第28章

You can't be angry with me for saying that I am truly thankful to escape from it.But I am grateful to you for what you have done, and - for being what you are."It was difficult to define the flavour of that speech, but Renouard received it with an austerely equivocal smile.The professor stepping into the boat opened his parasol and sat down in the stern-sheets waiting for the ladies.No sound of human voice broke the fresh silence of the morning while they walked the broad path, Miss Moorsom a little in advance of her aunt.

When she came abreast of him Renouard raised his head.

"Good-bye, Mr.Renouard," she said in a low voice, meaning to pass on; but there was such a look of entreaty in the blue gleam of his sunken eyes that after an imperceptible hesitation she laid her hand, which was ungloved, in his extended palm.

"Will you condescend to remember me?" he asked, while an emotion with which she was angry made her pale cheeks flush and her black eyes sparkle.

"This is a strange request for you to make," she said exaggerating the coldness of her tone.

"Is it? Impudent perhaps.Yet I am not so guilty as you think;and bear in mind that to me you can never make reparation.""Reparation? To you! It is you who can offer me no reparation for the offence against my feelings - and my person; for what reparation can be adequate for your odious and ridiculous plot so scornful in its implication, so humiliating to my pride.No! Idon't want to remember you."

Unexpectedly, with a tightening grip, he pulled her nearer to him, and looking into her eyes with fearless despair -"You'll have to.I shall haunt you," he said firmly.

Her hand was wrenched out of his grasp before he had time to release it.Felicia Moorsom stepped into the boat, sat down by the side of her father, and breathed tenderly on her crushed fingers.

The professor gave her a sidelong look - nothing more.But the professor's sister, yet on shore, had put up her long-handle double eye-glass to look at the scene.She dropped it with a faint rattle.

"I've never in my life heard anything so crude said to a lady," she murmured, passing before Renouard with a perfectly erect head.

When, a moment afterwards, softening suddenly, she turned to throw a good-bye to that young man, she saw only his back in the distance moving towards the bungalow.She watched him go in - amazed -before she too left the soil of Malata.

Nobody disturbed Renouard in that room where he had shut himself in to breathe the evanescent perfume of her who for him was no more, till late in the afternoon when the half-caste was heard on the other side of the door.

He wanted the master to know that the trader Janet was just entering the cove.

Renouard's strong voice on his side of the door gave him most unexpected instructions.He was to pay off the boys with the cash in the office and arrange with the captain of the Janet to take every worker away from Malata, returning them to their respective homes.An order on the Dunster firm would be given to him in payment.

And again the silence of the bungalow remained unbroken till, next morning, the half-caste came to report that everything was done.

The plantation boys were embarking now.

Through a crack in the door a hand thrust at him a piece of paper, and the door slammed to so sharply that Luiz stepped back.Then approaching cringingly the keyhole, in a propitiatory tone he asked:

"Do I go too, master?"

"Yes.You too.Everybody."

"Master stop here alone?"

Silence.And the half-caste's eyes grew wide with wonder.But he also, like those "ignorant savages," the plantation boys, was only too glad to leave an island haunted by the ghost of a white man.

He backed away noiselessly from the mysterious silence in the closed room, and only in the very doorway of the bungalow allowed himself to give vent to his feelings by a deprecatory and pained -"Tse! Tse! Tse!"