A fortnight had elapsed since that meeting on the palm-clad knoll, and Julian was still an inmate of Desolada. But each day as it came and went--while it only served to intensify his certainty that some strange trickery had been practised at the time when he was gone and when George Ritherdon had stolen him from his dying, or dead, mother's side--served also to convince him that he would never find out the manner in which the deceit had been practised, nor unravel the clue to that deceit. He had, too, almost decided to take his farewell of Desolada and its inmates, to shake the dust of the place off his shoes, and to abandon any idea of endeavouring to obtain further corroboration of his uncle's statement.
For he had come to believe, to fear, that no corroboration was to be found. Every one in British Honduras regarded Sebastian as the undoubted child and absolute heir of the late Charles Ritherdon, while, in addition, there were still scores of persons alive, black and white and half-caste, who remembered the birth of the boy, though not one individual could be discovered who had heard even a whisper of any kidnapping having ever taken place. Once, Julian had thought that a journey to New Orleans and a verification of the copy of his baptismal certificate with the original might be of some use, but on reflection he had decided that this, as against the certificate of Sebastian's baptism in Belize, would be of no help whatever.
"It is indeed a dead wall, a solid rock, against which I am pushing, as Mr. Spranger said," he muttered to himself again and again. "And it is too firm for me. I shall have to retreat--not because I fear my foe, but because that foe has no tangible shape against which to contend."
He had not returned to Desolada on the night that followed his meeting with, first, Sebastian on the knoll and then with Beatrix; he making his appearance at that place about dawn on the following morning. The reason whereof was, that, after passing the whole day with Miss Spranger on that spot (the lunch she had brought with her being amply sufficient to provide an afternoon, or evening, meal), he had insisted on escorting her back to her father's house.
At first she protested against his doing this, she declaring that Jupiter was quite sufficient cavalier for her, but he would take no denial and was firm in his resolve to do so. He did not tell her, though (as perhaps, there was no necessity for him to do, since, if all accounts are true, young ladies are very apt at discovering the inward workings of those whom they like and by whom they are liked), that he regarded this opportunity as a most fortuitous one, and, as such, not to be missed. Who is there amongst us all who, given youth and strength and the near presence of a woman whom we are fast beginning to love with our whole heart, would not sacrifice a night's rest to ride a score of miles by her side? Not one who is worthy to win that woman's love!
So through the tropical night--where high above them blazed the constellations of the Southern Crown, the Peacock, and the Archer, with their incandescentlike glow--those two rode side by side; the negro on ahead and casting many a glance of caution around at bush and shrub and clump of palm and mangrove. Of love they did not speak, for a sufficient reason; each knew that it was growing and blossoming in the other's heart--that it was there! The man's love there--in his heart, not only because of the girl's winsome beauty; but born and created also by the knowledge that she went hand in hand with him in all that he was endeavouring to accomplish; the woman's love engendered by her recognition of his bravery and strength of character. If she had not come to love him before, she did so when he exclaimed that, because the danger was near to and threatening him, he would never desist from the task on which he had embarked.
But love often testifies its existence otherwise than in words, and it did so now--not only in the subdued tones of their voices as they fell on the luscious sultry air of the night, but also in the understanding which they came to as to how they should be in constant communication with each other in the future, so that, if aught of evil befell Julian at Desolada, Beatrix might not be long unaware of the evil.
"Perhaps," Julian said, as now they were drawing near Belize--"perhaps it will not be necessary that I should apprise you each day of my safety, of the fact that everything is all right with me. Therefore----"
"I must know frequently! hear often," Beatrix said, turning her eyes on him. "I must. Oh! Mr. Ritherdon, forty-eight hours will appear an eternity to me, knowing, as I shall know, that you are in that dreadful house. Alone, too, and with none to help you. What may they not attempt against you next!"
"Whatever they attempt," he replied, "will, I believe, be thwarted. I take Paz and Zara--especially Zara, now that you tell me she is a jilted woman--against Sebastian and Madame Carmaux. But, to return to my communications with you."
"Yes," she said, with an inward catching of her breath--"yes, your communications with me.
"Let it be this way. If you do not hear from me at the end of every forty-eight hours, then begin to think that things may be going wrong with me; while if, at the end of a second forty-eight hours, you have still heard nothing from me, well! consider that they have gone very wrong indeed. Shall it be like that?"
"Oh!" the girl exclaimed with almost a gasp, "I am appalled. Appalled even at the thought that such an arrangement, such precautions, should have to be made."
"Of course, they may not be necessary," he said; "after all, we may be misjudging Sebastian."
"We are not," she answered emphatically. "I feel it; I know it. I mistrust that man--I have always disliked him. I feel as sure as it is possible to be that he meditates harm to you. And--and--" she almost sobbed, "what is to be done if the second forty-eight hours have passed, and still I have heard nothing from or of you."
"Then," he said with a light laugh--"then I think I should warn some of those gentry whom we have seen loafing about Belize in a light and tasteful uniform--the constabulary, aren't they?--that a little visit to Desolada might be useful."
