Sheltered by the squat headland from the first morning sparkle of the sea
the little bay breathed a delicious freshness. The party from the
schooner landed at the bottom of the garden. They exchanged
insignificant words in studiously casual tones. The professor’s sister
put up a long-handled eye-glass as if to scan the novel surroundings, but
in reality searching for poor Arthur anxiously. Having never seen him
otherwise than in his town clothes she had no idea what he would look
like. It had been left to the professor to help his ladies out of the
boat because Renouard, as if intent on giving directions, had stepped
forward at once to meet the half-caste Luiz hurrying down the path. In
the distance, in front of the dazzlingly sunlit bungalow, a row of
dark-faced house-boys unequal in stature and varied in complexion
preserved the immobility of a guard of honour.
Luiz had taken off his soft felt hat before coming within earshot.
Renouard bent his head to his rapid talk of domestic arrangements he
meant to make for the visitors; another bed in the master’s room for the
ladies and a cot for the gentleman to be hung in the room opposite
where—where Mr. Walter—here he gave a scared look all round—Mr.
Walter—had died.
“Very good,” assented Renouard in an even undertone. “And remember what
you have to say of him.”
“Yes, master. Only”—he wriggled slightly and put one bare foot on the
other for a moment in apologetic embarrassment—“only I—I—don’t like to
say it.”
Renouard looked at him without anger, without any sort of expression.
“Frightened of the dead? Eh? Well—all right. I will say it myself—I
suppose once for all. . . .” Immediately he raised his voice very much.
“Send the boys down to bring up the luggage.”
“Yes, master.”
Renouard turned to his distinguished guests who, like a personally
conducted party of tourists, had stopped and were looking about them.
“I am sorry,” he began with an impassive face. “My man has just told me
that Mr. Walter . . .” he managed to smile, but didn’t correct himself .
. . “has gone in a trading schooner on a short tour of the islands, to
the westward.”
This communication was received in profound silence.
Renouard forgot himself in the thought: “It’s done!” But the sight of
the string of boys marching up to the house with suit-cases and
dressing-bags rescued him from that appalling abstraction.
“All I can do is to beg you to make yourselves at home . . . with what
patience you may.”
This was so obviously the only thing to do that everybody moved on at
once. The professor walked alongside Renouard, behind the two ladies.
“Rather unexpected—this absence.”
“Not exactly,” muttered Renouard. “A trip has to be made every year to
engage labour.”
“I see . . . And he . . . How vexingly elusive the poor fellow has
become! I’ll begin to think that some wicked fairy is favouring this
love tale with unpleasant attentions.”
Renouard noticed that the party did not seem weighed down by this new
disappointment. On the contrary they moved with a freer step. The
professor’s sister dropped her eye-glass to the end of its chain. Miss
Moorsom took the lead. The professor, his lips unsealed, lingered in the
open: but Renouard did not listen to that man’s talk. He looked after
that man’s daughter—if indeed that creature of irresistible seductions
were a daughter of mortals. The very intensity of his desire, as if his
soul were streaming after her through his eyes, defeated his object of
keeping hold of her as long as possible with, at least, one of his
senses. Her moving outlines dissolved into a misty coloured shimmer of a
woman made of flame and shadows, crossing the threshold of his house.
The days which followed were not exactly such as Renouard had feared—yet
they were not better than his fears. They were accursed in all the moods
they brought him. But the general aspect of things was quiet. The
professor smoked innumerable pipes with the air of a worker on his
holiday, always in movement and looking at things with that mysteriously
sagacious aspect of men who are admittedly wiser than the rest of the
world. His white head of hair—whiter than anything within the horizon
except the broken water on the reefs—was glimpsed in every part of the
plantation always on the move under the white parasol. And once he
climbed the headland and appeared suddenly to those below, a white speck
elevated in the blue, with a diminutive but statuesque effect.
Felicia Moorsom remained near the house. Sometimes she could be seen
with a despairing expression scribbling rapidly in her lock-up dairy.
But only for a moment. At the sound of Renouard’s footsteps she would
turn towards him her beautiful face, adorable in that calm which was like
a wilful, like a cruel ignoring of her tremendous power. Whenever she
sat on the verandah, on a chair more specially reserved for her use,
Renouard would stroll up and sit on the steps near her, mostly silent,
and often not trusting himself to turn his glance on her. She, very
still with her eyes half-closed, looked down on his head—so that to a
beholder (such as Professor Moorsom, for instance) she would appear to be
turning over in her mind profound thoughts about that man sitting at her
feet, his shoulders bowed a little, his hands listless—as if vanquished.
