to side.&nbsp; To his eyes, brought in there from the dazzling sunshine,
+all was gloom for a moment.&nbsp; His pupils, like a cat&rsquo;s, dilating
+swiftly, he distinguished an enormous quantity of books.&nbsp; He was
+amazed; and he was put off too.&nbsp; He was vexed in his astonishment.&nbsp;
+He had meant to note the aspect and nature of things, and hoped to draw
+some useful inference, some hint as to the man.&nbsp; But what guess
+could one make out of a multitude of books?&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t know
+what to think; and he formulated his bewilderment in the mental exclamation:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What the devil has this fellow been trying to set up here
+- a school?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He gave a prolonged stare to the portrait of Heyst&rsquo;s father,
+that severe profile ignoring the vanities of this earth.&nbsp; His eyes
+gleamed sideways at the heavy silver candlesticks - signs of opulence.&nbsp;
+He prowled as a stray cat entering a strange place might have done,
+for if Ricardo had not Wang&rsquo;s miraculous gift of materializing
+and vanishing, rather than coming and going, he could be nearly as noiseless
+in his less elusive movements.&nbsp; He noted the back door standing
+just ajar; and an the time his slightly pointed ears, at the utmost
+stretch of watchfulness, kept in touch with the profound silence outside
+enveloping the absolute stillness of the house.</p>
+<p>He had not been in the room two minutes when it occurred to him that
+he must be alone in the bungalow.&nbsp; The woman, most likely, had
+sneaked out and was walking about somewhere in the grounds at the back.&nbsp;
+She had been probably ordered to keep out of sight.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp;
+Because the fellow mistrusted his guests; or was it because he mistrusted
+<i>her</i>?</p>
+<p>Ricardo reflected that from a certain point of view it amounted nearly
+to the same thing.&nbsp; He remembered Schomberg&rsquo;s story.&nbsp;
+He felt that running away with somebody only to get clear of that beastly,
+tame, hotel-keeper&rsquo;s attention was no proof of hopeless infatuation.&nbsp;
+She could be got in touch with.</p>
+<p>His moustaches stirred.&nbsp; For some time he had been looking at
+a closed door.&nbsp; He would peep into that other room, and perhaps
+see something more informing than a confounded lot of books.&nbsp; As
+he crossed over, he thought recklessly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If the beggar comes in suddenly, and starts to prance, I&rsquo;ll
+rip him up and be done with it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He laid his hand on the handle, and felt the door come unlatched.&nbsp;
+Before he pulled it open, he listened again to the silence.&nbsp; He
+felt it all about him, complete, without a flaw.</p>
+<p>The necessity of prudence had exasperated his self-restraint.&nbsp;
+A mood of ferocity woke up in him, and, as always at such times, he
+became physically aware of the sheeted knife strapped to his leg.&nbsp;
+He pulled at the door with fierce curiosity.&nbsp; It came open without
+a squeak of hinge, without a rustle, with no sound at all; and he found
+himself glaring at the opaque surface of some rough blue stuff, like
+serge.&nbsp; A curtain was fitted inside, heavy enough and long enough
+not to stir.</p>
+<p>A curtain!&nbsp; This unforeseen veil, baffling his curiosity checked
+his brusqueness.&nbsp; He did not fling it aside with an impatient movement;
+he only looked at it closely, as if its texture had to be examined before
+his hand could touch such stuff.&nbsp; In this interval of hesitation,
+he seemed to detect a flaw in the perfection of the silence, the faintest
+possible rustle, which his ears caught and instantly, in the effort
+of conscious listening, lost again.&nbsp; No!&nbsp; Everything was still
+inside and outside the house, only he had no longer the sense of being
+alone there.</p>
+<p>When he put out his hand towards the motionless folds it was with
+extreme caution, and merely to push the stuff aside a little, advancing
+his head at the same time to peep within.&nbsp; A moment of complete
+immobility ensued.&nbsp; Then, without anything else of him stirring,
+Ricardo&rsquo;s head shrank back on his shoulders, his arm descended
+slowly to his side.&nbsp; There was a woman in there.&nbsp; The very
+woman!&nbsp; Lighted dimly by the reflection of the outer glare, she
+loomed up strangely big and shadowy at the other end of the long, narrow
+room.&nbsp; With her back to the door, she was doing her hair with bare
+arms uplifted.&nbsp; One of them gleamed pearly white; the other detached
+its perfect form in black against the unshuttered, uncurtained square
+window-hole.&nbsp; She was there, her fingers busy with her dark hair,
+utterly unconscious, exposed and defenceless - and tempting.</p>
+<p>Ricardo drew back one foot and pressed his elbows close to his sides;
+his chest started heaving convulsively as if he were wrestling or running
+a race; his body began to sway gently back and forth.&nbsp; The self-restraint
+was at an end: his psychology must have its way.&nbsp; The instinct
+for the feral spring could no longer be denied.&nbsp; Ravish or kill
+- it was all one to him, as long as by the act he liberated the suffering
+soul of savagery repressed for so long.&nbsp; After a quick glance over
+his shoulder, which hunters of big game tell us no lion or tiger omits
+to give before charging home, Ricardo charged, head down, straight at
+the curtain.&nbsp; The stuff, tossed up violently by his rush, settled
+itself with a slow, floating descent Into vertical folds, motionless,
+without a shudder even, in the still, warm air.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER TWO</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>The clock - which once upon a time had measured the hours of philosophic
+meditation - could not have ticked away more than five seconds when
+Wang materialized within the living-room.&nbsp; His concern primarily
+was with the delayed breakfast, but at once his slanting eyes became
+immovably fixed upon the unstirring curtain.&nbsp; For it was behind
+it that he had located the strange, deadened scuffling sounds which
+filled the empty room.&nbsp; The slanting eyes of his race could not
+achieve a round, amazed stare, but they remained still, dead still,
+and his impassive yellow face grew all at once careworn and lean with
+the sudden strain of intense, doubtful, frightened watchfulness.&nbsp;
+Contrary impulses swayed his body, rooted to the floor-mats.&nbsp; He
+even went so far as to extend his hand towards the curtain.&nbsp; He
+could not reach it, and he didn&rsquo;t make the necessary step forward.</p>
+<p>The mysterious struggle was going on with confused thuds of bare
+feet, in a mute wrestling match, no human sound, hiss, groan, murmur,
+or exclamation coming through the curtain.&nbsp; A chair fell over,
+not with a crash but lightly, as if just grazed, and a faint metallic
+ring of the tin bath succeeded.&nbsp; Finally the tense silence, as
+of two adversaries locked in a deadly grip, was ended by the heavy,
+dull thump of a soft body flung against the inner partition of planks.&nbsp;
+It seemed to shake the whole bungalow.&nbsp; By that time, walking backward,
+his eyes, his very throat, strained with fearful excitement, his extended
+arm still pointing at the curtain, Wang had disappeared through the
+back door.&nbsp; Once out in the compound, he bolted round the end of
+the house.&nbsp; Emerging innocently between the two bungalows he lingered
+and lounged in the open, where anybody issuing from any of the dwellings
+was bound to see him - a self-possessed Chinaman idling there, with
+nothing but perhaps an unserved breakfast on his mind.</p>
+<p>It was at this time that Wang made up his mind to give up all connection
+with Number One, a man not only disarmed but already half vanquished.&nbsp;
+Till that morning he had had doubts as to his course of action, but
+this overheard scuffle decided the question.&nbsp; Number One was a
+doomed man - one of those beings whom it is unlucky to help.&nbsp; Even
+as he walked in the open with a fine air of unconcern, Wang wondered
+that no sound of any sort was to be heard inside the house.&nbsp; For
+all he knew, the white woman might have been scuffling in there with
+an evil spirit, which had of course killed her.&nbsp; For nothing visible
+came out of the house he watched out of the slanting comer of his eye.&nbsp;
+The sunshine and the silence outside the bungalow reigned undisturbed.</p>
+<p>But in the house the silence of the big room would not have struck
+an acute ear as perfect.&nbsp; It was troubled by a stir so faint that
+it could hardly be called a ghost of whispering from behind the curtain.</p>
+<p>Ricardo, feeling his throat with tender care, breathed out admiringly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have fingers like steel.&nbsp; Jimminy!&nbsp; You have
+muscles like a giant!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Luckily for Lena, Ricardo&rsquo;s onset had been so sudden - she
+was winding her two heavy tresses round her head - that she had no time
+to lower her arms.&nbsp; This, which saved them from being pinned to
+her sides, gave her a better chance to resist.&nbsp; His spring had
+nearly thrown her down.&nbsp; Luckily, again, she was standing so near
+the wall that, though she was driven against it headlong, yet the shock
+was not heavy enough to knock all the breath out of her body.&nbsp;
+On the contrary, it helped her first instinctive attempt to drive her
+assailant backward.</p>
+<p>After the first gasp of a surprise that was really too over-powering
+for a cry, she was never in doubt of the nature of her danger.&nbsp;
+She defended herself in the full, clear knowledge of it, from the force
+of instinct which is the true source of every great display of energy,
+and with a determination which could hardly have been expected from
+a girl who, cornered in a dim corridor by the red-faced, stammering
+Schomberg, had trembled with shame, disgust, and fear; had drooped,
+terrified, before mere words spluttered out odiously by a man who had
+never in his life laid his big paw on her.</p>
+<p>This new enemy&rsquo;s attack was simple, straightforward violence.&nbsp;
+It was not the slimy, underhand plotting to deliver her up like a slave,
+which had sickened her heart and had made her feel in her loneliness
+that her oppressors were too many for her.&nbsp; She was no longer alone
+in the world now.&nbsp; She resisted without a moment of faltering,
+because she was no longer deprived of moral support; because she was
+a human being who counted; because she was no longer defending herself
+for herself alone; because of the faith that had been born in her -
+the faith in the man of her destiny, and perhaps in the Heaven which
+had sent him so wonderfully to cross her path.</p>
+<p>She had defended herself principally by maintaining a desperate,
+murderous clutch on Ricardo&rsquo;s windpipe, till she felt a sudden
+relaxation of the terrific hug in which he stupidly and ineffectually
+persisted to hold her.&nbsp; Then with a supreme effort of her arms
+and of her suddenly raised knee, she sent him flying against the partition.&nbsp;
+The cedar-wood chest stood in the way, and Ricardo, with a thump which
+boomed hollow through the whole bungalow, fell on it in a sitting posture,
+half strangled, and exhausted not so much by the efforts as by the emotions
+of the struggle.</p>
+<p>With the recoil of her exerted strength, she too reeled, staggered
+back, and sat on the edge of the bed.&nbsp; Out of breath, but calm
+and unabashed, she busied herself in readjusting under her arms the
+brown and yellow figured Celebes sarong, the tuck of which had come
+undone during the fight.&nbsp; Then, folding her bare arms tightly on
+her breast, she leaned forward on her crossed legs, determined and without
+fear.</p>
+<p>Ricardo, leaning forward too, his nervous force gone, crestfallen
+like a beast of prey that has missed its spring, met her big grey eyes
+looking at him - wide open, observing, mysterious - from under the dark
+arches of her courageous eyebrows.&nbsp; Their faces were not a foot
+apart.&nbsp; He ceased feeling about his aching throat and dropped the
+palms of his hands heavily on his knees.&nbsp; He was not looking at
+her bare shoulders, at her strong arms; he was looking down at the floor.&nbsp;
+He had lost one of his straw slippers.&nbsp; A chair with a white dress
+on it had been overturned.&nbsp; These, with splashes of water on the
+floor out of a brusquely misplaced sponge-bath, were the only traces
+of the struggle.</p>
+<p>Ricardo swallowed twice consciously, as if to make sure of his throat
+before he spoke again:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right.&nbsp; I never meant to hurt you - though I am no
+joker when it comes to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He pulled up the leg of his pyjamas to exhibit the strapped knife.&nbsp;
+She glanced at it without moving her head, and murmured with scornful
+bitterness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, yes - with that thing stuck in my side.&nbsp; In no other
+way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook his head with a shamefaced smile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen!&nbsp; I am quiet now.&nbsp; Straight - I am.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t need to explain why - you know how it is.&nbsp; And I
+can see, now, this wasn&rsquo;t the way with you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made no sound.&nbsp; Her still, upward gaze had a patient, mournfulness
+which troubled him like a suggestion of an inconceivable depth.&nbsp;
+He added thoughtfully:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are not going to make a noise about this silly try of
+mine?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She moved her head the least bit.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Jee-miny!&nbsp; You are a wonder - &rdquo; he murmured earnestly,
+relieved more than she could have guessed.</p>
+<p>Of course, if she had attempted to run out, he would have stuck the
+knife between her shoulders, to stop her screaming; but all the fat
+would have been in the fire, the business utterly spoiled, and the rage
+of the governor - especially when he learned the cause - boundless.&nbsp;
+A woman that does not make a noise after an attempt of that kind has
+tacitly condoned the offence.&nbsp; Ricardo had no small vanities.&nbsp;
+But clearly, if she would pass it over like this, then he could not
+be so utterly repugnant to her.&nbsp; He felt flattered.&nbsp; And she
+didn&rsquo;t seem afraid of him either.&nbsp; He already felt almost
+tender towards the girl - that plucky, fine girl who had not tried to
+run screaming from him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We shall be friends yet.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t give you up.&nbsp;
+Don&rsquo;t think it.&nbsp; Friends as friends can be!&rdquo; he whispered
+confidently.&nbsp; &ldquo;Jee-miny!&nbsp; You aren&rsquo;t a tame one.&nbsp;
+Neither am I.&nbsp; You will find that out before long.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He could not know that if she had not run out, it was because that
+morning, under the sum of growing uneasiness at the presence of the
+incomprehensible visitors, Heyst had confessed to her that it was his
+revolver he had been looking for in the night; that it was gone, that
+he was a disarmed, defenceless man.&nbsp; She had hardly comprehended
+the meaning of his confession.&nbsp; Now she understood better what
+it meant.&nbsp; The effort of her self-control, her stillness, impressed
+Ricardo.&nbsp; Suddenly she spoke:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What are you after?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He did not raise his eyes.&nbsp; His hands reposing on his knees,
+his drooping head, something reflective in his pose, suggested the weariness
+of a simple soul, the fatigue of a mental rather than physical contest.&nbsp;
+He answered the direct question by a direct statement, as if he were
+too tired to dissemble:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;After the swag.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The word was strange to her.&nbsp; The veiled ardour of her grey
+gaze from under the dark eyebrows never left Ricardo&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A swag?&rdquo; she murmured quietly.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s
+that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, swag, plunder - what your gentleman has been pinching
+right and left for years - the pieces.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you know?&nbsp;
+This!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Without looking up, he made the motion of counting money into the
+palm of his hand.&nbsp; She lowered her eyes slightly to observe this
+bit of pantomime, but returned them to his face at once.&nbsp; Then,
+in a mere breath:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How do you know anything about him?&rdquo; she asked, concealing
+her puzzled alarm.&nbsp; &ldquo;What has it got to do with you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Everything,&rdquo; was Ricardo&rsquo;s concise answer, in
+a low, emphatic whisper.&nbsp; He reflected that this girl was really
+his best hope.&nbsp; Out of the unfaded impression of past violence
+there was growing the sort of sentiment which prevents a man from being
+indifferent to a woman he has once held in his arms - if even against
+her will - and still more so if she has pardoned the outrage.&nbsp;
+It becomes then a sort of bond.&nbsp; He felt positively the need to
+confide in her - a subtle trait of masculinity, this almost physical
+need of trust which can exist side by side with the most brutal readiness
+of suspicion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a game of grab - see?&rdquo; he went on, with a
+new inflection of intimacy in his murmur.&nbsp; He was looking straight
+at her now.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That fat, tame slug of a gin-slinger, Schomberg, put us up
+to it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So strong is the impression of helpless and persecuted misery, that
+the girl who had fought down a savage assault without faltering could
+not completely repress a shudder at the mere sound of the abhorred name.</p>
+<p>Ricardo became more rapid and confidential:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He wants to pay him off - pay both of you, at that; so he
+told me.&nbsp; He was hot after you.&nbsp; He would have given all he
+had into those hands of yours that have nearly strangled me.&nbsp; But
+you couldn&rsquo;t, eh?&nbsp; Nohow - what?&rdquo;&nbsp; He paused.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;So, rather than - you followed a gentleman?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He noticed a slight movement of her head and spoke quickly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Same here - rather than be a wage-slave.&nbsp; Only these
+foreigners aren&rsquo;t to be trusted.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re too good for
+him.&nbsp; A man that will rob his best chum?&rdquo; She raised her
+head.&nbsp; He went on, well pleased with his progress, whispering hurriedly:
+&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; I know all about him.&nbsp; So you may guess how he&rsquo;s
+likely to treat a woman after a bit!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He did not know that he was striking terror into her breast now.&nbsp;
+Still the grey eyes remained fixed on him unmovably watchful, as if
+sleepy under the white forehead.&nbsp; She was beginning to understand.&nbsp;
+His words conveyed a definite, dreadful meaning to her mind, which he
+proceeded to enlighten further in a convinced murmur.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You and I are made to understand each other.&nbsp; Born alike,
+bred alike, I guess.&nbsp; You are not tame.&nbsp; Same here!&nbsp;
+You have been chucked out into this rotten world of &rsquo;yporcrits.&nbsp;
+Same here!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her stillness, her appalled stillness, wore to him an air of fascinated
+attention.&nbsp; He asked abruptly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made an effort to breathe out:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His tone expressed excited secrecy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The swag - plunder - pieces.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a game of grab.&nbsp;
+We must have it; but it isn&rsquo;t easy, and so you will have to lend
+a hand.&nbsp; Come! is it kept in the house?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As often with women, her wits were sharpened by the very terror of
+the glimpsed menace.&nbsp; She shook her head negatively.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sure?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay!&nbsp; Thought so.&nbsp; Does your gentleman trust you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Again she shook her head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Blamed &rsquo;yporcrit,&rdquo; he said feelingly, and then
+reflected: &ldquo;He&rsquo;s one of the tame ones, ain&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You had better find out for yourself,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You trust me.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t want to die before you and
+I have made friends.&rdquo;&nbsp; This was said with a strange air of
+feline gallantry.&nbsp; Then, tentatively: &ldquo;But he could be brought
+to trust you, couldn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Trust me?&rdquo; she said, in a tone which bordered on despair,
+but which he mistook for derision.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stand in with us,&rdquo; he urged.&nbsp; &ldquo;Give the chuck
+to all this blamed &rsquo;yporcrisy.&nbsp; Perhaps, without being trusted,
+you have managed to find out something already, eh?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps I have,&rdquo; she uttered with lips that seemed to
+her to be freezing fast.</p>
+<p>Ricardo now looked at her calm face with something like respect.&nbsp;
+He was even a little awed by her stillness, by her economy of words.&nbsp;
+Womanlike, she felt the effect she had produced, the effect of knowing
+much and of keeping all her knowledge in reserve.&nbsp; So far, somehow,
+this had come, about of itself.&nbsp; Thus encouraged, directed in the
+way of duplicity, the refuge of the weak, she made a heroically conscious
+effort and forced her stiff, cold lips into a smile.</p>
+<p>Duplicity - the refuge of the weak and the cowardly, but of the disarmed,
+too!&nbsp; Nothing stood between the enchanted dream of her existence
+and a cruel catastrophe but her duplicity.&nbsp; It seemed to her that
+the man sitting there before her was an unavoidable presence, which
+had attended all her life.&nbsp; He was the embodied evil of the world.&nbsp;
+She was not ashamed of her duplicity.&nbsp; With a woman&rsquo;s frank
+courage, as soon as she saw that opening she threw herself into it without
+reserve, with only one doubt - that of her own strength.&nbsp; She was
+appalled by the situation; but already all her aroused femininity, understanding
+that whether Heyst loved her or not she loved him, and feeling that
+she had brought this on his head, faced the danger with a passionate
+desire to defend her own.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER THREE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>To Ricardo the girl had been so unforeseen that he was unable to
+bring upon her the light of his critical faculties.&nbsp; Her smile
+appeared to him full of promise.&nbsp; He had not expected her to be
+what she was.&nbsp; Who, from the talk he had heard, could expect to
+meet a girl like this?&nbsp; She was a blooming miracle, he said to
+himself, familiarly, yet with a tinge of respect.&nbsp; She was no meat
+for the likes of that tame, respectable gin-slinger.&nbsp; Ricardo grew
+hot with indignation.&nbsp; Her courage, her physical strength, demonstrated
+at the cost of his discomfiture, commanded his sympathy.&nbsp; He felt
+himself drawn to her by the proofs of her amazing spirit.&nbsp; Such
+a girl!&nbsp; She had a strong soul; and her reflective disposition
+to throw over her connection proved that she was no hypocrite.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is your gentleman a good shot?&rdquo; he said, looking down
+on the floor again, as if indifferent.</p>
+<p>She hardly understood the phrase; but in its form it suggested some
+accomplishment.&nbsp; It was safe to whisper an affirmative.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mine, too - and better than good,&rdquo; Ricardo murmured,
+and then, in a confidential burst: &ldquo;I am not so good at it, but
+I carry a pretty deadly thing about me, all the same!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He tapped his leg.&nbsp; She was past the stage of shudders now.&nbsp;
+Stiff all over, unable even to move her eyes, she felt an awful mental
+tension which was like blank forgetfulness.&nbsp; Ricardo tried to influence
+her in his own way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And my gentleman is not the sort that would drop me.&nbsp;
+He ain&rsquo;t no foreigner; whereas you, with your baron, you don&rsquo;t
+know what&rsquo;s before you - or, rather, being a woman, you know only
+too well.&nbsp; Much better not to wait for the chuck.&nbsp; Pile in
+with us and get your share - of the plunder, I mean.&nbsp; You have