"Oh!" Beatrix cried again now, "don't make a joke of it, Mr. Ritherdon! Don't, pray don't. You cannot understand how I feel, nor what my fears are. If four days went by and I heard no tidings of you, I should begin to think that--that----"
"No," he said, interrupting her. "No. Don't think that! Whatever Sebastian may suspect me of knowing, he would not do what you imagine. He would not----"
"Kill you, you would say! Why, then, should he mount you on that horse? And--and was--there no intention of killing you when the coral snake was found in your bed--a deadly, venomous reptile, whose bite is always fatal within the hour--nor when that shot was fired at you?"
"Is there not a chance," Julian said now, asking a question instead of answering one, "that, after all, we are entirely on a wrong tack, granting even that Sebastian is in a false position--a position that by right is mine?"
"What can you mean? How can we be on a false tack?"
"In this way. Even should it be as I suggest, namely, that he is--well, the wrong man, how is it possible that he should be aware of it; above all, how is it possible that he should know that I am aware of it? He has been at Desolada, and held the position of heir to--to--to my father ever since he was a boy, a baby. If wrong has been done, he was not and could not be the doer of it. Therefore, why should he suspect me of being the right man, and consequently wish to injure me?"
"Surely the answer is clear enough," Beatrix replied. "However innocent he may once have been of all knowledge of a wrong having been done, he possesses that knowledge now--in some way. And," the girl went on, turning her face towards him as she spoke, so that he could see her features plainly in the starlight, "he knows that it is to you it has been done. Would not that suffice to make him meditate harm to you?"
"Yet, granting this, how--how can it be? How can he have discovered the wrongdoing. A wrongdoing that his father--his supposed father--died without suspecting."
"Yes, that is it; that is what puzzles me more than all else," Beatrix exclaimed, "that Mr. Ritherdon should have died without suspecting.' That is it. It is indeed marvellous that he could have been imposed upon from first to last."
Then for a time they rode on in silence, each deep in their own thoughts: a silence broken at last by Beatrix saying--
"Whatever the secret is, I am convinced that one other person knows it besides himself."
"Madame Carmaux?"
"Yes, Madame Carmaux. If we could find out what her influence over him is, or rather what makes her so strong an ally of his, then I feel sure that all would be as clear as day."
These conversations caused Julian ample food for meditation as he rode back towards Desolada in the coolness of the dawn--a roseate and primrose hued dawn--after having left Beatrix Spranger at her father's house.
What was Madame Carmaux's influence over Sebastian? Why was she so strong an ally of his? And for answer to his self-communings, he could find only one. The answer that this woman, who had been bereft in one short year of the husband she had hurriedly espoused in her bitterness of desolation as well as of the little infant daughter who had come as a solace to her misery, had transferred all the affection left in her heart to the boy she found at Desolada; no matter whom that boy might be.
An affection that year following year had caused to ripen until, at last, her very existence had become bound up in his. This, combined with the fact that Desolada had been her home, and that home a comfortable one, over which she had ruled as mistress for so many years, was the only answer he could find.
All was very still as he rode into the back part of the mansion where the stables were--for it was now but little after four o'clock, and consequently there was hardly daylight yet--when, unsaddling the mustang himself, he closed the stable door again and prepared to make his way into the house. This was easy enough to do, since, in such a climate, windows were never closed at night, and, beyond the persianas, which could easily be lifted aside, there was no bar to any one's entrance.
Yet early as it was or, as it should be said, perhaps, far advanced as the night was, Sebastian had not yet sought his bed. Instead, he seemed to have decided on taking whatever rest he might require in the great saloon in which he seemed to pass the principal part of his time when at home. He was asleep now in the large Singapore chair he always sat in--it being inside the room at this time instead of outside on the veranda--possibly for fear of any night dews that--even in this climate--will sometimes arise; he being near the table on which was the never-failing bottle of Bourbon whisky. "The young man's companion," as Sebastian had more than once hilariously termed it.
But that was not the only bottle, the only liquid, on the table by his side.
For there stood also by Sebastian's hand a stumpy, neckless bottle which looked as if it might once have been part of the stock-in-trade of some chemist's shop--a bottle which was half full of a liquid of the faintest amber or hay-colour. And, to his astonishment, he likewise saw standing on the table a small retort, a thing he had never supposed was likely to be known to Sebastian.
"Well!" he thought to himself as he moved slowly along the balcony to the open door, not being desirous of waking the sleeping man, "you are indeed a strange man, if 'strange' is the word to apply to you. I wonder what you are dabbling in chemistry for now? Probably no good!"