And, indeed, the moral poison of falsehood has such a decomposing power
that Renouard felt his old personality turn to dead dust. Often, in the
evening, when they sat outside conversing languidly in the dark, he felt
that he must rest his forehead on her feet and burst into tears.
The professor’s sister suffered from some little strain caused by the
unstability of her own feelings toward Renouard. She could not tell
whether she really did dislike him or not. At times he appeared to her
most fascinating; and, though he generally ended by saying something
shockingly crude, she could not resist her inclination to talk with
him—at least not always. One day when her niece had left them alone on
the verandah she leaned forward in her chair—speckless, resplendent, and,
in her way, almost as striking a personality as her niece, who did not
resemble her in the least. “Dear Felicia has inherited her hair and the
greatest part of her appearance from her mother,” the maiden lady used to
tell people.
She leaned forward then, confidentially.
“Oh! Mr. Renouard! Haven’t you something comforting to say?”
He looked up, as surprised as if a voice from heaven had spoken with this
perfect society intonation, and by the puzzled profundity of his blue
eyes fluttered the wax-flower of refined womanhood. She continued.
“For—I can speak to you openly on this tiresome subject—only think what a
terrible strain this hope deferred must be for Felicia’s heart—for her
nerves.”
“Why speak to me about it,” he muttered feeling half choked suddenly.
“Why! As a friend—a well-wisher—the kindest of hosts. I am afraid we
are really eating you out of house and home.” She laughed a little.
“Ah! When, when will this suspense be relieved! That poor lost Arthur!
I confess that I am almost afraid of the great moment. It will be like
seeing a ghost.”
“Have you ever seen a ghost?” asked Renouard, in a dull voice.
She shifted her hands a little. Her pose was perfect in its ease and
middle-aged grace.
“Not actually. Only in a photograph. But we have many friends who had
the experience of apparitions.”
“Ah! They see ghosts in London,” mumbled Renouard, not looking at her.
“Frequently—in a certain very interesting set. But all sorts of people
do. We have a friend, a very famous author—his ghost is a girl. One of
my brother’s intimates is a very great man of science. He is friendly
with a ghost . . . Of a girl too,” she added in a voice as if struck for
the first time by the coincidence. “It is the photograph of that
apparition which I have seen. Very sweet. Most interesting. A little
cloudy naturally. . . . Mr. Renouard! I hope you are not a sceptic.
It’s so consoling to think. . .”
“Those plantation boys of mine see ghosts too,” said Renouard grimly.
The sister of the philosopher sat up stiffly. What crudeness! It was
always so with this strange young man.
“Mr. Renouard! How can you compare the superstitious fancies of your
horrible savages with the manifestations . . . ”
Words failed her. She broke off with a very faint primly angry smile.
She was perhaps the more offended with him because of that flutter at the
beginning of the conversation. And in a moment with perfect tact and
dignity she got up from her chair and left him alone.
Renouard didn’t even look up. It was not the displeasure of the lady
which deprived him of his sleep that night. He was beginning to forget
what simple, honest sleep was like. His hammock from the ship had been
hung for him on a side verandah, and he spent his nights in it on his
back, his hands folded on his chest, in a sort of half conscious,
oppressed stupor. In the morning he watched with unseeing eyes the
headland come out a shapeless inkblot against the thin light of the false
dawn, pass through all the stages of daybreak to the deep purple of its
outlined mass nimbed gloriously with the gold of the rising sun. He
listened to the vague sounds of waking within the house: and suddenly he
became aware of Luiz standing by the hammock—obviously troubled.
“What’s the matter?”
“Tse! Tse! Tse!”
“Well, what now? Trouble with the boys?”
“No, master. The gentleman when I take him his bath water he speak to
me. He ask me—he ask—when, when, I think Mr. Walter, he come back.”
The half-caste’s teeth chattered slightly. Renouard got out of the
hammock.
“And he is here all the time—eh?”
Luiz nodded a scared affirmative, but at once protested, “I no see him.
I never. Not I! The ignorant wild boys say they see . . . Something!
Ough!”
He clapped his teeth on another short rattle, and stood there, shrunk,
blighted, like a man in a freezing blast.
“And what did you say to the gentleman?”
“I say I don’t know—and I clear out. I—I don’t like to speak of him.”
“All right. We shall try to lay that poor ghost,” said Renouard
gloomily, going off to a small hut near by to dress. He was saying to
himself: “This fellow will end by giving me away. The last thing that I
. . . No! That mustn’t be.” And feeling his hand being forced he
discovered the whole extent of his cowardice.