The offender never pardons.
Victor Durnovo lingered on at Loango. He elaborated and detailed to all interested, and to some whom it did not concern, many excuses for his delay in returning to his expedition, lying supine and attendant at Msala. It was by now an open secret on the coast that a great trading expedition was about to ascend the Ogowe river, with, it was whispered, a fortune awaiting it in the dim perspective of Central Africa.
Durnovo had already built up for himself a reputation. He was known as one of the foremost ivory traders on the coast—a man capable of standing against those enormous climatic risks before which his competitors surely fell sooner or later. His knowledge of the interior was unrivalled, his power over the natives a household word. Great things were therefore expected, and Durnovo found himself looked up to and respected in Loango with that friendly worship which is only to be acquired by the possession or prospective possession of vast wealth.
It is possible even in Loango to have a fling, but the carouser must be prepared to face, even in the midst of his revelry, the haunting thought that the exercise of the strictest economy in any other part of the world might be a preferable pastime.
During the three days following his arrival Victor Durnovo indulged, according to his lights, in the doubtful pleasure mentioned. He purchased at the best factory the best clothes obtainable; he lived like a fighting cock in the one so-called hotel—a house chiefly affected and supported by ship-captains. He spent freely of money that was not his, and imagined himself to be leading the life of a gentleman. He rode round on a hired horse to call on his friends, and on the afternoon of the sixth day he alighted from this quadruped at the gate of the Gordons' bungalow.
He knew that Maurice Gordon had left that morning on one of his frequent visits to a neighbouring sub-factory. Nevertheless, he expressed surprise when the servant gave him the information.
“Miss Gordon,” he said, tapping his boot with a riding-whip: “is she in?”
“Yes, sir.”
A few minutes later Jocelyn came into the drawing-room, where he was waiting with a brazen face and a sinking heart. Somehow the very room had power to bring him down towards his own level. When he set eyes on Jocelyn, in her fair Saxon beauty, he regained aplomb.
She appeared to be rather glad to see him.
“I thought,” she said, “that you had gone back to the expedition?”
And Victor Durnovo's boundless conceit substituted “feared” for “thought.”
“Not without coming to say good-bye,” he answered. “It is not likely.”
Just to demonstrate how fully he felt at ease, he took a chair without waiting for an invitation, and sat tapping his boot with his whip, looking her furtively up and down all the while with an appraising eye.
“And when do you go?” she asked, with a subtle change in her tone which did not penetrate his mental epidermis.
“I suppose in a few days now; but I'll let you know all right, never fear.”
Victor Durnovo stretched out his legs and made himself quite at home; but Jocelyn did not sit down. On the contrary, she remained standing, persistently and significantly.
“Maurice gone away?” he inquired.
“Yes.”
“And left you all alone,” in a tone of light badinage, which fell rather flat, on stony ground.
“I am accustomed to being left,” she answered gravely.
“I don't quite like it, you know.”
“YOU?”
She looked at him with a steady surprise which made him feel a trifle uncomfortable.
“Well, you know,” he was forced to explain, shuffling the while uneasily in his chair and dropping his whip, “one naturally takes an interest in one's friends' welfare. You and Maurice are the best friends I have in Loango. I often speak to Maurice about it. It isn't as if there was an English garrison, or anything like that. I don't trust these niggers a bit.”
“Perhaps you do not understand them?” suggested she gently.
She moved away from him as far as she could get. Every moment increased her repugnance for his presence.
“I don't think Maurice would endorse that,” he said, with a conceited laugh.
She winced at the familiar mention of her brother's name, which was probably intentional, and her old fear of this man came back with renewed force.
“I don't think,” he went on, “that Maurice's estimation of my humble self is quite so low as yours.”
She gave a nervous little laugh.
“Maurice has always spoken of you with gratitude,” she said.
“To deaf ears, eh? Yes, he has reason to be grateful, though perhaps I ought not to say it. I have put him into several very good things on the coast, and it is in my power to get him into this new scheme. It is a big thing; he would be a rich man in no time.”