A fortnight had elapsed, it has been written, since the meeting between Beatrix and Julian on the palm-clad knoll, and during that time the latter had found himself left very much to his own resources by Sebastian. Indeed, Julian was never quite able to make out what became of his "relative" during the day, although at night, when they sat as usual on the veranda, Sebastian generally explained matters by saying that he had been absent at one place or another on business, the "business" consisting of trafficking with other settlers for the sale or purchase of the productions of the various estates. As, however, few people ever came to Desolada, and none as "visitors" in the ordinary sense of the word, Julian had no opportunity of discovering by outside conversation whether the other's statements were accurate or not. Still, as he said to himself, Sebastian's pursuits were no concern whatever of his, and at any rate the latter's absence left him free to do whatever he chose with his own time. To shoot curassows, wild turkeys, and sometimes monkeys, or, at least, to appear to go out shooting them; though, as often as not, the expedition ended at All Pines, to which place Julian made his way every other day to post a letter to Beatrix.
Now, after a fortnight had been spent in this manner, during the whole of which period he had not set his eyes on Madame Carmaux, who still kept her room and was reported to be suffering from a bilious fever, the two men sat upon the veranda of the lower floor after the evening meal had been concluded, both of them having their pipes in their mouths. While, close to Sebastian's hand, was a large tumbler which contained a very good modicum of Bourbon whisky, slightly dashed with water.
"You don't drink at all now," that gentleman said to his cousin, as he always called him. "Don't you like the stuff, or what? If that's what it is, I can get something else, you know, from Belize."
"No," Julian replied, "that is not what it is. But of late, for a week or so now, I have not been feeling well, and perhaps abstinence from that is the best thing," and he nodded his head towards where the Bourbon whisky bottle stood.
"I told you so," Sebastian exclaimed; "only you wouldn't believe me. You were sure to feel seedy sooner or later. Every one does at first, when they come to this precious colony."
"I ought to be pretty well climate-hardened all the same," Julian remarked, "after the places I've been in. Burmah isn't considered quite the sweetest thing in the way of health resorts, yet I got through that all right."
"I hope you are not going to have a fever or anything wrong with your liver. Those are the things people suffer from here, intermittent and remittent fevers especially. I must give you some medicine."
"No, thanks," Julian replied; "I think I can do very well without it at present. Besides, the time has come for me to bring my visit to a close, you know. You have been very kind and hospitable, but there is such a thing as overstaying one's welcome."
To his momentary astonishment, since he quite expected that Sebastian was looking forward to his departure with considerable eagerness and was extremely desirous of seeing the last of him, this announcement was not received at all as he expected. In actual truth, Julian had imagined that his decision would be accepted with the faintest of protests which a host could make, while, instead, he perceived that Sebastian was absolutely overcome with something that, if not dismay, was very like it. His face fell, as the light of the lamp (round which countless moths buzzed and circled in the sickly night air) testified plainly, and he uttered an exclamation that was one of unfeigned disappointment, if not regret.
"Oh!" he said, "but I can't allow that. I can't, indeed. Going away because you feel queer. Nonsense, man! You'll be all right in a day or so. And to go away after a visit of two or three weeks only! Why! when people come such a journey as you have done from England to here, we expect them to stop six months."
"That in any case would be impossible. My leave of absence only covers that space of time, and cannot be exceeded. But," Julian continued, "don't think, all the same, that I am afraid of fever or anything of that sort. That wouldn't frighten me away."
"I can't see what you came for, then. What the deuce," he said, speaking roughly now as though his temper was rising, "could have brought you to Honduras if you weren't going to stay above a month in the place?"
"I wanted to see the place where my father lived," the other replied, and as he did so he watched Sebastian's features carefully. For although, of course, he was supposed to be the son of George Ritherdon who had lived at Desolada once, he thought it most probable that this remark might cause his cousin some disturbance.
Whether it did so or not, he could, however, scarcely tell, since, as he made it, Sebastian, who was relighting his pipe with a match, let the latter fall, and instantly leant forward to pick it up again.
"Oh!" he exclaimed, when he had done so, "of course, if you only wanted to do that, two or three weeks are long enough. Yet, I must say, I think it is an uncommon short stay. However, I suppose even now you don't mean to go off in a wonderful hurry?"
"To-day," said Julian, "is Wednesday. Suppose, as you are so kind, that we fix next Monday for my departure."
"Next Monday. Next Monday," and by the movement of Sebastian's lips, the other could see that he was making some kind of calculation. "Next Monday. Four clear days. Ah!" and his face brightened very much as he spoke. "Well! that's something, isn't it? Four clear days."
Upstairs, when Julian had reached his room, he found himself meditating upon why Sebastian should have seemed so undoubtedly pleased at the knowledge that he was going to stay for another "four clear days."
"We haven't seen such a wonderful lot of each other," he reflected, "except for an hour or so after supper; and as I have spent my time uselessly in mooning about this place and the neighbourhood, he can't suppose that it's very lively for me. Especially as--as there have been risks."
"As--as--as there have been--risks," he repeated a few moments afterwards. Then, while still he sat on in his chair, gazing, as he recognised, vaguely out of the window, he noticed that his mind seemed to have got into a dull, sodden state--that it was not active.
