“You are certain you have not been seen so far?” he asked suddenly.
The motionless head spoke.
“How can I be certain? You told me you wanted me to keep out of the way. I kept out of the way. I didn’t ask your reason. I thought you didn’t want people to know that you had a girl like me about you.”
“What? Ashamed?” cried Heyst.
“It isn’t what’s right, perhaps—I mean for you—is it?”
Heyst lifted his hands, reproachfully courteous.
“I look upon it as so very much right that I couldn’t bear the idea of any other than sympathetic, respectful eyes resting on you. I disliked and mistrusted these fellows from the first. Didn’t you understand?”
“Yes; I did keep out of sight,” she said.
A silence fell. At last Heyst stirred slightly.
“All this is of very little importance now,” he said with a sigh. “This is a question of something infinitely worse than mere looks and thoughts, however base and contemptible. As I have told you, I met Ricardo’s suggestions by silence. As I was turning away he said:
“ ‘If you happen to have the key of that storeroom of yours on you, Mr. Heyst, you may just as well let me have it; I will give it to our Pedro.’
“I had it on me, and I tendered it to him without speaking. The hairy creature was at the door by then, and caught the key, which Ricardo threw to him, better than any trained ape could have done. I came away. All the time I had been thinking anxiously of you, whom I had left asleep, alone here, and apparently ill.”
Heyst interrupted himself, with a listening turn of his head. He had heard the faint sound of sticks being snapped in the compound. He rose and crossed the room to look out of the back door.
“And here the creature is,” he said, returning to the table. “Here he is, already attending to the fire. Oh, my dear Lena!”
She had followed him with her eyes. She watched him go out on the front verandah cautiously. He lowered stealthily a couple of screens that hung between the columns, and remained outside very still, as if interested by something on the open ground. Meantime she had risen in her turn, to take a peep into the compound. Heyst, glancing over his shoulder, saw her returning to her seat. He beckoned to her, and she continued to move, crossing the shady room, pure and bright in her white dress, her hair loose, with something of a sleepwalker in her unhurried motion, in her extended hand, in the sightless effect of her grey eyes luminous in the half-light. He had never seen such an expression in her face before. It had dreaminess in it, intense attention, and something like sternness. Arrested in the doorway by Heyst’s extended arm, she seemed to wake up, flushed faintly—and this flush, passing off, carried away with it the strange transfiguring mood. With a courageous gesture she pushed back the heavy masses of her hair. The light clung to her forehead. Her delicate nostrils quivered. Heyst seized her arm and whispered excitedly:
“Slip out here, quickly! The screens will conceal you. Only you must mind the stair-space. They are actually out—I mean the other two. You had better see them before you—”
She made a barely perceptible movement of recoil, checked at once, and stood still. Heyst released her arm.
“Yes, perhaps I had better,” she said with unnatural deliberation, and stepped out on the verandah to stand close by his side.
Together, one on each side of the screen, they peeped between the edge of the canvas and the verandah-post entwined with creepers. A great heat ascended from the sun-smitten ground, in an ever-rising wave, as if from some secret store of earth’s fiery heart; for the sky was growing cooler already, and the sun had declined sufficiently for the shadows of Mr. Jones and his henchman to be projected towards the bungalow side by side—one infinitely slender, the other short and broad.
The two visitors stood still and gazed. To keep up the fiction of his invalidism, Mr. Jones, the gentleman, leaned on the arm of Ricardo, the secretary, the top of whose hat just came up to his governor’s shoulder.
“Do you see them?” Heyst whispered into the girl’s ear. “Here they are, the envoys of the outer world. Here they are before you—evil intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm. The brute force is at the back. A trio of fitting envoys perhaps—but what about the welcome? Suppose I were armed, could I shoot those two down where they stand? Could I?”
Without moving her head, the girl felt for Heyst’s hand, pressed it, and thereafter did not let it go. He continued, bitterly playful:
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. There is a strain in me which lays me under an insensate obligation to avoid even the appearance of murder. I have never pulled a trigger or lifted my hand on a man, even in self-defence.”
The suddenly tightened grip of her hand checked him.
“They are making a move,” she murmured.
“Can they be thinking of coming here?” Heyst wondered anxiously.
“No, they aren’t coming this way,” she said; and there was another pause. “They are going back to their house,” she reported finally.
After watching them a little longer, she let go Heyst’s hand and moved away from the screen. He followed her into the room.
“You have seen them now,” he began. “Think what it was to me to see them land in the dusk, fantasms from the sea—apparitions, chimaeras! And they persist. That’s the worst of it—they persist. They have no right to be—but they are. They ought to have aroused my fury. But I have refined everything away by this time—anger, indignation, scorn itself. Nothing’s left but disgust. Since you have told me of that abominable calumny, it has become immense—it extends even to myself.” He
