Part 2

‘We had to tell Synge a yarn about Wasp’s death. I’ve forgotten how it went now, but I remember it was very artistic and untrue, and the whitest sort of a lie. Well, I’m tired of yarning, and that’s the whole show, and now perhaps you understand why my wife looked so queer to-night, and why’--he broke off, and tapped the butt end of the revolver. There was a long silence, which Clemenson broke with:

‘You don’t mean to say that you can go on living here with the possibility of that happening again?’

‘Oh! This is different; Luma was specially designed by a beneficent Providence for lone madness. Personally I don’t admit the possibility--wouldn’t do, you know,’ he shuddered,--‘and forewarned is forearmed; besides, these things are with the Fates, and if it _should_ come about, it’s better with _us_ than with people who don’t know and wouldn’t understand, and--we’re fond of Synge.’

Clemenson lay back and whistled softly, and the three sat on in silence and watched the grey turn to red, and the glow steal from over the lagoon, flecking the green growing things with light, and chasing the sentinel stars back into their boxes; and they listened to the murmurs of the wakening island world, till the splash of oars in the narrow winding river hard by warned the globe-trotters that the time for departure was come.

‘Time’s up,’ said Hay, ‘there’s Missa Tanner and his boat,’ and he pointed through the red clusters of the flamboyante trees to the tall figure of a Fijian coming up the bank of the stream towards the house. Taplin rose and stretched himself, then he walked over to Hay and shook him hard by the hand.

‘You’re a good chap,’ he said, ‘a thundering good chap; and your wife’s a brick--tell her so.’

‘Thanks,’ said Hay.

Half an hour later, the boat, held in the stream by the oars of the convict crew, waited, while from the stern-sheets the two globe-trotters said good-bye to their host.

‘Remember, you fellows, nobody’s ever heard a word of that yarn--you won’t forget that?’

‘All right, old chap,’ said Clemenson; ‘but I say, just one thing: how do you account for it? Wasn’t it temporary insanity, pure and simple?’

‘Certainly not; that I’ll take my solemn Dick--but I don’t account for it, and I don’t try to; all I know is, as Judy says: “Synge Sahib run amok.”’

* * * * *

The boat drifted away down the stream to join the steamer lying out beyond the line of white reef. The globe-trotters lay back in the stern silently, and from across the lagoon as they watched, the group of houses grew smaller and smaller through the palm-groves, and the sugar plantations, beginning to teem with working life and labour, faded into a blurr.

Presently Clemenson, still looking backward, said, with a sigh, ‘By gum!’

Taplin nodded.

DICK DENVER’S IDEA

‘A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, The more you beat ’em the better they be.’

This was always a good lie; there is such an amount of truth in it.

SCENE I

‘You are quite mistaken, I didn’t speak to him.’

‘That’s a lie! I saw you myself,--and I tell you, if you can’t behave yourself better than to go talking to a blackguard adventurer like that, you stay down here till this d----d voyage is over.’

The brutal voice, raised in anger, subsided into a sort of growl; the first, a woman’s, was silent.

‘Why don’t you answer? Curse it, d’you think it’s your “duty,”’ with a sneer, ‘to stand there like a mummy? By God, a mummy’s a fool to you!’ The man’s voice rose again in a harsh crescendo.

Dick Denver, leaning against the ship’s side, involuntarily took his cigar from his lips, and ground his teeth.

‘I judge domestic felicity has its shady side,’ he muttered, with a soul-satisfying drawl; ‘thank the Almighty for His infinite mercies!’--presumably referring to his own unencumbered condition.

‘Poor little woman, she looked very sweet at dinner. Gosh! _I_ was the blackguard adventurer!’ He laughed softly, and shrugged his shoulders.

‘What an everlasting brute the fellow is; that unfortunate woman must have considerable of a bad time. Ah! Well,--no affair of yours, Dick, my son.’