"As--there--have--been risks," he repeated once more. And now he pushed his chair on one side as he rose from it, exclaiming:
"This won't do. There's something wrong with me. As--there--have--no!--no! I don't want to keep on repeating this phrase over and over again. What is the matter with me? Have I got a fever?"
Thinking this, though as he did so he recognised that his head was by no means clear and that he felt dull and heavy, as a man might do who had not slept for some nights, he thought, too, that it would be best for him to go to bed. Doubtless his liver was affected by the climate; doubtless, also, he would be well enough in the morning.
"There is," he said to himself, "a chemist's in the village of All Pines--I will let him to give me a draught in the morning. I wonder if Zara ever takes a draught--I--I--mean Beatrix. What rot I am talking!" he murmured to himself, "and now, to add to other things the lamp is going out."
Whereon he made a step towards where the lamp stood on the table, and turning up the wicks gently saw that, in a moment, the flames were leaping up the glass chimney and blackening it.
"I thought it was going out," he said to himself, turning the wicks down again rapidly; "I seem to be getting blind too. There is no doubt that I have got a fever. Let me see."
As he spoke he put his hand into his trousers pocket to draw out his keys, it being his intention to open his Gladstone bag and get out a little medicine casket he always carried with him when out of England, and especially when in tropical places; and, in doing so, he leant his head a little to the side that the pocket was on, his chin drooping somewhat towards the lapel of his white jacket.
"I suppose," he muttered, "that my sense of smell's affected too, now. Or else--jacket's getting--some beastly old--old--old tropical smell that clings to everything--in--in such countries. Never mind. Here's keys."
He drew them forth, regarding the bunch with a stare as though it was something he was unacquainted with, and then, instead of putting into the lock of the bag the long slim key which is usual, he endeavoured to insert a large one that really belonged to a trunk he had left behind at the shipping office in Belize as not being wanted.
Reflection served, however, to call to his mind that this key was not very likely to open the bag, and at last, after giving an inane smile at the mistake, he succeeded in his endeavour and was able to get out the contents, and to withdraw the little medicine casket.
"Quinine," he said, spelling the word letter by letter as he held the phial under the lamp. "Quinine. That's it. Don't let's make a mistake. Q-u-i-n-i-n-e. That's all right. Can't go wrong now."
By the aid of the contents of the water-bottle and his glass he was enabled to swallow two quinine pills of two grains each, and then he resolved--in a hazy, uncertain kind of way--to go to bed. Whereon, slowly he divested himself of his clothes and, in a mechanical manner, threw back the mosquito curtains. But, whatever might be the matter with him, and however clouded his intellect might be, he was not yet so dense as to forget the strange occupant of that bed which he had once before discovered there.
"Beatrix said," he muttered, "that coral snake kills in an hour. I don't want to die in an hour. Let's see if we've got another guest here to-night."
And, as he had done every night since he had returned to Desolada, he thoroughly explored the bed, doing so, however, on this occasion in a lethargic, heavy manner which caused him to be some considerable time about it.
"Turn to the left to unscrew," he said to himself, recalling some old schoolboy phrase as he stood now by the lamp ready to extinguish it, "to the right to screw. Same, I suppose, to turn up and down. Oh! the revolver. Where's that? May as well have it handy." Whereupon he went over to where he had hung up his jacket and removed the weapon from the inside pocket.
"A nasty smell these tropical places have," he muttered as he did so. "There's the smell of India--no one ever forgets that--and also the smell of Africa. Well! strikes me Honduras can go one better than either of them."
Then he got into bed.
Dizzy, stupefied as he felt, however, it did not seem as if his stupefaction or semi-delirium, or whatever it was which had overcome him, was likely to plunge him into a heavy, dull sleep. Instead, he found himself lying there with his eyes wide open, and, although his brain felt like a lump of lead, while there was a weight at his forehead as if something were pressing on it, he was conscious that one of his senses was very acute--namely, the sense of smell. Either that, or else some very peculiar phase in the fever which he was experiencing, was causing a strange sense of disgust in his nostrils.
"This bed smells just like a temple I went into in Burmah once," he thought to himself. "What the deuce is the matter with me--or it? Anyhow, I can't stand it." And, determined not to endure the unpleasantness any longer, he got up from the bed, while wrapping himself in the dark coverlet he went over to an old rickety sofa that ran along the opposite side of the room and lay down upon it.
And here, at least, the odour was not apparent. The old horsehair bolster and pillow did emit, it is true, the peculiar stuffy flavour which such things will do even in temperate climates; but beyond that nothing else. The acrid, loathsome odour which he had smelt for the first time when he leant his head slightly as he felt for his keys, and which he had perceived in a far more intensified form when he lay down in the bed, was not at all apparent now. It seemed as if he was, at last, likely to fall asleep.
