“Impossible! Somewhere else!”
He tried to remember where he had put the thing; but those provoked whispers of memory were not encouraging. Foraging in every receptacle and nook big enough to contain a revolver, he came slowly to the conclusion that it was not in that room. Neither was it in the other. The whole bungalow consisted of the two rooms and a profuse allowance of verandah all round. Heyst stepped out on the verandah.
“It’s Wang, beyond a doubt,” he thought, staring into the night. “He has got hold of it for some reason.”
There was nothing to prevent that ghostly Chinaman from materialising suddenly at the foot of the stairs, or anywhere, at any moment, and toppling him over with a dead sure shot. The danger was so irremediable that it was not worth worrying about, any more than the general precariousness of human life. Heyst speculated on this added risk. How long had he been at the mercy of a slender yellow finger on the trigger? That is, if that was the fellow’s reason for purloining the revolver.
“Shoot and inherit,” thought Heyst. “Very simple!” Yet there was in his mind a marked reluctance to regard the domesticated grower of vegetables in the light of a murderer.
“No, it wasn’t that. For Wang could have done it any time this last twelve months or more.”
Heyst’s mind had worked on the assumption that Wang had possessed himself of the revolver during his own absence from Samburan; but at that period of his speculation his point of view changed. It struck him with the force of manifest certitude that the revolver had been taken only late in the day, or on that very night. Wang, of course—But why? So there had been no danger in the past. It was all ahead.
“He has me at his mercy now,” thought Heyst, without particular excitement.
The sentiment he experienced was curiosity. He forgot himself in it; it was as if he were considering somebody else’s strange predicament. But even that sort of interest was dying out when, looking to his left, he saw the accustomed shapes of the other bungalows looming in the night, and remembered the arrival of the thirsty company in the boat. Wang would hardly risk such a crime in the presence of other white men. It was a peculiar instance of the “safety in numbers” principle, which somehow was not much to Heyst’s taste.
He went in gloomily, and stood over the empty drawer in deep and unsatisfactory thought. He had just made up his mind that he must breathe nothing of this to the girl, when he heard her voice behind him. She had taken him by surprise, but he resisted the impulse to turn round at once under the impression that she might read his trouble in his face. Yes, she had taken him by surprise; and for that reason the conversation which began was not exactly as he would have conducted it if he had been prepared for her pointblank question. He ought to have said at once: “I’ve missed nothing.” It was a deplorable thing that he should have let it come so far as to have her ask what it was he missed. He closed the conversation by saying lightly:
“It’s an object of very small value. Don’t worry about it—it isn’t worth while. The best you can do is to go and lie down again, Lena.”
Reluctant she turned away, and only in the doorway asked:
“And you?”
“I think I shall smoke a cheroot on the verandah. I don’t feel sleepy for the moment.”
“Well, don’t be long.”
He made no answer. She saw him standing there, very still, with a frown on his brow, and slowly dropped the curtain.
Heyst did really light a cheroot before going out again on the verandah. He glanced up from under the low eaves, to see by the stars how the night went on. It was going very slowly. Why it should have irked him he did not know, for he had nothing to expect from the dawn; but everything round him had become unreasonable, unsettled, and vaguely urgent, laying him under an obligation, but giving him no line of action. He felt contemptuously irritated with the situation. The outer world had broken upon him; and he did not know what wrong he had done to bring this on himself, any more than he knew what he had done to provoke the horrible calumny about his treatment of poor Morrison. For he could not forget this. It had reached the ears of one who needed to have the most perfect confidence in the rectitude of his conduct.
“And she only half disbelieves it,” he thought, with hopeless humiliation.
This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no desire to do anything—neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the revolver nor to find out from the strangers who they were, and how their predicament had come about. He flung his glowing cigar away into the night. But Samburan was no longer a solitude wherein he could indulge in all his moods. The fiery parabolic trail the cast-out stump traced in the air was seen from another verandah at a distance of some twenty yards. It was noted as a symptom of importance by an observer with his faculties greedy