He turned, and from over the ship’s side watched the rings of smoke curling away from his cigar. A rustle as of silken garments caught his ear, and over his shoulder he saw a woman’s figure coming from the hatchway. Standing back in shadow, he watched her move listlessly towards a long deck chair, half-way between him and the hatch. He could catch a long-drawn sigh, half a sob, and see the shiver of the slight form as she sank into it. A whisper came floating along the deck to where he stood. ‘God! How I hate him! How I hate him! How long? How long?’

Dick Denver, vagabond, adventurer, gambler--what you will--was a man with a soft heart, and a curious hardened inability to witness distress without a desire to offer his help, which, owing to his manner of life, was generally found to be worse than useless. Watching her as she lay with profile half-turned from him, her chin resting dejectedly in her hand, the fair hair clustering low on her white forehead, and a pitiful droop in the corner of the little mouth,--he was conscious of a desire, gradually concentrating in the toe of his boot, to kick the originator of so much unhappiness. As he leant forward for a better look, a puff of wind caught the brim of his large felt hat, and blew it along the deck to the chair where she was sitting. Glad of the excuse, he moved towards her. She turned her head, and a gleam from the moon, half-hidden in the hurrying clouds, lit up a sweet pale face with deep grey eyes. A word of apology, and he bent forward to pick up his hat, catching a glimpse, as he did so, of a tear on her cheek. A great compassion smote his vagabond heart. He straightened himself and said:

‘Aren’t you cold, sitting up here so late?’

A soft musical voice was one of Mr Denver’s chief accomplishments; it was useful at poker, and was found attractive even by victims.

‘Oh! no, thank you; see, I have this shawl,’ pointing to a flimsy concoction of silk and lace that hung over the arm of the chair in a sufficiently useless way. Without a word he took it up, and with the deftest fingers--was not Mr Denver a dealer of the first water?--wrapped it round the shoulders and slender throat. A little smile, half surprise, half thanks, was his reward.

‘The dew’s very heavy in these seas. Guess my cigar’ll bother you?’

‘Oh, no, not in the least, thank you. Don’t throw it away,’ as Dick made a motion in that direction. Thankfully retaining it, he stretched his length on the next chair, and emitted silent but contented puffs.

An attractive length, sinewy but slight; under the shady hat a drawn, clean-cut, clean-shaven face, bronzed from original fairness to a deep tan; lazily veiled grey eyes, rather deep-set, and a firm mouth--all these things Dick turned to his companion, and spake in his most musical and least nasal voice. She listened with pleasure, but with an apparent and growing uneasiness, and with ear strained to catch the least sound of an approach from the cabin; and, in spite of the nonchalance of his voice and attitude, Mr Denver was no less on the strain than she; ‘for,’ thought he, ‘the powers forbid that I cause her to have more abuse from my friend below.’

The moon had burst through the clouds and was flooding the deck with silver light, and Dick improved the shining hour. The ship was bound for the West Indies; he discoursed of the islands and his own experiences there, and she listened, with an evident interest in spite of her fears. Never yet was woman (or man either, for the matter of that) uninterested when Dick Denver talked, which he did but seldom; his voice, as he might have phrased it himself, was ‘kind of seductive.’ Presently, however, he rose, and hat in hand, said:

‘You’ll pardon me, but I guess you’d better go down; your shawl’s quite wet.’

She rose with a little shiver, held out her hand without a word, and turning, went down the hatchway with the same listless, dejected step as before. Dick watched her go, pushed his hat high up on his head, and whistled softly and expressively; then he stooped suddenly, raising himself again with a handkerchief in his hand, the corners of which he examined with unscrupulous care till he read a name. Holding it softly in his hand, he pitched away the end of his cigar. Presently he began whistling again. Nobody ever heard Mr Denver whistle, except in moments of profound thought; evidently he was cogitating deeply. After a minute or two he took a pack of cards out of his pocket, and caressing them with his unoccupied hand, raised his head and voice, and spake to the moon with a meditative drawl:

‘’Pears I can feel kind of a sorrow for the animal!’ He then put the handkerchief in his breast-pocket and idled down the hatch. Dick Denver was always solitary in his habits, and made a point of a cabin to himself, otherwise his conduct that night with a small lace pocket-handkerchief might have been considered somewhat out of keeping with the character of a professional black sheep. It is impossible to disguise the fact that Mr Denver, in spite of his notorious insouciance, was an impressionable man.

