CHAPTER XIX
AT THE END OF THE ROPE
BETWEEN periods of extreme weakness, when life barely flickered within the man from the Four Winds, he spoke incoherently of many things, as his tortured brain jumped from one vivid moment in his past to another. There were times when he referred to a girl with strange greenish eyes. Sometimes he addressed her directly, as Eileen; but it was not in the language of love that he spoke … rather was it as a youngster in his teens might banter with a girl. Once he adopted quite a fatherly tone toward Eileen. Joan was sitting by his bedside. Keith was addressing an imaginary figure at the foot of the bed.
"I've often thought of you," he said seriously. "Lord, it's many a year since you and I used to have good times together. 'Member that day in the orchard when you fed me with cherries, and you fought like a cat as soon as I tried to kiss you? I'd just got back from my first voyage, and you'd switched over to some other fellow. I can't remember his name though. Did you ever marry him? Didn't you, really? Stop laughing." Keith was smiling now. "You always did take everything as a joke. Oh, yes, I remember now, you did marry him, but you didn't last long. Pneumonia, or something of the kind, they told me."
The man ceased talking abruptly, and Joan drew the coverlet up a little higher over him. To stay there and listen to such intimate memories seemed to her terribly like eavesdropping, but she could not leave him unattended. During her long vigil, though, Joan obtained a certain degree of satisfaction in reflecting that it was some other man the girl with the greenish eyes had married.
Then, at times, Keith spoke more or less rationally about pearls, and particularly about the two large pearls. On one such occasion Joan was lying down in her own room, Chester having relieved her at her post. Keith spoke to himself rather than to some third person.
"They're worth a good deal," he was saying. "Funny thing to me that Trent didn't get any more like 'em, but they'd fetch enough to keep a man out of trouble for a while."
Chester leaned forward curiously. He had searched in every nook and corner of the house, including that room, for the missing pearls, without success, and had come to the conclusion that after removing them from the hole in the beam Keith must have deposited them somewhere out of doors.
"Where did you put them?" Chester asked deliberately, hoping the sick man, taken off his guard, might give away the secret of their hiding-place. Keith, however, took no notice.
"Where did you put those pearls?" Chester persisted.
For a moment or two the sailor's mind was clearer.
"Put what?" he asked, looking surprised.
"The pearls you took out of the beam?" Chester said, slowly.
A cunning smile spread over the sick man's face.
"That's what Murdock would like to know," he replied. "Lots of people want to know that. I can't tell you, though. It's a secret, see?"
Chester's face darkened. There was no shred of doubt now that it was Keith who had taken the pearls—his pearls, practically the only fruit he had reaped after all his expense and labour at the reef. It was maddening to have a semi-conscious man taunt him about it, but he could press the matter no further, for Keith's mind wandered off to other subjects.
The change came at dawn two days later. Keith had lain at death's door all night. Fearing the end was approaching, Joan and her brother had taken turns by his side. Twice the girl thought he had ceased to breathe. And then came the great sweat. Not long after that Keith was sleeping, peacefully as a child, and the girl knew that his life had been spared.
Chester Trent made no reference to the subject of the pearls for a few days, until Keith, who made a rapid recovery, was fast becoming his old self again. The planter waited until one afternoon when he and Keith were sitting on the veranda smoking, while Joan was busy with needlework. Chester purposely chose a moment when his sister was there to broach the subject, so that whatever was said should be said in her presence.
"By the way, Keith," he began, biting hard on the end of a cigar, and fixing his eyes on the sailor, "what do you know about those pearls we hid in my bedroom?"
"Why, as I told you before," Keith replied, gazing out unconcernedly over the vast expanse of ocean, "in my opinion they're not anything very special, but they ought to fetch a good price if you can get them to the right market."
His eyes had never left the course of a far distant gull as he spoke, and there was not the slightest hesitation in his manner. Joan had let her sewing fall to her lap and had awaited his reply with undisguised interest.
For more than one reason it was not easy for Chester to frame his next question. There was a momentary pause. Keith left the gull to pursue its lonely course unobserved, and glanced round.
Both Chester and Joan were looking intently at him. Some instinct seemed to tell him that everything was not as it should be.
"What's wrong?" he asked quickly.
"Let me tell him, Chester," said the girl. "Mr. Keith, someone has taken them away."
"Stolen them?" Keith ejaculated.
"They've disappeared, anyway," put in Chester.
Keith rose to his feet with a puzzled expression.
"Why—let me see—" he began.
He swung round, and entering the bungalow, made for the planter's room, striding straight to the beam where the cache had been. Chester was at his heels.
"I took them, Trent," said Keith bluntly. "I remember now. It seems weeks ago—anyhow I only remember it in a hazy kind of way."
"I know you did," replied Chester. "When was it?"
"The day the officers came from the Petrel."
"How did you know I took them?"
"You and I put a little wedge in the beam, and inked it on one side, you remember, so that it would not show; I found that wedge on your bedroom floor."
Keith nodded.
"I must have dropped it there," he said.
"Besides that, while you were delirious you spoke several times of having taken them. Where are they?"
"I don't know," replied the man from the Four Winds, slowly. "It happened when the fever had a grip on me. I fancy I had an idea—yes, I'm sure I had—that someone was going to take the things. You know what silly notions you get into your head when the malaria is biting you. Now, what in thunder—yes, I left you all on the veranda, to get some quinine, and I've a dreamy sort of recollection of trying to get that wedge out with my nails—"
"Yes, yes," said Chester anxiously. "What did you do then?"