+some notion about it already.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She felt that if she as much as hinted by word or sign that there
+was no such thing on the island, Heyst&rsquo;s life wouldn&rsquo;t be
+worth half an hour&rsquo;s purchase; but all power of combining words
+had vanished in the tension of her mind.&nbsp; Words themselves were
+too difficult to think of - all except the word &ldquo;yes,&rdquo; the
+saving word!&nbsp; She whispered it with not a feature of her face moving.&nbsp;
+To Ricardo the faint and concise sound proved a cool, reserved assent,
+more worth having from that amazing mistress of herself than a thousand
+words from any other woman.&nbsp; He thought with exultation that he
+had come upon one in a million - in ten millions!&nbsp; His whisper
+became frankly entreating.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s good!&nbsp; Now all you&rsquo;ve got to do is
+to make sure where he keeps his swag.&nbsp; Only do be quick about it!&nbsp;
+I can&rsquo;t stand much longer this crawling-on-the-stomach business
+so as not to scare your gentleman.&nbsp; What do you think a fellow
+is - a reptile?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She stared without seeing anyone, as a person in the night sits staring
+and listening to deadly sounds, to evil incantations.&nbsp; And always
+in her head there was that tension of the mind trying to get hold of
+something, of a saving idea which seemed to be so near and could not
+be captured.&nbsp; Suddenly she seized it.&nbsp; Yes - she had to get
+that man out of the house.&nbsp; At that very moment, raised outside,
+not very near, but heard distinctly, Heyst&rsquo;s voice uttered the
+words:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you been looking out for me, Wang?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was for her like a flash of lightning framed in the darkness which
+had beset her on all sides, showing a deadly precipice right under her
+feet.&nbsp; With a convulsive movement she sat up straight, but had
+no power to rise.&nbsp; Ricardo, on the contrary, was on his feet on
+the instant, as noiseless as a cat.&nbsp; His yellow eyes gleamed, gliding
+here and there; but he too seemed unable to make another movement.&nbsp;
+Only his moustaches stirred visibly, like the feelers of some animal.</p>
+<p>Wang&rsquo;s answer, &ldquo;<i>Ya tuan</i>,&rdquo; was heard by the
+two in the room, but more faintly.&nbsp; Then Heyst again:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right!&nbsp; You may bring the coffee in.&nbsp; Mem Putih
+out in the room yet?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To this question Wang made no answer.</p>
+<p>Ricardo&rsquo;s and the girl&rsquo;s eyes met, utterly without expression,
+all their faculties being absorbed in listening for the first sound
+of Heyst&rsquo;s footsteps, for any sound outside which would mean that
+Ricardo&rsquo;s retreat was cut off.&nbsp; Both understood perfectly
+well that Wang must have gone round the house, and that he was now at
+the back, making it impossible for Ricardo to slip out unseen that way
+before Heyst came in at the front.</p>
+<p>A darkling shade settled on the face of the devoted secretary.&nbsp;
+Here was the business utterly spoiled!&nbsp; It was the gloom of anger,
+and even of apprehension.&nbsp; He would perhaps have made a dash for
+it through the back door, if Heyst had not been heard ascending the
+front steps.&nbsp; He climbed them slowly, very slowly, like a man who
+is discouraged or weary - or simply thoughtful; and Ricardo had a mental
+vision of his face, with its martial moustache, the lofty forehead,
+the impassive features, and the quiet, meditative eyes.&nbsp; Trapped!&nbsp;
+Confound it!&nbsp; After all, perhaps the governor was right.&nbsp;
+Women had to be shunned.&nbsp; Fooling with this one had apparently
+ruined the whole business.&nbsp; For, trapped as he was he might just
+as well kill, since, anyhow, to be seen was to be unmasked.&nbsp; But
+he was too fair-minded to be angry with the girl.</p>
+<p>Heyst had paused on the veranda, or in the very doorway.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall be shot down like a dog if I ain&rsquo;t quick,&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Ricardo muttered excitedly to the girl.</p>
+<p>He stooped to get hold of his knife; and the next moment would have
+hurled himself out through the curtain, nearly, as prompt and fully
+as deadly to Heyst as an unexpected thunderbolt.&nbsp; The feel more
+than the strength of the girl&rsquo;s hand, clutching at his shoulder,
+checked him.&nbsp; He swung round, crouching with a yellow upward glare.&nbsp;
+Ah!&nbsp; Was she turning against him?</p>
+<p>He would have stuck his knife into the hollow of her bare throat
+if he had not seen her other hand pointing to the window.&nbsp; It was
+a long opening, high up, close under the ceiling almost, with a single
+pivoting shutter.</p>
+<p>While he was still looking at it she moved noiselessly away, picking
+up the overturned chair, and placed it under the wall.&nbsp; Then she
+looked round; but he didn&rsquo;t need to be beckoned to.&nbsp; In two
+long, tiptoeing strides he was at her side.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Be quick!&rdquo; she gasped.</p>
+<p>He seized her hand and wrung it with all the force of his dumb gratitude,
+as a man does to a chum when there is no time for words.&nbsp; Then
+he mounted the chair.&nbsp; Ricardo was short - too short to get over
+without a noisy scramble.&nbsp; He hesitated an instant; she, watchful,
+bore rigidly on the seat with her beautiful bare arms, while, light
+and sure, he used the back of the chair as a ladder.&nbsp; The masses
+of her brown hair fell all about her face.</p>
+<p>Footsteps resounded in the next room, and Heyst&rsquo;s voice, not
+very loud, called her by name.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lena!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes!&nbsp; In a minute,&rdquo; she answered with a particular
+intonation which she knew would prevent Heyst from coming in at once.</p>
+<p>When she looked up, Ricardo had vanished, letting himself down outside
+so lightly that she had not heard the slightest noise.&nbsp; She stood
+up then, bewildered, frightened, as if awakened from a drugged sleep,
+with heavy, downcast, unseeing eyes, her fortitude tired out, her imagination
+as if dead within her and unable to keep her fear alive.</p>
+<p>Heyst moved about aimlessly in the other room.&nbsp; This sound roused
+her exhausted wits.&nbsp; At once she began to think, hear, see; and
+what she saw - or rather recognized, for her eyes had been resting on
+it all the time - was Ricardo&rsquo;s straw slipper, lost in the scuffle,
+lying near the bath.&nbsp; She had just time to step forward and plant
+her foot on it when the curtains shook, and, pushed aside, disclosed
+Heyst in the doorway.</p>
+<p>Out of the appeased enchantment of the senses she had found with
+him, like a sort of bewitched state, his danger brought a sensation
+of warmth to her breast.&nbsp; She felt something stir in there, something
+profound, like a new sort of life.</p>
+<p>The room was in partial darkness, Ricardo having accidentally swung
+the pivoted shutter as he went out of the window.&nbsp; Heyst peered
+from the doorway.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, you haven&rsquo;t done your hair yet,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t stop to do it now.&nbsp; I shan&rsquo;t be long,&rdquo;
+she replied steadily, and remained still, feeling Ricardo&rsquo;s slipper
+under the sole of her foot.</p>
+<p>Heyst, with a movement of retreat, let the curtain drop slowly.&nbsp;
+On the instant she stooped for the slipper, and, with it in her hand,
+spun round wildly, looking for some hiding-place; but there was no such
+spot in the bare room.&nbsp; The chest, the leather bunk, a dress or
+two of hers hanging on pegs - there was no place where the merest hazard
+might not guide Heyst&rsquo;s hand at any moment.&nbsp; Her wildly roaming
+eyes were caught by the half-closed window.&nbsp; She ran to it, and
+by raising herself on her toes was able to reach the shutter with her
+fingertips.&nbsp; She pushed it square, stole back to the middle of
+the room, and, turning about, swung her arm, regulating the force of
+the throw so as not to let the slipper fly too far out and hit the edge
+of the overhanging eaves.&nbsp; It was a task of the nicest judgement
+for the muscles of those round arms, still quivering from the deadly
+wrestle with a man, for that brain, tense with the excitement of the
+situation and for the unstrung nerves flickering darkness before her
+eyes.&nbsp; At last the slipper left her hand.&nbsp; As soon as it passed
+the opening, it was out of her sight.&nbsp; She listened.&nbsp; She
+did not hear it strike anything; it just vanished, as if it had wings
+to fly on through the air.&nbsp; Not a sound!&nbsp; It had gone clear.</p>
+<p>Her valiant arms hanging close against her side, she stood as if
+turned into stone.&nbsp; A faint whistle reached her ears.&nbsp; The
+forgetful Ricardo, becoming very much aware of his loss, had been hanging
+about in great anxiety, which was relieved by the appearance of the
+slipper flying from under the eaves; and now, thoughtfully, he had ventured
+a whistle to put her mind at ease.</p>
+<p>Suddenly the girl reeled forward.&nbsp; She saved herself from a
+fall only by embracing with both arms one of the tall, roughly carved
+posts holding the mosquito net above the bed.&nbsp; For a long time
+she dung to it, with her forehead leaning against the wood.&nbsp; One
+side of her loosened sarong had slipped down as low as her hip.&nbsp;
+The long brown tresses of her hair fell in lank wisps, as if wet, almost
+black against her white body.&nbsp; Her uncovered flank, damp with the
+sweat of anguish and fatigue, gleamed coldly with the immobility of
+polished marble in the hot, diffused light falling through the window
+above her head - a dim reflection of the consuming, passionate blaze
+of sunshine outside, all aquiver with the effort to set the earth on
+fire, to burn it to ashes.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FOUR</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Heyst, seated at the table with his chin on his breast, raised his
+head at the faint rustle of Lena&rsquo;s dress.&nbsp; He was startled
+by the dead pallor of her cheeks, by something lifeless in her eyes,
+which looked at him strangely, without recognition.&nbsp; But to his
+anxious inquiries she answered reassuringly that there was nothing the
+matter with her, really.&nbsp; She had felt giddy on rising.&nbsp; She
+had even had a moment of faintness, after her bath.&nbsp; She had to
+sit down to wait for it to pass.&nbsp; This had made her late dressing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t try to do my hair.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t want
+to keep you waiting any longer,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>He was unwilling to press her with questions about her health, since
+she seemed to make light of this indisposition.&nbsp; She had not done
+her hair, but she had brushed it, and had tied it with a ribbon behind.&nbsp;
+With her forehead uncovered, she looked very young, almost a child,
+a careworn child; a child with something on its mind.</p>
+<p>What surprised Heyst was the non-appearance of Wang.&nbsp; The Chinaman
+had always materialized at the precise moment of his service, neither
+too soon nor too late.&nbsp; This time the usual miracle failed.&nbsp;
+What was the meaning of this?</p>
+<p>Heyst raised his voice - a thing he disliked doing.&nbsp; It was
+promptly answered from the compound:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Ada tuan</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lena, leaning on her elbow, with her eyes on her plate, did not seem
+to hear anything.&nbsp; When Wang entered with a tray, his narrow eyes,
+tilted inward by the prominence of salient cheek-bones, kept her under
+stealthy observation all the time.&nbsp; Neither the one nor the other
+of that white couple paid the slightest attention to him and he withdrew
+without having heard them exchange a single word.&nbsp; He squatted
+on his heels on the back veranda.&nbsp; His Chinaman&rsquo;s mind, very
+clear but not far-reaching, was made up according to the plain reason
+of things, such as it appeared to him in the light of his simple feeling
+for self-preservation, untrammelled by any notions of romantic honour
+or tender conscience.&nbsp; His yellow hands, lightly clasped, hung
+idly between his knees.&nbsp; The graves of Wang&rsquo;s ancestors were
+far away, his parents were dead, his elder brother was a soldier in
+the yamen of some Mandarin away in Formosa.&nbsp; No one near by had
+a claim on his veneration or his obedience.&nbsp; He had been for years
+a labouring restless vagabond.&nbsp; His only tie in the world was the
+Alfuro woman, in exchange for whom he had given away some considerable
+part of his hard-earned substance; and his duty, in reason, could be
+to no one but himself.</p>
+<p>The scuffle behind the curtain was a thing of bad augury for that
+Number One for whom the Chinaman had neither love nor dislike.&nbsp;
+He had been awed enough by that development to hang back with the coffee-pot
+till at last the white man was induced to call him in.&nbsp; Wang went
+in with curiosity.&nbsp; Certainly, the white woman looked as if she
+had been wrestling with a spirit which had managed to tear half her
+blood out of her before letting her go.&nbsp; As to the man, Wang had
+long looked upon him as being in some sort bewitched; and now he was
+doomed.&nbsp; He heard their voices in the room.&nbsp; Heyst was urging
+the girl to go and lie down again.&nbsp; He was extremely concerned.&nbsp;
+She had eaten nothing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The best thing for you.&nbsp; You really must!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She sat listless, shaking her head from time to time negatively,
+as if nothing could be any good.&nbsp; But he insisted; she saw the
+beginning of wonder in his eyes, and suddenly gave way.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps I had better.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She did not want to arouse his wonder, which would lead him straight
+to suspicion.&nbsp; He must not suspect!</p>
+<p>Already, with the consciousness of her love for this man, of that
+something rapturous and profound going beyond the mere embrace, there
+was born in her a woman&rsquo;s innate mistrust of masculinity, of that
+seductive strength allied to an absurd, delicate shrinking from the
+recognition of the naked necessity of facts, which never yet frightened
+a woman worthy of the name.&nbsp; She had no plan; but her mind, quieted
+down somewhat by the very effort to preserve outward composure for his
+sake, perceived that her behaviour had secured, at any rate, a short
+period of safety.&nbsp; Perhaps because of the similarity of their miserable
+origin in the dregs of mankind, she had understood Ricardo perfectly.&nbsp;
+He would keep quiet for a time now.&nbsp; In this momentarily soothing
+certitude her bodily fatigue asserted itself, the more overpoweringly
+since its cause was not so much the demand on her strength as the awful
+suddenness of the stress she had had to meet.&nbsp; She would have tried
+to overcome it from the mere instinct of resistance, if it had not been
+for Heyst&rsquo;s alternate pleadings and commands.&nbsp; Before this
+eminently masculine fussing she felt the woman&rsquo;s need to give
+way, the sweetness of surrender.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I will do anything you like,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>Getting up, she was surprised by a wave of languid weakness that
+came over her, embracing and enveloping her like warm water, with a
+noise in her ears as of a breaking sea.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must help me along,&rdquo; she added quickly.</p>
+<p>While he put his arm round her waist - not by any means an uncommon
+thing for him to do - she found a special satisfaction in the feeling
+of being thus sustained.&nbsp; She abandoned all her weight to that
+encircling and protecting pressure, while a thrill went through her
+at the sudden thought that it was she who would have to protect him,
+to be the defender of a man who was strong enough to lift her bodily,
+as he was doing even then in his two arms.&nbsp; For Heyst had done
+this as soon as they had crept through the doorway of the room.&nbsp;
+He thought it was quicker and simpler to carry her the last step or
+two.&nbsp; He had grown really too anxious to be aware of the effort.&nbsp;
+He lifted her high and deposited her on the bed, as one lays a child
+on its side in a cot.&nbsp; Then he sat down on the edge, masking his
+concern with a smile which obtained no response from the dreamy immobility
+of her eyes.&nbsp; But she sought his hand, seized it eagerly; and while
+she was pressing it with all the force of which she was capable, the
+sleep she needed overtook her suddenly, overwhelmingly, as it overtakes
+a child in a cot, with her lips parted for a safe, endearing word which
+she had thought of but had no time to utter.</p>
+<p>The usual flaming silence brooded over Samburan.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What in the world is this new mystery?&rdquo; murmured Heyst
+to himself, contemplating her deep slumber.</p>
+<p>It was so deep, this enchanted sleep, that when some time afterwards
+he gently tried to open her fingers and free his hand, he succeeded
+without provoking the slightest stir.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There is some very simple explanation, no doubt,&rdquo; he
+thought, as he stole out into the living-room.</p>
+<p>Absent-mindedly he pulled a book out of the top shelf, and sat down
+with it; but even after he had opened it on his knee, and had been staring
+at the pages for a time, he had not the slightest idea of what it was
+about.&nbsp; He stared and stared at the crowded, parallel lines.&nbsp;
+It was only when, raising his eyes for no particular reason, he saw
+Wang standing motionless on the other side of the table, that he regained
+complete control of his faculties.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; he said, as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten
+appointment of a not particularly welcome sort.</p>
+<p>He waited a little, and then, with reluctant curiosity, forced himself
+to ask the silent Wang what he had to say.&nbsp; He had some idea that
+the matter of the vanished revolver would come up at last; but the guttural
+sounds which proceeded from the Chinaman did not refer to that delicate
+subject.&nbsp; His speech was concerned with cups, saucers, plates,
+forks, and knives.&nbsp; All these things had been put away in the cupboards
+on the back veranda, where they belonged, perfectly clean, &ldquo;all
+plopel.&rdquo;&nbsp; Heyst wondered at the scrupulosity of a man who
+was about to abandon him; for he was not surprised to hear Wang conclude
+the account of his stewardship with the words:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I go now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh!&nbsp; You go now?&rdquo; said Heyst, leaning back, his
+book on his knees.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; Me no likee.&nbsp; One man, two man, three man
+- no can do!&nbsp; Me go now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s frightening you away like this?&rdquo; asked
+Heyst, while through his mind flashed the hope that something enlightening
+might come from that being so unlike himself, taking contact with the
+world with a simplicity and directness of which his own mind was not
+capable.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are used
+to white men.&nbsp; You know them well.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; Me savee them,&rdquo; assented Wang inscrutably.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Me savee plenty.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>All that he really knew was his own mind.&nbsp; He had made it up
+to withdraw himself and the Alfuro woman from the uncertainties of the
+relations which were going to establish themselves between those white
+men.&nbsp; It was Pedro who had been the first cause of Wang&rsquo;s
+suspicion and fear.&nbsp; The Chinaman had seen wild men.&nbsp; He had
+penetrated, in the train of a Chinese pedlar, up one or two of the Bornean
+rivers into the country of the Dyaks.&nbsp; He had also been in the
+interior of Mindanao, where there are people who live in trees - savages,
+no better than animals; but a hairy brute like Pedro, with his great
+fangs and ferocious growls, was altogether beyond his conception of
+anything that could be looked upon as human.&nbsp; The strong impression
+made on him by Pedro was the prime inducement which had led Wang to
+purloin the revolver.&nbsp; Reflection on the general situation, and
+on the insecurity of Number One, came later, after he had obtained possession
+of the revolver and of the box of cartridges out of the table drawer
+in the living-room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you savee plenty about white men,&rdquo; Heyst went on
+in a slightly bantering tone, after a moment of silent reflection in
+which he had confessed to himself that the recovery of the revolver
+was not to be thought of, either by persuasion or by some more forcible
+means.&nbsp; &ldquo;You speak in that fashion, but you are frightened
+of those white men over there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Me no flightened,&rdquo; protested Wang raucously, throwing
+up his head - which gave to his throat a more strained, anxious appearance
+than ever.&nbsp; &ldquo;Me no likee,&rdquo; he added in a quieter tone.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Me velly sick.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He put his hand over the region under the breast-bone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Heyst, serenely positive, &ldquo;belong
+one piecee lie.&nbsp; That isn&rsquo;t proper man-talk at all.&nbsp;
+And after stealing my revolver, too!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had suddenly decided to speak about it, because this frankness
+could not make the situation much worse than it was.&nbsp; He did not
+suppose for a moment that Wang had the revolver anywhere about his person;
+and after having thought the matter over, he had arrived at the conclusion
+that the Chinaman never meant to use the weapon against him.&nbsp; After
+a slight start, because the direct charge had taken him unawares, Wang
+tore open the front of his jacket with a convulsive show of indignation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No hab got.&nbsp; Look see!&rdquo; he mouthed in pretended
+anger.</p>
+<p>He slapped his bare chest violently; he uncovered his very ribs,
+all astir with the panting of outraged virtue; his smooth stomach heaved
+with indignation.&nbsp; He started his wide blue breeches flapping about
+his yellow calves.&nbsp; Heyst watched him quietly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never said you had it on you,&rdquo; he observed, without
+raising his voice; &ldquo;but the revolver is gone from where I kept
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Me no savee levolvel,&rdquo; Wang said obstinately.</p>
+<p>The book lying open on Heyst&rsquo;s knee slipped suddenly and he
+made a sharp movement to catch it up.&nbsp; Wang was unable to see the
+reason of this because of the table, and leaped away from what seemed
+to him a threatening symptom.&nbsp; When Heyst looked up, the Chinaman
+was already at the door facing the room, not frightened, but alert.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; asked Heyst.</p>
+<p>Wang nodded his shaven head significantly at the curtain closing
+the doorway of the bedroom.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Me no likee,&rdquo; he repeated.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What the devil do you mean?&rdquo; Heyst was genuinely amazed.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t like what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wang pointed a long lemon-coloured finger at the motionless folds.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Two,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Two what?&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Suppose you savee, you no like that fashion.&nbsp; Me savee
+plenty.&nbsp; Me go now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst had risen from his chair, but Wang kept his ground in the doorway
+for a little longer.&nbsp; His almond-shaped eyes imparted to his face
+an expression of soft and sentimental melancholy.&nbsp; The muscles
+of his throat moved visibly while he uttered a distinct and guttural
+&ldquo;Goodbye&rdquo; and vanished from Number One&rsquo;s sight.</p>
+<p>The Chinaman&rsquo;s departure altered the situation.&nbsp; Heyst
+reflected on what would be best to do in view of that fact.&nbsp; For
+a long time he hesitated; then, shrugging his shoulders wearily, he
+walked out on the veranda, down the steps, and continued at a steady
+gait, with a thoughtful mien, in the direction of his guests&rsquo;
+bungalow.&nbsp; He wanted to make an important communication to them,
+and he had no other object - least of all to give them the shock of
+a surprise call.&nbsp; Nevertheless, their brutish henchman not being
+on watch, it was Heyst&rsquo;s fate to startle Mr. Jones and his secretary
+by his sudden appearance in the doorway.&nbsp; Their conversation must
+have been very interesting to prevent them from hearing the visitor&rsquo;s
+approach.&nbsp; In the dim room - the shutters were kept constantly
+closed against the heat - Heyst saw them start apart.&nbsp; It was Mr.