SCENE II

The ship’s saloon, fitfully lighted by the swinging lamp with a green shade, furnished a picturesque framing for the two figures it contained. Mr Dick Denver, in loose garments of spotless white, sat leaning carelessly back in one chair, with his legs resting on another; a cigar in his mouth, his hands, with the cards in them, from habit well held up, and the usual indifferent look upon his face. A great contrast was the man sitting on the other side of the long, narrow saloon table. Major Massinger, late of Her Majesty’s Service, a large, bull-necked man with eyes like a cod fish, in a white mess jacket and scarlet cummerbund, was sitting forward, burying a somewhat red face in a beaker of brandy and soda. A box of cigars and picquet markers testified to a long evening’s play, the last indeed of a series. To those who knew him, the gallant Major’s boisterous joviality would have betokened a winning night. His luck was ‘in,’ even to and beyond Dick’s bottom dollar, but this beyondness, which might have been somewhat disquieting to his opponent, was not to be gathered from Dick’s impassive face.

‘Eleven o’clock--shall we conclude?’ said the latter.

‘Not a bit of it, unless you’re afraid of the luck?’

Dick answered by an amused look and a shrug of his shoulders, but he said:

‘Won’t you disturb your wife if you stay here much longer?’

‘D----n my wife; you’ve evidently never been spliced, or you wouldn’t be so beastly particular.’

Massinger turned as he said this to open another bottle of soda, and missed the ugly look in Dick’s half-shut eyes.

‘All serene, then,’ said the latter--‘guess I owe you twelve hundred and fifty dollars; well, now, I’ll play you double or quits, the best of three games.’

‘What’s that in pounds? Two fifty, isn’t it? Very good! Go ahead, my sportsman; double or quits, five hundred or nothing.’

Dick shuffled the cards and cut them; a breeze stole in at the open skylight, and sighed fitfully through the saloon, and as it died away, his sharp ears caught the ‘frou frou’ of a silk dress descending the hatch.

‘One moment,’ he said--‘reckon I’ll just shut that door; there’s kind of a hurricane playing around here;’ and, rising quickly, he moved to the saloon door and stood there a moment, hat in hand, as a slender white figure passed down the stairs. Her hand rested a moment in his as she glided by, and Mr Denver shut the door and returned to his seat. Massinger, manufacturing his fourth drink, saw nothing of this by-play, and the game was resumed. But the tide had turned, and Massinger was ‘rubiconed’ twice running.

‘As you was before you was! Look here, Denver, can’t end up like this, you know--it’s too infernal slow;’ his voice was getting thick and his hand shook somewhat.

‘Mussh’t see the luck through, y’know, somehow’n other--no craning.’

Dick, a covert sneer on his face, was far too considerate to disappoint him, and once again the cards were shuffled and dealt; the Major more boisterous, Dick more impassive than ever. With the end of the partie came the transference of £200 in notes from Massinger’s pocket-book to Mr Denver’s. Undaunted, the Major slapped the latter on the back, declaring him thickly to be a jolly good sportsman.

‘Have my revenge to-morrow night,--too tight now,’ said he.

‘Yes,’ assented Dick, cheerfully, ‘but I guess we get to St Martin to-morrow, and I leave the ship.’

‘Oh, hang it! Never mind; I suppose we stay there a bit, eh?’

‘Two days,’ said Dick.

‘All right! I’ll play you on shore. Is there any solitary thing to see in the d----d hole? My wife always wants to see everything, confound her!’

Mr Denver apparently paid no heed to this remark; he was sitting tilted back in his chair, his hat slouched over his brows, and only the slight twitching of the hand holding the pocket-book, and a curious smouldering fire in his half-closed eyes, showed that a struggle was going on in his mind. Presently, with a sudden jerk, he returned to a right-angled position, and stared straight at Massinger. The man looked particularly like a cod-fish at that moment, and breathed heavily. Dick shivered slightly and disgustedly. Through the open skylight above the wind could be heard sighing in the sails, ‘God! How I hate him! How long? How long?’ That was the refrain it took. A cold look of purpose and resolution settled in Dick’s eyes--the crystallisation of a vague idea.