He rose from his seat and deliberately crossed the room to the sofa where she had sat down, where he reclined, with one arm stretched out along the back of it towards her. In his other hand he held his riding-whip, with which he began to stroke the skirt of her dress, which reached along the floor almost to his feet.
“Would you like him to be in it?” he asked, with a meaning glance beneath his lashes. “It is a pity to throw away a good chance; his position is not so very secure, you know.”
She gave a strange little hunted glance round the room. She was wedged into a corner, and could not rise without incurring the risk of his saying something she did not wish to hear. Then she leant forward and deliberately withdrew her dress from the touch of his whip, which was in its way a subtle caress.
“Is he throwing away the chance?” she asked.
“No, but you are.”
Then she rose from her seat, and, standing in the middle of the room, faced him with a sudden gleam in her eyes.
“I do not see what it has to do with me,” she said; “I do not know anything about Maurice's business arrangements, and very little about his business friends.”
“Then let me tell you, Jocelyn—well, then, Miss Gordon, if you prefer it—that you will know more about one of his business friends before you have finished with him. I've got Maurice more or less in my power now, and it rests with you—”
At this moment a shadow darkened the floor of the verandah, and an instant later Jack Meredith walked quietly in by the window.
“Enter, young man,” he said dramatically, “by window—centre.”
“I am sorry,” he went on in a different tone to Jocelyn, “to come in this unceremonious way, but the servant told me that you were in the verandah with Durnovo and—”
He turned towards the half-breed, pausing.
“And Durnovo is the man I want,” weighing on each word.
Durnovo's right hand was in his jacket pocket. Seeing Meredith's proffered salutation, he slowly withdrew it and shook hands.
The flash of hatred was still in his eyes when Jack Meredith turned upon him with aggravating courtesy. The pleasant, half-cynical glance wandered from Durnovo's dark face very deliberately down to his jacket pocket, where the stock of a revolver was imperfectly concealed.
“We were getting anxious about you,” he explained, “seeing that you did not come back. Of course, we knew that you were capable of taking—care—of yourself.”
He was still looking innocently at the tell-tale jacket pocket, and Durnovo, following the direction of his glance, hastily thrust his hand into it.
“But one can never tell, with a treacherous climate like this, what a day may bring forth. However, I am glad to find you looking—so very fit.”
Victor Durnovo gave an awkward little laugh, extremely conscious of the factory clothes.
“Oh, yes; I'm all right,” he said. “I was going to start this evening.”
The girl stood behind them, with a flush slowly fading from her face. There are some women who become suddenly beautiful—not by the glory of a beautiful thought, not by the exaltation of a lofty virtue, but by the mere practical human flush. Jack Meredith, when he took his eyes from Durnovo's, glancing at Jocelyn, suddenly became aware of the presence of a beautiful woman.
The crisis was past; and if Jack knew it, so also did Jocelyn. She knew that the imperturbable gentlemanliness of the Englishman had conveyed to the more passionate West Indian the simple, downright fact that in a lady's drawing-room there was to be no raised voice, no itching fingers, no flash of fiery eyes.
“Yes,” he said, “that will suit me splendidly. We will travel together.”
He turned to Jocelyn.
“I hear your brother is away?”
“Yes, for a few days. He has gone up the coast.”
Then there was a silence. They both paused, helping each other as if by pre-arrangement, and Victor Durnovo suddenly felt that he must go. He rose, and picked up the whip which he had dropped on the matting. There was no help for it—the united wills of these two people were too strong for him.
Jack Meredith passed out of the verandah with him, murmuring something about giving him a leg up. While they were walking round the house, Victor Durnovo made one of those hideous mistakes which one remembers all through life with a sudden rush of warm shame and self-contempt. The very thing that was uppermost in his mind to be avoided suddenly bubbled to his lips, almost, it would seem, in defiance of his own will.
“What about the small—the small-pox?” he asked.
