She moved forward a step.
“What is it you have missed?” she asked again.
Heyst turned his back altogether on the table. The black spokes of darkness over the floor and the walls, joining up on the ceiling in a patch of shadow, were like the bars of a cage about them. It was his turn to ignore a question.
“You woke up in a fright, you say?” he said.
She walked up to him, exotic yet familiar, with her white woman’s face and shoulders above the Malay sarong, as if it were an airy disguise; but her expression was serious.
“No!” she replied. “It was distress, rather. You see, you weren’t there, and I couldn’t tell why you had gone away from me. A nasty dream—the first I’ve had, too, since—”
“You don’t believe in dreams, do you?” asked Heyst.
“I once knew a woman who did. Leastwise, she used to tell people what dreams meant, for a shilling.”
“Would you go now and ask her what this dream means?” inquired Heyst jocularly.
“She lived in Camberwell. She was a nasty old thing!”
Heyst laughed a little uneasily.
“Dreams are madness, my dear. It’s things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.”
“You have missed something out of this drawer,” she said positively.
“This or some other. I have looked into every single one of them and come back to this again, as people do. It’s difficult to believe the evidence of my own senses; but it isn’t there. Now, Lena, are you sure that you didn’t—”
“I have touched nothing in the house but what you have given me.”
“Lena!” he cried.
He was painfully affected by this disclaimer of a charge which he had not made. It was what a servant might have said—an inferior open to suspicion—or, at any rate, a stranger. He was angry at being so wretchedly misunderstood; disenchanted at her not being instinctively aware of the place he had secretly given her in his thoughts.
“After all,” he said to himself, “we are strangers to each other.”
And then he felt sorry for her. He spoke calmly:
“I was about to say, are you sure you have no reason to think that the Chinaman has been in this room tonight?”
“You suspect him?” she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
“There is no one else to suspect. You may call it a certitude.”
“You don’t want to tell me what it is?” she inquired, in the equable tone in which one takes a fact into account.
Heyst only smiled faintly.
“Nothing very precious, as far as value goes,” he replied.
“I thought it might have been money,” she said.
“Money!” exclaimed Heyst, as if the suggestion had been altogether preposterous. She was so visibly surprised that he hastened to add: “Of course, there is some money in the house—there, in that writing-desk, the drawer on the left. It’s not locked. You can pull it right out. There is a recess, and the board at the back pivots; a very simple hiding-place, when you know the way to it. I discovered it by accident, and I keep our store of sovereigns in there. The treasure, my dear, is not big enough to require a cavern.”
He paused, laughed very low, and returned her steady stare.
“The loose silver, some guilders and dollars, I have always kept in that unlocked left drawer. I have no doubt Wang knows what there is in it; but he isn’t a thief, and that’s why I—no, Lena, what I’ve missed is not gold or jewels; and that’s what makes the fact interesting—which the theft of money cannot be.”
She took a long breath, relieved to hear that it was not money. A great curiosity was depicted on her face, but she refrained from pressing him with questions. She only gave him one of her deep-gleaming smiles.
“It isn’t me, so it must be Wang. You ought to make him give it back to you.”
Heyst said nothing to that naive and practical suggestion, for the object that he missed from the drawer was his revolver.
It was a heavy weapon which he had owned for many years and had never used in his life. Ever since the London furniture had arrived in Samburan, it had been reposing in the drawer of the table. The real dangers of life, for him, were not those which could be repelled by swords or bullets. On the other hand, neither his manner nor his appearance looked sufficiently inoffensive to expose him to light-minded aggression.
He could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer in the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly—which was very unusual with him. He had found himself sitting up and extremely wide awake all at once, with the girl reposing by his side, lying with her face away from him, a vague, characteristically feminine form in the dim light. She was perfectly still.
At that season of the year there were no mosquitoes in Samburan, and the sides of the mosquito net were looped up. Heyst swung his feet to the floor, and found himself standing there, almost before he had become aware of his intention to get up. Why he did this he did not know. He didn’t wish to wake her up, and the slight creak of the broad bedstead had sounded very loud to him. He turned round apprehensively and waited for her to move; but she did not stir. While he looked at her, he had a vision of himself lying there too, also fast asleep, and—it
