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.