“We have got it under,” replied Jack quietly. “We had a very bad time for three days, but we got all the cases isolated and prevented it from spreading. Of course, we could do little or nothing to save them; they died.”
Durnovo had the air of a whipped dog. His mind was a blank. He simply had nothing to say; the humiliation of utter self-contempt was his.
“You need not be afraid to come back now,” Jack Meredith went on, with a strange refinement of cruelty.
And that was all he ever said about it.
“Will it be convenient for you to meet me on the beach at four o'clock this afternoon?” he asked, when Durnovo was in the saddle.
“Yes.”
“All right—four o'clock.”
He turned and deliberately went back to the bungalow.
There are some friendships where the intercourse is only the seed which absence duly germinates. Jocelyn Gordon and Jack had parted as acquaintances; they met as friends. There is no explaining these things, for there is no gauging the depths of the human mind. There is no getting down to the little bond that lies at the bottom of the well—the bond of sympathy. There is no knowing what it is that prompts us to say, “This man, or this woman, of all the millions, shall be my friend.”
“I am sorry,” he said, “that he should have had a chance of causing you uneasiness again.”
Jocelyn remembered that all her life. She remembers still—and Africa has slipped away from her existence for ever. It is one of the mental photographs of her memory, standing out clear and strong amidst a host of minor recollections.
It surely was my profit had I knownIt would have been my pleasure had I seen.
“Why did he come back?”
Jocelyn had risen as if to intimate that, if he cared to do so, they would sit in the verandah.
“Why did Mr. Durnovo come back?” she repeated; for Jack did not seem to have heard the question. He was drawing forward a cane chair with the leisurely debonnair grace that was his, and, before replying, he considered for a moment.
“To get quinine,” he answered.
Without looking at her, he seemed to divine that he had made a mistake. He seemed to know that she had flushed suddenly to the roots of her hair, with a distressed look in her eyes. The reason was too trivial. She could only draw one conclusion.
“No,” he continued; “to tell you the truth, I think his nerve gave way a little. His health is undermined by this climate. He has been too long in Africa. We have had a bad time at Msala. We have had small-pox in the camp. Oscard and I have been doing doughty deeds. I feel convinced that, if we applied to some Society, we should get something or other—a testimonial or a monument—also Joseph.”
“I like Joseph,” she said in a low tone.
“So do I. If circumstances had been different—if Joseph had not been my domestic servant—I should have liked him for a friend.”
He was looking straight in front of him with a singular fixity. It is possible that he was conscious of the sidelong scrutiny which he was undergoing.
“And you—you have been all right?” she said lightly.
“Oh, yes,” with a laugh. “I have not brought the infection down to Loango; you need not be afraid of that.”
For a moment she looked as if she were going to explain that she was not “afraid of that.” Then she changed her mind and let it pass, as he seemed to believe.
“Joseph constructed a disinfecting room with a wood-smoke fire, or something of that description, and he has been disinfecting everything, down to Oscard's pipes.”
She gave a little laugh, which stopped suddenly.
“Was it very bad?” she asked.
“Oh, no. We took it in time, you see. We had eleven deaths. And now we are all right. We are only waiting for Durnovo to join, and then we shall make a start. Of course, somebody else could have come down for the quinine.”
“Yes.”
He glanced at her beneath his lashes before going on,
“But, as Durnovo's nerves were a little shaken, it—was just as well, don't you know, to get him out of it all.”
“I suppose he got himself out of it all?” she said quietly.
“Well—to a certain extent. With our approval, you understand.”
Men have an esprit de sexe as well as women. They like to hustle the cowards through with the crowd, unobserved.
“It is a strange thing,” said Jocelyn, with a woman's scorn of the man who fears those things of which she herself has no sort of dread, “a very strange thing, that Mr. Durnovo said nothing about it down here. It is not known in Loango that you had small-pox in the camp.”
“Well, you see, when he left we were not quite sure about it.”