+Jones who spoke:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, here you are again!&nbsp; Come in, come in!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst, taking his hat off in the doorway, entered the room.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FIVE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Waking up suddenly, Lena looked, without raising her head from the
+pillow, at the room in which she was alone.&nbsp; She got up quickly,
+as if to counteract the awful sinking of her heart by the vigorous use
+of her limbs.&nbsp; But this sinking was only momentary.&nbsp; Mistress
+of herself from pride, from love, from necessity, and also because of
+a woman&rsquo;s vanity in self-sacrifice, she met Heyst, returning from
+the strangers&rsquo; bungalow, with a dear glance and a smile.</p>
+<p>The smile he managed to answer, but, noticing that he avoided her
+eyes, she composed her lips and lowered her gaze.&nbsp; For the same
+reason she hastened to speak to him in a tone of indifference, which
+she put on without effort, as if she had grown adept in duplicity since
+sunrise.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have been over there again?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have.&nbsp; I thought - but you had better know first that
+we have lost Wang for good.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She repeated &ldquo;For good?&rdquo; as if she had not understood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For good or evil - I shouldn&rsquo;t know which if you were
+to ask me.&nbsp; He has dismissed himself.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s gone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You expected him to go, though, didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst sat down on the other side of the table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; I expected it as soon as I discovered that he had
+annexed my revolver.&nbsp; He says he hasn&rsquo;t taken it.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+untrue of course.&nbsp; A Chinaman would not see the sense of confessing
+under any circumstances.&nbsp; To deny any charge is a principle of
+right conduct; but he hardly expected to be believed.&nbsp; He was a
+little enigmatic at the last, Lena.&nbsp; He startled me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst paused.&nbsp; The girl seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He startled me,&rdquo; I repeated Heyst.&nbsp; She noted the
+anxiety in his tone, and turned her head slightly to look at him across
+the table.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It must have been something - to startle you,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp;
+In the depth of her parted lips, like a ripe pomegranate, there was
+a gleam of white teeth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was only a single word - and some of his gestures.&nbsp;
+He had been making a good deal of noise.&nbsp; I wonder we didn&rsquo;t
+wake you up.&nbsp; How soundly you can sleep!&nbsp; I say, do you feel
+all right now?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As fresh as can be,&rdquo; she said, treating him to another
+deep gleam of a smile.&nbsp; &ldquo;I heard no noise, and I&rsquo;m
+glad of it.&nbsp; The way he talks in his harsh voice frightens me.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t like all these foreign people.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was just before he went away - bolted out, I should say.&nbsp;
+He nodded and pointed at the curtain to our room.&nbsp; He knew you
+were there, of course.&nbsp; He seemed to think - he seemed to try to
+give me to understand that you were in special - well, danger.&nbsp;
+You know how he talks.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She said nothing; she made no sound, only the faint tinge of colour
+ebbed out of her cheek.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Heyst went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;He seemed to try to
+warn me.&nbsp; That must have been it Did he imagine I had forgotten
+your existence?&nbsp; The only word he said was &lsquo;two&rsquo;.&nbsp;
+It sounded so, at least.&nbsp; Yes, &lsquo;two&rsquo; - and that he
+didn&rsquo;t like it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What does that mean?&rdquo; she whispered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We know what the word two means, don&rsquo;t we, Lena?&nbsp;
+We are two.&nbsp; Never were such a lonely two out of the world, my
+dear!&nbsp; He might have tried to remind me that he himself has a woman
+to look after.&nbsp; Why are you so pale, Lena?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Am I pale?&rdquo; she asked negligently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are.&rdquo;&nbsp; Heyst was really anxious.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, it isn&rsquo;t from fright,&rdquo; she protested truthfully.</p>
+<p>Indeed, what she felt was a sort of horror which left her absolutely
+in the full possession of all her faculties; more difficult to bear,
+perhaps, for that reason, but not paralysing to her fortitude.</p>
+<p>Heyst in his turn smiled at her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I really don&rsquo;t know that there is any reason to be frightened.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean I am not frightened for myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I believe you are very plucky,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; The colour
+had returned to her face.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rdquo; continued Heyst, &ldquo;am
+so rebellious to outward impressions that I can&rsquo;t say that much
+about myself.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t react with sufficient distinctness.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He changed his tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;You know I went to see those men first
+thing this morning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know.&nbsp; Be careful!&rdquo; she murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder how one can be careful!&nbsp; I had a long talk with
+- but I don&rsquo;t believe you have seen them.&nbsp; One of them is
+a fantastically thin, long person, apparently ailing; I shouldn&rsquo;t
+wonder if he were really so.&nbsp; He makes rather a point of it in
+a mysterious manner.&nbsp; I imagine he must have suffered from tropical
+fevers, but not so much as he tries to make out.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s what
+people would call a gentleman.&nbsp; He seemed on the point of volunteering
+a tale of his adventures - for which I didn&rsquo;t ask him - but remarked
+that it was a long story; some other time, perhaps.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I suppose you would like to know who I am?&rsquo; he
+asked me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I told him I would leave it to him, in a tone which, between
+gentlemen, could have left no doubt in his mind.&nbsp; He raised himself
+on his elbow - he was lying down on the camp-bed - and said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I am he who is - &rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lena seemed not to be listening; but when Heyst paused, she turned
+her head quickly to him.&nbsp; He took it for a movement of inquiry,
+but in this he was wrong.&nbsp; A great vagueness enveloped her impressions,
+but all her energy was concentrated on the struggle that she wanted
+to take upon herself, in a great exaltation of love and self-sacrifice,
+which is woman&rsquo;s sublime faculty; altogether on herself, every
+bit of it, leaving him nothing, not even the knowledge of what she did,
+if that were possible.&nbsp; She would have liked to lock him up by
+some stratagem.&nbsp; Had she known of some means to put him to sleep
+for days she would have used incantations or philtres without misgivings.&nbsp;
+He seemed to her too good for such contacts, and not sufficiently equipped.&nbsp;
+This last feeling had nothing to do with the material fact of the revolver
+being stolen.&nbsp; She could hardly appreciate that fact at its full
+value.</p>
+<p>Observing her eyes fixed and as if sightless - for the concentration
+on her purpose took all expression out of them - Heyst imagined it to
+be the effect of a great mental effort.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No use asking me what he meant, Lena; I don&rsquo;t know,
+and I did not ask him.&nbsp; The gentleman, as I have told you before,
+seems devoted to mystification.&nbsp; I said nothing, and he laid down
+his head again on the bundle of rugs he uses for a pillow.&nbsp; He
+affects a state of great weakness, but I suspect that he&rsquo;s perfectly
+capable of leaping to his feet if he likes.&nbsp; Having been ejected,
+he said, from his proper social sphere because he had refused to conform
+to certain usual conventions, he was a rebel now, and was coming and
+going up and down the earth.&nbsp; As I really did not want to listen
+to all this nonsense, I told him that I had heard that sort of story
+about somebody else before.&nbsp; His grin is really ghastly.&nbsp;
+He confessed that I was very far from the sort of man he expected to
+meet.&nbsp; Then he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are
+thinking of, and I have neither more nor less determination.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst looked across the table at Lena.&nbsp; Propped on her elbows,
+and holding her head in both hands, she moved it a little with an air
+of understanding.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing could be plainer, eh?&rdquo; said Heyst grimly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Unless, indeed, this is his idea of a pleasant joke; for, when
+he finished speaking, he burst into a loud long laugh.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+join him!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish you had,&rdquo; she breathed out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t join him.&nbsp; It did not occur to me.&nbsp;
+I am not much of a diplomatist.&nbsp; It would probably have been wise,
+for, indeed, I believe he had said more than he meant to say, and was
+trying to take it back by this affected jocularity.&nbsp; Yet when one
+thinks of it, diplomacy without force in the background is but a rotten
+reed to lean upon.&nbsp; And I don&rsquo;t know whether I could have
+done it if I had thought of it.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; It would
+have been against the grain.&nbsp; Could I have done it?&nbsp; I have
+lived too long within myself, watching the mere shadows and shades of
+life.&nbsp; To deceive a man on some issue which could be decided quicker,
+by his destruction while one is disarmed, helpless, without even the
+power to run away - no!&nbsp; That seems to me too degrading.&nbsp;
+And yet I have you here.&nbsp; I have your very existence in my keeping.&nbsp;
+What do you say, Lena?&nbsp; Would I be capable of throwing you to the
+lions to save my dignity?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She got up, walked quickly round the table, posed herself on his
+knees lightly, throwing one arm round his neck, and whispered in his
+ear:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may if you like.&nbsp; And may be that&rsquo;s the only
+way I would consent to leave you.&nbsp; For something like that.&nbsp;
+If it were something no bigger than your little finger.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She gave him a light kiss on the lips and was gone before he could
+detain her.&nbsp; She regained her seat and propped her elbows again
+on the table.&nbsp; It was hard to believe that she had moved from the
+spot at all.&nbsp; The fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the
+hug round his neck, the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might
+have been the unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality
+of waking life; a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his
+thoughts.&nbsp; He hesitated to speak till she said, businesslike:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well.&nbsp; And what then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst gave a start.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t join him.&nbsp; I let him have
+his laugh out by himself.&nbsp; He was shaking all over, like a merry
+skeleton, under a cotton sheet he was covered with - I believe in order
+to conceal the revolver that he had in his right hand.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t
+see it, but I have a distinct impression it was there in his fist.&nbsp;
+As he had not been looking at me for some time, but staring into a certain
+part of the room, I turned my head and saw a hairy, wild sort of creature
+which they take about with them, squatting on its heels in the angle
+of the walls behind me.&nbsp; He wasn&rsquo;t there when I came in.&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t like the notion of that watchful monster behind my back.&nbsp;
+If I had been less at their mercy, I should certainly have changed my
+position.&nbsp; As things are now, to move would have been a mere weakness.&nbsp;
+So I remained where I was.&nbsp; The gentleman on the bed said he could
+assure me of one thing; and that was that his presence here was no more
+morally reprehensible than mine.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;We pursue the same ends,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;only
+perhaps I pursue them with more openness than you - with more simplicity.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what he said,&rdquo; Heyst went on, after looking
+at Lena in a sort of inquiring silence.&nbsp; &ldquo;I asked him if
+he knew beforehand that I was living here; but he only gave me a ghastly
+grin.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t press him for an answer, Lena.&nbsp; I thought
+I had better not.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>On her smooth forehead a ray of light always seemed to rest.&nbsp;
+Her loose hair, parted in the middle, covered the hands sustaining her
+head.&nbsp; She seemed spellbound by the interest of the narrative.&nbsp;
+Heyst did not pause long.&nbsp; He managed to continue his relation
+smoothly enough, beginning afresh with a piece of comment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He would have lied impudently - and I detest being told a
+lie.&nbsp; It makes me uncomfortable.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s pretty clear
+that I am not fitted for the affairs of the wide world.&nbsp; But I
+did not want him to think that I accepted his presence too meekly, so
+I said that his comings or goings on the earth were none of my business,
+of course, except that I had a natural curiosity to know when he would
+find it convenient to resume them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He asked me to look at the state he was in.&nbsp; Had I been
+all alone here, as they think I am, I should have laughed at him.&nbsp;
+But not being alone - I say, Lena, you are sure you haven&rsquo;t shown
+yourself where you could be seen?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certain,&rdquo; she said promptly.</p>
+<p>He looked relieved.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You understand, Lena, that when I ask you to keep so strictly
+out of sight, it is because you are not for them to look at - to talk
+about.&nbsp; My poor Lena!&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t help that feeling.&nbsp;
+Do you understand it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She moved her head slightly in a manner that was neither affirmative
+nor negative.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;People will have to see me some day,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder how long it will be possible for you to keep out
+of sight?&rdquo; murmured Heyst thoughtfully.&nbsp; He bent over the
+table.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let me finish telling you.&nbsp; I asked him point
+blank what it was he wanted with me; he appeared extremely unwilling
+to come to the point.&nbsp; It was not really so pressing as all that,
+he said.&nbsp; His secretary, who was in fact his partner, was not present,
+having gone down to the wharf to look at their boat.&nbsp; Finally the
+fellow proposed that he should put off a certain communication he had
+to make till the day after tomorrow.&nbsp; I agreed; but I also told
+him that I was not at all anxious to hear it.&nbsp; I had no conception
+in what way his affairs could concern me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Ah, Mr. Heyst,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;you and I have
+much more in common than you think.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst struck the table with his fist unexpectedly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was a jeer; I am sure it was!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He seemed ashamed of this outburst and smiled faintly into the motionless
+eyes of the girl.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What could I have done - even if I had had my pockets full
+of revolvers?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made an appreciative sign.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Killing&rsquo;s a sin, sure enough,&rdquo; she murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I went away,&rdquo; Heyst continued.&nbsp; &ldquo;I left him
+there, lying on his side with his eyes shut.&nbsp; When I got back here,
+I found you looking ill.&nbsp; What was it, Lena?&nbsp; You did give
+me a scare!&nbsp; Then I had the interview with Wang while you rested.&nbsp;
+You were sleeping quietly.&nbsp; I sat here to consider all these things
+calmly, to try to penetrate their inner meaning and their outward bearing.&nbsp;
+It struck me that the two days we have before us have the character
+of a sort of truce.&nbsp; The more I thought of it, the more I felt
+that this was tacitly understood between Jones and myself.&nbsp; It
+was to our advantage, if anything can be of advantage to people caught
+so completely unawares as we are.&nbsp; Wang was gone.&nbsp; He, at
+any rate, had declared himself, but as I did not know what he might
+take it into his head to do, I thought I had better warn these people
+that I was no longer responsible for the Chinaman.&nbsp; I did not want
+Mr. Wang making some move which would precipitate the action against
+us.&nbsp; Do you see my point of view?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made a sign that she did.&nbsp; All her soul was wrapped in her
+passionate determination, in an exalted belief in herself - in the contemplation
+of her amazing opportunity to win the certitude, the eternity, of that
+man&rsquo;s love.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never saw two men,&rdquo; Heyst was saying, &ldquo;more
+affected by a piece of information than Jones and his secretary, who
+was back in the bungalow by then.&nbsp; They had not heard me come up.&nbsp;
+I told them I was sorry to intrude.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Not at all!&nbsp; Not at all,&rsquo; said Jones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The secretary backed away into a corner and watched me like
+a wary cat.&nbsp; In fact, they both were visibly on their guard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I am come,&rsquo; I told them, &lsquo;to let you know
+that my servant has deserted - gone off.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At first they looked at each other as if they had not understood
+what I was saying; but very soon they seemed quite concerned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;You mean to say your Chink&rsquo;s cleared out?&rsquo;
+said Ricardo, coming forward from his corner.&nbsp; &lsquo;Like this
+- all at once?&nbsp; What did he do it for?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I said that a Chinaman had always a simple and precise reason
+for what he did, but that to get such a reason out of him was not so
+easy.&nbsp; All he told me, I said, was that he &ldquo;didn&rsquo;t
+like&rdquo;.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They were extremely disturbed at this.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t
+like what, they wanted to know.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;The looks of you and your party,&rsquo; I told Jones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Nonsense!&rsquo; he cried out, and immediately Ricardo,
+the short man, struck in.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Told you that?&nbsp; What did he take you for, sir
+- an infant?&nbsp; Or do you take us for kids? - meaning no offence.&nbsp;
+Come, I bet you will tell us next that you&rsquo;ve missed something.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;I didn&rsquo;t mean to tell you anything of the sort,&rsquo;
+I said, &lsquo;but as a matter of fact it is so.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He slapped his thigh.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Thought so.&nbsp; What do you think of this trick,
+governor?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Jones made some sort of sign to him, and then that extraordinary
+cat-faced associate proposed that he and their servant should come out
+and help me catch or kill the Chink.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My object, I said, was not to get assistance.&nbsp; I did
+not intend to chase the Chinaman.&nbsp; I had come only to warn them
+that he was armed, and that he really objected to their presence on
+the island.&nbsp; I wanted them to understand that I was not responsible
+for anything that might happen.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Do you mean to tell us,&rsquo; asked Ricardo, &lsquo;that
+there is a crazy Chink with a six-shooter broke loose on this island,
+and that you don&rsquo;t care?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Strangely enough they did not seem to believe my story.&nbsp;
+They were exchanging significant looks all the time.&nbsp; Ricardo stole
+up close to his principal; they had a confabulation together, and then
+something happened which I did not expect.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s rather awkward,
+too.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Since I would not have their assistance to get hold of the
+Chink and recover my property, the least they could do was to send me
+their servant.&nbsp; It was Jones who said that, and Ricardo backed
+up the idea.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Yes, yes - let our Pedro cook for all hands in your
+compound!&nbsp; He isn&rsquo;t so bad as he looks.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+what we will do!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He bustled out of the room to the veranda, and let out an
+ear-splitting whistle for their Pedro.&nbsp; Having heard the brute&rsquo;s
+answering howl, Ricardo ran back into the room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Yes, Mr. Heyst.&nbsp; This will do capitally, Mr. Heyst.&nbsp;
+You just direct him to do whatever you are accustomed to have done for
+you in the way of attendance.&nbsp; See?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lena, I confess to you that I was taken completely by surprise.&nbsp;
+I had not expected anything of the sort.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know what
+I expected.&nbsp; I am so anxious about you that I can&rsquo;t keep
+away from these infernal scoundrels.&nbsp; And only two months ago I
+would not have cared.&nbsp; I would have defied their scoundrelism as
+much as I have scorned all the other intrusions of life.&nbsp; But now
+I have you!&nbsp; You stole into my life, and - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst drew a deep breath.&nbsp; The girl gave him a quick, wide-eyed
+glance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; That&rsquo;s what you are thinking of - that you
+have me!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was impossible to read the thoughts veiled by her steady grey
+eyes, to penetrate the meaning of her silences, her words, and even
+her embraces.&nbsp; He used to come out of her very arms with the feeling
+of a baffled man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I haven&rsquo;t you, if you are not here, then where are
+you?&rdquo; cried Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;You understand me very well.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head a little.&nbsp; Her red lips, at which he looked
+now, her lips as fascinating as the voice that came out of them, uttered
+the words:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hear what you say; but what does it mean?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It means that I could lie and perhaps cringe for your sake.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; No!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you ever do that,&rdquo; she
+said in haste, while her eyes glistened suddenly.&nbsp; &ldquo;You would
+hate me for it afterwards!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hate you?&rdquo; repeated Heyst, who had recalled his polite
+manner.&nbsp; &ldquo;No!&nbsp; You needn&rsquo;t consider the extremity
+of the improbable - as yet.&nbsp; But I will confess to you that I -
+how shall I call it? - that I dissembled.&nbsp; First I dissembled my
+dismay at the unforeseen result of my idiotic diplomacy.&nbsp; Do you
+understand, my dear girl?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was evident that she did not understand the word.&nbsp; Heyst
+produced his playful smile, which contrasted oddly with the worried
+character of his whole expression.&nbsp; His temples seemed to have
+sunk in, his face looked a little leaner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything
+is true, but the sentiment which seems to prompt it.&nbsp; I have never
+been diplomatic in my relation with mankind - not from regard for its
+feelings, but from a certain regard for my own.&nbsp; Diplomacy doesn&rsquo;t
+go well with consistent contempt.&nbsp; I cared little for life and
+still less for death.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t talk like that!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I dissembled my extreme longing to take these wandering scoundrels
+by their throats,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have only two hands
+- I wish I had a hundred to defend you - and there were three throats.&nbsp;
+By that time their Pedro was in the room too.&nbsp; Had he seen me engaged
+with their two throats, he would have been at mine like a fierce dog,
+or any other savage and faithful brute.&nbsp; I had no difficulty in
+dissembling my longing for the vulgar, stupid, and hopeless argument
+of fight.&nbsp; I remarked that I really did not want a servant.&nbsp;
+I couldn&rsquo;t think of depriving them of their man&rsquo;s services;
+but they would not hear me.&nbsp; They had made up their minds.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;We shall send him over at once,&rsquo; Ricardo said,
+&lsquo;to start cooking dinner for everybody.&nbsp; I hope you won&rsquo;t
+mind me coming to eat it with you in your bungalow; and we will send
+the governor&rsquo;s dinner over to him here.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I could do nothing but hold my tongue or bring on a quarrel
+- some manifestation of their dark purpose, which we have no means to
+resist.&nbsp; Of course, you may remain invisible this evening; but
+with that atrocious-brute prowling all the time at the back of the house,
+how long can your presence be concealed from these men?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst&rsquo;s distress could be felt in his silence.&nbsp; The girl&rsquo;s
+head, sustained by her hands buried in the thick masses of her hair,
+had a perfect immobility.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are certain you have not been seen so far?&rdquo; he asked
+suddenly.</p>
+<p>The motionless head spoke.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How can I be certain?&nbsp; You told me you wanted me to keep
+out of the way.&nbsp; I kept out of the way.&nbsp; I didn&rsquo;t ask
+your reason.&nbsp; I thought you didn&rsquo;t want people to know that
+you had a girl like me about you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What?&nbsp; Ashamed?&rdquo; cried Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t what&rsquo;s right, perhaps - I mean for you
+- is it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst lifted his hands, reproachfully courteous.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I look upon it as so very much right that I couldn&rsquo;t
+bear the idea of any other than sympathetic, respectful eyes resting
+on you.&nbsp; I disliked and mistrusted these fellows from the first.&nbsp;
+Didn&rsquo;t you understand?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes; I did keep out of sight,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>A silence fell.&nbsp; At last Heyst stirred slightly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All this is of very little importance now,&rdquo; he said
+with a sigh.&nbsp; &ldquo;This is a question of something infinitely
+worse than mere looks and thoughts, however base and contemptible.&nbsp;
+As I have told you, I met Ricardo&rsquo;s suggestions by silence.&nbsp;
+As I was turning away he said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;If you happen to have the key of that store-room of
+yours on you, Mr. Heyst, you may just as well let me have it; I will
+give it to our Pedro.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had it on me, and I tendered it to him without speaking.&nbsp;
+The hairy creature was at the door by then, and caught the key, which
+Ricardo threw to him, better than any trained ape could have done.&nbsp;
+I came away.&nbsp; All the time I had been thinking anxiously of you,
+whom I had left asleep, alone here, and apparently ill.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst interrupted himself, with a listening turn of his head.&nbsp;
+He had heard the faint sound of sticks being snapped in the compound.&nbsp;
+He rose and crossed the room to look out of the back door.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And here the creature is,&rdquo; he said, returning to the
+table.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here he is, already attending to the fire.&nbsp;
+Oh, my dear Lena!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had followed him with her eyes.&nbsp; She watched him go out
+on the front veranda cautiously.&nbsp; He lowered stealthily a couple
+of screens that hung between the column, and remained outside very still,
+as if interested by something on the open ground.&nbsp; Meantime she
+had risen in her turn, to take a peep into the compound.&nbsp; Heyst,
+glancing over his shoulder, saw her returning to her seat.&nbsp; He
+beckoned to her, and she continued to move, crossing the shady room,
+pure and bright in her white dress, her hair loose, with something of
+a sleep-walker in her unhurried motion, in her extended hand, in the
+sightless effect of her grey eyes luminous in the half-light.&nbsp;
+He had never seen such an expression in her face before.&nbsp; It had
+dreaminess in it, intense attention, and something like sternness.&nbsp;
+Arrested in the doorway by Heyst&rsquo;s extended arm, she seemed to
+wake up, flushed faintly - and this flush, passing off, carried away
+with it the strange transfiguring mood.&nbsp; With a courageous gesture
+she pushed back the heavy masses of her hair.&nbsp; The light clung
+to her forehead.&nbsp; Her delicate nostrils quivered.&nbsp; Heyst seized
+her arm and whispered excitedly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Slip out here, quickly!&nbsp; The screens will conceal you.&nbsp;
+Only you must mind the stair-space.&nbsp; They are actually out - I
+mean the other two.&nbsp; You had better see them before you - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made a barely perceptible movement of recoil, checked at once,