"Trent, I'm damned if I know," the sailor replied frankly. "Maybe it'll come to me, but at present I can't remember another thing about it. I only know I was full of the idea that they were going to be stolen, and I thought I'd get ahead of the thief."
Joan had followed her brother into the room and listened intently to every word.
"You were talking to the ship's doctor after that," she said. "Do you think you gave them to him?"
Keith shook his head.
"No. In the first place he would probably have said something to you about it if I had, and in the second place I do know I was obsessed with the thought that I must protect them somehow. Of course, there's no telling what a man who isn't in his right mind might do, but I should think the last thing that I was likely to do under the circumstances was to give them away."
"It was … unfortunate," commented the planter.
"It was … very unfortunate, Trent," Keith replied, with a square look into the other man's eyes. "They're bound to turn up, though, when we make a thorough search."
"I've been through the place with a fine-toothed comb," Chester said. "There isn't the least trace of them anywhere."
Keith was already ransacking his pockets in vain.
"Unless I threw them away, which I can't conceive possible, they must be somewhere," he said. "Now leave me alone for a while. I'm going to look for them my own way."
For two hours he hunted in every part of the bungalow where it would have been possible for two such small objects to be secreted. Considering his own room to be the most likely hunting ground, he first rummaged into every crack in the walls, floor and ceiling there. Then he subjected each of the other rooms to a similar scrutiny until, finally, he had to confess himself beaten.
"It's no good," he said to the planter. "They're gone, and it begins to look to me as though there was precious little hope of ever seeing the things again. We reckoned they were worth fully two thousand dollars, and from now on I shall consider myself in debt to you for that amount, though as far as I can judge from my present finances, it'll be some considerable time before you're paid."
"Don't look at it in that way, please," said Chester, "though it's true they were my sheet anchor—my last hope. There's only the Kestrel left now, and if I sold her we should be utterly stranded."
"It is possible," said Joan, "that they might yet turn up—hidden away in some totally unexpected place. You know how things are found sometimes in the most unlikely corners."
"It's possible," agreed Chester, with an attempt to be civil in trying circumstances "but it doesn't sound to me likely."
Keith shook his head.
"I'm afraid," he said, "very much afraid, that's the end of them. I have a dim sort of notion—so dim that it is more than likely to be imagination—that I did something with them which put my mind at rest on the subject for the time. And as they're not in the house I might have hidden them out of doors, in which case the hunt would be hopeless."
"It couldn't have cropped up at a more inopportune moment," Chester said reflectively. "That chap Steel was perfectly willing to come into partnership with me, at least so far as the pearling was concerned. Anyway he was willing to make me a decent cash offer for all the pearls I had."
"It's no use my making apologies," said Keith. "I'd do a lot at this minute if I could restore the things to you, though even then it would be too late for you to fix up the partnership. I'm sorry, terribly sorry, Trent. My only excuse is that I hadn't the faintest notion of what I was doing."
Chester's feelings had passed through a variety of stages on the subject. First anger and disappointment, then suspicion, natural enough in the circumstances.
He walked over to the sailor and gave him a friendly pat on the back.
"Keith, think no more about it," he said; and the subject was dropped.
During the last week or so operations on the plantation had been carried out as a mere form of routine. The blacks had dozed and idled over their work, with no driving force behind them, especially while Keith was ill, and Chester appeared to be losing interest in the place altogether, though that was largely because his mind was fully occupied with the problem of how he was to carry on at all. Joan tried gently to stir up renewed enthusiasm in him, but was not very successful.
"I feel I'm in a regular hole, sis," he declared, "and there's no way out of it as far as I can see. To go on with the work on Tao Tao is almost like flogging a dead horse, but not quite, and that's the worst of it. If I had enough capital I'd sell this concern outright for whatever it would fetch and start all over again somewhere else, with a different kind of land."
"Well, well," said Joan, "we've made our bed and I suppose we shall have to lie in it. Don't you think, Chester, we could manage to scrape through for another year or so until the money begins to come in?"
"I've been wondering lately," the planter replied, "whether it would be possible for me to get some sort of an advance, to carry me over, from one of the big copra buyers in Manila, if I guaranteed to let them market my stuff. I know such things are done, and I could make Manila safely enough in the Kestrel, but even if I found a firm who would be willing to do business they wouldn't take my word about what we had on Tao Tao."
"Couldn't they send a representative down?"
"I expect they'd probably laugh at me if I suggested it," Chester said. "You see, it's such a deuce of a distance. I must churn that idea over, though. Something's got to be done, anyhow. We can't stay here and starve."
That night Chester Trent lay awake for hours after the other occupants of the bungalow had gone to sleep. He felt that the position into which he had drifted was rapidly becoming desperate, and nothing remained but the trip to Manila. Long after he had arrived at that conclusion he continued to toss and turn in bed, for his brain was still active and wild cat schemes were chasing one another through it. Midnight had long passed when he rose restlessly and stared out of the window into the night. There was no moon, and even the tropic stars were dimmed by low-lying clouds. Everywhere there was deathly stillness, for the night breeze was too gentle even to cause a rustling among the leaves.
"Oh, my hat!" he exclaimed half aloud, and reached for a match with the intention of reading himself to sleep.
His fingers had barely closed on the box when the sound of many harsh voices struck his ears. It was an ominous, swelling chorus.
Chester's frame stiffened. For three seconds he held his head on one side in a listening attitude.
"God!" he muttered. "The niggers!"
Turning, he sped swiftly to the bed and pulled his revolver from under the pillow.