“I imagine Mr. Durnovo knows all about small-pox. We all do on this coast. He could hardly help recognising it in its earliest stage.”
She turned on him with a smile which he remembered afterwards. At the moment he felt rather abashed, as if he had been caught in a very maze of untruths. He did not meet her eyes. It was a matter of pride with him that he was equal to any social emergency that might arise. He had always deemed himself capable of withholding from the whole questioning world anything that he might wish to withhold. But afterwards—later in his life—he remembered that look in Jocelyn Gordon's face.
“Altogether,” she said, with a peculiar little contented laugh, “I think you cannot keep it up any longer. He ran away from you and left you to fight against it alone. All the same, it was—nice—of you to try and screen him. Very nice, but I do not think that I could have done it myself. I suppose it was—noble—and women cannot be noble.”
“No, it was only expedient. The best way to take the world is to wring it dry—not to try and convert it and make it better, but to turn its vices to account. That method has the double advantage of serving one's purpose at the time, and standing as a warning later. The best way to cure vice is to turn it ruthlessly to one's own account. That is what we are doing with Durnovo. His little idiosyncrasies will turn in witness against him later on.”
She shook her head in disbelief.
“Your practice and your theory do not agree,” she said.
There was a little pause; then she turned to him gravely.
“Have you been vaccinated?” she asked.
“In the days of my baptism, wherein I was made—”
“No doubt,” she interrupted impatiently, “but since? Have you had it done lately?”
“Just before I came away from England. My tailor urged it so strongly. He said that he had made outfits for many gents going to Africa, and they had all made their wills and been vaccinated. For reasons which are too painful to dwell upon in these pages I could not make a will, so I was enthusiastically vaccinated.”
“And have you all the medicines you will require? Did you really want that quinine?”
There was a practical, common-sense anxiety in the way she asked these questions which made him answer gravely.
“All, thanks. We did not really want the quinine, but we can do with it. Oscard is our doctor; he is really very good. He looks it all up in a book, puts all the negative symptoms on one side, and the positive on the other—adds them all up, then deducts the smaller from the larger, and treats what is left of the patient accordingly.”
She laughed, more with the view of pleasing him than from a real sense of the ludicrous.
“I do not believe,” she said, “that you know the risks you are running into. Even in the short time that Maurice and I have been here we have learnt to treat the climate of Western Africa with a proper respect. We have known so many people who have—succumbed.”
“Yes, but I do not mean to do that. In a way, Durnovo's—what shall we call it?—lack of nerve is a great safeguard. He will not run into any danger.”
“No, but he might run you into it.”
“Not a second time, Miss Gordon. Not if we know it. Oscard mentioned a desire to wring Durnovo's neck. I am afraid he will do it one of these days.”
“The mistake that most people make,” the girl went on more lightly, “is a want of care. You cannot be too careful, you know, in Africa.”
“I am careful; I have reason to be.”
She was looking at him steadily, her blue eyes searching his.
“Yes?” she said slowly, and there were a thousand questions in the word.
“It would be very foolish of me to be otherwise,” he said. “I am engaged to be married, and I came out here to make the wherewithal. This expedition is an expedition to seek the wherewithal.”
“Yes,” she said, “and therefore you must be more careful than any one else. Because, you see, your life is something which does not belong to you, but with which you are trusted. I mean, if there is anything dangerous to be done, let some one else do it. What is she like? What is her name?”
“Her name is Millicent—Millicent Chyne.”
“And—what is she like?”
He leant back, and, interlocking his fingers, stretched his arms out with the palms of his hands outward—a habit of his when asked a question needing consideration.
“She is of medium height; her hair is brown. Her worst enemy admits, I believe, that she is pretty. Of course, I am convinced of it.”
“Of course,” replied Jocelyn steadily. “That is as it should be. And I have no doubt that you and her worst enemy are both quite right.”
He nodded cheerfully, indicating a great faith in his own judgment on the matter under discussion.
