That morning wandering about his plantation, more like a frightened soul
than its creator and master, he dodged the white parasol bobbing up here
and there like a buoy adrift on a sea of dark-green plants. The crop
promised to be magnificent, and the fashionable philosopher of the age
took other than a merely scientific interest in the experiment. His
investments were judicious, but he had always some little money lying by,
for experiments.
After lunch, being left alone with Renouard, he talked a little of
cultivation and such matters. Then suddenly:
“By the way, is it true what my sister tells me, that your plantation
boys have been disturbed by a ghost?”
Renouard, who since the ladies had left the table was not keeping such a
strict watch on himself, came out of his abstraction with a start and a
stiff smile.
“My foreman had some trouble with them during my absence. They funk
working in a certain field on the slope of the hill.”
“A ghost here!” exclaimed the amused professor. “Then our whole
conception of the psychology of ghosts must be revised. This island has
been uninhabited probably since the dawn of ages. How did a ghost come
here. By air or water? And why did it leave its native haunts. Was it
from misanthropy? Was he expelled from some community of spirits?”
Renouard essayed to respond in the same tone. The words died on his
lips. Was it a man or a woman ghost, the professor inquired.
“I don’t know.” Renouard made an effort to appear at ease. He had, he
said, a couple of Tahitian amongst his boys—a ghost-ridden race. They
had started the scare. They had probably brought their ghost with them.
“Let us investigate the matter, Renouard,” proposed the professor half in
earnest. “We may make some interesting discoveries as to the state of
primitive minds, at any rate.”
This was too much. Renouard jumped up and leaving the room went out and
walked about in front of the house. He would allow no one to force his
hand. Presently the professor joined him outside. He carried his
parasol, but had neither his book nor his pipe with him. Amiably serious
he laid his hand on his “dear young friend’s” arm.
“We are all of us a little strung up,” he said. “For my part I have been
like sister Anne in the story. But I cannot see anything coming.
Anything that would be the least good for anybody—I mean.”
Renouard had recovered sufficiently to murmur coldly his regret of this
waste of time. For that was what, he supposed, the professor had in his
mind.
“Time,” mused Professor Moorsom. “I don’t know that time can be wasted.
But I will tell you, my dear friend, what this is: it is an awful waste
of life. I mean for all of us. Even for my sister, who has got a
headache and is gone to lie down.”
He shook gently Renouard’s arm. “Yes, for all of us! One may meditate
on life endlessly, one may even have a poor opinion of it—but the fact
remains that we have only one life to live. And it is short. Think of
that, my young friend.”
He released Renouard’s arm and stepped out of the shade opening his
parasol. It was clear that there was something more in his mind than
mere anxiety about the date of his lectures for fashionable audiences.
What did the man mean by his confounded platitudes? To Renouard, scared
by Luiz in the morning (for he felt that nothing could be more fatal than
to have his deception unveiled otherwise than by personal confession),
this talk sounded like encouragement or a warning from that man who
seemed to him to be very brazen and very subtle. It was like being
bullied by the dead and cajoled by the living into a throw of dice for a
supreme stake.
Renouard went away to some distance from the house and threw himself down
in the shade of a tree. He lay there perfectly still with his forehead
resting on his folded arms, light-headed and thinking. It seemed to him
that he must be on fire, then that he had fallen into a cool whirlpool, a
smooth funnel of water swirling about with nauseating rapidity. And then
(it must have been a reminiscence of his boyhood) he was walking on the
dangerous thin ice of a river, unable to turn back. . . . Suddenly it
parted from shore to shore with a loud crack like the report of a gun.
With one leap he found himself on his feet. All was peace, stillness,
sunshine. He walked away from there slowly. Had he been a gambler he
would have perhaps been supported in a measure by the mere excitement.
But he was not a gambler. He had always disdained that artificial manner
of challenging the fates. The bungalow came into view, bright and
pretty, and all about everything was peace, stillness, sunshine. . . .
While he was plodding towards it he had a disagreeable sense of the dead
man’s company at his elbow. The ghost! He seemed to be everywhere but
in his grave. Could one ever shake him off? he wondered. At that moment
Miss Moorsom came out on the verandah; and at once, as if by a mystery of
radiating waves, she roused a great tumult in his heart, shook earth and
sky together—but he plodded on. Then like a grave song-note in the storm
her voice came to him ominously.
“Ah! Mr. Renouard. . . ” He came up and smiled, but she was very
serious. “I can’t keep still any longer. Is there time to walk up this
headland and back before dark?”
The shadows were lying lengthened on the ground; all was stillness and
peace. “No,” said Renouard, feeling suddenly as steady as a rock. “But
I can show you a view from the central hill which your father has not
seen. A view of reefs and of broken water without end, and of great
wheeling clouds of sea-birds.”
She came down the verandah steps at once and they moved off. “You go
first,” he proposed, “and I’ll direct you. To the left.”
She was wearing a short nankin skirt, a muslin blouse; he could see
through the thin stuff the skin of her shoulders, of her arms. The noble
delicacy of her neck caused him a sort of transport. “The path begins
where these three palms are. The only palms on the island.”