+and stood still.&nbsp; Heyst released her arm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, perhaps I had better,&rdquo; she said with unnatural
+deliberation, and stepped out on the veranda to stand close by his side.</p>
+<p>Together, one on each side of the screen, they peeped between the
+edge of the canvas and the veranda-post entwined with creepers.&nbsp;
+A great heat ascended from the sun-smitten ground, in an ever-rising
+wave, as if from some secret store of earth&rsquo;s fiery heart; for
+the sky was growing cooler already, and the sun had declined sufficiently
+for the shadows of Mr. Jones and his henchman to be projected towards
+the bungalow side by side - one infinitely slender, the other short
+and broad.</p>
+<p>The two visitors stood still and gazed.&nbsp; To keep up the fiction
+of his invalidism, Mr. Jones, the gentleman, leaned on the arm of Ricardo,
+the secretary, the top of whose hat just came up to his governor&rsquo;s
+shoulder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you see them?&rdquo; Heyst whispered into the girl&rsquo;s
+ear.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here they are, the envoys of the outer world.&nbsp;
+Here they are before you - evil intelligence, instinctive savagery,
+arm in arm.&nbsp; The brute force is at the back.&nbsp; A trio of fitting
+envoys perhaps - but what about the welcome?&nbsp; Suppose I were armed,
+could I shoot these two down where they stand?&nbsp; Could I?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Without moving her head, the girl felt for Heyst&rsquo;s hand, pressed
+it and thereafter did not let it go.&nbsp; He continued, bitterly playful:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think so.&nbsp; There
+is a strain in me which lays me under an insensate obligation to avoid
+even the appearance of murder.&nbsp; I have never pulled a trigger or
+lifted my hand on a man, even in self-defence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The suddenly tightened grip of her hand checked him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They are making a move,&rdquo; she murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can they be thinking of coming here?&rdquo; Heyst wondered
+anxiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, they aren&rsquo;t coming this way,&rdquo; she said; and
+there was another pause.&nbsp; &ldquo;They are going back to their house,&rdquo;
+she reported finally.</p>
+<p>After watching them a little longer, she let go Heyst&rsquo;s hand
+and moved away from the screen.&nbsp; He followed her into the room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have seen them now,&rdquo; he began.&nbsp; &ldquo;Think
+what it was to me to see them land in the dusk, fantasms from the sea
+- apparitions, chimeras!&nbsp; And they persist.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+the worst of it - they persist.&nbsp; They have no right to be - but
+they are.&nbsp; They ought to have aroused my fury.&nbsp; But I have
+refined everything away by this time - anger, indignation, scorn itself.&nbsp;
+Nothing&rsquo;s left but disgust.&nbsp; Since you have told me of that
+abominable calumny, it has become immense - it extends even to myself.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He looked up at her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But luckily I have you.&nbsp; And if only Wang had, not carried
+off that miserable revolver - yes, Lena, here we are, we two!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She put both her hands on his shoulders and looked straight into
+his eyes.&nbsp; He returned her penetrating gaze.&nbsp; It baffled him.&nbsp;
+He could not pierce the grey veil of her eyes; but the sadness of her
+voice thrilled him profoundly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are not reproaching me?&rdquo; she asked slowly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Reproach?&nbsp; What a word between us!&nbsp; It could only
+be myself - but the mention of Wang has given me an idea.&nbsp; I have
+been, not exactly cringing, not exactly lying, but still dissembling.&nbsp;
+You have been hiding yourself, to please me, but still you have been
+hiding.&nbsp; All this is very dignified.&nbsp; Why shouldn&rsquo;t
+we try begging now?&nbsp; A noble art?&nbsp; Yes.&nbsp; Lena, we must
+go out together.&nbsp; I couldn&rsquo;t think of leaving you alone,
+and I must - yes, I must speak to Wang.&nbsp; We shall go and seek that
+man, who knows what he wants and how to secure what he wants.&nbsp;
+We will go at once!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wait till I put my hair up,&rdquo; she agreed instantly, and
+vanished behind the curtain.</p>
+<p>When the curtain had fallen behind her, she turned her head back
+with an expression of infinite and tender concern for him - for him
+whom she could never hope to understand, and whom she was afraid she
+could never satisfy, as if her passion were of a hopelessly lower quality,
+unable to appease some exalted and delicate desire of his superior soul.&nbsp;
+In a couple of minutes she reappeared.&nbsp; They left the house by
+the door of the compound, and passed within three feet of the thunderstruck
+Pedro, without even looking in his direction.&nbsp; He rose from stooping
+over a fire of sticks, and, balancing himself clumsily, uncovered his
+enormous fangs in gaping astonishment.&nbsp; Then suddenly he set off
+rolling on his bandy legs to impart to his masters the astonishing discovery
+of a woman.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER SIX</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>As luck would have it, Ricardo was lounging alone on the veranda
+of the former counting-house.&nbsp; He scented some new development
+at once, and ran down to meet the trotting, bear-like figure.&nbsp;
+The deep, growling noises it made, though they had only a very remote
+resemblance to the Spanish language, or indeed to any sort of human
+speech, were from long practice quite intelligible to Mr. Jones&rsquo;s
+secretary.&nbsp; Ricardo was rather surprised.&nbsp; He had imagined
+that the girl would continue to keep out of sight.&nbsp; That line apparently
+was given up.&nbsp; He did not mistrust her.&nbsp; How could he?&nbsp;
+Indeed, he could not think of her existence calmly.</p>
+<p>He tried to keep her image out of his mind so that he should be able
+to use its powers with some approach to that coolness which the complex
+nature of the situation demanded from him, both for his own sake and
+as the faithful follower of plain Mr. Jones, gentleman.</p>
+<p>He collected his wits and thought.&nbsp; This was a change of policy,
+probably on the part of Heyst.&nbsp; If so, what could it mean?&nbsp;
+A deep fellow!&nbsp; Unless it was her doing; in which case - h&rsquo;m
+- all right.&nbsp; Must be.&nbsp; She would know what she was doing.&nbsp;
+Before him Pedro, lifting his feet alternately, swayed to and fro sideways
+- his usual attitude of expectation.&nbsp; His little red eyes, lost
+in the mass of hair, were motionless.&nbsp; Ricardo stared into them
+with calculated contempt and said in a rough, angry voice:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Woman!&nbsp; Of course there is.&nbsp; We know that without
+you!&rdquo;&nbsp; He gave the tame monster a push.&nbsp; &ldquo;Git!&nbsp;
+<i>Vamos</i>!&nbsp; Waddle!&nbsp; Get back and cook the dinner.&nbsp;
+Which way did they go, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Pedro extended a huge, hairy forearm to show the direction, and went
+off on his bandy legs.&nbsp; Advancing a few steps, Ricardo was just
+in time to see, above some bushes, two white helmets moving side by
+side in the clearing.&nbsp; They disappeared.&nbsp; Now that he had
+managed to keep Pedro from informing the governor that there was a woman
+on the island, he could indulge in speculation as to the movements of
+these people.&nbsp; His attitude towards Mr. Jones had undergone a spiritual
+change, of which he himself was not yet fully aware.</p>
+<p>That morning, before tiffin, after his escape from the Heyst bungalow,
+completed in such an inspiring way by the recovery of the slipper, Ricardo
+had made his way to their allotted house, reeling as he ran, his head
+in a whirl.&nbsp; He was wildly excited by visions of inconceivable
+promise.&nbsp; He waited to compose himself before he dared to meet
+the governor.&nbsp; On entering the room, he found Mr. Jones sitting
+on the camp bedstead like a tailor on his board, cross-legged, his long
+back against the wall.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I say, sir.&nbsp; You aren&rsquo;t going to tell me you are
+bored?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bored!&nbsp; No!&nbsp; Where the devil have you been all this
+time?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Observing - watching - nosing around.&nbsp; What else?&nbsp;
+I knew you had company.&nbsp; Have you talked freely, sir?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I have,&rdquo; muttered Mr. Jones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not downright plain, sir?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No.&nbsp; I wished you had been here.&nbsp; You loaf all the
+morning, and now you come in out of breath.&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t been wasting my time out there,&rdquo; said
+Ricardo.&nbsp; &ldquo;Nothing&rsquo;s the matter.&nbsp; I - I - might
+have hurried a bit.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was in truth still panting; only
+it was not with running, but with the tumult of thoughts and sensations
+long repressed, which had been set free by the adventure of the morning.&nbsp;
+He was almost distracted by them now.&nbsp; He forgot himself in the
+maze of possibilities threatening and inspiring.&nbsp; &ldquo;And so
+you had a long talk?&rdquo; he said, to gain time.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Confound you!&nbsp; The sun hasn&rsquo;t affected your head,
+has it?&nbsp; Why are you staring at me like a basilisk?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Beg pardon, sir.&nbsp; Wasn&rsquo;t aware I stared,&rdquo;
+Ricardo apologized good-humouredly.&nbsp; &ldquo;The sun might well
+affect a thicker skull than mine.&nbsp; It blazes.&nbsp; Phew!&nbsp;
+What do you think a fellow is, sir - a salamander?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You ought to have been here,&rdquo; observed Mr. Jones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did the beast give any signs of wanting to prance?&rdquo;
+asked Ricardo quickly, with absolutely genuine anxiety.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+wouldn&rsquo;t do, sir.&nbsp; You must play him easy for at least a
+couple of days, sir.&nbsp; I have a plan.&nbsp; I have a notion that
+I can find out a lot in a couple of days.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have?&nbsp; In what way?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, by watching,&rdquo; Ricardo answered slowly.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones grunted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing new, that.&nbsp; Watch, eh?&nbsp; Why not pray a little,
+too?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha, ha, ha!&nbsp; That&rsquo;s a good one,&rdquo; burst out
+the secretary, fixing Mr. Jones with mirthless eyes.</p>
+<p>The latter dropped the subject indolently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you may be certain of at least two days,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>Ricardo recovered himself.&nbsp; His eyes gleamed voluptuously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll pull this off yet - clean - whole - right through,
+if you will only trust me, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am trusting you right enough,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s your interest, too.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And, indeed, Ricardo was truthful enough in his statement.&nbsp;
+He did absolutely believe in success now.&nbsp; But he couldn&rsquo;t
+tell his governor that he had intelligences in the enemy&rsquo;s camp.&nbsp;
+It wouldn&rsquo;t do to tell him of the girl.&nbsp; Devil only knew
+what he would do if he learned there was a woman about.&nbsp; And how
+could he begin to tell of it?&nbsp; He couldn&rsquo;t confess his sudden
+escapade.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll pull it off, sir,&rdquo; he said, with perfectly
+acted cheerfulness.&nbsp; He experienced gusts of awful joy expanding
+in his heart and hot like a fanned flame.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We must,&rdquo; pronounced Mr. Jones.&nbsp; &ldquo;This thing,
+Martin, is not like our other tries.&nbsp; I have a peculiar feeling
+about this.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a different thing.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a sort
+of test.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo was impressed by the governor&rsquo;s manner; for the first
+time a hint of passion could be detected in him.&nbsp; But also a word
+he used, the word &ldquo;test,&rdquo; had struck him as particularly
+significant somehow.&nbsp; It was the last word uttered during that
+morning&rsquo;s conversation.&nbsp; Immediately afterwards Ricardo went
+out of the room.&nbsp; It was impossible for him to keep still.&nbsp;
+An elation in which an extraordinary softness mingled with savage triumph
+would not allow it.&nbsp; It prevented his thinking, also.&nbsp; He
+walked up and down the veranda far into the afternoon, eyeing the bungalow
+at every turn.&nbsp; It gave no sign of being inhabited.&nbsp; Once
+or twice he stopped dead short and looked down at his left slipper.&nbsp;
+Each time he chuckled audibly.&nbsp; His restlessness kept on increasing
+till at last it frightened him.&nbsp; He caught hold of the balustrade
+of the veranda and stood still, smiling not at his thought but at the
+strong sense of life within him.&nbsp; He abandoned himself to it carelessly,
+even recklessly.&nbsp; He cared for no one, friend or enemy.&nbsp; At
+that moment Mr. Jones called him by name from within.&nbsp; A shadow
+fell on the secretary&rsquo;s face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here, sir,&rdquo; he answered; but it was a moment before
+he could make up his mind to go in.</p>
+<p>He found the governor on his feet.&nbsp; Mr. Jones was tired of lying
+down when there was no necessity for it.&nbsp; His slender form, gliding
+about the room, came to a standstill.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been thinking, Martin, of something you suggested.&nbsp;
+At the time it did not strike me as practical; but on reflection it
+seems to me that to propose a game is as good a way as any to let him
+understand that the time has come to disgorge.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s less
+- how should I say? - vulgar.&nbsp; He will know what it means.&nbsp;
+It&rsquo;s not a bad form to give to the business - which in itself
+is crude, Martin, crude.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Want to spare his feelings?&rdquo; jeered the secretary in
+such a bitter tone that Mr. Jones was really surprised.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why, it was your own notion, confound you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who says it wasn&rsquo;t?&rdquo; retorted Ricardo sulkily.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But I am fairly sick of this crawling.&nbsp; No!&nbsp; No!&nbsp;
+Get the exact bearings of his swag and then a rip up.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+plenty good enough for him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His passions being thoroughly aroused, a thirst for blood was allied
+in him with a thirst for tenderness - yes, tenderness.&nbsp; A sort
+of anxious, melting sensation pervaded and softened his heart when he
+thought of that girl - one of his own sort.&nbsp; And at the same time
+jealousy started gnawing at his breast as the image of Heyst intruded
+itself on his fierce anticipation of bliss.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The crudeness of your ferocity is positively gross, Martin,&rdquo;
+Mr. Jones said disdainfully.&nbsp; &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t even understand
+my purpose.&nbsp; I mean to have some sport out of him.&nbsp; Just try
+to imagine the atmosphere of the game - the fellow handling the cards
+- the agonizing mockery of it!&nbsp; Oh, I shall appreciate this greatly.&nbsp;
+Yes, let him lose his money instead of being forced to hand it over.&nbsp;
+You, of course, would shoot him at once, but I shall enjoy the refinement
+and the jest of it.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s a man of the best society.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;ve been hounded out of my sphere by people very much like that
+fellow.&nbsp; How enraged and humiliated he will be!&nbsp; I promise
+myself some exquisite moments while watching his play.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay, and suppose he suddenly starts prancing.&nbsp; He may
+not appreciate the fun.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean you to be present,&rdquo; Mr. Jones remarked calmly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, as long as I am free to plug him or rip him up whenever
+I think the time has come, you are welcome to your bit of sport, sir.&nbsp;
+I shan&rsquo;t spoil it.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER SEVEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>It was at this precise moment of their conversation that Heyst had
+intruded on Mr. Jones and his secretary with his warning about Wang,
+as he had related to Lena.&nbsp; When he left them, the two looked at
+each other in wondering silence.&nbsp; My Jones was the first to break
+it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I say, Martin!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What does this mean?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s some move.&nbsp; Blame me if I can understand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Too deep for you?&rdquo; Mr. Jones inquired dryly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s nothing but some of his infernal impudence,&rdquo;
+growled the secretary.&nbsp; &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t believe all that
+about the Chink, do you, sir?&nbsp; &rsquo;Tain&rsquo;t true.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t necessary for it to be true to have a meaning
+for us.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the why of his coming to tell us this tale
+that&rsquo;s important.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you think he made it up to frighten us?&rdquo; asked Ricardo.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones scowled at him thoughtfully.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The man looked worried,&rdquo; he muttered, as if to himself.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Suppose that Chinaman has really stolen his money!&nbsp; The
+man looked very worried.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing but his artfulness, sir,&rdquo; protested Ricardo
+earnestly, for the idea was too disconcerting to entertain.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is
+it likely that he would have trusted a Chink with enough knowledge to
+make it possible?&rdquo; he argued warmly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why, it&rsquo;s
+the very thing that he would keep close about.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s something
+else there.&nbsp; Ay, but what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha, ha, ha!&rdquo; Mr. Jones let out a ghostly, squeaky laugh.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never been placed in such a ridiculous position before,&rdquo;
+he went on, with a sepulchral equanimity of tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+you, Martin, who dragged me into it.&nbsp; However, it&rsquo;s my own
+fault too.&nbsp; I ought to - but I was really too bored to use my brain,
+and yours is not to be trusted.&nbsp; You are a hothead!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A blasphemous exclamation of grief escaped from Ricardo.&nbsp; Not
+to be trusted!&nbsp; Hothead!&nbsp; He was almost tearful.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t I heard you, sir, saying more than twenty times
+since we got fired out from Manila that we should want a lot of capital
+to work the East Coast with?&nbsp; You were always telling me that to
+prime properly all them officials and Portuguese scallywags we should
+have to lose heavily at first.&nbsp; Weren&rsquo;t you always worrying
+about some means of getting hold of a good lot of cash?&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t
+to be got hold of by allowing yourself to become bored in that rotten
+Dutch town and playing a two-penny game with confounded beggarly bank
+clerks and such like.&nbsp; Well, I&rsquo;ve brought you here, where
+there is cash to be got - and a big lot, to a moral,&rdquo; he added
+through his set teeth.</p>
+<p>Silence fell.&nbsp; Each of them was staring into a different corner
+of the room.&nbsp; Suddenly, with a slight stamp of his foot, Mr. Jones
+made for the door.&nbsp; Ricardo caught him up outside.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Put an arm through mine, sir,&rdquo; he begged him gently
+but firmly.&nbsp; &ldquo;No use giving the game away.&nbsp; An invalid
+may well come out for a breath of fresh air after the sun&rsquo;s gone
+down a bit.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s it, sir.&nbsp; But where do you want
+to go?&nbsp; Why did you come out, sir?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones stopped short.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I hardly know myself,&rdquo; he confessed in a hollow mutter,
+staring intently at the Number One bungalow.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+quite irrational,&rdquo; he declared in a still lower tone.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Better go in, sir,&rdquo; suggested Ricardo.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s
+that?&nbsp; Those screens weren&rsquo;t down before.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s
+spying from behind them now, I bet - the dodging, artful, plotting beast!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why not go over there and see if we can&rsquo;t get to the
+bottom of this game?&rdquo; was the unexpected proposal uttered by Mr.
+Jones.&nbsp; &ldquo;He will have to talk to us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo repressed a start of dismay, but for a moment could not speak.&nbsp;
+He only pressed the governor&rsquo;s hand to his side instinctively.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&nbsp; What could you say?&nbsp; Do you expect to
+get to the bottom of his lies?&nbsp; How could you make him talk?&nbsp;
+It isn&rsquo;t time yet to come to grips with that gent.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t
+think I would hang back, do you?&nbsp; His Chink, of course, I&rsquo;ll
+shoot like a dog the moment I catch sight of him; but as to that Mr.
+Blasted Heyst, the time isn&rsquo;t yet.&nbsp; My head&rsquo;s cooler
+just now than yours.&nbsp; Let&rsquo;s go in again.&nbsp; Why, we are
+exposed here.&nbsp; Suppose he took it into his head to let off a gun
+on us!&nbsp; He&rsquo;s an unaccountable, &rsquo;yporcritical skunk.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Allowing himself to be persuaded, Mr. Jones returned to his seclusion.&nbsp;
+The secretary, however, remained on the veranda - for the purpose, he
+said, of seeing whether that Chink wasn&rsquo;t sneaking around; in
+which case he proposed to take a long shot at the galoot and chance
+the consequences.&nbsp; His real reason was that he wanted to be alone,
+away from the governor&rsquo;s deep-sunk eyes.&nbsp; He felt a sentimental
+desire to indulge his fancies in solitude.&nbsp; A great change had
+come over Mr. Ricardo since that morning.&nbsp; A whole side of him
+which from prudence, from necessity, from loyalty, had been kept dormant,
+was aroused now, colouring his thoughts and disturbing his mental poise
+by the vision of such staggering consequences as, for instance, the
+possibility of an active conflict with the governor.&nbsp; The appearance
+of the monstrous Pedro with his news drew Ricardo out of a feeling of
+dreaminess wrapped up in a sense of impending trouble.&nbsp; A woman?&nbsp;
+Yes, there was one; and it made all the difference.&nbsp; After driving
+away Pedro, and watching the white helmets of Heyst and Lena vanishing
+among the bushes he stood lost in meditation.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where could they be off to like this?&rdquo; he mentally asked
+himself.</p>
+<p>The answer found by his speculative faculties on their utmost stretch
+was - to meet that Chink.&nbsp; For in the desertion of Wang Ricardo
+did not believe.&nbsp; It was a lying yarn, the organic part of a dangerous
+plot.&nbsp; Heyst had gone to combine some fresh move.&nbsp; But then
+Ricardo felt sure that the girl was with him - the girl full of pluck,
+full of sense, full of understanding; an ally of his own kind!</p>
+<p>He went indoors briskly.&nbsp; Mr. Jones had resumed his cross-legged
+pose at the head of the bed, with his back against the wall.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Anything new?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo walked about the room as if he had no care in the world.&nbsp;
+He hummed snatches of song.&nbsp; Mr. Jones raised his waspish eyebrows,
+at the sound.&nbsp; The secretary got down on his knees before an old
+leather trunk, and, rummaging in there, brought out a small looking-glass.&nbsp;
+He fell to examining his physiognomy in it with silent absorption.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think I&rsquo;ll shave,&rdquo; he decided, getting up.</p>
+<p>He gave a sidelong glance to the governor, and repeated it several
+times during the operation, which did not take long, and even afterwards,
+when after putting away the implements, he resumed his walking, humming
+more snatches of unknown songs.&nbsp; Mr. Jones preserved a complete
+immobility, his thin lips compressed, his eyes veiled.&nbsp; His face
+was like a carving.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So you would like to try your hand at cards with that skunk,
+sir?&rdquo; said Ricardo, stopping suddenly and rubbing his hands.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones gave no sign of having heard anything.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, why not?&nbsp; Why shouldn&rsquo;t he have the experience?&nbsp;
+You remember in that Mexican town - what&rsquo;s its name? - the robber
+fellow they caught in the mountains and condemned to be shot?&nbsp;
+He played cards half the night with the jailer and the sheriff.&nbsp;
+Well, this fellow is condemned, too.&nbsp; He must give you your game.&nbsp;
+Hang it all, a gentleman ought to have some little relaxation!&nbsp;
+And you have been uncommonly patient, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are uncommonly volatile all of a sudden,&rdquo; Mr. Jones
+remarked in a bored voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s come to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The secretary hummed for a while, and then said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll try to get him over here for you tonight, after
+dinner.&nbsp; If I ain&rsquo;t here myself, don&rsquo;t you worry, sir.&nbsp;
+I shall be doing a bit of nosing around - see?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see,&rdquo; sneered Mr. Jones languidly.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+what do you expect to see in the dark?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo made no answer, and after another turn or two slipped out
+of the room.&nbsp; He no longer felt comfortable alone with the governor.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER EIGHT</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Meantime Heyst and Lena, walking rather fast, approached Wang&rsquo;s
+hut.&nbsp; Asking the girl to wait, Heyst ascended the little ladder
+of bamboos giving access to the door.&nbsp; It was as he had expected.&nbsp;
+The smoky interior was empty, except for a big chest of sandalwood too
+heavy for hurried removal.&nbsp; Its lid was thrown up, but whatever
+it might have contained was no longer there.&nbsp; All Wang&rsquo;s
+possessions were gone.&nbsp; Without tarrying in the hut, Heyst came
+back to the girl, who asked no questions, with her strange air of knowing
+or understanding everything.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let us push on,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>He went ahead, the rustle of her white skirt following him into the
+shades of the forest, along the path of their usual walk.&nbsp; Though
+the air lay heavy between straight denuded trunks, the sunlit patches
+moved on the ground, and raising her eyes Lena saw far above her head
+the flutter of the leaves, the surface shudder on the mighty limbs extended
+horizontally in the perfect immobility of patience.&nbsp; Twice Heyst
+looked over his shoulder at her.&nbsp; Behind the readiness of her answering
+smile there was a fund of devoted, concentrated passion, burning with
+the hope of a more perfect satisfaction.&nbsp; They passed the spot
+where it was their practice to turn towards the barren summit of the
+central hill.&nbsp; Heyst held steadily on his way towards the upper
+limit of the forest.&nbsp; The moment they left its shelter, a breeze
+enveloped them, and a great cloud, racing over the sun, threw a peculiar
+sombre tint over everything.&nbsp; Heyst pointed up a precipitous, rugged
+path clinging to the side of the hill.&nbsp; It ended in a barricade
+of felled trees, a primitively conceived obstacle which must have cost
+much labour to erect at just that spot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This,&rdquo; Heyst, explained in his urbane tone, &ldquo;is
+a barrier against the march of civilization.&nbsp; The poor folk over
+there did not like it, as it appeared to them in the shape of my company
+- a great step forward, as some people used to call it with mistaken
+confidence.&nbsp; The advanced foot has been drawn back, but the barricade
+remains.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They went on climbing slowly.&nbsp; The cloud had driven over, leaving
+an added brightness on the face of the world.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a very ridiculous thing,&rdquo; Heyst went on;
+&ldquo;but then it is the product of honest fear - fear of the unknown,
+of the incomprehensible.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s pathetic, too, in a way.&nbsp;
+And I heartily wish, Lena, that we were on the other side of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, stop, stop!&rdquo; she cried, seizing his arm.</p>
+<p>The face of the barricade they were approaching had been piled up
+with a lot of fresh-cut branches.&nbsp; The leaves were still green.&nbsp;
+A gentle breeze, sweeping over the top, stirred them a little; but what
+had startled the girl was the discovery of several spear-blades protruding
+from the mass of foliage.&nbsp; She had made them out suddenly.&nbsp;
+They did not gleam, but she saw them with extreme distinctness, very
+still, very vicious to look at.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You had better let me go forward alone, Lena,&rdquo; said
+Heyst.</p>
+<p>She tugged, persistently at his arm, but after a time, during which
+he never ceased to look smilingly into her terrified eyes, he ended
+by disengaging himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a sign rather than a demonstration,&rdquo; he argued,
+persuasively.&nbsp; &ldquo;Just wait here a moment.&nbsp; I promise
+not to approach near enough to be stabbed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As in a nightmare she watched Heyst go up the few yards of the path
+as if he never meant to stop; and she heard his voice, like voices heard
+in dreams, shouting unknown words in an unearthly tone.&nbsp; Heyst
+was only demanding to see Wang.&nbsp; He was not kept waiting very long.&nbsp;
+Recovering from the first flurry of her fright, Lena noticed a commotion