“I am afraid,” he said, “that I have not a photograph. That would be the correct thing, would it not? I ought to have one always with me in a locket round my neck, or somewhere. A curiously-wrought locket is the correct thing, I believe. People in books usually carry something of that description—and it is always curiously wrought. I don't know where they buy them.”
“I think they are usually inherited,” suggested Jocelyn.
“I suppose they are,” he went on in the same semi-serious tone. “And then I ought to have it always ready to clasp in my dying hand, where Joseph would find it and wipe away a furtive tear as he buried me. It is a pity. I am afraid I inherited nothing from my ancestors except a very practical mind.”
“I should have liked very much to see a photograph of Miss Chyne,” said Jocelyn, who had, apparently, not been listening.
“I hope some day you will see herself, at home in England. For you have no abiding city here.”
“Only a few more years now. Has she—are her parents living?”
“No, they are both dead. Indian people they were. Indian people have a tragic way of dying young. Millicent lives with her aunt, Lady Cantourne. And Lady Cantourne ought to have married my respected father.”
“Why did she not do so?”
He shrugged his shoulders—paused—sat up and flicked a large moth off the arm of his chair. Then,
“Goodness only knows,” he said. “Goodness, and themselves. I suppose they found it out too late. That is one of the little risks of life.”
She answered nothing.
“Do you think,” he went on, “that there will be a special Hell in the Hereafter for parents who have sacrificed their children's lives to their own ambition? I hope there will be.”
“I have never given the matter the consideration it deserves,” she answered. “Was that the reason? Is Lady Cantourne a more important person than Lady Meredith?”
“Yes.”
She gave a little nod of comprehension, as if he had raised a curtain for her to see into his life—into the far perspective of it, reaching back into the dim distance of fifty years before. For our lives do reach back into the lives of our fathers and grandfathers; the beginnings made there come down into our daily existence, shaping our thought and action. That which stood between Sir John Meredith and his son was not so much the present personality of Millicent Chyne as the past shadows of a disappointed life, an unloved wife and an unsympathetic mother. And these things Jocelyn Gordon knew while she sat, gazing with thoughtful eyes, wherein something lived and burned of which she was almost ignorant—gazing through the tendrils of the creeping flowers that hung around them.
At last Jack Meredith rose briskly, watch in hand, and Jocelyn came back to things of earth with a quick gasping sigh which took her by surprise.
“Miss Gordon, will you do something for me?”
“With pleasure.”
He tore a leaf from his pocket-book, and, going to the table, he wrote on the paper with a pencil pendent at his watch-chain.
“The last few days,” he explained while he wrote, “have awakened me to the lamentable fact that human life is rather an uncertain affair.”
He came towards her, holding out the paper.
“If you hear—if anything happens to me, would you be so kind as to write to Millicent and tell her of it? That is the address.”
She took the paper, and read the address with a dull sort of interest.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, if you like. But—nothing must happen to you.”
There was a slight unsteadiness in her voice, which made her stop suddenly. She did not fold the paper, but continued to read the address.
“No,” he said, “nothing will. But would you not despise a man who could not screw up his courage to face the possibility?”
He wondered what she was thinking about, for she did not seem to hear him.
A clock in the drawing-room behind them struck the half-hour, and the sound seemed to recall her to the present.
“Are you going now?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered, vaguely puzzled. “Yes, I must go now.”
She rose, and for a moment he held her hand. He was distinctly conscious of something left unsaid—of many things. He even paused on the edge of the verandah, trying to think what it was that he had to say. Then he pushed aside the hanging flowers and passed out.
“Good-bye!” he said over his shoulder.
Her lips moved, but he heard no sound. She turned with a white, drawn face and sat down again. The paper was still in her hand. She consulted it again, reading in a whisper:
“Millicent Chyne—Millicent!”
She turned the paper over and studied the back of it—almost as if she was trying to find what there was behind that name.