Julian supposed when he was awakened later on, and felt that he was drenched with a warm perspiration which caused his light tropical clothes to stick to him with a hot clammy feeling, that he must have slept for two hours. For now, as he lay on the sofa facing the window, he could see through the slats of the persianas, which he had forgotten to turn down, that, peeping round the window-frame there came an edge of the moon, which he seemed to recollect--dimly, hazily, and indistinctly--had risen late last night.
And that moon--which stole more and more into his view as he regarded it--was casting now a long ray into the bedroom, so that there came across the floor a streak of light of about the breadth of nine inches.
Yet--once his bemused brain had grasped the fact that this ray was there, while, at the same time, that brain was still clear enough to comprehend that every moment the flood of light was becoming larger, so that soon the apartment would be filled with it--he paid no further attention to the matter, nor to the distant rumbling of thunder far away--thunder that told of a tropical storm taking place at a distance. Instead, he was endeavouring to argue silently with himself as to the actual state in which his mind was; as to whether he was in a dreamy kind of delirium, or whether, in spite of any fever that might be upon him, he was still able to distinctly understand his surroundings.
If, as he hoped earnestly, the latter was the case; if he was not delirious, but only numbed by some ailment that had insidiously taken possession of him--then--why then--surely! he was in deadly peril of some immediate attack upon him--upon his life perhaps.
For, outside those persianas there was another light, two other lights glittering in upon him that were not cast by the moon, but that (because now and again her rays were thrown upon them) he discovered to be a pair of eyes. And not the eyes of an animal either, since they glisten in the dark, but, instead, human eyes that glared horribly as now and again the moonbeams caught them.
Only! was it the truth that they were real tangible eyes, or were they but a fantasy of a mind unhinged by fever?
He must know that! And he could only do so by lying perfectly still; by watching.
Those eyes which stared in at him now were low down to the floor of the balcony, even as he seemed to recollect Zara's eyes had been on one occasion during her nocturnal visits to him when he first arrived at Desolada; yet now he knew, felt sure, that they were not Zara's. Why he felt so sure he could not tell, nor in the feverish languor that was upon him, could he even reason with himself as why he did feel so sure. But, at the same time, he told himself, they were not hers. Of that he was certain.
How did they come there, low down--not a foot above the floor of the veranda? Could they indeed be the eyes of an animal in spite of the white eyeballs on which the rays shone with such a sickly gleam; did they belong to some household dog which had chosen this spot for its night's repose? Yet--yet--if such was the case, why did it not sleep curled up or stretched out, instead of peering through the latticework with its eyes close to the slats, as though determined to see all that was in the room and all that was going on in it. No! it could not be that, while, also it was not what he had deemed it might be a few minutes ago--the eyes of a snake. It was impossible, since the eyes of a snake would have been much closer together.
They were--there could be no doubt about it! the eyes of a human being, man or woman. And they were not Zara's. He was sure of that.
But still they glared into the room, glared through the dusky sombreness of the lower part of it, of that part of the floor which, even now, the moonlight was not illuminating. And then to his astonishment he saw, as the light flooded the apartment more and more, that those eyes were staring not at him but towards another portion of the room; towards where the bed stood enveloped in the long hanging folds of the mosquito curtains, which, to his distempered mind, seemed in the weird light of the tropical night to look like the hangings that enshroud a catafalque--a funeral canopy.
His hand, shaky though he knew it was from whatever ailed him, was on his revolver; for a moment or so he lay there asking himself if he should fire at that wizard thing, that creepy mystery outside his room; if he should aim fair between those glistening eyeballs and trust to fortune to kill or disable the mysterious watcher? But still, however, he refrained; for, if his senses were still in his own possession, if his mind was still able to understand anything, it understood that near the bed in which he should have been sleeping had it not been for the evil odours exhaled from it to-night, there was something that might be a more fitting object of his discharge than the creature outside.
"If," he thought to himself, "I am neither mad nor delirious nor drenched with fever, those eyes are watching something in this room, and that something is not myself."
Should he turn his head; could he turn it towards that dark patch behind the mosquito curtains which was not illuminated with the moon's rays? Could he do it as a man turns in his sleep--restlessly--so that in the action there might be nothing which should alarm whatever lurked in the darkness over there; the thing that, having got into his room in the night full of evil intentions towards him, was now itself being watched, suspected, perhaps trapped. Could he do it?
As he meditated thus, feeling sure now that his stupor, his density of mind, was not what it had been--recognising with a feeling of devout thankfulness that, whatever his state might hitherto have been, his mind was now becoming clear and his intellect collected, he prepared to put this determination into practise. He would roll over on to his right side, as he had seen sleepy sailors roll over on to theirs in the watch below; he would roll over too, with his hand securely on the butt of his revolver. And then--if--if, as he felt certain was the case, there was some dark skulking thing hiding behind his bedhead, if he should see another pair of eyes gleaming out in the rays of the moon--why, then, woe befall it! He had had enough of these midnight hauntings from one visitant or another in this house of mystery; he would fire straight at that figure, he would kill it dead, if so it must be, even if it were Sebastian himself.