+in the green top-dressing of the barricade.&nbsp; She exhaled a sigh
+of relief when the spear-blades retreated out of sight, sliding inward
+- the horrible things! in a spot facing Heyst a pair of yellow hands
+parted the leaves, and a face filled the small opening - a face with
+very noticeable eyes.&nbsp; It was Wang&rsquo;s face, of course, with
+no suggestion of a body belonging to it, like those cardboard faces
+at which she remembered gazing as a child in the window of a certain
+dim shop kept by a mysterious little man in Kingsland Road.&nbsp; Only
+this face, instead of mere holes, had eyes which blinked.&nbsp; She
+could see the beating of the eyelids.&nbsp; The hands on each side of
+the face, keeping the boughs apart, also did not look as if they belonged
+to any real body.&nbsp; One of them was holding a revolver - a weapon
+which she recognized merely by intuition, never having seen such an
+object before.</p>
+<p>She leaned her shoulders against the rock of the perpendicular hillside
+and kept her eyes on Heyst, with comparative composure, since the spears
+were not menacing him any longer.&nbsp; Beyond the rigid and motionless
+back he presented to her, she saw Wang&rsquo;s unreal cardboard face
+moving its thin lips and grimacing artificially.&nbsp; She was too far
+down the path to hear the dialogue, carried on in an ordinary voice.&nbsp;
+She waited patiently for its end.&nbsp; Her shoulders felt the warmth
+of the rock; now and then a whiff of cooler air seemed to slip down
+upon her head from above; the ravine at her feet, choked fun of vegetation,
+emitted the faint, drowsy hum of insect life.&nbsp; Everything was very
+quiet.&nbsp; She failed to notice the exact moment when Wang&rsquo;s
+head vanished from the foliage, taking the unreal hands away with it.&nbsp;
+To her horror, the spear-blades came gliding slowly out.&nbsp; The very
+hair on her head stirred; but before she had time to cry out, Heyst,
+who seemed rooted to the ground, turned round abruptly and began to
+move towards her.&nbsp; His great moustaches did not quite hide an ugly
+but irresolute smile; and when he had come down near enough to touch
+her, he burst out into a harsh laugh:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha, ha, ha!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked at him, uncomprehending.&nbsp; He cut short his laugh
+and said curtly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had better go down as we came.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She followed him into the forest.&nbsp; The advance of the afternoon
+had filled it with gloom.&nbsp; Far away a slant of light between the
+trees closed the view.&nbsp; All was dark beyond.&nbsp; Heyst stopped.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No reason to hurry, Lena,&rdquo; he said in his ordinary,
+serenely polite tones.&nbsp; &ldquo;We return unsuccessful.&nbsp; I
+suppose you know, or at least can guess, what was my object in coming
+up there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I can&rsquo;t guess, dear,&rdquo; she said, and smiled,
+noticing with emotion that his breast was heaving as if he had been
+out of breath.&nbsp; Nevertheless, he tried to command his speech, pausing
+only a little between the words.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No?&nbsp; I went up to find Wang.&nbsp; I went up&rdquo; -
+he gasped again here, but this was for the last time - &ldquo;I made
+you come with me because I didn&rsquo;t like to leave you unprotected
+in the proximity of those fellows.&rdquo;&nbsp; Suddenly he snatched
+his cork helmet off his head and dashed it on the ground.&nbsp; &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+he cried roughly.&nbsp; &ldquo;All this is too unreal altogether.&nbsp;
+It isn&rsquo;t to be borne!&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t protect you!&nbsp; I
+haven&rsquo;t the power.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He glared at her for a moment, then hastened after his hat which
+had bounded away to some distance.&nbsp; He came back looking at her
+face, which was very white.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I ought to beg your pardon for these antics,&rdquo; he said,
+adjusting his hat.&nbsp; &ldquo;A movement of childish petulance!&nbsp;
+Indeed, I feel very much like a child in my ignorance, in my powerlessness,
+in my want of resource, in everything except in the dreadful consciousness
+of some evil hanging over your head - yours!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s you they are after,&rdquo; she murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No doubt, but unfortunately - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Unfortunately - what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Unfortunately, I have not succeeded with Wang,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I failed to move his Celestial, heart - that is, if there is
+such a thing.&nbsp; He told me with horrible Chinese reasonableness
+that he could not let us pass the barrier, because we should be pursued.&nbsp;
+He doesn&rsquo;t like fights.&nbsp; He gave me to understand that he
+would shoot me with my own revolver without any sort of compunction,
+rather than risk a rude and distasteful contest with the strange barbarians
+for my sake.&nbsp; He has preached to the villagers.&nbsp; They respect
+him.&nbsp; He is the most remarkable man they have ever seen, and their
+kinsman by marriage.&nbsp; They understand his policy.&nbsp; And anyway
+only women and children and a few old fellows are left in the village.&nbsp;
+This is the season when the men are away in trading vessels.&nbsp; But
+it would have been all the same.&nbsp; None of them have a taste for
+fighting - and with white men too!&nbsp; They are peaceable, kindly
+folk and would have seen me shot with extreme satisfaction.&nbsp; Wang
+seemed to think my insistence - for I insisted, you know - very stupid
+and tactless.&nbsp; But a drowning man clutches at straws.&nbsp; We
+were talking in such Malay as we are both equal to.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Your fears are foolish,&rsquo; I said to him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Foolish? of course I am foolish,&rsquo; he replied.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;If I were a wise man, I would be a merchant with a big hong in
+Singapore, instead of being a mine coolie turned houseboy.&nbsp; But
+if you don&rsquo;t go away in time, I will shoot you before it grows
+too dark to take aim.&nbsp; Not till then, Number One, but I will do
+it then.&nbsp; Now - finish!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;All right,&rsquo; I said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Finish as far
+as I am concerned; but you can have no objections to the <i>mem putih</i>
+coming over to stay with the Orang Kaya&rsquo;s women for a few days.&nbsp;
+I will make a present in silver for it.&rsquo;&nbsp; Orang Kaya, is
+the head man of the village, Lena,&rdquo; added Heyst.</p>
+<p>She looked at him in astonishment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You wanted me to go to that village of savages?&rdquo; she
+gasped.&nbsp; &ldquo;You wanted me to leave you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would have given me a freer hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst stretched out his hands and looked at them for a moment, then
+let them fall by his side.&nbsp; Indignation was expressed more in the
+curve of her lips than in her clear eyes, which never wavered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I believe Wang laughed,&rdquo; he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;He
+made a noise like a turkey-cock.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;That would be worse than anything,&rsquo; he told me.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was taken aback.&nbsp; I pointed out to him that he was
+talking nonsense.&nbsp; It could not make any difference to his security
+where you were, because the evil men, as he calls them, did not know
+of your existence.&nbsp; I did not lie exactly, Lena, though I did stretch
+the truth till it cracked; but the fellow seems to have an uncanny insight.&nbsp;
+He shook his head.&nbsp; He assured me they knew all about you.&nbsp;
+He made a horrible grimace at me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t matter,&rdquo; said the girl.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+didn&rsquo;t want - I would not have gone.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst raised his eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wonderful intuition!&nbsp; As I continued to press him, Wang
+made that very remark about you.&nbsp; When he smiles, his face looks
+like a conceited death&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; It was his very last remark
+that you wouldn&rsquo;t want to.&nbsp; I went away then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She leaned back against a tree.&nbsp; Heyst faced her in the same
+attitude of leisure, as if they had done with time and all the other
+concerns of the earth.&nbsp; Suddenly, high above their heads the roof
+of leaves whispered at them tumultuously and then ceased.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That was a strange notion of yours, to send me away,&rdquo;
+she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Send me away?&nbsp; What for?&nbsp; Yes, what
+for?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You seem indignant,&rdquo; he remarked listlessly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To these savages, too!&rdquo; she pursued.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+you think I would have gone?&nbsp; You can do what you like with me
+- but not that, not that!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst looked into the dim aisles of the forest.&nbsp; Everything
+was so still now that the very ground on which they stood seemed to
+exhale silence into the shade.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why be indignant?&rdquo; he remonstrated.&nbsp; &ldquo;It
+has not happened.&nbsp; I gave up pleading with Wang.&nbsp; Here we
+are, repulsed!&nbsp; Not only without power to resist the evil, but
+unable to make terms for ourselves with the worthy envoys, the envoys
+extraordinary of the world we thought we had done with for years and
+years.&nbsp; And that&rsquo;s bad, Lena, very bad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s funny,&rdquo; she said thoughtfully.&nbsp; &ldquo;Bad?&nbsp;
+I suppose it is.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t know that it is.&nbsp; But do you?&nbsp;
+Do you?&nbsp; You talk as if you didn&rsquo;t believe in it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She gazed at him earnestly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do I?&nbsp; Ah!&nbsp; That&rsquo;s it.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+know how to talk.&nbsp; I have managed to refine everything away.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;ve said to the Earth that bore me: &lsquo;I am I and you are
+a shadow.&rsquo;&nbsp; And, by Jove, it is so!&nbsp; But it appears
+that such words cannot be uttered with impunity.&nbsp; Here I am on
+a Shadow inhabited by Shades.&nbsp; How helpless a man is against the
+Shades!&nbsp; How is one to intimidate, persuade, resist, assert oneself
+against them?&nbsp; I have lost all belief in realities . . . Lena,
+give me your hand.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked at him surprised, uncomprehending.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your hand,&rdquo; he cried.</p>
+<p>She obeyed; he seized it with avidity as if eager to raise it to
+his lips, but halfway up released his grasp.&nbsp; They looked at each
+other for a time.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter, dear?&rdquo; she whispered timidly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Neither force nor conviction,&rdquo; Heyst muttered wearily
+to himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;How am I to meet this charmingly simple problem?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am sorry,&rdquo; she murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And so am I,&rdquo; he confessed quickly.&nbsp; &ldquo;And
+the bitterest of this humiliation is its complete uselessness - which
+I feel, I feel!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had never before seen him give such signs of feeling.&nbsp; Across
+his ghastly face the long moustaches flamed in the shade.&nbsp; He spoke
+suddenly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder if I could find enough courage to creep among them
+in the night, with a knife, and cut their throats one after another,
+as they slept!&nbsp; I wonder - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was frightened by his unwonted appearance more than by the words
+in his mouth, and said earnestly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you try to do such a thing!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+you think of it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t possess anything bigger than a penknife.&nbsp;
+As to thinking of it, Lena, there&rsquo;s no saying what one may think
+of.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think.&nbsp; Something in me thinks - something
+foreign to my nature.&nbsp; What is the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He noticed her parted lips, and the peculiar stare in her eyes, which
+had wandered from his face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s somebody after us.&nbsp; I saw something white
+moving,&rdquo; she cried.</p>
+<p>Heyst did not turn his head; he only glanced at her out-stretched
+arm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No doubt we are followed; we are watched.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see anything now,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And it does not matter,&rdquo; Heyst went on in his ordinary
+voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here we are in the forest.&nbsp; I have neither
+strength nor persuasion.&nbsp; Indeed, it&rsquo;s extremely difficult
+to be eloquent before a Chinaman&rsquo;s head stuck at one out of a
+lot of brushwood.&nbsp; But can we wander among these big trees indefinitely?&nbsp;
+Is this a refuge?&nbsp; No!&nbsp; What else is left to us?&nbsp; I did
+think for a moment of the mine; but even there we could not remain very
+long.&nbsp; And then that gallery is not safe.&nbsp; The props were
+too weak to begin with.&nbsp; Ants have been at work there - ants after
+the men.&nbsp; A death-trap, at best.&nbsp; One can die but once, but
+there are many manners of death.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl glanced about fearfully, in search of the watcher or follower
+whom she had glimpsed once among the trees; but if he existed, he had
+concealed himself.&nbsp; Nothing met her eyes but the deepening shadows
+of the short vistas between the living columns of the still roof of
+leaves.&nbsp; She looked at the man beside her expectantly, tenderly,
+with suppressed affright and a sort of awed wonder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have also thought of these people&rsquo;s boat,&rdquo; Heyst
+went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;We could get into that, and - only they have taken
+everything out of her.&nbsp; I have seen her oars and mast in a corner
+of their room.&nbsp; To shove off in an empty boat would be nothing
+but a desperate expedition, supposing even that she would drift out
+a good distance between the islands before the morning.&nbsp; It would
+only be a complicated manner of committing suicide - to be found dead
+in a boat, dead from sun and thirst.&nbsp; A sea mystery.&nbsp; I wonder
+who would find us!&nbsp; Davidson, perhaps; but Davidson passed westward
+ten days ago.&nbsp; I watched him steaming past one early morning, from
+the jetty.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You never told me,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He must have been looking at me through his big binoculars.&nbsp;
+Perhaps, if I had raised my arm - but what did we want with Davidson
+then, you and I?&nbsp; He won&rsquo;t be back this way for three weeks
+or more, Lena.&nbsp; I wish I had raised my arm that morning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What would have been the good of it?&rdquo; she sighed out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What good?&nbsp; No good, of course.&nbsp; We had no forebodings.&nbsp;
+This seemed to be an inexpugnable refuge, where we could live untroubled
+and learn to know each other.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s perhaps in trouble that people get to know each
+other,&rdquo; she suggested.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps,&rdquo; he said indifferently.&nbsp; &ldquo;At any
+rate, we would not have gone away from here with him; though I believe
+he would have come in eagerly enough, and ready for any service he could
+render.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s that fat man&rsquo;s nature - a delightful
+fellow.&nbsp; You would not come on the wharf that time I sent the shawl
+back to Mrs. Schomberg through him.&nbsp; He has never seen you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know that you wanted anybody ever to see me,&rdquo;
+she said.</p>
+<p>He had folded his arms on his breast and hung his head.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I did not know that you cared to be seen as yet.&nbsp;
+A misunderstanding evidently.&nbsp; An honourable misunderstanding.&nbsp;
+But it does not matter now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He raised his head after a silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How gloomy this forest has grown!&nbsp; Yet surely the sun
+cannot have set already.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked round; and as if her eyes had just been opened, she perceived
+the shades of the forest surrounding her, not so much with gloom, but
+with a sullen, dumb, menacing hostility.&nbsp; Her heart sank in the
+engulfing stillness, at that moment she felt the nearness of death,
+breathing on her and on the man with her.&nbsp; If there had been a
+sudden stir of leaves, the crack of a dry branch, the faintest rustle,
+she would have screamed aloud.&nbsp; But she shook off the unworthy
+weakness.&nbsp; Such as she was, a fiddle-scraping girl picked up on
+the very threshold of infamy, she would try to rise above herself, triumphant
+and humble; and then happiness would burst on her like a torrent, flinging
+at her feet the man whom she loved.</p>
+<p>Heyst stirred slightly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We had better be getting back, Lena, since we can&rsquo;t
+stay all night in the woods - or anywhere else, for that matter.&nbsp;
+We are the slaves of this infernal surprise which has been sprung on
+us by - shall I say fate? - your fate, or mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was the man who had broken the silence, but it was the woman who
+led the way.&nbsp; At the very edge of the forest she stopped, concealed
+by a tree.&nbsp; He joined her cautiously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What is it?&nbsp; What do you see, Lena?&rdquo; he whispered.</p>
+<p>She said that it was only a thought that had come into her head.&nbsp;
+She hesitated for a moment giving him over her shoulder a shining gleam
+in her grey eyes.&nbsp; She wanted to know whether this trouble, this
+danger, this evil, whatever it was, finding them out in their retreat,
+was not a sort of punishment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Punishment?&rdquo; repeated Heyst.&nbsp; He could not understand
+what she meant.&nbsp; When she explained, he was still more surprised.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;A sort of retribution, from an angry Heaven?&rdquo; he said in
+wonder.&nbsp; &ldquo;On us?&nbsp; What on earth for?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He saw her pale face darken in the dusk.&nbsp; She had blushed.&nbsp;
+Her whispering flowed very fast.&nbsp; It was the way they lived together
+- that wasn&rsquo;t right, was it?&nbsp; It was a guilty life.&nbsp;
+For she had not been forced into it, driven, scared into it.&nbsp; No,
+no - she had come to him of her own free will, with her whole soul yearning
+unlawfully.</p>
+<p>He was so profoundly touched that he could not speak for a moment.&nbsp;
+To conceal his trouble, he assumed his best Heystian manner.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What?&nbsp; Are our visitors then messengers of morality,
+avengers of righteousness, agents of Providence?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s
+certainly an original view.&nbsp; How flattered they would be if they
+could hear you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now you are making fun of me,&rdquo; she said in a subdued
+voice which broke suddenly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you conscious of sin?&rdquo; Heyst asked gravely.&nbsp;
+She made no answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;For I am not,&rdquo; he added; &ldquo;before
+Heaven, I am not!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You!&nbsp; You are different.&nbsp; Woman is the tempter.&nbsp;
+You took me up from pity.&nbsp; I threw myself at you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, you exaggerate, you exaggerate.&nbsp; It was not so bad
+as that,&rdquo; he said playfully, keeping his voice steady with an
+effort.</p>
+<p>He considered himself a dead man already, yet forced to pretend that
+he was alive for her sake, for her defence.&nbsp; He regretted that
+he had no Heaven to which he could recommend this fair, palpitating
+handful of ashes and dust - warm, living sentient his own - and exposed
+helplessly to insult, outrage, degradation, and infinite misery of the
+body.</p>
+<p>She had averted her face from him and was still.&nbsp; He suddenly
+seized her passive hand.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will have it so?&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes?&nbsp;
+Well, let us then hope for mercy together.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She shook her head without looking at him, like an abashed child.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Remember,&rdquo; he went on incorrigible with his delicate
+raillery, &ldquo;that hope is a Christian virtue, and surely you can&rsquo;t
+want all the mercy for yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Before their eyes the bungalow across the cleared ground stood bathed
+in a sinister light.&nbsp; An unexpected chill gust of wind made a noise
+in the tree-tops.&nbsp; She snatched her hand away and stepped out into
+the open; but before she had advanced more than three yards, she stood
+still and pointed to the west.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh look there!&rdquo; she exclaimed.</p>
+<p>Beyond the headland of Diamond Bay, lying black on a purple sea,
+great masses of cloud stood piled up and bathed in a mist of blood.&nbsp;
+A crimson crack like an open wound zigzagged between them, with a piece
+of dark red sun showing at the bottom.&nbsp; Heyst cast an indifferent
+glance at the ill-omened chaos of the sky.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thunderstorm making up.&nbsp; We shall hear it all night,
+but it won&rsquo;t visit us, probably.&nbsp; The clouds generally gather
+round the volcano.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was not listening to him.&nbsp; Her eyes reflected the sombre
+and violent hues of the sunset.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That does not look much like a sign of mercy,&rdquo; she said
+slowly, as if to herself, and hurried on, followed by Heyst.&nbsp; Suddenly
+she stopped.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care.&nbsp; I would do more
+yet!&nbsp; And some day you&rsquo;ll forgive me.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll
+have to forgive me!&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER NINE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Stumbling up the steps, as if suddenly exhausted, Lena entered the
+room and let herself fall on the nearest chair.&nbsp; Before following
+her, Heyst took a survey of the surroundings from the veranda.&nbsp;
+It was a complete solitude.&nbsp; There was nothing in the aspect of
+this familiar scene to tell him that he and the girl were not completely
+alone as they had been in the early days of their common life on this
+abandoned spot, with only Wang discreetly materializing from time to
+time and the uncomplaining memory of Morrison to keep them company.</p>
+<p>After the cold gust of wind there was an absolute stillness of the
+air.&nbsp; The thunder-charged mass hung unbroken beyond the low, ink-black
+headland, darkening the twilight.&nbsp; By contrast, the sky at the
+zenith displayed pellucid clearness, the sheen of a delicate glass bubble
+which the merest movement of air might shatter.&nbsp; A little to the
+left, between the black masses of the headland and of the forest, the
+volcano, a feather of smoke by day and a cigar-glow at night, took its
+first fiery expanding breath of the evening.&nbsp; Above it a reddish
+star came out like an expelled spark from the fiery bosom of the earth,
+enchanted into permanency by the mysterious spell of frozen spaces.</p>
+<p>In front of Heyst the forest, already full of the deepest shades,
+stood like a wall.&nbsp; But he lingered, watching its edge, especially
+where it ended at the line of bushes, masking the land end of the jetty.&nbsp;
+Since the girl had spoken of catching a glimpse of something white among
+the trees, he believed pretty firmly that they had been followed in
+their excursion up the mountain by Mr. Jones&rsquo;s secretary.&nbsp;
+No doubt the fellow had watched them out of the forest, and now, unless
+he took the trouble to go back some distance and fetch a considerable
+circuit inland over the clearing, he was bound to walk out into the
+open space before the bungalows.&nbsp; Heyst did, indeed, imagine at
+one time some movement between the trees, lost as soon as perceived.&nbsp;
+He stated patiently, but nothing more happened.&nbsp; After all, why
+should he trouble about these people&rsquo;s actions?&nbsp; Why this
+stupid concern for the preliminaries, since, when the issue was joined,
+it would find him disarmed and shrinking from the ugliness and degradation
+of it?</p>
+<p>He turned and entered the room.&nbsp; Deep dusk reigned in there
+already.&nbsp; Lena, near the door, did not move or speak.&nbsp; The
+sheen of the white tablecloth was very obtrusive.&nbsp; The brute these
+two vagabonds had tamed had entered on its service while Heyst and Lena
+were away.&nbsp; The table was laid.&nbsp; Heyst walked up and down
+the room several times.&nbsp; The girl remained without sound or movement
+on the chair.&nbsp; But when Heyst, placing the two silver candelabra
+on the table, struck a match to light the candles, she got up suddenly
+and went into the bedroom.&nbsp; She came out again almost immediately,
+having taken off her hat.&nbsp; Heyst looked at her over his shoulder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the good of shirking the evil hour?&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve
+lighted these candles for a sign of our return.&nbsp; After all, we
+might not have been watched - while returning, I mean.&nbsp; Of course
+we were seen leaving the house.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl sat down again.&nbsp; The great wealth of her hair looked
+very dark above her colourless face.&nbsp; She raised her eyes, glistening
+softly in the light with a sort of unreadable appeal, with a strange
+effect of unseeing innocence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Heyst across the table, the fingertips of
+one hand resting on the immaculate cloth.&nbsp; &ldquo;A creature with
+an antediluvian lower jaw, hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a
+pre-historic ape, has laid this table.&nbsp; Are you awake, Lena?&nbsp;
+Am I?&nbsp; I would pinch myself, only I know that nothing would do
+away with this dream.&nbsp; Three covers.&nbsp; You know it is the shorter
+of the two who&rsquo;s coming - the gentleman who, in the play of his
+shoulders as he walks, and in his facial structure, recalls a Jaguar.&nbsp;
+Ah, you don&rsquo;t know what a jaguar is?&nbsp; But you have had a
+good look at these two.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the short one, you know, who&rsquo;s
+to be our guest.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made a sign with her head that she knew; Heyst&rsquo;s insistence
+brought Ricardo vividly before her mental vision.&nbsp; A sudden languor,
+like the physical echo of her struggle with the man, paralysed all her
+limbs.&nbsp; She lay still in the chair, feeling very frightened at
+this phenomenon - ready to pray aloud for strength.</p>
+<p>Heyst had started to pace the room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our guest!&nbsp; There is a proverb - in Russia, I believe
+- that when a guest enters the house, God enters the house.&nbsp; The
+sacred virtue of hospitality!&nbsp; But it leads one into trouble as
+well as any other.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl unexpectedly got up from the chair, swaying her supple figure
+and stretching her arms above her head.&nbsp; He stopped to look at
+her curiously, paused, and then went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I venture to think that God has nothing to do with such a
+hospitality and with such a guest!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had jumped to her feet to react against the numbness, to discover
+whether her body would obey her will.&nbsp; It did.&nbsp; She could
+stand up, and she could move her arms freely.&nbsp; Though no physiologist,
+she concluded that all that sudden numbness was in her head, not in
+her limbs.&nbsp; Her fears assuaged, she thanked God for it mentally,
+and to Heyst murmured a protest:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes!&nbsp; He&rsquo;s got to do with everything - every
+little thing.&nbsp; Nothing can happen - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said hastily, &ldquo;one of the two sparrows
+can&rsquo;t be struck to the ground - you are thinking of that.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The habitual playful smile faded on the kindly lips under the martial
+moustache.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ah, you remember what you have been told - as
+a child - on Sundays.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I do remember.&rdquo;&nbsp; She sank into the chair again.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It was the only decent bit of time I ever had when I was a kid,
+with our landlady&rsquo;s two girls, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wonder, Lena,&rdquo; Heyst said, with a return to his urbane
+playfulness, &ldquo;whether you are just a little child, or whether
+you represent something as old as the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She surprised Heyst by saying dreamily:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well - and what about you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I?&nbsp; I date later - much later.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t call
+myself a child, but I am so recent that I may call myself a man of the
+last hour - or is it the hour before last?&nbsp; I have been out of
+it so long that I am not certain how far the hands of the clock have
+moved since - since - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He glanced at the portrait of his father, exactly above the head
+of the girl, as if it were ignoring her in its painted austerity of
+feeling.&nbsp; He did not finish the sentence; but he did not remain
+silent for long.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only what must be avoided are fallacious inferences, my dear
+Lena - especially at this hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now you are making fun of me again,&rdquo; she said without
+looking up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Am I?&rdquo; he cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Making fun?&nbsp; No,
