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.