Through the trees there rose and fell the music of the distant surf. Somewhere near at hand a water-wheel, slowly irrigating the rice-fields, creaked and groaned after the manner of water-wheels all over Africa. In all there was that subtle sense of unreality—that utter lack of permanency which touches the heart of the white exile in tropic lands, and lets life slip away without allowing the reality of it to be felt.
The girl sat there with the name before her—written on the little slip of paper—the only memento he had left her.
'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,Another thing to fall.
One of the peculiarities of Africa yet to be explained is the almost supernatural rapidity with which rumour travels. Across the whole breadth of this darkest continent a mere bit of gossip has made its way in a month. A man may divulge a secret, say, at St. Paul de Loanda, take ship to Zanzibar, and there his own secret will be told to him.
Rumour met Maurice Gordon almost at the outset of his journey northward.
“Small-pox is raging on the Ogowe River,” they told him. “The English expedition is stricken down with it. The three leaders are dead.”
Maurice Gordon had not lived four years on the West African coast in vain. He took this for what it was worth. But if he had acquired scepticism, he had lost his nerve. He put about and sailed back to Loango.
“I wonder,” he muttered, as he walked up from the beach to his office that same afternoon—“I wonder if Durnovo is among them?”
And he was conscious of a ray of hope in his mind. He was a kind-hearted man, in his way, this Maurice Gordon of Loango; but he could not disguise from himself the simple fact that the death of Victor Durnovo would be a distinct convenience and a most desirable relief. Even the best of us—that is to say, the present writer and his reader—have these inconvenient little feelings. There are people who have done us no particular injury, to whom we wish no particular harm, but we feel that it would be very expedient and considerate of them to die.
Thinking these thoughts, Maurice Gordon arrived at the factory and went straight to his own office, where he found the object of them—Victor Durnovo—sitting in consumption of the office sherry.
Gordon saw at once that the rumour was true. There was a hunted unwholesome look in Durnovo's eyes. He looked shaken, and failed to convey a suggestion of personal dignity.
“Hulloa!” exclaimed the proprietor of the decanter. “You look a bit chippy. I have been told there is small-pox up at Msala.”
“So have I. I've just heard it from Meredith.”
“Just heard it—is Meredith down here too?”
“Yes, and the fool wants to go back to-night. I have to meet him on the beach at four o'clock.”
Maurice Gordon sat down, poured out for himself a glass of sherry, and drank it thoughtfully.
“Do you know, Durnovo,” he said emphatically, “I have my doubts about Meredith being a fool.”
“Indeed!” with a derisive laugh.
“Yes.”
Maurice Gordon looked over his shoulder to see that the door was shut.
“You'll have to be very careful,” he said. “The least slip might let it all out. Meredith has a quiet way of looking at one which disquiets me. He might find out.”
“Not he,” replied Durnovo confidently, “especially if we succeed; and we shall succeed—by God we shall!”
Maurice Gordon made a little movement of the shoulders, as indicating a certain uneasiness, but he said nothing.
There was a pause of considerable duration, at the end of which Durnovo produced a paper from his pocket and threw it down.
“That's good business,” he said.
“Two thousand tusks,” murmured Maurice Gordon. “Yes, that's good. Through Akmed, I suppose?”
“Yes. We can outdo these Arabs at their own trade.”
An evil smile lighted up Durnovo's sallow face. When he smiled, his dropping, curtain-like moustache projected in a way that made keen observers of the human face wonder what his mouth was like.
Gordon, who had been handling the paper with the tips of his finger, as if it were something unclean, threw it down on the table again.
“Ye—es,” he said slowly; “but it does not seem to dirty black hands as it does white. They know no better.”
“Lord!” ejaculated Durnovo. “Don't let us begin the old arguments all over again. I thought we settled that the trade was there; we couldn't prevent it, and therefore the best thing is to make hay while the sun shines, and then clear out of the country.”
“But suppose Meredith finds out?” reiterated Maurice Gordon, with a lamentable hesitation that precedes loss.
“If Meredith finds out, it will be the worse for him.”