‘Why, certainly no, not the smallest use! ’Pears to me as if there might be a chance,’ he muttered unintelligibly to himself; and fingering the pocket-book in his hand, he looked at the man opposite with a calculating eye.

‘What’s the matter with you? You’re drunker than I am,’ said the latter. ‘I ask you simply if there’s anything to see in the island, and, begad, you’re jibbering like a boiled owl.’ He stooped unsteadily to reach his glass under the table.

Mr Denver’s look was that of one who measures the distance for a spring.

‘Malūa! Malūa!’ (which is by interpretation ‘Go easy’). ‘I guess it can be done,’ he drawled softly to himself. ‘Anything to see? No--o. Stop, though,’--to the intelligent eye, as he drew himself together in his chair, the spring was very near now--‘I guess I’m wrong all the time, there _is_ something almighty curious to see, for those who have the sand.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We--ell, it mightn’t interest _you_, but it’s a place they call “La boîte du diable”--kind of a cavern in the side of a hill. Considerable few people have been to see it, and none stayed very long. Reckon _you_ won’t care about it.’

An indescribable sneer was in Mr Denver’s voice, and the Major, though far gone, was not _too_ far gone to seize upon it as an insult.

‘You mean, I wouldn’t dare,’ he said, huskily. ‘Confound you, sir, d’you think I’ve not got as much pluck as you?’

‘Guess not,’ said Dick, drily.

‘D----n you, sir!’ said Massinger, furiously; ‘I’ll bet you that £200 I’ve just paid you, I go to that hole, whatever it is, and stay there as long or longer than you do.’

For answer, Mr Denver rose slowly.

‘Put it in writing,’ he said, and, producing pen and paper out of his pocket, he reached down the saloon ink-bottle, and pushed them over to Massinger. The latter, quite sobered, stared a minute at his nonchalant companion, then sat down, and without saying a word penned the following lines in a shaky hand:

‘“I bet Mr Dick Denver the sum of £200 that I visit with him a condemned hole called ‘La boîte du diable,’ and stay there as long or longer than he does.”

‘Will that do?’

‘Play or pay,’ added Mr Denver, calmly.

‘“Play or pay.”

‘“Albert Massinger, October 9th, 188-”--he signed his name, and threw it across to Dick, who signed his own, and pocketed the document.

‘Guess I’ll call for you after dinner at your hotel,’ he said; ‘might be happier with pistols, it’s kind of a skeery place. Good-night,’ he nodded, and without another word, lounged up on to the silent deck, the suspicion of an unholy smile flickering on his impassive features.

SCENE III

The night was dark, and the two figures taking a winding way up the narrow hillside path had much ado to keep from going astray. The leader, ploughing along, head down, with eyes diligently on the move to save his precious shins, was betrayed by a running accompaniment of his favourite language. He was volubly cursing his folly in having made ‘such a d----d silly bet,’ and Mr Denver for having inveigled him into a fool’s errand. The latter, sauntering along a few steps behind, apparently quite oblivious of his companion, was humming a favourite little tune, and turning from time to time to look down on the twinkling lights of the little town scattered here and there amid the tall stems of the palms outlined against the further sky. The faint murmur of the surf breaking on the reef seemed to chime in with his mood better than the tune, for he stopped humming, and bent forward to listen. Massinger had exhausted his vocabulary for the present, and was silent also; only the fitful chirping of a cicala and the occasional bark of a dog from below broke the stillness of the tropical night. The moon was just rising over the sea, throwing a long silvery line of light, which gradually spread, as if eager to embrace the land, awaiting it in silent expectancy. The solemnity and stillness of the scene, however, only served to increase the Major’s irritation.

‘Come on,’ he said, impatiently; ‘don’t stand moonstruck there; let’s get this infernal foolishness over as soon as possible. How much further have we got to go up this beastly path? If it’s far I’d sooner pay £500 than go on.’

