"I wouldn"t judge you, not for anything."
"Really?"
"It would be as if I dared to judge everything that there is." With her other hand she made a gesture that seemed to embrace in one movement the earth and the heaven. "I wouldn"t do such a thing."
Then came a silence, broken at last by Heyst:
"I! I! do a deadly wrong to my poor Morrison!" he cried. "I, who could not bear to hurt his feelings. I, who respected his very madness! Yes, this madness, the wreck of which you can see lying about the jetty of Diamond Bay. What else could I do? He insisted on regarding me as his saviour; he was always restraining the eternal obligation on the tip of his tongue, till I was burning with shame at his grat.i.tude. What could I do? He was going to repay me with this infernal coal, and I had to join him as one joins a child"s game in a nursery. One would no more have thought of humiliating him than one would think of humiliating a child.
What"s the use of talking of all this! Of course, the people here could not understand the truth of our relation to each other. But what business of theirs was it? Kill old Morrison! Well, it is less criminal, less base--I am not saying it is less difficult--to kill a man than to cheat him in that way. You understand that?"
She nodded slightly, but more than once and with evident conviction. His eyes rested on her, inquisitive, ready for tenderness.
"But it was neither one nor the other," he went on. "Then, why your emotion? All you confess is that you wouldn"t judge me."
She turned upon him her veiled, unseeing grey eyes in which nothing of her wonder could be read.
"I said I couldn"t," she whispered.
"But you thought that there was no smoke without fire!" the playfulness of tone hardly concealed his irritation. "What power there must be in words, only imperfectly heard--for you did not listen with particular care, did you? What were they? What evil effort of invention drove them into that idiot"s mouth out of his lying throat? If you were to try to remember, they would perhaps convince me, too."
"I didn"t listen," she protested. "What was it to me what they said of anybody? He was saying that there never were such loving friends to look at as you two; then, when you got all you wanted out of him and got thoroughly tired of him, too, you kicked him out to go home and die."
Indignation, with an undercurrent of some other feeling, rang in these quoted words, uttered in her pure and enchanting voice. She ceased abruptly and lowered her long, dark lashes, as if mortally weary, sick at heart.
"Of course, why shouldn"t you get tired of that or any other--company?
You aren"t like anyone else, and--and the thought of it made me unhappy suddenly; but indeed, I did not believe anything bad of you. I--"
A brusque movement of his arm, flinging her hand away, stopped her short. Heyst had again lost control of himself. He would have shouted, if shouting had been in his character.
"No, this earth must be the appointed hatching planet of calumny enough to furnish the whole universe. I feel a disgust at my own person, as if I had tumbled into some filthy hole. Pah! And you--all you can say is that you won"t judge me; that you--"
She raised her head at this attack, though indeed he had not turned to her.
"I don"t believe anything bad of you," she repeated. "I couldn"t."
He made a gesture as if to say:
"That"s sufficient."
In his soul and in his body he experienced a nervous reaction from tenderness. All at once, without transition, he detested her. But only for a moment. He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites--and escapes.
He jumped up and began to walk to and fro. Presently his hidden fury fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind emptiness, desolation, regret. His resentment was not against the girl, but against life itself--that commonest of snares, in which he felt himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled by the lucidity of his mind.
He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side.
Before she could make a movement or even turn her head his way, he took her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another appeal to his tenderness--a new seduction. The girl glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone--a command which Heyst did not obey.
CHAPTER FIVE
When she opened her eyes at last and sat up, Heyst scrambled quickly to his feet and went to pick up her cork helmet, which had rolled a little way off. Meanwhile she busied herself in doing up her hair, plaited on the top of her head in two heavy, dark tresses, which had come loose. He tendered her the helmet in silence, and waited as if unwilling to hear the sound of his own voice.
"We had better go down now," he suggested in a low tone.
He extended his hand to help her up. He had the intention to smile, but abandoned it at the nearer sight of her still face, in which was depicted the infinite la.s.situde of her soul. On their way to regain the forest path they had to pa.s.s through the spot from which the view of the sea could be obtained. The flaming abyss of emptiness, the liquid, undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light, made her long for the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an austere spell; for the velvety dark sky and the mysterious great shadow of the sea, conveying peace to the day-weary heart. She put her hand to her eyes. Behind her back Heyst spoke gently.
