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.