‘We’re almost there,’ said Dick, and passing his companion, he swung along up the track. In about ten minutes he came to a halt, and said in his soft drawling voice, ‘We turn down here, and in a minute or so we’ll be right there. Then look to your shooting-iron, and harden your heart, and in we go. Malūa, my son,’ he added to himself, ‘it’s no part of the game to “show” a while yet--mustn’t skeer the gentleman;’ he chuckled grimly and audibly.

‘What the devil’s wrong with the infernal place, and why do we want pistols?’ said Massinger, testily; but even as he spoke he drew a revolver from his side pocket. For all answer, Mr Denver led on down a zig-zag path to the left, until brought up sharp by the face of a rocky cliff, grown over with bushes and creepers. After standing there a minute to see that his companion had followed him, he stooped suddenly, raising with his hand a huge, hanging creeper, and dived as it were into the face of the rock. Astonished at his sudden disappearance, Massinger stood a minute before the rock irresolute, but a mocking voice, with that peculiar high drawl, came from within.

‘Reckon you’re going back, Major; is that so?’

With a muttered oath, Massinger raised the creeper, and, imitating his companion, crawled through a hidden opening in the rock, till he found himself standing upright beside Dick in an open space. When his eyes had become somewhat accustomed to the gloom, he saw that they were in a natural vault or chamber, formed in the rock of the hillside, nearly square, and about forty feet from side to side. In the centre was a huge jagged hole of cavernous depth, and above it, a large cleft in the rock ceiling of the vault, letting in a glimpse of the starry heavens. The sides of the walls, of a reddish-grey stone, were damp and clammy, and the air hot and steamy. In the far corner of the cavern, opposite the entrance, was a natural stone seat. When by degrees and uncertain glances he had taken in his surroundings, Massinger looked round for his companion. Mr Denver was seated in a _degagé_ attitude on a stone, with his back to the entrance, carefully selecting a weed from his cigar-case. This he lighted, and got well under weigh, before he said, with the drawl that had become hateful to the other:

‘Nice place, a’nt it, Major? Take a seat; there’s a tolerable spry pew opposite.’

He waved with his cigar to the stone seat. Massinger, though secretly far from comfortable, was not to be outdone in coolness by this Yankee blackguard. Taking a cigarette, he lit it from the other’s cigar, and strolled, with a fine assumption of indifference, to the seat indicated. A long silence followed; the moon was gradually creeping up in the sky, and long ghostly shadows were cast on the floor and walls of the ‘Devil’s Box.’ Massinger’s feelings during this night had been far from enviable; starting after a good dinner, he had looked upon the affair as an amusing freak by which he would save himself the payment of £200. The steep, difficult ascent had thoroughly disillusioned him, and the eerie look of the cavern was fast completing his discomfiture. He was conscious, too, of a vague feeling of distrust as to his companion’s conduct. Why had he brought him to this unearthly hole,--where apparently there was nothing to prevent their staying till Doomsday to decide this fool of a bet. There was something sinister about the entertainment.

As if reading the thoughts that were pressing on his companion’s brain, Mr Denver broke the silence,--

‘Guess you’re feeling up a considerable high tree, Major; this is going to be an interesting occasion for you.’ There was a look as of a cat playing with a mouse about the speaker, and Massinger was not slow to read a menace into the suave tones of the high-pitched voice.

‘What in God’s name is the meanin’ of this foolery?’ he broke out, harshly; ‘why have you brought me here? There’s something behind all this d----d skittlin’, and I’ll trouble you to tell me what it is.’ He rose as he spoke, and took a step with clenched hands towards Dick. The latter did not move.

‘I should mind that little orifice if I were you,’ he said, pointing to the yawning chasm that separated them in the centre, and from the murky depths of which ascended a faintly hissing, bubbling sound as of boiling water. Massinger, who in his excitement had advanced almost to its edge, started back again with an alacrity that showed the unstrung state of his nerves. When he had again dropped into his seat, and was playing nervously with the butt of the revolver in his coat pocket, Mr Denver took up the word.