isolated position. For she had to be told something! And I feel convinced that this version had been assented to by Jacobus. I must say the old woman was putting it forward with considerable gusto. It was on her lips the universal explanation, the universal allusion, the universal taunt.
One day Jacobus came in early and, beckoning me into the dining-room, wiped his brow with a weary gesture and told me that he had managed to unearth a supply of quarter-bags.
“It’s fourteen hundred your ship wanted, did you say, Captain?”
“Yes, yes!” I replied eagerly; but he remained calm. He looked more tired than I had ever seen him before.
“Well, Captain, you may go and tell your people that they can get that lot from my brother.”
As I remained open-mouthed at this, he added his usual placid formula of assurance:
“You’ll find it correct, Captain.”
“You spoke to your brother about it?” I was distinctly awed. “And for me? Because he must have known that my ship’s the only one hung up for bags. How on earth—”
He wiped his brow again. I noticed that he was dressed with unusual care, in clothes in which I had never seen him before. He avoided my eye.
“You’ve heard people talk, of course. . . . That’s true enough. He . . . I . . . We certainly. . . for several years . . .” His voice declined to a mere sleepy murmur. “You see I had something to tell him of, something which—”
His murmur stopped. He was not going to tell me what this something was. And I didn’t care. Anxious to carry the news to my charterers, I ran back on the verandah to get my hat.
At the bustle I made the girl turned her eyes slowly in my direction, and even the old woman was checked in her knitting. I stopped a moment to exclaim excitedly:
“Your father’s a brick, Miss Don’t Care. That’s what he is.”
She beheld my elation in scornful surprise. Jacobus with unwonted familiarity seized my arm as I flew through the dining-room, and breathed heavily at me a proposal about “A plate of soup” that evening. I answered distractedly: “Eh? What? Oh, thanks! Certainly. With pleasure,” and tore myself away. Dine with him? Of course. The merest gratitude—
But some three hours afterwards, in the dusky, silent street, paved with cobble-stones, I became aware that it was not mere gratitude which was guiding my steps towards the house with the old garden, where for years no guest other than myself had ever dined. Mere gratitude does not gnaw at one’s interior economy in that particular way. Hunger might; but I was not feeling particularly hungry for Jacobus’s food.
On that occasion, too, the girl refused to come to the table.
My exasperation grew. The old woman cast malicious glances at me. I said suddenly to Jacobus: “Here! Put some chicken and salad on that plate.” He obeyed without raising his eyes. I carried it with a knife and fork and a serviette out on the verandah. The garden was one mass of gloom, like a cemetery of flowers buried in the darkness, and she, in the chair, seemed to muse mournfully over the extinction of light and colour. Only whiffs of heavy scent passed like wandering, fragrant souls of that departed multitude of blossoms. I talked volubly, jocularly, persuasively, tenderly; I talked in a subdued tone. To a listener it would have sounded like the murmur of a pleading lover. Whenever I paused expectantly there was only a deep silence. It was like offering food to a seated statue.
“I haven’t been able to swallow a single morsel thinking of you out here starving yourself in the dark. It’s positively cruel to be so obstinate. Think of my sufferings.”
“Don’t care.”
I felt as if I could have done her some violence—shaken her, beaten her maybe. I said:
“Your absurd behaviour will prevent me coming here any more.”
“What’s that to me?”
“You like it.”
“It’s false,” she snarled.
My hand fell on her shoulder; and if she had flinched I verily believe I would have shaken her. But there was no movement and this immobility disarmed my anger.
“You do. Or you wouldn’t be found on the verandah every day. Why are you here, then? There are plenty of rooms in the house. You have your own room to stay in—if you did not want to see me. But you do. You know you do.”
I felt a slight shudder under my hand and released my grip as if frightened by that sign of animation in her body. The scented air of the garden came to us in a warm wave like a voluptuous and perfumed sigh.
“Go back to them,” she whispered, almost pitifully.
As I re-entered the dining-room I saw Jacobus cast down his eyes. I banged the plate on the table. At this demonstration of ill-humour he murmured something in an apologetic tone, and I turned on him viciously as if he were accountable to me for these “abominable eccentricities,” I believe I called them.
“But I dare say Miss Jacobus here is responsible for most of this offensive manner,” I added loftily.
She piped out at once in her brazen, ruffianly manner:
“Eh? Why don’t you leave us in peace, my good fellow?”
I was astonished that she should dare before Jacobus. Yet what could he have done to repress her? He needed her too much. He raised a heavy, drowsy glance for an instant, then looked down again. She insisted with shrill finality:
“Haven’t you done your business, you two? Well, then—”
She had the true Jacobus impudence, that old woman. Her mop of iron-grey hair was parted, on the side like a man’s, raffishly, and she made as if to plunge her fork into it, as she used to do with the knitting-needle, but refrained. Her little black eyes sparkled venomously. I turned to my host at the head of the table—menacingly as it were.
“Well, and what do you say to that, Jacobus? Am I to take it that we have done with each other?”
I had to wait a little. The answer when it came was rather unexpected, and in quite another spirit than the question.
“I certainly think we might do some business yet with those potatoes of mine, Captain. You will find that—”
I cut him short.
“I’ve told you before that I don’t trade.”
His broad chest heaved without a sound in a noiseless sigh.
“Think it over, Captain,” he murmured, tenacious and tranquil; and I burst into a jarring laugh, remembering how he had stuck to the circus-rider woman—the depth of passion under that placid surface, which even cuts with a riding-whip (so the legend had it) could never raffle into the semblance of a storm; something like the passion of a fish would be if one could imagine such a thing as a passionate fish.
That evening I experienced more distinctly than ever the sense of moral discomfort which always attended me in that house lying under the ban of all “decent” people. I refused to stay on and smoke after dinner; and when I put my hand into the thickly-cushioned palm of Jacobus, I said to myself that it would be for the last time under his roof. I pressed his bulky paw heartily nevertheless. Hadn’t he got me out of a serious difficulty? To the few words of acknowledgment I was bound, and indeed quite willing, to utter, he answered by stretching his closed lips in his melancholy, glued-together smile.
“That will be all right, I hope, Captain,” he breathed out weightily.
“What do you mean?” I asked, alarmed. “That your brother might yet—”
“Oh, no,” he reassured me. “He . . . he’s a man of his word, Captain.”
My self-communion as I walked away from his door, trying to believe that this was for the last time, was not satisfactory. I was aware myself that I was not sincere in my reflections