As he turned, imitating a sleeper's restlessness, as well as he was able, there came two interruptions--interruptions that stayed his hand.
From near the bed--he was right! those eyes outside had been watching something that was inside there!--close to him, across the room, he heard a sound. A sound that was half a one, half an inward catching of the breath, a gasp. Yet so low, so quickly suppressed, that none who had not suspected, none who had not been on the watch for the slightest sign, would have heard or noticed it. But he had heard it!
The other was a noisier, a more palpable interruption. Sebastian, below in the great saloon on the front was singing to himself, loudly and boisterously, and then, equally boisterously, was wishing Madame Carmaux "Good-night." Answering evidently, too, some question, which Julian could not hear put to him by her, and expressing also the hope that she would feel better soon.
"Yet," thought Julian, "she cannot quit her room. It is strange. Strange, too, that she should be up so late. It must be two o'clock, at least."
With a glance from his eye towards the lower part of the window, which still he could see from the position in which he lay, he observed that the mysterious watcher outside was gone. Those eyes, at least, no longer gleamed from low down by the floor; through the slats of the blind he perceived that the spot where they had lately been was now a void. The watcher was gone! But what of the one who had been watched, of the lurking creature that was near his bed, and that had gasped with fear even as he turned over on the sofa? What of that? Well, it was still there. He was alone with it.
His thumb drew back the trigger of the revolver, the well-known click was heard--the click which can never be disguised or silenced. A click that many a man has listened to with mortal agony and terror of soul, knowing that it sounds his knell. Then again on his ears there fell that gasp, that indrawn catching of the breath, which told of a terrified object close by his side.
And it could not be Sebastian who had uttered it; Sebastian, the one person alone who had reason to meditate the worst towards him that one human being can desire for another. It could not be he. For was he not still singing boisterously below in the front of the house? It could not be he. And, Julian reflected, he was about to take a life, the life of some one whom he himself did not know, of some one whose presence in his room even at night, at such an hour of the night, might yet be capable of explanation; that might not, in absolute fact, bode evil to him. Suppose, that after all, it should be Zara, and that again she was there for some purpose of serving his interest as he had told Beatrix he believed she had been more than once before. Suppose that, and that now he should fire and kill her! How would he feel then! What would his remorse be?
No! He would not do it.
Instead, therefore, he whispered the words, "Zara, what is it?"
Even as he did so, even as he spoke, he noticed that a change had come over the room. It was quite dark now; the moon's rays no longer gleamed in; the moon itself was gone, obscured. What had happened? In a moment the question was answered.
Upon the balcony outside there came a rattle as though a deluge of small stones had been hurled down upon it, and he, who knew well what the violence of tropical storms is, recognized that one had broken over Desolada, and that the rain, if not hail, was descending in a deluge. A moment later there came, too, a flash of purple, gleaming lightning which was gone before he could turn his eyes into the quarter of the room where lurked the thing that he suspected, felt sure was there. Then, over all, there burst the roar of the thunder from above, reverberating, pealing all around, rumbling, and reechoing a moment later in the Cockscomb Mountains.
"Zara!" he called louder now, so as to make himself heard above the din of the storm--"Zara, why do you not answer me? I mean you no harm."
But, if amid this tumult any answer was given, he did not hear it. For now the crash of the thunder, the downpour of the rain, the screaming of the parrots, and the demoniacal howlings of the baboons farther away, served to create such a turmoil that scarcely could the cry of a human voice be heard above it all.
"I am determined," Julian exclaimed, "to know who and what it is that cowers there!" Wherewith he sprang from off the sofa on which he had previously raised himself to a sitting position, and, with a leap, rushed towards the mosquito curtains hanging by the bedhead. "I will see who and what you are!" he cried, feeling certain that in this spot was still lurking some strange, secret visitant.
Yet to his astonishment the spot was empty when he reached it. Neither human being nor animal, nor anything whatever, was there.
"I am indeed struck with fever and delirious," he muttered to himself, "or if not that, am mad. Yet I could have sworn it was as I thought."
Then again, as he stood there holding in his hand the gauzy curtains which he had brushed aside, the storm burst afresh over the house with renewed violence; again the sheets of rain poured down; once more the purple tropical lightning flashed and the thunder roared. And as the tempest beat down on all beneath its violence, and while a moment of intense darkness was followed by an instant of brilliant light, Julian heard a stronger rattle of the Venetian blinds than the wind had made, and saw, as again there came a flash of lightning, a dark, hooded figure creep out swiftly past them on to the balcony--a figure shrouded to the eyes, yet in the dark eyes of which, as the lightning played on them, there seemed to be a look of awful fear.
Blue as the deepest gleam within the sapphire's depth were the heavens; bright as molten gold were the sun's rays the next morning when the storm was past--leaving, however, in its track some marks of its passage. For the flowers in the gardens round the house were beaten down now with the weight of water that had fallen on them; beneath the oleanders and the flamboyants, the allamandas and ixoras, the blossoms strewed the pampas grass in masses; while many crabs--which wander up from the seacoast in search of succulent plants whereon to feed--lay dead near the roots of the bushes and shrubs.