+giving warning.&nbsp; Hang it all, whatever truth people told you in
+the old days, there is also this one - that sparrows do fall to the
+ground, that they are brought to the ground.&nbsp; This is no vain assertion,
+but a fact.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s why&rdquo; - again his tone changed,
+while he picked up the table knife and let it fall disdainfully - &ldquo;that&rsquo;s
+why I wish these wretched round knives had some edge on them.&nbsp;
+Absolute rubbish - neither edge, point, nor substance.&nbsp; I believe
+one of these forks would make a better weapon at a pinch.&nbsp; But
+can I go about with a fork in my pocket?&rdquo;&nbsp; He gnashed his
+teeth with a rage very real, and yet comic.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There used to be a carver here, but it was broken and thrown
+away a long time ago.&nbsp; Nothing much to carve here.&nbsp; It would
+have made a noble weapon, no doubt; but - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stopped.&nbsp; The girl sat very quiet, with downcast eyes.&nbsp;
+As he kept silence for some time, she looked up and said thoughtfully:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, a knife - it&rsquo;s a knife that you would want, wouldn&rsquo;t
+you, in case, in case - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There must be a crowbar or two in the sheds; but I have given
+up all the keys together.&nbsp; And then, do you see me walking about
+with a crowbar in my hand?&nbsp; Ha, ha!&nbsp; And besides, that edifying
+sight alone might start the trouble for all I know.&nbsp; In truth,
+why has it not started yet?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps they are afraid of you,&rdquo; she whispered, looking
+down again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By Jove, it looks like it,&rdquo; he assented meditatively.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;They do seem to hang back for some reason.&nbsp; Is that reason
+prudence, or downright fear, or perhaps the leisurely method of certitude?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Out in the black night, not very far from the bungalow, resounded
+a loud and prolonged whistle.&nbsp; Lena&rsquo;s hands grasped the sides
+of the chair, but she made no movement.&nbsp; Heyst started, and turned
+his face away from the door.</p>
+<p>The startling sound had died away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Whistles, yells, omens, signals, portents - what do they matter?&rdquo;
+he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;But what about the crowbar?&nbsp; Suppose I had
+it!&nbsp; Could I stand in ambush at the side of the door - this door
+- and smash the first protruding head, scatter blood and brains over
+the floor, over these walls, and then run stealthily to the other door
+to do the same thing - and repeat the performance for a third time,
+perhaps?&nbsp; Could I?&nbsp; On suspicion, without compunction, with
+a calm and determined purpose?&nbsp; No, it is not in me.&nbsp; I date
+too late.&nbsp; Would you like to see me attempt this thing while that
+mysterious prestige of mine lasts - or their not less mysterious hesitation?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, no!&rdquo; she whispered ardently, as if compelled to
+speak by his eyes fixed on her face.&nbsp; &ldquo;No, it&rsquo;s a knife
+you want to defend yourself with - to defend - there will be time -
+&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And who knows if it isn&rsquo;t really my duty?&rdquo; he
+began again, as if he had not heard her disjointed words at all.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It may be - my duty to you, to myself.&nbsp; For why should I
+put up with the humiliation of their secret menaces?&nbsp; Do you know
+what the world would say?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He emitted a low laugh, which struck her with terror.&nbsp; She would
+have got up, but he stooped so low over her that she could not move
+without first pushing him away.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would say, Lena, that I - the Swede - after luring my friend
+and partner to his death from mere greed of money, have murdered these
+unoffending shipwrecked strangers from sheer funk.&nbsp; That would
+be the story whispered - perhaps shouted - certainly spread out, and
+believed - and believed, my dear Lena!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who would believe such awful things?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Perhaps you wouldn&rsquo;t - not at first, at any rate; but
+the power of calumny grows with time.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s insidious and
+penetrating.&nbsp; It can even destroy one&rsquo;s faith in oneself
+- dry-rot the soul.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>All at once her eyes leaped to the door and remained fixed, stony,
+a little enlarged.&nbsp; Turning his head, Heyst beheld the figure of
+Ricardo framed in the doorway.&nbsp; For a moment none of the three
+moved, then, looking from the newcomer to the girl in the chair, Heyst
+formulated a sardonic introduction.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr Ricardo, my dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her head drooped a little.&nbsp; Ricardo&rsquo;s hand went up to
+his moustache.&nbsp; His voice exploded in the room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At your service, ma&rsquo;am!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stepped in, taking his hat off with a flourish, and dropping it
+carelessly on a chair near the door.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At your service,&rdquo; he repeated, in quite another tone.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I was made aware there was a lady about, by that Pedro of ours;
+only I didn&rsquo;t know I should have the privilege of seeing you tonight,
+ma&rsquo;am.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lena and Heyst looked at him covertly, but he, with a vague gaze
+avoiding them both, looked at nothing, seeming to pursue some point
+in space.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Had a pleasant walk?&rdquo; he asked suddenly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes.&nbsp; And you?&rdquo; returned Heyst, who had managed
+to catch his glance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t been a yard away from the governor this afternoon
+till I started for here.&rdquo;&nbsp; The genuineness of the accent
+surprised Heyst, without convincing him of the truth of the words.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why do you ask?&rdquo; pursued Ricardo with every inflection
+of perfect candour.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You might have wished to explore the island a little,&rdquo;
+said Heyst, studying the man, who, to render him justice, did not try
+to free his captured gaze.&nbsp; &ldquo;I may remind you that it wouldn&rsquo;t
+be a perfectly safe proceeding.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo presented a picture of innocence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes - meaning that Chink that has ran away from you.&nbsp;
+He ain&rsquo;t much!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He has a revolver,&rdquo; observed Heyst meaningly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, and you have a revolver, too,&rdquo; Mr. Ricardo argued
+unexpectedly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t worry myself about that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s different.&nbsp; I am not afraid of you,&rdquo;
+Heyst made answer after a short pause.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of all of you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have a queer way of putting things,&rdquo; began Ricardo.</p>
+<p>At that moment the door on the compound side of the house came open
+with some noise, and Pedro entered, pressing the edge of a loaded tray
+to his breast.&nbsp; His big, hairy head rolled a little, his feet fell
+in front of each other with a short, hard thump on the floor.&nbsp;
+The arrival changed the current of Ricardo&rsquo;s thought, perhaps,
+but certainly of his speech.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You heard me whistling a little while ago outside?&nbsp; That
+was to give him a hint, as I came along, that it was time to bring in
+the dinner; and here it is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lena rose and passed to the right of Ricardo, who lowered his glance
+for a moment.&nbsp; They sat down at the table.&nbsp; The enormous gorilla
+back of Pedro swayed out through the door.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Extraordinary strong brute, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; said Ricardo.&nbsp;
+He, had a propensity to talk about &ldquo;his Pedro,&rdquo; as some
+men will talk of their dog.&nbsp; &ldquo;He ain&rsquo;t pretty, though.&nbsp;
+No, he ain&rsquo;t pretty.&nbsp; And he has got to be kept under.&nbsp;
+I am his keeper, as it might be.&nbsp; The governor don&rsquo;t trouble
+his head much about dee-tails.&nbsp; All that&rsquo;s left to Martin.&nbsp;
+Martin, that&rsquo;s me, ma&rsquo;am.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst saw the girl&rsquo;s eyes turn towards Mr. Jones&rsquo;s secretary
+and rest blankly on his face.&nbsp; Ricardo, however, looked vaguely
+into space, and, with faint flickers of a smile about his lips, made
+conversation indefatigably against the silence of his entertainers.&nbsp;
+He boasted largely of his long association with Mr. Jones - over four
+years now, he said.&nbsp; Then, glancing rapidly at Heyst:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can see at once he&rsquo;s a gentleman, can&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You people,&rdquo; Heyst said, his habitual playful intonation
+tinged with gloom, &ldquo;are divorced from all reality in my eyes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo received this speech as if he had been expecting to hear
+those very words, or else did not mind at all what Heyst might say.&nbsp;
+He muttered an absent-minded &ldquo;Ay, ay,&rdquo; played with a bit
+of biscuit, sighed, and said, with a peculiar stare which did not seem
+to carry any distance, but to stop short at a point in the air very
+near his face:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Anybody can see at once <i>you</i> are one.&nbsp; You and
+the governor ought to understand each other.&nbsp; He expects to see
+you tonight.&nbsp; The governor isn&rsquo;t well, and we&rsquo;ve got
+to think of getting away from here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>While saying these words he turned himself full towards Lena, but
+without any marked expression.&nbsp; Leaning back with folded arms,
+the girl stared before her as if she had been alone in the room.&nbsp;
+But under that aspect of almost vacant unconcern the perils and emotion
+that had entered into her life warmed her heart, exalted her mind with
+a sense of an inconceivable intensity of existence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really?&nbsp; Thinking of going away from here?&rdquo; Heyst
+murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The best of friends must part,&rdquo; Ricardo pronounced slowly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And, as long as they part friends, there&rsquo;s no harm done.&nbsp;
+We two are used to be on the move.&nbsp; You, I understand, prefer to
+stick in one place.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was obvious that all this was being said merely for the sake of
+talking, and that Ricardo&rsquo;s mind was concentrated on some purpose
+unconnected with the words that were coming but of his mouth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should like to know,&rdquo; Heyst asked with incisive politeness,
+&ldquo;how you have come to understand this or anything else about me?&nbsp;
+As far as I can remember, I&rsquo;ve made you no confidences.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo, gazing comfortably into space out of the back of his chair
+- for some time all three had given up any pretence of eating - answered
+abstractedly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Any fellow might have guessed it!&rdquo;&nbsp; He sat up suddenly,
+and uncovered all his teeth in a grin of extraordinary ferocity, which
+was belied by the persistent amiability of his tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+governor will be the man to tell you something about that.&nbsp; I wish
+you would say you would see my governor.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s the one who
+does all our talking.&nbsp; Let me take you to him this evening.&nbsp;
+He ain&rsquo;t at all well; and he can&rsquo;t make up his mind to go
+away without having a talk with you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst, looking up, met Lena&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; Their expression
+of candour seemed to hide some struggling intention.&nbsp; Her head,
+he fancied, had made an imperceptible affirmative movement.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp;
+What reason could she have?&nbsp; Was it the prompting of some obscure
+instinct?&nbsp; Or was it simply a delusion of his own senses?&nbsp;
+But in this strange complication invading the quietude of his life,
+in his state of doubt and disdain and almost of despair with which he
+looked at himself, he would let even a delusive appearance guide him
+through a darkness so dense that it made for indifference.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, suppose I <i>do</i> say so.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ricardo did not conceal his satisfaction, which for a moment interested
+Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It can&rsquo;t be my life they are after,&rdquo; he said to
+himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;What good could it be to them?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked across the table at the girl.&nbsp; What did it matter
+whether she had nodded or not?&nbsp; As always when looking into her
+unconscious eyes, he tasted something like the dregs of tender pity.&nbsp;
+He had decided to go.&nbsp; Her nod, imaginary or not imaginary, advice
+or illusion, had tipped the scale.&nbsp; He reflected that Ricardo&rsquo;s
+invitation could scarcely be anything in the nature of a trap.&nbsp;
+It would have been too absurd.&nbsp; Why carry subtly into a trap someone
+already bound hand and foot, as it were?</p>
+<p>All this time he had been looking fixedly at the girl he called Lena.&nbsp;
+In the submissive quietness of her being, which had been her attitude
+ever since they had begun their life on the island, she remained as
+secret as ever.&nbsp; Heyst got up abruptly, with a smile of such enigmatic
+and despairing character that Mr. Secretary Ricardo, whose abstract
+gaze had an all-round efficiency, made a slight crouching start, as
+if to dive under the table for his leg-knife - a start that was repressed,
+as soon as begun.&nbsp; He had expected Heyst to spring on him or draw
+a revolver, because he created for himself a vision of him in his own
+image.&nbsp; Instead of doing either of these obvious things, Heyst
+walked across the room, opened the door and put his head through it
+to look out into the compound.</p>
+<p>As soon as his back was turned, Ricardo&rsquo;s hand sought the girl&rsquo;s
+arm under the table.&nbsp; He was not looking at her, but she felt the
+groping, nervous touch of his search, felt suddenly the grip of his
+fingers above her wrist.&nbsp; He leaned forward a little; still he
+dared not look at her.&nbsp; His hard stare remained fastened on Heyst&rsquo;s
+back.&nbsp; In an extremely low hiss, his fixed idea of argument found
+expression scathingly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;See!&nbsp; He&rsquo;s no good.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s not the man
+for you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He glanced at her at last.&nbsp; Her lips moved a little, and he
+was awed by that movement without a sound.&nbsp; Next instant the hard
+grasp of his fingers vanished from her arm.&nbsp; Heyst had shut the
+door.&nbsp; On his way back to the table, he crossed the path of the
+girl they had called Alma - she didn&rsquo;t know why - also Magdalen,
+whose mind had remained so long in doubt as to the reason of her own
+existence.&nbsp; She no longer wondered at that bitter riddle, since
+her heart found its solution in a blinding, hot glow of passionate pride.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER TEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>She passed by Heyst as if she had indeed been blinded by some secret,
+lurid, and consuming glare into which she was about to enter.&nbsp;
+The curtain of the bedroom door fell behind her into rigid folds.&nbsp;
+Ricardo&rsquo;s vacant gaze seemed to be watching the dancing flight
+of a fly in mid air.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Extra dark outside, ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; he muttered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not so dark but that I could see that man of yours prowling
+about there,&rdquo; said Heyst in measured tones.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What - Pedro?&nbsp; He&rsquo;s scarcely a man you know; or
+else I wouldn&rsquo;t be so fond of him as I am.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very well.&nbsp; Let&rsquo;s call him your worthy associate.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ay!&nbsp; Worthy enough for what we want of him.&nbsp; A great
+standby is Peter in a scrimmage.&nbsp; A growl and a bite - oh, my!&nbsp;
+And you don&rsquo;t want him about?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You want him out of the way?&rdquo; insisted Ricardo with
+an affectation of incredulity which Heyst accepted calmly, though the
+air in the room seemed to grow more oppressive with every word spoken.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s it.&nbsp; I do want him out of the way.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He forced himself to speak equably.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lor&rsquo;!&nbsp; That&rsquo;s no great matter.&nbsp; Pedro&rsquo;s
+not much use here.&nbsp; The business my governor&rsquo;s after can
+be settled by ten minutes&rsquo; rational talk with - with another gentleman.&nbsp;
+Quiet talk!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked up suddenly with hard, phosphorescent eyes.&nbsp; Heyst
+didn&rsquo;t move a muscle.&nbsp; Ricardo congratulated himself on having
+left his revolver behind.&nbsp; He was so exasperated that he didn&rsquo;t
+know what he might have done.&nbsp; He said at last:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You want poor, harmless Peter out of the way before you let
+me take you to see the governor - is that it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, that is it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;H&rsquo;m!&nbsp; One can see,&rdquo; Ricardo said with hidden
+venom, &ldquo;that you are a gentleman; but all that gentlemanly fancifulness
+is apt to turn sour on a plain man&rsquo;s stomach.&nbsp; However -
+you&rsquo;ll have to pardon me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He put his fingers into his mouth and let out a whistle which seemed
+to drive a thin, sharp shaft of air solidly against one&rsquo;s nearest
+ear-drum.&nbsp; Though he greatly enjoyed Heyst&rsquo;s involuntary
+grimace, he sat perfectly stolid waiting for the effect of the call.</p>
+<p>It brought Pedro in with an extraordinary, uncouth, primeval impetuosity.&nbsp;
+The door flew open with a clatter, and the wild figure it disclosed
+seemed anxious to devastate the room in leaps and bounds; but Ricardo
+raised his open palm, and the creature came in quietly.&nbsp; His enormous
+half-closed paws swung to and fro a little in front of his bowed trunk
+as he walked.&nbsp; Ricardo looked on truculently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You go to the boat - understand?&nbsp; Go now!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The little red eyes of the tame monster blinked with painful attention
+in the mass of hair.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well?&nbsp; Why don&rsquo;t you get?&nbsp; Forgot human speech,
+eh?&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you know any longer what a boat is?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Si</i> - boat,&rdquo; the creature stammered out doubtfully.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, go there - the boat at the jetty.&nbsp; March off to
+it and sit there, lie down there, do anything but go to sleep there
+- till you hear my call, and then fly here.&nbsp; Them&rsquo;s your
+orders.&nbsp; March!&nbsp; Get, <i>vamos</i>!&nbsp; No, not that way
+- out through the front door.&nbsp; No sulks!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Pedro obeyed with uncouth alacrity.&nbsp; When he had gone, the gleam
+of pitiless savagery went out of Ricardo&rsquo;s yellow eyes, and his
+physiognomy took on, for the first time that evening, the expression
+of a domestic cat which is being noticed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You can watch him right into the bushes, if you like.&nbsp;
+Too dark, eh?&nbsp; Why not go with him to the very spot, then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst made a gesture of vague protest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing to assure me that he will stay there.&nbsp;
+I have no doubt of his going, but it&rsquo;s an act without guarantee.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There you are!&rdquo;&nbsp; Ricardo shrugged his shoulders
+philosophically.&nbsp; &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t be helped.&nbsp; Short of
+shooting our Pedro, nobody can make absolutely sure of his staying in
+the same place longer than he has a mind to; but I tell you, he lives
+in holy terror of my temper.&nbsp; That&rsquo;s why I put on my sudden-death
+air when I talk to him.&nbsp; And yet I wouldn&rsquo;t shoot him - not
+I, unless in such a fit of rage as would make a man shoot his favourite
+dog.&nbsp; Look here, sir!&nbsp; This deal is on the square.&nbsp; I
+didn&rsquo;t tip him a wink to do anything else.&nbsp; He won&rsquo;t
+budge from the jetty.&nbsp; Are you coming along now, sir?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A short-silence ensued.&nbsp; Ricardo&rsquo;s jaws were working ominously
+under his skin.&nbsp; His eyes glided: voluptuously here and there,
+cruel and dreamy, Heyst checked a sudden movement, reflected for a while,
+then said:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must wait a little.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wait a little!&nbsp; Wait a little!&nbsp; What does he think
+a fellow is - a graven image?&rdquo; grumbled Ricardo half audibly.</p>
+<p>Heyst went into the bedroom, and shut the door after him with a bang.&nbsp;
+Coming from the light, he could not see a thing in there at first; yet
+he received the impression of the girl getting up from the floor.&nbsp;
+On the less opaque darkness of the shutter-hole, her head detached itself
+suddenly, very faint, a mere hint of a round, dark shape without a face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am going, Lena.&nbsp; I am going to confront these scoundrels.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He was surprised to feel two arms falling on his shoulders.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+thought that you - &rdquo; he began.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, yes!&rdquo; the girl whispered hastily.</p>
+<p>She neither clung to him, nor yet did she try to draw him to her.&nbsp;
+Her hands grasped his shoulders, and she seemed to him to be staring
+into his face in the dark.&nbsp; And now he could see something of her
+face, too - an oval without features - and faintly distinguish her person,
+in the blackness, a form without definite lines.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have a black dress here, haven&rsquo;t you, Lena?&rdquo;
+he asked, speaking rapidly, and so low that she could just hear him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes - an old thing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very good.&nbsp; Put it on at once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But why?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not for mourning!&rdquo;&nbsp; Them was something peremptory
+in the slightly ironic murmur.&nbsp; &ldquo;Can you find it and get
+into it in the dark?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She could.&nbsp; She would try.&nbsp; He waited, very still.&nbsp;
+He could imagine her movements over there at the far end of the room;
+but his eyes, accustomed now to the darkness, had lost her completely.&nbsp;
+When she spoke, her voice surprised him by its nearness.&nbsp; She had
+done what he had told her to do, and had approached him, invisible.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good!&nbsp; Where&rsquo;s that piece of purple veil I&rsquo;ve
+seen lying about?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>There was no answer, only a slight rustle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where is it?&rdquo; he repeated impatiently.</p>
+<p>Her unexpected breath was on his cheek.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In my hands.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Capital!&nbsp; Listen, Lena.&nbsp; As soon as I leave the
+bungalow with that horrible scoundrel, you slip out at the back - instantly,
+lose no time! - and run round into the forest.&nbsp; That will be your
+time, while we are walking away, and I am sure he won&rsquo;t give me
+the slip.&nbsp; Run into the forest behind the fringe of bushes between
+the big trees.&nbsp; You will know, surely, how to find a place in full
+view of the front door.&nbsp; I fear for you; but in this black dress,
+with most of your face muffled up in that dark veil, I defy anybody
+to find you there before daylight.&nbsp; Wait in the forest till the
+table is pushed into full view of the doorway, and you see three candles
+out of four blown out and one relighted - or, should the lights be put
+out here while you watch them, wait till three candles are lighted and
+then two put out.&nbsp; At either of these signals run back as hard
+as you can, for it will mean that I am waiting for you here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>While he was speaking, the girl had sought and seized one of his
+hands.&nbsp; She did not press it; she held it loosely, as it were timidly,
+caressingly.&nbsp; It was no grasp; it was a mere contact, as if only
+to make sure that he was there, that he was real and no mere darker
+shadow in the obscurity.&nbsp; The warmth of her hand gave Heyst a strange,
+intimate sensation of all her person.&nbsp; He had to fight down a new
+sort of emotion, which almost unmanned him.&nbsp; He went on, whispering
+sternly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But if you see no such signals, don&rsquo;t let anything -
+fear, curiosity, despair, or hope - entice you back to this house; and
+with the first sign of dawn steal away along the edge of the clearing
+till you strike the path.&nbsp; Wait no longer, because I shall probably
+be dead.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The murmur of the word &ldquo;Never!&rdquo; floated into his ear
+as if it formed itself in the air.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know the path,&rdquo; he continued.&nbsp; &ldquo;Make
+your way to the barricade.&nbsp; Go to Wang - yes, to Wang.&nbsp; Let
+nothing stop you!&rdquo;&nbsp; It seemed to him that the girl&rsquo;s
+hand trembled a little.&nbsp; &ldquo;The worst he can do to you is to
+shoot you, but he won&rsquo;t.&nbsp; I really think he won&rsquo;t,
+if I am not there.&nbsp; Stay with the villagers, with the wild people,
+and fear nothing.&nbsp; They will be more awed by you than you can be
+frightened of them.&nbsp; Davidson&rsquo;s bound to turn up before very
+long.&nbsp; Keep a look-out for a passing steamer.&nbsp; Think of some
+sort of signal to call him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She made no answer.&nbsp; The sense of the heavy, brooding silence
+in the outside world seemed to enter and fill the room - the oppressive
+infinity of it, without breath, without light.&nbsp; It was as if the
+heart of hearts had ceased to beat and the end of all things had come.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you understood?&nbsp; You are to run out of the house
+at once,&rdquo; Heyst whispered urgently.</p>
+<p>She lifted his hand to her lips and let it go.&nbsp; He was startled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lena!&rdquo; he cried out under his breath.</p>
+<p>She was gone from his side.&nbsp; He dared not trust himself - no,
+not even to the extent of a tender word.</p>
+<p>Turning to go out he heard a thud somewhere in the house.&nbsp; To
+open the door, he had first to lift the curtain; he did so with his
+face over his shoulder.&nbsp; The merest trickle of light, earning through
+the keyhole and one or two cracks, was enough for his eyes to see her
+plainly, all black, down on her knees, with her head and arms flung
+on the foot of the bed - all black in the desolation of a mourning sinner.&nbsp;
+What was this?&nbsp; A suspicion that there were everywhere more things
+than he could understand crossed Heyst&rsquo;s mind.&nbsp; Her arm,
+detached from the bed, motioned him away.&nbsp; He obeyed, and went
+out, full of disquiet.</p>
+<p>The curtain behind him had not ceased to tremble when she was up
+on her feet, close against it, listening for sounds, for words, in a
+stooping, tragic attitude of stealthy attention, one hand clutching
+at her breast as if to compress, to make less loud the beating of her
+heart.&nbsp; Heyst had caught Mr. Jones&rsquo;s secretary in the contemplation
+of his closed writing-desk.&nbsp; Ricardo might have been meditating
+how to break into it; but when he turned about suddenly, he showed so
+distorted a face that it made Heyst pause in wonder at the upturned
+whites of the eyes, which were blinking horribly, as if the man were
+inwardly convulsed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you were never coming,&rdquo; Ricardo mumbled.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t know you were pressed for time.&nbsp; Even
+if your going away depends on this conversation, as you say, I doubt
+if you are the men to put to sea on such a night as this,&rdquo; said
+Heyst, motioning Ricardo to precede him out of the house.</p>
+<p>With feline undulations of hip and shoulder, the secretary left the
+room at once.&nbsp; There was something cruel in the absolute dumbness
+of the night.&nbsp; The great cloud covering half the sky hung right
+against one, like an enormous curtain hiding menacing preparations of
+violence.&nbsp; As the feet of the two men touched the ground, a rumble
+came from behind it, preceded by a swift, mysterious gleam of light
+on the waters of the bay.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ha!&rdquo; said Ricardo.&nbsp; &ldquo;It begins.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It may be nothing in the end,&rdquo; observed Heyst, stepping
+along steadily.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; Let it come!&rdquo; Ricardo said viciously.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I am in the humour for it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>By the time the two men had reached the other bungalow, the far-off
+modulated rumble growled incessantly, while pale lightning in waves
+of cold fire flooded and ran off the island in rapid succession.&nbsp;
+Ricardo, unexpectedly, dashed ahead up the steps and put his head through
+the doorway.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here he is, governor!&nbsp; Keep him with you as long as you
+can - till you hear me whistle.&nbsp; I am on the track.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He flung these words into the room with inconceivable speed, and
+stood aside to let the visitor pass through the doorway; but he had