A certain concentration of tone aroused Maurice Gordon's attention, and he glanced uneasily at his companion.
“No one knows what goes on in the heart of Africa,” said Durnovo darkly. “But we will not trouble about that; Meredith won't find out.”
“Where is he now?”
“With your sister, at the bungalow. A lady's man—that is what he is.”
Victor Durnovo was smarting under a sense of injury which was annoyingly indefinite. It was true that Jack Meredith had come at a very unpropitious moment; but it was equally clear that the intrusion could only have been the result of accident. It was really a case of the third person who is no company, with aggravated symptoms. Durnovo had vaguely felt in the presence of either a subtle possibility of sympathy between Jocelyn Gordon and Jack Meredith. When he saw them together, for only a few minutes as it happened, the sympathy rose up and buffeted him in the face, and he hated Jack Meredith for it. He hated him for a certain reposeful sense of capability which he had at first set down as conceit, and later on had learnt to value as something innate in blood and education which was not conceit. He hated him because his gentlemanliness was so obvious that it showed up the flaws in other men, as the masterpiece upon the wall shows up the weaknesses of the surrounding pictures. But most of all he hated him because Jocelyn Gordon seemed to have something in common with the son of Sir John Meredith—a world above the head of even the most successful trader on the coast—a world in which he, Victor Durnovo, could never live and move at ease.
Beyond this, Victor Durnovo cherished the hatred of the Found Out. He felt instinctively that behind the courteous demeanour of Jack Meredith there was an opinion—a cool, unbiassed criticism—of himself, which Meredith had no intention of divulging.
On hearing that Jack was at the bungalow with Jocelyn, Maurice Gordon glanced at the clock and wondered how he could get away from his present visitor. The atmosphere of Jack Meredith's presence was preferable to that diffused by Victor Durnovo. There was a feeling of personal safety and dignity in the very sound of his voice which set a weak and easily-led man upon his feet.
But Victor Durnovo had something to say to Gordon which circumstances had brought to a crisis.
“Look here,” he said, leaning forward and throwing away the cigarette he had been smoking. “This Simiacine scheme is going to be the biggest thing that has ever been run on this coast.”
“Yes,” said Gordon, with the indifference that comes from non-participation.
“And I'm the only business man in it,” significantly.
Gordon nodded his head, awaiting further developments.
“Which means that I could work another man into it. I might find out that we could not get on without him.”
The black eyes seemed to probe the good-natured, sensual face of Maurice Gordon, so keen, so searching was their glance.
“And I would be willing to do it—to make that man's fortune—provided—that he was—my brother-in-law.”
“What the devil do you mean?” asked Gordon, setting down the glass that was half raised to his lips.
“I mean that I want to marry—Jocelyn.”
And the modern school of realistic, mawkishly foul novelists, who hold that Love excuseth all, would have taken delight in the passionate rendering of the girl's name.
“Want to marry Jocelyn, do you?” answered Maurice, with a derisive little laugh. On the first impulse of the moment he gave no thought to himself or his own interests, and spoke with undisguised contempt. He might have been speaking to a beggar on the roadside.
Durnovo's eyes flashed dangerously, and his tobacco-stained teeth clenched for a moment over his lower lip.
“That is my desire—and intention.”
“Look here, Durnovo!” exclaimed Gordon. “Don't be a fool! Can't you see that it is quite out of the question?”
He attempted weakly to dismiss the matter by leaning forward on his writing-table, taking up his pen, and busying himself with a number of papers.
Victor Durnovo rose from his chair so hastily that in a flash Maurice Gordon's hand was in the top right-hand drawer of his writing-table. The good-natured blue eyes suddenly became fixed and steady. But Durnovo seemed to make an effort over himself, and walked to the window, where he drew aside the woven-grass blind and looked out into the glaring sunlight. Still standing there, he turned and spoke in a low, concentrated voice:
“No,” he said, “I can't see that it is out of the question. On the contrary, it seems only natural that she should marry the man who is her brother's partner in many a little—speculation.”