Yet a day's scorching sun, to be followed perhaps by an entire absence of further rain for a month, would soon cause fresh masses of bloom to take the place of those which were destroyed, especially as now they had received the moisture so necessary to their existence. And Julian, standing on his balcony and wondering who that strange nocturnal visitor was who had fled on to this very balcony a few hours before, thought that during his stay in this mysterious place he had never seen its surroundings look so fair.
Whether it was that he had received considerable benefit from the quinine which he had taken overnight, or whether it was from the total change of clothing which he had now assumed in place of the garments he had worn up to now, or perhaps from his not having lain through the night upon the bed which, particularly of late, had seemed so malodorous, he felt very much better this morning. His brain no longer appeared numbed nor his mind hazy, nor had he any headache.
"Which," he said to himself, "is a mighty good thing. For now I want all my wits about me. This affair has got to be brought to a conclusion somehow, and Julian Ritherdon is the man to do it. Only," he said, with now a smile on his face--"only, no more of the simple trusting individual you have been, my friend--if you ever have been such! Instead of suspecting Master Sebastian of being in the wrong box you have got to prove him so, and instead of suspecting him to be a--well! say a gentleman who hasn't got much regard for you, you have got to get to windward of him. Now go full speed ahead, my son."
Whereon, to commence the process of getting to windward of Sebastian and also of carrying out the movement known in his profession as going "full speed ahead," he informed the nigger who brought him his shaving-water that he felt very poorly indeed, and would, with Sebastian's permission, remain in his room that day.
"Because," he said to himself, "I think it would be as well if I kept a kind of watch upon this tastefully furnished apartment. Like all the rest of this house, it is becoming what the conjurers call 'a home of mystery,' and is consequently getting more and more interesting. And there are only the 'four clear days' left wherein the mystery can be solved--if ever."
A few moments after he had made these reflections he heard a tap at his bedroom door, and on bidding the person who was outside to come in, Sebastian made his appearance, there being on his face a look of regret at the information which he said the negro had just conveyed to him.
"I say, old fellow, this is bad news. It won't do at all. Not at all. What is the matter with you?" he exclaimed in his usual bluff, hearty way.
"A touch of fever, I'm afraid," Julian replied. "Not much, I fancy, but still worth being careful about. I'll keep my room to-day if you don't mind."
"Mind!" Sebastian exclaimed. "Mind; why, my dear Julian, that's the very best thing you can do, the very thing you ought to do. And I'll send you something appetizing by Zara. Let me see. They have brought in this morning some of that mountain mullet you liked so much; that will do first-rate for breakfast with some Guava jelly. How will that suit?"
"Nothing could be better. Those mountain mullet are superb. You are very good."
"Oh! that's nothing. And, look here, I have brought you a little phial of our physic-nut oil, which the natives say will cure anything, and almost bring a dead man back to life. Take three or four drops of that, my boy, in your coffee, and you'll feel a new man," whereon he drew a little phial from his pocket and stood it on the table. Then, after a few more sympathetic remarks he prepared to depart, saying he would have the breakfast prepared and sent up by Zara at once.
"I was glad," Julian said casually, as Sebastian approached the door, "to hear you wishing Madame Carmaux good-night, last night. I didn't know she was well enough to get downstairs yet."
"Oh! yes," the other replied in a more or less careless tone, "she came down to supper last night and sat up late with me. I was glad of her company, you know. So you heard us, eh? Did you hear us singing, too? We got quite inspirited over her return to health. If you'd only been down, my boy, we would have had a rollicking time of it."
"Never mind," said Julian, "better luck next time. You wait till I do come down and we'll have a regular chorus. When I give you some of my wardroom songs, you'll be surprised."
"Right," said Sebastian, with a laugh; "the sooner the better," whereon he took himself off.
"I didn't hear the silvery tones of Madame Carmaux, all the same," Julian thought to himself after the other was gone, "neither do I remember that I heard her return his 'good-night.' However, Sebastian's own tones are somewhat stentorian when he lets himself go, or as our Irish doctor used to say of the bo'sun's, 'enough to split a pitcher,' so I suppose that isn't very strange."
He took down his jacket now, and indeed the whole of his white drill suit which he had discarded for an exactly similar one that he had in his large Gladstone bag, and began to roll it up preparatory to packing it away. Though, as he did so, he again perceived the horrible fœtid odour which it had emitted overnight--the same odour that had also been so perceptible when he had laid his head upon the pillow. The revolting smell that had driven him from the bed to seek repose on that sofa.
"Faugh!" he exclaimed, "it is loathsome. Even now, with the room full of the fresh morning air, I feel as if I were getting giddy and bemused again." Whereon, and while uttering some remarks that were by no means complimentary to Honduras and some of its perfumes, he began rolling the clothes up as quickly as he could. Yet while he did so, being now engaged with the jacket, his eye was attracted by the lapel of the collar, the white surface of which was discoloured--though only in the faintest degree discoloured--a yellowish, grey colour. Each lapel, down to where the topmost button was! Then, after a close inspection of the jacket all over, he perceived that nowhere else was it similarly stained.