“I see.”
She never turned her head. After a while she observed: “This path looks
as if it had been made recently.”
“Quite recently,” he assented very low.
They went on climbing steadily without exchanging another word; and when
they stood on the top she gazed a long time before her. The low evening
mist veiled the further limit of the reefs. Above the enormous and
melancholy confusion, as of a fleet of wrecked islands, the restless
myriads of sea-birds rolled and unrolled dark ribbons on the sky,
gathered in clouds, soared and stooped like a play of shadows, for they
were too far for them to hear their cries.
Renouard broke the silence in low tones.
“They’ll be settling for the night presently.” She made no sound. Round
them all was peace and declining sunshine. Near by, the topmost pinnacle
of Malata, resembling the top of a buried tower, rose a rock,
weather-worn, grey, weary of watching the monotonous centuries of the
Pacific. Renouard leaned his shoulders against it. Felicia Moorsom
faced him suddenly, her splendid black eyes full on his face as though
she had made up her mind at last to destroy his wits once and for all.
Dazzled, he lowered his eyelids slowly.
“Mr. Renouard! There is something strange in all this. Tell me where he
is?”
He answered deliberately.
“On the other side of this rock. I buried him there myself.”
She pressed her hands to her breast, struggled for her breath for a
moment, then: “Ohhh! . . . You buried him! . . . What sort of man are
you? . . . You dared not tell! . . . He is another of your victims? . . .
You dared not confess that evening. . . . You must have killed him. What
could he have done to you? . . . You fastened on him some atrocious
quarrel and . . .”
Her vengeful aspect, her poignant cries left him as unmoved as the weary
rock against which he leaned. He only raised his eyelids to look at her
and lowered them slowly. Nothing more. It silenced her. And as if
ashamed she made a gesture with her hand, putting away from her that
thought. He spoke, quietly ironic at first.
“Ha! the legendary Renouard of sensitive idiots—the ruthless
adventurer—the ogre with a future. That was a parrot cry, Miss Moorsom.
I don’t think that the greatest fool of them all ever dared hint such a
stupid thing of me that I killed men for nothing. No, I had noticed this
man in a hotel. He had come from up country I was told, and was doing
nothing. I saw him sitting there lonely in a corner like a sick crow,
and I went over one evening to talk to him. Just on impulse. He wasn’t
impressive. He was pitiful. My worst enemy could have told you he
wasn’t good enough to be one of Renouard’s victims. It didn’t take me
long to judge that he was drugging himself. Not drinking. Drugs.”
“Ah! It’s now that you are trying to murder him,” she cried.
“Really. Always the Renouard of shopkeepers’ legend. Listen! I would
never have been jealous of him. And yet I am jealous of the air you
breathe, of the soil you tread on, of the world that sees you—moving
free—not mine. But never mind. I rather liked him. For a certain
reason I proposed he should come to be my assistant here. He said he
believed this would save him. It did not save him from death. It came
to him as it were from nothing—just a fall. A mere slip and tumble of
ten feet into a ravine. But it seems he had been hurt before
up-country—by a horse. He ailed and ailed. No, he was not a
steel-tipped man. And his poor soul seemed to have been damaged too. It
gave way very soon.”
“This is tragic!” Felicia Moorsom whispered with feeling. Renouard’s
lips twitched, but his level voice continued mercilessly.
“That’s the story. He rallied a little one night and said he wanted to
tell me something. I, being a gentleman, he said, he could confide in
me. I told him that he was mistaken. That there was a good deal of a
plebeian in me, that he couldn’t know. He seemed disappointed. He
muttered something about his innocence and something that sounded like a
curse on some woman, then turned to the wall and—just grew cold.”
“On a woman,” cried Miss Moorsom indignantly. “What woman?”
“I wonder!” said Renouard, raising his eyes and noting the crimson of her
ear-lobes against the live whiteness of her complexion, the sombre, as if
secret, night-splendour of her eyes under the writhing flames of her
hair. “Some woman who wouldn’t believe in that poor innocence of his. .
. Yes. You probably. And now you will not believe in me—not even in me
who must in truth be what I am—even to death. No! You won’t. And yet,
Felicia, a woman like you and a man like me do not often come together on
this earth.”
The flame of her glorious head scorched his face. He flung his hat far
away, and his suddenly lowered eyelids brought out startlingly his
resemblance to antique bronze, the profile of Pallas, still, austere,
bowed a little in the shadow of the rock. “Oh! If you could only
understand the truth that is in me!” he added.
She waited, as if too astounded to speak, till he looked up again, and
then with unnatural force as if defending herself from some unspoken
aspersion, “It’s I who stand for truth here! Believe in you! In you,
who by a heartless falsehood—and nothing else, nothing else, do you
hear?—have brought me here, deceived, cheated, as in some abominable
farce!” She sat down on a boulder, rested her chin in her hands, in the
pose of simple grief—mourning for herself.
“It only wanted this. Why! Oh! Why is it that ugliness, ridicule, and
baseness must fall across my path.”