Maurice Gordon, sitting there, staring hopelessly into the half-breed's yellow face, saw it all. He went back in a flash of recollection to many passing details which had been unnoted at the time—details which now fitted into each other like the links of a chain—and that chain was around him. He leapt forward in a momentary opening of the future, and saw himself ruined, disgraced, held up to the execration of the whole civilised world. He was utterly in this man's power—bound hand and foot. He could not say him no. And least of all could he say no to this demand, which had roused all the latent chivalry, gentlemanliness, brotherly love, that was in him. Maurice Gordon knew that Victor Durnovo possessed knowledge which Jocelyn would consider cheap at the price of her person.
There was one way out of it. His hand was still on the handle of the top right-hand drawer. He was a dead shot. His finger was within two inches of the stock of a revolver. One bullet for Victor Durnovo, another for himself. Then the old training of his school days—the training that makes an upright, honest gentleman—asserted itself, and he saw the cowardice of it. There was time enough for that later, when the crisis came. In the meantime, if the worst came to the worst, he could fight to the end.
“I don't think,” said Durnovo, who seemed to be following Gordon's thoughts, “that the idea would be so repellent to your sister as you seem to think.”
And a sudden ray of hope shot athwart the future into which his listener was staring. It might be so. One can never tell with women. Maurice Gordon had had considerable experience of the world, and, after all, he was only building up hope upon precedent. He knew, as well as you or I, that women will dance and flirt with—even marry—men who are not gentlemen. Not only for the moment, but as a permanency, something seems to kill their perception of a fact which is patent to every educated man in the room; and one never knows what it is. One can only surmise that it is that thirst for admiration which does more harm in the world than the thirst for alcoholic stimulant which we fight with societies and guilds, oaths and little snips of ribbon.
“The idea never entered my head,” said Gordon.
“It has never been out of mine,” replied Durnovo, with a little harsh laugh which was almost pathetic. “I don't want you to do anything now,” he went on more gently. It was wonderful how well he knew Maurice Gordon. The suggested delay appealed to one side of his nature, the softened tone to another. “There is time enough. When I come back I will speak of it again.”
“You have not spoken to her?”
“No, I have not spoken to her.”
Maurice Gordon shook his head.
“She is a queer girl,” he said, trying to conceal the hope that was in his voice. “She is cleverer than me, you know, and all that. My influence is very small, and would scarcely be considered.
“But your interests would,” suggested Durnovo. “Your sister is very fond of you, and—I think I have one or two arguments to put forward which she would recognise as uncommonly strong.”
The colour which had been returning slowly to Maurice Gordon's face now faded away again. His lips were dry and shrivelled as if he had passed through a sirocco.
“Mind,” continued Durnovo reassuringly, “I don't say I would use them unless I suspected that you were acting in opposition to my wishes.”
Gordon said nothing. His heart was throbbing uncomfortably—it seemed to be in his throat.
“I would not bring forward those arguments except as a last resource,” went on Victor Durnovo, with the deliberate cruelty of a tyrant. “I would first point out the advantages; a fourth share in the Simiacine scheme would make you a rich man—above suspicion—independent of the gossip of the market-place.”
Maurice Gordon winced visibly, and his eyes wavered as if he were about to give way to panic.
“You could retire and go home to England—to a cooler climate. This country might get too hot for your constitution—see?”
Durnovo came back into the centre of the room and stood by the writing-table. His attitude was that of a man holding a whip over a cowering dog.
He took up his hat and riding-whip with a satisfied little laugh, as if the dog had cringingly done his bidding.
“Besides,” he said, with a certain defiance of manner, “I may succeed without any of that—eh?”
“Yes,” Gordon was obliged to admit with a gulp, as if he were swallowing his pride, and he knew that in saying the word he was degrading his sister—throwing her at this man's feet as the price of his honour.
With a half-contemptuous nod Victor Durnovo turned, and went away to keep his appointment with Meredith.