+to wait an appreciable moment, because Heyst, seeing his purpose, had
+scornfully slowed his pace.&nbsp; When Heyst entered the room it was
+with a smile, the Heyst smile, lurking under his martial moustache.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER ELEVEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Two candles were burning on the stand-up desk.&nbsp; Mr. Jones, tightly
+enfolded in an old but gorgeous blue silk dressing-gown, kept his elbows
+close against his sides and his hands deeply plunged into the extraordinarily
+deep pockets of the garment.&nbsp; The costume accentuated his emaciation.&nbsp;
+He resembled a painted pole leaning against the edge of the desk, with
+a dried head of dubious distinction stuck on the top of it.&nbsp; Ricardo
+lounged in the doorway.&nbsp; Indifferent in appearance to what was
+going on, he was biding his time.&nbsp; At a given moment, between two
+flickers of lightning, he melted out of his frame into the outer air.&nbsp;
+His disappearance was observed on the instant by Mr. Jones, who abandoned
+his nonchalant immobility against the desk, and made a few steps calculated
+to put him between Heyst and the doorway.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s awfully close,&rdquo; he remarked</p>
+<p>Heyst, in the middle of the room, had made up his mind to speak plainly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We haven&rsquo;t met to talk about the weather.&nbsp; You
+favoured me earlier in the day with a rather cryptic phrase about yourself.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I am he that is,&rsquo; you said.&nbsp; What does that mean?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Jones, without looking at Heyst, continued his absentminded movements
+till, attaining the desired position, he brought his shoulders with
+a thump against the wall near the door, and raised his head.&nbsp; In
+the emotion of the decisive moment his haggard face glistened with perspiration.&nbsp;
+Drops ran down his hollow cheeks and almost blinded the spectral eyes
+in their bony caverns.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It means that I am a person to be reckoned with.&nbsp; No
+- stop!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t put your hand into your pocket - don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His voice had a wild, unexpected shrillness.&nbsp; Heyst started,
+and there ensued a moment of suspended animation, during which the thunder&rsquo;s
+deep bass muttered distantly and the doorway to the right of Mr. Jones
+flickered with bluish light.&nbsp; At last Heyst shrugged his shoulders;
+he even looked at his hand.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t put it in his pocket,
+however.&nbsp; Mr. Jones, glued against the wall, watched him raise
+both his hands to the ends of his horizontal moustaches, and answered
+the note of interrogation in his steady eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A matter of prudence,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones in his natural
+hollow tones, and with a face of deathlike composure.&nbsp; &ldquo;A
+man of your free life has surely perceived that.&nbsp; You are a much
+talked-about man, Mr. Heyst - and though, as far as I understand, you
+are accustomed to employ the subtler weapons of intelligence, still
+I can&rsquo;t afford to take any risks of the - er - grosser methods.&nbsp;
+I am not unscrupulous enough to be a match for you in the use of intelligence;
+but I assure you, Mr. Heyst, that in the other way you are no match
+for me.&nbsp; I have you covered at this very moment.&nbsp; You have
+been covered ever since you entered this room.&nbsp; Yes - from my pocket.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>During this harangue Heyst looked deliberately over his shoulder,
+stepped back a pace, and sat down on the end of the camp bedstead.&nbsp;
+Leaning his elbow on one knee, he laid his cheek in the palm of his
+hand and seemed to meditate on what he should say next.&nbsp; Mr. Jones,
+planted against the wall, was obviously waiting for some sort of overture.&nbsp;
+As nothing came, he resolved to speak himself; but he hesitated.&nbsp;
+For, though he considered that the most difficult step had been taken,
+he said to himself that every stage of progress required great caution,
+lest the man in Ricardo&rsquo;s phraseology, should &ldquo;start to
+prance&rdquo; - which would be most inconvenient.&nbsp; He fell back
+on a previous statement:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And I am a person to be reckoned with.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The other man went on looking at the floor, as if he were alone in
+the room.&nbsp; There was a pause.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have heard of me, then?&rdquo; Heyst said at length, looking
+up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should think so!&nbsp; We have been staying at Schomberg&rsquo;s
+hotel.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Schom - &rdquo; Heyst choked on the word.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter, Mr. Heyst?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing.&nbsp; Nausea,&rdquo; Heyst said resignedly.&nbsp;
+He resumed his former attitude of meditative indifference.&nbsp; &ldquo;What
+is this reckoning you are talking about?&rdquo; he asked after a time,
+in the quietest possible tone.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s obvious that we belong to the same - social sphere,&rdquo;
+began Mr. Jones with languid irony.&nbsp; Inwardly he was as watchful
+as he could be.&nbsp; &ldquo;Something has driven you out - the originality
+of your ideas, perhaps.&nbsp; Or your tastes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones indulged in one of his ghastly smiles.&nbsp; In repose his
+features had a curious character of evil, exhausted austerity; but when
+he smiled, the whole mask took on an unpleasantly infantile expression.&nbsp;
+A recrudescence of the rolling thunder invaded the room loudly, and
+passed into silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You are not taking this very well,&rdquo; observed Mr. Jones.&nbsp;
+This was what he said, but as a matter of fact he thought that the business
+was shaping quite satisfactorily.&nbsp; The man, he said to himself,
+had no stomach for a fight.&nbsp; Aloud he continued: &ldquo;Come!&nbsp;
+You can&rsquo;t expect to have it always your own way.&nbsp; You are
+a man of the world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you?&rdquo; Heyst interrupted him unexpectedly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;How do you define yourself?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I, my dear sir?&nbsp; In one way I am - yes, I am the world
+itself, come to pay you a visit.&nbsp; In another sense I am an outcast
+- almost an outlaw.&nbsp; If you prefer a less materialistic view, I
+am a sort of fate - the retribution that waits its time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish to goodness you were the commonest sort of ruffian!&rdquo;
+said Heyst, raising his equable gaze to Mr. Jones.&nbsp; &ldquo;One
+would be able to talk to you straight then, and hope for some humanity.&nbsp;
+As it is - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I dislike violence and ferocity of every sort as much as you
+do,&rdquo; Mr. Jones declared, looking very languid as he leaned against
+the wall, but speaking fairly loud.&nbsp; &ldquo;You can ask my Martin
+if it is not so.&nbsp; This, Mr. Heyst, is a soft age.&nbsp; It is also
+an age without prejudices.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve heard that you are free
+from them yourself.&nbsp; You mustn&rsquo;t be shocked if I tell you
+plainly that we are after your money - or I am, if you prefer to make
+me alone responsible.&nbsp; Pedro, of course, knows no more of it than
+any other animal would.&nbsp; Ricardo is of the faithful-retainer class
+- absolutely identified with all my ideas, wishes, and even whims!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones pulled his left hand out of his pocket, got a handkerchief
+out of another, and began to wipe the perspiration from his forehead,
+neck, and chin.&nbsp; The excitement from which he suffered made his
+breathing visible.&nbsp; In his long dressing-gown he had the air of
+a convalescent invalid who had imprudently overtaxed his strength.&nbsp;
+Heyst, broad-shouldered, robust, watched the operation from the end
+of the camp bedstead, very calm, his hands on his knees.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And by the by,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;where is he now, that
+henchman of yours?&nbsp; Breaking into my desk?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That would be crude.&nbsp; Still, crudeness is one of life&rsquo;s
+conditions.&rdquo;&nbsp; There was the slightest flavour of banter in
+the tone of Ricardo&rsquo;s governor.&nbsp; &ldquo;Conceivable, but
+unlikely.&nbsp; Martin is a little crude; but you are not, Mr. Heyst.&nbsp;
+To tell you the truth, I don&rsquo;t know precisely where he is.&nbsp;
+He has been a little mysterious of late; but he has my confidence.&nbsp;
+No, don&rsquo;t get up, Mr. Heyst!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The viciousness of his spectral face was indescribable.&nbsp; Heyst,
+who had moved a little, was surprised by the disclosure.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was not my intention,&rdquo; he said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pray remain seated,&rdquo; Mr. Jones insisted in a languid
+voice, but with a very determined glitter in his black eye-caverns.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you were more observant,&rdquo; said Heyst with dispassionate
+contempt, &ldquo;you would have known before I had been five minutes
+in the room that I had no weapon of any sort on me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Possibly; but pray keep your hands still.&nbsp; They are very
+well where they are.&nbsp; This is too big an affair for me to take
+any risks.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Big?&nbsp; Too big?&rdquo; Heyst repeated with genuine surprise.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Good Heavens!&nbsp; Whatever you are looking for, there&rsquo;s
+very little of it here - very little of anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You would naturally say so, but that&rsquo;s not what we have
+heard,&rdquo; retorted Mr. Jones quickly, with a grin so ghastly that
+it was impossible to think it voluntary.</p>
+<p>Heyst&rsquo;s face had grown very gloomy.&nbsp; He knitted his brows.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What have you heard?&rdquo; he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A lot, Mr. Heyst - a lot,&rdquo; affirmed Mr. Jones.&nbsp;
+He was vying to recover his manner of languid superiority.&nbsp; &ldquo;We
+have heard, for instance, of a certain Mr. Morrison, once your partner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst could not repress a slight movement.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Aha!&rdquo; said Mr. Jones, with a sort of ghostly glee on
+his face.</p>
+<p>The muffled thunder resembled the echo of a distant cannonade below
+the horizon, and the two men seemed to be listening to it in sullen
+silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This diabolical calumny will end in actually and literally
+taking my life from me,&rdquo; thought Heyst.</p>
+<p>Then, suddenly, he laughed.&nbsp; Portentously spectral, Mr. Jones
+frowned at the sound.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Laugh as much as you please,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I,
+who have been hounded out from society by a lot of highly moral souls,
+can&rsquo;t see anything funny in that story.&nbsp; But here we are,
+and you will now have to pay for your fun, Mr. Heyst.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have heard a lot of ugly lies,&rdquo; observed Heyst.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Take my word for it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You would say so, of course - very natural.&nbsp; As a matter
+of fact I haven&rsquo;t heard very much.&nbsp; Strictly speaking, it
+was Martin.&nbsp; He collects information, and so on.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t
+suppose I would talk to that Schomberg animal more than I could help?&nbsp;
+It was Martin whom he took into his confidence.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The stupidity of that creature is so great that it becomes
+formidable,&rdquo; Heyst said, as if speaking to himself.</p>
+<p>Involuntarily, his mind turned to the girl, wandering in the forest,
+alone and terrified.&nbsp; Would he ever see her again?&nbsp; At that
+thought he nearly lost his self-possession.&nbsp; But the idea that
+if she followed his instructions those men were not likely to find her
+steadied him a little.&nbsp; They did not know that the island had any
+inhabitants; and he himself once disposed of, they would be too anxious
+to get away to waste time hunting for a vanished girl.</p>
+<p>All this passed through Heyst&rsquo;s mind in a flash, as men think
+in moments of danger.&nbsp; He looked speculatively at Mr. Jones, who,
+of course, had never for a moment taken his eyes from his intended victim.&nbsp;
+And, the conviction came to Heyst that this outlaw from the higher spheres
+was an absolutely hard and pitiless scoundrel.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones&rsquo;s voice made him start.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It would be useless, for instance, to tell me that your Chinaman
+has run off with your money.&nbsp; A man living alone with a Chinaman
+on an island takes care to conceal property of that kind so well that
+the devil himself - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; Heyst muttered.</p>
+<p>Again, with his left hand, Mr. Jones mopped his frontal bone, his
+stalk-like neck, his razor jaws, his fleshless chin.&nbsp; Again his
+voice faltered and his aspect became still more gruesomely malevolent
+as of a wicked and pitiless corpse.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see what you mean,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;but you mustn&rsquo;t
+put too much trust in your ingenuity.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t strike me
+as a very ingenious person, Mr. Heyst.&nbsp; Neither am I.&nbsp; My
+talents lie another way.&nbsp; But Martin - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who is now engaged in rifling my desk,&rdquo; interjected
+Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think so.&nbsp; What I was going to say is that
+Martin is much cleverer than a Chinaman.&nbsp; Do you believe in racial
+superiority, Mr. Heyst?&nbsp; I do, firmly.&nbsp; Martin is great at
+ferreting out such secrets as yours, for instance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Secrets like mine!&rdquo; repeated Heyst bitterly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well
+I wish him joy of all he can ferret out!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s very kind of you,&rdquo; remarked Mr. Jones.&nbsp;
+He was beginning to be anxious for Martin&rsquo;s return.&nbsp; Of iron
+self-possession at the gaming-table, fearless in a sudden affray, he
+found that this rather special kind of work was telling on his nerves.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Keep still as you are!&rdquo; he cried sharply.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve told you I am not armed,&rdquo; said Heyst, folding
+his arms on his breast.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am really inclined to believe that you are not,&rdquo; admitted
+Mr. Jones seriously.&nbsp; &ldquo;Strange!&rdquo; he mused aloud, the
+caverns of his eyes turned upon Heyst.&nbsp; Then briskly: &ldquo;But
+my object is to keep you in this room.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t provoke me,
+by some unguarded movement, to smash your knee or do something definite
+of that sort.&rdquo;&nbsp; He passed his tongue over his lips, which
+were dry and black, while his forehead glistened with moisture.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know if it wouldn&rsquo;t be better to do it at
+once!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He who deliberates is lost,&rdquo; said Heyst with grave mockery.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones disregarded the remark.&nbsp; He had the air of communing
+with himself.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Physically I am no match for you,&rdquo; he said slowly, his
+black gaze fixed upon the man sitting on the end of the bed.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+could spring - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Are you trying to frighten yourself?&rdquo; asked Heyst abruptly.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t seem to have quite enough pluck for your business.&nbsp;
+Why don&rsquo;t you do it at once?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones, taking violent offence, snorted like a savage skeleton.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Strange as it may seem to you, it is because of my origin,
+my breeding, my traditions, my early associations, and such-like trifles.&nbsp;
+Not everybody can divest himself of the prejudices of a gentleman as
+easily as you have done, Mr, Heyst.&nbsp; But don&rsquo;t worry about
+my pluck.&nbsp; If you were to make a clean spring at me, you would
+receive in mid air, so to speak, something that would make you perfectly
+harmless by the time you landed.&nbsp; No, don&rsquo;t misapprehend
+us, Mr. Heyst.&nbsp; We are - er - adequate bandits; and we are after
+the fruit of your labours as a - er - successful swindler.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+the way of the world - gorge and disgorge!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He leaned wearily the back of his head against the wall.&nbsp; His
+vitality seemed exhausted.&nbsp; Even his sunken eyelids drooped within
+the bony sockets.&nbsp; Only his thin, waspish, beautifully pencilled
+eyebrows, drawn together a little, suggested the will and the power
+to sting - something vicious, unconquerable, and deadly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fruits!&nbsp; Swindler!&rdquo; repeated Heyst, without heat,
+almost without contempt.&nbsp; &ldquo;You are giving yourself no end
+of trouble, you and your faithful henchman, to crack an empty nut.&nbsp;
+There are no fruits here, as you imagine.&nbsp; There are a few sovereigns,
+which you may have if you like; and since you have called yourself a
+bandit - &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yaas!&rdquo; drawled Mr. Jones.&nbsp; &ldquo;That, rather
+than a swindler.&nbsp; Open warfare at least!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very good!&nbsp; Only let me tell you that there were never
+in the world two more deluded bandits - never!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst uttered these words with such energy that Mr. Jones, stiffening
+up, seemed to become thinner and taller in his metallic blue dressing-gown
+against the whitewashed wall.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Fooled by a silly, rascally innkeeper!&rdquo; Heyst went on.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Talked over like a pair of children with a promise of sweets!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t talk with that disgusting animal,&rdquo; muttered
+Mr. Jones sullenly; &ldquo;but he convinced Martin, who is no fool.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should think he wanted very much to be convinced,&rdquo;
+said Heyst, with the courteous intonation so well known in the Islands.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t want to disturb your touching trust in your - your
+follower, but he must be the most credulous brigand in existence.&nbsp;
+What do you imagine?&nbsp; If the story of my riches were ever so true,
+do you think Schomberg would have imparted it to you from sheer altruism?&nbsp;
+Is that the way of the world, Mr. Jones?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>For a moment the lower jaw of Ricardo&rsquo;s gentleman dropped;
+but it came up with a snap of scorn, and he said with spectral intensity:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The beast is cowardly!&nbsp; He was frightened, and wanted
+to get rid of us, if you want to know, Mr. Heyst.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+know that the material inducement was so very great, but I was bored,
+and we decided to accept the bribe.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t regret it.&nbsp;
+All my life I have been seeking new impressions, and you have turned
+out to be something quite out of the common.&nbsp; Martin, of course,
+looks to the material results.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s simple - and faithful
+- and wonderfully acute.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, yes!&nbsp; He&rsquo;s on the track - &rdquo; and now Heyst&rsquo;s
+speech had the character of politely grim raillery - &ldquo;but not
+sufficiently on the track, as yet, to make it quite convenient to shoot
+me without more ado.&nbsp; Didn&rsquo;t Schomberg tell you precisely
+where I conceal the fruit of my rapines?&nbsp; Pah!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+you know he would have told you anything, true or false, from a very
+clear motive?&nbsp; Revenge!&nbsp; Mad hate - the unclean idiot!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones did not seem very much moved.&nbsp; On his right hand the
+doorway incessantly flickered with distant lightning, and the continuous
+rumble of thunder went on irritatingly, like the growl of an inarticulate
+giant muttering fatuously.</p>
+<p>Heyst overcame his immense repugnance to allude to her whose image,
+cowering in the forest was constantly before his eyes, with all the
+pathos and force of its appeal, august, pitiful, and almost holy to
+him.&nbsp; It was in a hurried, embarrassed manner that he went on:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If it had not been for that girl whom he persecuted with his
+insane and odious passion, and who threw herself on my protection, he
+would never have - but you know well enough!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know!&rdquo; burst out Mr. Jones with amazing
+heat.&nbsp; &ldquo;That hotel-keeper tried to talk to me once of some
+girl he had lost, but I told him I didn&rsquo;t want to hear any of
+his beastly women stories.&nbsp; It had something to do with you, had
+it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst looked on serenely at this outburst, then lost his patience
+a little.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What sort of comedy is this?&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t mean to
+say that you didn&rsquo;t know that I had - that there was a girl living
+with me here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>One could see that the eyes of Mr. Jones had become fixed in the
+depths of their black holes by the gleam of white becoming steady there.&nbsp;
+The whole man seemed frozen still.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here!&nbsp; Here!&rdquo; he screamed out twice.&nbsp; There
+was no mistaking his astonishment, his shocked incredulity - something
+like frightened disgust.</p>
+<p>Heyst was disgusted also, but in another way.&nbsp; He too was incredulous.&nbsp;
+He regretted having mentioned the girl; but the thing was done, his
+repugnance had been overcome in the heat of his argument against the
+absurd bandit.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it possible that you didn&rsquo;t know of that significant
+fact?&rdquo; he inquired.&nbsp; &ldquo;Of the only effective truth in
+the welter of silly lies that deceived you so easily?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I didn&rsquo;t!&rdquo; Mr. Jones shouted.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+Martin did!&rdquo; he added in a faint whisper, which Heyst&rsquo;s
+ears just caught and no more.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I kept her out of sight as long as I could,&rdquo; said Heyst.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Perhaps, with your bringing up traditions, and so on; you will
+understand my reason for it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He knew.&nbsp; He knew before!&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Jones mourned
+in a hollow voice.&nbsp; &ldquo;He knew of her from the first!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Backed hard against the wall he no longer watched Heyst.&nbsp; He
+had the air of a man who had seen an abyss yawning under his feet.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If I want to kill him, this is my time,&rdquo; thought Heyst;
+but he did not move.</p>
+<p>Next moment Mr. Jones jerked his head up, glaring with sardonic fury.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have a good mind to shoot you, you woman-ridden hermit,
+you man in the moon, that can&rsquo;t exist without - no, it won&rsquo;t
+be you that I&rsquo;ll shoot.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the other woman-lover
+- the prevaricating, sly, low-class, amorous cuss!&nbsp; And he shaved
+- shaved under my very nose.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll shoot him!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;s gone mad,&rdquo; thought Heyst, startled by the
+spectre&rsquo;s sudden fury.</p>
+<p>He felt himself more in danger, nearer death, than ever since he
+had entered that room.&nbsp; An insane bandit is a deadly combination.&nbsp;
+He did not, could not know that Mr. Jones was quick-minded enough to
+see already the end of his reign over his excellent secretary&rsquo;s
+thoughts and feelings; the coming failure of Ricardo&rsquo;s fidelity.&nbsp;
+A woman had intervened!&nbsp; A woman, a girl, who apparently possessed
+the power to awaken men&rsquo;s disgusting folly.&nbsp; Her power had
+been proved in two instances already - the beastly innkeeper, and that
+man with moustaches, upon whom Mr. Jones, his deadly right hand twitching
+in his pocket, glared more in repulsion than in anger.&nbsp; The very
+object of the expedition was lost from view in his sudden and overwhelming
+sense of utter insecurity.&nbsp; And this made Mr. Jones feel very savage;
+but not against the man with the moustaches.&nbsp; Thus, while Heyst
+was really feeling that his life was not worth two minutes, purchase,
+he heard himself addressed with no affection of languid impertinence
+but with a burst of feverish determination.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here!&nbsp; Let&rsquo;s call a truce!&rdquo; said Mr. Jones.</p>
+<p>Heyst&rsquo;s heart was too sick to allow him to smile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have I been making war on you?&rdquo; he asked wearily.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;How do you expect me to attach any meaning to your words?&rdquo;
+he went on.&nbsp; &ldquo;You seem to be a morbid, senseless sort of
+bandit.&nbsp; We don&rsquo;t speak the same language.&nbsp; If I were
+to tell you why I am here, talking to you, you wouldn&rsquo;t believe
+me, because you would not understand me.&nbsp; It certainly isn&rsquo;t
+the love of life, from which I have divorced myself long ago - not sufficiently,
+perhaps; but if you are thinking of yours, then I repeat to you that
+it has never been in danger from me.&nbsp; I am unarmed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones was biting his lower lip, in a deep meditation.&nbsp; It
+was only towards the last that he looked at Heyst.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Unarmed, eh?&rdquo;&nbsp; Then he burst out violently: &ldquo;I
+tell you, a gentleman is no match for the common herd.&nbsp; And yet
+one must make use of the brutes.&nbsp; Unarmed, eh?&nbsp; And I suppose
+that creature is of the commonest sort.&nbsp; You could hardly have
+got her out of a drawing-room.&nbsp; Though they&rsquo;re all alike,
+for that matter.&nbsp; Unarmed!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s a pity.&nbsp; I am
+in much greater danger than you are or were - or I am much mistaken.&nbsp;
+But I am not - I know my man!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He lost his air of mental vacancy and broke out into shrill exclamations.&nbsp;
+To Heyst they seemed madder than anything that had gone before.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On the track!&nbsp; On the scent!&rdquo; he cried, forgetting
+himself to the point of executing a dance of rage in the middle of the
+floor.</p>
+<p>Heyst looked on, fascinated by this skeleton in a gay dressing-gown,
+jerkily agitated like a grotesque toy on the end of an invisible string.&nbsp;
+It became quiet suddenly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I might have smelt a rat!&nbsp; I always knew that this would
+be the danger.&rdquo;&nbsp; He changed suddenly to a confidential tone,
+fixing his sepulchral stare on Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;And yet here I am,
+taken in by the fellow, like the veriest fool.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been
+always on the watch for some beastly influence, but here I am, fairly
+caught.&nbsp; He shaved himself right in front of me and I never guessed!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The shrill laugh, following on the low tone of secrecy, sounded so
+convincingly insane that Heyst got up as if moved by a spring.&nbsp;
+Mr. Jones stepped back two paces, but displayed no uneasiness.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s as clear as daylight!&rdquo; he uttered mournfully,
+and fell silent.</p>
+<p>Behind him the doorway flickered lividly, and the sound as of a naval
+action somewhere away on the horizon filled the breathless pause.&nbsp;
+Mr, Jones inclined his head on his shoulder.&nbsp; His mood had completely
+changed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you say, unarmed man?&nbsp; Shall we go and see what
+is detaining my trusted Martin so long?&nbsp; He asked me to keep you
+engaged in friendly conversation till he made a further examination
+of that track.&nbsp; Ha, ha, ha!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is no doubt ransacking my house,&rdquo; said Heyst.</p>
+<p>He was is bewildered.&nbsp; It seemed to him that all this was an
+incomprehensible dream, or perhaps an elaborate other-world joke, contrived
+by that spectre in a gorgeous dressing gown.</p>
+<p>Mr Jones looked at him with a horrible, cadaverous smile of inscrutable
+mockery, and pointed to the door.&nbsp; Heyst passed through it first.&nbsp;
+His feelings had become so blunted that he did not care how soon he
+was shot in the back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How oppressive the air is!&rdquo; the voice of Mr. Jones said
+at his elbow.&nbsp; &ldquo;This stupid storm gets on my nerves.&nbsp;
+I would welcome some rain, though it would be unpleasant to get wet.&nbsp;
+On the other hand, this exasperating thunder has the advantage of covering
+the sound of our approach.&nbsp; The lightning&rsquo;s not so convenient.&nbsp;
+Ah, your house is fully illuminated!&nbsp; My clever Martin is punishing
+your stock of candles.&nbsp; He belongs to the unceremonious classes,
+which are also unlovely, untrustworthy, and so on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I left the candles burning,&rdquo; said Heyst, &ldquo;to save
+him trouble.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You really believed he would go to your house?&rdquo; asked
+Mr. Jones with genuine interest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I had that notion, strongly.&nbsp; I do believe he is there
+now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you don&rsquo;t mind?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; Mr. Jones stopped to wonder.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You are an extraordinary man,&rdquo; he said suspiciously, and
+moved on, touching elbows with Heyst.</p>
+<p>In the latter&rsquo;s breast dwelt a deep silence, the complete silence
+of unused faculties.&nbsp; At this moment, by simply shouldering Mr.