His curiosity becoming excited by this, since in no way could he account for such a thing (he distinctly remembered that there had been no stain, however faint, on the lapel before), he regarded the waistcoat next; and there, on the small lapel of that--both left and right--were the same marks.
"Strange," he muttered, "strange. Very strange. One might say that the washerwoman had spilt something on coat and waistcoat--purposely. Something, too, that smells uncommonly nasty."
For, by inspection, or rather test with his nostrils, he was easily able to perceive that no other part of his discarded clothing emitted any such disagreeable odour. While, too, as he applied his nose again and again to the faint stains, he also perceived that in his brain there came once more the giddiness and haziness from which he had suffered so much last night--as well as the feeling of stupid density amounting almost to dreaminess or delirium.
"If that stuff was under my nose all day long yesterday, and perhaps for a week or so before," he reflected, "I don't wonder that at last I became almost wandering in my mind, as well as stupefied." Then, a thought striking him, he went over to the pillow on the bed and gazed down on it. And there, upon it, on either side, was the same stain--faint, yellow, and emitting the same acrid, loathsome odour.
"So, so," he said to himself, "I begin to understand. I begin to understand very well, and to comprehend Sebastian's chemical experiments. The woman who washed my jacket and waistcoat in England is not the same woman who washed that pillow-case in British Honduras. Yet the same stain and the same odour are on both. All right! A good deal may happen in the next four days."
Then, as he thus meditated, he opened the little phial of physic-nut oil, which Sebastian had thoughtfully brought him and left behind with injunctions that he should take three or four drops of it in his coffee, and smelt it. After which he said, "Certainly, I won't fail to do so. All right, Sebastian, it's full speed ahead now!"
A little later, Zara arrived bearing in her hands a large tray on which were all the necessaries for a breakfast that would have satisfied a hungry man, let alone an "invalid." There were, of course, innumerable other servants about this vast house, but Zara always seemed to perform the principal duties of waiting upon those who constituted the superiors, and in many cases to issue orders to the others, in much such a way as a butler in England issues orders to his underlings.
Now, having deposited the tray upon the table, which she cleared for the purpose, she uncovered the largest dish and submitted to Julian's gaze a good-sized trout reposing in it and looking extremely appetizing.
"But," said Julian, as he regarded the fish, "that isn't what Sebastian promised me. He said he would send one of those delicious mountain mullet we had the other night."
For a moment the half-caste girl's lustrous eyes dwelt almost meditatively, as it seemed, on him; then she said, "There are none. The men have not caught any for a long time."
"But Mr. Ritherdon said there were. That the men----"
"He was wrong," she interrupted, her eyes roaming all round the room, while it seemed almost to Julian as though, particularly, they sought the spot where the pillow was. "He was wrong. You eat that," looking at the dish. "That will do you no--will do you good."
And it appeared to Julian, now thoroughly on the qui vive as to everything that went on around him as well as to every word that was uttered, as though she emphasized the word "that."
"I'm glad to hear Madame Carmaux is so much better," he said, conversationally, as she finished arranging the breakfast before him and poured out his coffee. "They were pretty gay below last night."
"Below last night," she repeated, her eyes full on him. "Below last night. Were they? Did you hear her below last night?"
"Didn't you?"
"I was not there," she answered; "I was nursing a sick woman in the plantation."
"Oh! You didn't pass your evening on the balcony, then, as you have sometimes done?"
"No," she said, and still her eyes gazed so intently into his that he wondered what was going on in her mind.
"No." Then, suddenly, she asked, "When are you going away?"
"That is not polite, Zara. One never asks a guest----"
"Why," she interrupted, speaking almost savagely and showing her small white teeth, as though with an access of sudden temper--"why do you turn everything into a--a--chanza--a joke. Are you a fo--a madman?"
"Really, Zara!" Then, seeing that the girl was contending with some inward turbulence of spirit which seemed almost likely to end in an outbreak, Julian said quietly, seriously, "No, Zara, I am neither a fool nor a madman. Look here, I believe you are a good, honest, straightforward girl. Therefore, I will be plain with you. I have told Mr. Ritherdon that I am going on Monday. In four days----"
"Go at once!" she interrupted again. "At once. Get news from Belize, somehow, that calls you away. Leave Desolada. Begone!" she continued in her quaint, stilted English, which she spoke well enough except when obliged to use either a Spanish or Carib word. "Begone!" And as she said this it seemed almost to Julian that, with those dark gleaming eyes of hers, she was endeavouring to convey some intelligence to him which she would not put into words.
"That," he said, referring to her last sentence, "is what I am thinking about doing. Only, even then, I shall not have done with Desolada and its inhabitants. There is more for me to do yet, Zara."