"Let us get on, Lena."
She walked ahead in silence. Heyst remarked that they had never been out before during the hottest hours. It would do her no good, he feared.
This solicitude pleased and soothed her. She felt more and more like herself--a poor London girl playing in an orchestra, and s.n.a.t.c.hed out from the humiliations, the squalid dangers of a miserable existence, by a man like whom there was not, there could not be, another in this world. She felt this with elation, with uneasiness, with an intimate pride--and with a peculiar sinking of the heart.
"I am not easily knocked out by any such thing as heat," she said decisively.
"Yes, but I don"t forget that you"re not a tropical bird."
"You weren"t born in these parts, either," she returned.
"No, and perhaps I haven"t even your physique. I am a transplanted being. Transplanted! I ought to call myself uprooted--an unnatural state of existence; but a man is supposed to stand anything."
She looked back at him and received a smile. He told her to keep in the shelter of the forest path, which was very still and close, full of heat if free from glare. Now and then they had glimpses of the company"s old clearing blazing with light, in which the black stumps of trees stood charred, without shadows, miserable and sinister. They crossed the open in a direct line for the bungalow. On the veranda they fancied they had a glimpse of the vanishing w.a.n.g, though the girl was not at all sure that she had seen anything move. Heyst had no doubts.
"w.a.n.g has been looking out for us. We are late."
"Was he? I thought I saw something white for a moment, and then I did not see it any more."
"That"s it--he vanishes. It"s a very remarkable gift in that Chinaman."
"Are they all like that?" she asked with naive curiosity and uneasiness.
"Not in such perfection," said Heyst, amused.
He noticed with approval that she was not heated by the walk. The drops of perspiration on her forehead were like dew on the cool, white petal of a flower. He looked at her figure of grace and strength, solid and supple, with an ever-growing appreciation.
"Go in and rest yourself for a quarter of an hour; and then Mr. w.a.n.g will give us something to eat," he said.
They had found the table laid. When they came together again and sat down to it, w.a.n.g materialized without a sound, unheard, uncalled, and did his office. Which being accomplished, at a given moment he was not.
A great silence brooded over Samburan--the silence of the great heat that seems pregnant with fatal issues, like the silence of ardent thought. Heyst remained alone in the big room. The girl seeing him take up a book, had retreated to her chamber. Heyst sat down under his father"s portrait; and the abominable calumny crept back into his recollection. The taste of it came on his lips, nauseating and corrosive like some kinds of poison. He was tempted to spit on the floor, naively, in sheer unsophisticated disgust of the physical sensation. He shook his head, surprised at himself. He was not used to receive his intellectual impressions in that way--reflected in movements of carnal emotion. He stirred impatiently in his chair, and raised the book to his eyes with both hands. It was one of his father"s. He opened it haphazard, and his eyes fell on the middle of the page. The elder Heyst had written of everything in many books--of s.p.a.ce and of time, of animals and of stars; a.n.a.lysing ideas and actions, the laughter and the frowns of men, and the grimaces of their agony. The son read, shrinking into himself, composing his face as if under the author"s eye, with a vivid consciousness of the portrait on his right hand, a little above his head; a wonderful presence in its heavy frame on the flimsy wall of mats, looking exiled and at home, out of place and masterful, in the painted immobility of profile.
And Heyst, the son, read:
Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love--the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.
He turned the pages of the little volume, "Storm and Dust," glancing here and there at the broken text of reflections, maxims, short phrases, enigmatical sometimes and sometimes eloquent. It seemed to him that he was hearing his father"s voice, speaking and ceasing to speak again.
Startled at first, he ended by finding a charm in the illusion. He abandoned himself to the half-belief that something of his father dwelt yet on earth--a ghostly voice, audible to the ear of his own flesh and blood. With what strange serenity, mingled with terrors, had that man considered the universal nothingness! He had plunged into it headlong, perhaps to render death, the answer that faced one at every inquiry, more supportable.