+Jones, he could have thrown him down and put himself, by a couple of
+leaps, beyond the certain aim of the revolver; but he did not even think
+of that.&nbsp; His very will seemed dead of weariness.&nbsp; He moved
+automatically, his head low, like a prisoner captured by the evil power
+of a masquerading skeleton out of a grave.&nbsp; Mr. Jones took charge
+of the direction.&nbsp; They fetched a wide sweep.&nbsp; The echoes
+of distant thunder seemed to dog their footsteps.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By the by,&rdquo; said Mr. Jones, as if unable to restrain
+his curiosity, &ldquo;aren&rsquo;t you anxious about that - ouch! -
+that fascinating creature to whom you owe whatever pleasure you can
+find in our visit?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have placed her in safety,&rdquo; said Heyst.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+- I took good care of that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr Jones laid a hand on his arm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have?&nbsp; Look! is that what you mean?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst raised his head.&nbsp; In the flicker of lightning the desolation
+of the cleared ground on his left leaped out and sank into the night,
+together with the elusive forms of things distant, pale, unearthly.&nbsp;
+But in the brilliant square of the door he saw the girl - the woman
+he had longed to see once more as if enthroned, with her hands on the
+arms of the chair.&nbsp; She was in black; her face was white, her head
+dreamily inclined on her breast.&nbsp; He saw her only as low as her
+knees.&nbsp; He saw her - there, in the room, alive with a sombre reality.&nbsp;
+It was no mocking vision.&nbsp; She was not in the forest - but there!&nbsp;
+She sat there in the chair, seemingly without strength, yet without
+fear, tenderly stooping.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can you understand their power?&rdquo; whispered the hot breath
+of Mr. Jones into his ear.&nbsp; &ldquo;Can there be a more disgusting
+spectacle?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s enough to make the earth detestable.&nbsp;
+She seems to have found her affinity.&nbsp; Move on closer.&nbsp; If
+I have to shoot you in the end, then perhaps you will die cured.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst obeyed the pushing pressure of a revolver barrel between his
+shoulders.&nbsp; He felt it distinctly, but he did not feel the ground
+under his feet.&nbsp; They found the steps, without his being aware
+that he was ascending them - slowly, one by one.&nbsp; Doubt entered
+into him - a doubt of a new kind, formless, hideous.&nbsp; It seemed
+to spread itself all over him, enter his limbs, and lodge in his entrails.&nbsp;
+He stopped suddenly, with a thought that he who experienced such a feeling
+had no business to live - or perhaps was no longer living.</p>
+<p>Everything - the bungalow, the forest, the open ground - trembled
+incessantly, the earth, the sky itself, shivered all the time, and the
+only thing immovable in the shuddering universe was the interior of
+the lighted room and the woman in black sitting in the light of the
+eight candle-flames.&nbsp; They flung around her an intolerable brilliance
+which hurt his eyes, seemed to sear his very brain with the radiation
+of infernal heat.&nbsp; It was some time before his scorched eyes made
+out Ricardo seated on the floor at some little distance, his back to
+the doorway, but only partly so; one side of his upturned face showing
+the absorbed, all forgetful rapture of his contemplation.</p>
+<p>The grip of Mr. Jones&rsquo;s hard claw drew Heyst back a little.&nbsp;
+In the roll of thunder, swelling and subsiding, he whispered in his
+ear a sarcastic: &ldquo;Of course!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A great shame descended upon Heyst - the shame of guilt, absurd and
+maddening.&nbsp; Mr. Jones drew him still farther back into the darkness
+of the veranda.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;This is serious,&rdquo; he went on, distilling his ghostly
+venom into Heyst&rsquo;s very ear.&nbsp; &ldquo;I had to shut my eyes
+many times to his little flings; but this is serious.&nbsp; He has found
+his soul-mate.&nbsp; Mud souls, obscene and cunning!&nbsp; Mud bodies,
+too - the mud of the gutter!&nbsp; I tell you, we are no match for the
+vile populace.&nbsp; I, even I, have been nearly caught.&nbsp; He asked
+me to detain you till he gave me the signal.&nbsp; It won&rsquo;t be
+you that I&rsquo;ll have to shoot, but him.&nbsp; I wouldn&rsquo;t trust
+him near me for five minutes after this!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook Heyst&rsquo;s arm a little.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you had not happened to mention the creature, we should
+both have been dead before morning.&nbsp; He would have stabbed you
+as you came down the steps after leaving me and then he would have walked
+up to me and planted the same knife between my ribs.&nbsp; He has no
+prejudices.&nbsp; The viler the origin, the greater the freedom of these
+simple souls!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He drew a cautious, hissing breath and added in an agitated murmur:
+&ldquo;I can see right into his mind, I have been nearly caught napping
+by his cunning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stretched his neck to peer into the room from the side.&nbsp;
+Heyst, too, made a step forward, under the slight impulse of that slender
+hand clasping his hand with a thin, bony grasp.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Behold!&rdquo; the skeleton of the crazy bandit jabbered thinly
+into his ear in spectral fellowship.&nbsp; &ldquo;Behold the simple,
+Acis kissing the sandals of the nymph, on the way to her lips, all forgetful,
+while the menacing life of Polyphemus already sounds close at hand -
+if he could only hear it!&nbsp; Stoop a little.&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER TWELVE</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>On returning to the Heyst bungalow, rapid as if on wings, Ricardo
+found Lena waiting for him.&nbsp; She was dressed in black; and at once
+his uplifting exultation was replaced by an awed and quivering patience
+before her white face, before the immobility of her reposeful pose,
+the more amazing to him who had encountered the strength of her limbs
+and the indomitable spirit in her body.&nbsp; She had come out after
+Heyst&rsquo;s departure, and had sat down under the portrait to wait
+for the return of the man of violence and death.&nbsp; While lifting
+the curtain, she felt the anguish of her disobedience to her lover,
+which was soothed by a feeling she had known before - a gentle flood
+of penetrating sweetness.&nbsp; She was not automatically obeying a
+momentary suggestion, she was under influences more deliberate, more
+vague, and of greater potency.&nbsp; She had been prompted, not by her
+will, but by a force that was outside of her and more worthy.&nbsp;
+She reckoned upon nothing definite; she had calculated nothing.&nbsp;
+She saw only her purpose of capturing death - savage, sudden, irresponsible
+death, prowling round the man who possessed her, death embodied in the
+knife ready to strike into his heart.&nbsp; No doubt it had been a sin
+to throw herself into his arms.&nbsp; With that inspiration that descends
+at times from above for the good or evil of our common mediocrity, she
+had a sense of having been for him only a violent and sincere choice
+of curiosity and pity - a thing that passes.&nbsp; She did not know
+him.&nbsp; If he were to go away from her and disappear, she would utter
+no reproach, she would not resent it; for she would hold in herself
+the impress of something most rare and precious - his embraces made
+her own by her courage in saving his life.</p>
+<p>All she thought of - the essence of her tremors, her flushes of heat,
+and her shudders of cold - was the question how to get hold of that
+knife, the mark and sign of stalking death.&nbsp; A tremor of impatience
+to clutch the frightful thing, glimpsed once and unforgettable, agitated
+her hands.</p>
+<p>The instinctive flinging forward of these hands stopped Ricardo dead
+short between the door and her chair, with the ready obedience of a
+conquered man who can bide his time.&nbsp; Her success disconcerted
+her.&nbsp; She listened to the man&rsquo;s impassioned transports of
+terrible eulogy and even more awful declarations of love.&nbsp; She
+was even able to meet his eyes, oblique, apt to glide away, throwing
+feral gleams of desire.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&rdquo; he was saying, after a fiery outpouring of words
+in which the most ferocious phrases of love were mingled with wooing
+accents of entreaty.&nbsp; &ldquo;I will have no more of it!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+you mistrust me.&nbsp; I am sober in my talk.&nbsp; Feel how quietly
+my heart beats.&nbsp; Ten times today when you, you, you, swam in my
+eye, I thought it would burst one of my ribs or leap out of my throat.&nbsp;
+It has knocked itself dead and tired, waiting for this evening, for
+this very minute.&nbsp; And now it can do no more.&nbsp; Feel how quiet
+it is!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He made a step forward, but she raised her clear voice commandingly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No nearer!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stopped with a smile of imbecile worship on his lips, and with
+the delighted obedience of a man who could at any moment seize her in
+his hands and dash her to the ground.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah!&nbsp; If I had taken you by the throat this morning and
+had my way with you, I should never have known what you am.&nbsp; And
+now I do.&nbsp; You are a wonder!&nbsp; And so am I, in my way.&nbsp;
+I have nerve, and I have brains, too.&nbsp; We should have been lost
+many times but for me.&nbsp; I plan - I plot for my gentleman.&nbsp;
+Gentleman - pah!&nbsp; I am sick of him.&nbsp; And you are sick of yours,
+eh?&nbsp; You, you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He shook all over; he cooed at her a string of endearing names, obscene
+and tender, and then asked abruptly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you speak to me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s my part to listen,&rdquo; she said, giving him
+an inscrutable smile, with a flush on her cheek and her lips cold as
+ice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But you will answer me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, her eyes dilated as if with sudden interest.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s that plunder?&nbsp; Do you know?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; Not yet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But there is plunder stowed somewhere that&rsquo;s worth having?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I think so.&nbsp; But who knows?&rdquo; she added after
+a pause.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And who cares?&rdquo; he retorted recklessly.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+had enough of this crawling on my belly.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s you who are
+my treasure.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s I who found you out where a gentleman
+had buried you to rot for his accursed pleasure!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked behind him and all around for a seat, then turned to her
+his troubled eyes and dim smile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am dog-tired,&rdquo; he said, and sat down on the floor.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I went tired this morning, since I came in here and started talking
+to you - as tired as if I had been pouring my life-blood here on these
+planks for you to dabble your white feet in.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Unmoved, she nodded at him thoughtfully.&nbsp; Woman-like, all her
+faculties remained concentrated on her heart&rsquo;s desire - on the
+knife - while the man went on babbling insanely at her feet, ingratiating
+and savage, almost crazy with elation.&nbsp; But he, too, was holding
+on to his purpose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For you!&nbsp; For you I will throw away money, lives - all
+the lives but mine!&nbsp; What you want is a man, a master that will
+let you put the heel of your shoe on his neck; not that skulker, who
+will get tired of you in a year - and you of him.&nbsp; And then what?&nbsp;
+You are not the one to sit still; neither am I.&nbsp; I live for myself,
+and you shall live for yourself, too - not for a Swedish baron.&nbsp;
+They make a convenience of people like you and me.&nbsp; A gentleman
+is better than an employer, but an equal partnership against all the
+&rsquo;yporcrits is the thing for you and me.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll go on
+wandering the world over, you and I both free and both true.&nbsp; You
+are no cage bird.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ll rove together, for we are of them
+that have no homes.&nbsp; We are born rovers!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She listened to him with the utmost attention, as if any unexpected
+word might give her some sort of opening to get that dagger, that awful
+knife - to disarm murder itself, pleading for her love at her feet.&nbsp;
+Again she nodded at him thoughtfully, rousing a gleam in his yellow
+eyes, yearning devotedly upon her face.&nbsp; When he hitched himself
+a little closer, her soul had no movement of recoil.&nbsp; This had
+to be.&nbsp; Anything had to be which would bring the knife within her
+reach.&nbsp; He talked more confidentially now.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We have met, and their time has come,&rdquo; he began, looking
+up into her eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;The partnership between me and my gentleman
+has to be ripped up.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s no room for him where we two
+are.&nbsp; Why, he would shoot me like a dog!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you
+worry.&nbsp; This will settle it not later than tonight!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He tapped his folded leg below the knee, and was surprised, flattered,
+by the lighting up of her face, which stooped towards him eagerly and
+remained expectant, the lips girlishly parted, red in the pale face,
+and quivering in the quickened drawing of her breath.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You marvel, you miracle, you man&rsquo;s luck and joy - one
+in a million!&nbsp; No, the only one.&nbsp; You have found your man
+in me,&rdquo; he whispered tremulously.&nbsp; &ldquo;Listen!&nbsp; They
+are having their last talk together; for I&rsquo;ll do for your gentleman,
+too, by midnight.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Without the slightest tremor she murmured, as soon as the tightening
+of her breast had eased off and the words would come:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t be in too much of a hurry - with him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The pause, the tone, had all the value of meditated advice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good, thrifty girl!&rdquo; he laughed low, with a strange
+feline gaiety, expressed by the undulating movement of his shoulders
+and the sparkling snap of his oblique eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;You am still
+thinking about the chance of that swag.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll make a good
+partner, that you will!&nbsp; And, I say, what a decoy you will make!&nbsp;
+Jee-miny!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was carried away for a moment, but his face darkened swiftly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No!&nbsp; No reprieve.&nbsp; What do you think a fellow is
+- a scarecrow?&nbsp; All hat and clothes and no feeling, no inside,
+no brain to make fancies for himself?&nbsp; No!&rdquo; he went on violently.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Never in his life will he go again into that room of yours -
+never any more!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A silence fell.&nbsp; He was gloomy with the torment of his jealousy,
+and did not even look at her.&nbsp; She sat up and slowly, gradually,
+bent lower and lower over him, as if ready to fall into his arms.&nbsp;
+He looked up at last, and checked this droop unwittingly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Say!&nbsp; You, who are up to fighting a man with your bare
+hands, could you - eh? - could you manage to stick one with a thing
+like that knife of mine?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She opened her eyes very wide and gave him a wild smile.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How can I tell?&rdquo; she whispered enchantingly.&nbsp; &ldquo;Will
+you let me have a look at it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Without taking his eyes from her face, he pulled the knife out of
+its sheath - a short, broad, cruel double-edged blade with a bone handle
+- and only then looked down at it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A good friend,&rdquo; he said simply.&nbsp; &ldquo;Take it
+in your hand and feel the balance,&rdquo; he suggested.</p>
+<p>At the moment when she bent forward to receive it from him, there
+was a flash of fire in her mysterious eyes - a red gleam in the white
+mist which wrapped the promptings and longings of her soul.&nbsp; She
+had done it!&nbsp; The very sting of death was in her hands, the venom
+of the viper in her paradise, extracted, safe in her possession - and
+the viper&rsquo;s head all but lying under her heel.&nbsp; Ricardo,
+stretched on the mats of the floor, crept closer and closer to the chair
+in which she sat.</p>
+<p>All her thoughts were busy planning how to keep possession of that
+weapon which had seemed to have drawn into itself every danger and menace
+on the death-ridden earth.&nbsp; She said with a low laugh, the exultation
+in which he failed to recognize:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t think that you would ever trust me with that
+thing!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For fear I should suddenly strike you with it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What for?&nbsp; For this morning&rsquo;s work?&nbsp; Oh, no!&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s no spite in you for that.&nbsp; You forgave me.&nbsp;
+You saved me.&nbsp; You got the better of me, too.&nbsp; And anyhow,
+what good would it be?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, no good,&rdquo; she admitted.</p>
+<p>In her heart she felt that she would not know how to do it; that
+if it came to a struggle, she would have to drop the dagger and fight
+with her hands.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen.&nbsp; When we are going about the world together,
+you shall always call me husband.&nbsp; Do you hear?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said bracing herself for the contest, in whatever
+shape it was coming.</p>
+<p>The knife was lying in her lap.&nbsp; She let it slip into the fold
+of her dress, and laid her forearms with clasped fingers over her knees,
+which she pressed desperately together.&nbsp; The dreaded thing was
+out of sight at last.&nbsp; She felt a dampness break out all over her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am not going to hide you, like that good-for-nothing, finicky,
+sneery gentleman.&nbsp; You shall be my pride and my chum.&nbsp; Isn&rsquo;t
+that better than rotting on an island for the pleasure of a gentleman,
+till he gives you the chuck?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be anything you like,&rdquo; she said.</p>
+<p>In his intoxication he crept closer with every word she uttered,
+with every movement she made.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give your foot,&rdquo; he begged in a timid murmur, and in
+the full consciousness of his power.</p>
+<p>Anything!&nbsp; Anything to keep murder quiet and disarmed till strength
+had returned to her limbs and she could make up her mind what to do.&nbsp;
+Her fortitude had been shaken by the very facility of success that had
+come to her.&nbsp; She advanced her foot forward a little from under
+the hem of her skirt; and he threw himself on it greedily.&nbsp; She
+was not even aware of him.&nbsp; She had thought of the forest, to which
+she had been told to run.&nbsp; Yes, the forest - that was the place
+for her to carry off the terrible spoil, the sting of vanquished death.&nbsp;
+Ricardo, clasping her ankle, pressed his lips time after time to the
+instep, muttering gasping words that were like sobs, making little noises
+that resembled the sounds of grief and distress.&nbsp; Unheard by them
+both, the thunder growled distantly with angry modulations of it&rsquo;s
+tremendous voice, while the world outside shuddered incessantly around
+the dead stillness of the room where the framed profile of Heyst&rsquo;s
+father looked severely into space.</p>
+<p>Suddenly Ricardo felt himself spurned by the foot he had been cherishing
+- spurned with a push of such violence into the very hollow of his throat
+that it swung him back instantly into an upright position on his knees.&nbsp;
+He read his danger in the stony eyes of the girl; and in the very act
+of leaping to his feet he heard sharply, detached on the comminatory
+voice of the storm the brief report of a shot which half stunned him,
+in the manner of a blow.&nbsp; He turned his burning head, and saw Heyst
+towering in the doorway.&nbsp; The thought that the beggar had started
+to prance darted through his mind.&nbsp; For a fraction of a second
+his distracted eyes sought for his weapon an over the floor.&nbsp; He
+couldn&rsquo;t see it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Stick him, you!&rdquo; he called hoarsely to the girl, and
+dashed headlong for the door of the compound.</p>
+<p>While he thus obeyed the instinct of self-preservation, his reason
+was telling him that he could not possibly reach it alive.&nbsp; It
+flew open, however, with a crash, before his launched weight, and instantly
+he swung it to behind him.&nbsp; There, his shoulder leaning against
+it, his hands clinging to the handle, dazed and alone in the night full
+of shudders and muttered menaces, he tried to pull himself together.&nbsp;
+He asked himself if he had been shot at more than once.&nbsp; His shoulder
+was wet with the blood trickling from his head.&nbsp; Feeling above
+his ear, he ascertained that it was only a graze, but the shock of the
+surprise had unmanned him for the moment.</p>
+<p>What the deuce was the governor about to let the beggar break loose
+like this?&nbsp; Or - was the governor dead, perhaps?</p>
+<p>The silence within the room awed him.&nbsp; Of going back there could
+be no question.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But she know show to take care of her self,&rdquo; he muttered.</p>
+<p>She had his knife.&nbsp; It was she now who was deadly, while he
+was disarmed, no good for the moment.&nbsp; He stole away from the door,
+staggering, the warm trickle running down his neck, to find out what
+had become of the governor and to provide himself with a firearm from
+the armoury in the trunks.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER THIRTEEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>Mr Jones, after firing his shot over Heyst&rsquo;s shoulder, had
+thought it proper to dodge away.&nbsp; Like the spectre he was, he noiselessly
+vanished from the veranda.&nbsp; Heyst stumbled into the room and looked
+around.&nbsp; All the objects in there - the books, portrait on the
+wall - seemed shadowy, unsubstantial, the dumb accomplices of an amazing
+dream-plot ending in an illusory effect of awakening and the impossibility
+of ever closing his eyes again.&nbsp; With dread he forced himself to
+look at the girl.&nbsp; Still in the chair, she was leaning forward
+far over her knees, and had hidden her face in her hands.&nbsp; Heyst
+remembered Wang suddenly.&nbsp; How clear all this was - and how extremely
+amusing!&nbsp; Very.</p>
+<p>She sat up a little, then leaned back, and taking her hands from
+her face, pressed both of them to her breast as if moved to the heart
+by seeing him there looking at her with a black, horror-struck curiosity.&nbsp;
+He would have pitied her, if the triumphant expression of her face had
+not given him a shock which destroyed the balance of his feelings.&nbsp;
+She spoke with an accent of wild joy:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I knew you would come back in time!&nbsp; You are safe now.&nbsp;
+I have done it!&nbsp; I would never, never have let him - &rdquo;&nbsp;
+Her voice died out, while her eyes shone at him as when the sun breaks
+through a mist.&nbsp; &ldquo;Never get it back.&nbsp; Oh, my beloved!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He bowed his head gravely, and said in his polite.&nbsp; Heystian
+tone:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No doubt you acted from instinct.&nbsp; Women have been provided
+with their own weapon.&nbsp; I was a disarmed man, I have been a disarmed
+man all my life as I see it now.&nbsp; You may glory in your resourcefulness
+and your profound knowledge of yourself; but I may say that the other
+attitude, suggestive of shame, had its charm.&nbsp; For you are full
+of charm!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The exultation vanished from her face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You mustn&rsquo;t make fun of me now.&nbsp; I know no shame.&nbsp;
+I was thanking God with all my sinful heart for having been able to
+do it - for giving you to me in that way - oh, my beloved - all my own
+at last!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stared as if mad.&nbsp; Timidly she tried to excuse herself for
+disobeying his directions for her safety.&nbsp; Every modulation of
+her enchanting voice cut deep into his very breast, so that he could
+hardly understand the words for the sheer pain of it.&nbsp; He turned
+his back on her; but a sudden drop, an extraordinary faltering of her
+tone, made him spin round.&nbsp; On her white neck her pale head dropped
+as in a cruel drought a withered flower droops on its stalk.&nbsp; He
+caught his breath, looked at her closely, and seemed to read some awful
+intelligence in her eyes.&nbsp; At the moment when her eyelids fell
+as if smitten from above by an the gleam of old silver familiar to him
+from boyhood, the very invisible power, he snatched her up bodily out
+of the chair, and disregarding an unexpected metallic clatter on the
+floor, carried her off into the other room.&nbsp; The limpness of her
+body frightened him.&nbsp; Laying her down on the bed, he ran out again,
+seized a four-branched candlestick on the table, and ran back, tearing
+down with a furious jerk the curtain that swung stupidly in his way,
+but after putting the candlestick on the table by the bed, he remained
+absolutely idle.&nbsp; There did not seem anything more for him to do.&nbsp;
+Holding his chin in his hand he looked down intently at her still face.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Has she been stabbed with this thing?&rdquo; asked Davidson,
+whom suddenly he saw standing by his side and holding up Ricardo&rsquo;s
+dagger to his sight.&nbsp; Heyst uttered no word of recognition or surprise.&nbsp;
+He gave Davidson only a dumb look of unutterable awe, then, as if possessed
+with a sudden fury, started tearing open the front of the girls dress.&nbsp;
+She remained insensible under his hands, and Heyst let out a groan which
+made Davidson shudder inwardly the heavy plaint of a man who falls clubbed
+in the dark.</p>
+<p>They stood side by side, looking mournfully at the little black hole
+made by Mr. Jones&rsquo;s bullet under the swelling breast of a dazzling
+and as it were sacred whiteness.&nbsp; It rose and fell slightly - so
+slightly that only the eyes of the lover could detect the faint stir
+of life.&nbsp; Heyst, calm and utterly unlike himself in the face, moving
+about noiselessly, prepared a wet cloth, and laid it on the insignificant
+wound, round which there was hardly a trace of blood to mar the charm,
+the fascination, of that mortal flesh.</p>
+<p>Her eyelids fluttered.&nbsp; She looked drowsily about, serene, as
+if fatigued only by the exertions of her tremendous victory, capturing
+the very sting of death in the service of love.&nbsp; But her eyes became
+very wide awake when they caught sight of Ricardo&rsquo;s dagger, the
+spoil of vanquished death, which Davidson was still holding, unconsciously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Give it to me,&rdquo; she said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson put the symbol of her victory into her feeble hands extended
+to him with the innocent gesture of a child reaching eagerly for a toy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For you,&rdquo; she gasped, turning her eyes to Heyst.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Kill nobody.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Heyst, taking the dagger and laying it gently
+on her breast, while her hands fell powerless by her side.</p>
+<p>The faint smile on her deep-cut lips waned, and her head sank deep
+into the pillow, taking on the majestic pallor and immobility of marble.&nbsp;
+But over the muscles, which seemed set in their transfigured beauty
+for ever, passed a slight and awful tremor.&nbsp; With an amazing strength
+she asked loudly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have been shot, dear Lena,&rdquo; Heyst said in a steady
+voice, while Davidson, at the question, turned away and leaned his forehead
+against the post of the foot of the bed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shot?&nbsp; I did think, too, that something had struck me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Over Samburan the thunder had ceased to growl at last, and the world
+of material forms shuddered no more under the emerging stars.&nbsp;
+The spirit of the girl which was passing away from under them clung
+to her triumph convinced of the reality of her victory over death.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No more,&rdquo; she muttered.&nbsp; &ldquo;There will be no
+more!&nbsp; Oh, my beloved,&rdquo; she cried weakly, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+saved you!&nbsp; Why don&rsquo;t you take me into your arms and carry
+me out of this lonely place?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Heyst bent low over her, cursing his fastidious soul, which even
+at that moment kept the true cry of love from his lips in its infernal
+mistrust of all life.&nbsp; He dared not touch her and she had no longer
+the strength to throw her arms about his neck.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who else could have done this for you?&rdquo; she whispered
+gloriously.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No one in the world,&rdquo; he answered her in a murmur of
+unconcealed despair.</p>
+<p>She tried to raise herself, but all she could do was to lift her
+head a little from the pillow.&nbsp; With a terrible and gentle movement,
+Heyst hastened to slip his arm under her neck.&nbsp; She felt relieved
+at once of an intolerable weight, and was content to surrender to him
+the infinite weariness of her tremendous achievement.&nbsp; Exulting,
+she saw herself extended on the bed, in a black dress, and profoundly
+at peace, while, stooping over her with a kindly, playful smile, he
+was ready to lift her up in his firm arms and take her into the sanctuary
+of his innermost heart - for ever!&nbsp; The flush of rapture flooding
+her whole being broke out in a smile of innocent, girlish happiness;
+and with that divine radiance on her lips she breathed her, last triumphant,
+seeking for his glance in the shades of death.</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<h3>CHAPTER FOURTEEN</h3>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines2"><br /><br /></div>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, Excellency,&rdquo; said Davidson in his placid voice;
+&ldquo;there are more dead in this affair - more white people, I mean
+- than have been killed in many of the battles in the last Achin war.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson was talking with an Excellency, because what was alluded
+to in conversation as &ldquo;the mystery of Samburan&rdquo; had caused
+such a sensation in the Archipelago that even those in the highest spheres
+were anxious to hear something at first hand.&nbsp; Davidson had been
+summoned to an audience.&nbsp; It was a high official on his tour.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You knew the late Baron Heyst well?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The truth is that nobody out here can boast of having known
+him well,&rdquo; said Davidson.&nbsp; &ldquo;He was a queer chap.&nbsp;
+I doubt if he himself knew how queer he was.&nbsp; But everybody was
+aware that I was keeping my eye on him in a friendly way.&nbsp; And
+that&rsquo;s how I got the warning which made me turn round in my tracks.&nbsp;
+In the middle of my trip and steam back to Samburan, where, I am grieved
+to say, I arrived too late.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Without enlarging very much, Davidson explained to the attentive
+Excellency how a woman, the wife of a certain hotel-keeper named Schomberg,
+had overheard two card-sharping rascals making inquiries from her husband
+as to the exact position of the island.&nbsp; She caught only a few
+words referring to the neighbouring volcano, but there were enough to
+arouse her suspicions - &ldquo;which,&rdquo; went on Davidson, &ldquo;she
+imparted to me, your Excellency.&nbsp; They were only too well founded!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That was very clever of her,&rdquo; remarked the great man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s much cleverer than people have any conception
+of,&rdquo; said Davidson.</p>
+<p>But he refrained from disclosing to the Excellency the real cause
+which had sharpened Mrs. Schomberg&rsquo;s wits.&nbsp; The poor woman
+was in mortal terror of the girl being brought back within reach of
+her infatuated Wilhelm.&nbsp; Davidson only said that her agitation
+had impressed him; but he confessed that while going back, he began
+to have his doubts as to there being anything in it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I steamed into one of those silly thunderstorms that hang
+about the volcano, and had some trouble in making the island,&rdquo;
+narrated Davidson.&nbsp; &ldquo;I had to grope my way dead slow into
+Diamond Bay.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t suppose that anybody, even if looking
+out for me, could have heard me let go the anchor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He admitted that he ought to have gone ashore at once; but everything
+was perfectly dark and absolutely quiet.&nbsp; He felt ashamed of his
+impulsiveness.&nbsp; What a fool he would have looked, waking up a man
+in the middle of the night just to ask him if he was all right!&nbsp;
+And then the girl being there, he feared that Heyst would look upon
+his visit as an unwarrantable intrusion.</p>
+<p>The first intimation he had of there being anything wrong was a big
+white boat, adrift, with the dead body of a very hairy man inside, bumping
+against the bows of his steamer.&nbsp; Then indeed he lost no time in
+going ashore - alone, of course, from motives of delicacy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I arrived in time to see that poor girl die, as I have told
+your Excellency,&rdquo; pursued Davidson.&nbsp; &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t
+tell you what a time I had with him afterwards.&nbsp; He talked to me.&nbsp;
+His father seems to have been a crank, and to have upset his head when
+he was young.&nbsp; He was a queer chap.&nbsp; Practically the last
+words be said to me, as we came out on the veranda, were:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned
+while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As we stood there, just before I left him, for he said be
+wanted to be alone with his dead for a time, we heard a snarly sort
+of voice near the bushes by the shore calling out:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Is that you, governor?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s me.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Jeeminy!&nbsp; I thought the beggar had done for you.&nbsp;
+He has started prancing and nearly had me.&nbsp; I have been dodging
+around, looking for you ever since.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;Well, here I am,&rsquo; suddenly screamed the other
+voice, and then a shot rang out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;&lsquo;This time he has not missed him,&rsquo; Heyst said
+to me bitterly, and went back into the house.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I returned on board as he had insisted I should do.&nbsp;
+I didn&rsquo;t want to intrude on his grief.&nbsp; Later, about five
+in the morning, some of my calashes came running to me, yelling that
+there was a fire ashore.&nbsp; I landed at once, of course.&nbsp; The
+principal bungalow was blazing.&nbsp; The heat drove us back.&nbsp;
+The other two houses caught one after another like kindling-wood.&nbsp;
+There was no going beyond the shore end of the jetty till the afternoon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson sighed placidly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose you are certain that Baron Heyst is dead?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is - ashes, your Excellency,&rdquo; said Davidson, wheezing
+a little; &ldquo;he and the girl together.&nbsp; I suppose he couldn&rsquo;t
+stand his thoughts before her dead body - and fire purifies everything.&nbsp;
+That Chinaman of whom I told your Excellency helped me to investigate
+next day, when the embers got cooled a little.&nbsp; We found enough
+to be sure.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s not a bad Chinaman.&nbsp; He told me that
+he had followed Heyst and the girl through the forest from pity, and
+partly out of curiosity.&nbsp; He watched the house till he saw Heyst
+go out, after dinner, and Ricardo come back alone.&nbsp; While he was
+dodging there, it occurred to him that he had better cast the boat adrift,
+for fear those scoundrels should come round by water and bombard the
+village from the sea with their revolvers and Winchesters.&nbsp; He
+judged that they were devils enough for anything.&nbsp; So he walked
+down the wharf quietly; and as he got into the boat, to cast her off,
+that hairy man who, it seems, was dozing in her, jumped up growling,
+and Wang shot him dead.&nbsp; Then he shoved the boat off as far as
+he could and went away.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a pause.&nbsp; Presently Davidson went on, in his tranquil
+manner:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let Heaven look after what has been purified.&nbsp; The wind
+and rain will take care of the ashes.&nbsp; The carcass of that follower,
+secretary, or whatever the unclean ruffian called himself, I left where
+it lay, to swell and rot in the sun.&nbsp; His principal had shot him
+neatly through the head.&nbsp; Then, apparently, this Jones went down
+to the wharf to look for the boat and for the hairy man.&nbsp; I suppose
+he tumbled into the water by accident - or perhaps not by accident.&nbsp;
+The boat and the man were gone, and the scoundrel saw himself alone,
+his game clearly up, and fairly trapped.&nbsp; Who knows?&nbsp; The
+water&rsquo;s very clear there, and I could see him huddled up on the
+bottom, between two piles, like a heap of bones in a blue silk bag,
+with only the head and the feet sticking out.&nbsp; Wang was very pleased
+when he discovered him.&nbsp; That made everything safe, he said, and
+he went at once over the hill to fetch his Alfuro woman back to the
+hut.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Davidson took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his
+forehead.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And then, your Excellency, I went away.&nbsp; There was nothing
+to be done there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Clearly!&rdquo; assented the Excellency.</p>
+<p>Davidson, thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and
+then murmured with placid sadness:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nothing!&rdquo;</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines1"><br /></div>
+<p><i>October</i> 1912 - <i>May</i> 1914</p>
+<div class="GutenbergBlankLines3"><br /><br /><br /></div>
+<p>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, VICTORY ***</p>
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