On that height, alone with the sky, they spoke to each other as if the
earth had fallen away from under their feet.
“Are you grieving for your dignity? He was a mediocre soul and could
have given you but an unworthy existence.”
She did not even smile at those words, but, superb, as if lifting a
corner of the veil, she turned on him slowly.
“And do you imagine I would have devoted myself to him for such a
purpose! Don’t you know that reparation was due to him from me? A
sacred debt—a fine duty. To redeem him would not have been in my power—I
know it. But he was blameless, and it was for me to come forward. Don’t
you see that in the eyes of the world nothing could have rehabilitated
him so completely as his marriage with me? No word of evil could be
whispered of him after I had given him my hand. As to giving myself up
to anything less than the shaping of a man’s destiny—if I thought I could
do it I would abhor myself. . . .” She spoke with authority in her deep
fascinating, unemotional voice. Renouard meditated, gloomy, as if over
some sinister riddle of a beautiful sphinx met on the wild road of his
life.
“Yes. Your father was right. You are one of these aristocrats . . .”
She drew herself up haughtily.
“What do you say? My father! . . . I an aristocrat.”
“Oh! I don’t mean that you are like the men and women of the time of
armours, castles, and great deeds. Oh, no! They stood on the naked
soil, had traditions to be faithful to, had their feet on this earth of
passions and death which is not a hothouse. They would have been too
plebeian for you since they had to lead, to suffer with, to understand
the commonest humanity. No, you are merely of the topmost layer,
disdainful and superior, the mere pure froth and bubble on the
inscrutable depths which some day will toss you out of existence. But
you are you! You are you! You are the eternal love itself—only, O
Divinity, it isn’t your body, it is your soul that is made of foam.”
She listened as if in a dream. He had succeeded so well in his effort to
drive back the flood of his passion that his life itself seemed to run
with it out of his body. At that moment he felt as one dead speaking.
But the headlong wave returning with tenfold force flung him on her
suddenly, with open arms and blazing eyes. She found herself like a
feather in his grasp, helpless, unable to struggle, with her feet off the
ground. But this contact with her, maddening like too much felicity,
destroyed its own end. Fire ran through his veins, turned his passion to
ashes, burnt him out and left him empty, without force—almost without
desire. He let her go before she could cry out. And she was so used to
the forms of repression enveloping, softening the crude impulses of old
humanity that she no longer believed in their existence as if it were an
exploded legend. She did not recognise what had happened to her. She
came safe out of his arms, without a struggle, not even having felt
afraid.
“What’s the meaning of this?” she said, outraged but calm in a scornful
way.
He got down on his knees in silence, bent low to her very feet, while she
looked down at him, a little surprised, without animosity, as if merely
curious to see what he would do. Then, while he remained bowed to the
ground pressing the hem of her skirt to his lips, she made a slight
movement. He got up.
“No,” he said. “Were you ever so much mine what could I do with you
without your consent? No. You don’t conquer a wraith, cold mist, stuff
of dreams, illusion. It must come to you and cling to your breast. And
then! Oh! And then!”
All ecstasy, all expression went out of his face.
“Mr. Renouard,” she said, “though you can have no claim on my
consideration after having decoyed me here for the vile purpose,
apparently, of gloating over me as your possible prey, I will tell you
that I am not perhaps the extraordinary being you think I am. You may
believe me. Here I stand for truth itself.”
“What’s that to me what you are?” he answered. “At a sign from you I
would climb up to the seventh heaven to bring you down to earth for my
own—and if I saw you steeped to the lips in vice, in crime, in mud, I
would go after you, take you to my arms—wear you for an incomparable
jewel on my breast. And that’s love—true love—the gift and the curse of
the gods. There is no other.”
The truth vibrating in his voice made her recoil slightly, for she was
not fit to hear it—not even a little—not even one single time in her
life. It was revolting to her; and in her trouble, perhaps prompted by
the suggestion of his name or to soften the harshness of expression, for
she was obscurely moved, she spoke to him in French.
“_Assez_! _J’ai horreur de tout cela_,” she said.
He was white to his very lips, but he was trembling no more. The dice
had been cast, and not even violence could alter the throw. She passed
by him unbendingly, and he followed her down the path. After a time she
heard him saying:
“And your dream is to influence a human destiny?”
“Yes!” she answered curtly, unabashed, with a woman’s complete assurance.
“Then you may rest content. You have done it.”
She shrugged her shoulders slightly. But just before reaching the end of
the path she relented, stopped, and went back to him.
“I don’t suppose you are very anxious for people to know how near you
came to absolute turpitude. You may rest easy on that point. I shall
speak to my father, of course, and we will agree to say that he has
died—nothing more.”
“Yes,” said Renouard in a lifeless voice. “He is dead. His very ghost
shall be done with presently.”
She went on, but he remained standing stock still in the dusk. She had
already reached the three palms when she heard behind her a loud peal of
laughter, cynical and joyless, such as is heard in smoking-rooms at the
end of a scandalous story. It made her feel positively faint for a
moment.